Powerful, but flinching

Rating: Null/10 (11 June 2000)

Well before "American History X," back around 1990, I heard a real-life Derek Vinyard interviewed on radio. This articulate, former white supremacist had, like Derek, come to reject his racist beliefs, and like Derek he had devoted his life to trying to make amends for his past by addressing youth and other at-risk groups. Unlike Derek, however, his analysis did not stop with platitudes about hate being bad, or even denunciations of white supremacist corruption and hypocrisy, as Derek comes to espouse. He contextualized his former life.
When his fellow supremacists went out recruiting, he said, they did not go straight to overt racialist appeals. Instead they took advantage of the demagogic spadework begun by Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and their ilk, and played the coded race cards of "affirmative action", "quotas," "busing" and "urban crime." He and his fellow supremacists knew exactly what the subtext of this rhetoric was, and they frankly appreciated the help given them by their "respectable" allies in Washington and the media.
It's too bad that this movie did not have the guts to make a similar connection with the larger political framework that Derek's prototype saw so readily. True, we do get a scene in which Derek's father fulminates in barely coded terms about affirmative action, and the anti-hate pseudo-strategy of film's token hapless liberal (well played by Elliott Gould) consists solely of a knee-jerk PC censorship reflex (ignoring the famous dictum about sunlight being the best disinfectant).
But these glimpses into the larger sustaining milieu of white racism fall well short of helping audiences confront the continuum between overt racism and the "respectable" politicial rheteoric that feeds it. Instead, it is suggested through Derek's brother Danny that nice communities like Venice Beach just decayed passively as gangs moved in. Is it too much to expect some passing mention of decades of malign political neglect of our urban centers? Of a deliberate, decades-long widening of the gap between rich and poor, with the predictable (and frankly, intended) effect of pitting economically insecure lower-class whites and blacks against one another in a struggle for shrinking slices of the economic pie? Of the concomitant shredding of the social safety net?
I don't think so. Other movies have explored the class-based terrain of race hate in a gripping fashion; "Blood in the Face" comes to mind. It's necessary, but not enough, to show us the redemptive power of forgiveness, as "American History X" does. (In an inspired symbolic moment of levity, Derek first breaks through his prejudices as his black prison co-worker, mimicking sex between two lovers who have just had a spat, pants orgiastically, "I forgive you, baby! I forgive you!!!") If change is going to come about, it must begin with making audiences feel uncomfortable with their own unexamined assumptions and prejudices. And that, by and large, this movie fails to do.
Nonetheless I share the general critical consensus that the performances in the film are first-rate, and the story expertly told. The elegiac score adds an affecting emotional dimension to the movie as well, perhaps suggesting, where the movie otherwise cops out, the sense of America's promise lost. And the film's tragic ending, while unconvincing to some, demonstrates the realization that our actions can have far-reaching repercussions beyond our control. On a purely dramatic level, the movie succeeds.
However, AHX failure of nerve only helps guarantee that we have not seen the end of any further need for films like it in the future. And that's the real tragedy.