In his 1991 film Boyz in the Hood, first time director John Singleton brings to life characters from a poor, gang-ridden neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. Despite any cultural or socio-economic differences that may exist between the three young men at the heart of the movie and his audience, Singleton uses the magic of cinema to create characters who we cannot help but empathize with. The peak of the movie’s plot arc comes when high school senior Tre (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) watches helplessly as his best friend Ricky (Morris Chestnut) is gunned down in front of him. This is not a situation that most moviegoers have ever encountered and yet Singleton makes us feel as if we are present at the scene of the murder; he makes his audience feel Tre’s horror and grief at the violent, unnecessary death of his friend. This paper will show through a careful analysis of the shots of Ricky’s death that Singleton achieves this suturing effect through skillful use of camera angles, camera movement, and sound editing, as well as other filmic techniques.
Shot 1 begins in the above clip at 3:42 (or 1:28:08 of the full film’s run time). It shows us a close-up of Ricky’s hands scratching a lottery ticket braced against a brown paper bag of groceries. The focus is very narrow so everything except Ricky’s hand and arm, the lottery ticket, and the bag is out of focus. We can see that he is standing in an alley and that there is a cross street at the end of the alley, but this is all very indistinct and blurry, representing his single minded focus on the lottery ticket. Because Ricky’s mind is solely on his scratch off, the audience is likewise unable to see anything else around him. The camera is positioned behind Ricky’s left shoulder and we can only see the side of his body from about his waist to his shoulder. This shot functions as a point of view shot even though it technically is not one because we aren’t seeing from Ricky’s perspective; however, we still see only what he sees. By choosing to make the entire scene out of focus beyond what occupies Ricky’s eyes, Singleton sutures the audience into Ricky’s viewpoint. Just before the cut to Shot 2, a red car rolls into the bottom left hand corner of the screen, still very out of focus and only on camera for a split second before the cut. Though this car is driven by the gang members who seconds earlier had tried to kill Ricky, he is absorbed in his lottery ticket and fails to notice its presence. The viewer too has no chance to really process the significance of the car or recognize it from the previous scene; like Ricky we are engaged elsewhere.
While Shot 1 forces the audience to see from Ricky’s perspective, the decision not to make it a true point of view shot serves the dual purpose of making us feel like we are another observer in the alley. The focus of the shot puts us in Ricky’s shoes, but the framing and camera placement (behind the character rather than where his eyes would be) gives us a simultaneous sense of being the unseen “other” in the alley, a third participant in the scene besides Ricky and Tre.
Shot 2 furthers this duality. It begins with a medium shot of Tre’s back as he walks down the alley away from Ricky. The camera is positioned about where Ricky is standing, but we know we are not seeing a point of view shot because Ricky is facing away from Tre. The camera maintains a steady gaze at first, watching as Tre slowly turns to see Ricky walk down the alley away from him. As he does this, the camera swiftly and shakily zooms in on Tre’s face. A “woosh” sound, reminiscent of air rapidly escaping through a tunnel accompanies this move to the close up. It is as if the world is closing in on Tre and causing him to catch his breath from fear. The use of sound and zoom here produce Tre’s inner reaction on screen for the audience to experience as well. We feel as if we are also standing in the alley, short of breath and eyes wide with terror.
Once the camera has completely zoomed in on Tre’s face, he cups his hands around his lips and yells Ricky’s name as loud as he can, eyes wide with fright. Singleton then cuts to Shot 3, a medium shot of Ricky from Tre’s point of view. We see Ricky from the back, now upright, as he has finally seen the car and the danger it represents. Unless the audience is alert enough to pick up on the car in its half-second of blurry screen time in Shot 1, this explanation for Tre’s behavior is as jarring and scary for us as it is for Ricky. Singleton keeps this from us just long enough to shock us, perhaps to make us wonder (as Ricky does) why we failed to see it sooner. Upon seeing the car, Ricky drops his grocery bag and lottery ticket and turns to run toward Tre and toward the camera, which pans left to follow his desperate flight.
It is at this point that sound becomes a major factor in the process of the suture. For the first two shots, all expected sounds from the alley - like Ricky scratching his lottery ticket - are clearly audible and backed by an instrumental, vaguely ominous piece of horn music. As Tre shouts for Ricky, the horn stops and we hear only the supporting drum beat as it fades out. By Shot 3, there is no music to be heard, as if the viewer has gone into shock along with Tre and Ricky at the horror of what the car represents. No sound from the alley penetrates the oppressive silence either, not Ricky’s running footsteps, not Tre’s heavy breathing. All we hear are voices and sounds from the yards adjoining the alley: dogs barking and children laughing. The high pitched laughter contrasts starkly and inappropriately with the grim reality of Ricky’s terrified run down the alley and it works to heighten the surreal nature of the scene. Singleton forces the audience to feel the confusion of the senses that terror and adrenaline bring with them. He subverts our expectations for normal sound and creates a sense of discomfort and wrongness similar (though of course to a somewhat lesser degree) to what his characters feel.
As Ricky runs toward the camera, we cut to Shot 4 which is a close up of a gang member in the back seat of the car aiming a shotgun out the window at Ricky. His red hat matches the outside of the car and his black shirt blends in with the black trim and shadowy interior of the vehicle. In contrast to the very real, powerful emotions we see on the faces of Ricky and Tre, the gang member is completely emotionless, almost mechanical. His face wears a look of blank anger as he pulls the trigger of the shotgun, shattering the surreal silence for the first time. Smoke from the blast covers the screen and when it clears, his face remains unchanged. There is no way for the viewer to identify with such a passionless character; Singleton’s choice to show us his face rather than provide a long shot of the entire alley sharpens the difference between this man and Ricky.
Shot 5 does give us that wider perspective, pulling back to a medium shot of Ricky with the car in the background, the shooter visible in the window. Even when we see the shell hit Ricky in the thigh and knock him to the ground, there is still no sound except for the reverberation of the shotgun. Singleton leaves it up to the audience to imagine Ricky’s verbal reaction, but the sight of him clutching his bloodied leg and limping toward the camera makes us imagine sounds worse than any the director could provide. The directorial decision to have Ricky sustain a shot in the leg first also gives the audience a glimmer of hope that he might survive the attempted murder, as gruesome as it is; it makes us root for him all the more and increases our emotional investment in the scene by prolonging it.
But at the very end of Shot 5, we hear the sound of the shotgun cocking and immediately cut to Shot 6 which is an even tighter close up of the gang member with the gun. Unlike Shot 4, this camera view cuts out the car entirely and only shows us his face against the all black background of the darkened car interior. As he fires a second time, the camera’s focus moves briefly from his face to the gun barrel. This move serves to equate the gang member with his gun, even further dehumanizing him and contrasting him with the ensuing shot of Ricky, Shot 7. Like Shot 5, there is no sound here save for the echoing of the shotgun blast. Ricky is hit this time in the chest and collapses. The camera pans down as Ricky falls and then zooms in on him writhing on the ground, agony written all over his face. By the time Ricky has fallen, the echoes of the second shotgun blast have faded and there is no sound once again. This maintains the surrealism of the shooting but also gives it a grim, somber touch rather than simply a shocking feel. By stripping the scene of all but the most essential sounds, Singleton ensures that Ricky’s death is not played for shock value and thus keeps the audience sutured into the film.
Of course, Singleton works throughout the film to build the audience’s emotional investment in the fates of Ricky and Tre, but as this shot by shot analysis shows, he does this on a micro level as well. Even in thirty seconds of film time, by framing shots in certain ways, by following Ricky with the camera while choosing to passively film the gang member, and by his effective use of sound to create a “realistic surrealism” of disaster, the director sutures his audience into his narrative. In a sequence of just seven shots, he is able to create sympathy for his characters solely by his use of these techniques, without the benefit or aid of plot. While the movie is best appreciated as a whole, it is worth breaking down Singleton’s work on such a small level because the mastery of his technique and the completeness of this film really shine through in sequences like this.
