Tony Kaye
American History X

Yesterday I watched American History X. Many had recommended it to me, and they had described it as a raw and violent film, but at the same time touching and educational.

Indeed, American History X is a film about hostility, ideals, a reflection on hate, and in this case on racism. Director Kaye teaches us not to do to others what we wouldn't want done to ourselves. Young people express their fears and doubts through violence.

These are themes that we could debate for centuries, still damnably current: the division of races, homeland, intolerance… all events that hover around the Nazi symbol, often tattooed (ideologically if not pragmatically, like Derek) on the skin of the young. Young people who gather in the form of “hate groups” and where any weak but intelligent figure, like Derek, can find strength and security. Young people abandoned to themselves, emptied of affection and filled with hate to try to make up for the cruelty of life. Young people into whom rules have been instilled that, right or wrong, are followed and respected. Rules, like those of Nazism, which though born already dead, still have not ceased to exist and there is fear they have become eternal, and the only feeble “opposition” is to be ashamed of them, something that we are doing but seems terribly pointless.

Themes that cannot be ignored, especially if chosen as the subject of a film, and should not just be oil on water, should not simply pass by without leaving a trace, remaining afloat without mixing with it. American History X flows, parallel to the reactions and reflections that strong images provoke, making us relive the causes of a young person’s fate through flashbacks, it is a knife in the butter. We grow up with wrong ideals, only to arrive at self-destruction, distinguishing black from white without being able to grasp the most important nuances.

Derek travels through his memories, searching for the root of those evils; but he himself reveals how hate manages to blind, due to his past in prison. He doesn’t want to be just a guide for his brother, but he wants to try to make him understand how everything in life has a cost, and sooner or later one will wonder if life itself has been improved by what one believed in. It is not just an analysis of neo-Nazism, but an absolute condemnation of racial prejudice (always a focus of attention especially in the USA) and above all of hate.

Careful cinematography and a screenplay always well cohesive with the narrated theme contribute to the film's "poeticity"; Edward Norton, in one of his most superb performances, lends spectacularity to the whole.

“Hate is baggage: life is too short to be pissed off all the time, it's not worth it.”