American History X

White supremacy is on the rise in Southern California. Following the murder of his father, Derek shoots a black person and executes another. The landscape is anonymous. Front yards, backyards, and the dreary repetition of suburbia mark the coast. Not much changes from day to day. Derek’s charisma and persuasive abilities coalesces the collective anxiety, boredom and hatred of the shiftless white suburban male. He uses these frustrations to promote the idea of white supremacy, and to proclaim that America is in the midst of an immigrant takeover. Action is needed, he thinks. So they trash a Grocery store owned by Chinese. And let a basketball game determine the supremacy of the races and who has access to what land.

In Kai Erickson’s book Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance the Puritan’s faced the same problems as the neo-Nazis. The Puritans faced three separate struggles since the 1600s and 1700s. Originally, when the Puritans first washed ashore they faced starvation and the unrelenting environment. There battles were direct. They were fighting against the elements. Then the battle was religious and political. Anne Hutchison questioned the powerful. If in the Puritans eyes, your soul is predestined to go to heaven or hell, and no action on Earth could alter that plan, how could anyone determine that they were worthy of power? So the powerful booted her out of Massachusetts. Later came the witch accusations, witch trails, and witch drowning and witch burnings (and any other bad things you can do to suspected witches). After gaining relative prosperity the Puritans became paranoid of witches. Why? Kai Erickson believes since there physical battles had been conquered, and the land tamed, the new battle was one of things on the periphery. The unseen world became the new menace. The occult, the invisible, became the cause of mass suffering of the people. To the Neo-Nazis the vast invisible oppressor is the Zog machine and the Jewish World Order. Ideas like this thrive with these newbie Nazis.

The 1990s are fairly prosperous. But in the late 1990s movies like American History X, The Matrix, Fight Club, and Office Space, all portray the psychic hardships of the disgruntled semi-affluent. In each movie generally college educated white suburban males see an omnipresent threat or problem that nobody else sees, or has become to deadened to see or react to it. When the world becomes increasingly ambiguous, theories that tap into the mystical universal do well, is something Erickson might say.

Derek sheds this mystism after doing time. Prison is like a personal think tank of Derek. Boundaries are put on him. His intelligence is bounded within the walls. The only person that prevents him from being raped daily is a black man. This along with the self-interest, and doublespeak of the white gang cause him to have a dramatic ideological shift. He rejects his white supremacist past and seeks to escape it along with getting his brother out. But this may no be a movie of shedding hate and walking into the movie with an independent and tolerant mind. Derek sees the death of his father. After that he eventually becomes the leader of a racist organization. Prison changes who he is, but so will Danny’s death. In Totsi, the City of God, and Were once Warriors, the environment and the oppression embedded in it hit everyone the same way. People react in predictable, but not always healthy ways to the environment around them. But in Southern California life really isn’t straightforward, a healthy approach to the world is more likely to come about through the way you look at the world.

American History X. X is an interesting choice for Danny’s teacher to name the class. Malcolm X chooses the name of X when he was in the nation of Islam. It was like a placeholder for him. Since his original name Little was “given to him by white slave masters” X was what he used until, after ultimately leaving the Nation of Islam, he went on a Hajj to Mecca and became El-Hajj Malik El-Shabbazz. The X could be seen as the placeholder for Derek’s mind. The X will be there until something more definitive, true, and permanent comes along for Derek, whatever that might be.