Biography of a Repentant Nazi

Rating: 8/10 (13 April 2006)

"American History X" is the biography of a repentant Nazi. Derek Vinyard is a young man from a poor white family in Los Angeles. After his father, a fireman, is shot dead while tacking a blaze in a black area of the city, Derek becomes a bigoted racist, joining a violent Neo-Nazi skinhead group and getting involved in clashes with local black and Hispanic gangs. When a group of black youths attempt to steal his truck, Derek fights back, shooting one of them dead and killing another by stamping on his head. For this crime Derek is arrested, convicted of murder and jailed for three years. When he comes out of jail he is a hero to his former skinhead comrades, but he is a changed man who wants to disown his past and to renounce hatred and violence. His greatest fear is that his younger brother Danny, who idolises him, shows every sign of following him down the Neo-Nazi path.
The present-day scenes, dealing with Derek's attempts to lead Danny away from his fascination with Nazism, are shot in colour. Derek's own history is told in flashbacks, shot in black and white. We see him as a frustrated, angry young man, intelligent and articulate, who becomes a monster wholly lacking in conscience. We then see how he is changed by his experiences in prison, and how he comes to realise two things. The first is that blacks are people too, with as much right to exist as he has. The second is that his sterile ideology of hatred has actually blighted his own life, offering nothing better than a jail sentence and the prospect of martyrdom in a worthless cause.
I was interested to note that the film's director Tony Kaye and its star Edward Norton later quarrelled about the editing of the film, because it was their contributions which helped lift the film above the ordinary. This could have been just another worthy "issue of the month" anti-racist film, but Kaye's direction and Norton's acting mean that it is much more than that. The black and white sequences, particularly the murder and the prison scenes, have a stark, violent power. I have been impressed by Norton in the past in films such as "Primal Fear", "Fight Club" and "Kingdom of Heaven", but this was probably the best of his performances that I have seen. In the scenes where Derek is part of the skinhead gang there is a frightening intensity to his violent hatred, and his transformation during the prison scenes is agonising as he realises that the whole of his life has been based on a lie. Norton receives good support from some of the other actors, such as Edward Furlong as his younger brother and Avery Brooks as their black history teacher Dr Sweeney.
I was interested by the comments of another reviewer who pointed out that the first anti-racist films in the sixties tended to give idealised portraits of black characters. The example he gave was "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", but there are other examples such as "To Kill a Mockingbird" or "In the Heat of the Night". The assumption was that the roots of racism lay in irrational prejudices among the white community which could be overcome by the simple exercise of greater goodwill. There is no such easy assumption in "American History X", and no assumption that the problems of racial tension can be overcome by the standard liberal remedies.
By far the most eloquent voice we hear in the film is Derek's; the token voice of liberalism is the ineffectual one of Murray, the new boyfriend of Derek's mother, played by Elliott Gould in one of the film's weaker performances. Although some of their doctrines are just simply wrong (such as the idea that blacks have a genetic predisposition towards crime) there is a suggestion that the success of the extremists in winning support is partly due to legitimate grievances among working-class whites over immigration and affirmative action. Derek's reformation is due to self-interest rather than to any conversion to a liberal world view; he realises that following an ideology of violence and hatred has done nothing to improve his lot or that of whites in general.
Although Derek is befriended by a sympathetic black inmate while in prison, the black characters in this film are far from idealised. The malevolence of the white skinheads has its equivalent in the violent criminality of the black and Hispanic gangs. There is, in fact, a suggestion that these gangs hate one another and yet are also dependent on one another. The Neo-Nazis rely on white fears of black crime in order to recruit members, increasing black fears about white racist violence, thus enabling black gangsters to consolidate their own power by exploiting the idea of racial solidarity. It is notable that in prison the white racist gang-leaders are quite happy to discuss matters of mutual concern with their black counterparts, while subjecting Derek to a brutal rape for the "crime" of becoming too friendly with a black prisoner.
The implication is that the responsibility for racism does not lie solely with the white race, or with the black race, or with any other race. Perhaps the fault lies with the concept of "race" itself, the idea that humanity can be divided into discrete sub-groups on the basis of physical appearance and that the most important thing about any individual is his or her skin colour. The film does not offer any easy solutions to the social problems it deals with, a pessimism highlighted by its tragic ending. It is, however, an important film, thought-provoking as well as emotionally powerful. 8/10