The gangster lifestyle is one that has been idolized, consumed, and regurgitated seemingly from generation to generation. The gangster is a trope particularly utilized in the movies, from Coppola to Scorcese, and even to Ben Affleck today.

Menace II Society as a whole explores this fascination, while simultaneously asking critical questions about the adolescent relationship to gangsters. In one particular scene, O-Dog—main character Caine’s chaotic best friend—shows a group of friends a security tape of him murdering a shop owner. It’s a black-and-white version of the opening scene, an opening that is steeped in unpredictable violence and blood-spattering brutality. The security video is also a reflection of old Hollywood gangster movies, which glorified the violence and the criminality of the mob. Here, the tape plays for O-Dog’s friends, but there is a certain kind of distance between the characters and the violence onscreen—there’s a sort of pride not unlike that of Italian-Americans who surround themselves in mob culture, viewing it as a means to an end but sometimes ignoring the violent history, sometimes relishing in it.

For black folk, though, gang warfare and Mafioso-like violence isn’t glorified, nor seen as the only way for a marginalized group to make a name for themselves in a country attempting to push them to the sides. Instead, it’s pathologized and demonized, so that the police, the government, and white folks view the projects as places without hope and without reason to help.

A Scarface unlikely to end up on the posters of fratboy college freshmen.

Centering their movie on this gangster violence, Menace II Society is a brutal first feature film from the Hughes brothers. It shows a summer in the life of 18-year-old Caine as he comes of age in Watts, a community in the Los Angeles projects. Caine is a sort of Hamlet figure, delivering monologues by means of an intermittent voiceover, and weighed down by indecision and a narrow worldview. Many questions get thrown his way, and the Hughes brothers make it clear that Caine’s decisions—or lack of decision—have consequences that can be unexpected, yet predetermined. More often than not, the question being asked of Caine, and the one he asks himself, is where to go from here? Caine’s graduated from high school, but can’t seem to figure out a plan beyond Watts and the gangster lifestyle that surrounds him, even as opportunities fall in his lap.

Whereas Caine’s friends and family seem to relish in the gangster lifestyle or actively condemn it, Caine is stuck in the middle. The things he does, criminal, gangster, or otherwise, appear to be means to an end, but what end? Caine himself doesn’t seem to know or want to think about it, deciding instead to go with the flow, relishing in what he can get from the lifestyle—whether emotionally or materialistically—while simultaneously ignoring the broader implications of his and his friend’s actions. During the opening scene, Caine views the murder more as an adolescent inconvenience—he just wanted a beer, and now he is an accessory to murder. It sets the stage for the movie’s overall point of how influencing youth with the gangster lifestyle tends to dangerously refract back from them, yet narrowed by an immature worldview.

At one point, his religious, sanctimonious grandfather asks him, “Do you care whether you live or die?” It’s an apt question posed by a character seemingly so out of touch to Caine’s world, yet only seems so out of touch as far as any adult is to any teenager. Caine can’t answer this question, for he doesn’t know or doesn’t want to critically think on it. Even though the question is posed so fleetingly and Caine’s answer so readily dismissive, it’s a question that haunts the film.

Menace II Society actively avoids answering the question with any sort of moralization, satirical or earnest, in order to better demonstrate something real—as opposed to cautionary, sensational, or even, nostalgic. For even in the harsh, noir-like lighting and the stylistic brutality of the violence, there is something unmistakably honest in these characters who are simply trying to find a way to keep going. A pervasive Shakespearean fatalism makes it clear that there is a predetermination to their lives, whether from an overall society that regards black folk with either indifference or antipathy, or from these characters’ own uncritical commitment to the gangster lifestyle. This passivity towards life and death becomes a sort of gradual unraveling that leads to a destruction of both person and community.

The Hughes brothers utilize classic narrative structures and themes—life, death, Shakespeare, noir, a biblical sort of destiny—in order to dig deeper towards saying something real and true about the life of Caine Lawson, life in the Los Angeles projects, and the everyday decisions made by people like Caine that reverberate for better or worse. Despite some flat characterization, it is a great movie because of it’s refusal to glorify or condemn its characters, and instead honestly know them. Because to know them is to understand them.

Menace II Society
1993
dir. Allen Hughes and Albert Hughes
97 min.

Movie plays at Coolidge Corner Theatre on March 13th,  at 7:00pm. Tickets are $12.25.