American History X
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| American History X | |
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 Theatrical poster for American History X |
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| Directed by | Tony Kaye |
| Produced by | John Morrissey |
| Written by | David McKenna |
| Starring | Edward Norton Edward Furlong Beverly D'Angelo Avery Brooks Stacy Keach Fairuza Balk Jennifer Lien Guy Torry Elliott Gould Ethan Suplee |
| Distributed by | New Line Cinema |
| Release date(s) | October 30, 1998 |
| Running time | 119 min. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $10,000,000 |
| IMDb profile | |
American History X is a 1998 film directed by Tony Kaye and written by David McKenna. It stars Edward Norton in the lead role, and co-stars Edward Furlong, Beverly D'Angelo, Jennifer Lien, Ethan Suplee, Fairuza Balk, Avery Brooks, Elliott Gould, and Stacy Keach. Norton was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance.
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[edit] Summary
When reformed neo-Nazi Derek Vinyard is released from prison after three years for the killing of two young black men who were stealing his car, he finds that his brother Danny (the narrator) has embraced Derek's ways in his absence and has become an active white supremacist in the same group Derek led before his arrest. The film centers on Derek's struggle to sever ties with his racist past but keep his family together, intercut with scenes from Derek's life, showing how he got to the point where he currently is .
[edit] Synopsis
The title of American History X is derived from the name of a class Danny (Furlong) is forced to take after writing a controversial essay on Adolf Hitler's autobiography, Mein Kampf. His teacher becomes outraged and bursts into Principal Sweeney's (Brooks) office and complains. Danny is called into the office and is told that he must write about the life of his brother, Derek Vinyard, and have it on his desk the next morning or face immediate expulsion. Danny continually complains that his neo-Nazi ways have nothing to do with his older brother, Dr. Sweeney does not believe him, knowing that Danny is only trying to create a separate image from his brother. Sweeney knows who and what Derek is, but he still forces him to write the report and sends him on his way.
This film tells the story of Derek Vinyard, taking place in the late 1980s and early 1990s. An extremely bright and charismatic student, Derek is drawn into the neo-Nazi underground after his father, a firefighter, is shot and killed by a black drug dealer. (His father also instilled some of Derek's attitudes into him, in his dinnertime rants against "affirmative blaction," excessive focus on black literature and culture in school, and similar issues.) Derek concludes that blacks are poverty stricken for a reason, and that they are holding back the white race and killing each other off due to what he came to believe was an innate unintelligence and lack of forethought. He becomes second in command of the Venice Beach neo-Nazi gang, The Disciples of Christ, which entices young whites to join by promising protection from predominantly Mexican and black gangs who are essentially in control of the area. He and Cameron Alexander, the number one D.O.C., eventually regain control of the boardwalk, basketball court and beach area, and maintain a large presence at the high school. Alexander uses Derek to recruit other members who the film claims have become frustrated at being attacked by other gangs of different ethnicities to them and see this as a way to defend themselves. The D.O.C. becomes a symbolic gang in Venice Beach. However, under the influence of Derek, who himself is following the orders of Cameron Alexander, the gang does not merely defend themselves from other races. They begin attacking them. They violently attack workers in a convenience store that Derek claims are 'border jumpers' (illegal immigrants) who have taken the jobs of white Americans, whom he feels rightly deserve those positions in society.
His hatred becomes a crucial breaking factor in his family life as well. When his mother invites a Jewish man into her life after their father died, Derek becomes more and more obsessed with white supremacy. His anti-Semitic rants culminate in an argument at dinner, where he flashes his swastika tattoo at the man and says "See this? It means 'NOT WELCOME!' The man leaves offended and disgusted, much to the fury of Derek's mother. The same night while Derek is having sex with his girlfriend, three Crips park in front of his house and one breaks into his car. His younger brother, Danny, hears the glass smash and notifies Derek, telling him that "a black guy" was breaking into his truck. Derek becomes infuriated and seizes a pistol from a nightstand drawer and puts on a pair of steel toed combat boots. Sneaking downstairs and opening the front door, he proceeds to shoot a man standing guard with a gun at his door, killing him. He then shoots the carjacker twice in the stomach, severely wounding him. The getaway driver begins speeding away. Derek fires at the back of the car and empties his magazine without accomplishment. Realizing that no more rounds are left, Derek turns on the wounded thief.
Derek grabs him by his jacket and drags him over to the curb and begins a loud, profanity-laced rant about the primitive nature of blacks. He recognizes the carjacker, Lawrence, as the leader of a black gang which he personally kicked off the basketball court by scoring the game-winning point with a slam dunk in a street basketball game on which they had both bet control of the courts for their respective gangs. Derek yells that he will teach Lawrence "a real lesson", puts his gun to Lawrence's head, and tells him to "bite the curb". Terrified and completely aware of Derek's intentions, Lawrence reluctantly obeys. Then, as Danny watches from the front door and tries to stop the coming tragedy, Derek curb stomps Lawrence, killing him, and spits on his body. Police cruisers arrive soon after, and Derek is arrested without hassle and with a smile on his face.
Derek is later sentenced to three years in prison, charged with voluntary manslaughter. While writing his paper for Principal Sweeney, Danny types that "It would have been life if I had testified". He then reconsiders including it and deletes this detail.
In prison, which Derek finds to his expectation predominantly black and Latino, he decides to join a group for protection. One day during the exercise period in the prison courtyard, he removes his shirt, revealing a massive, black swastika on his left pectoral. He shows off his impressive bench press to a group of men who are members of the prison's Aryan Brotherhood gang, and the next day at lunch they invite him over to discuss possible membership. He flourishes in the gang for a while, but his strong belief system soon alienates some of the others; he witnesses one of the lead members perform a drug trade with a Mexican gang member, and he later openly criticizes him for doing so. After witnessing this act being performed again, he stops talking to the gang and sits alone in the cafeteria. When they see him leaving the gang, they jump him in the shower and brutally rape him.
Meanwhile, Derek makes the acquaintance of a black inmate named Lamont (Torry), with whom he works in the prison laundry room. At first, Derek is reluctant to put his beliefs aside and work with him, but when he witnesses the hypocrisy of the prison whites, he opens up. After the rape, he sees that Lamont is his only friend and abandons the gang. Lamont is essentially a good man with no hatred for whites, despite the fact that racism most likely played a role in his incarceration. He received a six year sentence because he a stole a T.V. set- normally one would only receive a year in jail for such an offense, but he got six years because the police said that Lamont "threw" it at the officer. Just before Derek is released on parole, he realizes that only through Lamont's intervention did the black prison gangs leave him alone.
Once his stint is over, Derek returns home only to find that his little brother Danny had followed in his hardline, neo-Nazi footsteps. He tries for the rest of the movie to lead Danny away from this path, which Derek has since abandoned after his brutal treatment at the hands of men he believed were above such behavior and multiple talk therapy sessions with Dr. Sweeney. As Derek tries to help his family, in part by using his macho attitude, his old gang wants him back. When he visits his coming home party a fight ensues as he tells them he wants out and he wants Danny out. He also meets with his former mentor, white supremacist Cameron Alexander (Keach), and the two argue about the true nature of humanity. Alexander, as expected, is unwilling to accept Derek's new attitude. Danny eventually but reluctantly converts from his old ways after Derek tells him of his prison stint. Danny denounces his former lifestyle and beliefs, and the two walk home with a newly mended relationship. Once home, Derek and Danny remove all of their Nazi flags & posters from their wall.
The day before, however, Danny had witnessed a scrawny, unassuming white student being beaten up for snitching in the men's bathroom by a trio of black gang members. Danny blew cigarette smoke in their leader's face. While they were acting as if they would assault Danny, the bell had rung and the group left. The next morning, Danny walks into the bathroom, with his "American History X" report in hand. The scene changes back and forth between Derek walking down the street as a Cadillac pulls up behind him (the same Cadillac that had been circling their block the night before.) and Danny in the bathroom, with the implication that the Cadillac is about to threaten Derek's life for what he had done. But the car turns out to only have a single occupant. When Danny turns around, the black youth is standing behind him. He raises a gun and shoots Danny in the chest, splattering blood all over the wall behind him. He shoots Danny twice more before leaving.
Derek bursts into the school lobby, shoving police officers, crowds of crying teenagers, and Dr. Sweeney aside as he sprints into the men's bathroom, but stops as he sees Danny crumpled on the floor in front of the urinal. Derek picks up his young brother and cradles him in his arms, weeping uncontrollably. The film ends with the closing paragraphs of Danny's American History X report narrated by Danny himself, concluding with a quote from Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address and also saying "Hate is baggage. Life's too short to be pissed off all the time".
[edit] Issues
American History X touches on such controversial topics, such as: racism, affirmative action, illegal immigration, the continued existence of Neo-Nazi hate groups and the reasons these groups are formed within American society, the exploitation of vulnerable youth of all races by gangs, intra- and inter-racial violence, and other topics that still split American society to this day.
[edit] Controversy
The main controversy over the film centered on director Tony Kaye's attempts to try to remove his name from the credits, preferring to use the pseudonym Alan Smithee. Kaye alleged that his reasoning for this was Edward Norton's re-editing of the film to give himself more screen time. The Director's Guild of America ultimately denied Kaye the right to remove his name from the production, reasoning that Kaye had placed ads in Variety attacking the film, thus violating Guild rules regarding the right to invoke the pseudonym. Kaye proceeded to sue the Directors Guild and New Line Cinema, claiming they had violated his First Amendment rights.
[edit] Deleted scenes
- Danny's friends, Chris and Jason jump on a homeless black woman
- Seth and Cameron eat in Ben's Burgers after the party. A black man comes in with a white woman and they harass the couple. Then they leave and supposedly get jumped by the black guy Danny was messing with. (In the original script, they also harass an unemployed, homeless Vietnam veteran outside the restaurant; the movie clip shows them being respectful and donating change to him.) [1]
- Derek makes small talk with a little black girl at the donut shop, her mother comes immediately and keeps her away from Derek.
[edit] Trivia
- The word "fuck" is spoken 205 times throughout the film.[1]
- The quote Danny says at the end of the film is from Abraham Lincoln's Inaugural Address in 1861.
- Edward Norton packed on 30 pounds (14 kilograms) of muscle for the role.
- Both Avery Brooks (Dr. Sweeny) and Jennifer Lien (Davina) starred on Star Trek series at the same time. (Brooks on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from 1993 until 1999 as Captain Benjamin Sisko and Lien on Star Trek: Voyager from 1995 until 1997 as Kes.)
- A white power song is heard that is set to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic; the song describes a massacre of non-whites and Jews, referring to it as "the tramplin' at the Zoo". It is an actual song by Johnny Rebel.
- The shirt worn by Seth Ryan on the basketball court with the numbers "88" on the back is actually a reference to "HH" or "Heil Hitler," "H" being the 8th letter of the alphabet. In a later scene he wears a Skrewdriver T-shirt. The number is also a reference to the "88 Precepts", the 88 rules of conduct that neo-Nazis live by.
- The character of "Cameron Alexander" is a reference to the "Cameron" family in a The Birth of a Nation and is based on White Aryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger
- In the flashback where we see Norton's character start learning racist ways from his father, he mentions that the book Native Son by Richard Wright was assigned in class by Dr. Sweeney. That 1940s book deals with how racial inequality leads to violence from the perspective of a poor 20-year old black man.
[edit] External links
- American History X at the Internet Movie Database
- Movie Locations Guide.com - Maps and directions to American History X Filming Locations
- Fan site including original script
