Tony Kaye
American History X

American History X by Tony Kaye is a film that hurts, a tough, violent, raw film. Evil. Like its protagonist, Derek (played by an extraordinary Edward Norton). A film about racism, about hatred towards those who are not white, who are not Aryan, who are inferior. American History X is a film that has in its essence the quality of being current, because hatred is a universal and enduring theme.

American History X is a film of redemption, and Derek is a modern-day Paul of Tarsus, who, on the road to Damascus, has seen the Lord and converted. Indeed, just as Paul harbored hatred and persecuted Christians, Derek is driven by pure racial hatred towards the "dirty blacks," the "yellow faces," or Hispanics, all races that he and his friends see as parasites, inferior beings ruining America, a land that rightfully belongs to whites.

Derek: Our country is becoming every criminal's paradise. Honest and hardworking Americans, like my father was, are being killed by society's parasites.

Reporter: Parasites?

Derek: Blacks, Puerto Ricans, yellows, anyone.

Derek calls all these races "criminals" without realizing that he himself would soon become a criminal. A criminal of the worst kind: a criminal driven by racist ideologies, who commits violence systematically, with precise organization and a group of followers who eventually come to idolize him as a deity once he's in prison. A criminal who cannot be stopped because he is followed by a crowd of people who have adopted his ideas and are ready to emulate him: you can arrest one skinhead, but you can't stop the entire movement.

The directing and editing work by Kaye is of excellent quality, and on more than one occasion, in my opinion, it nods to the film that taught the world how to portray violence on screen: A Clockwork Orange by the master Stanley Kubrick. The cynicism of the skinheads and Derek is the same as that of the Droogs and Alex DeLarge; the use of slow motion is entirely indebted to the scene of the fight between the Droogs and Billy Boy's gang at the beginning of that aforementioned masterpiece from 1971. And the mad, fury-filled, hateful look of Edward Norton is akin to that of the unforgettable Malcolm McDowell: Derek's smile when he is arrested by the police after killing two black men involved in the theft of his car, the smile of a twisted mind, is comparable to Alex's smile at the opening of A Clockwork Orange, a malicious, evil, completely sick smile. And like Alex, Derek also ends up in prison, as already mentioned. And just like the protagonist of Kubrick's masterpiece, he undergoes a sort of conversion, although of a different nature: Alex pretends to be a "good" person just to be selected to participate in the Ludovico Technique, which would grant him freedom, and thanks to the shocking experience of the treatment, he "heals"; and Derek also "heals," changes thanks to the shocking experience in prison, where he is sodomized by a group of skinheads like him who do business with Puerto Ricans and whom he disrespects and where Dr. Sweeney, the principal of the school attended by Danny (Edward Furlong), Derek's brother who is following in his footsteps, asks him a very simple question that will change his life:

Has anything you've done made your life better?

And it's no coincidence that it's Sweeney, a black man, who asks him this question, because in prison, the person Derek bonds with the most, if not the only person he bonds with, is Lamont, a young black man he works alongside. The first time Derek and Lamont meet, Norton's gaze is filled with hate and disgust, with hints of fear, but the more they spend time together, the more his gaze softens, becomes friendly, and they even laugh and joke together about their girlfriends.

Once out of prison, Derek is redeemed, converted; he is no longer the Paul who persecutes Christians, but the one who has seen the dazzling light of God; he is Paul the apostle. Derek pulls himself away from the skinhead group and tries in every way to convince his brother and girlfriend to do the same: initially, Danny shouts at him, "I hate you!" but then, after listening to his prison experience, he changes too; the girlfriend, on the other hand, during a skinhead party, invites a friend of Danny's and Derek's to shoot him in the face after having said a few minutes earlier to Derek that she was willing to do anything for him. She is the proof that hatred can be stronger than love.

The photography that Kaye decided to use, color for scenes set in the present and black and white for those set in the past, is very fitting and carries strong symbolic value: indeed, the black and white scenes are those in which Derek lives with only one emotion, hatred, which does not allow him to see the world as it is, full of different colors: he only sees whites and non-whites (the shades of gray). These differences are accentuated and disappear when Kaye decides to use color: finally, Derek sees the skin color of other people not as the opposite and enemy of white, as it was in the sequences shot in b/w, but as colors in their own right, which only enrich the palette of diversity that is humanity. This change of vision is also highlighted by how he looks at or displays the swastika tattooed on his heart. Before his conversion, if we can call it that, he flaunted it in front of the "parasites" with pride:

See this? It means "we don't want you"!

Now instead he is ashamed of it, and after getting out of the shower, having managed to "convert" Danny, he looks at himself in the mirror, gazing with a sad and shameful look at that symbol that Hitler made infamous, and placing a hand on his chest, it almost seems like he wants to tear it away, as he had previously done with his brother, tearing down various posters depicting Hitler and various Nazi symbols from their room.

And now there is nothing that can make Derek want to see the world in black and white again. Not even the...

My conclusion is that hatred is a ball and chain: life is too short to be spent always angry. It's not worth it. [...] "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break the bonds of our affection.