My roommate and I went to see Straight Outta Compton over the weekend. It was good. Not the best,
but good. It was what I expected for a movie about the guys who produced it.
Obviously, missing was any violence against women even though there were
several high profile incidents that occurred during the movie time frame. There
was only one reference to the East Coast/West Coast rivalry, and as far as I’m
concerned there is never enough Bone Thugs and Harmony. They are absent during the
reconciliation between Ice Cube and Easy E, which is weird. The women are silent
in the film except the wives, who are treated with respect and only are spoken
ill about by the white manages. Of course, the women never speak to other
women. Though, two are portrayed as quite intelligent and given slight credit
for their partners getting out of the bad contracts. I also believe it to be fairly
accurate with a few movie type lines thrown in to make it funny and flow
better.
The movie owns police brutality and the exploitation of
these guys. I remember leaving and my roommate going, it is hard to reconcile
the men they are now with the naïve and idealistic children they were. But they
were, they were kids without appropriate tools to navigate legal contracts. Dr.
Dre holds on with Easy E for a long time wanting their manager not to be
screwing them even when Ice Cube leaves, but once Dre has proof (ala Suge
Knight---a very frightening man even on screen) he’s out. Easy E talks about loyalty
when people try to help him see he’s getting screwed and remains willfully
ignorant, and that is a home grown low-income value. But it happens again and again where the
established white media machine takes advantage of these young black men, who
have no way of protecting themselves in any way except the ways they always
have, and to quote one of the managers, you don’t kill people, we have lawyers.
I think that is what is so scary about Suge Knight he is able to exist in both realities
comfortably. One of the more interesting things about the film was the shock of
the white managers whenever they screwed the NWA members and were met with the
threat of violence. I think it speaks to the removal of these people making
bank off NWA from the music itself. We see the disparities in education in one
scene where Ice Cube is on a bus evidently being bus from one neighborhood to
another, and I don’t know if you were supposed to feel jealousy or frustration with
the affluence of the white students juxtaposed with the poverty of the black,
but man did I. Two very different worlds. Police brutality is all over this
movie and rightfully so. Each of the NWA members highlighted in the film have a
moment of resistance highlighted on screen before writing “Fuck the Police.”
All of which result in arrests or violent altercations.
Now back to the violence against women and white consumption.
F.
Gary Gray, the director, said the violence against women didn’t fit the
narrative and the movies was already too long, but as others reminded him, we
got other side stories. We saw Dre’s ex leave with their baby—there were
allegations of violence in that relationship; we saw everyone meet their wives;
we saw Ice Cube write Friday. But it
is the first part of the response, the narrative. Dre is a sympathetic
character; they all are. So to show Dre as an abuser, would have made it more
difficult to feel for him. At least for the paying audience. Personally, I
would have liked it better to show and develop real character flaws instead of
the superficial ones. But by leaving out the violence against women and the
violence from the East/West rivalry, we’re not seeing the whole picture. We’re
seeing an easily consumable narrative that you don’t have to reconcile your
feelings about a violent abuser who is in a way using this film to advocate for
the demilitarization of the police. But now that we’ve landed in consumption. I
just overheard a man I work with who has said “all lives matter” in my office,
who thought the Baltimore demonstrations over Freddie Gray were out of line say
the movie was great. This film is so easily digestible that people who cling to
racist social structures liked it, which makes me wonder if there was an
underlying message at all or if I was projecting one onto the film.
This film was made to make money, and while I have problems
with capitalism, I get it. I get that we see the boys grow into men and with
them the music industry transformed but for what purpose? Capitalism? Because
Ice Cube’s dis-track “No Vaseline” references the embracing of white culture by
the members of NWA and the casting call for this movie asked for light skinned women.
And a man in my office who hold racist views love the movie. So was the point
to pay homage to Easy E? Because that’s cool, but the video below is the shit.
Or was the audience supposed to be pushed toward action? And even if the later
wasn’t the intention, is there any other interpretation given the police
violence we keep seeing day after day?
