Boyz 'n the Hood: A Treatise on Violence

In his 1991 film Boyz ‘n the Hood, first time director John Singleton follows the lives of three boys growing up in a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. Singleton’s protagonist, Tre (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), lives with his father Furious Styles (Laurence Fishbourne) and comes of age under the strict rules and expectations of this strong male figure. Tre’s best friend is Ricky (Morris Chestnut), a high school football star with the drive to make a better life for his family. Ricky lives with his single mother (Tyra Ferrell) and his half brother Doughboy (Ice Cube), a gang leader who has given in to the allure of the street but still remains part of the trio of childhood friends. The peak of the movie’s plot arc comes when the three boys are high school seniors. Following a minor spat with some rivals of Doughboy’s gang, Ricky is gunned down in cold blood as Tre helplessly watches nearby. Singleton presents the violence of Ricky’s death by contrasting a few cinematographic conventions with a variety of unusual techniques that serve to sharpen our awareness of what we see onscreen. His use of sound, slow motion, close up, and the focus pull forces the audience to feel the full weight of Ricky’s death and confront our own perverse fascination with violence. In this way, the form of Boyz ‘n the Hood brings home the message of the film well before the final credits roll: violence in low income communities is tacitly accepted by most Americans who are desensitized to it and thus ignore the reality and humanity behind death.

This paper will primarily focus on a sequence of the five main shots that encompass Ricky’s shooting and the ways in which the director breaks with traditional continuity editing practices in order to increase the viewer’s awareness of the horror and reality of the action onscreen. The juxtaposition of a few standard filmmaking techniques with these unusual editing decisions furthers Singleton’s purpose with the scene. Shot 1 starts the clip, which takes place at 1:28:23 of the full film’s run time. Ricky notices the gang members at the end of the alley and begins to run away from them, towards the camera. Shot 2 cuts to a close up of the shooter in the car as he pulls the trigger of his shotgun. Shot 3 shows Ricky being hit in the leg by the blast and stumbling as he continues to flee his attackers. Shot 4 is an even tighter shot of the shooter as he fires again, followed by a quick cut to Shot 5 which shows Ricky being struck by this fatal shot.

In this sequence, the most noticeable departure from conventional cinematography appears in Singleton’s unusual treatment of sound. As soon as Ricky looks up to see the gang members aiming a shotgun at him, the diegetic sound and the musical score go silent. We do not hear the sound of Ricky’s footsteps as he runs away from his attackers and we do not hear the kind of heavy breathing that would typically accompany the kind of exertion his strained facial expression implies. Instead, there is a brief period of silence, followed only by the sounds of a dog barking and a child laughing. Given the neighborhood setting of this scene, at first blush these sounds might be thought to come from a nearby yard or park. But upon closer consideration, this theory does not hold up. There is no evidence on screen of any children or animals at play around the alley. In addition, the sounds come through much too clearly to be incidental carry over from off screen space, especially from sources that are never seen or mentioned elsewhere.

Instead, Singleton has inserted these sounds as a reflection of the audience itself. The barking dog, which is heard first, represents the baser desires of the viewer, our animal instincts. Ricky can be seen here as a hunted animal, with the shooter as the hunter, the pursuer. By associating the audience with the dog, a hunting animal, rather than with Ricky, Singleton points out our perverse desire to see Ricky get shot. At the psychological level of the id, we still take some pleasure in the pain of others. The sound of a child’s laughter is heard next, representing again that instinctual enjoyment of violence and pain. The sound feels completely out of place in this shot as it is contrasted with Ricky literally running for his life. This “contrapuntal use of sound vis-à-vis the visual [images]” (Braudy/Cohen 316) harks back to some of the earliest critiques of the use of sound in cinema. Russian theorists Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov state that the full power of a visual montage can only be realized if sound is used “at a sharp discord with the visual images” (Braudy/Cohen 316). This usage of sound increases the individual value (and thus the combined value) of the juxtaposed shots in this sequence.

The strangeness of the laughter and its complete incongruity with the gruesome images of a man gunned down in cold blood also serve to heighten the horror of Ricky’s death. The effect of the laughter calls to mind the use of children in horror films; normally associated with innocence, taken in a different context children can become scary and off-putting. The queasy feeling generated here builds on this effect by tacitly making the audience the source of the strangeness. The laughter reflects our inner enjoyment and acceptance of violence, not an easy revelation to come to grips with.


While no audience would ever actually laugh out loud at a moment like this, the jarring laughter that we hear attributed to us forces a recognition of the fact that there are elements of death in cinema that we enjoy. Take for example almost any typical action movie. The Star Wars movie franchise has spawned a world wide pop culture phenomenon, helped usher in the era of the blockbuster, and firmly established war and violence as one of its central themes. The films revolve around epic battle sequences that result in the casual deaths of thousands of foot soldiers. British super spy James Bond, star of history’s longest running movie franchise, disposes of his enemies via his famed ‘license to kill,’ a similarly mindless exercise in human death. In contrast, Singleton wants his audience to feel the full significance of Ricky’s death as a unique event and also to feel sick at the realization that watching this occur on screen can often be a source of enjoyment for us.

To drive this point home even further, Singleton elects to show Ricky’s flight down the alley in slow motion. As Walter Benjamin argues, slow motion extends movement, “presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones” (Braudy/Cohen 680), and thereby teaches us more about the action than we would normally understand. “The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses” (Braudy/Cohen 680); by this understanding of slow motion, we can see that Singleton’s decision to utilize it here ties in perfectly with his use of non-diegetic sound. The sound makes us aware of our perverse psychological instincts while the use of slow motion makes us feel Ricky’s humanity all the more by breaking down his run and extending it, thus increasing our emotional involvement in the scene. Drawing the death out as the director does here forces the audience to fully consider the death of a human being without the easy escape of a cut or transition away from the victim that is common in many typical Hollywood depictions of death.

Singleton presents sound and motion in these unconventional ways in order to jar the audience out of our everyday passive viewing experience. He makes us uncomfortable by way of the inappropriate pairing of happy sounds with images of death. By presenting the scene in slow motion, the director extends this discomfort long enough for us to realize that the laughter is coming from us and from our perverse enjoyment of what we see on screen. But what differentiates Singleton’s break with the conventions of continuity from other instances where directors set aside these norms? After all, slow motion and other atypical cinematographic techniques are actually somewhat common in filmic depictions of violence or sex. Witness the stylized portrayal of death in the clip from Zack Snyder’s 300 below. It glosses over the grittier aspects of battle, fitting in with Marinetti’s aesthetic that Benjamin references: “War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others” (Braudy/Cohen 684). This idea of war emphasizes the visual spectacle over the harsher reality of death that Singleton gives us. Though Snyder shows the blood and gore, he does so in a way that downplays any aspect of suffering and instead presents death more as a visual symphony.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8bIEk58LzI&feature=related

While Snyder shows death in slow motion in 300, he focuses mostly on the killer, quickly panning back to the Spartan warrior; with his camera, he abandons the dead and dying. In most films where death is approached unconventionally as it is in 300, the killer is the point of emphasis even if the victim is a major character.

But Singleton chooses to make his killer an anonymous figure, not even worthy of a mention by name. The director depicts this killer with very standard film techniques, a noticeable juxtaposition when compared to his treatment of Ricky. Our first shot of the shooter consists of a close up and a stationary camera trained on his face. He is completely unemotional throughout the killing, a stark contrast to the straining, fearful faces we see from Ricky (emphasized further by the slow motion). The killer fires his first shot, smoke fills the screen, and then clears to reveal an unchanged facial expression. In short, he is a blunt, inhuman instrument. The second shot of him develops this connection through an even tighter close up, followed by a focus pull from his face to the barrel of the shotgun. The visual message indicates that man and weapon are one and the same.

Other than the focus pull, the filmic presentation of the killer simply drips with convention. His actions take place in real time – no slow motion – and the sound of his gun firing and cocking are the only elements of diegetic sound in this sequence. Not only does this emphasize the unusual portrayal of Ricky, the straightforward shots of the shooter coincide with the very basic level on which we identify with him. The primal rage in his eyes becomes visceral through the close ups and the audience takes pleasure in this much as we do in watching violence. The effect of the focus pull as the shooter fires the second time is to show the audience how inhuman and mechanical his perspective is and, like the laughter, points to the perversity of our viewing emotions. How horrifying, Singleton seems to say, that what we get from this scene is pleasure from the actions of a mere instrument (the gun) rather than an understanding of how truly awful it is to experience the death of another human being.

Through the contrast of conventional and unconventional film techniques, Singleton uses the form of his film as much or more than he uses plot in order to convey meaning. Not only does he show how senseless violence can be, but he holds his audience partially responsible for it. Due to our enjoyment of violence in film, Americans have become desensitized to it in reality and ignore the humanity behind death. Our perverse instincts cause us to see violence – in the news, in film, or elsewhere – as entertainment and thus do not motivate us to work to eliminate it. Singleton strives to portray Ricky’s death in a manner that will break us out of this ideology and appreciate the emotional magnitude of violence in the inner city.

But Singleton takes his message one step further. His usage of sound and slow motion effectively accuses the viewer of enjoying and therefore tacitly supporting the murder of Ricky. He then employs standard cinematographic practices to tie that animalistic pleasure to the analogously id-driven rage of the killer. Interestingly though, the killer is black, just like Ricky, adding a complex racial element into the mix. By choosing to make both the shooter and the victim black, Singleton seems to be addressing the African-American audience in particular when he criticizes the viewers’ glorification of violence. This indictment of the black community as a major contributor to violence against blacks stands in opposition to the message found in many films made around this time, including some by perhaps the most famous African-American director of the early-90s, Spike Lee. In Lee’s Do the Right Thing, released just two years prior to Boyz ‘n the Hood, one of the major themes revolves around tension between racial groups. The violent conclusion of that film is initiated by a fight between a middle-aged white Italian and a young black man – racial conflict is at the heart of the movie.


Throughout Boyz, Singleton emphasizes the senselessness of the black-on-black crime and hatred that is so prevalent in South Central L.A. Black police officers discriminate against black civilians rather than stand up for their brothers. Black men shoot other black men in alleyways over minor slights to their street cred. Tre’s father Furious recognizes this self-discrimination and gives an impassioned speech about the importance of African-American cooperation, saying “It’s the ‘90s; we can’t afford to be afraid of our own people any more.”

Ricky’s death as Singleton shows it implicates the audience, holds us partially responsible for condoning the violence that destroys inner-city communities. He uses film techniques to draw out and personalize the violence he portrays, engendering guilt in his audience for finding a measure of enjoyment in it. This message is directed especially at the black viewer because Boyz ‘n the Hood primarily concerns itself with ways in which the African-American community can improve from the inside. Unlike many other black directors of the time, Singleton deems the impact that white society can have on the ‘hood as negligible and instead uses the form of his movie to condemn black-on-black violence and enjoin his African-American audience to unite against such behavior.

Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Film
Theory and Criticism. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 2009. 665-685.

Eisenstein, Sergei, Vsevold Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov. “Statement on Sound.”
Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press, 2009. 315-317.