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The Hollywood Boiling Pot - The Portrayal of Multiethnic Los Angeles in Film: Race Relations and Issues of Ethnicity in Crash , Freedom Writers and What's Cooking?

DIPLOMARBEIT

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades

Magistra der Philosophie

Anglistik und Amerikanistik(343)

Universität Klagenfurt

Fakultät für Kulturwissenschaften

Begutachter: Ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Adi Wimmer Institut: Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Juni 2010 Declaration of honour

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Villach, June 11, 2010 HOLLYWOOD'S BOILING POT - The portrayal of multi-ethnic Los Angeles in film: Race relations and issues in “ Crash ”, “ Freedom Writers ” & “ What's Cooking ”

1 Introduction 1 2 Defining 'American Ethnicity' 3 2.1 Ethnicity and Ethnic Identity 3 2.2 The Turn to Culture – Approaching American (Ethnic) Studies 5 2.3 Of Melting Pots, Pizza Pies and Salad Bowls – Approaching 7 (American) Ethnic Ideologies & Assimilation Theories 2.4 Voices of Ethnic America – Approaching Contemporary Ethnic 10 American Literature & Film 3 Conquering the Jungle: Los Angeles 30 3.1 Demographics & Ethnic geography of Los Angeles 30 3.2 L.A. History 32 3.2.1 Adobe Houses & A River – Early history 32 3.2.2 Tinseltown & Urban Sprawl – Rise of a metropolis 33 3.2.3 Rodney King & Burning Streets – America's first multi-ethnic 35 civil unrest 3.2.4 Multi-L.A.-yerd 37 3.3 Los Angeles in Numbers – Statistics & Facts 37 3.3.1 Crime & Safety 38 3.3.2 Economy 40 3.3.3 Education 43 3.3.4 Politics 44 3.3.5 Social Security, Health Care & Welfare 45 4 Starring:Los Angeles 48 4.1 L.A. in literature 48 4.2 L.A. in film 62 5 Crash 72 5.1 Synopsis 72 5.2 Character Analysis 75 5.3 Issues of race and ethnicity in Crash 79 5.4 Critics & Viewers' Reception 92 6 Freedom Writers 97 6.1 Synopsis 97 6.2 Character Analysis 99 6.3 Issues of race and ethnicity in Freedom Writers 101 6.4 Critics & Viewers' Reception 120 7 What's Cooking 124 7.1 Synopsis 124 7.2 Character Analysis 127 7.3 Issues of race and ethnicity in What's Cooking 130 7.4 Critics & Viewers' Reception 149 8 Conclusion 153 9 Bibliography Introduction

The greatest difficulty in coming to terms with Los Angeles will always be not seeing it as such; not for a lack of representations of it, but because of their contradictory plenitude. Brecht's scare-quotes spring up automatically around any mention of the 'real' L.A., due to the sheer volume of incompatible definitions. According to your point of view, Los Angeles is either exhilarating or nihilistic, sun-drenched or smog-enshrouded, a multicultural haven or a segregated ethnic concentration camp – Atlantis or high capitalism – and orchestrating these polarized alternatives is an urban identity thriving precisely on their interchangeability. The city (or is it a city, and not a collection of cities?) recycles an extraordinary amount of oxymoronic self-referential discourse, never cohering into anything more than a patchwork of undecidable clichés – this paragraph perhaps being just another instance of that tendency. 1

Los Angeles is multi-faceted in every aspect. The streets you walk, the people you meet, the reasons you are there (visiting or living), the food you eat, the weather that greets you - everything influences the perception you will have of L.A.. And since there are thousands of streets, millions of people, and cuisines from all of over the world, it will most likely differ even from those of the people closest to you. Many a perception of Los Angeles has translated into the arts. Music - think of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns'N'Roses, 2Pac, Madonna's Hollywood , L.A. Woman by the Doors or even Frank Sinatra's L.A. Is My Lady , to name only a few; visual art – paintings by Sandow Birk, Z. Swerdlove or James Doolin, the abundance of artistic L.A. photography and most notably the murals and graffiti that can be seen all over the city; literature – prominent L.A. novelists like Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy come to mind, but also works of Upton Sinclair, Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley and Norman Mailer; and lastly the extensive list of movies set in or even depicting Los Angeles – all are different ways of dealing with the many faces of L.A. Nonetheless, from this vast pool of images certain recurring elements of the city's character can be drawn. For instance, the beauty of the city would be acclaimed, and at the same time substantial problems could addressed. One of these recurring elements is Los Angeles' multi- ethnic background. Ranking high among the nation's top five metropolitan areas with the highest concentration of immigrants, L.A.'s attribute as a “melting pot” of cultures is reflected in its colorful cityscape. However, as beautiful as ethnic diversity can be, from time to time it will show its ugly sides, too, and in Los Angeles' case this happened more than once. This thesis shall examine how multi-ethnic Los Angeles is portrayed in film. Since there have been countless movies made about L.A., it would be a bold venture to interpret all of them. The choice of movies will hence be narrowed down to three recent examples of how

1 Murphet, Julian: Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cultural Margins) . Cambridge University Press, 2001. p.8

- 1 - Hollywood deals with race relations and racial issues. The first one is Paul Haggis's Crash . The Academy Award winning movie has thrown a very critical light at L.A.'s multi-ethnic society, claiming that strangers never come into contact unless they literally crash into one another. The second movie, Freedom Writers, tackles racial tensions from a different angle. The main character of the movie, a young high school teacher, tries to bring about a change on a campus ruled by interracial hostility – and she ultimately succeeds. What's Cooking? , the third movie in this thesis, is celebrating the ethnic diversity of Los Angeles rather than sharply criticizing its inherent problems or rallying for a change. In the end the predominant theme in all three of them clearly is race, which makes them a qualified selection for our purpose. However before we can resume with a thorough analysis of the movies and the kind of picture they paint of L.A., other related topics, which serve as a basis to underpin later arguments, have to be covered. The following chapter will focus on “American ethnicity”. First, definitions of the terms “race”, “ethnicity” and “ethnic identity” will be given. Then we will touch upon thesis-relevant topics of American Ethnic Studies and American Studies in general, moving on to display the various assimilation models and illustrate different ethnic ideologies. A short survey of contemporary ethnic American literature and film will form the final part of the chapter on “American ethnicity”. Particular attention will be paid to the common characters and themes they provide. From there our journey will take us to the city itself – Los Angeles. After looking at demographics and the geographical distribution of ethnic neighborhoods, the thesis will delve into L.A.'s rich and vivid past by retelling its history divided into four periods. To come full circle on Los Angeles, facts and figures on different topics such as crime, economy, education, politics and social security will be presented. Moving on from there, a chapter titled Starring: Los Angeles shall examine the role the city has played in film and fiction over the past, with different authors and different film genres having all paid their tribute to it. Subsequently the three movies of interest will be analyzed in what forms the main part of this thesis. To make it more distinct, the structure shall be the same for all three: first a plot synopsis will be given, then the characters will be analyzed, followed by the central point, the portrayal of issues of race and ethnicity, and rounded up by the reviews the movie received by critics and viewers. On the whole, the aim of the thesis is to determine what kind of picture of multi-ethnic Los Angeles the film industry has drawn over the last few years and how accurate it is, or if we may be dealing with completely differing images of a city that refuses to be defined.

- 2 - Defining 'American Ethnicity'

The United States of America is a country that was continually shaped by immigration, turning it into the multicultural, multi-ethnic society it is today. Race and ethnicity have therefore played a decisive role in the forming of an American national identity, eventually redefining the phrase “E pluribus unum” to reflect that a single people and nation emerged from a conglomerate of many ethnies. This chapter will attempt to interpret the meaning of ethnicity in America. First the terminology surrounding ethnicity and race shall be reviewed. The concept of American Ethnic Studies in its function as an interdisciplinary study of the history and culture of minority groups will then form the second part of this chapter on ethnicity in America. Since various researchers have posited their interpretations of the assimilation process for immigrants in America, prevalent assimilation theories shall be the focus of the third part of this chapter. Finally, exploring trends, movements and approaches within, 'Voices of Ethnic America' will present an overview of contemporary American ethnic literature and primarily film.

Race, Ethnicity and Ethnic Identity

The term ' ethnicity ' derives from the Greek ethnos , meaning people, crowd, multitude, but also nation and foreign people, and is frequently linked to concepts of race, nation and culture. Among the first to draw a clear distinction between the concepts was German sociologist Max Weber, who saw race being founded on the community of origin, ethnicity on a subjective belief in shared origins, and nation as characterized by a more intense political 'passion'. According to Weber, ethnic groups “entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration.” 2 Such a belief is important for group formation and the creation of a community spirit.

The concept of ethnicity implies three factors: (1) membership of a group, either from personal choice or as an external imposition, but which nonetheless implies the existence of an 'us' and a 'them', and therefore the concept of 'other'; (2) the search for a common identity on the part of group the members; and (3) the perception on the part of other groups of more or less coherent stereotypes ascribed to the ethnic group in question. 3

The issue of ethnicity has become a modern and universal one, as ethnic groups have begun to

2 Weber, Max: Economy and Society . University of California Press, Berkeley 1978. p. 398 3 Bolaffi, Guido et al.(Ed.): Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity and Culture . Sage, London 2003. p.94

- 3 - rediscover their cultural roots. Since the beginning of the 20 th century various theories on ethnicity have emerged. The primordial theory holds that the idea of ethnicity is rooted in a pre-Weber understanding of humanity being divided into groups that share distinct archetypal primordial features, and modern ethnic groups therefore have a historical continuity into the far past. However, most modern theories refute this idea, stating that, while the concept of it may have existed at all times, ethnicity is ever-changing and ethnic groups tend to vanish and realign in new patterns. Ethnicity is thus viewed as “not so much an isolated entity, but as the result of the constant encounters between different peoples.” 4 Ethnic groups, rather than being stable and unchanging, share certain economic, social, cultural and religious characteristics at a given moment in time. Another sociological focus is on the relational and dialogic aspects of ethnicity. The designation and exclusion of ' others ' based on characteristic differences assert a collective ego and group membership(' us '). “Human beings share a deep-seated psychological urge to identify diversity and similarity as terms of comparison in an effort to establish their essential identity.” 5 Diversity is required for a group to distinguish itself from another and to individuate, whereas similarity provides reassurance and the comfort of belonging. For this reason, separation and interaction, competition and conflict between ethnic groups become important components of ethnicity and ethnic identification . Since ethnicity is often used in popular discourse as a euphemism for race , and both tend to draw on the same range of attributes - skin color, religion, language, geographical origin, nationality and even cuisine – it is important to say a few words about the relationship between ethnicity and race. There are three approaches to the conceptual distinction between ethnicity and race: The traditional approach, which negates substantial conceptual differences, the racial formation approach, which views race as an autonomous field of social conflict and cultural/ideological meaning, and the new ethnicity approach, which “argues that race and ethnicity are distinct, but not mutually exclusive concepts.” 6 For some time it was common to divide humanity into four races that have originated on different continents and were identified by physical features (particularly skin color) – 'white', 'black', 'yellow' and 'red'. However, modern genetics have abandoned these classifications, since hereditary physical traits do not follow clear boundaries. Instead, they recognize an infinite number of sub-populations within the human species. Still, race exists as a social and

4 Ibid. 5 Bolaffi (2003) p. 239 6 Bolaffi (2003) p. 99

- 4 - cultural construct that is capable of exercising great force. For instance, under certain circumstances, race may become the pretext of discrimination.

Racism, obviously, builds on the assumption that personality is somehow linked with hereditary characteristics which differ systematically between 'races', and in this way race may assume sociological importance even if it has no 'objective' existence. 7

The study of race relations is thus a discrete field of enquiry constructed by social scientists on the notion that 'race' exists in everyday life. Sociologists hence need not believe in the existence of race itself, but that racial differences are at the center of race relations.

Race relations [...] are the relations existing between peoples distinguished by marks of racial descent, particularly when these racial differences enter into the consciousness of the individuals and groups so distinguished, and by so doing determine in each case the individual's conception of himself as well as his status in the community (Park, 1950:81). 8

In recent years, the increasing presence of race relations in media and film has sparked a heightened interest in this field of study. As a result, publications on the topic have established the study of race relations as an independent area of scientific inquiry within sociology.

The Turn to Culture – Approaching American Ethnic Studies

Born of student activism in the late 1960s, the field of ethnic studies has seen both periods of advance as well as backlash in the four decades of its rather short existence.

Beginning in 1968 at San Francisco State and University of California campuses such as Berkley and Santa Barbara - then spreading to many campuses across the nation during the course of the next quarter century to the present day - students of color have been demanding greater access to higher education, recruitment of more faculty of color, and the creation of programs that have come to be collectively known as ethnic studies and separately by a variety of names: Black studies (Also Afro Americans Studies, African American Studies, African Studies); Chicana/o, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican Studies (also Latina/o Studies); American Indian (or Native American) Studies; and Asian American Studies. These programs formed the beginning of multicultural curricular reform in higher education. 9

This demand for a separate space on college campuses devoted to the study of American racial and ethnic groups was endorsed by moral and political arguments raised in the public realm, leading to an upsurge of various ethnic study programs in the 1970s. Particularly the field of Black studies soon achieved wide recognition putting forth entire independent

7 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland: Ethnicity, race and nation . In: Guiberneau, Montserrat & Rex, John(Ed.): The Ethnicity Reader . Polity Press, Malden 1997. p. 34 8 Park, Robert : Race and Culture . Free Press, New York 1950. Quoted in: Solomos, John: Race and Racism in Britain . Palgrave Macimillan, London 2003 (3 rd edition). p. 15 9 Hu-DeHart, Evelyn: Ethnic studies in U. S. higher education: History, development, and goals. In: Banks, James & Banks, Cherry: Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education . Jossey-Bass, San Francisco 2004. p.869

- 5 - departments dedicated to it. The success of the latter can largely be attributed to the financial aid given to the departments by philanthropic organizations, e.g. the Ford Foundation under the direction on McGeorge Bundy 10 , which in turn shaped the course Black Studies would take. Other multidepartmental ethnic study programs, on the other hand, often had to rely on the generosity of established departments when it came to resources, and their curricula were not seldom pieced together: a course on history, one on sociology and a couple drawn from the language studies departments. Nevertheless, the 1960s and 1970s marked the blossoming of an entire range of new study programs dealing with the history and culture of ethnic groups. The 1980s saw a decade of retrenchment. Conservative political forces trying to (mis)represent affirmative action as reverse discrimination and a reparation for slavery, as well as dwindling resources and demoralized overtaxed faculty led to regressive enrollment in this field. Ethnic studies were vituperated as “balkanized bastions of self-imposed isolation for students of color, shoddy scholarship, and unqualified professors.” 11 The end of the decade, however, was marked by increasing numbers of students from various ethnic backgrounds and hence attempts to rehabilitate and reorganize ethnic study programs.

[T]he early advocates of ethnic studies deliberately rejected the notion of curricular 'mainstreaming' or 'integration', favoring instead, autonomous academic programs built on the principles of solidarity among racial minorities, interdisciplinary approach, 'self-determination', and 'educational relevance', unencumbered by failed paradigms and biased scholarship of the past. 12

The problem-prone vertical structure in the various distinct ethnic study programs was soon replaced by the desire to merge them into a single more comparative larger unit, which would “explore commonalities and divergencies in the experiences of racial and ethnic groups domestically and worldwide.”13 Ethnic studies had been reborn as a distinct cross- or transdisciplinary discipline. Taking methods of intensive investigation from social studies and combining them with vantage points from the humanities, the discipline of Ethnic studies set out to look at social relations from the bottom up. Instead of focusing on transcendent universalism and the dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity, it moved on to recognize the importance of perspective in its quest for a new or revised interpretation of

10 cf. Rooks, Noliwe M.: White Money/BlackPower: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education. Beacon Press, Boston 2006. 11 Wing, Bob: “Educate to Liberate!”: Multiculturalism and the Struggle for Ethnic Studies . Colorlines magazine, summer 1999. http://www.colorlines.com/article.php?ID=101&p=1 12 Gutierrez, Ramon A.: Ethnic Studies – Its Evolution in American Colleges and Universities. In: Goldberg, David Theo(Ed.): Multiculturalism – A critical reader . Blackwell, Cambridge(Mass.) 1994. p. 157-167 13 Ibid.

- 6 - America's past.

Ethnic studies was thus the study of social, cultural and historical forces that have shaped the development of America's diverse ethnic peoples. Focusing on immigration, slavery and genocide, the three social processes that combined to create in the United States a nation of nations, the ethnic studies department at UCSD was organized to examine intensively the histories, languages, and cultures of America's racial and ethnic groups in and of themselves, in their relationships to each other, and particularly, in structural contexts of power. 14

Today, virtually every college across the country has some kind of Ethnic studies program, and further, no institution of higher education can claim elite academic status unless it has an African American studies program.

Of Melting Pots, Pizza Pies and Salad Bowls – Approaching (American) Ethnic Ideologies & Assimilation Theories

Even though one's identity may be perceived as something very personal and individual, there are many factors that can influence it greatly. The migration to another country and the processes involved are perhaps one of the most prominent (ethnic) identity-shaping factors. The process in which the characteristics of members of immigrant groups come to resemble those of their host societies is commonly known as assimilation , but may also be called integration or incorporation depending on the context. Although immigrant experiences show that it generally takes three or four generations for the process of assimilation to be fully completed, no fixed timetables for the completion of the process can be drawn. The reasons may vary as to why the assimilation process of an immigrant group is incomplete, and often include self-referential components(level of education) as well as external factors(economic or structural changes within the host society, entry policies). Over the years scholars have developed various theories of assimilation in order to deepen the understanding of a subject that has played such an important role in the history of (U.S.) immigration. The resulting models of assimilation can be assigned to three major theoretical schools: Anglo-conformity, melting pot and cultural pluralism. The Anglo-conformity theory of assimilation is based on the presumption that immigrants to the United States have to adapt to the middle class cultural patterns of a dominant white, Anglo-Saxon culture. According to Milton Gordon, this adaptation demands “the complete renunciation of the immigrant’s ancestral culture in favor of the behavior and values of the Anglo-Saxon core group.” 15 Hence it suggests that immigrants (or more broadly ethnic 14 Ibid. 15 Gordon, Milton: Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion and National Origins. Oxford University Press, New York 1964. p.85

- 7 - groups) had to give up their distinct ethnic identity in favor of adopting the mainstream American culture and English language. In this interpretation, assimilation appears to be a one-way process where the presence of ethnic groups does not affect the mainstream culture. Gordon further identified seven dimensions of assimilation 16 : (1) cultural assimilation (or acculturation ) – cultural patterns are changed to match those of the host society, (2) structural assimilation - members of migrant ethnic groups join primary groups (cliques, clubs, institutions) within the host society, (3) marital assimilation - high rates of intermarriage with members of the dominant core group, (4) identificational assimilation – the development of a sense of peoplehood and personal identity based exclusively on the host society and not the land of origin, (5) attitude receptional assimilation – the absence of prejudicial attitudes and stereotyping on the part of both the dominant and migrant ethnic groups, (6) behavior receptional assimilation – the absence of intentional discriminatory behavior against the migrant ethnic group, and (7) civic assimilation – the conflict between ethnic groups and the dominant society over basic values and power becomes virtually non-existent.

Acculturation could occur in the absence of other types of assimilation, and the stage of 'acculturation only' could last indefinitely, according to Gordon. His major hypothesis was that structural assimilation – that is, integration into primary groups – is associated with, or stimulates, all other types of assimilation. [...] In particular, this meant that prejudice and discrimination would decline, if not disappear, that intermarriage would be common, and that the minority's separate identity would wane. 17

Hence structural assimilation seems to be the most powerful aspect of the entire process. Even though Gordon proposes Anglo-conformity as the dominant theoretical model regarding assimilation in America, he also acknowledges the existence of other types of assimilation models. The melting pot theory of assimilation is perhaps the most commonly used model to describe the population of the United States. However it would be inaccurate to claim that it is the one true model, as it just comprises a different belief about what assimilation is. The melting pot model “offers an idealistic vision of American society and identity as arising from the biological and cultural fusion of different peoples.” 18 It is based on the idea that different ethnic groups come together and from their interaction a new culture that incorporates elements from all of them emerges. The symbolical equation for this model would thus be A+B+C=D (as opposed to the Anglo-conformity equation of A+B+C=A). The term itself first

16 Ibid. p.71 17 Alba, Richard & Nee, Victor: Remaking the American Mainstream – Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration . Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 2003. p.24 18 Ibid p.26

- 8 - appeared in Israel Zangwill's Broadway play The Melting Pot from 1908. However, the idea of people from different origins merging into a hybrid society in the 'country of immigrants' can already be found in earlier writings, namely in the Letters from an American Farmer published by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in 1782:

What is the American, this new man? [...]that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country.[...] He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, [...]Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and prosperity will one day cause great changes in the world. 19

In 1845 Ralph Waldo Emerson similarly spoke of the energy “of all the European tribes” and also Africans and Polynesians that would “construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting- pot of the Dark Ages[...]”. 20 Even though the idealistic view of the U.S. as a melting pot of cultures has been expressed by many (scholars, politicians and men of letters alike), such a process of reciprocal adaptation on an equal basis never really came about.

Gordon feels that the melting pot version of assimilation also falls short of reality in describing American culture. He believes the ideal applies only to the early process of nation making in America, the result being what is considered the Anglo culture. This process would have to occur for Gordon with the absence of prejudice. Any melting that exists for Gordon is melting into the host group. Later research (Hirschman, 1983) confirms Gordon's conclusion regarding the melting pot version of assimilation theory. 21

Today the term melting pot is largely disregarded by modern sociologists as outdated and a myth – and to some extent even oppressive. Both Anglo-conformity and melting pot models have been critiqued for painting a benign picture of ethnic relations and not explaining how discriminatory forces operate. Since these models can only give clues about the types of discrimination an ethnic group is faced with from the extent to which the dimensions of assimilation have been developed, they only illustrate the consequences of discrimination. Also the underlying mono-culturalistic approach of both theories has been met with criticism among modern scholars of sociology. Instead pluralism has moved in to replace the idea of assimilation.

Today the trend is toward multiculturalism, not assimilation. The old 'melting pot' metaphor is giving way to new metaphors such as 'salad bowl' and 'mosaic', mixtures of various ingredients that keep their individual characteristics. Immigrant populations within the United States are not

19 Gordon (1964) p.116 20 Gordon (1964) p.117 21 Winters, Loretta I. & DeBose, Herman L.: New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial identity in the 21 st century. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks 2003. p.135

- 9 - being blended together in one 'pot', but rather they are transforming American Society into a truly multicultural mosaic. 22

The cultural pluralism theory maintains that ethnic groups can co-exist (in the United States) without giving up their cultural values and traditions through assimilation or melting together (A+B+C=A+B+C). A popular image used to depict cultural pluralism is that of the salad bowl : Each ethnic group represents an ingredient which preserves its own flavor and texture whilst still composing one mixed salad. Nevertheless, many sociologists agree that some assimilation to more dominant segments of society occurs in pluralistic models too. Hence another food image can be employed to describe the American society - a pizza has a common Anglo-Saxon dough, but the toppings may vary and are all distinct. 23 Even though fewer elements of ethnic heritage are retained from generation to generation and more customs of the dominant Anglo-Saxon society are adopted, “(white) ethnic groups continue to reveal residential, behavioral, organizational, and cultural patterns that mark their distinctive ethnic identity, one that subtly separates them from the middle-class Anglo-Saxon core.” 24 Exhibiting a distinctive ethnic identity can often be a way of coping with discrimination for it provides guidance and a source of support in a new or even hostile environment. In attempts to openly display their ethnic identities and the pride they feel for their ethnic heritage, later generations (third and fourth) may even create new symbols, reinvent identity markers, and revive and reinterpret old customs. In this context the term ethnogenesis is often used to describe the (re)emergence of a distinct, recognizable ethnic identity. From a multiculturalist perspective the motto of the United States could say e pluribus multiplex societas , but that does not sound quite as catchy, now does it? In the end both assimilation and multiculturalism theories have supporters and opponents. However, efforts have been made towards a compromise between the two with the goal to achieve a balance between the practicing of traditions and customs of the native country and the instillment of love for the host country. It remains to be seen, though, if this compromise will prevail.

Voices of Ethnic America – Approaching Contemporary Ethnic American Literature & Film

“My mission, if you will, is to get Americans to realize that we have to work together to second-by- second redefine what American culture is and what the total heritage is. I can be just as much an

22 http://www.culturalsavvy.com/understanding_american_culture.htm 23 Other images that are often used to reflect America's multi-ethnic society are the Patchwork Quilt (each ethnic group representing a patch in the quilt) and Mosaic (each ethnic group symbolizes a stone, but only when they come together they form a bigger picture). 24 Aguirre, Adalberto Jr. & Turner, Jonathan H.(Ed.): American Ethnicity . McGraw-Hill, Fairfield 1998. p.24

- 10 - American writer as a [Don] Delillo writing his last novel about baseball. There are many Americans, and it's sensitizing people to accept us as part of the fabric and not just simply adumbrations.” - Bharati Mukherjee, Indian American novelist 25

Since real life often serves as an inspiration for artistic output, it is reasonable to say that the undeniable presence of ethnic diversity in America has influenced artists from the colonial times to the present. Assimilation, integration, cultural pluralism, heritage, equality, racism and discrimination are all among the prevailing tropes of ethnic American literature and film. Nonetheless it is the processes directed at the self and the group identity (e.g. self-discovery and identification, exploring self-consciousness, self-awareness) that truly shape the core of ethnic discourse. The varied ethnic American literatures have been seeking to correct the long- standing stereotypical images of African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans, which have been produced and perpetuated by Anglo-American literary and cinematic culture. Their collective endeavour opened up to a broader viewing of American culture through a spectrum of diverse ethnic perspectives. Breaking it down into four core groups 26 - African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic/Chicano 27 and Native American – Voices of Ethnic America shall examine in concise form the historical development of these ethnic literatures and cinemas as well as their currents and main themes.

Literature

Earliest African-American literature can be dated back to the second half of the 18 th and the early 19 th century and the poets Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon, with some of their works even predating the emergence of the United States as an independent country. At a time when the white nationalist belief that other particularly darker skinned races are inferior was still very common (and even backed by scientific racism), many people found it hard to believe that African-American slaves were mentally capable of producing such forms of high art and thus Wheatley and Hammon had to prove their authorship repeatedly. However by the mid-19 th century abolitionist views were gaining weight, a shift that could be observed in literature as well. One novel in particular (by a white author) is credited with having a profound effect on the sectional conflict that lead to the American Civil War: Harriet Beecher

25 Bharati Mukherjee quoted in U.S. Society and Values(Vol.5 No.1): Contemporary U.S. Literature – Multicultural Perspectives . February 2000. p.45 26 Although a fifth core group, the ethnic White (an umbrella term grouping Americans of European origin [particularly Central, Eastern and Southern] as well as of Jewish religion and sometimes even including people of North African and Middle-Eastern descent), could be identified, an analysis of its divergent literary and cinematic discourse will be cut due to space restraints, it being more marginal in this context. 27 The broader scope of the term Hispanic (i.e. of origins in Spanish-speaking countries, of Mexican and Central and South American descent) will be partially abandoned in favor of the narrower scope of Chicano (i.e. of Mexican descent) literature, which has a perennial tradition and has been well studied.

- 11 - Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Even though the novel itself used and even created common stereotypes of blacks (e.g. the affectionate mammy, pickaninny children, the happy and lazy singing slave, the light-skinned mulatto as the sex object of white slave owners, and Uncle Tom, who epitomizes the subservient slave eager to please his owner), its depiction of the harsh reality and immorality of enslavement ignited heated debates between abolitionists and the defenders of slavery. Slave narratives, most prominently the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, Soujourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs, amplified abolitionist notions and offered authentic black perspectives on the experience of enslavement. At the turn of the century, many years after the end of the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery, the condition of African Americans in the country was still far from being optimal. Rather, it was marked by color-lines and ubiquitous inequity and prejudice, accompanied by the implementation of Jim Crow laws of racial segregation. Although occupying opposite positions on how the problem of racism should be tackled, the confrontational attitudes in the works of civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois and the more accommodationist approaches of educator Booker T. Washington respectively called for a change that sought to improve African-American life. The migration of a great number of southern African Americans from the rural peasant South to the urban sophisticated North brought about great changes to the image of the African- American population. The Harlem Renaissance (1920-1940) proved to be a breakthrough era for African-American literature and arts. From jazz to theatre and particularly literature African-American culture blossomed. African-American night clubs in Harlem like the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theatre enjoyed great popularity housing musicians like Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie and Duke Ellington. Among the leading literary figures of this era were poets Langston Hughes( The Weary Blues , 1926), Frank Marshall Davis( I am the American Negro , 1937) and Arna Bontemps, and novelists Zora Neale Hurston( Their Eyes Were Watching God , 1937), Claude McKay ( Home to Harlem , 1927), George Schuyler ( Black No More , 1930) and Jean Toomer( Cane , 1923). The Harlem Renaissance forged a new black identity (the “New Negro”) that possessed a spirit of great social self-consciousness and self-determination. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s drew upon the strength of this spirit, which created a sense of Black nationalism. Inspired by the Black activism, which demanded an end to segregation and racism, many a writer would turn to address issues of identity, empowerment, race and sexuality in their works, like James Baldwin would do in Another Country (1962), Richard Wright in Native Son (1940), and Ralph Ellison in Invisible

- 12 - Man (1952). During this period female black poets Gwendolyn Brooks(the first African- American to win the Pulitzer Prize), Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez made a name for themselves, and playwright Lorraine Hansberry made her debut on Broadway with A Raisin in the Sun (1959), a play about a poor African-American blue-collar family in Chicago. By the 1970s African-American literature had become a part of the mainstream and had been canonized as a genre of American literature. During the Black Arts Movement, which sought empowerment through art by “forg[ing] an unbreakable link between artistic production and revolutionary politics” 28 , the literary work of African-American writers began to be analyzed by scholars and fellow writers. The list of contributing African-American writers who defined the genre over the past few decades is exhaustive, hence I will only mention an exceptional few: poets Maya Angelou and James Emanuel, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison( The Bluest Eye , 1970; Song of Solomon , 1977; and Beloved ,1987), Pulitzer Prize- winner Alice Walker( The Color Purple ,1982), and novelists Ishmael Reed and Chester Himes. 29

As the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, Hispanic voices join in a common chorus that is clear and unmistakable and validates their experiences and culture(s) in the country. One of the means to make these voices heard is art, and literature, forming a dialogue between authors expressing their ideas and feelings and the readership that is able to process these and hence experience another person's conflicts, culture etc., is perhaps the most efficient amplifier and recorder of voices. The roots of Hispanic literature can be traced back to the sixteenth century and the chronicles written in Spanish by adventurers, conquistadors and settlers of the Spanish colonies that today comprise California, the American Southwest and Florida. After large parts of Mexico had been annexed by the United States in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in the wake of the Mexican-American War, Mexican and American cultural spheres intersected constantly and hence a new culture developed that belonged to neither fully - Chicano culture. Since most of the Hispanic literature in the 19 th century was still written in Spanish, and cultural expressions of Hispanics were not yet perceived by the U.S. mainstream as a vital component of the American experience, many literary creations remained unknown for a long time. The Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project sponsored by the

28 hooks, bell: Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics . South End Press, Boston 1990. p.106 29 cf. Andrews, William L.(ed.): The Oxford companion to African American literature. Oxford Univ. Press, New York 1997. Gates, Henry Louis(ed.): The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Norton, New York 1997.

- 13 - Rockerfeller Foundation and based at the University of Houston took on the task of recovering Hispanic literary works of value, which have been gathering dust in archives across the U.S. In corridos , a form of ballad that was popular in the late 19 th century and that celebrates the revolutionary hero, the outlaw, a first mixing of English and Spanish surfaced. This communicating in two languages runs through Hispanic literary history until today, as bilingualism is a shared experience of virtually all Hispanic writers, no matter what ancestry. The corridos resurfaced repeatedly in later periods and enjoyed great popularity. Moreover, serialized novels and poems appearing in Spanish newspapers were particularly popular among the growing Hispanic population in the early 20 th century. The flowering of Hispanic literature is an occurrence of the second half of the 20 th century and closely intertwined with the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, most notably the Chicano Movement itself, which had the social liberation of Mexican-Americans, their empowerment and resistance to Anglo cultural hegemony at its foremost goal. Thus the themes Hispanic literature employs are connected to a discourse of contestation of stereotypes and self-definition, and put emphasis on individual and group identity. Developed discourses include: the struggles against racism, sexism and classism, and beyond that against oppression, cultural imperialism, war, materialism, homophobia etc.; the politics of liberation in the U.S. and in the Americas; evolving thematics of the community(e.g. life in the barrio), the politics of the family; and the influence of ancestors, folklore and ancient myths. Additionally, women writers have added their perspectives to feminist agendas by challenging the patriarchal structures of their own Hispanic cultures. The abundance of themes combined with the diversity of nations of origin creates a complex, multidimensional literature. The major group contributing to Hispanic literature are Chicanos. Among the classic works of their most prominent literary figures are Rudolfo Anaya's novel Bless Me Ultima (1972) with a strong bond to nature and earth at its core, Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street (1985) set in a contrasting urban neighborhood, Ana Castillo's So Far From God (1993), and novels by Tomás Rivera, Oscar Zeta Acosta, John Rechy, and the plays of Luis Valdez and the poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Alberto Baltazar Urista(“Alurista”), Luis Omar Salinas and Rodolfo Gonzales 30 . Puerto Ricans, as the second largest group of contributors, set themselves apart with authors like the novelists Piri Thomas and Ed Vega, short story writer and essayist Judith Ortiz Cofer, and poets Miguel Algarin and Sandra Mariá Esteves. Their writings reflect the influence of rhythm on life on the island.

30 Gonzales wrote the epic poem I am Joaquin (1967) that came to be associated with the Chicano Movement.

- 14 - Meanwhile the writings of the third largest group, Cuban Americans, are dominated by images of life in exile as evident in Roberto G. Fernández' memoir Raining Backwards (1988), Cristina García's novel Dreaming in Cuban (1992), Oscar Hijuelos' Pulitzer-Prize winning novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1990) and the poetry of Gustavo Perez Firmat. Emerging voices from Dominican, Guatemalan, Colombian and other minor Hispanic communities across the U.S. - among them Dominican-Americans Julia Alvarez( How the García Girls Lost Their Accents , 1991) and Junot Díaz(Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 2008), Guatemalan-American Francisco Goldman and Colombian- American Jaime Manrique – add to the richness of an ever-growing Hispanic literary canon that is expected to produce some of the most vital and innovative works of literature in the 21 st century United States. 31

First anthologies of Asian-American writing, which started to appear in the 1970s 32 , confined Asian-American literature to that of writers of East Asian origin (China, Japan, Korea, Philippines). Since, the field has expanded to include the writings of Malaysians, Indians, Pakistani, Vietnamese, Cambodian and Pacific Islanders and the boundaries are still stretching. Asian-American literature is hence very heterogeneous, containing a multitude of nationalities, languages and religions as sources of origin. As a fairly young field of study it is developing in two directions uncovering writers of the past and helping new ones get published. Two sisters of Chinese ancestry, Edith Maud Eaton(pseud. Sui Sin Far) and Winnifred Eaton(pseud. Onoto Watanna) were credited as pioneers, their short stories( Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian , 1909) and novels( Tama , 1910) respectively being among the first works by Asian Americans to see publication. Perhaps the most prominent theme at that time (and to some extent still today) in Asian- and particularly Chinese- American literature was the pervasive hostility and prejudice Asians were met with. The Yellow Peril mindset of many (Anglo-)Americans - which arrived on the heels of heightened immigration from Asia in the second half of the 19 th century when cheap labor force was needed and extended to all Asians - peaked in the Immigration Act of 1924 that practically barred further immigration from Asia, and did not subside until after World War II and the confinement of Japanese Americans in internment camps. Writings about the traumatic

31 cf. Suarez, Virgil: Hispanic American Literature: Divergence & Commonality In: U.S. Society and Values (February 2000). p.32-34 Fernández, Roberta: In other words: Literature by Latinas of the United States . Arte Público Press, Houston 1994. p.xxi-xxiv Kanellos, Nicolás(ed.): Hispanic American literature: a brief introduction and anthology . HarperCollins, New York 1995. 32 Asian-American Authors (1992), Asian-American Heritage (1974), Aiiieeeee! (1975)

- 15 - relocation experience of Japanese-Americans during WWII, e.g. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1972), Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter (1953) and John Okada's No-no Boy (1957), supplemented earlier fiction about immigrant dreams of golden opportunities being destroyed by the harsh (labor) conditions they encountered. As various Exclusion Acts were being lifted and national-quotas abolished under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Asian-American authors became more prolific. Maxine Hong Kingston's acclaimed memoir The Woman Warrior (1975) is exemplary of several prevalent themes of Asian American literature:

Frequently identified as major themes [...] are several groups of subjects and clusters of issues: silence (both gendered and racially constituted) and the necessity for speech; the discovery of voice; the construction of identity and the search for self-realization; the mother-daughter relationship and the conflicts that it engenders; memory; acculturation and bi-culturalism; and cultural alienation. 33

Particularly generational conflicts and fixed Asian gender roles that contrast with those of American society proved to be a steady source of inspiration, as evident in the novels of C.Y.Lee( The Flower Drum Song , 1957), Louis Chu( Eat a Bowl of Tea , 1961), and the widely acclaimed Amy Tan ( The Kitchen God's Wife , 1991 & The Joy Luck Club , 1989), as well as in the short stories of Hisaye Yamamoto( Seventeen Syllables , 1988) and the poetry of Janice Mirikitani. In the last two decades of the 20 th century the spectrum of Asian-American literature expanded with the writings of accomplished Hawaiian poets Cathy Song and Garret Hongo, in addition to Vietnamese and Laotian refugee stories (e.g. Pegi Deitz Shea's The Whispering Cloth , 1995) and fiction of South-Asian American authors like Bharati Mukherjee and Bapsi Sidwha hitting the book market. By the 1980s the stereotypical image of Asian individuals in the United States had changed to that of a model minority due to high degrees of success in income and education, but also because of their high family values and respect for elders. However, this new stereotype that is mediated by the media, while positive, is still problematic for it ignores large Asian- American communities that may very well be in need of aids and support, as writer Asian- American writer Philip K. Chiu observes:

I am fed up with being stereotyped as either a subhuman or superhuman creature. Certainly I am proud of the academic and economic successes of Chinese Americans. [...]But it's important for people to realize that there is another side. [...]It is about time for the media to report on Chinese Americans the way they are. Some are superachievers, most are average citizens, and a few are criminals. They are only human - no more and no less. 34

33 Huntley, E.D.: Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion . Greenwood Press, Westport 2001. p.101 34 Chiu, Philip K.: The myth of the model minority . U.S. News & World Report (May 16, 1988)

- 16 - Therefore it has become the mission of Asian-American writers like Frank Chin( The Chickencoop Chinaman , 1971) and Shawn Hsu Wong( Homebase , 1979) to challenge prevalent stereotypes concerning their respective ethnical backgrounds, a notion that is continued by a new generation of writers including Chang-Rae Lee, Gish Jen, Gus Lee, Jessica Hagedorn, Le Thi Diem Thuy, Lan Cao. 35

Native American (also: American Indian) literature can look back with pride at an oral tradition of over a millennium. One has to bear in mind that Native American literature does not originate from any one homogenous national ethnic group, no one common ethnic background, but rather from a multitude of tribal groups. Thus Native American literature by itself can be described as multiethnic. Since identification happens on levels of the tribe, village and band, Native American oral tradition is exceptionally prolific containing an abundance of disparate origin stories, legends, myths, folk tales, chants, and ritual narratives. These have been transmitted by storytellers for centuries from one generation to the next for they establish and define the relationships that shape the individual tribal cultures: the relationships to nature, to elders and to traditions. At the end of the 19 th century the Bureau of American Ethnology backed by the Smithsonian Institute started an extensive project that would record the oral literature of America's indigenous peoples in their indigenous languages. However by then the native population had drastically diminished and of the over 200 estimated languages that had been in use upon European arrival only 149 had survived to see recording. Native American cultures had to endure great suffering and injustice at the hands of Anglo- American governing power (e.g. Indian Removal Act of 1830, Indian Appropriations Act of 1871, Dawes Act of 1887 36 ). Calls for cultural resistance to Anglo- American hegemony on a scientific level were heeded by early advocates of Native American rights, sovereignty and other interests like George Simon Pokagon (Pokagon Band of the Potawatomi; The Future of the Red Man , 1897, and An Indian on the Problems of His Race , 1895), Charles Alexander

35 cf. Cheung, King-Kok(ed.): An interethnic companion to Asian American literature . Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 1997. Wong, Shawn(ed.): Asian American literature - a brief introduction and anthology. HarperCollins, New York 1995. 36 In a way all served the purpose to secure land to Anglo settlers that was previously inhabited by indigenous tribes. The voluntary ceding of land inhabited by Native Americans in the East for land and payment in the West, as proponed by the Indian Removal Act of 1830, in reality saw the forceful removal of Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles and Choctaws from their homelands to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. The Indian Appropriations Act of 1871 ended recognition of any additional tribes as independent nations, hence prohibiting possible future treaties to be formed. The Dawes Act regulated the distribution of land to Native Americans in Oklahoma; its dubious allotment policy resulted in Native American being systematically deprived of their lands and resources.

- 17 - Eastman(“Ohiyesa”, Santee Sioux; The Soul of the Indian , 1911), Sarah Winnemucca (“Thocmentony”, Paiute; Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims , 1883) and Gertrude Bonnin(“Zitakála-Ša”, Sioux; American Indian Stories, 1921), who helped raise awareness for the plight of Native Americans by providing insights into Indian life and the impact white settlement had on it. Native American literary output in the first half of the 20 th century, particularly fiction, was low, for the conditions on reservations had reduced life to a matter of bare survival. Curiously enough, the same year as N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1968) was published, the American Indian Movement was founded and the Indian Civil Rights act passed, which guaranteed many of the rights Native Americans had been fighting for. While conditions were still harsh, there was a momentum of growing confidence when a generation of Native Americans who were educated outside standard Indian boarding schools was coming of age. When Momaday was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, it marked the first step towards the entry of Native American literature into mainstream literature. Within years the Native American literary canon expanded immensely and subsequent writers like Leslie Marmon Silko( Ceremony , 1977), James Welch, Simon Ortiz, Gerald Vizenor, Louis Owens, Diane Glancy, Louise Erdrich( Tracks ,1988), Joy Harjo, and Sherman Alexie( Reservation Blues , 1995) were widely received. In their novels, plays and poetry these and other authors place issues that relate to their cultural heritage and their experiences of Indianness into a modern (or post modern) context. 37

To be clear, there is no singular African-American, Hispanic, Asian American or Native American perspective. Rather, there are voices, both independent and diverse, that combined tell their songs, their stories of the ethnic American experience.

Film

Classic Hollywood cinema was never kind to ethnic minority groups... be they Indian, black, Hispanic, or Jewish, Hollywood represented ethnic and minorities as stereotypes... Classic Hollywood film [is] ethnographic discourse. 38

Ethnography stands here not so much for the qualitative research method that gathers empirical data and gives scientific descriptions of individual cultures; rather, it implies Hollywood's practice of cultural interpretation and representation from the standpoint of an

37 cf. Whitson, Kathy J.: Native American literatures . ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara 2000.; Tillett, Rebecca: Contemporary Native American literature . Edinburgh Univ. Press, Edinburgh 2007. 38 López, 1991. Quoted in: Denzin, Norman K.: Reading Race . Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, 2002. p.17

- 18 - observer. This is a biased practice that was heavily influenced by ideologies and theories on race of a given moment. While older forms of racism relied on science and biology to justify claims to white supremacy, new racism shifts the argument to culture and the politics of cultural difference and representation. Hollywood has a long-standing history of doing service to currents in race relations theory with its representations of racial and ethnic groups. Its (early) ethnographically tinted cinematic discourse heavily relies on essentialism, which assumes that certain characteristics are “inherently part of the core being of a group.” 39 Dominant culture has a tendency to abstract specific signs of social groups and turn them into signifiers, subsequently recoding them as general myths about the specific social group. 40 By reprising stereotypes in movie after movie, Hollywood helped in this process of recoding.

Hollywood aided in the containment of America's racial and ethnic minority population through the production of over 500 films featuring the violent ethnic other in a variety of stereotypical situations [...]. In these films the dark-skinned male and female enacted a variety of stereotypical identities, many of which have long cinematic histories: Uncle Tom, Bigger Thomas, Jack Johnson, mammy, Jezebel, Aunt Jemima, prostitute, buck, mulatto, coon, gangsta, welfare queen, Sapphire, red hot lover, crack addict, gang member, low rider, greaser, dragon lady, asexual enuch[sic.], geisha girl, Asian rapist, laundryman, cook, Jap, chink, Chinaman, Fu Manchu, gook, exotic flower, cantina girl, self-sacrificing mother or wife, vamp, bandit, gay caballero, faithful Mexican, lazy peasant, good badman, Hispanic avenger, Latin lover, wily señorita, colorful spitfire. 41

Until recently, race and ethnicity served a specific purpose in Hollywood films, and ethnic characters hardly ever occupied central roles. As López comments:

More significantly, minorities and ethnics were most noticeable by their absence in classic Hollywood films. Rarely protagonists, ethnics merely provided local color, comic relief, or easily recognizable villains and dramatic foils. When coupled with the pervasiveness of stereotypes, this marginalization or negation completes the usual “pattern” of Hollywood's ethnic representation and its standard assessment as damaging, insulting, and negative. 42

The cinematic histories of various racial and ethnic groups therefore show two distinct features – the first being Hollywood's systematic representation of the group throughout film history in accordance to race theories of the period, and the second being the filmic responses by mostly independent (ethnic) filmmakers that challenge this representation. Since art and in

39 Lubiano, Wahneema: But Compared to What? Reading Realism, Representation, and Essentialism in School Daze , Do the Right Thing , and the Spike Lee Discourse . In: Smith, Valerie(ed.): Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video . Rutgers Unversity Press, New Brunswick 1997. p.104 40 cf. Foster, Hal: Wild Signs . In: Ross, Andrew(ed.): Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism . University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1988. p.264 41 Denzin(2002) p.4 42 López, Ana M.: Are All Latins from Manhattan? Hollywood, Ethnography, and Cultural Colonialism . In: Williams, Alan(ed.): Film and nationalism . Rutgers, Piscataway 2002. p.195

- 19 - particular film can be used as a medium to carry political agendas, it can actively contribute to processes of transformation of the political climate. Thus most ethnic cinemas have developed, at least to some degree, a cinema of resistance that defies Hollywood's hegemonic portrayal of their respective ethnic groups and helps to press issues of their concern.

As I walk the streets of Hollywood Boulevard/ Thinin' how hard it was to those that starred/ In the movies portrayin' the roles/ Of butlers and maids slaves and hoes/ Many intelligent Black men seemed to look uncivilized/ When on the screen/ Like a guess I figure you to play some jigaboo/ On the plantation, what else can a nigger do/ And Black women in this profession/ As for playin' a lawyer, out of the question/ For what they play Aunt Jemima is the perfect term/ Even if now she got a perm/ So let's make our own movies like Spike Lee/ Cause the roles being offered don't strike me/ There's nothing that the Black man could use to earn/ Burn Hollywood burn – From Public Enemy's “Burn Hollywood Burn”

In the past twenty years several anthologies and book-length commentaries have been published about the development of African American cinema, among them Manthia Diawara's Black American Cinema and Ed Guerrero's Framing Blackness . It is agreed that one of the most important events in black cinematic history is the controversy and protests that arose around D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith's film, which openly articulated a biological discourse of racial inferiority, aimed to explain and justify the Civil War from a Southern perspective in order to reunite the still very detached Northerners and Southerners. In the movie, black slaves were represented as happy to please their owners with their dancing and work. African American film criticism existed even prior to Griffith's film. The core objectives of film reviews published in black print media at that time were to “[stress] the need for black spectators to resist the ideology of capitalism codified and reified in mainstream Hollywood films” 43 , as well as to criticize the portrayal of African Americans in films and minstrel shows, where it was customary to use white actors in blackface to play blacks. However, the criticism that was sparked by Birth of a Nation provoked the production of films by African Americans that would counter the ideology of Griffith's film and disseminate positive images (e.g. Birth of a Race , 1915). This counter-tradition of films contested racism and marginalization. Hollywood's perpetual unfavorable portrayal of African Americans was at times intermitted by short-lived, self-serving reformist moments that broke with usual stereotypes. One such moment occurred when the Allies tried to enlist maximum African-American support during World War II. However, social problem films released by Hollywood after the war to some extent reimposed prewar racial images, while the many Hollywood musicals African

43 Everett, Anna: Returning the Gaze – A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism . Duke University Press, Durham 2001. p.10

- 20 - Americans appeared in during the 1930s and 1940s showed a polite, yet segregated world. The social-consciousness film movement, which began after WWII and ended approximately with the civil rights movements, offered more film parts to blacks. With the arrival of a new group of black actors and actresses, earlier stereotypes were challenged. These actors represented the 'New Negro', a sympathetic, strong and feeling human being, who often held a respected position(doctor, law student, minister etc.). While politics during the 1950s revolved around desegregation(bus boycotts, the Supreme Court desegregation decision in 1954) and integration(forced integration in schools), and politic activist figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and black athletes like Jackie Robinson were gaining popularity, Hollywood picked up topics that were previously taboos such as racial intolerance and the tragic mulatto(e.g. Pinky ,1949), and increased the production of tales about integration and black-white bonding. Being able to draw mass white audiences to movie theaters, Dorothy Dandridge, Sidney Poitier, Ethel Waters, Ossie Davies and Ruby Dee emerged as stars. As the civil rights movement started to expose “[t]he flaws in the simplistic doctrine of integration” 44 and uncover the institutional roots of racism, mainstream Hollywood quieted down on the use of race in film, the only few exceptions being a couple of integrationist movies starring Sidney Poitier(e.g. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner , 1967). With Hollywood silent on civil rights issues, independently made black art films were able to establish themselves: Shadows (1961), One Potato, Two Potato (1964), Nothing But a Man (1964), The Learning Tree (1969). The clear distinction Diawara makes between commercial Hollywood and black independent film production was most strongly represented in the 1970s. A black film boom took hold of Hollywood. For one, the post-civil rights, black activism climate of the early 1970s expressed the need for afrocentric entertainment, and two, an economic crisis had led Hollywood studios to reexamine its audience resulting in the discovery of an exponentially high number of African Americans(28%) among overall moviegoers. In what came to be known as the blaxploitation era (1970-1973) Hollywood released more than 80 action and crime movies that established the black gangster-hero as a key cultural icon and the “inner city as context, drug and gang violence as themes, and rhythm and blues as the sound track of black cinema.” 45 Movies like Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), Melvin Van Peebles' huge success Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) and the big studio productions Shaft (1971) and Superfly (1972), as well as their female equivalents Cleopatra Jones (1973) and Foxy

44 Denzin(2002)p.27 45 Smith, Valerie(ed.): Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video . Rutgers, New Brunswick 1997. p.3

- 21 - Brown (1974) countered the prevailing pre-blaxploitation mainstream image of accomodationism and submissiveness. The musical Car Wash (1976) was one of the few non- action/crime genre movies that was modeled on the blaxploitation formula. As Dyer observes, in the movie black musicality is depicted “as an emanation of the Black personality, a given of the Black psyche”. 46 Music is used as a coping mechanism that “celebrates the recurrent resources for survival and change.” 47 Aside from Melinda (1972) and Bill Gunn's Ganja and Hess (1973) 48 Hollywood left the production of politically orientated, socially conscious films up to independent black filmmakers. Films like Haile Gerima's Bush Mama (1972), Larry Clark's Passing Through (1977), Charles Burnett's Killer of the Sheep (1977), Julie Dash's Illusions (1982) and Billy Woodbury's Bless Their Little Hearts (1984) thus contest Hollywood cinema's aesthetic codes. The problems of the production of positive images of African American are, as Cornel West identifies in his New Cultural Politics of Difference , that it proceeds in an assimilationist manner, i.e. shows that black really are like white people, and that it rests on a homogenizing impulse, i.e. all black people are alike. Thus movies like those listed above go beyond the negative/positive binary and attempt to produce interrogative images of racial and ethnic identity instead. In the following years both Hollywood and independent black cinema engaged in multiculturalist readings of American history that would honor “the contributions of the world's diverse cultures to the development of American society” 49 (e.g. the Civil War drama Glory ,1989; the crime drama Mississippi Burning, 1989 , set in the South during the civil rights movements; and the two slave trade dramas released in 1997 starring Djimon Hounsou, Amistad and Ill-Gotten Gains ). Also, the plantation genre, which had had its peak prior to World War II with movies like Jezebel (1938) and the notorious Gone With the Wind (1939), would see its deconstruction and the reversal of its ideological treatment of slavery in films like the independently made Mandigo (1975), Steven Spielberg's filmic adaptation of The Color Purple (1985) and Haile Gerima's Sankofa (1994). African-American filmmaking since the 1970s shows two different strands: The postmodernist expressive strand is celebratory and constructs a rejuvenating, inspirational

46 Dyer, Richard: Is Car Wash a black musical? In: Diawara, Manthia(ed.): Black American Cinema . Routledge, New York 1993. p.98 47 Ibid. p.105 48 Hired by the studio to make a black horror movie, Gunn made the expressive, socially conscious Ganja and Hess instead. His tactic epitomizes Toni Cade Bambara's notion of black guerilla cinema. 49 Davies, Jude: Gender, Ethnicity, and Sexuality in Contemporary American Film . KeeleUniversity Press, Edinburgh 1997. p.72

- 22 - black cultural space, while the modernist existentialist strand embraces realism to protest against racism, policing and genocide. Both contest dominant representations of space, but in separate manners. Complementing the existentialist one, the expressionist strand fulfills the “purpose of the Black Aesthetic”, which “is to do more than tell it like it is – it's to imagine what is possible” 50 and thus cut through Du Bois' veil and create a new standard of beauty. Examples of expressionist independent black films are Marlon Riggs' Tongues United (1989) and Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston (1989), both examinations of black sexuality and homophobia, and Julie Dash's acclaimed Daughters of the Dust (1991), which depicts a different way of African-American life in the South, one that in spite of the effects of racial oppression has retained strong ties to its African roots. The existentialist strand made use of the apparatus of cinematic realism for its ghettocentric, male-focused set of action/crime films. These hood movies would draw from the resources of black youth culture to tell didactic coming-of-age stories about young black men in the urban wastelands of postindustrial American cities, in the hoods and ghettos of New York and L.A. While the blaxploitation movies of the 1970s celebrated black urban community, the hood movies by a new generation of young black filmmakers in the 80s and 90s were intended to be wake-up calls to Black (and white) America. Films like Mario Van Peebles' New Jack City (1991), John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood (1991), Matty Rich's Straight Out of Brooklyn (1991), Ernest Dickerson's Juice (1992), the Hughes brothers' Menace II Society (1993) and the better part of Spike Lee's opus( Do The Right Thing ,1989, Clockers , 1995, He Got Game ,1998) are social problems texts that focus on social disorder and violence, and economic instead of politic struggle. They depict the hood as an overly militarized police state and insinuate that due to their connection to power and prestige, gangs, drugs and drug business are more attractive to young black men than low wage jobs and education. Rap, as the “current revolutionary poetry of the young black masses” 51 , is used to criticize police brutality and racial and economic discrimination. In hood movies rap is not only part of the music track of the film(i.e. the instrumental and vocal accompaniment; e.g. music themes) but becomes also part of the diegetic soundtrack(i.e. realistic sounds; e.g. traffic noise) In so doing it doubly emphasizes the nihilistic and misogynist undertones of these movies.

The sexist, misogynist, patriarchal ways of thinking and behaving that are glorified in gangsta 50 hooks, bell: Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations . Routledge, New York 1994. p.237 51 Harris, William J.: “Cross Roads Blues”: African American History and Culture, 1960 to the Present . In: Liggins Hill, Patricia(ed.): Call & Response: The Riverside Anthology of African American Literary Tradition . Houghton Miffln, New York 1998. p.1362

- 23 - rap are a reflection of the prevailing values in our society, values created and sustained by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. 52

Misogynist, because these movies feature only a narrow range of female identities: bitches , ho's , welfare mothers, crackheads, and buppies. Patriarchal, because they embrace the myth of the father figure: Fatherless homes are doomed to be sites of the reproduction of “the cultural dysfunction that disables the race as a whole” 53 , since welfare drug addict mothers are not capable of raising their sons( Boyz N the Hood ). Nihilistic, because although the films argue that blacks should tackle their problems on their own, and not seek white help or disappear through assimilation into white mainstream culture, they show at the same time that black culture left to their own devices is unable to deal with the problems of the hood( New Jack City ). Singleton's proposal to transform the hood into a safe civic space for the black community builds upon the following ideas: drugs, guns and gangs must go; men have to take responsibility and become role models for their sons; women should be treated with respect; education, hard work and solid family values are the only way out of poverty; the police and governmental institutions should not be trusted; and negative media images about the ghetto have to go and be replaced by positive ones. Even though the kind of protest art that hood movies employ made race visible and send the message to put an end to violence and racial genocide, Singleton's sentiments show that these films rather reproduce than contest dominant conservative criticisms (and liberal too) about economic and social conditions in the hood. Moreover, by capturing the morals, manners and milieu of black inner-city drug and gang culture, these realist films by black filmmakers have done a disservice to the black public sphere: they reinforced the “popular perception that black urban life and violent crime mutually define each other” 54 and what is more, they suggested that the hood has become the best metaphor of the African American experience. Only showing the effects and not the causes that lead young black men to reject the teachings of school, church and family values, hood (and barrio) films only repeat the age-old social disorganization story instead of taking up the larger political and economic situations that produce it. They “do not attack the essential underlying ideologies and material conditions that perpetuate racial oppression in America today.” 55 Despite the fact that hood movies may not have offered a radical cinematic racial resistance 56 or solutions to the problems of the hood, they have still managed to infiltrate the movie

52 Davies(1997)p.70 53 Gilroy, Paul: Against Race . Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge(Mass.) 2000. p.120 54 Giroux, Henry A.: Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence & Youth . Routledge, New York 1996. p.56 55 Denzin(2002)p.173 56 Rather, they offered views of black post-nationalist essentialisms.

- 24 - mainstream. Perhaps the director who came to be identified with the notion of crossover movie production the most is Spike Lee. He firmly believes that he (and others) can make socially-conscious films that meet Hollywood's box-office demands. Meanwhile Hollywood featured African Americans in the 80s and 90s as either sidekicks, thereby encoding racial difference in terms of functionality(i.e. some version of the magical Negro ; e.g. Whoopi Goldberg's role as a medium/cupid in Ghost , 1990; Morgan Freeman in the movies Million Dollar Baby , 2004, Bruce Almighty ,2003, Wanted, 2008 ), as the counterpart and voice of reason to, e.g., a white cop(the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard series), basketball hustler( White Men Can't Jump ,1992), hitman ( Pulp Fiction ,1994) or, recently. a terminally ill white man( The Bucket List ,2007) in a black-and-white duo, or as the lead in (all- Black) comedies(e.g. the Sister Act, Beverly Hills Cop, The Nutty Professor circle of films). Commenting on Guerrero and Ellison, Denzin notes that “[e]ven as they played fools and clowns, blacks maintained their own sense of reason and pride within this absurd racist system” 57 and hence produced their version of the American Joke. Hollywood comedies of the past 25 years have elaborated on this version of the American Joke: the racial status quo was maintained while white perceptions and expectations were mockingly reproduced.

[It seems that] the greater the racial tension in a society, the greater the need for racial comedy. Comedy allows the members of the society to become observers of their conduct, helping them see real and imaginary racial conflicts, tensions and obstacles. [...] But their[i.e. racial action- comedy texts] comedy framework does not challenge the dominant racial order. 58

These kinds of Hollywood productions launched the celebrity status of many an African American: Danny Glover, Whoopi Goldberg, Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, Eddie Murphy, Laurence Fishburne, Bill Cosby, Forrest Whitaker, Wesley Snipes, Samuel L. Jackson, Don Cheadle, Queen Latifah, Will Smith, Vanessa Williams. At the same time Hollywood recognized the potential of autobiographical films about African American icons to draw audiences to the theaters. What followed was the release of films like Lee's Malcolm X (1992), the background story to Tina Turner's rise to stardom What's Love Got to Do with It? (1993), Ali (2001) and Ray (2004). In the new millennium the disparity between Hollywood and independent black movies in terms of the portrayal of African Americans became less distinct as the relations between the two became more interactive. It is the insight that the most liberal films have little social impact without an audience which dominates the present era of New Black Cinema and opens the space for further cross-over productions. 57 Denzin(2002)p.99 58 Ibid.

- 25 - The silent movie era introduced Hispanics as one-dimensional character-stereotypes in Westerns and films that revolve around historical themes such as the Spanish colonial era in California, the Alamo, and the Mexican Revolution of 1910. These stereotypes mostly conveyed a negative image of Hispanics, that of violent, lawless bandits, beautiful but wily señoritas, lazy peasants and treacherous greasers. Hollywood slightly cut the usage of such derogatory representations following protests by the Mexican government, but especially after it discovered the value of the Mexican and Latin American film markets. The advent of sound in movies in the 1930s gave rise to Latin musicals and to some of the first Hispanic star personae, among them Dolores Del Rio, Rita Moreno, Rita Hayworth and Anthony Quinn. Moreover, the Good Neighbor Policy introduced by the Roosevelt administration in 1933, which sought to improve U.S. relations to Latin America, demanded a less racist portrayal of Hispanics in film. This demand was complied with by over one hundred films produced during the years from 1933 to 1947. These included classic genre films as well as musicals and comedies. The late 1940s all through to the civil rights movements of the 1960s modeled a period of socially conscious films that spoke out about social problems and put forward sympathetic images of Hispanics. These films were mostly assimilation narratives dealing with Hispanics trying to enter the American mainstream culture, yet at the same time they perpetuated the American dilemma by positioning marginal minority group members as threats to this mainstream culture. Films like The Lawless (1950) and Salt of the Earth (1954), which depicted the miserable working and living conditions of Chicano communities in a way heralding the ambitions of labor rights leader César Chávez, were the first to draw a connection between personal prejudice and institutional racism. The impact of the civil rights movements on Hollywood would not be felt before the 1970s; instead the Spaghetti Western, made popular by director Sergio Leone in the 1960s and oftentimes starring Clint Eastwood, once again reproduced old stereotypes about lazy and vicious Mexicans. The 1960s were also marked by a cycle of urban Hispanic gang films, the most famous being West Side Story (1961). In the decade after the (Hispanic and Chicano) civil rights movements some of the worn stereotypes were put to rest. A major driving force in challenging Hollywood's cultural representations, the Chicano Cinema Coalition produced films such as The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982) and El Norte (1983) that revised recurring themes like (illegal) immigration and the outlaw from a genuine Hispanic standpoint. Edward James Olmos, Cheech Marin, Elizabeth Peña and Raquel Welch emerged as Hispanic movie

- 26 - stars who attained respectable status in Hollywood. Hispanic gang films reappeared in the 1980s( Zoot Suit , 1981; Stand Alone , 1985; Colors , 1988) and continued through the 1990s( American Me , 1992; Bound by Honor , 1993; Mi Familia , 1995). These were male-centered narratives that honored Hispanic culture, history, religion and family life, yet at the same time, being didactic social-realist pieces, they offered a look at barrios and prisons full of gruesome gang-related violence. Barrio movies, in contrast to hood movies of that time, often established a link between the barrio and prisons: the heads or “Godfathers” of black(e.g. Black Guerilla Family), white(e.g. Aryan Brotherhood) and Hispanic(e.g. Mexican Mafia) gangs within the walls of state penitentiaries exert power and control over violent relations in the barrio. Moreover, these movies interrogate stereotypes associated with macho masculinity, homosociality and homosexuality, and in addition they try to unearth the forces that drive young boys (and girls) into gangs.

[T]he system of honor, pride, and violence in the gang produces a profound alienation 'from anything like normal existence'. There is nothing to hold these young gang members to life. They are bound only by a loyalty to the gang. They are doomed by the very values that define them: honor, courage, loyalty. 59

Although, by taking up and then rejecting a cinema of violence, these movies were intended to be calls for social justice, self-determination and equality for the Hispanic community, calls that show that white supremacy and institutionalized racism are the real root of evil in American society, they rather increased racial paranoia and helped solidify ideological links between race and crime. Of course there are also portrayals that show a barrio that is not completely drug- and gang- infested, where turf wars, drive-bys and violent sexuality are mostly absent, like Mi Vida Loca (1994). In addition, a new wave of commercial movies, like the comedies Tortilla Soup (2001) and Real Women Have Curves (2002), and the drama Bread and Roses (2000), speaks out against prevailing stereotypes, while Andy Garcia, John Leguizamo, George Lopez, the Sheen/Estevez clan, Eva Mendes, Jennifer Lopez, America Ferrera, Rosie Perez and others have become A-list celebrities.

Asians entered cinematic history - just like African Americans and Hispanics – as distorted racialized stereotypes: the roles Asian women were assigned were either exotic seductresses and geishas or simple servants, while Asian men were Oriental villains who were either into opium-trafficking or warfare. The cinematic discourse on major wars of the 20 th century with

59 Denzin(2002)p.140

- 27 - U.S. involvement (World War I and II, Korean War, Vietnam War; the Red Scare of the Cold War) contributed to negative representations of the Asian other as the political enemy with films like The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Halls of Montezuma (1951), Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), the ultra-patriotic John Wayne film The Green Berets(1968), the dark existential The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979), and the highly patriotic Rambo series(1982-1988). Reading these filmic discourses, Asians were perceived as a triple - a sexual, criminal and military - threat to American society. Viewed as a mass, when not posing a military or socioeconomic(as hordes of immigrants) threat, Asians, in particular Vietnamese women and children, were portrayed as victims of sinister (napalm!) warfare. Repercussions of the Vietnam War established further themes Hollywood could build on: protests against the war ( Hair , 1979), the damaged war veteran as subject( Coming Home , 1978, and recently Land of Plenty , 2004), and - since their experience in Vietnam introduced American soldiers to heroin and other drugs - the business of drug networks and drug trafficking extending from Asia. Asian martial arts were gladly adopted by Hollywood for they comprised a whole new genre of film with Asians taking on the customary role of the enemy (as in the 1980s Missing in Action series starring Chuck Norris), yet also acting as positive influences in form of spiritual guides and mentors(the character of Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid series). There were few revisionist moments in cinema that corrected the negative treatment of Asians in film. During the 1950s a few movies, among them Japanese War Bride (1952) and Three Stripes in the Sun (1955), “dramatized the Japanese as victims of American bigotry” 60 ; this was possible because by then communist China had taken on the role of the enemy. The 1980s brought sanitized images of Asians and an antipatriotic take on the Vietnam experience in films like The Killing Fields (1984), Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Good Morning Vietnam (1987), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), yet at the same time they introduced Asian gangs as a problem of present-day inner cities at home( Year of the Dragon , 1985, Black Rain , 1989). Aside from revisiting established historical themes, the 1990s launched movies about Southasian-American communities ( Mississippi Masala , 1992; Catfish in Black Bean Sauce , 1999) and explored generational family conflicts in Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), and Wayne Wang's adaptations of Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989) and Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1993). Still, an Asian-American cinema of cultural resistance has yet to take form. 61

60 Keller, Gary D.: Hispanics and United States Film: An Overview and Handbook . Bilingual Review, Tempe 1994. Quoted in: Denzin(2002) p.36 61 cf. Denzin(2002)p.34-38

- 28 - Even though the American Indian Film Institute has been holding its annual festival since 1974, Native American cinema has yet to fully gain recognition as a politically self-conscious ethnic cinema. The initial focus having been on the production of documentaries, films like the social-realist Powwow Highway (1989) and Thunderheart (1992) later addressed economic and social problems of reservation-dwelling: alcoholism, poverty, poor health and housing, depression and suicide. The first all-Indian movie Smoke Signals (1998), a road-trip comedy- drama written by Sherman Alexie, was an instant hit that helped put many young Native American actors like Adam Beach, Irene Bedard and Simon Baker on the screen, opening the gates for them to bigger studio projects. However, aside from the crime drama Skins (2002), the ensemble movie American Indian Graffiti (2003) and the inspirational Navajo boxer story Black Cloud (2004), few Native American movies had significant commercial success to be recognized outside the circles of experts of Native American cinema. With big Hollywood studios still hesitant to buy into all-Indian productions, the financing of independent Native American movies more often than not becomes a problematic issue, thus actors and directors (e.g. director Chris Eyre of Smoke Signals and Skins) resort to working on for-TV productions (Skinwalkers , 2002; Edge of America , 2003; A Thief of Time , 2004).

Unfortunately the Hollywood studio system to this day promotes only a small range of race- based films, mostly action movies or comedies. The need to correct age-old stereotypes has not subsided. The three movies that form the main body of this thesis are therefore, each in its very own way, refreshing in their representation of race relations in a city that has come to be identified with its diverse racial and ethnic population.

- 29 - Conquering the Jungle: Los Angeles

The city of Los Angeles has many faces. It can bring you down to your knees and at the same time be your only friend . It is the place to be and the place where the sunshine flows . The city of night and the city of light .62 Before one could begin a thorough examination of L.A.'s image in any song, novel, poem or film, it is essential to study the city itself - its history, demographics, and socio-economic data. The following chapter's aim is to highlight these points, hence: Welcome to the Jungle!

Demographics & Ethnic geography of Los Angeles

“Los Angeles has always grown through migration, but over the past fifty years, the movements from afar have varied greatly, in both origins and tempo. Natural increase has also added to the region's demographic dynamism, though not necessarily in synchronization with the arrival of migrants from abroad or elsewhere in the United States.” 63

Particularly in the second half of the 19 th and the first three decades of the 20 th century the city's population tended to more than double from census to census. It were “mainly white and native-born” 64 newcomers Los Angeles attracted then. However, this changed in the last few decades of the 20 th century, when more and more immigrants from Latin America and Asia chose the L.A. region as their new domicile. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau 65 , the 2005-2007 American Community Survey Estimate for the city of Los Angeles indicates a definite population growth in comparison to the 1990 and the 2000 Census. The percentage of people of Hispanic or Latino origin has seen a significant rise over the past 20 years and is now at 48.5%, whereas others seem to have leveled off or even declined (see table on the next page). Los Angeles County's population breakdown (pop.: 9,878,554 – W:29.1%, H:47.3%, B:9.5%, A:13.2%) is similar to that of the city of Los Angeles, however they both differ greatly from California state's (pop.: 36,553,215 – W:42.7%, H:36.2%, B:6.7%, A:12.4%).

62 From the lyrics of Welcome to the Jungle by Guns'N'Roses, Under the Bridge by The Red Hot Chili Peppers, To Live and Die in L.A. by 2Pac Shakur, Hot Fudge by Robbie Williams, and L.A. Woman by The Doors. 63 Waldinger, Roger & Bozorgmehr, Mehdi (ed.): Ethnic Los Angeles . Russel Sage Foundation, New York 1996. p.85 64 Ibid. p.8 65 http://factfinder.census.gov Note: The site allows for individual data table composition. Since the links to the data tables expire within hours, the tables used are included in the appendix.

- 30 - Race & Origin 2005-2007 % 2000 U.S. % 1990 U.S. % estimate Census Census Total 3,770,590 100 3,694,820 100 3,485,398 100 Hispanic or Latino Origin Hispanic or Latino 1,827,625 48.5 1,719,073 46.5 1,391,411 39.9 (of any race) White (not Hispanic) 1,104,369 29.3 1,099,188 29.7 1,299,604 37.3 Other Total (not Hispanic) 838,596 22.2 846,286 23.8 794,383 22.8 100% 100% 100% Race* White 1,104,369 29.3 1,099,188 29.7 1,299,604 37.3 Black or African-American 364,632 9.7 401,986 10.9 454,289 13.0

Asian 393,670 10.4 364,850 9.9 320,668ª 9.2 American Indian & Alaska 8,139 0.2 8,897 0.2 9,774 0.3 Native Native Hawaiian & other 5,255 0.1 4,484 0.1 ---ª --- Pacific Islander Some other race 18,019 0.5 9,065 0.3 9,652 0.3 Two or more races 48,881 1.3 87,277 2.4 NDA NDA *Not of Hispanic or Latino Origin 51.5% 53.5% 60.1% ª In the 1990 Census data Asian incorporated the group Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander.

L.A.'s cityscape shows typical ethnic enclaves like Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Koreatown, Little Ethiopia, Little Armenia and the historical Pueblo de Los Angeles, yet residential areas like Inglewood, Ladera Heights, Crenshaw, Irvine(Black), East L.A., East Compton, Boyle Heights (Hispanic) and Monterey Park, Alhambra (Asian) et al. are also predominated by certain ethnic groups. Concentration of African-American population Migration also contributed to the fact that Los Angeles is a fairly youthful city, even though the median age has gone up from 31.6 in 2000 to 33.6 in 2007. Approximately two in five people (1,509,764) are foreign-born. The average L.A. household counts 2.89 members, the

- 31 - average family 3.70.

L.A. History

"The history of a city is not only the story of its buildings and plazas. It's also the story of its people, the way they experienced and recreated their urban spaces. Although some may say that urban life is much the same everywhere, there are significant differences in the way people live, construct, and imagine their cities. Rio is not Los Angeles, Tokyo or New York" – Luis Restrepo 66

Cities flourish and decline, their past having glorious and dark chapters alike. The history of a city is what gives it its character and molds its future. And in these terms Los Angeles has its very own tale to tell.

Adobe Houses & A River – Early history

Even though Spain’s period of conquest in the New World began in the late 15 th century with the Columbus voyages, it was not until the 18 th century that missions were built in the region of Alta California (“Upper” California) and the land was settled. Accompanied by two Franciscan padres, Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portolà reached this part of California in 1769 via a land route. Awed by the beauty of a river they discovered, one of the Franciscan padres named the river El Río de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula (Spanish for: “The River of Our Lady Queen of the Angels of Porciuncula”) after the small Italian town Santa Maria degli Angeli, which houses the Porciuncula, the church of St. Francis of Assisi. Upon the order of King Charles III of Spain that a pueblo be built on this site, the first Spanish governor of Las Californias, Felipe de Neve, drew up a layout for the settlement and gathered 12 families from Sinaloa which would move up to the place founded by Portolà and the Franciscan padres. In September 1781 44 pobladores (settlers) arrived at what was then officially named El Pueblo de la Reina de los Ángeles . Of the twelve male heads of families, two were Spaniards, four Indians, two Negroes, two mulattos, one mestizo and one chino, 67 proving even more that diversity gave birth to L.A. When Mexico became independent from Spain in 1821, it did not have a great impact on life in the ever-growing settlement of mostly ranches, which was eventually declared a city by

66 Luis Restrepo, Fulbright foreign languages professor, in an interview with the University of Arkansas college paper Daily Headlines: http://dailyheadlines.uark.edu/1135.htm 67 cf. Forbes, Jack D.: The Indians in America's Past . Prentice-Hall Publishing, Englewood Cliffs 1964. p.148 Mason, William M.: Los Angeles under the Spanish Flag . Southern California Genealogical Society, Inc., Burbank 2004. http://www.scgsgenealogy.com/storage/Northrup3.pdf p.66 Note : The old Mexican racial term 'mestizo' refers to someone born to an Native American mother and a Spanish father, a 'chino' is someone born to an Native American mother and a salta-atras father, someone who has (some) negro features but is of white parents.

- 32 - Mexican Congress in 1835. The big change came, however, with the Mexican Cession in 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed to end the Mexican American War. In it, Mexico ceded a territory that encompasses all of the present-day states of California, Nevada and Utah, and portions of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming to the United States. Los Angeles, which was besieged during the war by the U.S. Marines, became an American city when California was admitted to the United States as its 31 st state. The period between 1850 and 1870 was marked by an increase of violent crimes, earning the city a reputation of being one of the toughest cities of the nation. Nevertheless, Los Angeles grew rapidly in the last few decades of the 19 th century. In 1870 it had been merely a village of 5,700 residents, but by 1900 the city's population surpassed the 100,000 mark. The rapid growth was sparked by the development of railway connections to San Francisco (Central Pacific) and the East (Santa Fe System), low ticket prices and the discovery of oil in 1892, but can also be attributed to the fact that Los Angeles was slowly turning into a modern mecca for migrants due to the establishment of cultural institutions, schools, parks, and churches, as well as industrial and economic centers. By the beginning of the 20 th century, Los Angeles had come far: Once a small settlement of adobe houses, it was now on its way to become one of the largest urban centers in the United States.

Tinseltown & Urban Sprawl – Rise of a metropolis

The first decade of the new century was marked by the search for alternate water sources. Being at the mercy of inconsistent rainfall, droughts and decreasing groundwater, it became obvious that Los Angeles would soon not be able to supply enough water for a rapidly growing population. Los Angeles Water Company employee Fred Eaton and its future director William Mulholland developed a plan to bring water from the Owens Valley, which is located roughly 230 miles northeast of Los Angeles, to the city. After the clever purchase of water rights in the valley, the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct began. 68 Its completion in 1913 secured the water supply for Los Angeles until a new aqueduct would be built in later years drawing upon water from the Colorado River. The year 1913 entailed yet another interesting event: When Cecil B. Demille rented a barn in Hollywood to film the motion picture The Squaw Man it marked the beginning of another important chapter in Los Angeles history - the arrival of the film industry. The 1920s saw the the mushrooming of major film studios as producers like the Warner brothers, William Fox, and Carl Lämmle made Hollywood the center of the motion picture industry. In 1923 the

68 http://www.american.edu/TED/mono.htm

- 33 - famous “Hollywood” sign was erected, which used to read Hollywoodland in the beginning but was shortened to Hollywood in 1945. 69 Apart from migration, Los Angeles geographical growth in the early decades of the 20 th century was mainly due to the annexation of communities and consolidation of neighboring towns. By the time it hosted the Summer Olympics in 1932, Los Angeles had widened the city's area to 450 square miles from its original 28 square-mile landgrant, now reaching into the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys in addition to having a port in the south(San Pedro 1906). During World War II, Los Angeles industrial production focused heavily on war supplies, ammunition and aircraft components, which resulted in a high demand for factory workers. A new wave of migrants from the South of the United States moved to the area to fill these jobs, adding to the city's continual growth. Tensions between American sailors and Marines stationed in Southern California and the local Mexican-American youth, who called themselves pachucos and dressed in zoot suits, culminated when a sailor was stabbed and the violence escalated. A mob proceeded to march through the streets of downtown beating up everyone who wore a zoot suit. The event became known as the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943. By the mid 20 th century, Los Angeles had become an industrial giant, the production in clothing and furniture manufactories ranging among the nation's highest. In particular the automobile industry changed Los Angeles' cityscape. The streetcar system was replaced by a metropolitan bus system and the demand for cars grew. In subsequent years L.A. would become known as the car capital of the nation, but as a consequence, it would also become notorious for pollution and smog. The construction of freeways in the 1940s favored the development of suburban areas. The urban sprawl primarily took to the rural land of the San Fernando Valley. However, the increasing land consumption per resident was met by efforts to confine people to existing urbanized areas and thus heighten the city's density. Today Los Angeles is the most densely populated urban area in the United States. In 1961 Los Angeles was plagued by a big brush fire that destroyed over 480 homes in the Bel Air and Brentwood area. Even though the city is to this day often threatened by fire, the 1961 Bel Air-Brentwood Fire remained the worst in Los Angeles history. In August 1965 the arrest of Marquette Frye for DUI 70 by a white California Highway Patrol

69 cf. Finler, Joel W.: The Hollywood Story . Octopus Books, London 1988. 70 DUI = driving under the influence (of drugs or alcohol)

- 34 - officer was critically observed by a steady growing crowd of onlookers. The crowd grew violent, unleashing a riot that lasted six days, “leaving 34 dead, over a thousand people injured, nearly 4,000 arrested, and hundreds of buildings destroyed.” 71 Named after the neighborhood of incident, the Watts riots of 1965 became known as L.A.'s second race riots (the Zoot Suit riots of 1943 being the first). In 1973 Los Angeles City Councilman Tom Bradley was the first American non-Anglo to become mayor of the City of Los Angeles. He would stay in office for a record five terms. Today the international flights terminal of the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) carries his name. After the law limiting building height to 150ft was repealed in 1957, the 1970s saw the completion of the first skyscrapers, enabling Los Angeles from then on to not only spread but also grow in height.

Rodney King & Burning Streets – America's first multi-ethnic civil unrest

Since the city's population was bordering 3 million by the early 1980s and congested highways were becoming an increasing problem, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority saw the need to expand its traffic network by a subway system and a commuter rail system(Metrolink) which would provide for faster public transportation. The first of the lines, the Blue Line to Long Beach, was completed in 1990. In the 1990s the project was halted for some time due to construction (methane gas leaks) and financing issues which led to a delay in the opening of new lines. Today Los Angeles has five subway lines and a progressive rapid bus transit system. In the 1980s an unwelcome guest infested Los Angeles repeatedly – the Mediterranean fruit fly. Due to the fear that the fly could cause considerable agricultural damage, aerial spraying assaults were launched over infested areas across the state. To eliminate future threats California has stricter food import regulations than most of the other states. The 1980s were also marked by a high increase in violent crimes. Gang warfare, a flourishing of cocaine market and corruption within police circles have earned L.A. a bad reputation as one of the nation's most dangerous cities. The most violent chapter in recent Los Angeles history, however, were certainly the incidents following the Rodney King case. On March 3 rd , 1991, after a night of drinking, driving and talking with his friends, 25 year- old Rodney King passed a California Highway Patrol car on the Foothill Freeway. The patrol car pulled behind him and flashed him to pull over, but King, “who was on parole for a

71 http://www.usc.edu/libraries/archives/la/watts.html

- 35 - second-degree robbery conviction, panicked and sped up. After he exited the freeway, LAPD units joined the chase. When King finally did stop [...] more than two dozen law enforcement officers [...] converged on his car.” 72 He complied with the officer's orders and emerged from the car and lay on the ground. Los Angeles police would later claim that he was still dangerous and posed a threat. “[P]olice hit him in the chest with a Taser stun gun as he lay on his back, then clubbed him without provocation.” 73 The shocking tape of the brutal police beating was broadcast in newscasts all over the world. The outrage that followed was tremendous and called for a swift prosecution of the officers involved. When a jury in Simi Valley, California, rendered the officers not guilty on April 29 th , 1992, it led to a nation-wide outcry of protest. The verdicts sparked a wave of violent protesting and uprising unprecedented in the history of Los Angeles. The six days of rioting following the verdicts were marked by looting, arson, assault and murder. Additional factors that were cited as reasons for the unrest (aside from the verdicts) were a high unemployment rate in South Central Los Angeles, the perception that the LAPD engaged in racial profiling, and tensions between the African-American and Korean(-American) community, which were set off by the sentencing of a Korean store owner to five years on probation and 400 hours community service for the voluntary manslaughter of 15 year-old African-American girl.

“Like a bandage stripped off an open wound, the unrest seemed to lay bare the racial anger long simmering among the city's ethnic communities. The popular notion that Los Angeles was transforming itself into a harmonious, multiethnic model city seemed to waft away in the smoke billowing over the city. Each new televised image – black, Latino and white looters rampaging through ruined stores, mostly white police officers and National Guard soldiers, dazed motorists beaten by angry black assailants, frightened Korean merchants guarding their shuttered markets with guns – threatened to reinforce fears and prejudices.” 74

Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley declared a state of emergency which led to enforcement of a dusk-to-dawn curfew and the activation of the National Guard and eventually Army and Marines. On the fourth day most of the violence was under control and 30,000 people joined in a rally for peace. On May 4 th the curfew was lifted, but state guards remained in Los Angeles for another several days. The L.A. Riots of 1992 cost 53 lives and over $1 billion in property damages. Lots of efforts have been taken since to rebuild the burnt bridges between the various ethnic groups. Nonetheless, the L.A. Riots will remain the perhaps darkest chapter of Los Angeles history. In January 1994 the Northridge earthquake 75 measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale shook Los

72 The Los Angeles Times Staff(Ed.): Understanding the Riots . Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles 1992. p.33 73 Ibid p.34 74 Ibid p.68 75 http://nisee.berkeley.edu/northridge/

- 36 - Angeles and devastated large parts of the city. Buildings and sections of freeways collapsed, resulting in an estimated $20 billion in property damage. More than 5000 people were injured and 57 died. In the aftermath of the costliest earthquake in the U.S., most insurance companies stopped offering or restricted earthquake insurance. In response to that, California Legislature designed reduced-coverage earthquake policies that are sold by the California Earthquake Authority, which was established in 1996. Towards the turn to the new millennium, another natural catastrophe - severe storms caused by El Niño - and corruption scandals within the Rampart Division of the LAPD made the headlines.

Multi-L.A.-yerd

In the new millennium Los Angeles' population has not only grown, but also grown together. Wildfires, floods, mud slides and the occasional greater earthquake are threats that the Angelenos have been faced with repeatedly in recent years. However, fighting these forces of nature and rebuilding homes after they had been destroyed united the ever-growing and ethnically diverse population in a common cause. In 2002 voters rejected a secession of Hollywood and parts of the San Fernando Valley from the city, which also contributed to a stronger sense of unity. Nevertheless, Los Angeles is still burdened with age-old problems of economic disparities, constant traffic jams, pollution and limited natural resources (especially water). On the upside, crime and unemployment rates have been sinking, and urban redevelopment and gentrification have revived many of the city's districts (e.g. Hollywood, Downtown) adding to an improvement of L.A.'s reputation as a livable U.S. city. The Los Angeles of today is multi-layered in all respects: In spite of the fact that many companies are relocating to low-tax areas, Los Angeles still has a wide-ranging field of industries. Its population, which is expected to surpass 4 million in the near future, is known for its distinct ethnic diversity. Ultimately as one of the nation's paramount cultural, economic, financial, scientific and entertainment centers, Los Angeles continues to attract people from all over the world, who will in turn play an active role in the forming of L.A.'s future.

Los Angeles in Numbers – Facts & Figures

Even though reminders of the city's fascinating and eventful past can be found throughout the area, and thus make L.A.'s history an integral part of both present and future, it is factors like education, rate of employment, crime and welfare that govern the lives of Angelenos most and

- 37 - that contribute to the forming of the image many (outsiders) have of Los Angeles. Unsurprisingly, they also play a significant role in collecting data on integration and ethnic minorities. Hence when giving a discourse on the subject of L.A., it is crucial to provide key facts and relevant statistics about these subject areas.

Crime & Safety

From the emergence of modern Los Angeles at the end of the 19 th century onwards the city has had a long reputation for obscure crimes, corruption scandals in circles of authority, and street gangs. The most famous incidents in L.A. crime history even made it into literature and film (e.g. the Black Dahlia murder, and more recently the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders in Eastwood's 2008 movie Changeling ). A century of relatively high criminal activity has earned the city the name “Gang Capital of the Nation” and an image of a mire of bent cops, drugs deals, theft and murder. However since the mid-1990s Los Angeles has been experiencing a steady decline in crime. In 2008 L.A. saw a total of 381 murders, the lowest homicide rate since 1969, and overall crime has sunk to a 1961 low. 76 Crime statistics of the Los Angeles Police Department 77 show that crime is down to a third of what it was in 1992.(Fig. 3.3.1.1)

(Fig. 3.3.1.1)

76 http://cbs2.com/local/Mayor.Antonio.Villaraigosa.2.900448.html 77 http://www.lapdonline.org/crime_maps_and_compstat/pdf_view/40460

- 38 - The heavy decline can be attributed to the raising of awareness for crime within communities and encouraging of people to report them(numerous sites on the internet list crimes on crime maps 78 ) and the new highly computerized era of investigation, but also to stricter policies and stronger law enforcement. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that Los Angeles is about to turn into a virtually crime-free city in the next few years. L.A. still has to battle many problems, drug trafficking and street gangs being the most troubling. The National Drug Intelligence Center lists Los Angeles as a HIDTA (High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area) region. One of the main reasons for this is that drug trafficking organizations(DTOs) have targeted Los Angeles due to its proximity to the Mexican border, its connectivity to the rest of the world and its concentration of gangs.

Mexican DTOs use the Los Angeles HIDTA region as a base of operations for national-level drug trafficking and money laundering activities. They have established a highly sophisticated smuggling infrastructure consisting of compartmentalization of duties; alliances with other DTOs, criminal groups, and gangs; and nationwide networks. They rely on established smuggling routes and adapt their smuggling methods to maximize the flow of illicit drugs into and through the Los Angeles HIDTA region and the return of drug proceeds in the reverse direction. 79

Designated programs by the Office of National Drug Control Policy 80 have made it their mission to reduce drug trafficking by developing strategies to combat drug threats and fund initiatives to implement these strategies. It has proven to be a difficult process due to the high density of gangs in L.A.. Greater Los

78 Among those websites are: LAPD crime maps http://www.lapdcrimemaps.org/ and The Los Angeles Times Homicide Map http://www.latimes.com/news/local/crime/homicidemap/ 79 http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs23/23937/dtos.htm 80 http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/HIDTA/overview.html

- 39 - Angeles County is said to have over 1350 gangs with 152,000 members 81 , Los Angeles itself has an estimated 720 gangs and 40,000 gang members 82 . Many belong to a greater (nationwide) collective of gangs such as the Crips, Bloods or 18 th Street Gang.

Gangs members participate in a variety of anti-social behaviors, including battery, mayhem, sexual assault, damage to property, larceny, murder, gang wars and other criminal activity. 83

The LAPD is stepping up to the problem and implementing gang injunctions, court-issued restraining orders prohibiting gang members from doing certain activities including, for instance, wearing certain clothes, making certain hand gestures, association with one another and fighting. Whether the LAPD - in collaboration with (nationwide) anti-drug and anti-crime programs - will manage to maintain this positive trend in crime statistics in the future remains to be seen.

Economy

Los Angeles County is also known for its diverse economic base. Harboring virtually all sorts of major industries, L.A. County is an essential component of California's state economy, which if California were an independent country, would be among the ten largest economies of the world. Among the leading industries of the region are (as illustrated in the 2006 chart of the LAEDC 84 , figure 3.3.2.1): international trade (employs 315,100 people), tourism (267,400), television and motion picture production (254,300), technology (225,500) and financial services (196,500). The Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach contiguously form the nation's largest, and fifth busiest port in the world. Profiting from the proximity to other major Pacific manufacturing nations (Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China) and the smooth access to transcontinental truck and rail shipping, the Los Angeles Customs District has emerged as the nation's largest one. In addition to this, the Los Angeles International Airport makes large commercial facilities available to international cargo, expediting the route from manufacturer to client. As the nation's number one manufacturing center Los Angeles County's leading fields are apparel/textiles, furniture, agriculture/food products, and fabricated metal products.

81 http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs0/668/overview.htm 82 http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N08492271.htm 83 http://www.lapdonline.org/get_informed/content_basic_view/23466 84 The Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation: L.A. Stats, 2007 Edition . http://www.laedc.org/reports/LAStats-2007.pdf (p.30)

- 40 - (Fig. 3.3.2.1)

In the United States, only Detroit produces more automobiles than the Los Angeles area, a fitting statistic for the city with more cars per capita than any other in the world. The "big three" U.S. auto manufacturers, along with Honda, Mazda, Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Volvo, have all located design centers in Los Angeles. The manufacture of heavy machinery for the agricultural, construction, mining, and oil industries contributes significantly to the local economy. Los Angeles is also a major producer of furniture and fixtures, as well as petroleum products and chemicals, print material, rubber goods, electronic equipment, and glass, pottery, ceramics, and cement products. 85

Even though Los Angeles County is as economically diverse as it can be, fewer and fewer companies seem to make the Fortune 500 list 86 . While California had 56 companies listed in 2002, 19 of which were L.A. County based, there are only 52 California companies (15 in L.A.C.) on Fortune's 2007 list. A reason for this trend may be that other U.S. cities lure companies away from Los Angeles by providing better living conditions, well-trained work forces, less taxation and ground that does not move at random. Nevertheless, among the well-known companies of the Greater Los Angeles area are animations studio Walt Disney, motions picture studios 20 th Century Fox, Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures, health care provider HealthNet, aerospace contractor Northrop Grumman, City National Bank, Hilton Hotels, toy manufacturer Mattel, and department store

85 http://www.city-data.com/us-cities/The-West/Los-Angeles-Economy.html 86 The economic magazine Fortune annually presents a list of the top 500/top 1000 businesses in the United States. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/ There is also a global edition of this list.

- 41 - chain Robinsons-May. One of the reason for keeping headquarters in Los Angeles (County) is the relatively cheap work-force. What may be good for the economy is a woe for L.A.'s social sector – low-wage jobs often result in inability to meet basic needs and consequently poverty.

However, there have also been promising developments. Los Angeles continues to boast an extremely diverse economy, and there has been growth in some higher-wage industry sectors like health care and finance. The state’s minimum wage has been increased five times in the past ten years, although its purchasing power is still 28 percent below its 1968 value. 87

On a different note, Los Angeles' unemployment rate has always been fairly(and the county's slightly) over the United States unemployment rate (Fig. 3.3.2.2) 88 .

(Fig. 3.3.2.2)

Whatever the future may bring for L. A. County economy-wise, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce will certainly have more than just an eye on it, since it “seeks full prosperity for the Los Angeles region [...] by being the voice of business and helping its [1600] members grow.” 89

87 http://laanenetwork.laane.org/laane/docs/research/Poverty_Jobs_and_the_Los_Angeles_Economy.pdf 88 http://www.lacity.org/CAO/Appendix_A.pdf 89 http://www.lachamber.com/index.php?submenu=about&src=gendocs&ref=about_aboutchamber&category=about

- 42 - Education

The Los Unified School District (LAUSD) compromises 885 K-12 schools 90 and 196 other (adult, early education) school centers in 32 cities of the Los Angeles County area. The total K-12 enrollment for the school year 2008/09 is 688,138 students. The ethnic student breakdown of the LAUSD shows that with 72.8% over two thirds of the enrolled are Hispanic, followed by 11.2% Black(non-Hispanic), 8.9% White(non-Hispanic), 3.7% Asian and 2.2% Filipino students. The LAUSD has 77,281 employees of which 36,767 are regular teachers. 91 Proposition 13 92 , which was passed in 1978 as a result to the Serrano vs. Priest case which stated schools financed by mostly property were unconstitutional, had a cataclysmic effect on the schools of the LAUSD. Prior to it California public schools had been among the best in the United States. Considerable trouble with funding and less spending per pupil have made them drop to the bottom of the list because the campuses are now overcrowded and poorly maintained and school libraries lack up-to-date material. Unfortunately the situation has not improved over the last few years. Los Angeles has 72 public libraries, which are operated by the Los Angeles Public Library system (LAPL) 93 . Aside from many adult literacy programs (adult illiteracy is one of the most socially and economically crippling problems that approx. a third 94 of L.A. residents have to face) and traditional read-to-me programs for little children, the LAPL tries to incorporate teenager interests in a program titled Teen'Scape . A website as well library staff help teenagers find whatever they are looking for, from books and papers to CDs and DVDs, be it for homework or personal interest. Furthermore, Los Angeles is the place of origin of other (famous) educational programs. Fairfax Senior High School teacher Virginia Uribe founded a discussion forum for homosexual students where they could talk about their problems. It later turned into Project 10 , a school-based outreach program for gay and lesbian teenagers 95 . Best Buddies, a program

90 The collective term K-12 is commonly used to describe schools offering education from Kindergarden to 12 th grade. These are per usual elementary schools, middle schools and high schools, but also Special Ed. and Magnet Centers. 91 http://notebook.lausd.net/pls/ptl/docs/PAGE/CA_LAUSD/LAUSDNET/OFFICES/COMMUNICATIONS/08-09EN GFINGERTIPFACTS.PDF 92 http://www.wccusd.k12.ca.us/elcerrito/history/prop13.htm 93 http://www.lapl.org/ 94 According to California's Postsecondary Education Commission, 33.5% of the “population 16 years and over are lacking basic prose literacy skills” compared to a California State Average of 23.1%. http://www.cpec.ca.gov/FiscalData/CACountyEconGraph.asp?D=Literacy&C=19 95 Harbeck, Karen M. & Uribe, Virginia: Addressing the needs of gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth . In: Harbeck, Karen M. (Ed.) Coming out of the classroom closet: Gay and lesbian students, teachers and curricula . Harrington Park Press, New York 1992.

- 43 - whose mission “is to enhance the lives of people with intellectual disabilities by providing opportunities for one-to-one friendships and integrated employment” 96 , was founded by Anthony K. Shriver in 1989 and soon after introduced in L.A. schools, and has since become an international phenomenon. The Los Angeles Community College District consists of nine campuses (among them the Los Angeles City College). However there is a high number of private colleges, e.g. the Loyola Marymount University, the Art Center College of Design, the Los Angeles Film School and the renown University of Southern California (USC). The three public universities located within Los Angeles city limits are California State University Los Angeles (Cal State L.A.), Cal State Northridge and the top-ranked University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). The college-going rate 97 shows that 52.3% of L.A. high school graduates pursue a higher education by enrolling in one of these colleges or a college in the nation.

Politics

As one of the most populous, but also most ethnically diverse counties of the United States, Los Angeles County plays an important part in state and national politics. With nearly 4 million registered voters, it has an average voter-turnout of 78%. Since California is known to be a Democratic state from nationwide elections, it is not very surprising that about half of the registered voters are Democrats (51%), followed by 27% Republican voters and 18% who decline-to-state. 98 On March 3 rd , 2009 Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was reelected for a second four-year term. In 2005 he became the first Latino to win mayoralty of L.A. since 1872. The International Herald Tribune quotes his saying that

“'I'm an American of Mexican descent and I'm proud of that,' said Villaraigosa, who grew up the son of a single mother in the barrio of East Los Angeles. 'But I intend to be the mayor of all of Los Angeles. As the mayor of the most diverse city in the world, that's the only way it can work.'” 99

And indeed, the last five years have shown that Villaraigosa was quite successful in bringing the city together, equally drawing on the rich diversity of communities and neighborhoods. Villaraigosa has so far accomplished many of the goals he set himself as mayor of L.A. During his first incumbency the Metro subway system was extended and funding for road

96 http://www.bestbuddies.org/best-buddies/mission-vision 97 http://www.cpec.ca.gov/StudentData/CACGRCounty.asp 98 http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/jtf/JTF_LACountyJTF.pdf 99 http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/19/news/mayor.php

- 44 - repair increased by 30%, gang prevention programs received wide support and the after- school programs of his predecessors were expanded. Having pledged to make Los Angeles the greenest city in America, he is encouraging Los Angeles residents to preserve their urban environment and cut down their water use. Within the first days of office Villaraigosa committed Los Angeles to the Kyoto Protocol and is resolutely promoting renewable energy sources and “clean” technology. He has also promised to continue the public safety efforts of the Hahn administration and joined the Mayors Against Illegal Guns Coalition. The governing body of the city of Los Angeles is formed by the City Council. Council members from 15 districts compose committees that handle issues from all city-related fields of life. Wendy Greuel was reaffirmed in her position as President pro tempore on March 3 rd , 2009. Another elected city official is the City Attorney (currently held by Rocky Delgadillo), whose responsibility is to prosecute all misdemeanor criminal offenses and infractions within city limits. The current Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department is William J. Bratton, who was appointed in 2002. Antonio Villaraigosa's reelection affirms that his popularity with voters is still very high (55%) and none of his nine challengers really stood a chance. Only the future will show if Villaraigosa is a second Tom Bradley, who was L.A.'s first African American mayor and served five(!) terms turning the city into a dynamic metropolis.

Social Security, Health Care & Welfare

The United States social security system is notorious for not being adjusted to current trends in society. It is agreed that there is a desperate need for reform. Particularly California struggles with the impact of the financial crisis and more and more people are depending on social benefits and welfare programs. The better part of the money from social security tax(7.65% are deducted from the wages of employed workers, 15.3% from the income of self- employed) is paid out as benefits for retirement, disability, survivors (widows, orphans), and unemployment insurance. The other part of the money goes into welfare programs (among them the publicly-funded health insurance Medicare). Health care is a highly debated topic in America. Although universal health care plans are in the works, health insurance is (still) not mandatory in the United States. Since private health insurance policies are expensive, there is a high number of people across the U.S. who cannot afford any. The 2005 Los Angeles County Health Survey 100 reveals that 21,8% of the residents are uninsured (60,6% have private insurance, 16,6% are part of Medi-Cal, California's public

100http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/ha/docs/Insurance1864-05.xls

- 45 - health insurance program for low-income individuals). Health insurance costs are high, but without insurance medical billing may lead to towering debts and prescription drugs become unaffordable. In 2005, 15,5% of Los Angeles County residents at some point could not afford to see a doctor. In 2006, almost two out of five L.A. County residents did not have an income high enough to meet their basic needs (Fig. 3.3.5.1) 101 . With 44% and 42.2% of residents respectively, the cities of Los Angeles and Long Beach fare worse. Although the number of families in extreme poverty has decreased since 2005, more than 250,000 families in Los Angeles County still live below the federal poverty line. Latinos and African Americans are more likely to be poor with rates twice as high as those of Non-Hispanic whites and Asians. Many people are poor in spite of having a paying job.

(Fig.3.3.5.1)

California's welfare system provides help for low-income individuals and families in form of food stamp programs, Medicare and Medicaid, public and subsidized housing, and welfare payments. Currently more than two million people 102 in Los Angeles County depend on welfare or other public aid and the number is expected to grow as the recession deepens. According to a 2007 count of the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority 103 , there are an estimated 68,608 homeless individuals throughout the Los Angeles Continuum of Care on any given night. 15% of these are children under the age of 18. The annual projection for 2007 is

101http://laanenetwork.laane.org/laane/docs/research/Poverty_Jobs_and_the_Los_Angeles_Economy.pdf 102http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/2-Million-Plus-Angelenos-on-Welfare-Public-Aid.html 103http://www.lahsa.org/docs/homelesscount/2007/Los%20Angeles%20Continuum%20of%20Care.pdf

- 46 - that 141,737 people will experience homelessness at some point during the year. These numbers include the Street Count and the Shelter and Institution Count that are both conducted on the same night. Only 11,442 homeless people, a sixth, are sheltered in one of the 500 plus “emergency shelters, transitional housing facilities, hospital emergency rooms, motels that accept vouchers, detention centers, and alcohol and drug treatment facilities” 104 . Even though the numbers have dropped by 17% since 2005, homelessness remains one of the most serious problems L.A. has to face.

104http://www.lahsa.org/shelterandinstitutioncount.asp

- 47 - Starring Los Angeles

For the past 125 years Los Angeles has proved to be a fertile territory, inspiring authors and screenwriters alike with its tumultuous history, its diverse scenery and a conglomerate of people from all corners of the globe. However L.A. does not merely serve as backdrop for from-rags-to-riches and love stories, murder and corruption scandals, gang wars, and modern- day apocalypses, instead it shows through works of legendary writers like Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, James Ellroy, Charles Bukowski, Joan Didion and many others, that it has a rather complex, if not schizophrenic, personality of its own.

L.A. in literature

The beginnings of Los Angeles literary history coincide with its cultural development into an urban region. Having dealt with Los Angeles' spectacular historical rise from a small adobe settlement of barely 5000 residents to a cutting-edge metropolis of millions in a previous chapter, the question how this was possible still remained insufficiently answered – at least up to this point. Never before in the history of world cities has a city been subject to such a widespread, cleverly conducted promotional campaign as it is the case with Los Angeles. At the turn of the 20 th century, in what became known as the booster era, leading bankers, businessmen, publishers and real estate investors, brought together by the increasingly powerful Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, set out to market the city as a new kind of paradise on the Pacific, an open-shop town with a pleasant Mediterranean climate. The city of sunshine was promoted as the “New Athens”, the “New Italy”, the “New Eden”, or even the “New World Garden” on the western end of the continent in order to lure tourists and settlers, mostly Midwesterners, to Southern California. What followed over the next few decades was the largest internal migration in U.S. history. An essential component of the boosters' selling of Southern California presented the region's past. Charles Fletcher Lummis, editor of the booster magazine Land of Sunshine (later Out West ), saw Los Angeles' assets in both its Anglo-American future and its inherited and preserved Hispanic and Indian history, stating that the “missions are, next to our climate and its consequences, the best capital Southern California has.” 105 Thus the reconstruction of a comforting mission history by portraying the process of often forceful Christianizing and

105Quoted in Davis, Mike: City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles . Random House Inc, New York 1992. p.24

- 48 - “civilizing” of the Indians by Spanish padres as a good deed done in peace and only with the best of intentions, served as one of the boosters' main marketing strategies as it conferred the sense of a noble past. Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884), which follows the doomed love story of half-breed Ramona Ortega and her Indian lover Alessandro Assis, is the most prominent example of a novel that was run through the booster mill.

Ramona extols life on the ranchos and haciendas in the 1870s, just as that life was drawing to an end with the invasion of Yankees and the theft of Mexican and Indian lands. Intended both as critique of Yankee imperialism and defense of Indian land rights, it was appropriated by the boosters for a far different end: the representation of romantic and gracious Hispanic Southern California in its waning years. 106

Ignoring the novel's open attack on Yankee imperialism and cruelty and instead focusing on the account of “real life” on the ranchos and authentic portraits of “noble Indians”, the city fathers filtered out what they wanted and needed: history that can readily be turned into a myth. The desert east of Los Angeles was a locale of interest for the early-twentieth-century literature of Southern California, with novels like John Van Dyke's The Desert (1901), George Wharton James' The Wonders of the Colorado Desert (1906) and A.J. Burdick's The Mystic Mid-Region (1907). Once posing threat and terror in its vastness to pioneers, the desert became a zone of enchantment and spirituality under the booster era, a place where one could retreat in order to find oneself. The domestication of the desert by the coming of the railroad is exhibited in Mark Lee Luther's The Boosters (1923), a novel that is inclined to show both the hype of the booster-myth of California and its slowly beckoning anti-hype. The disenchantment with the perpetuated booster myth of utopian Southern California began to take form in the second decade of the twentieth century, but could already be felt in Mary Austin's panoramic novel The Ford (1917) about the Owens Valley water grab, a historical incident many of the city officials, including chief booster and Los Angeles Daily Times editor and publisher Harrison Gray Otis, were involved in. More and more émigrés who had come to Los Angeles in their pursuit of happiness, believing that this was where they would find their piece of the American Dream, felt isolated, desperate and betrayed by false promises. These feelings and the realization that not everything about the City of Angels was bright and splendid filled the pages of the magazine American Mercury, which published satiric and debunking pieces on L.A. by young authors. Louis Adamic, one of them, described the city's boosters as “[all] driven by the same motive of wealth, power and personal glory”

106Fine, David: Imagining Los Angeles – A City in Fiction . University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque 2000. p.30

- 49 - who “exploit the 'come-ons' and one another” 107 , the “come-ons” being retired Midwestern farmers and merchants, who came to sunny California seeking to regain their vigor in the pretty scenery and pleasant climate. Adamic himself, like virtually all writers of Los Angeles fiction until recent years, came from elsewhere 108 . The writers of that time being foreigners, their relationship to the city often proved to be complex and distanced.

Los Angeles fiction is about the act of entry, about the discovery and the taking possession of a place that differed significantly from the place left behind. The distanced perspective of the outsider, marked by a sense of dislocation and estrangement is the central and essential feature of the fiction of Los Angeles, distinguishing it from fiction about other American places. 109

Not finding the WASP paradise promised by the boosters, writers in L.A. turned to write about what they saw, heard, read and experienced: crimes, scandals, moral reprehensibility and deception. Two notorious Angelenos whose lives both ended in scandals and suicide made their appearances again and again in Los Angeles fiction: The career of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the Four Square Gospel, a cross between pseudo-religious preaching and entertainment, is an illustration of the endemic charlatanism in the City of Angels. There is hardly a Los Angeles novel written between 1920 and 1960 that does not, in one way or another, include “bizarre cult, spiritualist, prophet or medical quack” 110 . A passage from Don Ryan's Angel's Flight (1927), one of many novels featuring Sister McPherson, shows how infected the city was with psychics, healers, and shamans:

“Swamis stalked the streets wrapped in meditation and bedticks. Famous bunko men honored the city with permanent residence. Cults and creeds that had lain dormant since the time of Pythagoras springing to life to bloom exotically in the semi-tropical air. An alchemist hung out his sign on Sunset Boulevard, advertising to perform physical and spiritual transmutation. Holy men from the hills, barefooted, hairy bearded in simulation of the Nazarene, selling postcards on the corners.” 111

The reprising of spiritualist cult figures is symbolic of a recurring theme of Los Angeles fiction, that is, “the fusion, or confusion, of reality and illusion, fact and fantasy” 112 . The other notorious figure of that time who found a tragic end was oil speculator Chauncy Julian. Upton Sinclair modeled Oil! (1927), his tale of the rise and fall of an oil tycoon after

107Quoted in Fine(2000) p.53-54 108Adamic' life journey took him from the Carniola region in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Pennsylvania, the battlefields of WWI Somme and eventually California. 109Fine(2000) p.15-16 110Ibid. p.14 111Quoted in Fine(2000)p.14 112Fine(2000) p.14

- 50 - the oil strike on Signal Hill, on the life of Julian. Sinclair himself was politically very active, drew up the EPIC(End Poverty in California) plan and ran as Democrat for Governor of California in 1934, but lost to Frank Merriam. With the coming of the movie industry, a new genre in fiction was born. Early Hollywood fiction, like Harry Leon Wilson's 1922 satire Merton of the Movies and Carl Van Vechten's Spider Boy (1928), had already picked up the idea of a young protagonist, a Hollywood- hopeful or sensitive artist, being cast among the philistines making the movies, which were often portrayed by stereotypical despotic Jewish studio heads. The male protagonist was prone to find his only help in a smart young female type, often a script-reader, who knew the reality of the showbiz and the town. Carroll and Garrett Graham's Queer People (1930) shows a stronger version of the same pattern: a fast-talking, opportunistic rogue hero nick-named Whitey in a film capital that resembles more an arena of sex, violence and betrayal. The Grahams also introduce two antithetical types of females: the “ruthless casting-couch vixen who uses men” to reach her goals and the “Hollywood actress as used and abused victim of powerful men” 113 . One of the main characteristics of the Hollywood novel is that it plays on the confusion of fantasy and reality by offering a pervasive sense of masquerade, of pretense and deception, as could be observed in the novels (and movies) of the years to come. Although Ryan's Angel's Flight does not belong to the literary genre of classic Hollywood novels, it too focuses on the fraudulence and pretense of the city. The hilltop of Bunker Hill district, upon which the funicular railway Angels Flight leads, offers “a vantage point for Ryan to look down cynically on a city of boosters, bums and crooks.” 114 What he finds is a downtown inhabited by old people and invalids who fell prey to inspirational speakers and healers of all kind 115 . The novel's detached and tough first-person narration in a way anticipates the hard-boiled fiction of the 1930s. The surreal apocalypse at the end of Myron Brinig's The Flutter of an Eyelid (1933), where the coast slides into the sea, is the first instance of a theme that would become popular in fiction and films about Los Angeles: the utter destruction of (parts of) the city as a consequence of, or punishment for, deceit, superficiality and depravity. In Brinig's bizarre absurdist novel it is a Southern Californian quasi-bohemian beach colony of hedonistic pleasure seekers who indulge in sex, drink and body image without really contributing to society (through arts for example) that meets its fate at the narrator's pen. The 1930s saw the emergence of hard-boiled crime stories and noir fiction, which delivered

113Fine(2000)p.68-69 114Ibid p.70 115See Ryan quote on previous page.

- 51 - a kind of antimyth to the booster myth, by “turning each charming ingredient of the boosters' arcadia into a sinister equivalent”, as Davis put it, and hence “[repainting] the image of Los Angeles as a deracinated urban hell.” 116

The novels were cynical in mood, fast in pace[...], unsentimental in tone[...], violent in action, and often narrated as vernacular, direct, first-person confessionals with minimal background or character development. 117

In the midst of these stories was an appropriated form of the American hero: an outsider who, having turned his back on society, defies all norms and adheres only to his individualistic code of behavior, yet at the same time he is aware of the corruption that is invading all layers of society. However it is private rather than public acts and familial rather than corporate crime that are at the core of hard-boiled fiction. Two novels that encompass and express the frustration and rage experienced by people during the Depression era are James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses Don't They? (1935). In The Postman Always Rings Twice the vagabond Frank Chambers meets attractive Cora at the roadside Twin Oaks Tavern and together they plot to murder her husband, and tavern- proprietor, Nick. After a first failed attempt they try to escape together, but Cora realizes that living on the road is not her dream, her need for security and domesticity being in stark opposition to Frank's life of mobility. They separate only to be united again. Their second attempt to kill Nick by staging a car accident is successful and they seem to have reached their goal. However, as fate would have it, Cora dies in a car accident and Frank is sentenced to death for killing her. McCoy's novel centers around a 37-day dance marathon on the pier in Santa Monica. The staged spectacle however soon turns from a celebration of life into a rite of death as the nihilistic, death obsessed Gloria Beatty convinces her dance partner Robert Syverton, whose outlook and views on life were quite the opposite to Gloria's prior to the dance, to shoot her and thus stop the endless, meaningless circularity of the dance marathon and life in general. Both stories are told from the memory of incarcerated men awaiting their penalty (Frank and Robert) and as such reveal a certain feeling of emptiness left with them. Their dreams have been ripped apart at the ocean's shores, the locale of both the futile dance marathon and the car crash. Here, as is often the case in later L.A. fiction, the meeting point of ocean and highway symbolizes the end of the road – there is no place farther to go and no dream left to

116Davis(1992) p.37-38 117Fine(2000)p.82

- 52 - follow. Engaged in subverting the booster myth, Los Angeles proved to émigré writers to be the perfect setting for the almost exclusively urban genre of detective and crime fiction due to the city's vast geographical spread, its ethnically diverse population and its long history of corruption scandals that the law enforcement frequently found itself entangled in. The master of this genre, who gave the city a lasting identity in his seven Philip Marlowe novels(1939-1958), is clearly Raymond Chandler.

"If, as is often said, every city has at least one writer it can claim for a muse," author and critic David L. Ulin once noted, "Raymond Chandler must be Los Angeles'." Chandler's background as both a journalist and a poet made him, said Ulin, "the one Los Angeles writer whose books have as a consistent center--the idea of the city as a living, breathing character--capturing the sights, the smells, the bleak glare of the sunlight, the deceptive smoothness of the surface beneath which nothing is as it seems." [...] Yet Chandler's Los Angeles is no City of Angels. It's an urban swamp filled with darkened back alleys, endless expressways and oppressive architecture. It's a city of decay and corruption, right down to the foliage. 118

His depictions of Los Angeles with its architecture, landmarks and landscapes, although often unflattering and pessimistic, still show a deep attachment and a great love for the city. While Chandler's private eye Philip Marlowe, as some kind of cross-breed between proletarian hero and social critic, found himself battling real and abstract forces, women in Chandler's fiction were portrayed as seductive, evil and deceptive figures, the latent misogyny serving to amplify Marlowe's masculinity. Chandler's tough-guy detective fiction inspired many an author after and during his time. His contemporary Ross Macdonald openly admitted to his private-eye Lew Archer being modeled after Chandler's Marlowe. However Archer dealt with his cases of kidnapping and disappearances in a more sympathetic way and with a less jaundiced eye. Order was usually restored when Archer accomplished to solve the mystery by linking past with present, a common trope in Los Angeles crime fiction, for the move to the West often signified the escape from a (criminal) past in the East and the opportunity to reinvent oneself. The genre of tough-guy detective fiction itself has undergone a process of reinvention over the last few decades:

The new detective story has come [...] to reflect contemporary, postmodern America's, and Los Angeles', diversity. Issues of race, gender and class have been foregrounded and highlighted. Racial and ethnic minorities, relegated to the margins in Chandler and Macdonald, have become major characters. Women are less often stereotyped as threatening figures, bearers of dangerous sexual allure, deception, or (worse yet) domestication. 119

118Valerio, Mike: The Great Wrong Place Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles at 70 . http://www.blackmaskmagazine.com/bm_15.html 119Fine(2000)p.136

- 53 - Moreover the role of detective or private-eye in contemporary L.A. crime fiction is no more limited to white protestant heterosexual males. Roger Simon, for example, introduced with Moses Wine in The Big Fix (1975) a divorced Jewish hippie/Berkeley-dropout who likes to smoke pot, whereas Sue Grafton's female P.I. Kinsey Millhone has been using her good networking skills since A for Alibi (1982) 120 to solve crimes. The Los Angeles as portrayed in Joseph Hansen's stories featuring the sophisticated, gay detective Dave Brandstetter seems to be a very tolerant and cosmopolitan place, while the threats to its urban stability often come from rural settings and totalitarian, violent or religiously extremist belief systems. Even though Gar Anthony Haywood and Gary Phillips provide exquisite examples of stories of African-Americans operating as detectives in Watts and South Central, it is Walter Mosley's Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins who gives the most thorough depiction of community life in a black neighborhood.

Black urban street culture, its gambling, prostitution, music, narcotics and fashion, is here preserved with its contradictions intact, and it is essential that Rawlins be intimately familiar with; since without his ability to move at will through the innumerable bars, clubs and brothels, his services would be useless to the LAPD, which comes to him for assistance with cases that stray into the officially unmapped terrain of the ghetto. 121

Despite Mosley's fiction being set in the 1940s to 1960s (though written during the 1990s) and thus actually rendering a piece of social history, its powerful evocation of black community life so different from the perpetuated media images is timeless in the way that it offers an inside tour of a widely uncharted territory and its people.

Southeast L.A. was palm trees and poverty; neat little lawns tended by the descendants of ex- slaves and massacred Indians. It was beautiful and wild; a place that was almost a nation, populated by lost peoples that were never talked about in the newspapers or seen on the TV. You might have read about freedom marchers; you might have heard about a botched liquor store robbery (if a white man was injured) – but you never heard about Tommy Jones growing the biggest roses in the world or how Fiona Roberts saved her neighbor by facing off three armed men with only the spirit of her God to guide her. 122

But Mosley was not the only one to delve into the Los Angeles of the past in his fiction. The reconstruction of the city's dark history, in particular the decades between 1930 and 1960, and the invocation of a gloomy aura have become the essence of what came to be known as “L.A. Noir”. Noir novelists usually build their stories of power, deception and corruption around an initial incident or crime; the crimes thus serve only as a pretext to larger stories.

120The series 21st installment, U for Undertow , was published in 2009. 121Murphet, Julian: Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cultural Margins) . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2001. p.70 122Mosley, Walter: A Little Yellow Dog . Simon & Schuster Inc., New York 1997.

- 54 - Not being able to properly digest his own mother's violent rape and murder, James Ellroy, the self-proclaimed demon dog of literature, felt that there was some sort of connection between what happened to his mother in his childhood and the famous Black Dahlia case. On January 15, 1947 the mutilated nude body of Elizabeth Short was found bisected at the waist in an empty lot in Los Angeles. Although investigation made slow to no progress in solving the case due to numerous false leads, confessions and accusations, the daily newspaper headlines kept revealing sensational background information about the young, innocent and naïve Hollywood hopeful, yet dark seductive mystery woman and delinquent Betty Short, and thus contributed to the fact that “the Black Dahlia case remained active in the collective memory of the city.” 123 In Ellroy's bizarre fable of confusion, paranoia and misogyny The Black Dahlia (1987), the murdered Elizabeth Short becomes the object of (sexual) obsession of two men, the homicide detective partners Lee Blanchard and Bucky Bleichert. Blanchard's death sends Bleichert on a restless quest to uncover the mystery, leading him first to Kay Lake, the violated victim of pimps and drug-dealers whom Bucky later marries, then to Short- look-alike, rich girl Madeleine Sprague, who is victim to her (step-) father's sexual advances but at the same time a mistress-like figure whom Bucky gets involved with, and eventually to contractor Emmett Sprague and film director Mack Sennett, who are linked to the murder, for Betty was slaughtered by Madeleine's biological father George Tilden in one of the shoddy substandard houses Sprague and Sennett erected just below the Hollywood sign on Mt. Lee. The Black Dahlia is the first and perhaps best known novel of Ellroy's L.A. Quartet, which further includes The Big Nowhere (1988), L.A. Confidential (1990) and White Jazz (1992). In John Gregory Dunne's True Confessions (1977) two brothers, one a policeman the other a priest, mutually confess their being implicated in the Lois “Virgin Tramp” Fazenda murder case – an adaptation of the Short murder case. Both Spellacy brothers worked at one point for, or with, gangster and contractor Jack Amsterdam, knowing that in order to get favors one has to do favors – an illustration of how fine the line between opportunism and corruption can be and that church and the state are not immune to moral failure. Even though he knew the true killer had been someone else, Tom Spellacy frames Amsterdam for the murder as an act of revenge and of putting the responsibility in the larger context on the intricate web of urban avarice, corruption and influence peddling. Another historic event that sparked the interest of novelists were the Zoot Suit Riots following the Sleepy Lagoon murder of 1942. The hostility and conflict between Anglos and Mexicans became the core subject of their writings. In Thomas Sánchez Zoot-Suit

123Fine(2000)p.211

- 55 - Murders (1978) the historical background is widely neglected in favor of the narrower scope of constructing the image of a barrio infiltrated by right-wing Sinarquistas and leftish Mankind Incorporated, an organization that has made it its goal to combat the “hidden rulers” of capitalism. In contrast, Luis Valdez stage play Zoot Suit (1978) offers deeper historical understanding for the roots of Anglo racism towards Mexicans by assigning a commentator to the action (which plays out at the Sleepy Lagoon, the trials, San Quentin state prison and the riots) in the form of the embodied pachuco spirit El Pachuco. While in Europe power shifted and new, dark chapters were opened (to be written by Hitler and Franco), 1939 proved to be a miracle year for Hollywood with the release of the films Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz and the publishing of Chandler's The Big Sleep , Aldous Huxley's After Many A Summer Dies the Swan and Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust . This upsurge in artistic production can be attributed to the fact that, as the war approached, more and more actors/actresses, architects, composers and novelists moved to Los Angeles, joining the host of émigré intelligentsia that had already settled there. Hollywood was adding to this tidal wave – or actually conjuring it up – by offering refugees and expatriates, as well as established U.S. writers, jobs in the movie industry (e.g. as scriptwriters) and promising to them their share of the California Dream. Not finding the experience they had been promised, writers once again turned to putting their disenchantment with the industry and the place down on paper. Often described as the ultimate Hollywood novel, even though it is less about movie production and film studios than it is about the effect mass culture has on the individual, West's satire on image-worship The Day of the Locust finds its protagonist, artist and set designer Tod Hackett, amidst an L.A. population made up by fakes, hacks and spectators, who try to fill the void within their lives with just anything spectacular and out of the ordinary.

The surreal ambiance of West's Hollywood, the grotesque 'half-world' of outcasts and hangers- on, misfits and freaks, exotic cultists and disillusioned mid-westerners he constructed, was grounded in observed reality[...] 124

In the novel, Hackett, cast into a world where commerce and philistines rule and art and creative spirits have to retreat, tries to bring his belief that Los Angeles is spiraling toward inevitable violent chaos down on canvas in his visionary painting “The Burning of Los Angeles”, which depicts a mob of defeated Angelenos carrying torches and bats – an image that would be reflected in the final scene of the book, where movie extras turn to vandalizing revolt at a movie premiere. 124Fine(2000)p.157

- 56 - F. Scott Fitzgerald's tale of the fall of producer Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon (1941), as narrated by an insider of the movie industry, Cecelia Brady, the daughter of a studio head, is exemplary for the notion that there is no room for individualistic moviemakers amidst the capitalistic world of studio power. Budd Schulberg's controversial What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) is similar in its exposing of Hollywood as an industry that praises self-constructed images over substance and talent. The novel shows Sammy Glick's rise from errand boy to studio head by the means of chutzpah, plagiarism and bluff. Schulberg was heavily attacked for contributing to antisemitism with his stereotypical portrayal of Jewish studio bosses. The ire of the Hollywood establishment went as far as Louis B. Mayer (of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) suggesting that Schulberg be deported, to which Schulberg's father sarcastically replied:"Louie, he's the only novelist who ever came from Hollywood. Where the hell are you going to deport him, Catalina Island?" 125 During the House of Un-American Activities Committee's(HUAC) investigation of the motion picture industry in 1947, Schulberg provided names of fifteen former Communist Party comrades, many of which had been studio moguls who tried to influence the content of his novel. British expatriates Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh turned to look at Hollywood from a different angle and made its death industry, its denial of old age and mortality and the quest for eternal youth the central themes of their novels After Many A Summer Dies the Swan (1939) and The Loved One (1948), respectively. Their incarnations of Hollywood's famous Forest Lawn cemetery – Beverly Pantheon in Huxley and Whispering Glades in Waugh – depict Hollywood as “the ultimate dumping ground, the cemetery of civilization.” 126 Yet there was an entire world outside the film studios, casting couches and movie sets that was completely different from Hollywood, which had developed into a metonym for the entertainment industry.

[H]owever seductive coastal and hillside Los Angeles has been to novelists, there is the fact that the vast majority of greater Los Angeles's residents do not live anywhere near the Hollywood Hills, the Westside, or the coast but inland, in the vast, flat zone that Reyner Banham called “the Plains of Id”, stretching in every direction from a downtown core: east across the Los Angeles River to the large Mexican American barrio, south to Watts and South Central, south again all the way to San Pedro and Wilmington. 127

These inland neighborhoods inhabited by a mostly nonwhite population were zones marked by poverty and racial conflict. Hence inner-city fiction is not about the act of becoming rich or

125Goldstein, Patrick: How Sammy Still Runs . Los Angeles Times (June 05,2005) http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jun/05/entertainment/ca-schulberg5?pg=7 126Fine(2000)p.166 127Ibid. p.181

- 57 - famous, but about mere surviving. One of these zones is Bunker Hill. Previously depicted in Don Ryan's Angels Flight , by the time John Fante took to writing about it, the once elegant downtown neighborhood was a rundown territory packed with rooming houses populated by a multiethnic cast of laborers, pensioners and floaters. Starting with The Road to Los Angeles (1933, but first publ. in 1985) and Ask the Dust (1939), Fante's series about the autobiographical hero Arturo Bandini shows much more sympathy for L.A. and its multiethnic mix of inhabitants than, for instance, West. Bandini's irony is turned inward at his own delusion rather than outward at the city. Thus Fante's L.A. is not “the graveyard of California dreams”, but “a place alive with hope and possibility, desire and allure.

His unglamorous, un-Hollywood central-city neighborhood is a diverse multiethnic enclave represented without sentimentality, derision or a sense of impending doom.” 128

John Fante was a rather overlooked author until another writer decades later stumbled upon his novels and helped them get republished, which even led to a downright Fante-hype. This writer was Charles Bukowski. Bukowski, who has often been compared to Henry Miller or Ernest Hemingway, was most famous for beat poetry about California, but he also wrote a set of novels processing his experiences in Los Angeles. Bukowski's semiautobiographical Henry Chinaski saw the inauguration of “a drink sodden, working, womanizing protagonist engaged in a series of episodic, picaresque and chance encounters in a comic-absurdist Los Angeles compounded of petty bureaucratic civil servants, conmen, and lost and lonely women.” In Post Office (1971), Bukowski processes the twelve years he spent working in various postal branches around L.A., while Factotum (1975) deals with other menial jobs he had. Bukowski's obsessive womanizing and his alcoholic binges, as portrayed in Women (1978), added to the barfly myth that surrounded him till his death. Chester Himes provides quite a different picture of Black L.A. during the 1940s from the one Mosley would give us decades later. The protagonists of his two L.A. novels, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947), are defense plant workers. When the U.S. joined the allied forced in WWII, it triggered a mass migration of black laborers to Los Angeles to work in the wartime industry. Yet as the attack on Pearl Harbor had intensified xenophobia all around, and Japanese-Americans found themselves in internment camps

128Ibid. p.189

- 58 - around Los Angeles (the Hollywood Bowl even served as one for some time), blacks were encountering discrimination in housing and jobs. Himes' novels deal with the hatred and hostility these workers faced on a daily basis. However, Himes, unlike Mosley would do later, does not establish L.A.'s African-American population as one solidarized community, but rather as a host of alienated outsiders. Even though Los Angeles has the highest concentration of Mexican population outside of Mexico, Latinos appeared only marginally in L.A. fiction. The increasing identity awareness that was brought about by the Civil Rights and Chicano Rights movements, however, slowly began to take form in fiction as well. Oscar Zeta Acosta's fictionalized memoir of his involvement in the Chicano protests in downtown L.A. at the end of the 1960s, The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), is written in the peculiar style of gonzo journalism, a heightened, manic style used here for reporting about the submerged Chicano's rage against a city that has prospered at their expanse. This manic style in a way mirrors Los Angeles' psychosis itself. Ron Aria's The Road to Tamazunchale (1975) combines realism with the “magic realism” popularized by Marquez and Borges: As old Fausto Tejada is dying in his barrio apartment(realist level), his mind goes on a journey to the other world where he roams the history and geography of Mexico and Peru(magic realism level). Danny Santiago's coming-of-age story of a boy in the East L.A. barrio, Famous All Over Town (1983) is the portrait of a tagger, a graffiti artist, leaving his mark on public buildings as a sign of protest against the establishment. Starting with the 1980s, ethnic artists found a new outlet to deal with the city they lived in: Poetry.

Los Angeles's spectrum of ethnic rock musicians, muralists, breakdancers and rappers constitute a kind of “organic intelligentsia” fomenting a cultural strategy for a “historical bloc of oppositional groups” .129

Particularly hip-hop music was credited as “the pre-eminent expressive medium for the ghettos and barrios of Los Angeles.” 130 However, it is really hip-hop's close relative poetry that, with its lack of economic opportunism and tie to the entertainment industry, expresses multiethnic life and its inherent problems best. Among the best-known poets are Wanda Coleman, notorious for her raw portraits of the black ghetto as a “black vagina” and “cement cunt” 131 to her “pimp” the county, Luis J. Rodriguez, whose poems are invaded by a sense of

129Davis(1992)p.86 130Murphet(2001)p.108 131From the poems Where I Live and Los Angeles Born and Buried

- 59 - nostalgia for the childhood spent in a barrio torn by labor exploitation and gang warfare, and Sesshu Foster, who frequently depicts everyday violence brought upon multiethnic communities by the law enforcement. Together these poets uncover a Third World amidst Los Angeles that is far from the glamor of Hollywood – a hot topic, it seems, as the Brazillianation of major cities is slowly becoming a problematic worldwide phenomenon. All these authors “remind us that Los Angeles is more than Hollywood, the Westside, the coast, or the canyons that Hollywood and hard-boiled novelists, as well as media merchants, spin doctors and later-day boosters, have invoked as the locus of Southern California life.” 132 Los Angeles' diversity in terms of cityscape, climate, geography, geology and demography has become an inexhaustible supply of material for postmodern fiction. Since the metropolis “has become target, repository, and scapegoat for national foreboding, the place where the worst fears about the future could be placed” 133 , many novels took to dealing with the natural (earthquake, fire, flood) or man-made(bombing, invasion, nuclear explosion) destruction of the city. Nevertheless, the place of endings can easily become the place of new beginnings, when people muster up the strength to face doomsday and live through disaster. Life has not treated John Rechy's Amalia well in The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez (1991), but looking back at her tragic personal history and a hard day, the simple plea of the thief who assaulted her to bless him before he is shot by the police becomes a miraculous act. Likewise, it is a freak accident in T. Coraghessan Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain (1995) that brings together the wealthy and successful Mossbachers, an Anglo couple, and the homeless Mexican couple living in the canyon on the other side of the gates of the Mossbacher estate. And while Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man (1964), a British professor whose lover has died, muses that the city will eventually die of suburbanization and over-extension, yet still has faith in the possibilities of (personal) renewal, which is what keeps him going, Kate Braverman's Maria Ortega in Palm Latitudes (1998) is dismayed to find that the neighborhood stability of Echo Park, which has always sustained her, is slowly collapsing. Alison Lurie's Katherine Cattleman in The Nowhere City (1965), a satire on the hipster culture of L.A.'s Westside, goes from being a contemptuous newcomer to a celebratory L.A. insider by taking the metropolis on her own terms. In contrast to Lurie's Kate, Bret Easton Ellis' Clay in Less Than Zero (1985) is an Angeleno returning home for a break from college on the East, as he realizes that L.A. is the stronghold of media-visuality and consumer culture

132Fine(2000)p.206 133Fine(2000)p.236

- 60 - and that life in the city is extricating any last shred of personality from individuals and turning them into unaffected beings .

The whole artistic paradox of a central character who, on the one hand, is “Clay” to the city's abstract visuality, and on the other can learn to condemn its amoral effects and finally choose to leave is a sign of genuine indecision on Ellis part. 134

The indifference and loss of meaning and desire, as encountered in Less Than Zero and also Ellis' collection of short stories The Informers (1994), truly registers as a postmodern notion. Similarly, Oedipa Maas' crusade in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is one to find answers and meaning in the past by trying to uncover the truth about a possible existence of the anarchic underground organization Trystero. Driving the freeways around the fictional city of San Narcisco(L.A.), Oedipa seeks to penetrate the world beneath the superficial maze of signs and buildings. Notably, the act of driving the freeways of L.A. County becomes a ritual of catharsis for Joan Didion's Maria Wyeth in Play It As It Lays (1970). Not finding any purpose to her life, Maria seeks to escape her daughter's mental disability, her abortion and the separation from her husband, on various highway and freeway routes. Didion comments on the sedating effect of driving in Los Angeles in her collection of essays Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968):

[T]he freeway experience [...] is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. [...] Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over. 135

Reyner Banham elaborates on the same idea by acknowledging the freeways' role of urban monuments as one of the four ecologies constituting the mobile metropolis of Los Angeles, namely Autopia:

[T]he freeway system in its totality is now a single comprehensible place, a coherent state of mind, a complete way of life, the fourth ecology of the Angeleno. 136

Maria's road (to alienation) has eventually taken her to a mental hospital, where she recovers from the breakdown she had after her friend BZ's suicide, while she recounts her life in 87 chapters on 218 pages, some not longer than a paragraph, echoing the discontinuity of her life. Although pointing toward an impending moral apocalypse, the notion of Los Angeles being “an endless text always promising meaning but ultimately only offering hints and signs of a

134Murphet(2001)p.83 135Didion, Joan: Slouching towards Bethlehem . Washington Square Press, New York 1981. 136Banham, Reyner: Los Angeles: The architecture of four ecologies . University of California Press, Berkeley 2001. p.195

- 61 - possible and final reality” 137 , immanent in Pynchon's, Ellis' and Didion's works, still leaves room for a glimmer of hope. Yet it is this hope for a better future that gives Carolyn See's characters in Golden Days (1986) and Making History (1991) the strength to go beyond tragedy, nuclear doomsday in the former and automobile accidents in the latter, and start anew (respectively by rebuilding society on a pacifist eco-sensitive model and by celebrating each day of life), just like Los Angeles continues to reinvent itself every day. Summing up, a consolidated view of Los Angeles fiction primarily indicates that the dichotomy of utopia and dystopia runs as a continuous preeminent line through all the tropes of L.A.'s (self-)representation of space identified by Michael Sorkin 138 : the weather, Disney, death, the Movies, banality, America in extremis, cars on freeways, the artist in a strange land, the beach, 'back east', apocalypse , and the future .

L.A. in film

With Hollywood having become a metonym of the film industry, it shall be interesting to see what reels have been giving back to the city notorious for their production. Hence the question is not only how Hollywood(the industry) has influenced the image of Los Angeles, but also how the city has been portrayed in film over the past, and further, if this portrayal does justice to the city. Claiming Los Angeles as the “most photographed city in the world”, filmmaker, critic and professor of film theory at CalArts Thom Andersen attempts to answer these precise questions in his 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself . Andersen's filmic essay comes close to being a cinematic equivalent of Mike Davis' City of Quartz and David Fine's Imagining Los Angeles . Distilling the essence of Andersen's documentary, the following pages are supposed to provide a concise summary of Los Angeles' filmic history. Los Angeles role in early movies was mainly that of a background. There is a peculiar relationship between architecture and movie production in the city. Due to strategical and financial reasons it was common to use L.A. streets and buildings in film to represent an anonymous or fictional place or even another city. “The varied terrain and eclectic architecture allowed Los Angeles and its environs to play almost any place” 139 , Andersen's narrator observes. Los Angeles thus played for example Chicago in The Public Enemy (1931) and Zenith in Babbitt (1934) 140 ; and its landmarks were obscure enough to reappear in many

137Quoted in Davis(1992)p.67 138cf. Sorkin, Michael: Explaining Los Angeles In: Sorkin, Michael: Exquisite Corpse: writing on buildings . Verson, New York 1991. p.54-60 139 Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)written and directed by Thom Andersen & narrated by Encke King. Transcript available at: http://filmkritik.antville.org/stories/1071484/ 140More recently Los Angeles, or to be precise Marina Del Ray, has been regularly appearing as Miami on the TV-

- 62 - different roles – e.g., Union Station played itself, a railway station, in Nick of Time (1995) and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), but was also used as an airport in The Replacement Killers (1998). Many buildings and residential houses look back at a long history of filmic use(e.g. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis house or the Bradbudy Building) that often continued long after they had been closed for business(e.g. the Ambassador Hotel or Johnie’s Coffee Shop at Wilshire and Fairfax) and hence were given a second purpose of existence – that of a movie set. In contrast, it also occurred that constructions built for the making of a movie have a different purpose in their afterlife, as it is the case with Lake Shrine which was turned into a spiritual sanctuary in 1950. However, “Background L.A.” often tells lies in movies: people live on inexistent streets and have fake phone numbers (notoriously beginning with 555-), and everyone with a job (any kind of job, no matter how low the wage or salary) lives in the hills or at the beach...

The dismal flatland between is the province exclusively of the lumpen proletariat. And most of them live next to an oil refinery. And in death they will rest next to an oil derrick. A hillside house may be appropriate for a hack composer... or a drug dealer on the way up. [...] But in reality, a bookstore clerk couldn’t afford to rent a house above Sunset Plaza, even if it is, as she claims, „small and kind of run-down“. 141

... and car chase scenes tend to jump from one part of the city to another omitting miles in- between(as in the 1974 movie Gone in 60 Seconds , which was, by the way, the first to show the South Bay section of L.A.), while taxi drivers seem to always take the longest, most improbable route (but then again, they do that in real life, too). And though it may appear from the movies that everyone in Los Angeles is working in, or is somehow connected to, the motion picture industry, in reality only one in 40 Angelenos actually is. Eclectic modern residences by celebrated architects like Pierre Koenig, Richard Neutra and John Lautner, were cast for numerous films, frequently as homes of villains and “dens of vice”, for their glass walls have something sinister and voyeuristic about them, and the increased use of steel and cubic forms suggest physical coldness. Maybe it is the prevalent moral depravity of the city, as depicted in gangster films and crime thrillers, that intensified Hollywood's interest in destroying its native home of Los Angeles and the associated landmarks. Mike Davis observed that „the entire world seems to be rooting for Los Angeles to slide into the Pacific or be swallowed by the San Andreas fault.” 142 But the reasons for L.A. taking the center stage in apocalyptic movies - from as early as The War of the World (1953)

shows CSI:Miami and Dexter. 141Los Angeles Plays Itself(2003) 142Davis, Mike: Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster . Metropolitan Books, New York 1998. p.276

- 63 - until Roland Emmerich's recent sci-fi spectacle 2012 (2009) - are oftentimes of a more simplistic nature, as Andersen comments:

In a sense, Hollywood’s frequent destruction of Los Angeles is just as crass, but it’s more often a case of economic expediency than of ideology. Hollywood destroys Los Angeles because it’s there. Our film-makers don’t really believe the Los Angeles City Hall is a more resonant civic symbol than the Empire State Building. But they are well aware that it’s closer.[...]In disaster movies, at least Los Angeles is finally there as a character, if not yet as a subject. 143

The second part of Andersen's 169-minute documentary is titled The City as Character and deals with how films have contributed to the perception of Los Angeles throughout the world. It can be said that the realization of Los Angeles as a character began with Billy Wilder's filmic adaptation of the James M. Cain novel Double Indemnity (1944). Wilder's film was only the first in a long line of adaptations of hard-boiled material which transformed the city into a capital of adultery and murder, of fraud and corruption on the silver screen. As Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel once noted in a review of Double Indemnity , "you could charge L.A. as a co-conspirator in the crimes this movie relates." 144 The sense of rootlessness and moral depravity invading the city indicated, as in the novels, that the California dream had become obsolete. The L.A. architecture present in these movies, a wild mix of different historical epochs and latitudes including everything from English cottages and medieval castles to Mission revival stucco houses and Southern plantation mansions, had an air of phoniness about it that came to stand for the dishonesty of the lives lived within. The postwar period introduced with the troubled teenager in films such as Rebel Without A Cause (1955) an entirely new angle to viewing life in Los Angeles.

The teenagers live in a world that is parallel to the adult world of normality and stability, in a world they have created for themselves and that is almost a parody of film noir. Their world is more dangerous than that of their parents - and more attractive. 145

The factor that enabled these kids to build a world of their own - and simultaneously an important element of this kind of film and films about Los Angeles in general - was the automobile. Cars allowed for the geographic dispersal of Los Angeles to be taken in at once, as cruising the city became a new sort of lifestyle. A movie that gives the audience an better understanding of the place by the means of a car is Kiss Me Deadly (1955):

Mike Hammer’s journeys, all shot on location, reveal a city divided. The rich... and the poor. The old... and the new. What was new then is still with us. What was old has been destroyed. [...] So

143Los Angeles Plays Itself(2003) 144Quoted in Andersen, Thom: Contempt for the Hometown: Hollywood – the movies vs. the city. Los Angeles Times, May 21, 2006. http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-ca-125realla21may21,0,443648.story 145Los Angeles Plays Itself(2003)

- 64 - the image of an obsolete gas station or grocery store can evoke the same kind of nostalgia we feel for any commodity whose day has passed. Old movies allow us to rediscover these icons, even to construct a documentary history of their evolution. 146

Drive-in restaurants and drive-in movies, the Gilmore Field baseball field in The Atomic City (1952), the PanPacific Auditorium as a roller disco in Xanadu (1980), and the Bunker Hill residential district are all examples of places that do not exist anymore today but have been conserved in movies. As Andersen observes, Bunker Hill was loved by the movies but hated by the city's authorities, and this is why its destruction and depopulation through slum clearance and urban renewal projects is well documented on film.

The best Bunker Hill movie is The Exiles , an independent low-budget film by Kent MacKenzie, about Indians from Arizona exiled in Los Angeles, shot in 1958, completed in 1962. It reveals the city as a place where reality is opaque, where different social orders coexist in the same space without touching each other. Better than any other movie, it proves that there once was a city here, before they tore it down and built a simulacrum. 147

The part of downtown once housing Bunker Hill today looks very much like a simulated city with skyscrapers of up to 55 stories and postmodern buildings like Frank Gehry's deconstructivist Walt Disney Concert Hall. As it was the case with fiction, (early) directors of movies with Los Angeles as character, and later subject, were mostly outsiders and visitors to the place. Their view of the city translated in their movies to what it was that made this city different from others. Andersen makes a distinction here:

Just as there are highbrows and lowbrows, there are high tourists and low tourists. Just as there are highbrow directors and lowbrow directors, there are high tourist directors and low tourist directors. Low tourist directors generally disdain Los Angeles. They prefer San Francisco and the coastline of northern California. More picturesque. 148

Among the low tourist directors he names are Alfred Hitchcock, who expressed a love for the San Francisco Bay area in his American films but chose to elide his adapted new hometown in all but one( Saboteur ), and Woody Allen, who epitomizes the age old Los Angeles vs. New York City debate by showing great disdain for the former in his movie Annie Hall (1977). Allen's character Alvy, who has come to visit a friend, shuns local architecture, firmly believes that the city is so clean because all the garbage is made into TV shows, and notes that “the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light”. Even though, according to stereotypes, New Yorkers tend to live Los Angeles down, it is really the British

146Ibid. 147Los Angeles Plays Itself(2003) 148Ibid.

- 65 - who are best at it, nevertheless not without a certain amount of fascination. Henry Jaglom's Venice/Venice (1992) and Hollywood Dreams (2006) deconstruct the movie industry yet at the same time are enchanted by its surrealism. John Boorman's corporate crime story Point Blank (1967) makes L.A. look like an insidious and bland nightmareland built of glass, concrete and looping freeways. Meanwhile experimental high tourist filmmakers discovered some sorts of abstract, natural or raw beauty within the city. Examples include Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Andy Warhol's Tarzan and Jane Regained...Sort of (1964), and Fred Halsted's sociocritical and violent gay film LA Plays Itself (1972). Andersen acknowledges that directors from Continental Europe were more often than not high tourists, who even appreciated those elements of the city that most Angelenos hate. Jack Deray's Un homme est mort (1972) and Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970) respectively take the audience on a tour of the city showing not only the pretty tourist spots but also dark and ugly corners like industrial zones or shady strip bars and motels. In Jaques Demy's portrait of Westside L.A., Model Shop (1969), the central character at one point tells his friend,

“[...]and I stopped at this place that overlooks the whole city. It was fantastic. I suddenly felt exhilarated. I was really moved by the geometry of the place, its conception, its baroque harmony. It’s a fabulous city. To think some people claim it’s an ugly city when it’s really pure poetry, it just kills me. I wanted to build something right then, create something.[...] ”149

Many years later, Roman Polanski would embellish the idea of looking at L.A. from afar instead of up close, saying: “There’s no more beautiful city in the world...provided it’s seen by night and from a distance.” Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne's movie Chinatown (1974), was among the first to pick up the City as Subject. The big-city problems Los Angeles was experiencing(e.g. racial conflicts, smog, water shortages and congestion) awakened the city's self-conscience from a long sleep, consequently posing the question – to authorities, the public and filmmakers alike – where the tipping point in history had been. Hence sense of nostalgia and myths filled the movies of the seventies. Chinatown located L.A.'s original sin in the Owen's Valley water grab. Although the movie echoes much of Mulholland's aqueduct project(even a resemblance in name can be found in Hollis Mulwray, in Chinatown however the opposer of the project), and has often been described as a docudrama telling the secret history of Los Angeles' water supply, this dark vision of Los Angeles' history of origin still remains pure fiction. However, Chinatown set a new pattern for movies about L.A. that would, set in past or future, replace

149Los Angeles Plays Itself(2003)

- 66 - public history with their rendering of a myth as “secret history”. But the truth, as Andersen points out, had always been there – in the case of the Owens Valley it meant that the insider land deals were known to the public weeks before it voted on the bond issue to purchase water rights. Another theme addressed in Chinatown is transportation, or better, the lack thereof and its consequences. The character Jack Gittes finds himself without his car for the better part of the second half of the movie, making him fall two steps back behind his adversaries. Not owning a car and thus having to walk or rely on public transportation to some extent equals being disabled or castrated. Without a car, you are lost - or worse. In Falling Down (1993) it is a traffic jam that causes William Fisher to abandon his car and go on a terrorizing march across the metropolis, railing against everybody who crosses his path. Furthermore, the issue of transportation is made the central theme of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), a comical recount of how, starting in 1947, trolleys had to make way for freeways. Advocates of decentralized suburban development benefitted from the discontinuance of trolley service and the introduction of bus lines as well as the construction of freeways. In the meantime, downtown's vertical skyrise began. Particularly the 1980s saw a construction boom of skyscrapers. However moviemakers widely shunned this new downtown in their movies and rather portrayed that of the past, e.g. during the Zoot Soot Riots in American Me (1992), or of a distant and/or dystopian future, e.g. the 2019 neon-jungle crowded with replicants and the odd human in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). Envoking L.A.'s past or future oftentimes proved to be an easier way of dealing with the city's problems than tackling present issues. Yet another movie built around a secret scandalous chapter in Los Angeles “history” is Brian DePalma's L.A. Confidential (1997 - his first cinematic adaptation of an Ellroy novel; The Black Dahlia would follow in 2006) Just like Chinatown , L.A. Confidential uses real events and scandals as material for the story(the beating of prisoners by drunken cops on Christmas day 1951) but infuses it with a fair amount of fictional liberty (the conspiracy within the Los Angeles Police Department to gain control over the rackets) and cynicism. The real scandal of that time, however, was the denouncement and destruction of public housing due to its tie to socialist ideas. In fact, the LAPD had more power in the fifties and was more corrupt than is portrayed in the movie, but that was definitely no secret to anyone. The underhand dealings of the LAPD during the years William Parker was Chief of the Police (1950-1966) were perhaps depicted best in the 50s television show Dragnet . Parker established a police force that was feared and hated not only by criminals.

- 67 - Dragnet admirably expressed the contempt the LAPD had for the law-abiding civilians it was pledged „to protect and to serve.“ It protected us from ourselves, and it served us despite our best efforts to make the job more difficult. 150

But Dragnet would not remain the last depiction of the Los Angeles police force. Over the years we had alcoholic and neurotic cops(in the works of screenwriter and novelist Joseph Wambaugh), the dandy cop(Sylvester Stallone in Tango & Cash ), suicidal cop(Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies), homicidal cop(Richard Gere in Internal Affairs ), cops with art- connoisseur wives(Al Pacino in Heat ), psycho cops, a “pussy-whipped cop”(Robert Duvall in Falling Down ), an uncontrollably horny cop(Dennis Hopper in Nails ), the dog-hating motorcycle cop(Tim Robbins in Short Cuts ), and even a cop killing machine(James Cameron's Terminator movies). And the list of TV shows dealing with the LAPD and/or private detectives is just as exhaustive – Boomtown, Columbo, Life, Pacific Blue, The Closer, The Shield et al. Andersen remarked:

Sometimes I wonder if we are more obsessed with the police than people in other cities. Is there any other city where the police put their motto in quotation marks? Are they trying to be ironic? Can there be a movie about Los Angeles that isn’t about its police? Only if it’s a movie about the film industry, and even then the police usually get called in, although it’s often a suburban police force, not the LAPD. 151

Los Angeles further proved to be the only city vast and diverse enough to contain Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), a filmic collection of interwoven Raymond Carver stories about everyday lives of people. Although Altman claimed to venture with this movie into untapped Los Angeles, far from Hollywood, the Westside and downtown - namely into suburbs like Glendale, Pomona, Watts or Compton – he fails to show them. Nevertheless Altman delivers a slightly steadier performance in depicting a Los Angeles closer to the real thing in The Player (1992), a movie that illustrates the sleaziness of the politics of the motion picture industry, and in his Chandler adaptation The Long Goodbye (1973). Given, it is kind of difficult to make a movie about one social stratum or a neighborhood when you come from another often more privileged one. Hence not seldom some parts of L.A. are rendered invisible. Steve Martin at least does not fall into this trap in his L.A. Story (1991). But the honorable yet failed romantic comedy about an L.A. TV weatherman trying to make some sense of life in the chaotic upper-middle-class Los Angeles is still packed with stereotypes of all kinds. In Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon (1991) the lives of Angelenos from different social and ethnic backgrounds intertwine and one after the other come to

150Los Angeles Plays Itself(2003) 151Los Angeles Plays Itself(2003)

- 68 - realize that the world they live in is not a bed of roses. Their epiphanies consequently make them want to become better people. At the end of the Andersen's documentary he chooses to highlight movies by three less- known African-American neorealist directors. Haile Gerima's Bush Mama (1975), Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1977) and To Sleep With Anger (1990) and Billy Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts (1983) suggest an alternate vision of the city, one seen by the people who walk the city.

Who knows the city? Only those who walk, only those who ride the bus. Forget the mystical blatherings of Joan Didion and company about the automobile and the freeways. They say, nobody walks; they mean no rich white people like us walk. They claimed nobody takes the bus, until one day we all discovered that Los Angeles has the most crowded buses in the United States. 152

By painting a picture of the daily trials of black families in L.A., these movies show their problems(e.g. unemployment) are actually emblematic for the crisis of the working class in general. Feeling that his native city was often betrayed by movies, Thom Andersen's main intention in making Los Angeles Plays Itself was to reform the way people see L.A. by bringing a change to the way we watch movies and by raising the awareness to less known titles. After the release of Los Angeles Plays Itself however, Thom Andersen was often approached and asked why he did not include certain films. Even though it would have been simply impossible to provide a complete anthology of movies about Los Angeles, he admits to failure on his part for not contemplating the movies of several directors. An article he wrote for Cinema magazine 153 intended to make up for the omissions. The director people had pointed out most was David Lynch. It was less his Lost Highway (1997), a bizarre and mysterious identity-swap murder intrigue, that people found missing than his surreal masterpiece Mulholland Dr. (2001). The latter succeeds in developing a real touch for the friendship being forged between naïve newcomer Betty and amnesiac accident victim Rita, while they try to recover Rita's memory and uncover the truth in an adventure through an unfamiliar outlandish world of illusions where nothing is as it seems. Sadly, the movie falters towards the end when it ceases to twist clichés and abandons one plot in favor for another. Thom Andersen also admits to having been a bit tough on director Michael Mann's Heat (1995) in his documentary, criticizing him for rechristening a bridge and situating a

152Ibid. 153Anderson, Thom: Collateral Damage: Los Angeles Continues to Play Itself . In: CinemaScope, Issue 20 (summer 2004). http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs20/ar_andersen_collat.htm

- 69 - character above what their economic status would allow, and further applauds his use of a cool, blue-grey color scheme instead of standard smoggy warm colors. He also praises Mann's action-packed Collateral (2004), a movie about a taxicab driver taking a contract killer through nighttime L.A., as material he always wanted to see realized on screen. Andersen finds it so appealing that Mann consciously spurs locales like the beach or the hills in Collateral and introduces a wider ethnic scope, that he forgives little lapses in geographical accuracy.

But he does acknowledge that Los Angeles is a multiethnic, multilingual city. The hero and the woman he must rescue are both black. Max speaks Spanish—an aptitude that is required of ill- paid service workers in Los Angeles, but not of its well-paid professionals. In the course of the evening, Max and Vincent visit a jazz club in Leimert Park, a Latino night club in Pico Rivera, and a Korean disco on Sixth Street. 154

Anderson also regrets not including Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Clueless (1995) since these were wonderful examples of comedies that dealt with the main topics in the lives of (middle- to upper-class) SoCal teenagers: high school, malls, fashion trends and pop-culture. Among other directors whom Andersen chose widely to neglect(except for maybe a few frames from their films), but has not yet explained why, are: Quentin Tarantino – Pulp Fiction (1994), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Jackie Brown (1997) all show a great sensitivity for South Bay locales and generate the image of an L.A. underground world torn between “sunshine and noir”(to borrow from Mike Davis). The Coen brothers - The Big Lebowski (1998) features an anti-Marlowe figure (“the Dude”: a lazy, pot-smoking, bowling bum) in a comedic Chandler-like plot, while the comedic Barton Fink (1991) takes a fine stab at the film industry in yet another version of the high art writer's struggle in a world of philistine studio bosses. And finally Paul Thomas Anderson - Boogie Nights (1997) being a splendid portrait of the vibrant yet saddening world of people from the porn industry, while in Magnolia (1999) the paths of several Angelenos cross by coincidence in a 24-hour period, giving a series of vignettes about antithetical themes in life like truth and lies, love and death, and guilt and redemption. Many more movies could have been included - e.g. John Singleton's saga of lifelong friendship in the Los Angeles ghetto Boyz n the Hood (1991); the gritty Training Day (2001) given to a rookie cop by an experienced but ethically dubious veteran narcotics officer in the mean streets of drug-infested South Central; the L.A. streetwalker version of the Cinderella story Pretty Woman (1990); or Tim Burton's delightful tribute to the worst director of all time 154Ibid.

- 70 - Ed Wood (1994) – but space would not permit. The list of movies produced in and about Los Angeles seems endless, and in fact it is, since new additions are made every year and will continue to be – that is unless, or until, L.A. meets its doomsday.

- 71 - Crash

The first movie to be analyzed is Paul Haggis' Crash . What makes it so relevant to this thesis is that racial stereotypes are not only shown but forthright voiced by the characters, who walk in a world of ever-present racial discrimination and openly talk about it. Therefore the city of Los Angeles is not the mere setting of the movie, rather it becomes a central character from the first scene on.

Synopsis

The 2004 movie Crash offers a range of characters from different ethnic and social backgrounds whose lives at one point or another all intertwine in a city where people do not seem to meet but collide: Los Angeles. The movie begins 'TOMORROW' with a minor car crash - a rear-end collision two detectives are involved in. However, the sight of a crime-scene nearby draws detective Graham Waters away from the argument that arises between his partner Ria and the driver of the other car, Kim Lee. A dead boy has been found in the roadside ditch. Graham detects a piece of evidence hidden in the tall weeds and is immediately overcome by a bad feeling. From there we go back in time to the events that happened prior to the discovery of the body and to TODAY: Dorri, a young doctor, buys a gun for her father Farhad, an Iranian shop- owner. It is strictly meant for protection, her family being victim to looting and discrimination on an almost daily basis. The next scene takes us to Rick Cabot an his wife Jean being mugged by two well-dressed young black men, Anthony and Peter, upon leaving a movie theater in Westwood. Anthony and Peter take off in the couple's Lincoln Navigator discussing their personal number one topic – racial discrimination in today's society. The viewer is then re-introduced to Ria and Graham, who are on the site of a homicide. The driver of one car shot the passenger of another - not really an unusual sight for them. As the movie continues characters are introduced at a fast pace: Officer John Ryan, whose father needs expensive medication, and Shaniqua Johnson, the administrator handling his HMO plan. She cannot do anything for his father's situation, as it would be against regulations, but Ryan simply blames it on racial incompetence. Later Ryan and his partner, rookie officer Tom Hansen, stop Cameron and Christine Thayer in their car on their way home. Christine does not like the way officer Ryan is talking to them

- 72 - and steps up, which only results in both Christine and Cameron being pat down by the officers. Ryan takes frisking Christine a bit too far. It turns into some sort of groping, which does not go unnoticed by officer Hansen, who tries to ignore it though. Even though performing fellatio on someone operating a vehicle is “a reckless endangerment” and would be considered a felony, the officers let them go with just a warning. Christine and Cameron later get into an argument about how they should have reacted and dealt with the situation. Back to Anthony and Peter, who are still driving around in deserted parts of town discussing the role of hip-hop music as the “oppressor” of black people, when they suddenly hit something on the street. Getting out of the car, they realize they have run over a middle-aged Asian man. Not sure what to do, they decide to drop him off at an emergency room. Over at the Cabot's house the locks are being exchanged. However, Jean doesn't feel comfortable with the idea that Daniel, the locksmith, has a shaved head and “prison-tattoos” and happens to be Latino. Thus she wants the locks to be exchanged a second time in the morning. Rick on the other hand is more worried that the story about their car-jacking will make the news due to his position as the District Attorney. Next we see locksmith Daniel returning home to his six-year old daughter Lara. Since they live in one of the worse neighborhoods, Lara is terribly scared every time it goes bump in the night. Her father tries to calm her telling her that nothing could ever happen to them, but she does not believe him. He then goes on to tell her the story of how once a fairy came to him and made him a gift, an invisible cloak that would protect him, so nothing could ever hurt him. All these years it served him well, but now it is time to pass it on to his little one. With a newly-gained feeling of safety, Lara finally falls asleep. The same night Daniel goes to fix the door of Farhad's store, which has once again been burglarized. He tries to explain that not only the lock but also the door needs to be replaced, but due to his bad English Farhad does not understand that he will need to have another workman come in. He assumes Daniel wants to cheat him. Daniel leaves without payment, while Farhad is angered. As the next morning dawns, Graham and Ria are in bed having sex when Graham's mother calls wanting him to go look for his younger brother, who has gone missing. After hanging up on his mother, an argument arises between Ria and Graham resulting from the comment he made on the phone about “having sex with a white woman”. Ria gets dressed and leaves slamming the door behind her. Later Graham decides to go check on his mother Louise, a drug addict on welfare. Back at the police department officer Hansen asks for a new partner. Lieutenant Dixon

- 73 - dismisses the request, arguing it would put the department in a bad light to remove an officer after seventeen years on the squad for being racist. On set Cameron, who is a film director, is confronted by an executive producer who claims that one of the actors has been seeing a speech coach and that as a result he now talks “less black” and therefore the scene should be redone. Even though this seems wrong to him, Cameron gives in and they shoot it again. Meanwhile John Ryan has an appointment with the HMO administrator. It turns out that Shaniqua Johnson cannot do anything for his father that has not already been done. Ryan will not accept that and lets off a racial rant about how there are surely several white people who would have been more qualified for the job, and how his father was a good man who paid his black employees equal wages. Shaniqua Johnson eventually calls the security guard to escort Mr. Ryan out of the building. During the night Farhad's store has once again been trashed, but the insurance refuses to pay for it. They say it is his own fault for not having had the door replaced. Realizing he has lost everything, he decides to take revenge on the locksmith, who in Farhad's mind is to blame for the situation. Later that day Ryan and his newly-assigned partner Gomez find themselves at a crash site. The car is on its top and gasoline is leaking out. When the woman trapped in the car recognizes officer Ryan, she tells him to stay away from her. It is Christine. Only reluctantly she lets him save her. As it turns out just in time. A few seconds later the car goes up in a blaze. Graham is called to the Criminal Courts building on behalf of the car slaying from the night before. He says the case is more complicated than it may seem and that the slain police officer might have been involved into something bigger, but the head of media relations of the D.A.'s office does not want to hear about it. He more or less indirectly points out that there is a higher position opening up for Graham and that the warrant against Graham's brother could be dropped, if Graham cooperated. Not wanting his brother to go to prison for life, Graham falters. Across town it is Cameron's turn to get car-jacked by Anthony. A police unit cuts in on it though, which results in a car chase that ends at a cul-de-sac. Anthony stays in the car unnoticed, but Cameron has to face the police. To his luck one of the officers is Hansen, who bargains Cameron out of the intense situation with just a “harsh” warning. Cameron returns to Anthony in the car who cannot believe they got out of this situation alive. Perplexed, Anthony stumbles out of the car, after the police has left the scene and takes off running.

- 74 - Back at Daniel's bungalow Farhad threatens him with a gun. When Lara sees this and realizes that her father does not have the cloak anymore, she bolts out to him. The very moment she throws herself at her father, the gun fires in their direction. Daniel thinks Lara is dead and so does Farhad in horror, but the girl lifts her head and smiles. It is a good cloak after all. Daniel walks his family to his house and closes the door, leaving Farhad standing on the street in utter shock. At the Cabot's house Jean is complaining to her friend on the phone about how her maid Maria cannot seem to do anything right. Hanging up on the portable phone, she heads downstairs, trips and falls. She hurts herself quite badly, but none of the friends she calls has time to drive her to the hospital. In the end it is her maid Maria, who comes to her help. Late in the evening officer Hansen picks up a hitch-hiker on his way home. It's Peter. After some small talk in the car, Peter notices a little statue of St. Christopher on the dashboard and chuckles. Hansen, who is still high on adrenaline from the events of earlier today, gets nervous. He asks Peter what it is that is so funny to him and eventually pulls over. When Peter reaches into his pocket to pull something out to show Hansen what made him chuckle, Hansen, who believes it is a gun, fires a shot. It goes straight to Peter's chest leaving him dead on the spot. In a last twitch his hand opens to reveal an identical little figurine to the one on the dashboard. In horror of what he has just done, Hansen opens the door to let Peter drop out then takes off. Later at the city morgue, the reason Graham had a bad gut feeling in the beginning of the movie is revealed: The dead boy, Peter, is Graham's brother. Cut to Kim Lee, the other driver from the movie's initial crash, looking for her husband at the hospital. He turns out to be the Korean man Anthony and Peter have hit with the stolen SUV. In the meantime Anthony, who has gone back and retrieved the Korean man's van, is now trying to sell the vehicle. When he and his associate at the chop shop open the back of the van, they find at least a dozen illegal aliens inside. Even though he is now offered more money, Anthony takes the van downtown and lets all of the precious, mostly Asian “cargo” go free. He tells them to hurry; in America time is money. As he drives off, another car comes around the corner, brakes hard and is then rear ended. A miracle happens as the movie closes on the camera slowly rising from the chaos at the intersection to show the entire city: it has started to snow.

Character Analysis

“A Brentwood housewife and her DA husband. A Persian store owner. Two police detectives who are also lovers. An African-American television director and his wife. A Mexican locksmith.

- 75 - Two car-jackers. A rookie cop. A middle-aged Korean couple... They all live in Los Angeles and during the next 36 hours, they will all collide...”155

What is remarkable about the multi-ethnic cast of main characters in Crash is that none of them truly fits a black-and-white scheme. Aside from Lara, the little angelic girl, they all are painted in shades of grey. In the course of the movie some move from being a victim to becoming a perpetrator, others are hit by a revelation and realize they have been (doing) wrong. No real protagonists can be detected, no heroes found.

The opening lines of the movie, about how people in L.A. do not seem to touch but instead crash into each other, are spoken by Detective Graham Waters. As a cop he has to face homicide and racial altercations on a day-to-day basis and thus he is well aware of the ethnic tensions in his city. In addition to his job, he is burdened with a drug-addict mother and a brother gone missing. He finds relief in a sexual affair with his colleague Ria, but manages to jinx it with a thoughtless, racially insensitive comment. Although his introductory quote critically assesses the problem of racial tensions in Los Angeles, Graham Waters himself does nothing to contribute to a change. At one point Waters is faced with the decision to either speak out against a crooked cop or withhold evidence and have his brother's criminal record wiped clean, and his decision falls in favor of his younger brother. This act ultimately disappoints early expectations of the viewer that Detective Graham Waters would be an honest and righteous man. Although only a minor character, Ria is portrayed as a proud Latina in the movie. Not being racist herself, Ria still knows to retort discriminative comments directed at her with sarcastic racial remarks, but usually dismisses people who bring them up as ignorant. Hence it bothers her more than usual, when Graham comments on “having sex with a white woman”. First of all it is disrespectful to his mother. Second, why should it even be an issue what ethnicity she is. And above of all – she is not white, Ria is Latina. A Latina who has just left Graham. From the moment officer John Ryan's character is introduced, the viewer can sense rancor radiating off him. Although his father's situation is surely difficult, it is hard to understand why Ryan is meeting the HMO worker with so much disregard. When officer Ryan and officer Hansen pull the Thayer's car over it becomes more obvious that he has clearly racist views. However, when Christine fights his attempts to save her from the car wreck the following day, the look on his face shows that he starts questioning his previous actions and attitude towards people of a different color. That very moment he regrets what he has said and

155http://www.crashfilm.com/

- 76 - done to her the night before. Deeply buried under a superficial and ethnocentric shell seems to be a gentle heart that is colorblind when it comes to matters of life and death. To boot, HMO worker Shaniqua Johnson, who is being verbally harassed by officer Ryan everytime they speak, shows that she does not really deserve the viewer's sympathy: she can be just as insulting to others as Ryan was to her. Unlike his partner, officer Tom Hanes tries to set aside racial differences and treat everyone equally. Conscientious as he is, Hanes is disconcerted by Ryan's methods and feels liable to report him. However, it appears that either there were no negative experiences involving different ethnic groups in his life or he has simply not had a lot of interaction with them, because his initial rejection of negative stereotyping and fair treatment of all is quickly pushed aside by fear and negative thoughts that he adopted from others, when Peter gets in his car. Driven by a creeping feeling of unease he ends up shooting Peter. Anthony is quite a successful car-thief, but his true interest is directed towards more philosophical matters. When he senses the smallest trace of unequal treatment in someone's behavior, even if it is just all in his mind, it usually turns into a sermon on the oppression of black people. Any chance he gets he tries to victimize his own race. However, his actions contradict his words most of the time. He says that young black males walking the streets at night are stereotyped as gangsters or thieves, but then turns around to steal a car. Although he is criticizing stereotypes when it comes to his own ethnicity, Anthony buys into them easily. For instance, he does not believe that Peter likes hockey because it is not a typically black sport. Also, to him all Asians are the same, which is proven by the fact that he calls the Korean man they have hit with the car “Chinaman”. Anthony is determined in his beliefs and nothing can seem to undermine them. The first time Anthony is really speechless is after the police cut in on Anthony's attempt to steal Cameron's car, when Cameron scolds him for embarrassing himself. Cameron's words may have brought about a change in Anthony, because at the end of the movie, when he is offered a high amount of money for every illegal alien in the van, he refuses to take it and instead lets them free. Peter, also a young black crook, is Anthony's friend and voice of reason. Peter does not constantly see racist motives behind other people's words and actions. He understands where Anthony's views come from but does not agree with them. He actually appears to be a good kid who just got mixed in with the wrong crowd, turning to the streets in order to escape his drug addict mother at home. He even likes some of the things that are considered typically “white” such as ice-hockey or country music. Since Peter seems to be one of the least prejudiced characters of the movie, it is quite hard to digest that he dies due to a

- 77 - misunderstanding fueled by a hint of xenophobia. After the Cabots have been car-jacked by Anthony and Peter, Rick's biggest concern is how the media will portray the incident. His position as District Attorney has made him aware of the delicate topic of race in police reports. He fears to lose supporters if the carjackers are described as black and had rather the ethnicity not mentioned on TV. His wife Jean, who had, in fear of being labeled racist, consciously not acted upon her instinct to walk the other way before they were car-jacked, now decidedly voices her doubts about the locksmith to her husband, who has no ear for it. Jean clearly has prejudices about people of different skin-color or appearance, but her character raises the question of whether fearing someone or something is always bad. There could after all be a situation where that fear may save your life. Jean also does not have a good opinion about her maid, but overcomes the prejudices she holds, when Maria turns out to be the only one to help her when she is hurt. Jean's example demonstrates that it is not always easy to distinguish between valid doubts and unjustified prejudices. Working as a TV show director with a multi-ethnic cast, Cameron Thayer is occasionally confronted with more subtle cases of racial discrimination, as illustrated by the discordance between him and the executive about the black actor's enunciation. Being a rather mellow man, Cameron tries to escape conflict whenever possible. His wife Christine, on the other hand, who is of mixed-race, faces conflict head-on. Even though she could pass as white, she sees herself as African-American and considers it aggravating when someone judges them by their skin color, ridicules their marriage or strips of their dignity. It frustrates her even more that her husband would not speak his mind in such situations and tell these people off. However, Christine has to realize that talking back is not always the best solution either. Dorri's role as the second generation of an immigrant family is skillfully shown in the scenes where she serves as a linguistic as well as cultural mediator between the owner of the gunstore, or the insurance company official, and her father Farhad. Moreover, her job as a doctor is inclined to demonstrate that if one is strong enough to overcome racial and language barriers they can be successful. Her Iranian father Farhad's existence, on the other hand, is at permanent risk. He has been burdened with the post-9/11 stereotype that all terrorists are from the Middle-East. The way this plays out is that his shop is being looted regularly with insulting racial graffiti left on the walls. When his existence is ultimately ruined, Farhad decides to let it out on the person who is to blame for it in his eyes, the locksmith, for he is a Mexican cheat, a stereotype Farhad adopted living in Los Angeles. Meeting Kim Lee's character in the first scene of the movie, the initial response is to be shocked at the racial remarks she throws at Ria. Clearly Kim Lee's opinion about the Latino

- 78 - population is not very good. It is all the more surprising that we are shown her softer side when she is at the hospital looking for her husband Ken Ho, the poor Korean man who has been hit by Anthony and Peter in the stolen SUV. For a minute, the viewer is able to sympathize with them – but only for a minute, because at the very end it turns out that the “poor” man is involved in human trafficking and thus one of the biggest criminals of the movie. Mexican locksmith Daniel and his little family, in particular his daughter Lara, are the only characters in Crash that could be described as outright positive. The story Daniel tells Lara to calm her worries shows that, even though Daniel is aware that his family lives in a dangerous place and has a hard time struggling to survive, he firmly believes in the good and does not give up faith. Being judged by his looks by Jean Cabot and labeled as a cheat by Farhad still does not make him hate his wrong-doers or waver from righteousness, and for that he is rewarded with a miracle: his daughter is not hit by the shot fired in her direction.

Issues of race and ethnicity in Crash

In an interview piece on the DVD commentary, writer and director Paul Haggis revealed that the memory of being carjacked at gunpoint in front of a video rental store on L.A.'s Wilshire Blvd. in 1991 was what spurred him to write the screenplay for his award-winning 2004 movie Crash . In Haggis case, a traumatic incident served as inspiration for artistic work, or, looked at it from a different angle, art production serves as some sort of release, as a way of coming to terms with a stressful and upsetting issue. Unfortunately, people are often hesitant to critically examine the consequences and side- effects of a bad experience or they simply lack the time. Instead we tend to suppress it, or look for blame in others, not seldom letting the problem grow until it cannot be ignored anymore, often causing an eruption of bottled-up feelings. In a multi-ethnic social environment like Los Angeles, race related conflicts can be fueled by suppressed resentment and inherent prejudices. Racial prejudice - a preconceived opinion or feeling on terms of race that is either favorable or unfavorable - is not illegal, but in a lot of situations racial discrimination is. Indeed, laws cannot control how people think, nor is it desirable, but the way people act can be influenced by laws that prohibit certain actions. The United Nations laid out a definition for racial(and ethnic) discrimination in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted in 1966:

In this Convention, the term “racial discrimination” shall mean any distinction, exclusion,

- 79 - restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life. 156

Racial discrimination can manifest itself in different forms: on an individual/internalized level(private beliefs, prejudice), on an interpersonal level(these beliefs coming into interaction with others), and on an institutional/structural level(produced and perpetuated by private and public institutions, e.g. governmental bodies, schools, corporations). In general we distinguish between forms of racial discrimination practiced by a majority and those practiced by a minority. A further division is made into forms of racism coming from above by a traditionally privileged group and those from below by an oppressed one. Thus minority racism from above, for example, is closely tied to Western imperialism (e.g. apartheid in South Africa), while majority racism from below is often of populist character with “a dispossessed majority group [directing] its anger at a more powerful minority group” 157 (e.g. the Hutu-Tutsi conflict). Since racism pertains to (unequal) distribution of power, (underprivileged) inter-minority racism is considered to be somewhat controversial. Nevertheless it does occur, as proven for instance by the climax of tensions between Korean-Amer. and African-Americans during the L.A. riots of 1992 or by several California prison revolts arising from Black-Latino tensions. Coming back to the initial topic, inter-minority tensions are depicted as just one of many manifestations of racism in Crash . In its depiction of tensions, friction and (faulty) communication, Crash attempts to mirror the state of multi-ethnic relations in Los Angeles. Whether or to what extent this portrayal is truthful shall be left aside for now to be judged by more competent others later(movie critics, audience, native Angelenos). Rather our interest be directed towards the manifestations itself, toward how racial prejudice and discrimination are expressed in Crash . Since racism is overtly discussed and acted out by the main characters, we shall move from the most obvious, transparent situations where it is articulated to the more opaque and covert ones. The imitation and caricaturing of the speech and behavior of someone from a different ethnical background in interpersonal conflict situations perhaps qualifies as the most apparent form, the mocking outright intended to be an insult to the person's background. There are a couple of such instances were characters' bad English language skills are being made fun of.

156 2. International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination . New York, 7 March 1966 . Part I, Article 1.1, p.3; document available at http://treaties.un.org/doc/Treaties/1969/03/19690312%2008-49%20AM/Ch_IV_2p.pdf 157http://abstractnonsense.wordpress.com/2006/10/09/different-forms-of-racism/

- 80 - In the argument between Farhad and the gun store owner...

STORE OWNER Am I making insult "at" you? Is that the closest you can come to English?

Or when Christine accuses her husband of having been submissive to the police officers, she plays on the stereotype of blacks not speaking proper English.

CHRISTINE Let me hear it again. "Thank you, mister policeman. You sure is mighty kind to us poor black folk.[...]”

Or Shaniqua's comment at the end when a car crashes into her car on an intersection.

SHANIQUA Uh-uh! Don't talk to me unless you speak American!

When Ria's and Kim Lee's cars collide in the very beginning of the movie, they engage in heated argument. Ria goes on to imitate Kim Lee's speech pattern.

RIA I "blake" too fast. I'm sorry you no see my "blake" lights.

The two of them carry on trying to insult each other with stereotypical racial stigmata. Kim Lee, for example, implies that Ria is an illegal immigrant because the common stereotype says that Mexicans usually are.

KIM LEE Stop in middle of street! Mexicans no know how to drive. [...] I call immigration on you.

Many characters engage in throwing racial slurs at each other. In the previously mentioned dispute between Farhad and the store owner, it was the latter's derogatory comment, which put all Middle-Easterners on the same level as al-Quaeda terrorists, that insulted Farhad in the first place.

STORE OWNER Yo, Osama! Plan a jihad on your own time.

(And later, when Frahad calls him ignorant:)

Yeah, I'm ignorant? You're liberating my country. And I'm flying 747s into your mud huts and incinerating your friends? Get the fuck out!

It seems that specific ethnic distinction is of no importance to the majority population, thus any one Asian nationality becomes synonymous with another. To Anthony, the Korean man he and Pete hit with the stolen SUV, Choi Gin Gui, as well as the victims of human trafficking

- 81 - locked to Gui's panel van are mere “Chinamen”. Lucien, Anthony's thug friend at the chop shop, informs him about the invalidity of his assumption.

ANTHONY You wanna buy these Chinamen?

LUCIEN Don't be ignorant. They're Thai or Cambodian. Entirely different kind of chinks.

The same goes for Latin American nationalities. Mexicans seem to be the prototype Latinos, the former becoming a synonym for the latter. When Graham calls Ria Mexican though, she lectures him on her descent.

RIA You want a lesson? I'll give you a lesson. How 'bout a geography lesson? My father's from Puerto Rico. My mother's from El Salvador. Neither one of those is Mexico.

GRAHAM Ah. Then I guess the big mystery is who gathered all those remarkably different cultures together and taught them all how to park their cars on their lawns?

Similarly Farhad's wife Shereen complains about them being taken for Arabs.

SHEREEN Look what they wrote. They think we're Arab. When did Persian become Arab?

Our basic need for identification and association with other individuals requests a cognitive process of social categorization of people into groups based on common attributes. At large, the groups formed are split into ingroups, groups an individual identifies with, and outgroups, groups the individual does not feel he/she belongs to. In order to differentiate between the two, stereotypes are used in this contest of “us vs. them” to define the respective groups, with the ones for the ingroup generally being less discrepant. However stereotypes are more often than not overgeneralized and inaccurate. Resistant to new information, enlightenment and change, stereotypes that have formed over many years if not centuries are hard to expunge. Therfeore having the stereotypes of another outgroup wrongfully applied by others to one's self becomes all the more tormenting for the individual, as Shereen's comment indicates. It seems that thinking in terms of stereotypes is, as a natural extension of thinking in terms of categories, inevitable - an idea the movie captures well. But is prejudice too, since stereotypes are at the base of it? Crash does not provide an easy answer to this question, yet due to its host of outspoken characters it manages to delineate the processes that link stereotypes with

- 82 - prejudice and prejudice with discrimination by showing the characters' inner conflict. The scene in which the locks are being changed at the Cabots' house after the carjacking shows how torn Jean is between acting upon her prejudiced beliefs and the ethical understanding that racial discrimination is wrong. She wants the locks changed again because in her opinion the “guy with the shaved head, the pants around his ass, the prison tattoo” looks like “a gang member”. She tries to reason it, blaming the carjacking on her reluctance to act on her instinct from fear of being perceived as racist.

JEAN And it was my fault because I knew it was gonna happen. But if a white person sees two black men walking towards her, and she turns and walks in the other direction, she's a racist, right? Well, I got scared and I didn't say anything. And ten seconds later I had a gun in my face! I am telling you. Your amigo in there is gonna sell our key to one of his homies. And this time it'd be really fucking great if you acted like you actually gave a shit!

Officer Hansen's conviction that prejudice and discrimination are wrong becomes clearly evident when he asks for a new partner, his current one being a “racist prick” as Lt. Dixon assesses. Yet after a hard day and a nerve-wracking confrontation, fear starts to creep up making Hansen feel uncomfortable about his hitchhiker. It is this fear that stereotypes might actually be true and that Peter may pose a threat to Hansen that makes Hansen shoot Peter. Horrified by his act, Hansen realizes that he too is prejudiced. Bad experiences and fear are at the core of the distrust Christine has for Office Ryan when he tries to save her from the car wreck. Her opinion about Caucasians may not have been altered by their previous encounter, but that about the moral integrity of the police force certainly has. In no sense is this a justification for personal prejudice, but it certainly helps to understand the causes of it. While some characters are careful to not be racially discriminatory, others see discrimination where there may be none. Most prominent among them is Anthony. There is certainly no doubt that African Americans have been victims to austere injustice and intolerable cruelty throughout history and that although slavery has been abolished and segregation declared unconstitutional, they are still fighting discrimination in many sectors. However Anthony seems to stretch the issue blowing the victim and oppressor roles out of proportion.

ANTHONY Did you see any white people waitin' an hour and minutes for a plate of spaghetti? And how many cups of coffee did we get?

PETER You don't drink coffee and I didn't want any.

- 83 - ANTHONY Man, that woman poured cup after cup to every single white person around us. But did she even ask you if you wanted any?

PETER We didn't get any coffee that you didn't want and I didn't order, and that's evidence of racial discrimination? Did you notice that our waitress was black?

ANTHONY And black women don't think in stereotypes? You tell me. When was the last time you met one who didn't think she knew everything about your lazy ass before you even opened your mouth, huh? That waitress sized us up in two seconds. We're black, and black people don't tip. She wasn't gonna waste her time. Somebody like that? Nothing you can do to change their mind.

PETER So how much did you leave?

ANTHONY You expect me to pay for that kind of service?

While complaining that he as a black person is being discriminated against due to stereotypes about his race, he does nothing to prove people wrong. Instead he even reinforces said stereotypes.

ANTHONY Wait, wait, wait. See what that woman just did? You see that?

PETER She's cold.

ANTHONY She got colder as soon as she saw us.

PETER Ah, come on, don't start.

ANTHONY Man, look around you, man. You couldn't find a whiter, safer or better-lit part of this city right now. But yet this white woman sees two black guys who look like UCLA students strolling down the sidewalk, and her reaction is blind fear? Look at us, dawg. Are we dressed like gangbangers?

PETER Huh? No.

ANTHONY Do we look threatening? No. Fact. If anybody should be scared around here, it's us! We're the only two black faces surrounded by a sea of over-caffeinated white people patrolled by the trigger-happy L.A.P.D. So you tell me. Why aren't we scared?

PETER 'Cause we got guns?

Anthony would never steal from black people. He figures that the “only reason black people steal from their own is 'cause they terrified of white people.” As Peter points out, Anthony

- 84 - believes that by doing this, he is setting a good example for the community. Anthony further describes hiphop as the “music of the oppressor” and explains how it is all part of a bigger plan of white supremacists to remain in control of the power by not letting proponents of enlightenment impart their knowledge and ideas, for knowledge is power.

ANTHONY Listen to it, man! "Nigger this, nigger that." You think white people go around calling each other honkies all day, man? "Hey, honky, how's business?" "Going great, cracker. We're diversifying."[...] See, back in the sixties we had smart, articulate black men. Like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Fred Hampton. These brothers were speaking out, and people were listening! Then the FBI said,"No, we can't have that. Let's give the niggers this music by a bunch of mumbling idiots and sooner or later, they'll all copy it, and nobody will be able to understand a fucking word they say. End of problem."

Also, in Anthony's opinion the big bus windows are only there “to humiliate people of color who are reduced to riding on them.” We remember, automobiles in Los Angeles are regarded to be status symbols, a way of lifestyle and means of surviving, whereas public transport carries the negative connotation of being used by the poor masses. Anthony thus refuses to ride the bus. Even though Peter constantly tries to refute Anthony's tendency to see oppression and discrimination of blacks in most social settings, it is Cameron's rebuke about Anthony embarrassing himself and his entire race that really has an impact on Anthony. This rebuke may also have led to Anthony's act of redeeming. The fact that he refuses to sell the Thai/Cambodian people and instead releases them, shows that there are limits to what Anthony would do for money. However Cameron's rebuke is not only directed outward at Anthony, but also at himself. Cameron has been confronted by his wife Christine on having been submissive to the police officers when they have stopped their car to frisk them. She feels that they have been stripped of their dignity and Cameron has not done anything against it, too scared it would compromise his social status. Both Cameron and Christine come from a more privileged background and might not have had to deal with problems of the working class like unemployment or housing, however that did not spare them from being discriminated against.

CAMERON Sooner or later you gotta find out what it is really like to be black.

CHRISTINE Fuck you, man. Like you know. The closest you ever came to being black, Cameron, was watching The Cosby Show.

CAMERON At least I wasn't watching it with the rest of the equestrian team.

- 85 - CHRISTINE You're right, Cameron. I got a lot to learn 'cause I haven't quite learned how to shuck and jive.

Cameron's simple question to Christine - ”You actually believe they're gonna take anything you have to say seriously?” - illustrates that he has come to accept that they cannot single- handedly defeat the institutional racism they encounter. He understands that he “must submit at some level, to the authority of the white male” 158 if he is to have what whites have. Likewise another scene suggests that Cameron had to make compromises in order to climb the social ladder and still has to make them to secure his status. In one scene the executive producer Fred approaches Cameron about one of the black characters of the TV show supposedly seeing a speech coach and hence “talking a lot less black lately.” Even though Cameron is baffled by Fred's prejudiced thinking that African-Americans don't speak proper English, he betrays his own conviction and backs down.

CAMERON Wait a minute. You think because of that, the audience won't recognize him as being a black man? Come on!

FRED Is there a problem, Cam?

CAMERON No, we don't have a problem.

FRED I mean, 'cause all I'm saying is it's not his character. Eddie's supposed to be the smart one, not Jamal, right? You're the expert here. But to me, it rings false.

CAMERON We're gonna do it one more time.

The movie suggests that the prices one has to pay in order to assimilate, or rather disappear into the white-dominated “mainstream” society, are high. Too high as Cameron's later outburst would show. As Denzin reflects on Williams' idea, racism brings a certain amount of absurdity to life, which in turn has severe consequences:

[R]acism introduces absurdity into the human condition. If one “lives in a country where racism is held valid and practiced in all ways of life, eventually, no matter whether one is a racist or a victim, one comes to feel the absurdity of life.” This absurdity produces violence, hatred and self-alienation. 159

Himes explains,

158Denzin(2002)p.61 159Williams, John A.: Foreword . p.1-3 In: Himes, Chester: The Third Generation . Thundermouth Press, New York 1989. Quoted in: Denzin(2002) p.77-78

- 86 - [The] American Negro experiences two forms of hate. He hates first his oppressor and then because he lives in constant fear of this hatred being discovered, he hates himself - because of this fear. 160

These two forms of hate appear to be a logic extension(or result) of the double-consciousness identified by W.E.B. Du Bois at the beginning of the 19 th century:

[T]he Negro is [...] born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. 161

As Christine observed(“ Oh? You weren't afraid that all your good friends at the studio were gonna read about you in the morning and realize he's actually black? ”) Cameron fears to be discovered in both ways: as being black, and for hating the fact that being black makes a difference in his job and life in general. Thus he begins to form feelings of resent towards an unjust society. When Cameron is stopped by the police a second time within the 24 hours, right after Anthony tried to carjack him, for the first time we sense a long-brewing storm of protest approaching. He lets his frustration loose on the officers by refusing to cooperate,inciting them and calling them names(e.g. “pig fucks”). Officer Hansen eventually jumps in to mediate and manages to talk some sense into Cameron, warning him that this behavior will lead to him getting shot. While it may not have been the right time or place for personal rebellion, the scene certainly shows that years of stepping back, remaining reticent and subduing himself and being subdued have left their mark on his psyche. There are other instances in Crash where characters are forced to make a decision between “doing the right thing”, i.e. whatever their moral conscience deems ethical, and letting themselves be coaxed into foul game in order to advance in their careers. When officer Hansen consults Lt.Dixon about his partner's dubious ways of conducting police work, Dixon confronts him with his harsh reality of work on the police force.

HANSEN I don't wanna cause any problems, Lieutenant. I just want a new partner.

DIXON I understand. Your partner's a racist prick. But you don't wanna stir up any

160A quote by Chester Himes in Williams(1989)p.3 161Du Bois, W.E.B.: The Souls of Black Folk . (1903; Reprint: Knopf, New York 1993) p.4

- 87 - bad feelings with him.

HANSEN He's been on the force for a long time.

DIXON Seventeen years.

HANSEN And I do have to work here, sir.

DIXON So you don't mind that there's a racist prick on the force. You just don't want him to ride in your car.

HANSEN If you need me to go on record about this, sir, I will.

DIXON That'd be great. Write a full report. Because I'm anxious to understand how an obvious bigot could've gone undetected in this department for years. Eleven of which he was under my personal supervision. Which doesn't speak very highly of my managerial skills. But that's not your concern. I can't wait to read it.

HANSEN What if I said I wanted a new partner for personal reasons?

DIXON So now you're saying he's not a racist prick, you just don't like him.

Even though he understands Hansen's concerns, Dixon obviously does not want to be easy on Hansen, knowing that life on the executive force is at times far from being just.

DIXON Not him. You. You have uncontrollable flatulence. You're too embarrassed to ride with anybody else so you're requesting a one-man car.

HANSEN I'm not... comfortable with that, Lieutenant.

DIXON I wouldn't be either. Which is why I understand your need for privacy. Just like I'm sure you understand how hard a black man has to work to get to, say, where I am, in a racist fucking organization like the L.A.P.D. and how easily that can be taken away. Now, that being said, it's your decision. You can put your career and mine on the line in pursuit of a just cause, or you can admit to having an embarrassing problem of a personal nature.

Graham Waters, too, is faced with a decision between having a clean conscience and being promoted. Flanagan, an assistant district attorney, pressures him into making a false statement that would frame a possibly innocent white police officer for the murder of a corrupt black colleague(Det. Lewis). To convince Graham, Flanagan plays one trump card after another:

GRAHAM

- 88 - You can do this dance if you want to, but I'm willing to bet when the coroner's report comes back tomorrow it's going to say that Detective Lewis was coked out of his head.

FLANAGAN Fucking black people, huh?

GRAHAM What did you just say?

FLANAGAN I mean, I know all the sociological reasons why per capita eight times more black men are incarcerated than white men. Schools are a disgrace. Lack of opportunity. Bias in the judicial system. All that stuff. All that stuff! But still, it's gotta get to you, on a gut level as a black man, they just can't keep their hands out of the cookie jar. Of course, you and I know that's not the truth. But that's the way it always plays, doesn't it? And assholes like Lewis keep feeding the flames. It's gotta get to you.

And then:

FLANAGAN What do you think those kids need...to make them believe, to give them hope? You think they need another drug-dealing cop or do you think they need a fallen black hero?

Flanagan eventually cuts to the chase and implies that Graham would be rewarded with the position of lead investigator on the district attorney's squad. However it is not before Flanagan plays his last card, the one that's on his heart, namely Graham's brother, that Graham complies.

GRAHAM And the right message is, "Look at this black boy I just bought?" Well, fuck you very much. But thanks for thinking of me.

FLANAGAN Actually we were thinking of you. Until we saw that. It's your brother's file. Twenty-something years old and already three felonies. Three strikes law. Kid's going away for life for stealing a car. Christ, that's a shitty law. There's a warrant in there. But still, hey, he had every opportunity you had. Fucking black people, huh?

GRAHAM So all, uh... all I need to do to make this disappear is to frame a potentially innocent man?

FLANAGAN What are you? The fucking defender of all things white? We're talking about a white man who shot three black men. And you're arguing with me that maybe we're not being fair to him? You know what? Maybe you're right. Maybe Lewis did provoke this. And maybe he got exactly what was coming to him. Or maybe stoned or not, just being a black man in the Valley was enough to get him killed. There was no one there to see who shot first, so there is no way to know. Which means we could get this wrong. Maybe that's what happened with your brother. Maybe we got it wrong. Maybe Lewis isn't the only one who deserves the benefit of the doubt. You're the one closest to

- 89 - all this. You need to tell us. What does your gut tell you?

Crash suggests that the system and life in Los Angeles in general are changing the individual. In this city even the most confident idealist would sooner or later become cynical and bitter. This neo-noir vision of life in Los Angeles changing the mindsets of its multi-ethnic population for the worse is reflected in Ryan's admonition:

RYAN Look at me, look at me. Wait till you've been doin' it a little longer. You think you know who you are, hmm? You have no idea.

Ryan's previous abuse of power when he degraded Cameron and molested Christine is to some extent being minimized and even vindicated by this statement. His character's paradigmatic function appears to be to demonstrate the diminishing power of white American identity. Ryan apparently seeks to compensate for his feeling of disempowerment in his private life in extreme forms of exercising the power granted to him by his position. Feeling stripped of any power to help his sick father, Ryan looks to blame someone else for his situation. Race becomes an easy target for his disdain. He projects the shortcomings of the health care system onto one person, Shaniqua, who would not have been holding the position she has, had it not been for affirmative action, Ryan is convinced. To him she and maybe even any other black person is incompetent and unqualified for this job. This notion of his can be sensed in their first conversation over the telephone; his sarcastic comment after Shaniqua discloses her name implies that he is not surprised that a black person cannot do her job and provide him with a solution to his problem.

RYAN Shaniqua. Big fucking surprise that is.

Ryan eventually comes to talk to her in person but obviously feels uncomfortable about the fact that he will have to curry favor with her in order to receive help. When any prospect of help vanishes though, he loses his temper.

SHANIQUA I'm sorry. There's nothing else I can do.

RYAN All right. You know what I can't do? I can't look at you without thinking about the five or six more qualified white men who didn't get your job.

SHANIQUA It's time for you to go.

RYAN I'm saying this 'cause I'm hoping that I'm wrong about you. I'm hoping that

- 90 - someone like yourself, someone who may have been given a helping hand, might have a little compassion for someone in a similar situation.

SHANIQUA Carol, I need security in my office!

RYAN You don't like me, that's fine. I'm a prick. My father doesn't deserve to suffer like this. He was a janitor. He struggled his whole life. Saved enough to start his own company. Twenty-three employees, all of them black. Paid 'em equal wages when no one else was doing that. For years he worked side by side with those men, sweeping and carrying garbage. Then the city council decides to give minority-owned companies preference in city contracts. And overnight, my father loses everything. His business, his home, his wife. Everything! Not once does he blame your people. I'm not asking you to help me. I'm asking that you do this small thing for a man who lost everything so people like yourself could reap the benefits. And do you know what it's gonna cost you? Nothing. Just a flick of your pen.

Nevertheless, Ryan proves to be the “contemporary descendant of American anti-heroes whose ability to act is underpinned and undermined by their racial rage” 162 and their growing feeling of powerlessness, but who still have their heart at the right spot when it comes down to it, which is in Ryan's case when he rescues Catherine from the car wreck. His contradictory behavior is a result of identity loss and the subsequent effort to redefine himself in an environment that compromises any conclusion. Hence it is no surprise that in a city where white paranoia around racial difference and the loss of identity and power is seemingly ubiquitous, where at the same time minorities have surrendered to an unjust white power structure, and where miscegenation is still viewed as a taboo 163 , people have lost their ability to connect.

GRAHAM (v.o.) It's the sense of touch. ...Any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people. People bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.

Graham's voiceover at the beginning of the movie is meant to summarize the main ideas about life in multi-ethnic Los Angeles. The loss of touch described insinuates that, as a consequence of alienated living in a fragmented city, people are charged with anger, despair, dissatisfaction and frustration. These various forms of repercussions are reflected in Jean's (accidentally) enlightening monologue over the phone.

JEAN 162Gormley, Paul: Crash and the City . May 7, 2007. http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2007/05/07/crash-and-the-city/ 163Christine's suspicion about Ryan(“Fuck you! That's what this is all about, isn't it? You thought you saw a white woman blowin' a black man. That drove your cracker ass crazy.”) and Graham's attempt to annoy his mother(“Mom, I can't talk to you right now, okay? I'm having sex with a white woman.[...]Oh, shit! Come on. I would've said you were Mexican, but I don't think it would've pissed her off as much.”) attest to that.

- 91 - I sent her out for groceries, and that was two hours ago, Carol. ... Well, you are one to talk. You go through, like, six housekeepers a year?...I'm not snapping at you! I am angry. ...Yes! At them! Yes!... At them, the police, at Rick, at Maria, at the dry cleaners who destroyed another blouse today, at the gardener who keeps overwatering the lawn. ...I... I just thought that... Carol, I just thought that I would wake up today and I would feel better, you know? But I was still mad. And I realized... I realized that it had nothing to do with my car being stolen. I wake up like this every morning! I am angry all the time, and I don't know why. Carol, I don't know why! And I... Yeah, yeah, call me back. ... Bye.

Her saving grace is that by the end of the movie she has learned that people defy stereotypes. The realization that her relationships with the people she calls her friends are by far more superficial than she thought, and the fact that she finds a true friend in someone she never considered to be one(Maria), cause Jean to revise her beliefs and tear down racial boundaries.

JEAN Do you wanna hear something funny? You're the best friend I've got.

Channelling the contact hypothesis that holds that contact between members of different ethnical groups can reduce intergroup antagonism like stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination, this scene between Jean and Maria sparks hope that the city is not doomed and that people will seek true interpersonal contact rather than collision.

Critics & Viewers' Reception

Reeling in almost nine times its production budget ($54.5 million/$6.5 million) in the U.S. alone and another $43.8 million abroad, it is safe to say that Paul Haggis' Crash was quite a box office hit in 2005 164 . The intense drama about life in L.A. not only fared well with the audience in national and international theatres, but also managed to stir up a storm of approval as well as objection among reviewers and critics. Met with wide acclaim at award ceremonies, Crash won an Oscar in three (Best Motion Picture of the Year; Best Writing, Original Screenplay; Best Achievement in Editing) of the six categories it was nominated for at the 2006 Academy Awards. Further awards include two BAFTAs(Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role & Best Screenplay), the Humanitas Prize, the Black Movie Award and Independent Spirit Award(all three in the best feature film category), a Black Reel for the Best Ensemble, and two Golden Globe nominations 165 . Drawing so much attention, Haggis' Crash soon turned into a discussion favorite. Race being the central theme of the movie, Crash would in fact not have done its job properly if it had not

164Numbers taken from BoxOfficeMojo http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=crash05.htm 165http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375679/awards

- 92 - been controversial.

In his provocative cinematic essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, director Thom Andersen complains that Hollywood has scrubbed away his home city's coarse texture, denying the racial and ethnic frissons that rip through its dense sprawl. On the surface, Paul Haggis' bold multi-character tapestry Crash addresses Andersen's concerns in startlingly explicit terms, presenting a city of whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians who not only eye each other with suspicion and hate, but frequently let the epithets fly. It's rare enough for an American movie to even acknowledge the race problem, and it's rarer still for one to be constructed entirely out of the torn fabric of race relations. But is this really the movie Andersen had in mind? 166

Featuring an impressive cast of accomplished actors, Crash introduces a variety of racially and ethnically diverse characters whose paths crisscross in a city plagued by racial tensions, disharmony and volatility. The relatively short running time (105 min), however, allows only for the development of some of the characters whereas others fall by the wayside. Other ensemble films of the past that dealt with L.A., like Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon or Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, have given their characters, and moments, an opportunity to breathe. In the audio-commentary to the DVD, Haggis reflects on the challenges of working on a fairly low budget and that the cutting of certain scenes was one of the drawbacks. Nevertheless the stellar performance of Matt Dillon (Officer John Ryan), Thandie Newton (Christine Thayer) and Don Cheadle (Detective Graham Waters) have elevated the problematic material and enhanced the two-dimensionality of their characters. At first, the characters in Crash appear flat, either being victims or offenders, and stereotypical, but later, as they are given second chances to prove themselves, it becomes clear that no one is just good, or just bad – all are victims of prejudice and racism and all are guilty of it at the same time.

Crash shuns political correctness with an enthusiasm rarely observed in modern cinema: its characters say exactly what they think and feel providing for an uncomfortable but uniquely edgy experience. What Haggis seems to be saying is that we're all prejudiced in some way or another no matter how broadminded we like to think we are and his film takes a look at the aftereffects of that ignorance, of all that bottled- up resentment and intolerance. Bullock's character Jean sums the incendiary situation up best when she says she wakes up angry every morning and doesn't know why. It's because L.A.'s racial boundaries are so clinically defined, so stringent that the city's rich melting pot of inhabitants rarely comes into physical contact with one another on its bustling, dangerous streets. 167

Paul Haggis' Crash was heavily critiqued by many a critic for being too obsessive about the issue at core. Race and bigotry seems to infiltrate every aspect of life: work, sex, household

166Scott Tobias, (May 10, 2005) http://www.avclub.com/articles/crash,4543/ 167David N. Butterworth, http://www.members.dca.net/dnb/reviews/crash2004.htm

- 93 - etc. Haggis, however, claims that the movie is less about race and should rather expose that American society in the wake of 9/11 is dominated by mistrust and frayed nerves. Further, the cars and car crashes in the movie are meant to serve as metaphors, capturing the isolation and alienation of living in a fragmented city. L.A's public life is depicted as void of any public spaces to meet each other, other than the freeways where people collide or “meet” from one car window to the next. The inability of Southern Californians to connect was already made an issue in the famous opening lines of Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero (1985, “ People are afraid to merge on the freeways in Los Angeles ”168 ). Having grown cold to affection and respect, paranoia and loathing just seem to be the logic manifestations of Angelenos' faulty way of human communication.

In many ways the villain of the film is Los Angeles itself. Unlike New York, a similarly multi- ethnic city, where people live cheek by jowl and travel on the subway, most Los Angelenos are isolated from social interaction inside the bubble of their cars. This is a real-estate culture that actively promotes the concept of 'white flight' and that has long made Los Angeles the most segregated and racially tense American city west of the Mississippi. [...] 'I think film's depiction of LA in terms of race has always been very interesting,' says Gaylene Gould, project manager of Black World at the BFI. 'I'm thinking of ensemble films like Robert Altman's Short Cuts and Gurinder Chadha's What's Cooking , where you have all these different communities living side by side and yet their world is so radically different. I think LA is the epitome of that kind of alienated existence. And I think the reason LA has always held this fascination for film-makers is that it's almost the furthest western point you can get, it's the furthest point of consumerism and capitalism. In a way it's almost the western frontier, so there is a kind of Wild Westness to it.' 169

Still, some critics argue that the movie is unrealistic in its portrayal of everyday life in multi- ethnic Los Angeles as a “seething cauldron of racial prejudice” 170 and that people in real life tend to spend more time discussing mundane things like dinner or the weather than race.

The possibility that people could be idealistically committed to what is now called "diversity," or that race and ethnicity could remain invisible to well-meaning people, especially in conflict, simply doesn't exist in the world of Crash . Intemperateness is a general condition among the melting-pot population of Crash. 171

Thus Crash does not give us the whole picture of L.A.'s population, because it does not account for people like Haggis himself who are concerned about interracial and interethnic attitudes. Neither does it illustrate all forms of racism, since people are very well capable of harboring feelings of antipathy towards people of a different skin-color without (immediately)

168Ellis, Bret Easton: Less Than Zero . Pan Books, London 1988. p.9 169Liz Hoggard, Colour code , The Observer, (Sunday 7 August 2005) http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/aug/07/features.review 170Philip French, Hollywood's last taboo , The Observer (Sunday 14 August 2005) http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/aug/14/philipfrench 171Alan Dale, Paul Haggis' Crash : First the Bad News , (Jul, 19 2005) http://blogcritics.org/video/article/paul-haggiss- crash-first-the-bad/

- 94 - voicing them. The characters in Crash tend to overreact, their reactions being often inappropriate and based on frustrations rather than race or ethnicity, as is claimed. Moreover most of the dire situations could probably have been easily diffused, if the characters had just stopped for a second to explain themselves. Therefore the L.A. portrayed in Crash is only a warped, partial image of the reality.

If what we see in Crash were statistically significant, that would mean that everybody in L.A. is being racist in every tense situation all day long, and it doesn't take much experience of life in the diverse big cities of this country to know that isn't right. The L.A. of Crash is a distorted scale model of the city that Haggis treats as if it were the city itself. 172

Haggis' idea to showcase how racial conflict always keeps bubbling under the surface of the melting pot that is contemporary L.A. is certainly not a novelty and may even seem a bit dated, with writers like Walter Mosley and T.C. Boyle having dealt with it extensively. Nevertheless, by encompassing “a gamut of ethnic vantage points” 173 , Haggis offers more than just the white-on-ethnic manifestation of racial discrimination and includes Latino/Asian, black/Asian, Latino/black and Middle-Eastern/Latino conflict. Movie experts further remarked that the way characters in Crash interlocked through serendipity, irony and luck was often too interdependent on coincidence and therefore unbelievable. The disparate yet interwoven storylines, however, seem to function as parables about lessons that need to be learned and were earned by bad behavior. Assumption and redemption hence play a decisive role.

Sometimes the assumption comes from a character, sometimes from the audience, but it inevitably results in a complete (and increasingly predictable) reversal of expectations. That leads to the redemption part, when previously despicable bigots display deep reserves of courage and compassion. 174

Although well-intended, these epiphanies make the characters' stories appear overly didactic, and due to this heavy moral instructiveness (a sermon, almost) about the wrongness of racism the movie occasionally becomes tedious to watch. Even though Crash gives a vivid depiction of the problem at hand, it does not really offer any solution to it. It leaves it up to the audience to do the math, and it is commonly known how popular that subject was in school. On the other hand, no rationalization would ever suffice anyway, nor would it stop the hatred completely. Lacking a cumulative impact - since the revelation that we all are prejudiced and that there is good and bad in everyone is rather a

172Ibid. 173Kevin Murphy, http://www.tiscali.co.uk/entertainment/film/review/films/crash/879 174Scott Tobias, (May 10, 2005) http://www.avclub.com/articles/crash,4543/

- 95 - bromide than an entirely new insight - Crash still manages to do one thing: to instill hope. Hope that people will learn – learn from one another, learn to tolerate each other and especially learn about themselves - and as a result become maybe not happier or wiser, but better. This hope that we may actually break away from the destructive forces in our lives and free ourselves from hatred is symbolized by the white snow falling through the dark of the night at the end of the movie.

In Altman's Short Cuts and Anderson's Magnolia there are biblical judgments on the wickedness of Los Angeles, a plague of medflies and an earthquake in the former, a climactic downpour of frogs in the latter. Crash , too, plays out on a religious or mystical note with what is a fairly rare event in Los Angeles, a snowfall on Christmas Eve, suggesting some kind of benediction or token of grace. But this is comically undercut though not undermined by yet another car crash involving ethnic figures, seen in a high angle shot as if from the viewpoint of a puzzled God. 175

Although its pretension at (divine) objectivity may often not be justified, Crash , despite being dark, gloomy and on the edge, possesses a redemptive humanist spirit. A trait it multi-strand spin-off TV series will work to preserve, meanwhile correcting Crash ' flaws by giving its characters more time to breathe, learn and grow and hence forge a real connection with the audience.

175Philip French, Hollywood's last taboo , The Observer (Sunday 14 August 2005) http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/aug/14/philipfrench

- 96 - Freedom Writers

In Freedom Writers L.A. might not be taking on such a central role as in Crash , since we are moving away from the broad setting of a megalopolis into the narrower one of a Long Beach high school. Nevertheless, in its portrayal of how high school students have to deal with a mostly inherited conflict between ethnic groups it manages to point to an important aspect of the issue: the future. In a way the popular belief that “our children are our future” becomes a vantage point for tackling a critical problem of society.

Synopsis

The very beginning of the 2007 movie Freedom Writers is composed of unsettling images from various newscasts about the incidents of the 1992 L.A. Riots: reporters' frantic voice- over narrations, police units running down burning streets, shop windows being smashed and stock looted, people firing weapons and screaming at each other, and smoke rising up into the sky from one of the many fires the fire rescue is trying to tame. It seems as if war had been declared. The movie stops right there to show a short message - “From the diaries of the students of room 203 Woodrow Wilson H.S.” - and picks up a year later introducing the first character, Eva Benitez. Eva, a teenaged Latino girl, tells us in her account how, when she was little, her father had been charged with a murder he had not commited. He has always been telling her to fight for their America and to defy those who claim they are less than equal. As she continues, she reveals that she has applied her father's words - by joining a gang. Cut to the next scene where recent college graduate Erin Gruwell takes on the task of teaching Freshman English at Woodrow Wilson high school in gang-infested Long Beach, California. Prior to the implementation of an intradistrict bussing program WWHS was regarded as an A-list school, but violent incidents and low grade levels have since given it a bad name. Soon Erin realizes that teaching these kids is more than she bargained for. They are loud, disruptive and not paying any attention, and there is some sort of hostility between the different ethnical groups of students in class. They see no point in learning, just as Erin's fellow teachers see no point in teaching them, for they seem to have no future ahead of them anyway. Least of all the kids themselves believe in their own future and hence just sit through class. A small incident that results in a revelation: when Erin discovers a racially discriminating

- 97 - cartoon one student made of another, she draws a comparison to those caricatures of Jews made by the Nazis, “ a gang who would put them all to shame ”. However, none of the students knows what the Holocaust was. When Erin then asks who has ever been shot at, virtually everyone raises their hand. Erin won't accept this. She decides that it is time for a change. Nonetheless her enthusiastic new approach at teaching students not only English but also lessons on life and tolerance faces the first obstacle when books and school supplies would not be provided for by the school's administration. The reason given is that the books would be returned damaged or not at all, and the school has no money to buy new ones every semester. Therefore if Erin wanted her students to read books like The Diary of Anne Frank , she would have to buy them herself. But Erin Gruwell does not just give up like that and takes on temporary jobs to pay for her first job. The first gift to her students is a stack of journals, one for every student, where they can write down their thoughts, poems, songs, stories of present, past and future. She would not grade them, just check if the required daily entry was made, and she would only read them if a student asked her to. Through Erin the kids realize that they all have to deal with the same problems: discrimination, violence and loss. Some have been to juvenile hall or have a family member in prison, some are homeless, some are being assaulted on a regular basis and some have seen their friends die. They all have their crosses to bear. In sophomore year they start reading The Diary of Anne Frank in class and get so immersed in it that Erin takes them on a field trip to the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance followed by an organized dinner with Holocaust survivors. All of this has such a great impact on their lives that the students start raising money to have Miep Gies, who has become somewhat of a hero for them, come and speak to them. Erin's efforts are showing fruit. While the grades in class are improving, Erin's relationship to her husband Scott is deteriorating. He feels neglected and in her way. He does not want to feel bad or demand from her to turn away from the good she is doing, and thus he leaves her. However Scott is not her only problem. Erin's unorthodox teaching methods become a thorn in the side of department chair Margaret Campbell and English honors teacher Brian Gelford. When Erin goes to the Board of Education to file a request in order to be able to continue with her kids through junior year, it is declined due to Ms. Campbell's argumentation. Preparing to part with her students she assigns a final project. The students put their diaries together in a book, which is aptly titled the Freedom Writers Diary. The Board of Education reviews her case and after a second consultation Erin can bring back good news to her

- 98 - students: she will stay with them for junior and senior year.

Freedom Writers is based on a true story. The real Erin Gruwell was born in 1970 and started in 1993 as a student teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School. Aside from Miep Gies' visit, Erin also invited Zlata Filipovi ć176 to come, who served her as an inspiration to introduce journals in class. After earning her Master's degree in 1998 she went on to teach at her alma mater, Cal State Long Beach. The Freedom Writers Diary was published in 1999. The title is an allusion to the Freedom Riders, groups of African American and white college students who tested newly formed civil right laws in 1961 by riding interstate buses into the segregated South. All of Erin's students have graduated from high school and some of them even from college. Today, they are all part of The Freedom Writers Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by Erin Gruwell. On a sad note: One of the actors from Freedom Writers, Armand Jones, had been shot and killed outside a Denny's restaurant in Anaheim, California, before the movie was even released. Grant Rice, his character in the movie, is put on trial for a murder at a convenience store that he did not commit. 177

Character Analysis

Deliberately wanting to teach at an integrated school, idealistic novice teacher Erin Gruwell is shocked by the hostility and self-segregation between the different ethnic groups in room 203. It takes the discovery of what her students go through in day-to-day life to connect to them and gain their respect. Introducing new teaching methods and creatively building on topics familiar to them, Erin manages to direct their attention back to education and awake an interest in literature. Being not only an idealist but also an individualist who firmly believes that she can make a difference, Erin is the main protagonist of the movie. Even when she is facing one obstacle after the other (working two jobs, divorce, and lack of support from the department) she never loses her cheerful positivity. Creating an ongoing dialogue in class amongst her students, she never loses faith in them either, and her dedication to her students only gets stronger. By the end of the movie Erin Gruwell has succeeded in restoring their hope and instilling a desire in them to pursue higher education. Erin and her students have transformed a hostile classroom

176Zlata Filipovi ć is a girl from Sarajevo whose diary about the war in her homeland had been published in 1993 titled Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo (orig.: Zlata's dnevnik ). Today it is one of the most famous war diaries. 177http://www.chasingthefrog.com/reelfaces/freedomwriters.php

- 99 - into a harmonious environment and substitute for home. Although it is likely that all of Erin's 150 students of room 203 on average equally contributed to bringing about a change, only a few of them were assigned bigger roles in the movie. Having other more crushing ills to deal with – violence, gang involvement, poverty, homelessness and drug abuse – the kids are unmotivated and reluctant to listen to the new teacher in the beginning. When they find that Erin Gruwell is not like any other teacher and instead tries to understand their situations and gives them respect, they start seeing education and school in a new light. As a member of a gang Eva Benitez learned to protect what is hers with violence. When she is witness to a murder committed by one of her own, she naturally chooses to protect him. But Ms. Gruwell's teachings on tolerance and doing what is right leave such an impact on Eva that she chooses to tell the truth at the trial, even though she knows that it means prison for someone close to her. Influenced by his brother, Andre Bryant accepted being drawn into drug deals and gangs as part of life in order to survive. In room 203, however, he learns that there are other ways and that education is one. Even though it causes him trouble within his circle of “homies”, he slowly withdraws from his former kind of lifestyle. As a young boy Marcus witnessed how his best friend killed himself by accident with a gun they had found. Although innocent, Marcus went to juvenile prison for it. Being a problem child, his mother kicked him out when he was thirteen and he has been living on the streets ever since. Marcus is impressed by The Diary of Anne Frank so much that he gets more books from the library to read up on it. Miep Gies becomes his real-life hero. This gives him enough confidence to go back and ask his mother for forgiveness. Ben Daniels is the only “white” student in class and thus not exposed to his peers' problems to the extent they are. Even though he could have transferred to another English class, he had the courage to stay, as he later notes. He overcomes the fear he initially felt towards students of other ethnicities. Brandy Ross knows violence from home, for she and her mother are beaten by Brandy's father. Sindy's family are refugees from Cambodia. Like Brandy she is exposed to a violent father who copes with the loss of his dignity by beating others. To all of them writing a diary is a new soothing way of dealing with their problems. Room 203 becomes their new home and Erin someone they can trust and talk to. Margaret Campbell is the head of the English language and literature department at Woodrow Wilson High School. She is convinced that none of the books on the curriculum or

- 100 - those proposed by Erin are appropriate for Erin's students. They are too difficult and would not be returned anyway. Moreover, she believes that it is best for Erin if she could just get them to obey and learn discipline, which more or less comes down to baby-sitting the students – or “warehousing” as Erin describes it – instead of teaching them. Campbell is not fond of Erin's new yet successful teaching methods and along with Brian Gelford opposes Erin's request to continue with her students on to junior year. As an experienced teacher of English honors classes at WWHS Brian Gelford does not like Erin's questioning of the system. He even takes it as a threat to his status as a distinguished teacher when one of his students wants to transfer to Ms. Gruwell's class. Like Ms. Campell, he is convinced that it is a waste of time teaching the lower English classes. Gelford considers himself and the school to be the real victims of the school district's integration program, because prior to it WWHS was an A-list school and now teachers have to fear for their lives. Due to their fatalistic attitude towards students and their negative responding to all of Erin's suggestions, they form the bureaucratic antagonist camp in this story. Erin's husband Scott (Casey) has studied architecture but never finished his studies and thus he settled to work as a computer programmer. It bothers him that Erin's father never really accepted him as son-in-law. What really frustrates him though, is that his wife sees his job as only temporary, hoping that he will work as an architect one day. When Scott realizes that Erin has found her calling in teaching this particular set of kids, and that she cannot devote her attention to both her marriage and school fully, he decides it is time to go – partly because he feels neglected, partly because he seems to be standing in her way. Scott's role in the movie is an unthankful one, the character being fairly reduced to one dimension. Nevertheless, it shows that Erin has a life away from school and that she has to make sacrifices in order to succeed in something of the “greater good” that really matters to her. Steve Gruwell, Erin's father, is very sceptical about his daughter's new job. Being a former civil rights activist himself, he knows that the task she accepted may be more than she can handle. However in the course of the movie he changes his mind and acknowledges the work she has been doing as exceptional and the results that are showing as inspiring. At a point where Erin's husband has just left her and new obstacles arise, her father is the one who finds words to motivate her – he believes that Erin “ has been blessed with a burden ”.

Issues of race and ethnicity in Freedom Writers

The real video footage of the 1992 L.A. Riots shown in the beginning of Freedom Writers

- 101 - (and somewhat reminiscent of the footage of the 1965 Watts Riots in Menace II Society ) establishes the hood as a locale early on – a warzone locale. The streets of Long Beach are ruled by gangs, drugs and militarized police force. As hood movies have taught us, it is practically impossible to escape this vicious circle of violence and despair in the hood. It infiltrates every aspect of life, and schools are no exception. Fresh from college, young English teacher Erin Gruwell chose Long Beach's Woodrow Wilson High School because of its integration program, but when she arrives in the classroom, she has to realize that integration has not happened. Instead, room 203 mirrors, in small, the violent relations outside of school.

EVA v.o. If it was up to me, I wouldn't even be in school. My probation officer threatened me, telling me it was either school or boot camp. Dumbass. He thinks that the problems going on in Long Beach aren't going to touch me at Wilson. My PO doesn't understand that schools are like the city, and the city is just like a prison, all of them divided into separate sections, depending on tribes. There's Little Cambodia. The Ghetto. Wonder Bread Land. And us, South of the Border or Little Tijuana. That's just the way it is, and everyone knows it. But soon enough, you have little wannabes trying to hit you up at school, demanding respect they haven't earned. It looks like this, one tribe drifting quietly to another's territory without respect, as if to claim what isn't theirs. An outsider looking in would never see it, but we could feel it. Something was coming.

Gangs are more often than not ethnically defined, i.e. the members of a gang belong to one ethnic group, with the warfare between gangs having become an inherited conflict. The codes of gang life rely, as mentioned in chapter one, on honor, pride and loyalty. Hence “protecting your own” becomes the principal priority that rules over everything else. Eva explains in her first voice-over of the film:

EVA v.o. In America, a girl can be crowned a princess for her beauty and her grace. But an Aztec princess is chosen for her blood... to fight for her people, as Papi and his father fought against those who say we are less than they are, who say we are not equal in beauty and in blessings. [...] When I got my initiation into the gang life, I became third generation. They beat you so you won't break. They are my family. In Long Beach, it all comes down to what you look like. If you're Latino or Asian or black, you could get blasted any time you walk out your door. We fight each other for territory. We kill each other over race, pride and respect. We fight for what is ours. They think they're winning by jumping me now, but soon they're all going down. War has been declared.

Gangs and family are interchangeable in this context. Both signify a strong collective, an in- group defined by blood relations and ethnicity. All threats from outside that would endanger the stability of this collective must be eliminated at all costs. So when Eva becomes the only witness in a local corner store shooting, it is clear what is expected from her, what the codes

- 102 - of street and gang life demand.

EVA v.o. Paco was scared. In the car, he said, "You can't go against your own people, your own blood." The same words my father used so many times. Only I saw Paco. The others were turned away. So when the police questioned me, I knew I had to protect him.

These lines reflect the recurring sentiment of barrio movies that relations are defined by blood (e.g. in Bound by Honor : “Blood for blood. Blood in blood out.” “No matter how much hate, you are still connected. The same blood pumps through your hearts.” “Three vatos locos full of carnelismo, tryin' to survive in a fuckin' warzone. I need my familia to do it.”) But Eva's mention of the “Aztec princess” also evokes a revolutionary subject of Chicano cultural nationalism, the Aztec warrior, as a symbol of cultural pride. Eva's voice-overs, in addition to the name-calling and racial slurs in the classroom (“slanty-eyed bitch”, “punk-ass homeboy”), establish a violent and hostile interracial order, which still seems to have rules of its own. Erin's first attempt to break down this order and connect with the kids goes massively wrong. Trying to cover poetry in a cool way, she brings up Tupac Shakur's lyrics as an example for the use of internal rhymes. However, the students do not respond to that the way Erin had it planned.

ANDRE Think we don't know 2Pac?

MARCUS White girl gonna teach us about rap.

[...]

EVA You have no idea what you're doing up there, do you? You ever been a teacher before?

Sick of antics and not being able to forge a bond with her students, she decides to remind them of her authority in the classroom by changing the seating order much to the students dismay(“So, everybody happy with the new borders?”) While she is aware of the dire situation in and outside the classroom, Erin still has to learn that, for the students to accept her, she has to earn their trust and respect first. She also has to gain an understanding for where they come from and what they had and still have to go through. In a crucial scene of the movie, Erin finds a derisive cartoon made by one of her students of another. She calls out not only the “artist”, but the entire class. At the same time she establishes World War II as a theme of comparison, something her students will be able to

- 103 - relate to in the course of the movie.

ERIN You know something? I saw a picture just like this once in a museum. Only it wasn't a black man, it was a Jewish man. And instead of the big lips, he had a really big nose, like a rat's nose. But he wasn't just one particular Jewish man, this was a drawing of all Jews. And these drawings were put in the newspapers by the most famous gang in history.[...] You think you know all about gangs? You're amateurs. This gang would put you all to shame. And they started out poor and angry, and everybody looked down on them. Until one man decided to give them some pride, an identity and somebody to blame. You take over neighborhoods? That's nothing compared to them. They took over countries. And you wanna know how? They just wiped out everybody else.[...] Yeah, they wiped out everybody they didn't like, and everybody they blamed for their life being hard. And one of the ways they did it was by doing this. See, they'd print pictures like this in the newspapers. Jewish people with big, long noses. Blacks with big, fat lips. They'd also publish scientific evidence that proved Jews and blacks were the lowest form of human species. Jews and blacks were more like animals. And because they were just like animals it didn't really matter whether they lived or died. In fact, life would be a whole lot better if they were all dead. That's how a holocaust happens. And that's what you all think of each other.

However, at this point Erin sees only the problem, the effects of racism, but she cannot grasp the cause yet. Hence it is her students' turn to call her out.

MARCUS You don't know nothing, homegirl.

[...]

ASIAN BOY Do you even know how we live?

[...]

ERIN All right! All right! All right! So what you're saying is, if the Latinos weren't here, or the Cambodians or the blacks or the whites or whoever they are, if they weren't here, everything would be better for you, isn't that right?

[...]

EVA You don't know nothing! You don't know the pain we feel. You don't know what we got to do. You got no respect for how we living. You got us in here, teaching us this grammar shit, and then we got to go out there again. And what are you telling me about that, huh? What are you doing in here that makes a goddamn difference to my life?

As the argument evolves, it becomes obvious what the classroom lacks the most: mutual respect. In order to establish an atmosphere where any kind of imparting knowledge could eventually take place, first there needs to be respect for one another, and so far there seems to be none:

- 104 - ERIN You don't feel respected. Is that what you're saying, Eva? Well, maybe you're not. But to get respect, you have to give it.

[...]

ANDRE [...]I'm not just gonna give you my respect because you're called a teacher.

EVA White people always wanting their respect like they deserve it for free.

That Erin is not even given a customary initial amount of respect can be blamed on her position and race. Her privileged white background makes the kids doubt that she will ever understand their situation, while white authority figures in general are met with contempt because their position and bestowed power to some extent reflect a history of racial injustice brought upon by white supremacist culture.

ERIN I'm a teacher. It doesn't matter what color I am.

EVA It's all about color. It's about people deciding what you deserve, about people wanting what they don't deserve, about whites thinking they run this world no matter what. You see, I hate white people. [...]I saw white cops shoot my friend in the back for reaching into his pocket! [...] I saw white cops break into my house and take my father for no reason except because they feel like it! Except because they can. And they can because they're white. So I hate white people on sight!

[...]

MARCUS Lady, stop acting like you're trying to understand our situation and just do your little babysitting up there.

ERIN That's all you think this is?

MARCUS It ain't nothing else. When I look out in the world, I don't see nobody that looks like me with their pockets full, unless they're rapping a lyric or dribbling a ball. So what else you got in here for me?

[...]

ERIN And you all think you're gonna make it to graduation like this?

[...]

MARCUS Lady, I'm lucky if I make it to 18. We in a war. We're graduating every day we live, because we ain't afraid to die protecting our own. At least when you die for your own, you die with respect, you die a warrior.

- 105 - To Erin there is something wrong with her students' ideas about codes of honor and respect.

ERIN So when you're dead, you'll get respect? Is that what you think?[...] You know what's gonna happen when you die? You're gonna rot in the ground. And people are gonna go on living, and they're gonna forget all about you.

But it is not before she comes to the shocking realization that in their hostile world laws of the street are valued more than education and knowledge that Erin can start to tear down the wall that separates her world from theirs.

ERIN Raise your hand if you know what the Holocaust is. [ no one ] Raise your hand if anyone in this classroom has ever been shot at.[hands go up ]

When Erin first entered room 203, relations in class were marked by intergroup conflict. Teaching a class, where everybody pretty much hates everybody else, and where the only thing everyone seems to agree on is that the teacher is their common enemy, is an impossible task. Thus Erin decides to throw all known methodology of didactics overboard in favor of introducing new, unorthodox teaching methods. In the “Line Game” Erin asks her students several question, and when a question applies to them they step to the line. She starts out with light questions. As it turns out, most of Erin's students have the new Snoop Dogg album and virtually everyone has seen Boyz N The Hood 178 . She then moves on to more serious questions:

ERIN Okay. Next question. How many of you live in the projects?... How many of you know someone, a friend or relative, who was or is in juvenile hall or jail?... How many of you have been in juvenile hall or jail for any length of time? Detention don't count.

SINDY Does a refugee camp count?

ERIN You decide. How many of you know where to get drugs right now? How many of you know someone in a gang? How many of you are gang members? ... Okay, that was a stupid question, wasn't it? You're not allowed gang affiliations in school. I apologize for asking. My badness. Okay, now I'm gonna ask you a more serious question. Stand on the line if you've lost a

178The reference to Boyz N the Hood here is twofold and goes beyond the normal play on pop culture. On one level, Erin brings up the hood movie Boyz N the Hood because it is a movie she suspects most of her students have seen and can relate to. On another level, Freedom Writers takes a jab at the controversial piece of conservative advice California Governor Pete Wilson gave in the wake of the L.A. Riots. He is quoted for saying that “everyone in America should see Boyz N the Hood . In that movie a strong father makes the difference for his teenaged son [...] that movie says we need a strong father figure and welfare is no suitable replacement for that.” (In Reeves, Jimmie L. & Campbell, Richard: Cracked Coverage . Duke University Press, Durham 1994. p.246-247)

- 106 - friend to gang violence. ... Stay on the line if you've lost more than one friend. ... Three. ... Four or more. Okay, I'd like us to pay respect to those people now. Wherever you are, just speak their name.

The Line Game has two effects. One, through the game Erin learns more about her students and the kind of lives they lead. Poverty, drugs, gangs, violence and death are issues they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. And two, the game shows the kids that, no matter what ethnic background or gang affiliation, there are points of similarity in their lives. They have shared commonalities, something they did not seem to be aware of before the game. In the course of the game a common ground to built on has been established, and a fair amount of mutual respect and understanding for another's suffering has been bestowed. To fortify this new bond between her and her students, and more importantly, to give them an opportunity to express themselves in a non-violent, non-destructive way, Erin encourages them to keep a journal. She makes it an assignment; daily entries are obligatory but what they write is up to them and will not be graded. It would not even be read without their permission and prior insisting. By making knowledge cool, Erin wants them to become conscious of their opportunity to learn and change. Traditional methods to escape poverty(in this case education) should replace their self-destructive value system. In this existential move, how you choose to live comes to determine who you are, and other determinants like race, gender and class are erased. Hence race in this movie is rendered invisible, by Erin at least. While her students, like Erin, start to look beyond gender and race and confront stereotypes, prejudice and fear, thereby challenging racial essentialisms and threatening the status quo, other characters(school authorities) are reluctant to change and refuse to abandon a system that has been in place for a long time. In her position as department head, Margaret Campbell perceives Erin's enthusiasm and eagerness to bring about a change as a threat to a system that has served Margaret and the faculty well, a system that Margaret herself has helped to establish. To her, Erin's students are criminals(“ Some of them are just out of juvenile hall. One or two might be wearing ankle cuffs to monitor their whereabouts. ”) or criminals in the making(“ And if I give your kids these books, I'll never see them again. If I do, they'll be damaged. ”), and Erin would be just wasting her time if she put too much effort in teaching them(“ You'll just be wasting a lot of time following up on overdue work. ”). Margaret is convinced that the below average scholastic scores of Erin's assigned class cannot be improved, because, in her opinion, these kids are unwilling to learn and not apt to understand more demanding subject matters of the curriculum.

MARGARET CAMPBELL

- 107 - And if you look at their scores, these vocabulary lists and some of these, the books, Homer's The Odyssey, they're gonna be too difficult for them.

And later..

MARGARET CAMPBELL No, they won't be able to read that. [...] Look at their reading scores.

And

MARGARET CAMPBELL You can't make someone want an education. The best you can do is try to get them to obey, to learn discipline. That would be a tremendous accomplishment for them.

Early in the movie, Erin, discouraged by the situation at Wilson HS, seeks to talk to Brian about it. He misinterprets her concerns however, and tries to cheer her up by informing her that if she stays on the job long enough, she will eventually “ be able to teach juniors. They're a pleasure. By then most of your kids will be gone anyway. ” Erin soon realizes that the school and its faculty, instead of helping to find solutions for the problem, have become part of the problem itself.

CAMPBELL No, not the books. This is what we give them. It is Romeo and Juliet, but it's a condensed version. But even these, look how they treat them. See how torn up they are? They draw on them.

ERIN Ms. Campbell? They know they get these because no one thinks they're smart enough for real books.

As prejudiced school authorities(Campbell:“ It's called site-based instruction. It means that I and the principal each have the authority to make these kinds of decisions without having to go to the Board, who have bigger problems to solve.”) who discriminate against students of certain racial, ethnic and class background, Margaret and Brian become agents of institutional racism. In a pivotal scene between Brian and Erin, the link between personal prejudice and institutional racism is established. Also, fear is once again depicted as the cause of prejudice, and consequently as being at the root of racism.

ERIN Since you know Margaret better than I do, if I could just get some backup from you. I really think that the stories like The Diary of Anne Frank and... That they'd be so great for them, and she doesn't seem to understand that they could relate to these stories considering all that they face.

BRIAN Oh, of course. It's a universal story. I mean, Anne Frank, Rodney King,they're almost interchangeable.

- 108 - ERIN Are you making fun of me?

BRIAN Yeah. God, listen to what you're saying. How dare you compare them to Anne Frank? They don't hide. They drive around in the open with automatic weapons. I'm the one living in fear. I can't walk out my door at night.

ERIN And you blame these kids?

BRIAN This was an A-list school before they came here. And look what they turned it into. I mean, does it make sense that kids who want an education should suffer because their high school gets turned into a reform school? Because kids who don't want to be here, and shouldn't be here, are forced to be here by the geniuses running the school district? Integration's a lie. Yeah, we teachers, we can't say that or we lose our jobs for being racist. So, please, stop your cheerleading, Erin. You're ridiculous. You don't know the first thing about these kids. And you're not qualified to make judgments about the teachers who have to survive this place.

Knowing that she will receive no inner-school support, Erin turns to the Board of Education for help. Although Dr. Cohn acknowledges that Erin has accomplished a lot by uniting a classroom of kids who previously met each other with contempt, he is unwilling to get involved with inner-school policy to change a system that has been running educational facilities for years. Erin however does not give up that easily.

ERIN With all due respect, all that program is doing is warehousing these kids until they're old enough to disappear.

BoE Look, I appreciate your intentions, but there's nothing I can do on a class-by- class basis.

ERIN Dr. Cohn, why should they waste their time showing up when they know we're wasting our time teaching them? We tell them, "Go to school. Get an education." And then we say, "Well, they can't learn, so let's not waste resources." I'm thinking trips. Most of them have never been outside of Long Beach. They haven't been given the opportunity to expand their thinking about what's out there for them. And they're hungry for it. I know it.

The Board of Education may not be willing to help Erin in her mission financially or otherwise, but it assures her that her endeavours will not be met with resistance on their side. Erin cannot count on too much support from her husband in her struggles to teach and overturn an unjust system either. Although Scott knows that teaching is Erin's calling, he soon feels that it is occupying too much of her time (“ I feel like we haven't talked about anything other than your job in like forever ”). It bothers him that his wife has to take on two more jobs to pay for the expenses at her primary one(i.e. books for her students). He feels left out of the

- 109 - whole process(“ You didn't even ask me ”), and most of all he feels neglected. When Erin is exhilarated that an honors student has asked to transfer to her class, Scott voices concerns asking if Erin “can [...] teach someone who's smart”; not because he thinks she is incapable, but because he tries to rain on her parade, for he feels that his own career as an architect has come to a halt(“ It doesn't matter if I want it, Erin. It doesn't mean it's going to happen. ”) and hence he is not good enough for her. Eventually the neglect and demerit Scott feels make him leave Erin.

SCOTT I think what you're doing is noble. And it's good. And I'm proud of you. I am. I just want to live my life and not feel bad about it.

Meanwhile Erin's father Steve's initial doubts that being a teacher is the right job for his daughter(“ With your brains, you could run a major corporation. Instead, I worry all night because you're a teacher at Attica ”) have transformed into a feeling of pride. Accompanying Erin on field trips, he learns that these kids are not the “criminals” who “don't even know who Rap Brown or Eldridge Cleaver were” whom he thought them to be. In the course of the movie Steve, a former political activist himself, realizes that Erin's job is much more than “just a job”(“ If you're not right for this one, get another job. ”). It is Erin's calling:

ERIN I don't know. It's just a job, like you said.

STEVE Yeah, it is. But is the job finished? Listen to me now. What you've done with those kids... I don't even have words for it. But one thing's for sure, you are an amazing teacher. Special. You have been blessed with a burden, my daughter. And I envy you that. And I admire you. And how many fathers ever get to say that to their daughters and really mean it?

Her father gives Erin the moral support she needs to keep fighting for her kids. The journals of room 203 reveal how severe the situation is for Erin's students. Through off- screen and voice-over narration as well as flashbacks, Freedom Writers allows for the audience reception of the characters' innermost thoughts and feelings, thus giving more depth to individual characters. In their short lives these kids were confronted with more violence than the average middle-class adult is during his entire life. The issues that are brought up in the students' entries include...

– Physical abuse

BRANDY v.o. In every war, there is an enemy. I watched my mother being half beaten to death and watched as blood and tears streamed down her face. I felt useless

- 110 - and scared and furious at the same time. I can still feel the sting of the belt on my back and my legs. One time, he couldn't pay the rent. And that night he stopped us on the street and pointed to the concrete. He said, "Pick a spot." _____

GLORIA v.o. If you look in my eyes, you'll see a loving girl. If you look at my smile, you'll see nothing wrong. If you pull up my shirt, you'll see the bruises. What did I do to make him so mad?

– Life dominated by street gangs

ANDRE v.o. My brother taught me what the life is for a young black man. Do what you have to, pimp, deal, whatever. Learn what colors to wear, gang banner. You can sell to one corner, but you can't sell another. Learn to be quiet. A wrong word can get you popped. _____

EVA v.o. I don't even know how this war started. It's just two sides who tripped each other way back. Who cares about the history behind it? I am my father's daughter. And when they call me to testify, I will protect my own no matter what. _____

MARCUS v.o. My friends are soldiers, not of war, but of the streets.They fight for their lives. [...] Every time I jump somebody in and make someone a part of our gang, it's another baptism. They give us their life, we give them a new one.I've lost many friends who have died in an undeclared war. To the soldiers and me, it's all worth it. Risk your life dodging bullets, pulling triggers. It's all worth it _____

TITO v.o. Nobody cares what I do. Why should I bother coming to school? [...]I hate the cold feeling of a gun against my skin. It makes me shiver. It's a crazy-ass life. Once you're in, there's no getting out.

– Gang-related killings

JAMAL v.o. At 16, I've seen more dead bodies than a mortician. Every time I step out my door, I'm faced with the risk of being shot. To the outside world, it's just another dead body on the street corner. They don't know that he was my friend. _____

ALEJANDRO v.o. I was having trouble deciding what candy I wanted, then I heard gunshots. I looked down to see that one of my friends had blood coming out of his back and his mouth. The next day, I pulled up my shirt and got strapped with a gun I found in an alley by my house.

- 111 - – The loss of freedom – in penitentiary institutions, juvenile hall or refugee camps

MARCUS v.o. I sat there till the police came. But when they come, all they see is a dead body, a gun and a nigga. They took me to juvenile hall. First night was the scariest. Inmates banging on the walls, throwing up their gang signs, yelling out who they were, where they're from. I cried my first night. Can't never let nobody know that. I spent the next few years in and out of cells. Every day I'd worry, "When will I be free?" _____

SINDY v.o. During the war in Cambodia, the camp stripped away my father's dignity. He sometimes tries to hurt my mom and me. I feel like I have to protect my family. _____

ANDRE v.o. Since my pop split, my mom can't even look at me, 'cause I look like my dad. And with my brother in jail, she looks at me and thinks that's where I'm going, too. She doesn't see me. She doesn't see me at all.

Freedom Writers continues a tradition of problematizing the genocide that is committed by rivaling street gangs. This tradition has previously been established in hood movies of the 80s and 90s. In Menace II Society it is Caine's grandfather who scolds the young gangsters, “The Lord didn't put you here to be shooting and killing each other”, in Boyz N the Hood Doughboy compares “what's going on in the hood” to a “violent war”, while in Lethal Weapon 3 Murtaugh comments that “blacks are engaging in group genocide” and that “there must be an end to this tragedy”. However, Freedom Writers takes this tradition one step further by drawing a parallel to the Holocaust. With the money Erin and her students raise and the income from Erin's two additional jobs(as a hotel concierge and in a lingerie shop), Erin can afford to take her students on a field trip to the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance. At the beginning of the tour visitors to the museum are handed a card with a child's picture on it, and after the tour, which enlightens the visitor through video presentations, photographs and showcased items about the tragic fate of Jews during World War II, about Kristallnacht and concentration camps, they could find out whether “their” child survived. There is an impressive calmness to the scenes in the museum, which reflects the students' sympathy for the victims of World War II. Afterwards Erin has organized a dinner for her students at the hotel she works at and invited Holocaust survivors to speak to them. For both Erin and her students, this experience and freshman year in general proved to be anything but what they had expected on the first day of class. After summer, on the first day of school, Erin sets up a little surprise for her sophomores:

- 112 - each of them would receive a bag with brand new books for the coming school year. But first Erin makes them stand up for a change.

ERIN They're very special books, and they each remind me, in some way, of each of you. But, before you take the books, I want you to take one of these glasses of sparkling cider, and I want each of you to make a toast. We're each gonna make a toast for change. And what that means is, from this moment on every voice that told you "You can't" is silenced. Every reason that tells you things will never change, disappears. And the person you were before this moment, that person's turn is over. Now it's your turn.

The impact freshman year had on the kids of room 203 becomes apparent, when they take turns at speaking about the goals they want to reach. Their words are filled with confidence they did not have a year before.

GLORIA I was always the person that was gonna get pregnant before I turned 16 and drop out. Like my mom. Ain't gonna happen. _____

BRANDY Nobody ever listens to a teenager. Everybody thinks you should be happy just because you're young. They don't see the wars that we fight every single day. And one day, my war will end. And I will not die. And I will not tolerate abuse from anyone. I am strong.

They even feel comfortable and brave enough to share their problems with not only Ms. G. but the entire class. They have become more than peers, they have become friends.

MARCUS My moms kicked me out when I got jumped into the gang life. But I'd like her to see me graduate. I'd like to be 18.

And room 203 has become a substitute home. A safe port away from home; a place where problems can be left behind or solved with the help of others. And a real home for those stricken by homelessness.

MIGUEL "This summer was the worst summer in my short 14 years of life. [...] My mother was crying and begging [...] Her tears hit my shirt like bullets and told me we were being evicted. She kept apologizing to me. I thought, 'I have no home. I should have asked for something less expensive at Christmas.' [...] My mother has no family to lean on, no money coming in. Why bother coming to school or getting good grades if I'm homeless? The bus stops in front of the school. I feel like throwing up. I'm wearing clothes from last year, some old shoes and no new haircut. I kept thinking I'd get laughed at. Instead, I'm greeted by a couple of friends who were in my English class last year. And it hits me, Mrs. Gruwell, my crazy English teacher from last year, is the only person that made me think of hope. Talking with friends about last year's English and our trips, I began to feel better. I receive my schedule and the first teacher is Mrs. Gruwell in Room 203. I walk into the room and feel as

- 113 - though all the problems in life are not so important anymore. I am home."

When Miguel reads his journal entry to the entire class, it becomes clear that room 203 has come far: A roomful of conflicting groups has become one harmonious ingroup. Threats to this harmony from outside(school administration) will not be tolerated. So when the students later learn that Erin is not allowed to teach them in their junior and senior years because she does not have seniority, they react as if under attack:

EVA Shit! They can't do that! They don't have the right! Ms. G, this is our kick-it spot. Everybody's cool with everybody. Everybody knows everybody. This is the only place where we really get to be ourselves. There's no place like this out there for us.

Up to this point, i.e. when Erin asks them to make a toast to change, Freedom Writers has focused on a cinema of realism to depict and deconstruct the social problems of non-white working class public sphere. In this scene however, the underlying idealism of the film becomes apparent. Although the movie never abandons its realist aesthetics, the notion of idealism dominates the second half of Freedom Writers . Freedom Writers builds on the stark opposition between idealism, individualism, and existentialism on the one side, and pessimism, essentialism and fatalism on the other. The more dominant idealistic nature of the film is epitomized by Erin's character. With her ceaseless efforts to bring about a change, Erin instills hope for betterment not only in her students, but also in the audience. Individualism, because Erin promotes ideas of independence and self-reliance among her students and encourages them to overcome obstacles and pursue their individual goals and desires. By giving students equal time in voice-overs that express their innermost thoughts Freedom Writers also indicates the moral worth of every individual. Meanwhile pessimistic attitudes are voiced by several characters in the movie. For one, the students' initial outlook on life is clearly pessimistic. Most of them see no point in going to school, for they believe their circumstances have predefined their lives. However Erin changes the climate in class, thus giving her students a new perspective. She manages to turn their hostile “dangerous minds” into minds that will use knowledge instead of guns on the battleground of life. Erin is not able to change the minds of Ms. Campbell and Brian Gelford, though. Margaret and Brian hold essentialist positions when it comes to racial, ethnic and class background. They consider these to be fixed traits that define the students of Woodrow Wilson High

- 114 - School and do not allow for variations. To Campbell and Gelford, these kids are all the same and not capable of change in any way (“ What gets me is they're violent, they break laws, they destroy school property and in the end we make them feel special ”). These characters also share fatalistic views because in their opinion, teaching these kids is a “waste of time” and Erin's efforts are inevitably doomed to fail. The conflict between Erin and Brian is raised to another level when one of Brian's honors students, the only African-American student in his class, wants to transfer to Erin's class.

BRIAN So, you had all summer to read and consider this book. And you know, I thought it would be most valuable to begin with Victoria to give us the black perspective. Victoria?

VICTORIA v.o. Do I have a stamp on my forehead that says, "The National Spokesperson for the Plight of Black People"? How the hell should I know the black perspective on The Color Purple? That's it, if I don't change classes, I'm gonna hurt this fool. Teachers treat me like I'm some kind of Rosetta stone for African-Americans. What? Black people learn how to read, and we all miraculously come to the same conclusion? At that point, I decided to check out my friend Brandy's English class.

In Gelford's class Victoria felt like an exotic animal, which can mostly be attributed to Brian's treatment of her. His statement reflects his essentialist belief that all African-Americans think alike(“ the black perspective ”), and it seems that he is not alone with this belief, as other teachers have similar practices.

VICTORIA My grades will still be the same. Look, Ms. Campbell. When I first transferred to the school, I had a 4.0 average. But when I applied for advanced placement at English and Math, I was told it would be better for me to be in a class with my own kind. Now, when I did get in, my teacher said, "Victoria, it's not every day one finds an African-American student in A.P. and honors courses." As if I didn't notice. And when I asked another honors teacher why we don't read more black literature, she said, "We don't read black literature because of all the sex, drugs, cussing and fornication!" I thought a simple "It's inappropriate" would have sufficed.

Victoria's decision to transfer affects Brian's self-esteem as a teacher. He feels attacked and sides with Margaret, who is against Erin's practices. Margaret and Brian show no sign of respect for the students. Their disrespect opposes the mutual respect that Erin and her students worked hard to establish. When both parties meet before the Board of Education to discuss the option of Erin continuing with her class through junior and senior year, Erin addresses the main shortcoming in Brian's way of teaching, which Brian dismisses as irrelevant.

ERIN You can't teach them. You don't even like them.

- 115 - BRIAN What does that have to do with teaching?

Erin's relationship with her students is certainly special (Erin: “ These students, this class, they've become a family. ”) But Margaret Campbell's doubts that what Erin has accomplished in room 203 could be repeated are plausible and justified.

CAMPBELL On paper. But what has she accomplished in reality? What about new students that come in next year? Can she repeat this process every year? Her methods are impractical, impossible to implement with regularity. What if every teacher performed in this way? We have millions of children to get through the education system in this country, and we need a means of accomplishing that which allows as many students to benefit as possible, not just special cases. And you honestly think you can create this family in every classroom, for every grade, for every student you teach?

Nevertheless Erin's work is remarkable. Reading her students' journals, Erin has discovered similarities to situations depicted in The Diary of Anne Frank . These similarities are emphasized in a scene that shows the students reading from The Diary , each one in their private surroundings.

BRANDY reads "Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. I mean, not only because I've never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on, neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a 13-year-old schoolgirl.”

The passages they read reflect some of their own experiences. Sindy who has experienced war as a child in Cambodia reads...

SINDY reads "Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart."

The passage Gloria reads harks back to the toast she made, to her wanting to prove everyone wrong and become more than what people expect.

GLORIA reads "If only I can be myself, I'll be satisfied. I know that I'm a woman with inner strength and a great deal of courage. If God lets me live, I'll achieve more than Mother ever did."

Meanwhile what Alejandro reads mirrors his own fear of getting killed in a drive-by shooting.

ALEJANDRO reads "I can't tell you how oppressive it is never to be able to go outdoors. Also, I'm very afraid that we will be discovered and be shot."

- 116 - Finally Eva's passage directly addresses war, both that of the past(World War II) and that of the present(the gang wars waging out in the streets).

EVA reads "No one can keep out of the conflict. The entire world is at war. And even though the Allies are doing better, the end is nowhere in sight."

There are a few scenes in the second half of Freedom Writers that break with the overriding idealism, moments where hope is deflated and where the movie returns to its realist hood movie roots. One such moment occurs when Eva, saddened and aggravated by the ending of The Diary of Anne Frank , comes to Erin to vent her frustrations( “If she dies, then what about me?” ). The fact that Eva could relate to Anne made her identify with her heroine. However, The Diary is not fiction and thus Eva's hopes for a happy Hollywood ending to both Anne's and her own life are dashed. Marcus, who witnesses Eva's outburst, looks at it differently. To him Anne's story is inspirational because it is a true story, and because the book has drawn attention to at least one of the many tragedies of WWII.

MARCUS See, to me, she ain't dead at all. How many friends did you know that are dead now that got killed? [...] How many have you read a book about? Have you seen them on TV or even in the newspaper? That's why this story's dope. She was our age, man. Anne Frank understands our situation, my situation.

Another instance for the clash of idealism with reality can be found in Andre's voice-over after his brother's trial. Hopes instilled by a fictional novel are once again shattered by the reality of life.

ANDRE v.o. Ms. G made us read Twelve Angry Men. It's all about how this one juror helped to turn the hearts of 11 jurors. It made me feel hopeful. At 2:00 today, my brother was given a verdict on his own trial. No O.J. Dream Team, just a court-appointed attorney who probably thought his ass was guilty. And I realized Twelve Angry Men was just a book and nothing more. My brother got 15 years to life. Justice don't mean the bad guy goes to jail. It just means somebody pays for the crime.

One of Erin's main goals is to inspire her students and to show them that there are different sides to everything. She is intent on changing their violent, destructive ways. And despite setbacks, her students exhibit a willingness to change. This willingness is exemplified in Marcus' plea to his mother(“ I want to come home. I don't want to be in the streets no more. I'm sorry. I want to change. I can't do it alone. I need you, Mama. I need you.” ) and, more strikingly, in Eva's attempts to change her parents' ways of thinking. Unfortunately Eva falls

- 117 - on deaf ears – to them “protecting your own” and “taking victories when you can” retains highest priority. Neither Erin nor their fellow students would allow small defeats to discourage them, though. The students now find comfort and support in each other. When Erin asks her students to grade themselves, Andre gives himself an “F”. But Erin does not accept it. She knows what he is up against, yet does not take it as an excuse, because she “can see” him and knows that he can do better and that he deserves a better grade. Likewise Erin is there for Eva. After betraying her own by revealing in court that Paco was the shooter, Eva is threatened by Paco's family.

GANG MEMBER(in Spanish) Because of what you did today you should be dead. Because of who your father is you are alive. But you are dead to us for good. And one day you will know a traitor suffers.

Eva confides in her teacher, and Erin has no objections to Eva spending her afternoons with her in the much safer room 203. Sindy, who witnessed their conversation, relates with a simple statement (“ I think I got your color ”) her acceptance and sympathy for Eva. Courage becomes another strong theme of the movie: Eva's courage to do what is right, Erin's courage to fight school administration in order to change regulations, and Ben's courage to stay (as the only white kid in class) -

BEN v.o. In 1961, an interracial civil rights group traveled by bus through the South to challenge segregation. Blacks sat in the front, whites in the back. They were attacked, firebombed, but they kept going. In Montgomery, Alabama, Jim Zwerg offered to be the first off the bus, knowing there was a mob waiting for them. He was almost beaten to death so the others could get away. That kind of courage is unbelievable to me. I was afraid of just being in this class, and I was ashamed because I've always been the dumb kid in school, even with my friends. But not anymore. And I must have some kind of courage, because I could have lied to get out of here, but I stayed. I stayed.

Courage as a theme is taken a step further in the scene where Miep Gies talks to Erin's students in a visit to Wilson High. She is recounting her memories of the day the Frank family was deported to the camps, when Marcus raises his hand to speak:

MARCUS I've never had a hero before. But you are my hero.

MIEP GIES Oh, no. No, no, young man, no. I am not a hero. No. I did what I had to do, because it was the right thing to do. That is all. You know, we are all ordinary people. But even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, within their own small ways, turn on a small light in a dark room. Ja? I have read your letters, and your teacher has been telling me many things about your experiences. You are the heroes. You are heroes every day. Your faces are engraved in my heart.

- 118 - Miep Gies' calling the students of room 203 heroes counters and relativizes Brian's earlier criticism of Erin's idea that Anne Frank's story is something her students could relate to. Stories about race told from a woman's point of view, as it is the case with Freedom Writers 179 , tend to neutralize violence. The main focus being on Erin, her relationship with her students, and their struggles to overcome social tragedies and unjust bureaucratic systems, the movie disrupts classic male narratives of race, gender and disorder. Thus Freedom Writers provides a completely different stance to problems of the hood than the hood movies of a decade and a half earlier did. While hood movies like Menace II Society , Do the Right Thing and Boyz N the Hood focused on a realist depiction of social problems in the hood and only casually pointed towards possible solutions, Freedom Writers chooses to narrate one such solution in detail.

In neutralizing traditional conceptions of male racial violence, black and white women articulate the possibilities of a non-violent racial order [...] based on intuition, compassion and deep feeling, [... and] on love, mutual respect and trust. [...] By disrupting the traditional male narrative, women model non-aggressive behavior for men. They do this by engendering race with a critical, non-essentialist feminist standpoint. This standpoint defuses potentially explosive racial situations. It creates the possibilities for non-violent friendships that cross gender and racial boundaries. 180

Similar to Louanne Johnson in Dangerous Minds (1995), Erin teaches her students “how to imagine a new racial order based on pride, personal choice, love, mutual respect, and trust.” 181 And she does not take credit for it; instead, she stresses the existentialist notion that her students are all individuals who possess freedom of choice and are capable of taking responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

ERIN Listen to me. All of you. Don't use me as another excuse for why you can't make it. You made it to your junior year. Think about how you did that. Everyone in this room has a chance to graduate. For some, you'll be the first in your family. The first with a choice to go to college. Some may move faster than others. But you'll each have the chance. And you did that. Not me.

By showing that “[l]oving committed teachers make a difference” and “[s]tudents who work hard can triumph over adversity” 182 Freedom Writers renders race and gender irrelevant. However, in doing this it also reinstates a version of the white (and black) adult's burden to

179In spite of having a male director, Richard LaGravenese, Freedom Writers retains a female note, most likely due to the fact that the adapted screenplay sticks to the original book The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them by Erin Gruwell and her students. 180Denzin(2002)p.65 181Ibid. p.77 182Denzin(2002)p.75

- 119 - take young (ethnic) people out of a violent, self-destructive environment.

The classical missionary model presumes a morally superior white person who carries a message of salvation to the inferior dark-skinned other. 183

The implementation of this White Missionary Racial Allegory in Freedom Writers is validated by a white person (Erin) who brings the roots of culture, i.e. language, literacy etc., to the ethnic other(the students of room 203) in order to help them assimilate to dominant white culture. If they were left to their own devices, chaos would reign (as the scenes of the first day of school from the beginning of the movie prove).

Nonetheless [this] non-essentialist, existential approach to identity leads to another version of the new cultural racism. This version [...] emphasizes social, not biological differences, suggesting that cultural 'difference' should be overcome even as it reaffirms white power and domination. 184

Hence Freedom Writers , too, cannot “fully escape the long arms of white patriarchy” 185 and the male narratives that locate violence in the hood. Nevertheless, taking the good intentions behind the movie, its realist depiction of social problems in the hood, and the strong idealism of the narrative into consideration, completely resisting to employ elements and conservative ideas of dominant white culture seems to have been an impossible thing to do.

Critics & Viewers' Reception

Released to over 2000 theatrical screens in 2007, Richard LaGravenese's inspirational teacher drama Freedom Writers balanced the estimated production budget of $21 million easily, bringing in a total of $36.6 million at U.S. box offices. Cross-country it made another $6.5 million. 186 Even though the theatrical success was fairly satisfying and the story could not be described as lightweight, shallow entertainment, the movie seemed to have been quite neglected when it comes to awards. It won the Humanitas Prize in the feature film category in 2007 and was nominated for an Image Award in Outstanding Writing in a Motion Picture, but other than that it did not find its recognition at larger festivals and award shows, despite the fact that two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank (Erin Gruwell) was once again at her best. Perhaps this was the case because the theme of the movie rings all too familiar. We have seen it before: a motivational teacher is cast into a classroom full of troubled kids he/she needs to find a way to connect to and inspire, so they can become more than they ever hoped for. The

183Ibid. 184Ibid. p.77 185Ibid. p.83 186Numbers taken from BoxOfficeMojo http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=freedomwriters.htm

- 120 - list of movies in this genre is long, early examples being The Blackboard Jungle (1955), Spare the Rod (1961), To Sir, with Love (1967), and Goodbye Mr. Chips (1938 & 1969). With a little change of ingredients – be it the setting(from private schools and colleges in Dead Poet's Society and The Emperor's Club , to violence-stricken inner-city high schools in The Pricipal and Lean on Me ), the subjects taught(art in Mona Lisa Smile , music in Mr. Holland's Opus , math in Stand and Deliver , history in Half Nelson , and basketball in Sunset Park ) or the method of connecting to the students(karate and Bob Dylan lyrics in Dangerous Minds , dance in Take the Lead , or brutality in One Eight Seven , the last being an anti-movie of this genre and argument for home-schooling) – the same dish may have a more or less pleasing, but certainly new taste. Nonetheless, taking a closer look at Freedom Writers it becomes evident that it is not simply a carbon copy of any of the movies listed above, for it defies the obvious formula by adding refreshing new elements. It is not only Hilary Swank's acting performance, which is reliably first-rate, or the fact that the movie (like many other of the genre before) is based on a true-life story that make the movie worthwhile.

Freedom Writers strikes the right chord by omitting or twisting the obvious. When Ms. G loses her cool with the class after a student is ridiculed, she doesn't deliver some contrived "we're all equal" speech; instead, she explains how the Nazis used propaganda to become the most horrible "gang" ever. With a wonderful command of intensity and vulnerability, Swank exclaims, "You think your gangs are tough? This gang took over countries." 187

Comparing the Holocaust to instances of gang violence draws the attention of these kids back to school. Hardened by life in a violent and hateful environment, they want to learn more about World War II and, eventually, how to bridge divides formed by racism and intolerance.

The everyday violence experienced by the students is established as both the stimulus that divides them and the eventual basis for their bonding. 188

Having to cope with poverty, poor housing, overburdened social workers, inept parents barely older than themselves, vicious gangs, drug dealers and indifferent, merciless cops on a daily basis, these kids run low on self-esteem and high on built-up aggression. They are at war with everything and everyone, but particularly themselves.

Starting out with footage of the Los Angeles riots of 1992 (the film is set in '94), he sets up the students' psychology through an internal dialogue narrated by one student, Eva (April Lee Hernandez), a Latina gang member whose worldview is shared by her peers: Their streets are a

187Norm Schrager, http://www.contactmusic.com/new/film.nsf/reviews/freedomwriters 188Kevin Crust, Los Angeles Times (January 5, 2007) http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-et- freedom5jan05,0,168001.story

- 121 - war zone, and school, while relatively safe, is an exercise in futility. 189

The atmosphere in the classroom is frosty yet scorching at the same time, when Erin arrives at the school. The desks of the Hispanic, Asian, black - and one Caucasian - students were arranged in an archipelago of distrust toward the new teacher and mainly one another.

Gruwell may sympathize with her students' plight, but she never appears to feel sorry for them. Swank's portrayal avoids an epiphany moment, or the conventional ebb and flow emotions. Instead, her Erin Gruwell keeps plugging and chugging, devising new ways to impart that energy to her kids with nary a ridiculous fist pump in sight. 190

Introducing The Diary of Anne Frank to the kids in class and later taking them to the Museum of Tolerance, Erin helps them learn lessons of prejudice, self-esteem and fortitude. The assignment to keep diary is perhaps the first real chance these kids get to express themselves and vent their bottled-up feelings in a non-violent way. The result is an affecting compilation of poems, songs and innermost thoughts brought to paper.

Funny how point of view works. If so many films about so-called troubled teenagers come off as little more than exploitation, it’s often because the filmmakers are not really interested in them, just their dysfunction. “Freedom Writers,” by contrast, isn’t only about an amazingly dedicated young teacher who took on two extra jobs to buy supplies for her students (to supplement, as Mr. LaGravenese carefully points out, a $27,000 salary); it’s also, emphatically, about some extraordinary young people. [...] Mr. LaGravenese keeps faith with the multiple perspectives in the book, which includes Ms. Gruwell’s voice and those of her students, whose first-person narratives pay witness to the effects of brutalizing violence, dangerous tribal allegiances and institutional neglect. 191

The fact that, aside from rap-singer Mario, mostly amateurs and new-comers were cast in the roles of students, mainly because they could relate to the traumatic experiences portrayed in the movie, and the commitment to characters infuse Freedom Writers with a large dose of realism, which also makes up for lacking acting experience. The individual students thus move away from being pure clichés.

LaGravenese, who also directs, resists the temptation to focus primarily on their idealistic instructor, Erin Gruwell, even though she's played by two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank. This was the mistake of the similarly themed Dangerous Minds , in which Michelle Pfeiffer's teacher is too much front and center. 192

However, Pfeiffer's movie had singer/rapper Coolio, whose song “Gangsta's Paradise” became

189John Anderson, Variety (Jan. 3, 2007) http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117932389.html? categoryid=31&cs=1&p=0 190Norm Schrager, http://www.contactmusic.com/new/film.nsf/reviews/freedomwriters 191Manohla Dargis , To Ms. With Love: A Teacher’s Heart Fords a Social Divide, New York Times (January 5,2007) http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/01/05/movies/05free.html 192Ruthe Stein, Steely Swank inspires writers in moving true story , San Francisco Chronicle, (Friday, January 5,2007) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/05/DDG8RNCDHB1.DTL

- 122 - one of the biggest hits in 1995 and an anthem of existential despair, whereas the well-meant collaboration of hip-hop artists will.I.am and Common on the Freedom Writers theme song “A Dream” featuring Martin Luther King's famous speech went fairly unrecognized. If the critics gave Freedom Writers credit where it was due, they also laid blame where it belonged. The characters portrayed by Imelda Staunton(Margaret Campbell) and John Benjamin Hickey(Brian Gelford), though being a classic ingredient of the genre in their role of disdainful school officials whom the audience is meant to hate, come off as far too one- dimensional, so much that they almost become comical. The fundaments of their negativity could not be shaken as it seemed, and the audience might have therefore missed that they actually had a point: Erin's idealistic approach may have worked with these kids at that time, but it was not a given that it would work again. Gruwell's disintegrating marriage and her slumped-puppy husband Scott (Patrick Dempsey) don't get enough screen-time, leaving the impression that if her students are not involved it cannot be that important. Another minus is that the plot strand concerning the pearl necklace, which was given so much attention in the beginning, was simply dropped (although the DVD commentary reveals that the pearl necklace was Swank's key to unlocking Gruwell's character and that the pearls reflected Erin's resolve to maintain high standards in class). Furthermore, the movie seems to have too many climaxes, or at least is permanently on the verge of one: the moment of epiphany when the students realize they have more in common than they think, Miep Gies' visit, and finally Erin's approval by the school board. Particularly the emotional moment at the end feels a bit contrived and maybe too Hollywood-like. Even though some standard plot points were unavoidable and the course of the movie is quite predictable with a typical conflict to resolution arc, the feel-good drama Freedom Writers could easily be forgiven for minor misses, since it is in its core a heartwarming tale of determination and inspiration which shows that pens are indeed mightier than guns.

Freedom Writers delivers the expected messages about hope and the ability to change one's destiny, and does it in a manner that it is emotionally and intellectually satisfying. This isn't a great movie, but it is effective drama where the big emotional scenes more often feel real than contrived. Through voiceovers, LaGravenese uses passages lifted from the actual students' diaries to provide the framework for the secondary stories (those of the teenagers), thereby lending a ring of authenticity. For those who see it, the movie has a chance to connect. 193

193James Berardinelli http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=445

- 123 - What's Cooking

What's Cooking? is the third movie to be looked at and as such it sets itself apart from the previous two by exhibiting yet another side of Los Angeles. Entering the colorful world of ethnic cuisines, What's Cooking? takes us on a journey to the place where families meet, secrets are unveiled and crises sparked and overcome: the Thanksgiving dinner table. Skillfully showing differences and similarities between four disparate families (Jewish, African-American, Vietnamese and Mexican), the movie manages to draw a relatively bright image of Los Angeles multicultural and multi-ethnic society where simple bowls, pots and pans become their allegorical counterparts.

Synopsis

The movie opens to the sound of the Star-spangled Banner accompanied by an image of the all-American white family assembled around a perfectly roasted turkey. As the camera moves away, the melody begins to change and the image is revealed to be just a poster on the side of a bus. From there the viewer is taken on a frantic bus ride through the city of Los Angeles, passing buildings with signs in all languages and meeting people of all origins. The opening sequence ends with the same image of a family assembled around a turkey, only that this time it is on a park bench and the family is Latino. It is the day before Thanksgiving and four families from the Fairfax district of Los Angeles are busy running last errands before the great feast. There is the Mexican-American Avila family: While shopping for ingredients Anthony Avila and his wife meet Anthony's father Javier, who had abandoned his family over a year ago after being caught cheating on his wife with her cousin. Seeing how bad he looks and feeling sorry for him, Anthony invites his father over for Thanksgiving. When his mother Elizabeth, who has a relationship with one of the teachers at the school she works at, later finds out about the invitation, she is not happy at all and asks Anthony to revoke it. Meanwhile Anthony's sister Gina and her boyfriend Jimmy arrive at the Avila's abode, which causes commotion mainly among the male members of the Avila family for Jimmy is Vietnamese. The African-African Williams family: Her husband Ronald being occupied with his job as spin doctor for governor Rhoades, Audrey Williams goes to pick up her mother-in-law at the airport. From the second they meet it becomes clear that the vibes between these women are not exactly good. Something is off, but Grace cannot quite tell. It also bothers her that her

- 124 - grandson Michael won't be home for Thanksgiving. He is still angry with his father about his continuing work for the conservative (and supposedly racist) governor. The Jewish Seelig family: The Seelig's daughter Rachel arrives at her parents' L.A. home with her girlfriend Carla. Particularly her mother Ruth has a problem with Rachel's lesbian relationship. Even though she may accept her daughter's sexual orientation, she thinks of it as only temporary and hopes that Rachel will eventually have a fulfilled life – with a man. Knowing that her mother has a hard time accepting her lover, Rachel likes to tease her with it and deliberately shows Carla her affection when Ruth is around. The Vietnamese Nguyen family: The Nguyens run a video rental store where all of the children except for Jimmy, who is in college (which he states as the reason for his absence on Thanksgiving), help out. However, there seems to be quite a big generation gap between the elder Nguyen generations (parents Trinh and Duc & grandparents) and the younger Nguyens(Jimmy, Jenny, Gary and Joey). This is evident when Jenny becomes the “black sheep” of the family after her mother finds a condom on the floor. She tries to explain that condoms have been handed out by the school nurse, but her parents would not listen. When Jenny later finds a gun under her brother's bed, she turns to her Caucasian friend for advice instead. In between all of the action going on in the four households, there is beautiful imagery of food from various ethnic cuisines. Tortillas and corn in the Avila's house, maccaroni and cheese over at the Williams', polenta at the Seelig's and spring rolls with shrimp at the Nguyen's – and of course four turkeys, each one prepared according to a different recipe. Another thing the four households have in common is that the TV is running in all four showing a football broadcast that attracts especially the male occupants of the house – the women meanwhile busy preparing the meals of course. However, the Nguyen's turkey burns to coal in the oven, because everyone forgets about it when an argument arises. At the video store Duc and Gary have discovered Jenny with her friend, who has only been comforting her, and everyone jumps to the conclusion that the boy must be Jenny's boyfriend. Seeing that arguing leads nowhere, Jenny decides to just sit and let the storm pass. The Williams' turkey nearly meets a similar fate, when the table breaks in two and all the plates end up on the floor. The disaster is averted, though, the turkey saved, and the vegetables rinsed. Nonetheless, the unexpected arrival of Michael causes stir and commotion among the Williams family and their guests, the (white) Moore family. Michael dropped out of college, because he did not feel comfortable there being one of only very few black students. More

- 125 - secrets are revealed in the course of the evening: Michael is the one who threw paint on the governor the day before Thanksgiving, and Ronald has had an affair with a woman at work. The mess is complete. Over at the Avila's house, Javier has found his place at the table and soon starts to act as if he had never left. His hopes of restoring his family's harmony are thrashed by the arrival of Elizabeth's boyfriend. Javier's mood instantly swings from cheerful to grumpy, but Lizzy sets her estranged husband straight, telling him that he lost his rights when he left them in order to be with someone else. In the meantime Herb and Ruth Seelig do their best to keep their daughter's sexual orientation a secret from the rest of the family. Yet nosy aunt Bea's interrogation about Rachel's private life – whether there is a special someone and when she intends to have children - prompts Rachel to drop the bomb: she is already pregnant. It only results in more questions about Rachel's lifestyle, but at least there is no more hiding now and even Ruth seems relieved by that fact. When friends come to pick up Gary, Jenny cannot keep quiet about the gun anymore and confronts her brother in front of the whole family. Gary denies any kind of gang involvement and says that he was keeping the gun for a friend. His parents do not quite believe him and press for the truth so fiercely that Gary tries to run. They manage to stop him before he reaches the door and continue to argue there. Nobody notices that the youngest of the Nguyen's, Joey, has taken the gun to play with it until a shot rings out through the entire neighborhood. The shot is heard in the Avila's house. It is heard in the houses of the Williams and the Seeligs too. When the four families all gather on the street the viewer realizes that they all live on the same street. Making sure that no one has been hurt, the other families take to helping the Nguyens repair their shattered window. Chatting on the street, they share a few moments of bonding between neighbors before they return to their own homes and their own lovely messes. Jimmy finally musters up the courage to introduce Gina to his parents who are to his surprise quite fond of her and even note that she looks Vietnamese. In the last scene of the movie the camera pans from one house to another to display that some kind of peace has been restored in all four homes, and finally retreats to show first the nighttime neighborhood and then the city with its shining lights.

- 126 - Character Analysis

Perfectionist Audrey Williams is taking the task of preparing an unimpeachable traditional yet innovative Thanksgiving meal for her family and friends very serious. However her patronizing mother-in-law Grace is constantly straining her nerves, because Grace clearly worships her son and finds something wrong with everything Audrey does. The air between the women is very tense until Grace finds out about Ronald's affair at work and followingly takes Audrey's side. Being a divorce lawyer herself, Audrey knows the consequences of a divorce well and would not like to get one, as she tells her son. She is not being weak, she says, for it takes strength to keep the family together in a situation like this. Grace acts as some kind of catalyst for family problems. Her constant meddling and way of inquiring about what is going on in their lives eventually unearths the ugly truths – Michael having dropped out of college and his father Ronald having an affair. Thus striving to be omniscient about all family matters and claiming to be the better cook, Grace represents the stereotypical frumpy big momma. Ronald's job is a thorn in the family's side. For one, he is so occupied with it that he is hardly ever at home. Then there is the affair that is threatening to ruin his marriage. And lastly, the fact that he is working for a ultraconservative governor has disenchanted his son Michael. Even though Ronald is thoroughly convinced of his job and political views in the beginning, by the end of the movie he realizes that they will destroy the family if he does not do anything about it. The tensions between Michael and his father cannot be denied either. Ronald is disappointed that his son has dropped out of UC Santa Barbara business school, but Michael, who would much rather have African-American studies as his major, did not feel comfortable at that particular college because “there were no black people”. Ronald is also angry with his son for throwing paint at governor Rhoades, while Michael is angry that his father still works for said governor. Although Ronald goes to his wife for forgiveness, it is not clear if Michael and Ronald will be able to settle their differences.

Ever since her philandering husband Javier abandoned them, Elizabeth “Lizzy” Avila worked hard to maintain harmony among the remaining family members and establish herself as the new head of the family. She is in charge of all holiday preparations and therefore not too happy when she finds out her son invited Javier over for Thanksgiving. After all, she has finally moved on and even gotten a new love interest. When Javier shows up to dinner and attempts to reclaim his position within the family, the feisty matriarch is not willing to hand it

- 127 - over to him. He had left them. He just cannot expect to come back and everything would be as it had been before. The one-on-one dialogue with Javier shows Elizabeth's strength and affirms her position as an independent woman and single mother. Stunned by her feistiness and having realized that he won't succeed in reclaiming what used to be his, Javier leaves once again. His unwillingness to fight for his wife, his early capitulation, only shows that Javier is nowhere near as strong as Elizabeth. Elizabeth is also very approving of Gina's romantic relationship with Jimmy Nguyen. There is instantly some sort of mutual affection between the two, as Elizabeth is one of the few Avilas who does not judge Jimmy by his ethnicity. That her mother fully accepts Jimmy as Gina's boyfriend also strengthens the bond between Gina and Elizabeth. Gina is on her mother's side and frankly does not believe her father deserves a second chance. The Avila girls stick together, which is also reflected at the table where Gina sits right next to her mother while her brother Anthony is at the other end of the table. The male members of the Avila family, especially Anthony, are portrayed as somewhat chauvinistic and a bit ignorant. While the women are stuck with all of the work and cooking on Thanksgiving, they just sit and watch TV. They deem traditional gender role patterns as appropriate. They also have objections in regard to Gina's new boyfriend but play it off by making jokes and imitating Bruce Lee – who is Chinese – to show Jimmy he is welcome. In a way the male Avilas form a band and Anthony, as their “leader”, would like to see himself as the new patriarch of the family, but he has to recognize that the true head of the family is female.

Judging by the stories that are told at the dinner table about how things used to be, the Seeligs have lived the longest in the neighborhood. Fairfax district is after all known as a Jewish district with kosher grocers, delis, jewelry stores and a synagogue, and Ruth and Herb Seelig just seem to fit in. They are every bit the (stereo)typical Jewish middle-aged couple. Ruth Seelig's life as a retiree could be perfect, if it was not for the one thing that bothers her the most: her daughter's sexual preference. Even though she may accept Carla as Rachel's current life partner, she cannot hide her hopes that this would be just temporary and her daughter would marry a nice man one day. Hence she wants to keep the extent of Rachel's relationship with Carla a secret from the rest of the family and finds it particularly frustrating when the two of them are openly affectionate with each other. Herb on the other hand either tries to ignore it or has come to terms with it. Either way, his attention is devoted to getting the temperature in his hot tub to a perfect degree rather than snooping around in his daughter's

- 128 - business. Rachel is quite happy with her life and her relationship with Carla and would want her parents to feel the same way about it. Sometimes teasing her a bit, she tries to make her mother understand that this is really what she wants. In comparison with her parents Rachel's views are overall more liberal, especially in regards to politics. Whereas Ruth and Herb are supporters of the controversial conservative governor, Rachel thinks “he is a racist anti-gay bigot.” Even though their views often clash, there is some sort of mutual acceptance between Rachel and her parents. Carla seems reserved and a bit insecure about her role in the family. She does not quite feel accepted by Rachel's parents and to some extent fears meeting the rest of her relatives. However, through the course of the Thanksgiving dinner she grows more and more confident, and is reassured that she belongs, when Rachel reveals she is pregnant and that they are starting a little family of their own.

Traditions rank high within the Nguyen family, thus it is not very surprising that the typically American holiday of Thanksgiving is given a Vietnamese touch. Mother Trinh is stuck with the balancing act of combining American and Vietnamese customs and uniting the traditional side of the family (her husband Duc and the grandparents) with the Americanized (her children). Trying to satisfy both, she even prepares a two-sided, two-flavored turkey. Meanwhile the younger Nguyens, particularly Jenny and Gary, act like ordinary American teenagers and do not care much for Vietnamese traditions. They date and befriend people from other ethnic backgrounds, dress in jeans and t-shirts, gossip on the phone, get in teenie troubles and like KFC's secret ingredients much more than traditional Vietnamese spices. Trinh is distressed by her children's lifestyle. Thus after Trinh has discovers the condom and loses trust in her daughter, Jenny and her often clash. While Jenny is more rebellious and speaks her mind about the rigid views of the older generation, her brothers seek the path of the least resistance and try to evade all confrontation. Jimmy uses college as an excuse to stay away at Thanksgiving and is scared what his parents may think of his Latina girlfriend. Gary agrees with his parents when it comes to criticizing Jenny, for it leaves him in a better light. He deliberately steers the attention to his sister, so his parents would not have the chance to monitor his own actions, which are much more troublesome than Jenny's. Whether Gary is really involved with a gang or telling the truth about keeping the gun for someone else is not revealed. However, it is clear that guns and gangs are things he is confronted with.

- 129 - Trinh and Duc are worried to lose control over their children. Yet by the end of the movie they learn that it is important not to put to much pressure on them and rather try to listen to what the younger Nguyens are actually saying.

Issues of race and ethnicity in What's Cooking

While the first two movies rendered race relations in Los Angeles a problem, What's Cooking? takes a different approach by positively highlighting the multicultural dynamics that shape the city. Race and ethnicity are visible - in every scene from first to last. What Chadha and Berges' script is missing, though, is the pervasive display of negatively charged emotions between people from different ethnic backgrounds, which we have throughout Crash and in the first half of Freedom Writers . Instead, race serves as the premise to broach other topics. Most of these topics up for discussion and debate are intrafamilial, yet at the same time seem universal. The four families in What's Cooking may be separated by cultural differences, but they are united in their cross-cultural similarities and commonalities. Meaning, within their families they have to deal with fairly the same set of problems.

PAULA I was afraid to ask. They're still not speaking? Well, I guess, you can't call yourself a family unless someone isn't speaking to someone else.

To some extent Paula's statement mirrors the famous words from the beginning of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: “ Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way .” To the world outside a family may seem harmonious and happy, but realistically speaking all families have troubles, only some are more intense than others and some families just know how to cover up well. The four individual families in What's Cooking? are not spared from turbulence. They all have problems of some sort, but that does not necessarily make them unhappy. In the Avila and Williams households, for instance, the fundaments of the nuclear family model have been shaken by the husband's infidelity. Meanwhile the older Seelig generation has a hard time accepting Rachel's choice of lifestyle. The trend towards traditional family models being replaced by patchwork families and other models, although not heavily promoted, is still present in What's Cooking? and perhaps reflected the best in Monica's snarky evaluation of a common children's play.

KRISTIN Do you wanna play Thanksgiving with us?

MONICA I can't think of anything I'd rather do less.

- 130 - KRISTIN Now, you'll be the mommy and I'll be the dad.

MONICA Wow. This is sick. You guys are really twisted, you know that?

[a bit later ]

GRACE What are you all playing, honey?

KRISTIN Grandma! We're playing Thanksgiving.

GRACE Oh, that's nice.

MONICA Yeah. She's the mommy, she's the daddy and I'm the alcoholic, cult- worshipping, satanic step-mother.

To Monica, whose father has left her mother to marry Paula, the nuclear family structure mother-father-child is what is abnormal and “sick”. The problems may vary from family to family, but some commonalities can be observed. For one, all four families are exposed to generational conflicts. The older generations(i.e. parents, grandparents and other elderly relatives) have a rather conservative opinion in common, while the younger generations tend to pursue a more liberal lifestyle. In the Seelig's case, it is Rachel's sexual orientation that troubles her parents. Although it is obvious that Rachel's relationship with Carla has developed into something serious and that they have been together for quite some time, Rachel's parents cannot fully accept Rachel's lesbianism. Instead of taking her orientation as a given, they view it as a phase, a passing condition, and try to find the cause of it.

[in Rachel's bedroom ]

RACHEL Can't believe we still have to do this every time we come.

CARLA I like it. Makes me feel like I'm doing something naughty.....

[in the parental bedroom ]

HERB We must've done something wrong.

RUTH Oh, don't be ridiculous, Herb.

- 131 - HERB Maybe it was the Kibbuz we sent her to. With all the girls...

[in Rachel's bedroom ]

RACHEL Maybe they don't think about it anymore.

CARLA&RACHEL( in unison ) Yeah they do.

RACHEL They think about it all the time.

Even though Ruth and Herb to some extent accept Rachel's choice of partner, they do not want the rest of the family to know about it. There is no room for homosexual relationships in their rather conservative value system and they fear that such an abnormality would be looked down upon as a disgrace.

CARLA What happened?

RACHEL She burst in tears about something. She.. she doesn't want my aunt and uncle to know about us.

CARLA The uncle who's having an affair with the mistress?

RACHEL ( laughs ) Yes. Oh God. .. Please don't let them pull you into an argument.

Since aunt Beatrice later assumes that Carla is Rachel's roommate, it can be said with certainty that she got that information from Ruth. Clueless about Rachel's orientation and relationship, Beatrice begins to pest Rachel with questions, after all Rachel's fertile years are ticking away (Aunt Beatrice: “ Rachel, honey. I can hear the clock going tik-tok, tik-tok. [...] Meaning we're all tired of waiting for your Mr. Right to come along” ). Ruth tries to resolve the awkward situation by signaling her to stop, but Beatrice continues to give Rachel beauty tips and advice on how to attract men. While in a pivotal scene towards the end Rachel has to pull her parents (and uncle and aunt) out of their denial and dreams about a son-in-law, Trinh and Duc Nguyen are aware of their children not sharing their beliefs and values to the extent that they become oversensitive and see rising problems where there may be none.

TRINH

- 132 - Why doesn't Jimmy wanna come home anymore?

GRANDMOTHER Jimmy works very hard. Let him study. Education is the most important thing.

TRINH Not more than family.

GRANDMOTHER What does it matter? You don't even like Thanksgiving. Look at all this work just to make the food have some taste. You should be thankful every day for your children.

TRINH For what? What's happened to my children in this country. Jimmy doesn't wanna come home. Gary gets thrown out of school. Daughter is disrespectful. And Joey will grow up just the same.

When the Nguyens emigrated to the United States, their children were still little, some even not born yet. The beliefs they tried to raise them by have however been partially undermined by western civilization's more liberal views about upbringing. Disobedience, talking back and dating are unacceptable. When the family therefore discovers a condom in Jenny's pocket they are shocked.

TRINH Where have you been?

JENNY Studying.

TRINH( showing her the condom ) Why do you have this?

JENNY They give them out at school.

TRINH( shocked ) At school? Why do schools give my daughter this?

JENNY The nurses give them to everybody. I don't have any use for them.

TRINH Look at yourself.

DUC Ok. Jenny, go to your room!

TRINH No sense of modesty.

JENNY Ask the school if you don't believe me!

DUC

- 133 - Go to your room. Now!

JENNY You never listen to me!

Trinh and Duc are disturbed by the possibility of their teenage daughter being sexually active. Moreover, it seems that they do not favor the school's promoting of safe sex practices. To them, the passing out of condoms is encouraging teenagers to have sex. When her father and brother find Jenny with her boyfriend at the video store, Duc Nguyen is outraged and tells the boy to stay away. Instead of letting Jenny explain herself, the family immediately jumps to conclusions.

TRINH( screaming ) Who is he? Who is he, Jenny?

JENNY It doesn't matter. You should've brought him out.

TRINH Is that why you have condoms? Is that why your daughter has condoms? So you can sleep with everybody? You're such a shame.

JENNY( screaming hysterically ) You don't know how good I am. You don't know...

TRINH Is that how you repay your family, huh? Ungrateful beast, you! You ungrateful... Is that how you give thanks, huh?

JENNY You don't understand!

TRINH I don't understand? What I don't understand? No, what do I not understand?

JENNY You don't understand me! You don't understand anything! You don't ever listen to me!

TRINH Ok, alright. Alright. It's finished for now. It's finished for now. You go.

JENNY Finished for now! Bye!

TRINH We don't know anything about our child! We don't know anything about our child.

Trinh is horrified by the fact that she does not know anything about her child, but does not recognize that by not giving Jenny a chance to explain, by controlling her, and by trying to limit her personal freedom and invade her privacy, the gap that divides them only grows bigger. Finding that Jenny has disgraced the family, Trinh turns to her oldest for help. Jimmy

- 134 - obviously mediated between the older and younger generations in the past, but he himself made compromises and has not been straightforward with his parents at all times. When Gina informs him that Jenny was with a white guy that looked like he was her boyfriend, Jimmy's reaction is somewhere between shock and awe, the latter probably because he himself has yet to find the courage to introduce his Latina girlfriend to his family. Alexis de Tocqueville once concluded that “[a]mong democratic nations each generation is a new people”, meaning that different generations can have fundamentally different visions of self and society, two world views. What is found acceptable, common and normal in one generation, may be rejected by another for either being inappropriate and audacious or outdated. A major factor in the formation of a generation is its common experience, shared events that have an impact on this cohort group. The dynamics of modernity and a relatively tolerant social atmosphere are the prerequisites for new generations to arise. The political climate and events in Vietnam that the older Nguyens have been exposed to, have obviously led to little difference between the world views of the grandparent and parent generation, making the gap between those two and the younger, California-raised generation even larger. Generational conflict evolves from a clash of differing ideals, and in What's Cooking? there is plenty of that. The Nguyens clash on the topics of education, dating and gang association, while the Williamses are not on the same page when it comes to politics, and the Seeligs disagree about choices of lifestyle. It seems that the feast of Thanksgiving is the perfect occasion to press the issue of imparting values, beliefs and traditions, since customs and practices surrounding the feast are then usually passed down (or at least attempted to). Across all four families we find scenes where a member of the older generation more or less successfully tries to demonstrate how the turkey shall be prepared. In the Avila kitchen Tony's wife Sofia carefully listens to Lizzy's instructions for stuffing the bird. At the Williamses, Grace continually has objections to Audre's manner of handling the preparations. She is displeased by Audre's decision to try out a new recipe, she had rather see it done the old-fashioned way.

GRACE Worcester and Shiitake mushroom dressing? Hmm. Never heard of that before. ... These friends of yours, do they have families to be with today?

AUDRE James' parents have passed on. Ok? Paula's family's in Montana.

GRACE What, isn't Michael gonna at least call or do you just talk to each other on the e-mail now?

- 135 - AUDRE We'll call him later.

KRISTIN Mommy, when's the turkey gonna be ready?

GRACE You know, I could whip up a batch of macaroni and cheese.

AUDRE You know every once in a while it's good to try something brand new.

GRACE Well, you could've put some more cinnamon on that apple pie.

Her later admission that the turkey does not taste bad at all indicates a tolerance and acceptance of different ideals. Taken a step further, at least a mutual yet not undisputed acknowledging of different tastes can be observed over at the Nguyens' home.

GRANDMOTHER Should I put chilies on this side too?

JENNY Why do you wanna make the turkey taste like everything else we eat?

GRANDMOTHER Why do you want everything to taste like McDonald's?

The fact that two meals are being prepared in order to please the taste buds of both the younger and older Nguyen generation further points out the conflict between the two.

JIMMY Yeah. Right now my mom would be cooking two meals. One for my grandparents and one for the kids.

To their misfortune, the two-sided turkey burns. Maybe a further metaphor that a truce between the conflicting generations is hard to sustain? Although preparations are running high in the Seelig kitchen, the women still find time to gossip about other family members. The traditional Jewish circumcision of male newborns is brought up, and while Ruth's thinking is naturally in compliance with the tradition, Rachel supports the decision of the baby's parents.

RUTH And their only grandson's not circumcised yet. It's a schande. And they spoke to that mohel in Beverly Hills about the bris and everything.

RACHEL But it's up to his parents.

RUTH It's tradition.

- 136 - RACHEL You invited them because you feel sorry for them.

RUTH I invited them because everyone who lives in that retirement home has no place to go to during the holidays. So we couldn't do that to them.

RACHEL Still. We should not be talking about their kids.

RUTH Your father's side of the family have never ever been good listeners. ... Alright. Carla, could you please get the oven.

The older Seeligs take pride in their religion and heritage and everything that is tied to it, hence any deviance from the Jewish lifestyle dictated by the Torah is not brushed off easily. Being a shiksa and Rachel's lesbian lover, Carla has it twice as hard to find acceptance within the family.

HERB You know Michael Landon from Bonanza ?

CARLA Uh-huh.

HERB He was Jewish. The whole Cartwright family is Jewish.

Herb's disclosure of this trivial fact implies that he is proud of being Jewish and also aware that his daughter chose a lover of a different religious denomination. Aunt Beatrice's last line in the movie (“ So is the baby Jewish ?”) implies this as well. An argument arises when Rachel reveals her pregnancy to the family. At first Ruth and Herb fear that Rachel is going to come out as lesbian when she stands up to make an announcement, however the revelation she makes only shocks them more, for it is what they had least expected (Herb: “ But you're a lesbian! ”).

HERB Who's the father?

RACHEL It doesn't matter who the father is!!

HERB Well, of course it matters who the father is.

RACHEL It doesn't matter.

HERB How're you gonna bring up the child without a father?

- 137 - RUTH(almost crying) Can everybody just be quiet and calm down because the twins are getting upset.

ART Listen to me, it's very common these days. And Rachel and Carla, they're gonna be great moms.

HERB I just... I just wanna question what's right for the child.

RACHEL Dad. Daddy. All that matters is that I have a baby inside of me. And... and I don't...don't know what it's gonna look like, I mean... we don't know, we think it's gonna be a boy, but we're not sure, but I... I try to imagine what he's gonna look like in our home with Carla and.... and what his life is gonna be like... and, and whether or not you're even gonna wanna know him.

Although Rachel's sentimental plea softens everyone's heart on that matter, her father still has trouble digesting the information that a grandchild is on the way which has not been conceived the traditional way. In the end tolerance wins as the whole family comes to joyously accept Rachel's pregnancy. Meanwhile Michael has to fight for his father's acceptance. His decision to drop out of college has not been met with approval by Ronald. Michael knows that he can count on his mother's support, yet when it comes to his father, he is unsure if his father can understand or even relate to him at all. Their visions of Michael's future are very conflicting.

RONALD But you did register for the spring semester, right?

MICHAEL Dad, you know I'm not going back!

AUDRE Honey, you're taking time off and that's ok.

RONALD Well, UC Santa Barbara has a well respected business school.

MICHAEL Dad, there's no black people there!

RONALD You tell me what you're gonna do with a degree in African-American studies, young man. Hmm?

AUDRE Ronald!

Michael is proud of his African-American heritage and cannot see himself disavowing it like his father did in order to assimilate and thus further advance in a career. At the dinner table

- 138 - Michael finds a like-minded person in Monica, who shares his disdain for the current Governor and favors his interest in African-American culture(“ So Michael, how do you feel about the whole Ebonics thing? ”). Although it does not seem like it at first, at the end of the movie Ronald assures his son that he understands what he is going through and supports any decision Michael makes. However, he also lets him know that “ life's gonna be real hard without an education ”. Education is also of highest value to any model minority family, and the Nguyens do not seem to be an exemption. Although Trinh is worried about her family being dismantled by the abominations of society - sex, drugs and rock'n'roll – and is clearly not happy that her eldest won't be home for the holidays, she repeatedly proclaims that “ [t]he family will understand. The study is the most important thing. ” Gary and Jenny have a hard time living up to their larger than life brother in college.

GRANDMOTHER( in Vietnamese ) Your mother didn't mean what she said. Your parents are very proud of you.

JENNY Well, then why don't they tell me that?! All they ever talk about is Jimmy.

What they do not realize is that Jimmy himself has troubles living up to his parents expectations. When Gina asks him if he wants to go over to his family's house he declines and states that he couldn't be himself over there. The interracial relationship between Gina, a Latina, and Jimmy, a Vietnamese, does not go unnoticed and uncommented by the other characters.

ROB AVILA Is that Gina's new boyfriend?

TONY Yeah. Why?

ROB I didn't know he would be Chinese and shit.

TONY Neither did I know. Shut up an watch the game.

Unsure how to act around Jimmy, Tony and later also his father Javier think they will find a topic of common interest in Jackie Chan(TONY: “ The boy is hell of crazy, jumping off of helicopters, buses, hanging from poles...sss .”) and Bruce Lee, never taking notice that Jimmy is not of Chinese descent. While the Avila men are rather surprised at Gina's choice, Lizzy and the other women

- 139 - quickly get to like Jimmy. Compared to the “testosterone club” in the living room he is a breath of fresh air. Unlike the other men, he helps the ladies in the kitchen, who in turn cannot take their eyes off of him. To their surprise he understands every bit of what they have been talking about him in Spanish in his presence. Jimmy's perfect Spanish skills are an indication of the importance and influence Latin American culture has in Los Angeles and also prove that he is open to it. There is no doubt about Lizzy's appreciation for the boyfriend her daughter picked. Lizzy herself is someone who seeks contact to people regardless of their ethnicity or race. She seems genuinely happy to meet Joey's (and Jimmy's) father at the video store, and when she asks Jimmy where he is from, it is not to find out what ethnicity he is.

LIZZY So where are you from, Jimmy?

JIMMY Uh. I was born in Vietnam.

LIZZY Oh no. That's not what I mean. I mean Gina told me that your family lives in L.A..

JIMMY Yeah, they live on Westminster.

The forthcoming, open-hearted nature of her character represents What's Cooking? 's idea of race relations in Los Angeles rather being about seeking contact than clash. Having met Jimmy's father and knowing that she raised her daughter well, Lizzy is certain that Gina will be accepted by Jimmy's family and thus fills her daughter with confidence.

LIZZY Gina, I met his father at the store yesterday. He's a good man. I think it would be okay.

And she is intuitively right, as we later find out, because when Gina and Jimmy join the rest of the Nguyens at the table after the incident with the gunshot, everyone seems to be quite fond of her, including grandmother Nguyen.

GRANDMOTHER (to the family in Vietnamese) She's adorable. She looks Vietnamese.

Like her mother, Gina is a strong woman who is not afraid to speak her mind. Lizzy and Javier's split led the way to emancipation for the Avila women. They rebel against the stereotypical Mexican machismo demonstrated by the male members of the Avila family. E.g. In the very beginning Gina reminds her mother to make Anthony “get off his flabby but and

- 140 - help” her. This is obviously something the Avila men only reluctantly do.

TONY Uh-huh. Sofie, sweetie, can I have another beer?

TONY'S WIFE Why don't you get it yourself?!

Tony's decision to invite his father over for Thanksgiving is not met with approval by his sister and his mother. Gina tells him how stupid his idea was, while Lizzy is more fierce in her rebuttal:

LIZZY No, no. No! Listen..listen to me. Listen to me. And really hear me this time. He left. And as hard as it is for you, it's better this way. I like it like this.

TONY Well, it's too late because I've asked him now.

LIZZY No, no. You're just going to have to unask him. Unask him. That's it.

When Javier appears on the scene it causes a lot of commotion. He immediately assumes his position as the head of the family, not even noticing that he is not all that welcome. He is keen to reinstate the state of family affairs as it had been before he left. He just wants them “all to be together. That's all.” The Avila women however disapprove of Javier's claiming the center of attention for himself and his telling of dirty, misogynist jokes. Javier's cheerful mood swings when the male guest Lizzy has invited arrives. When Lizzy turns to the task of introducing Daniel to everyone, Javier interrupts her to make sure his presence and the position he claims is known.

LIZZY And this is my daughter's boyfriend Jimmy.

JAVIER(angry) And I'm Javier, her husband. Who are you?

DANIEL I'm a teacher at Elizabeth's school.

While Gina is very appreciative of her mother's new relationship, though a bit unsure how to act around Daniel, her brother Tony is utterly surprised at this revelation. He feels that his mother should have informed him about Daniel. By the time desserts are served it becomes clear how Javier feels about this new information.

LIZZY

- 141 - Pumpkin! Could we have the pumpkin down here? Thank you. Javier, what would you like? Hmm?

JAVIER I want my wife and children back.

LIZZY Javier, this is not the time. Would you like some pie?

JAVIER Good, what about me?!

GINA Dad, you're the one who left.

TONY No, stop right there. You all saw the way that Rosa threw herself at dad last Christmas, ok?

GINA Oh, please, Anthony. Are you really gonna bail on Sofia if some slut walks in right now?

Calamity arises.

JAVIER Oh nonono. It's not right, my wife dating!

HAPUELA Shut up, Javier! Can't you see she's happy now?

Yet, second chances are out of the question. Lizzy has moved on. Their split has empowered her to become more than she had been before. In a one-on-one encounter between her and Javier in the kitchen, she lets him know who truly has the power now and holds the position as head of the family, and it is definitely not Javier.

LIZZY( calm ) Ok. What do yo want me to do? Hmm? What do you expect me to do? The whole time you were gone you never once said you were sorry to me. You never once said you were sorry to the children. ( raises her voice ) What did you think we were thinking?!

JAVIER Ok.

LIZZY Or feeling?!

JAVIER Alright, ok. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I love you. Don't let this one thing destroy the family.

LIZZY No one in this family is destroyed.

Lizzy's process of emancipation since Javier had abandoned the family has made her more

- 142 - aware of her wants and needs. She now knows with certainty that taking back her cheating husband is something she does not want or need to do. While Lizzy has come far in this process, Audre is still at the very beginning. She is not quite sure that her decision to stay with Ronald was right. Her inner turmoil is something Grace picks up on from the beginning but cannot quite put her finger on it. Even though Audre is unsure about acting right, she knows that it has been anything but weak and hence tells her son so when he confronts her.

MICHAEL Mom, you don't have to stay with him. What is wrong with you? Why you acting like this? You're acting so weak.

AUDRE Weak?! Trying to hold this family together is weak?! Sometimes I really have enough of the fucking shit I have to put up with, but you and Kristin mean more to me than that! You tell me how I'm weak!

Grace, who previously found fault with everything Audre said and did (AUDRE to Ronald: “Your mother thinks you shit ice cream. ”), now takes her side, mainly because an intact family is of high value to her.

GRACE Your wife yelled at me.

RONALD Lighten up on Audre, alright? She's under a lot of stress. Please don't do that in front of the company.

GRACE Friends are one thing. When was the last time you all saw the family. Talk to computers that ain't the same thing.

RONALD Mama, let's not start, ok? He's coming back.

GRACE Are you embarrassed by us? All my life I had to put up with white people looking at me funny. And now my own son's gonna do the same, too?

RONALD Oh Mama, please don't be crazy. I mean I've just been busy, that's all.

GRACE Maybe, if you spent more time with our family, Michael would think he was part of something bigger.

Grace confronts Ronald on how he is planning to fix his marriage and also points out to him to “give [Audre] that much respect” and “think about why she's still here”. Although Lizzy and Audre have found themselves in similar situations, they have each chosen their own way

- 143 - of dealing with it. The problems that plague the four Los Angeles families form points of contact, of relating to, since they all have to deal with similar issues. Once again the point is made that the families are equal yet different. The city of Los Angeles rarely comes up as the topic of a conversation in What's Cooking? However, when aunt Beatrice asks Carla how she likes it there, it presents an opportunity to critically analyze the city's changing face.

AUNT BEATRICE I wanna know everything about you. Where were you born? And then where were you living after that? And don't you just love Los Angeles? Is this your first time?

CARLA Umm, no. Actually I've been here once before. I like it. I just don't think I could live here. Everything is so spread out.

HERB Well, it used to be in L.A. Everything was twenty minutes away. Now it's 24 hours a day traffic.

CARLA It must be really hard to meet people.

ART Well, people don't know who their neighbors are anymore.

Three main points of criticism about the city are raised here. First, the vast spread of the city. Second, the huge traffic problems that the world's capital of automobiles is experiencing. And third, the issue of alienation and isolation. The entire movie Crash is based off these three ideas, while here they only find a short mention, only to be relativized in other scenes. The fact that the four families are multiply connected in the movie shows that L.A. may be a small world after all and that it takes nothing but openness and willingness to reach out in order to cross borders and bridges. When the Seelig's dinner conversation moves to politics, Los Angeles is mentioned once again.

AUNT I mean, why did they throw paint on his nice suit? Didn't Rhoades grow up around here?

HERB His father used to own a store around.. around the corner from us. You know what I like about him? He says what he thinks, and he doesn't care about what anybody else says.

ART Come on, dad!

- 144 - AUNT I was born and raised in Fairfax and now I'm afraid to come home. It was never like that before.

ART'S WIFE His entire campaign was playing on people's fears.

UNCLE DAVID You know what I think? I think someone should speak up for the ordinary people. I mean there's a limit to how many foreigners this country can accommodate.

Rachel is about to say something .

RUTH Don't.

AUNT Well, you know what I like about him? He's an honest man. He's not like every other politician.

ART( laughs ) They're all exactly the same. Some are just a little more dangerous than others.

HERB You know, if we don't have some strong leadership in this state, it's gonna collapse on us.

AUNT You know what makes me mad? The graffiti. It makes everything look so ugly. I just....

ART Yeah? Don't you think he's a little extreme?

HERB Well, he should do whatever it takes to stop what's going on. I mean there's uh... there's so many people on welfare. There's drugs, the gangs. C'mon. It's gotta be stopped.

RACHEL But he's a racist anti-gay bigot!

The older Seelig generations lament that nothing in L.A. is the way it had been before. Gangs and drugs are invading the city turning peaceful neighborhoods into places you are afraid to cross at night. While Herb, aunt Beatrice and uncle David see in Governor Rhoades someone who recognizes their concerns and is willing to do something about it, Art, his wife and Rachel see in him someone who is willing to take their fears and use them against them in order to advance in his goals. For instance, Governor Rhoades repudiates the accusation that he is “ punishing the unprivileged ” by stating that he was “ voted by the Californian people. [He is] tired of preferential treatment [and] believe[s] all Californians to be created equally. ” Rhoades conservative take on issues like immigration, affirmative action and gay rights is not

- 145 - met with approval by the younger generations of both the Seelig and Williams family.

RONALD You think Howard's gonna accept someone who doesn't finish what they start? And why do you wanna go clear across the country to isolate yourself at an all black school, anyway?

MICHAEL Why are you always so critical of anything black? You're working for a man who sold out on affirmative action.

RONALD He is saying the same thing I'm saying. Do for yourself. Don't expect anybody else to do it for you.

MICHAEL Ohh, c'mon, dad! There's always been preferential treatment. It just depends on who you know and where you come from. See, what I'm talking about here is access.

RONALD But you don't think your mother and I worked for all this?

MICHAEL I tell you this. If it wasn't for affirmative action, you wouldn't have your boy Colin Powell now, would you?

JAMES Michael, what Mr. Rhoades is saying has nothing to do with being a black or white or Democrat or Republican. It has to do with taking responsibility for your own action.

MONICA Like the way you walked out on mom?

Michael obviously resents the job his Ronald is doing. He feels that not only has his father cheated the family by secretly seeing a woman from work, but he has also betrayed his own people by working for Governor Rhoades. Therefore Michael goes as far as calling his father a hypocrite. The movie gets political again when the hypocrisy of the feast of Thanksgiving is brought to attention by Monica. Asked to name what she is thankful for, she states,

MONICA I'd like to thank our fellow Native Americans who gave us this land in exchange for measles, reservations and casinos, so we can have all that food to celebrate it with.

JAMES Monica, please.

MONICA More like Thankstaking, don't you think?

Thanksgiving, the most traditional American holiday, which is celebrated by the four families

- 146 - in What's Cooking? and a million more families of different ethnic background in Los Angeles and all of the United States, has often been criticized for being whitewashed. The relations between settlers and natives were not nearly as harmonious as presented in the school play at the beginning of the movie. Monica refutes this idea just like the entire film refutes the idyllic image of a family gathering around a fully set table, by portraying disharmony within the families. What's Cooking? elaborates on the meaning of the holiday to the individual families in a parallel-montage scene where the true heads of the families say their blessings. Ruth thanks God for

...bringing us all together on this very special day. And for allowing our children to be happy in whatever way they choose to be. We ask that others are as understanding and tolerant as you are..., her lines hinting that Rachel's sexual orientation is still causing her worries. Lizzy thanks Him for the happiness, perhaps her personal happiness with her life after Javier. Meanwhile Grace's thanks is interrupted by a phone call which indicates that the Williamses' life as a family has fallen short to Ronald's busy schedule in the past. In the Nguyen's home it is the youngest, Joey, who blesses the food. He does this by reciting parts of his text from the school play and including personal wishes(Christmas presents, a telescope, Lakers win the playoff). The fact that it is he who gives thanks, and also what he says, points towards instable authoritative relations within the family. The gunshot that disrupts ongoing discussions in the four households brings us back to one of the dangers that invade L.A.: gang culture. At the very beginning of the movie, when Gary Nguyen is being introduced, we see him acting tough with a price tagger in front of the mirror.

GARY NGUYEN Oh, you're sorry. You're scared now, ain't you? Wanna run like a punk? Go on then, bitch.... ( corrects himself ) ... BIATCH. Run!

His attempts to be strong and cool, however, make him take the entire issue that later arises around his friend's gun too lightly. Gary is not really aware of the danger it poses until his parents confront him.

GARY My friend asked me to hold on to it, alright? He was afraid these guys at school...

DUC It doesn't matter, Gary. How could you bring a gun into the house, huh? It's not a toy! It's not like the movies! How do you think your mom and I would feel if we came home and found you dead, huh?!

TRINH

- 147 - Gary, are you in a gang?

[...]

TRINH Why do you have a gun in our house? Is it Don's? What why? Why? Why does Don have a gun?

GARY Some guys jumped him and took his jacket. He started cussing 'em out and now they're after him. What the hell am I supposed to do? Huh? He's my best friend! I gotta back him up!

DUC Why didn't you tell a teacher?

GARY 'Coz teacher's gonna do shit. They can't protect us after school.

DUC Yeah, but we don't wanna read about you on the newspapers, huh?!

GRANDFATHER We came here to get away from guns and you play with them like toys?!

GARY Grandpa, this is not Vietnam, alright?! You don't know what it's like outside. I'm afraid to go to school. I don't wanna die. I don't wanna be scare... all the time.

JENNY What?! I only found it this morning and that's why I was talking to Luke.

TRINH You talk to a stranger?! And you didn't tell us?!

JENNY Yeah, because we don't talk about stuff like other families do!

Once again L.A.'s state of gang infestation is compared to a war. The older Nguyens have fled Vietnam to “get away from guns”, however they do not realize up until the point when a gun is brought into their home that kids in L.A. have to deal with violence, gangs and guns on the street. In the story arc with the gun What's Cooking ? takes up what Freedom Writers made its main topic. Uncle David's comment after the gunshot shows that in the back of their minds people are well aware of the problems gangs in L.A. cause, even though they may not try to succumb to this fear on an everyday basis.

UNCLE Why do they have to keep a gun in their house? A gun! I'm telling you, Ruthie, before you know it, you're going to have a triad war in this neighborhood. Triad war.

The gunshot has a unifying effect on the neighborhood. Up to then the four families have

- 148 - stayed within their own private realms, each by themselves. The shot however brings them together and eventually makes the want to get to know their nextdoor neighbors. It is the moments without dialogue in What's Cooking?, however, that are the most celebratory of the city's cultural diversity. Take the scenes that display food, for example. The many colorful dishes that are being prepared in the four households appear to serve as a reminder of the many contributions made by different ethnic groups, which have gained the United States a unique status. Although race relations have always been a problematic and intense issue, the United States boasts of being a multicultural country, a nation of many. Yet the common melting pot ideal, which has long been held valid, cannot be detected in What's Cooking? Rather, the various dishes served at Thanksgiving are reminiscent of the ingredients of the salad bowl. Each of the four families adds its own note to traditional recipes giving the food an ethnically-specific taste. In so doing, each of the four Thanksgiving meals retains, just like the ingredients of the salad bowl, its unique flavor. Another scene that strikes a highly positive, celebratory note on ethnic diversity in Los Angeles is the introductory sequence featuring an extended bus ride through the vast cityscape of L.A. This scene also establishes the scope of the entire movie. As the bus passes through Russian, Jewish, Korean, Mexican neighborhoods(easy to recognize due to shop signs in various languages), the people inside the bus vividly interact through conversation, mimics and gestures. There seem to be no signs of alienation among the commuters of the L.A. metropolitan transit system. In this sense the entire bus sequence counters Graham's introductory monologue in Crash and hence Crash 's main message.

Critics & Viewers' Reception

It would have probably been the worst marketing decision ever made, if Gurinder Chadha's independent piece What's Cooking? had not been released in time for Thanksgiving. Playing in 40 theatres across the U.S. it made roughly over one million dollars at the box office and another $600,000 at theatres in the UK, Ireland, Australia, Spain, Malta and Norway. 194 The opening night film at the Sundance Film Festival in 2000, What's Cooking? was nominated for the Humanitas Prize but lost to Love & Basketball, which interestingly enough also starred Alfre Woodard and Dennis Haybert (Audre and Ronald Williams). Speaking of Woodard, she was up as best actress at the Black Reel Awards, which recognize the achievement of African- Americans in film, but unfortunately did not get to go home with the prize. Gurinder Chadha,

194Numbers taken from BoxOfficeMojo http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=whatscooking.htm

- 149 - however, finally managed to win the critics' recognition at the London Critics Circle Film Awards in the category Best Director of the Year. Not having raised too much attention and too many brows at film festivals and award shows, What's Cooking? was still a fascinating subject of critics' interest. The powerful opening shot of a Thanksgiving advertisement on the side of a bus and the subsequent multicultural tour of the city was favoured by reviewers to be a fitting introduction to this comedy-drama.

[It] sweetly and concisely summarizes the movie's message. As the national anthem plays in the background, a turkey slowly comes into focus. The camera pulls back to show us that the turkey is part of a Thanksgiving meal in a Norman Rockwell-style painting on the side of an L.A. city bus. We then cut to the multi-ethnic tapestry of life inside the bus. 195

From this very first scene it becomes clear that the movie will deal with the rainbow of races living together in the City of Angeles. It is characters like the multi-ethnic people on the bus that are taken from the margins of American society and put center stage in What's Cooking? . Taking four ethnically diverse families and showing how they celebrate the most traditional and uniquely American holiday, Chadha's film becomes “a valentine to the cultural diversity that defines Los Angeles as a new kind of city.” 196 Each of the families gives its cultural stamp by preparing the turkey in a different manner and serving different side dishes with it, clearly illustrating the different aspects of American society and, well, the difference between cultures, whereas the conflicts that arise within each of the four families and the way the family members deal with universal issues is meant to point out their similarities. The humanistic approach and the underlying theme of tolerance make the movie more sociologically than cinematically significant. Chadha's aim with this film, as it seems, is to depict the mosaic of American society, where each ethnicity and each of the characters in the movie is like a dot in a large pointillism canvas. With an ensemble cast of over 40 speaking parts, overlapping storylines, and cluttered, noisy scenes the movie can certainly be described as Altmanesque – the influence of the master being only too apparent, though Chadha has still a lot to learn. The casting is probably one of the finest features of the movie, with Mercedes Ruehl(Elizabeth Avila) as a strong matriarch with an impeccable b.s. detector and Alfre Woodard(Audre Williams) as a woman in pain and on the verge of a nervous breakdown, who is just trying to hold her family together. Only Joan Chen(Trinh Nguyen) is over-the-top in her performance of a hysterical mother trying to

195Steve Rhodes http://www.allmoviephoto.com/photo/2000_What's_Cooking_photo.html 196Emanuel Levy , Variety (Posted: Mon., Jan. 24, 2000) http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117775587.html? categoryid=31&cs=1&p=0

- 150 - control her children and preach to them the importance of education and depravity of U.S. consumer culture. The character is reduced to a mere caricature of and Asian-American mother. Other than that we only find little stereotyping – the Latino machismo over household chores and Jewish handwringing over where they went wrong with their daughter exempt – for the characters are vividly drawn and the performances stable and real. The aspects about What's Cooking? met with mostly negative critique were, for one, the soundtrack with its heavily stereotypical ethnic instrumentations and its terribly sweet surfer tunes, two, the at times too overt melodrama, and three, the artificial climax at the end. The gunshot that makes the characters leave their homes and gather on the street, revealing to the audience that the families are nextdoor neighbors, comes across as a rather silly surprising twist, particularly because the consequences of the incident are resolved rather unsatisfactory in their gushy thank-God-nothing-bad-happened-let's-get-back-to-dining chatter. Thus the powerful cleansing effect such unifying elements had in e.g. Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (the surreal rain of frogs), Robert Altman's Short Cuts (earthquake) and not to forget Paul Haggis' Crash (snow) could not be achieved. Even though What's Cooking? may run the danger of being compared to other food movies (Babette's Feast , Like Water For Chocolate and Eat Drink Man Woman ) and disaster Thanksgiving movies( Planes, Trains and Automobiles; Home for the Holidays ) respectively, and fail to live up to their food imagery or clever dialogue, it is the cross-cultural look at this American holiday exercised by Chadha what makes the movie nonetheless stand-out.

What's Cooking? reflects the kind of fascination with L.A. that many outsiders like the director (born in Kenya of Indian descent and educated in London) experience. Los Angeles is a city of the future -- one in which the family is still the central institution of communal life but the definition of family has radically changed. 197

The “outsider's eye” proved more than once that it could provide an accurate depiction of American (sub)urban life – Ang Lee's The Ice Storm and Sam Mendes' American Beauty being the most dazzling examples thereof. Former documentary maker Gurinder Chadha says in an interview that tackling ethnicity and race in film feels easy to her, because

'One of the amazing things about being a director is how your own personality ends up in the film. I happen to be comfortable with who I am, and my perception of the world is in whatever film I make. The direction comes out of who I am - as an Indian British girl from Southall, happily married and with loving parents. It's not just an Indian thing.' 198

197Ibid. 198West Coast's Eastern eye, The Guardian (Sunday 19 August 2001) http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2001/aug/19/features1 (Interview with film-maker Gurinder Chadha)

- 151 - In this interview with The Guardian, Chadha also speaks about her reasons for making this movie,

'Los Angeles is such an exciting city and what I was seeing wasn't really reflected in the scripts I was reading or in the films I'd seen about America. I was intrigued by this picture of a living, breathing city that is culturally shifting to accommodate new influences all the time. Thanksgiving is perfect for exploring the ways people of different cultures experience the most American of holidays.'

and the difficulties she encountered trying to get it financed and eventually marketed,

That cut little ice with salespeople interested only in ethnic niche-marketing. 'Films are usually segregated, in the sense that Waiting to Exhale was all-black, while The Joy Luck Club , say, was all-Chinese. It took me a long while to cotton on to that.' 199

Gurinder Chadha's way of dealing with such a sensitive topic as race is rather refreshing. Race and racial differences are not constantly reiterated in the thoughts and actions of the main characters(as in Crash ), or made an issue that has to be overcome (as in Freedom Writers ). In What's Cooking? race seems to be the premise and not the problem.

[D]ifferences in race or ethnicity are a given, not an issue or problem, and interracial couples are presented in a matter-of-fact way. Unlike Spike Lee's explosive Do the Right Thing , made 10 years ago, What's Cooking? emphasizes coexistence rather than conflict. 200

The Los Angeles Times, which after all should have some authority in reflecting the Angeleno opinion, states in its review of the film that,

Of all the films made about life in contemporary Los Angeles, What's Cooking? could well be the one in which the greatest number of Angelenos recognize themselves. 201

However, this can also be largely attributed to the fact that the charming mood-piece and its likable characters evoke a warm and nostalgic feeling in the viewers.

While L.A. has gotten bad press during the past few years, the cops getting the brunt of the hostile journalism and the country getting the impression that every teen is in a gang, "What's Cooking" provides a nourishing antidote. If the story is banal, the dialogue lacking in sharpness, and the exposition taking forever before Chadha cuts to the chase, the well-acted film is a love poem to the city of angels, making Thanksgiving into a valentine's-day ode to American diversity. 202

199Ibid. 200Emanuel Levy, Variety (Posted: Mon., Jan. 24, 2000) http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117775587.html? categoryid=31&cs=1&p=0 201Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times (November 17, 2000) http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl- movie001116-3,0,4831077.story 202Harvey Karten, http://www.all-reviews.com/videos-2/whats-cooking-3.htm

- 152 - Conclusion

Who are you? It seems people are faced with this simple question repeatedly in today's society. On a day-to-day basis you come to question who you are, redefine it, and, if need be, reinvent yourself. Identity construction is an infinite process. The last few decades were characterized by an ever faster spinning wheel of globalization that would not stop at cultural identity either. A widespread anxiety about global homogenization threatening national identities has taken hold of communities around the world. Kobena Mercer argues that “identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty.” 203 Meanwhile Stuart Hall suggests “three possible consequences of globalisation on cultural identities: erosion, strengthening and the emergence of new identities or 'new ethnicities'” 204 . With these processes unfolding, it should come as no surprise that cosmopolitanism has become a state of mind, a mode of giving meaning in the context of globalization. Multiculturalism and the turn to ethnicity have been discovered as a market for big international business and corporate exploitation: the business of difference. In this context, cosmopolitanism, as defined by Hannerz, means “an orientation, a willingness to engage with the Other [and] entails an intellectual and esthetic openness toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather than uniformity.” 205 The explosive power of media, which has helped connect any part of the world with any other at any given time, has apparently also made everyone a little more cosmopolitan. Yet there are no cosmopolitans without locals. As Gillespie reflects on Hannerz, “for the former, the experience of diversity depends on access to varied cultures, just as locals increasingly feel the need to carve out special niches for their cultures and preserve them from the threat of assimilation and homogenisation” 206 . The steady exchanges between cultures and the movement between differentiation and homogenization, between cosmopolitan and local, adds to an understanding of culture as becoming, not being. It too has to undergo phases of questioning, redefinition and reinvention. Can Americans claim that they stand for one culture or ethnicity as a whole? In complete defiance the claim actually goes in the opposite direction.

203Mercer, Kobena: Welcome to the Jungle: Identity and diversity in postmodern politics. In: Rutherford, Jonathan(ed.): Identity: Community, culture, difference. Lawrence and Wishart, London 1990. p.43 204Gillespie, Marie: Television, ethnicity and cultural change . Routledge, London 2000. p.17 205Hannerz, Ulf: Transnational Connections . Routledge, London 1996. p.103 206Gillespie(2000)p.22

- 153 - The U.S. is a nation that prides itself on the coherence and orderliness of the internal differences and invests deeply in the mythology of a variety of different ethnic groups in peaceful co- existence. 207

However there are tensions between the image of American culture as all-incorporating and the reality of a fragmented and diffused society. The promise of American pluralism has been a desirable part of the American Dream. But when the idea that people of all ethnic backgrounds could live together in one country and produce a culturally diverse environment was developed, no one apparently accounted for racism and other cultural maladies. One medium that readily and repeatedly engages in a discourse on the abysmal race relations and tensions that underlie the “façade of American life” is cinema.

In post-classical Hollywood ethnicity is a discourse spoken with increasing sophistication in the interests of cultivating ethnic nostalgia or as a means of evading more contentious social differences at a time when we openly identify our society as a 'multiculture'. 208

Yet films can offer much more. Films about race are “[s]haped by a dialectic of anxiety and hope”, they have the power to “revive and manipulate fears and anxieties about the social order” 209 . At the same time, as cultural texts films contain “kernels of utopian fantasy [...] whereby the medium constitutes itself as a projected fulfillment of what is desired and absent within the status quo” 210 . Thus ideological and utopian elements can be found in any film, the three that have been examined are no exception. In a world where “white identity has managed to assume normativeness” 211 and a central position which has left it “underinterrogated” and mostly undefined, ethnic identity is valued for the sake of its opposition. Whiteness is a relational category that acquires meaning by positioning the Other(s) at its borders. Hence whiteness is dependent on this notion of Otherness. Nonetheless, as Richard Dyer notes, “[p]ower in contemporary society habitually passes itself off as embodied in the normal as opposed to the superior” 212 . While power is something people are drawn to and aspire to, unequal power relationships still persist. Even though some multiculturalist U.S. policies may generate interminority inequalities, the arguing for an end of racial differences and an assimilation to the golden norm of whiteness only reaffirms white

207Negra, Diane: Off-White Hollywood: American culture and ethnic female stardom . Routledge, London 2001. p.3 208Ibid.p.17 209Denzin(2002)p.149 210Shohat Ella & Stam, Robert: Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the media. Routledge, London 1995. p.352 211Young, Lola: Fear of the Dark: 'Race', Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema . Routledge, London 1996. p.181 212Dyer, Richard: White . In: Simpson, Utterson & Shepherdson(ed.): Film theory: Critical concepts in media and cultural studies. Routledge, London 2004.

- 154 - power. Instead of claims of racial supremacy, racism can now come in the form of an appeal to cultural uniformity. Where do the three films presented in this thesis fit in this tangled web of power relationships, globalization and cultural identities? And what does it have to do with the city of Los Angeles? Los Angeles has proven to be like a magic-eight ball. Society's worst fears and greatest hopes have been projected onto it in the past. No other place on earth has heaven and hell so close to one another. In the past this dichotomous relationship inspired writers and filmmakers alike. At the same time Los Angeles is home to people from various racial and ethnic backgrounds making it a microcosm of the country and even the world. Wherever you are in L.A. there seems to be diversity – not only ethnic, but also in terms of age, economics, politics, education, sexual orientation etc. Thus it serves as a crystal ball for sweeping changes that will occur nationwide. In a way the city is a trend-setter. Like rapper Ice-T once said commenting on the L.A. riots, “Los Angeles is a microcosm of the United States. If L.A. falls, the country falls." Positioned at the west end of the continent, it can both signify the cutting edge and the cutting end of the American Dream. The three movies central to this thesis – Crash , Freedom Writers and What's Cooking? - give different perspectives on the city and race relations in general. Although some themes reoccur in all three, each deals with them differently.

The cinematic apparatus creates and constitutes its own version of reality, its own imagine sense of moral community, and the world out there. A film is to be judged not by its truthfulness, or its falsity, or its genuineness: rather, in terms of the moral meanings and cultural identities it allows us to see, and recognize, and take as our own. 213

Haggis' film exposes that African Americans (and other ethnic others) still have a subordinate status in dominant white capitalist society. Anthony's radical thoughts bare that. Although his own double-standards show that his kind of black nationalism and separatism may not be the way forward, “assimilation into whiteness may not be the way to go either” 214 , as Cameron's character illustrates. As Anthony in Crash and other characters in the hood movies of the 1980s and 90s lament, no sacred safe black (and brown) public sphere exists. Moreover, media images suggest that the harsh social conditions of the hood and barrios and the inherent violence in form of gangs, guns and drugs threaten to spill over into white middle-class neighborhoods compromising the public spaces of white everyday life.

213Denzin(2002)p.74 214Chan, Sylvia & Chang, Jeff: Can White Hollywood Get Race Right? AlterNet July 19, 2005 http://www.alternet.org/ movies/23597/

- 155 - Those who embody otherness and difference are often the focus for the projection of white societies' rages, fears and anxieties .215

Yet at the same time the historical and political oppression of darker-skinned individuals is to blame for inequalities marring their present social conditions. Thus nerves are frazzled on both white and ethnic side. They result in suspicion, prejudice, discrimination, and ultimately fragmentation and alienation. Los Angeles – a fragmented city. Crash focusses on racism as prejudice. The film's conflict is reduced to “a dispute between personalities, to personal and group bigotry, not the larger structures of institutional racism.” 216 But racism cannot be attributed to a single factor, such as personal prejudice or the machinery of capitalistic greed. Rather, it is a complex interweaving of many factors. Nonetheless, Crash chooses to highlight this one particular factor – prejudice. Through its arc of false assumptions and redemptions the film shows that not one single character, be it white or dark-skinned, is solely good or solely bad, for they are all united in their bigotry. Yet classic Hollywood traditions still demand at least an abstract form of the good-bad binary position 217 . Prejudice and racism therefore function as the structuring other, as the invading evils that need to be fought. The adversary the Freedom Writers are faced with is the repetitive cycle of institutional racism that generates a hostile environment, a world that is defined by police, gangs, prison and random, senseless murders. Even though the film Freedom Writers builds on the liberal assumption that a privileged white woman can solve the problems of the marginalized, its realistic delivery of the problems that plague ethnic working-class youth in the hoods far away from all the glitz and glamor of Hollywood(the metonym, not the district), makes up for some of its naïveté and idealism. This can partly be attributed to the filmmakers being truly interested in the troubled teenagers as individuals instead of merely their dysfunction. State authorities tend to deal with problems such as gangs from a security perspective instead of a social perspective. This kind of approach however seldom produces effective solutions. Erin's model solution certainly did not lack said social perspective, yet it only worked on an individual level. Nevertheless, Erin succeeded in creating a safe environment for her students, something that seemed unfathomable to them in the beginning, and hence she proved that it

215Young(1996)p.183 216Denzin(2002)p.160 217 The binary good-evil position reflects the need to identify an “other” by an act of exclusion. This binary position in relation to ethnicity in cinema has in recent films moved away from attaching the role of the “bad guy” to the ethnic other as it was most evidently the case in the early Western (bad Indians) and war genre. A multiculturalist view has been adopted in films like Emmerich's Independence Day (1996), where outside or abstract threats take up the role of the structuring other(e.g., in Emmerich's film, aliens).

- 156 - can be done. The optimistic notion of the movie that although there are horrid problems, these can be solved if people bond and work together is reflected in its title song I have a Dream by Common featuring will.i.am. Lines like “ hate has no color or age/ flip the page/ now my rage became freedom right/ write dreams in the dark/ they far, but I can see em/ I believe in heaven more than hell/ blessings more than jail/ In the ghetto, let love prevail ” or the chorus “ I got a dream, we gonna work it out oh oh ” capture the message of Freedom Writers that not all is lost. Still, political relations, particularly that of race and ethnicity, are subject to continual negotiation, and as such deserve attention and should not be neglected to sink to the abyss of society. The third movie in the row, What's Cooking? , supplements Crash 's dark tone and Freedom Writers ' curious mix of idealism and harsh realism in a way that strikes a celebratory note on multicultural life in Los Angeles. The movie focuses on both the differences and similarities that families from different ethnic backgrounds experience in this increasingly multicultural country. Director Gurinder Chadha noted that she had wanted to make a movie about Los Angeles that depicted the normality of ethnic diversity and showed something other than the sanitized versions of the city that were usually shown (Beverly Hills, Baywatch beaches). The Los Angeles of her film is not only diverse but also seems to be much more integrated than other motion pictures have portrayed it. In What's Cooking? each family creates their own version of the all-American holiday of Thanksgiving. The film shows that each ethnic group thereby retains their own culinary tradition, thus highlighting difference between the families. Although Chadha falls a bit short on sufficiently nuancing the Nguyens, What's Cooking? portrays the four ethnic American families in multidimensional terms, showing their troubles and dilemma as well as their virtues and vigor, all the while drawing up similarities between them. It demonstrates the promise of a functioning yet not unflawed mixed-race America. If there is one thing these three movies share, then it is the fact that while none of them tries to disguise that there can be conflict where different cultures meet, it can still be resolved. If people are open-minded, solutions may come to them. In spite of this information each film preserves a certain version of the status quo. Individuals not social structures and cultures change. Yet regardless of that these three movies entice the audience to reexamine their opinions and stereotypes about people of other ethnic backgrounds and critically assess the state of race relations in Los Angeles and all of the United States. In a 2005 interview about race in movies following the success of Crash , Sylvia Chan, Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnic Studies at the University of Berkeley, stated:

- 157 - “This is the type of narrative Hollywood needs to be putting out there right now – the black man as the symbol for our nation, the guy who's going to provide order for not only the U.S., but for the world. And let's be real: this isn't happening in real life.” 218

Well, it is happening. Barack Obama is President of the United States and the first African- American to hold the office. The country is torn between an image of pluralist capitalism, where people of all races and ethnic backgrounds work and shop together in this multicultural America, on the one side, and policies that back Sam Huntington's “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, which asserts that Americans “must claim [their] white 'western' heritage to maintain America's global power against threatening 'Islamic' and 'Sinic' [...] culture” 219 and the threat from within – Latinos, on the opposite side. Caught in this moral divide, race relations remain something that should not be taken lightly. Rather, they should be given attention and constantly be worked on. After all any relationship requires work. Keeping this and L.A.'s precognitive character in mind, a close eye ought to be kept on how both Hollywood and independently produced movies portray race relations and issues of ethnicity. Perhaps it could ultimately shed more light into the abyss and thus open our minds.

218Chan & Chang(2005) 219Ibid.

- 158 - Bibliography

Video Material

● Crash (2004) – written and directed by Paul Haggis

● Freedom Writers (2007) directed by Richard LaGravenese, adapted screenplay written by Richard LaGravenese, based on the book The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them

● Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) - written and directed by Thom Andersen and narrated by Encke King. Transcript available at: http://filmkritik.antville.org/stories/1071484/

● What's Cooking? (2000) written by Gurinder Chadha and Paul Mayeda Berges, directed by Gurinder Chadha

Secondary Literature

● 2. International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination . New York, 7 March 1966 . Part I, Article 1.1

● Aguirre, Adalberto Jr. & Turner, Jonathan H.(ed.): American Ethnicity . McGraw-Hill, Fairfield 1998.

● Alba, Richard & Nee, Victor: Remaking the American Mainstream – Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration . Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 2003.

● Anderson, Thom: Collateral Damage: Los Angeles Continues to Play Itself . In: CinemaScope, Issue 20 (summer 2004).

● Andersen, Thom: Contempt for the Hometown: Hollywood – the movies vs. the city. Los Angeles Times, May 21, 2006.

● Andrews, William L.(ed.): The Oxford companion to African American literature. Oxford Univ. Press, New York 1997.

● Banks, James & Banks, Cherry: Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education . Jossey-Bass, San Francisco 2004.

● Banham, Reyner: Los Angeles: The architecture of four ecologies . University of California Press, Berkeley 2001.

● Bolaffi, Guido et al.(ed.): Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity and Culture . Sage, London 2003.

● Butler, Johnella E.(ed.): Color-Line to Borderlands – The Matrix of American Ethnic Studies . University of Washington Press, Seattle and London 2001.

● Cheung, King-Kok(ed.): An interethnic companion to Asian American literature . Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 1997.

● Chiu, Philip K.: The myth of the model minority . U.S. News & World Report (May 16, 1988)

● Davies, Jude & Smith, Carol R.: Gender, Ethnicity and Sexuality in Contemporary American Film . Keele University Press, Edinburgh 1997. ● Davis, Mike: City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Random House Inc, New York 1992.

● Davis, Mike: Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster . Metropolitan Books, New York 1998.

● Denzin, Norman K.: Reading Race . Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, 2002.

● Diawara, Manthia(ed.): Black American Cinema . Routledge, New York 1993.

● Didion, Joan: Slouching towards Bethlehem . Washington Square Press, New York 1981.

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● During, Simon(Ed.): The Cultural Studies Reader (Second Edition). Routledge, New York 1999.

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Websites (all website links have been checked for actuality on May 18, 2010)

● http://abstractnonsense.wordpress.com/2006/10/09/different-forms-of-racism/ [Different Forms of Racism]

● http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jun/05/entertainment/ca-schulberg5?pg=7 [Parick Goldstein, How Sammy Still Runs, Los Angeles Times, June 05,2005]

● http://cbs2.com/local/Mayor.Antonio.Villaraigosa.2.900448.html [CBS News, Los Angeles Crime Rate Lowest Since 1961, January 05,2009]

● http://dailyheadlines.uark.edu/1135.htm [University of Arkansas Daily Headlines, University Of Arkansas Researcher Wins Fulbright Scholarship To Study Impact Of Colonialism On Latin America, April 25, 2000]

● http://factfinder.census.gov [U.S. Census Bureau]

● http://filmkritik.antville.org/stories/1071484/ [Los Angeles Plays Itself Transcript]

● http://laanenetwork.laane.org/laane/docs/research/Poverty_Jobs_and_the_Los_Angeles_E conomy.pdf [Los Angeles Allegiance for a New Economy, Poverty Jobs and the Los Angeles Economy, August 28,2007]

● http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/ [Fortune 500 listings]

● http://nisee.berkeley.edu/northridge/ [Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, University of California Berkeley - about the Northridge Earthquake]

● http://notebook.lausd.net/pls/ptl/docs/PAGE/CA_LAUSD/LAUSDNET/OFFICES/COM MUNICATIONS/08-09ENGFINGERTIPFACTS.PDF [Facts about the LAUSD]

● http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/ha/docs/Insurance1864-05.xls [Los Angeles County Health Survey – Types of Insurance] ● http://treaties.un.org/doc/Treaties/1969/03/19690312%2008-49%20AM/Ch_IV_2p.pdf [2. International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination . New York, 7 March 1966 . Part I, Article 1.1]

● http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N08492271.htm [Reuters, Police target 11 worst Los Angeles street gangs, February 09,2007]

● http://www.alternet.org/movies/23597/ [Chan, Sylvia & Chang, Jeff: Can White Hollywood Get Race Right? AlterNet July 19, 2005] ● http://www.american.edu/TED/mono.htm [Case Study: The Los Angeles Aqueduct and the Owens and Mono Lakes]

● http://www.bestbuddies.org/best-buddies/mission-vision [official website for the Best Buddies program]

● http://www.blackmaskmagazine.com/bm_15.html [Mike Valerio, THE GREAT WRONG PLACE: Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles at 70]

● http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-ca-125realla21may21,0,443648.story [Thom Andersen, HOLLYWOOD | THE MOVIES VS. THE CITY: Contempt for the hometown, Los Angeles Times, May 21,2006]

● http://www.chasingthefrog.com/reelfaces/freedomwriters.php [Freedom Writers: Questioning the Story - comparison of movie and reality]

● http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs20/ar_andersen_collat.htm [Anderson, Thom: Collateral Damage: Los Angeles Continues to Play Itself . In: CinemaScope, Issue 20 summer 2004.]

● http://www.city-data.com/us-cities/The-West/Los-Angeles-Economy.html [city data about Los Angeles economy]

● http://www.colorlines.com/article.php?ID=101&p=1 [Bob Wing, “Educate to Liberate!”: Multiculturalism and the Struggle for Ethnic Studies . Colorlines magazine, summer 1999]

● http://www.cpec.ca.gov/FiscalData/CACountyEconGraph.asp?D=Literacy&C=19 [Postsecondary Education Commission: California County Comparison - Fiscal, Economics, and Population - Graphs - Adult Illiteracy in Los Angeles County]

● http://www.cpec.ca.gov/StudentData/CACGRCounty.asp [Postsecondary Education Commission: College-Going Rates by County]

● http://www.crashfilm.com/ [Official website for the movie Crash]

● http://www.culturalsavvy.com/understanding_american_culture.htm [Joyce Millet, Understanding American Culture From Melting Pot to Salad Bowl]

● http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2007/05/07/crash-and-the-city/ [Paul Gormley, Crash and the City. May 7, 2007.]

● http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/19/news/mayor.php [John M. Broder, A Los Angeles lesson in ethnic coalition politics, The New York Times, Friday, May 20, 2005]

● http://www.lachamber.com/index.php? submenu=about&src=gendocs&ref=about_aboutchamber&category=about [Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce] ● http://www.lacity.org/CAO/Appendix_A.pdf [official website of the City of Los Angeles]

● http://www.laedc.org/reports/LAStats-2007.pdf [Los Angeles County conomic Development Corporation statistics for 2007]

● http://www.lahsa.org/docs/homelesscount/2007/Los%20Angeles%20Continuum%20of %20Care.pdf [Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority 2007 GREATER LOS ANGELES HOMELESS COUNT]

● http://www.lahsa.org/shelterandinstitutioncount.asp [Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority shelter and institution count]

● http://www.lapdcrimemaps.org/ [Los Angeles Police Department Crime Maps]

● http://www.lapdonline.org/crime_maps_and_compstat/pdf_view/40460 [Los Angeles Police Department CRIME AND ARREST WEEKLY STATISTICS 2008]

● http://www.lapdonline.org/get_informed/content_basic_view/23466 [Los Angeles Police Department: Introduction to Gangs]

● http://www.lapl.org/ [official website of the Los Angeles Public Library]

● http://www.latimes.com/news/local/crime/homicidemap/ [Los Angeles Times homicide report updated daily]

● http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/2-Million-Plus-Angelenos-on-Welfare-Public- Aid.html [NBC Local News, 2-Million-Plus Angelenos on Welfare, Public Aid, February 22,2009]

● http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/jtf/JTF_LACountyJTF.pdf [useful facts about Los Angeles County]

● http://www.scgsgenealogy.com/storage/Northrup3.pdf [William M. Mason, Los Angeles Under The Spanish Flag: Spain’s New World]

● http://www.usc.edu/libraries/archives/la/watts.html [USC reference to the 1965 Watts riots]

● http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs0/668/overview.htm [National Drug Intelligence Center - California Central District Drug Threat Assessment]

● http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs23/23937/dtos.htm [National Drug Intelligence Center -Los Angeles High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Drug Market Analysis June 2007]

● http://www.wccusd.k12.ca.us/elcerrito/history/prop13.htm [Joel Fox, The Truth About Proposition 13 and the California Tax Revolt]

● http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/HIDTA/overview.html [Office of National Drug Control Policy - The High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Program: An Overview] Movie reviews and box office statistics (all online)

● David N. Butterworth , Crash movie review http://www.robomod.net/pipermail/rec-arts- movies-reviews/2005-July/000136.html

● James Berardinelli, Freedom Writers movie review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=445

● John Anderson, Freedom Writers movie review, Variety (Jan. 3, 2007) http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117932389.html?categoryid=31&cs=1&p=0

● Kevin Crust, Freedom Writers movie review, Los Angeles Times (January 5, 2007) http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-et-freedom5jan05,0,168001.story

● Norm Schrager, Freedom Writers movie review http://www.contactmusic.com/new/film.nsf/reviews/freedomwriters

● Box office statistics for Crash http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=crash05.htm

● Box office statistics for Freedom Writers http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/? id=freedomwriters.htm

● Box office statistics for What's Cooking?http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/? id=whatscooking.htm

● Internet Movie Database Information about Crash's awards http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375679/awards

● Manohla Dargis, To Ms. With Love: A Teacher’s Heart Fords a Social Divide , New York Times, (January 5,2007) http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/01/05/movies/05free.html

● Ruthe Stein, Steely Swank inspires writers in moving true story , San Francisco Chronicle, (Friday, January 5,2007) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi? f=/c/a/2007/01/05/DDG8RNCDHB1.DTL

● Scott Tobias, (May 10, 2005) http://www.avclub.com/articles/crash,4543/

● Kevin Murphy, http://www.tiscali.co.uk/entertainment/film/review/films/crash/879

● Alan Dale, Paul Haggis' Crash : First the Bad News , (Jul, 19 2005) http://blogcritics.org/video/article/paul-haggiss-crash-first-the-bad/

● West Coast's Eastern eye , The Guardian (Sunday 19 August 2001) http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2001/aug/19/features1 (Interview with film-maker Gurinder Chadha)

● Emanuel Levy, What's Cooking? movie review, Variety (Posted: Mon., Jan. 24, 2000) http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117775587.html?categoryid=31&cs=1&p=0

● Kevin Thomas, What's Cooking? movie review, Los Angeles Times (November 17, 2000) http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-movie001116-3,0,4831077.story

● Steve Rhodes, What's Cooking? movie review http://www.allmoviephoto.com/photo/2000_What's_Cooking_photo.html

● Liz Hoggard, Colour code , The Observer, (Sunday 7 August 2005) http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/aug/07/features.review

● Philip French, Hollywood's last taboo , The Observer (Sunday 14 August 2005) http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/aug/14/philipfrench