Upon A Second Glance

Since the first humans came into existence, racism and bigotry has plagued and corrupted our every thought, making us fearful, and as a result, hateful, to anything that differs from our status quo. There has long been a saying that even if we humans were to wake up one morning to discover everyone was of the same, race, creed, religion, and color, we would find a reason to hate each other by noon.



There is, however, a silver lining in the perpetual cloud of intolerance. Humans, though often irrational and fanatical as a whole, are essentially a mixture of both light and dark, and are individually equipped with the infinite potential to do both good and evil. We all have the ability to trade in our biases and hatred for something much more positive, and this fact is demonstrated no better that in Tony Kaye’s award winning masterpiece, American History X. This film smashed the precedent set by most American films of the time that difficult and contentious topics are best left to documentaries, and that any ending that doesn’t end with the tell-tale happily ever after has no place outside of the horror genre. American History X jumps right into the deep end of today’s most controversial, but rarely discussed, issue of race, and navigates through it with intelligence and, for the most part, psychosomatic plausibility



As far as the plot was concerned, none could have illustrated the transformation from destructivity and hate-induced militancy to enlightenment so smoothly than that of this film. In the opening, we are introduced to narrator through the elegant words of his paper, and later find out that it was a an assignment forced upon him by his principle for being apparently sympathetic to the third Reich and praising Hitler’s Mein Komf in a book report. From there we become acquainted with our narrator’s charismatic older brother and idol, an up and coming Skinhead bent on the destruction of everything that was not ‘white, Protestant, and American’. We learn of the brother’s deep seated racist roots that traced all the way back to the subtle prejudices of their father, and eventually reached full boil when he was killed by a black gangster while trying to put out a fire in a crack house. We, as the audience, trail behind Danny Vineyard with a mixture of tear stained cheeks and rage filled shouts, following him along the winding roads of murder, prison, and redemption. We are filled with immeasurable pride when he triumphantly faces the demons of his hatred, and our hearts break along with his when tragedy once again shatters his world.



It is these roller coaster ride of emotions that make this film truly stand out among the rest, and ties the watcher to the true message of the movie This film not only explores the underlying racism among America’s white middle class, and the resulting real life uprising of the neo-Nazi Skin head’s, but causes the reader to look deeper into the similar vices that may very well lead to their own destruction.