I developed a fascination with gangs in my early teens. I'd love to tell you some dramatic tale of a childhood brush with gang violence, or a friend tragically lost to gangs, but the truth is that my first exposure to any kind of "real" picture of gangs was almost certainly through the media. I watched gang movies, listened to gangster music, and collected small tidbits of actual information from news articles that solemnly clucked their tongue at a generation of young black men lost to violence.
What interested me was not the destruction of it, but the way in which these young men seemed to build a kind of order out of the disorder of their environment. Bloody and terrible, certainly, but with clear rules, and a structure of leadership and authority that came from no external source. Power, leadership and small-group dynamics can be observed in endless variation on the streets, and everyone from CEOs to 4-star generals would probably recognize some of the tactics employed by gang leaders to maintain their authority.
What further fascinated me
was the sheer level of disenfranchisement that allowed gangs to
continue to look like the most attractive lifestyle for so many young
men. From the perspective of my middle-class lifestyle in San Francisco
it seemed impossible to imagine that a few hundred miles away there
existed a virtual war zone, and yet there could be no other way to
describe South Central LA in the 90s. I knew exactly enough to know
that I could not possibly understand what that life was like, and the
only thing that was abundantly clear to me was that the government and
the police had done more to create this problem than to solve it. It
was from the futility of the drug war and the absolute tragedy of the
Rodney King riots that the first seeds of my political radicalism began
to grow.
17 years later, it's strangely nostalgic to watch Stacy Peralta's excellent documentary "Made In America," which covers the history of the Crips and Bloods in LA. The story is told by reaching forward and backwards at the same time, interposing interviews with young gang members between footage of the Watts Riots and stories of the first African Americans who came to LA seeking to escape the oppressive racism of the south. The message is clear: What happened to South Central was a slowly descending spiral of violence and unrest, fueled by racism and systemic oppression. There is a past which led these people to this point, and seeing it play out in news clips and interviews it is not hard to imagine how so many young men came of age with a sense of futility so powerful that guns and drugs seemed like the only choice, so powerful that prison seemed like an inevitable step along the way.
Peralta, who directed the brilliant skateboarding documentary "Dogtown and Z-Boys," employs a heavy hand when telling this story. Sometimes that works, but other times it gets in the way of the story. The dramatic soundtracking with gangster rap lends a sense of urgency and reality to the story being told, it's hard not to be affected by hearing a singer rant about the inescapable ghetto while the camera pans across the grungy, broken down streets that are the origin of all that anger. On the other hand, a sequence of women weeping while the names of their dead sons, brothers and nephews flash across the screen seems maudlin and overdone, you can't help but wonder if these women were prodded until they wept in order to produce a better shot.
Perhaps the single most striking moment in the film is the dry recitation of a single fact in the opening minutes of the film: In the last 4 decades, gang violence in LA has claimed more lives than the conflict in Northern Ireland. This is a striking comparison, especially when you consider that Northern Ireland is a country of 1.6 million people, and South Central has less than a third that many residents.
The interviews in the film are mostly with gang members, former gang members and gang intervention activists. Peralta makes an interesting choice to leave law and order essentially unrepresented in the film, with the exception of archival footage. Ultimately, I think this choice is one of the things that makes "Made in America" stand out from other documentaries on gangs. This isn't a documentary about the war on drugs or the war on gangs, this is a history of how gang culture was created and how the community of South Central struggles to right itself after so many years of warfare.
You shouldn't turn to "Made In America" if you want an unbiased look at the gang culture in our country, Peralta comes in with an agenda and he's not shy about it, but don't let bias turn you away from an excellent documentary. There's no glamorization or romanticizing of gang culture, but Peralta does examine his subjects with a kind of empathy and concern rarely shown to them. Ultimately the goal of the film is not simply to educate the viewer on the history of gangs, but to pass that same empathy and concern through the camera lens. It's an admirable mission, and overall a successful one, which makes "Made In America" a film worth passing on. Go watch it, it's worth the time.
