A Film Canon

Not only is Boyz N The Hood the original hood melodrama, but it presents hood melodrama as the spectre that haunts all domestic melodrama - the psychotic, self-perpetuating destruction of the nuclear family and complete absence of any father-figure or father-function. Crafting his narrative around three young men growing up in South Central LA in the late 80s and early 90s - Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr), Baha (Ice Cube) and Morris (Donovan McCrary) - Singleton translates the central, crippling paradox of African-American pride - that a heritage only exists at all as a legacy of slavery and imprisonment - into a world in which fatherhood is impossible, its closest approximation the idealized father-brother role that Tre's father "Furious" (Lawrence Fishburne) provides, his most intimate and loving register reserved for the advice on contraception that is presumably designed to prevent Tre having a child, like he did, at seventeen; that is, to prevent the very father-brother rapport that the film presents as so redemptive. What's even braver and more uncompromising about Singleton's vision is his acknowledgment of how easy and tempting it is to look to white institutional culture as a kind of surrogate father - the most terrifying character is undoubtedly an African-American policeman who's psychotically over-identified with his badge - a temptation that's as pervasive and crushing as the near-constant helicopters, part of a beautifully and evocatively crafted soundscape. In the end, Singleton's tentative aesthetic solution is the cinematic equivalent of late 80s and early 90s jazz and art rap - and the smooth, languorous score could easily play as a series of samples for A Tribe Called Quest - a kind of mythical, panglobal Africanism that removes the need for fathers altogether, replacing it with a vision of the continent as everyone's mother, and everybody who acknowledges it as a mother to her people. It's appropriate, then, that Ice Cube plays such a prominent role, not only because he's the only one who manages to transform a slightly stilted script into something more like freestyling, but because his quite different musical affiliations suggest a gangsta-jazz symbiosis that remains as troubling as A Tribe Called Quest's notorious - and notoriously uncharacteristic - paean to date rape, signalling Singleton's prescience of how easily his utopian sentimentality might be coopted and commodified by the MTV sheen it occasionally recalls.