The second item I chose for my media portfolio is a movie called American History X. I chose this movie because it tells the story of someone who is extremely smart and talented and how he got dragged into a neo-Nazi way of life, pretty much because of his father’s critical views on black culture and affirmative action. After his father is killed by a black drug dealer, things spiral down for Derek. Derek (main character) becomes the second in command to a local neo-Nazi gang. Doris (Derek’s mom) doesn’t really see what is happening to her son until she has her Jewish friend Murray over for dinner and Derek freaks out on him for his open views and liberal thinking and shows him the swastika tattoo on his chest and says to Murray, “You see this? That means not welcome”. That same night three black men drive up to Derek and surround him. Derek ends up shooting at them. He kills one and wounds another, the third man drives away. Derek does end up killing the wounded man by telling him to “put your mouth on the curb” and stomps on the back of his head. Unknowingly, Derek’s little brother Danny is watching the whole time, and is horrified. The movie is actually based off of Danny’s flashbacks, I am just telling it in summary. Derek goes to prison for three years (which is good because if Danny testified it would be life imprisonment). Surprisingly in jail Derek alienates himself from the white gangs and makes friends with a black inmate named Lamont. He is released from prison early because his honors English teacher vouches for him, and he realizes that he is living wrong and is fearful for Danny. Derek comes home to Danny molded just as he was before prison, and maybe even worse, Danny wrote a paper for school about how Hitler should be considered a civil rights hero. Derek returns to the gang leader and his fellow friends to tell them that he will no longer take part in the gang and he threatens them to stay away from his brother, Danny. Danny is at first mad at what his brother has done, because he thinks that he is so different than before he went to prison, but when Derek explains to Danny what happened in prison they decide to change together, they go home and rip down the neo-Nazi signs in their bedrooms. The next day Danny goes to school with his new report and walks into the bathroom where he is shot several times in the chest by an African American boy who had previously had an altercation with him. Derek arrives and holds Danny realizing that his old ways of life killed his little brother. Then the movie ends with Danny reading his new essay on the beach with the famous quote by Abraham Lincoln "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies”.
In my opinion this movie is a good portrayal of what we have read in class. It really gives the message that although times have changed, people necessarily haven’t. In a way this movie reminds me of Johnson Chap 6 and Chap 8 and even though we haven’t read it yet, the very beginning of Chap 9. In these three chapters it can be summed up that we need to change our ways, although we were taught to discriminate hundreds of years ago, because it starts with one person. Think about it in the sense that if Danny and Derek’s father hadn’t taught them to hate their lives would have been dramatically different. Besides the fact that the story is fiction, things like this do happen in real life and children do pay for their parents actions.
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