American History X

I saw this appear on netflix recently and it took me back to my school days. I'd say I had seen this before starting college and remember loving it, but wondered if it would be an amazing film to a 16 year old but not terribly interesting to a 34 year old. Turns out it holds up Betty well.

As regards relevance, if anything it's more relevant now than ever. It's obviously showing a fairly extreme side to racism, but also showing the roots of it in less extreme racism with the father. An influential figure like that combined with the tragedy makes it very understandable how Derek and Danny end up in that crowd.

Something which you can't help is wondering how it would go down if it was released now. I suspect, it would face huge opposition. For several reasons;

Derek's change in prison is largely because the other neo nazis in there lacked conviction in their beliefs. If they had been equally unyielding in their views, I'm not sure he'd have left them. So it wasn't so much that he realised his views were wrong, it was that he realised the people he was associating with were phonies.

Also, the points the likes of the father or Derek make aren't really proven wrong. You can feel that they're wrong and they might use a racist slur at the end of the point they make which kind of confirms them as prejudiced as opposed to having a purely measured view on something. But, I wouldn't say that their racist views are challenged throughout the film and taken down. Which i think is a strength of the film. If you have a dominant individual like the father or Derek, often their opinions go largely unchallenged because people don't like arguing with them. I think it was very true to life.

I also wonder how the portrayal of the guy who kills Danny at the end would go down. For all the context that we're shown for Danny and Derek, we don't see that for the black kid. He kind of is an example of the bad black men that the neo nazis hated. And as I say, we basically get no context for him being like that. But that said, I don't find this a problem. The film isn't about him. It shows us that there's more to the neo nazis than we see on the surface. And if you can see that you should be able to understand that there always is, even if you haven't been shown it.

What I thought was really positive in the film too was that it portrayed the father, Danny and Derek as people capable of understanding and reason. Essentially nice people, even though the kids did terrible things. I don't think it's helpful to think of these groups as cartoon baddies and all the same. They're diverse, some intelligent, some not and maybe outside of that side of their character, maybe they're good with their nieces and nephews or whatever. Basically, it humanised them.

As you can guess, I really enjoyed rewatching it. It was actually a refreshing film to watch and I absolutely think one that would do people a lot of good to look at right now.