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Looking for the ’Hood and Finding Community 227 factor for the anger and violence that erupted during the uprisings.41 Du’s store was destroyed during the 1992 unrest. Just as Sweetback was, in some ways, a response to the Watts uprisings of 1965, Menace was a response to the Los Angeles uprisings of 1992. But while Sweetback engaged in a considered, albeit sensationalized, critique of the political circumstances that led to Watts, Menace, clinging to its claim that it was representing reality, often failed to critique it. Menace’s authenticity claims constructed a problematic image of South Central and its inhabitants. The character of O-Dog has all of the characteristics of a sociopath, and the South Central neighborhoods the young characters inhabit constitute a nihilistic nightmare. These images are rarely relieved by redeeming qualities, nor is the context in which the characters and the neighborhoods are situated, as they are explained or explored. This is not, in and of itself, unusual or even problematic for a fictional film attempting to create an imagined world. However, by constructing these deeply pathologizing images of young black men and their South Central neighborhoods as “true” and “real,” Menace argues that young black men and South Central Los Angeles are truly pathological—people and places for whom rational and thoughtful behavior is not merely difficult but, in fact, impossible. This leaves viewers of the film with the belief that South Central cannot be understood or restored; it must be abandoned. Menace’s version of South Central ignores the complexity of the area and negates the range of possible experiences blacks may have there. The movie Training Day42 like Boyz, received multiple Academy Award nominations , earning Denzel Washington a Best Actor Oscar award for playing a sociopath, crack-head cop who turns South Central into his psychotic playground. Training Day’s success inspired more films about troubled cops and the people and politics of South Central. Dark Blue43 examined the Los Angeles uprisings from the perspectives of white police officers. Crash,44 which won the Academy Award for Best Film in 2004, was lauded for examining race relations in Los Angeles from diverse perspectives, with South Central serving as an important setting for tensions between characters and their confrontations with the law. Street Kings45 was directed by the white male screenwriter of Training Day who, like John Singleton, claimed to have spent his youth on the streets of South Central. Street Kings also explored the area as racialized criminal territory, similar to the television drama Southland,46 and the 228 Dionne Bennett film Life is Hot in Cracktown,47 which examined the notorious South Central drug trade (see chap. 5). This menacing model of South Central is the one most consistently reproduced in urban cinema of the 1990s and the early twenty-first century , spilling over into other forms of media representations. The image of South Central as a dangerous but glamorous ghetto had long since shifted from the large screen to the small, in the form of music videos. As urban films set in South Central were distributed throughout the world, they were joined by another cultural phenomenon that was associated with South Central: gangsta rap, which became one of the most popular music genres of the 1990s. Although the hip-hop music that emerged from Los Angeles during the period was significantly more critical and complex than the news media revealed, the music videos that accompanied the songs sustained the image of South Central as a menacing urban wasteland.48 The blaxploitation films of the 1970s were often derided for their violent and sexualized images of South Central Los Angeles and other black communities, while the urban film dramas of the 1990s were often critically acclaimed for their “authentic” portrayal of the area. However, films from both periods were cinematic constructions, rather than authentic representations of black life in South Central. Nonetheless, for much of the world the urban dramas of the 1990s, which displayed some of the most nightmarish and dehumanizing images of the area, were indelibly marked in the cultural imagination as the “real” South Central. In the early twenty-first century, media images of South Central Los Angeles continued to label and limit African Americans. They were typically presented as authentic portrayals of Black Los Angeles, and were generalized to represent all black people in any urban place where blacks resided. These images usually omitted the educational, social, and economic diversity of blacks not only in South Central...

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