AMERICAN HISTORY X.
“May you embrace, in spirit, the companion your attrition keeps you from embracing in body!”
“all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
The windows are black. One by one white droplets form & gasp, clinging close as the howling wind licks them up.
You watched American History X at 4am this morning. Primed to rewatch due to the contemporary BLACK LIVES MATTER protests, American History X stars Edward Norton as neo-Nazi skinhead, Derek Vinyard. Derek’s firefighter father (the inherited rot of his racism) is shot & killed by African-American drug dealers. This formative event mutates, transforming the young, innocent & suggestable Derek’s loss into an efflorescent racial prejudice, that would be beautiful if it wasn't so terrible. Thus this no-longer X History manifests into a defining action: the murder of two black men during the attempted robbery of Derek’s deceased father’s truck — First you took my father’s life, but not his memory!
Violent retribution is hard to predict or measure when an individual's history is marked by unresolved X’s. The killings are quick & without pause; face-painted with a dimpled rictus of pleasure & rage. Edward Norton's schizo method-acting, reaped in his seminal debut, Primal Fear, gets an injection of Greek with his classically buff & hairless torso cropped by pure white boxers & inked by a jet Swastika on one big breast. A further injection of tragedy drips from a needle in the arbitrary transfusion of death onto loved ones, when blood hearts & biassed minds are provoked. Made manifest in the death of his miraculously reformed brother Danny in the film's epilogue.
American History X's infamous scene shows the last gun-shot wounded perpetrator, found lying on the imagined green of suburbia, as Derek walks towards him — under the big & slow tones of black, white & orchestral — with unnerving vengeance in his eyes. Detached & determined, Derek drags the man to the footpath, orders him to bite down on the kerb, says “Say goodnight!”, & in quick-fire succession, Derek’s foot comes down snap & hard on the back of the victim's skull with Derek’s younger brother, Danny, looking on in horror. Loop.