The (Im)Possibilities of Life and the (Im)Possibilities of Death: Liminality, Identity, and Cyclical Violence in Menace II Society
Written by Lis Riveros
Edited by Flavie Deveaux
For the characters of Allen and Albert Hughes' insightful 1993 film Menace II Society (Menace), death is not an abstract concept; it is seldom escapable, and few choices are given to its characters that are not self-destructive. As the question is not whether the film's antiheroes, Caine Lawson and Kevin “O-Dog” Anderson, will die, but rather how and when, Menace seeks to show how senseless and arbitrary life becomes when the cycles of poverty, brutality, and marginalisation are perpetuated. To this end, Menace serves as a cinematic prism that vividly portrays the complexities of life in the inner city, where the spectre of violence and the quest for identity loom large, as can be analysed through the works of several authors. Firstly, Charis Kubrin’s “I See Death Around the Corner: Nihilism in Rap Music” is deployed to explore the creation of street codes for the maintenance of hierarchical structures. Secondly, Jan Mohamed's “The Culture of Social Death” underscores the characters’ constant struggle for survival and the psychological impact of living in a state of liminality, where Caine and O-Dog teeter on the precipice between life and death, meat and flesh. Thirdly, The film's adept use of gangsta rap, primarily the songs of MC Eiht and N.W.A, are analysed through Anahid Kassabian’s three modes of rap to underline the nihilism and fatalism of the gangsta rap genre as described by Kubrin. Lastly, Guthrie P. Ramsey’s “Scoring a Black Nation: Music, Film, and Identity in the Age of Hip-Hop” concludes to recognise the difference between cinematic entertainment and the “truth” of lived experience.
In tracing and rearticulating images of the hood, Menace utilises the Black urban male body to mark a conscribed site of violence, one limited to the clearly identified geography it inhabits. Opening with an invasive, birds-eye view documenting the Watts Riots of 1965, the film connects its anti-heroes’ crime-infected lives and the overarching social causes that produce generations of poverty and violence.1 By deeming the riots as the moment when hope and optimism fled — “When the riots stopped, the drugs started” — Caine's actions are framed as resulting from his internalisation of the institutional boundaries placed on his very existence.2 In this sense, though acting as the film's narrator, Caine is as much a spectator as he is the audience. The use of Crenshaw Boulevard signs that appear before and above a street light turning red suggests a key signification within the film: travel is not permitted beyond a certain point.3 By juxtaposing the two signs before a scene in which Caine is shot and his cousin is fatally wounded, the film suggests the limitations of movement both outside and within the hood. Thus, a paradox exists in the Black-man-driven automobile: while it promises freedom and mobility, it also signifies death as figured through drive-by shootings and car-jackings.4
The omnipresence of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), beginning with an approval to use “whatever force necessary,” is ubiquitous to the aura of surveillance present throughout the film.5 As Caine and O-Dog are stopped and questioned by the LAPD for driving the wrong car in the wrong place, the two are beaten and taken out of the hood to be dropped off in a neighbouring Mexican-American barrio. This Othering illuminates the presumption of criminality attributed to young African-American men based on their location — such individuals are unjustly labelled as criminals by being outside the hood.6 The police anticipate violence when they abandon the duo outside their neighbourhood, highlighting how boundaries can be employed to perpetuate interracial conflicts. Caine and O-Dog, placed beyond their recognisable experiential boundaries, anticipate adverse outcomes.7
Familial life in the hood and the creation of quasi-families is embodied through Caine — an orphan raised by his grandparents since the age of seven, wherein his drug-hustling father was killed and his mother overdosed soon thereafter. One thus gets the impression from Menace that the “game of life” was rigged from the start. As a mere child, Caine witnesses his father kill a man; it is no shock, Caine narrates, that he learns to kill, nor when Caine introduces a young man to his first gun. In response to his abandonment, Caine engages in a substitute social order governed by a code — a street code — and rituals of authenticity.8 Noted by Kubrin, at the heart of street culture is the issue of respect, defined as being treated right or granted the deference one deserves.9 In the inner city, respect often forms the core of the person's self-esteem, mainly when alternative avenues of self-expression may be closed. As the film’s main characters grow up in distressed communities, they become cognisant of the constraints of their existence, either through first-hand experience of material obstacles, such as a lack of educational and job opportunities, or through the direct observation of family members and friends struggling to make it.10 Having witnessed death since birth, it becomes easier for men like O-Dog and Caine to convey that the activity they engage in “aint no big deal.”11
The characters of Menace are therefore caught in an aporetic zone between the (im)possibilities of life and the (im)possibilities of death, in which the threat of death is a constant reign over the bodies of the young Black men.12 Between the drive-by shootings, LAPD assaults, and curb-stompings, Caine and O-Dog live in a constant death sentence with the prospect of such commutation being withdrawn unpredictably, together constituting the precarious nature of the subject-position occupied by the death-bound-subject.13 It is in this position that the “limbo” of JanMohamed’s writing emerges in the film: the young Black man is socially dead in that he has no sociopolitical presence as a subject or citizen in the police society, and he is socially dead in that he can be killed without the commitment of a homicidal or sacrilegious transgression.14 In the film's opening moments, Caine and O-Dog step into a convenience store to grab 40s. It ends with the two store owners, a middle-aged Korean couple who had warily watched Caine and O-Dog's every move, starkly dead. Caine puts it wisely: “Went into the store just to get a beer, came out an accessory to murder and armed robbery… It's funny like that in the hood sometimes. You never knew what was gonna happen — or when.”15 Such quote underscores the lack of agency and control that the characters have over their lives — the characters have little say in whether they will be exposed to violence or become perpetrators. O-Dog's ruthless killing of the store owner starkly illustrates how life and death-decisions are made in a split second within this perilous environment.
As O-Dog, flexing the tape of the shooting at the Korean store says, “I'll be a big-ass star,” the intricate interplay of power dynamics and individual agency come to fruition.16 There is a power in being the watcher and not the watched — that is the subtext of all surveillance footage. The act of violence, even captured on a surveillance tape, can be perceived as a means to attain a level of recognition and notoriety within a community that often feels overlooked or disenfranchised.17 This profoundly unsettling notion underscores how violence may become a distorted path to empowerment and visibility for some individuals.18 O-Dog does not want to destroy the tape; he wants to watch it. Beyond that, he wants to distribute it throughout the hood. While showing the tape, a gun is turned onto Caine a few seconds after the first shot at the Korean man is seen on his television.19 The bodies of the store owners, bleeding out on the floor, are mirrored on the screen to show the possibility of Caine's death. Similar to O-Dog jokingly pulling a gun on Caine while Caine works on car repairs, the teetering from “flesh” into “meat” occurs quickly — viewed from within the subjectivity trapped in this zone, one needs to stress that bare life always exists as “flesh” that is readily and easily convertible to “meat.”20 When one kills flesh, it is transformed; it dies and becomes meat.21 The line between existence and disposability in Menace is disturbingly thin.
Such a pervasive sense of everyday violence and despair further amplifies the notion of liminality. The characters in the film are not truly living; instead, they are merely surviving in an environment that offers little escape from the cycle of crime and violence. For Caine, a new form of limbo emerges in a single question: Will he kill again? In a voice over, he says, “I thought killing these fools would make me feel good, but it didn't make me feel anything. I just knew that I could kill somebody. And if I had to, I'd kill again.”22 The death-bound subject's “life” is defined by the need to avoid the possibilities of life as well as the possibility of death. Caine does not have an immediate answer when asked if he wants to live or die.23 To Caine, it does not feel like he has a say in the matter, and nothing around him suggests otherwise.
Providing a cinematic mediation on how various rap idioms denote the menacing aspects of male nihilist culture, Menace deploys gangsta rap to shape viewer perceptions of setting and characterisation through Kassabian's three primary modes: identification, mood, and commentary.24 In one scene, Caine visits the house of a drug dealer named A-Wax while “Pocket Full of Stones” by UGK plays in the background. The song is prominently featured to allow the audience to understand A-Wax's influence — his involvement in illegal activities and his drug trade participation. Therefore, in this brief scene, rap music becomes quickly associated with a questionable character trait. In tandem, gangsta rap is utilised to create a sonic backdrop that immerses the audience in the raw and challenging environment of the characters. For instance, the song “Dopeman” by N.W.A. plays as Caine and O-Dog cruise through the hood, with the aggressive beats and explicit lyrics underscoring the tension of their surroundings:
You beat your friend up and you whooped his ass long 'Cause he hit the pipe 'til the rock was all gone You're robbin' and stealin', buggin' and illin' While the dope man's dealin', what is healing your pain?25
The ominous-sounding strains of smoking “that rock” signify in this film the destruction of a community and the pursuit of financial gain despite Caine losing his mother and father to the drug business. It is in this sound that youth learn to negotiate the street world by building a social identity, projecting a reputation, and developing a protective peer group in the neighbourhood.26 Immediately following Caine's brutal stomping of Illena's cousin outside his grandparents' house, the sound of MC Eiht's “Straight up Menace” clearly perceives the hazards of living by the gun:
A fucked up childhood, is why the way I am It's got me in the state where I don't give a damn, hmm Somebody help me, but nah they don't hear me though I guess I'll be another victim of the ghetto27
Three subthemes of nihilism emerge in the lyrics above, as noted in the work of Kubrin: bleak surroundings with little hope, pervasive violence in the ghetto, and a preoccupation with death and dying.28 Music is central to constructing Black characters within these films' narratives. Gangsta rap, for example, helps to create specific character traits in subjects: politicised, nihilistic, and fatalistic.29 Although gangsta rap themes vary, Menace’s are consistent with Kubrin's assertion of gangsta rap as “ghettocentric”: the construction of the ghetto as a living nightmare and gangstas as products of that nightmare have given rise to “ghettocentric” identity, in which the specific class, race, and gendered experiences in late-capitalist urban centers coalesce to create a new identity.30 To be the “dopeman” is to be from the ghetto, and by linking one's identity to the ghetto instead of just to skin colour, gangsta rap acknowledges the limitations of racial politics.31
Rejecting the religious values espoused by his grandparents and side-character Sharif on racial grounds, the notion of being physically and spiritually left behind in the ghetto becomes ever apparent.32 As Caine tells his grandfather, “Sir, I don't think God really cares too much about us, or he wouldn't have put us here. I mean look where we stay at,” the ghetto drowns the young man in a vat of hopelessness.33 With Sharif catching a stray bullet in his chest, the American Dream depicted in Caine's watching of “It's A Little Wonderful Life” becomes irrelevant for those in the hood. The acts of violence Menace depicts are much more random in nature, with anybody from desperate hamburger-eating drug addicts to innocent teenagers susceptible to spontaneous drive-by bullets. In this world, death is just around the corner; America's inner city is a war zone, which makes the idea of salvation seem futile.
The lyric “victim of the ghetto” emphasises the monotony of one's existence in the hood — there is a further demonstration that rappers feel that death and dying are simply part of the equation given a life of crime and violence. In this sense, the presence of Anthony brings both anxiety and relief to viewers: the direct contrast between Anthony riding his juvenile, brightly coloured, plastic bike while the drive-by occurs and his ultimate survival of the shooting brings hope to the future of Anthony's relocation to Atlanta. However, Anthony's exposure to gun violence and his request for a beer at the soiree exemplifies how his childhood has been taken as a “victim of the ghetto.” While Anthony and O-Dog survive the shooting, they emerge as victims in their own right.
Collectively, Menace's discography demonstrates a better understanding of what challenges inner-city residents face, how they interpret and experience their lives, and how they respond to the conditions in their communities. Concurrently, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has labeled it, “guiltsploitation” surrounding the ambiguity of upward Black mobility remains poignant.34 The politics of Black identity, and the determined quest to reconcile upward mobility with cultural “authenticity” is a central preoccupation within Menace.35 The status of Caine as a victim is thoroughly debated on screen and within the lyrics “victim of the ghetto” — Caine has taken a life, yet he has faced immense loss; Caine is told to be grateful that he “graduated and is alive at eighteen,” yet he initially hesitates at the offering of a safer, new life in Atlanta since he will still “be Black.”36 The film however does offer glimpses of a way out: Caine has a chance to relocate to Kansas with a friend, leaving Watts on an athletic scholarship; Sharif has taken solace and found a narrower path via the teachings of the Nation of Islam, but Sharif's father, expressing genuine concern, cannot penetrate the thick façade of the environment — “the hunt is on, and you're the prey… survive.”37
As the screams of the Korean shop owner fade into the sound of police sirens in the first scene, Menace shows the relentless ways in which the “no-exit” quality of life in South Central Los Angeles and the cyclic nature of poverty are forced upon those for whom there is no escape. It immerses the audience in their world, noting the constant struggle for survival, the psychological toll of living in a state of liminality, and the omnipresent surveillance and control enforced by authorities. Through its use of gangsta rap music, the depiction of the inner city, and the exploration of complex power dynamics, Menace offers a compelling commentary on poverty in urban life.
Endnotes
Paula J. Massood, "Mapping the Hood: The Genealogy of City Space in 'Boyz N the Hood' and 'Menace II Society,'" Cinema Journal 35, no. 2 (Winter, 1996): 90.
Menace II Society, directed by Albert and Allen Hughes (1993; New Line Cinema), 2:08.
Massood, "Mapping the Hood,” 93.
Massood, "Mapping the Hood,” 93.
Massood, "Mapping the Hood,” 93.
Massood, "Mapping the Hood,” 92.
Massood, "Mapping the Hood,” 92.
Charis E. Kubrin, "I See Death Around the Corner: Nihilism in Rap Music," Sociological Perspectives 48, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 439.
Kubrin, "I See Death Around the Corner: Nihilism in Rap Music," 439.
Kubrin, "I See Death Around the Corner: Nihilism in Rap Music,” 440.
Menace II Society, 26:40.
Abdul R. JanMohamed, Post-Contemporary Interventions: The Death-Bound Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (Duke University Press, March 2005): 10.
JanMohamed, Post-Contemporary Interventions:, 16.
JanMohamed, Post-Contemporary Interventions:, 8.
Menace II Society, 3:55.
Menace II Society, 3:55.
Kubrin, "I See Death Around the Corner," 434.
Kubrin, "I See Death Around the Corner," 435.
Menace II Society, 26:21.
JanMohamed, Post-Contemporary Interventions:, 10.
JanMohamed, Post-Contemporary Interventions:, 10.
Menace II Society, 9:42.
JanMohamed, Post-Contemporary Interventions:, 19.
Guthrie P. Ramsey, “Scoring a Black Nation: Music, Film, and Identity in the Age of Hip Hop," in Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (University of California Press, 2004), 170.
N.W.A., "Dopeman," in Straight Outta Compton (Ruthless Records, 1988).
Kubrin, "I See Death Around the Corner," 440.
MC Eiht, "Straight up Menace," in Menace II Society (Music from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (Jive, 1993).
Kubrin, "I See Death Around the Corner," 444.
Kubrin, "I See Death Around the Corner," 443.
Kubrin, "I See Death Around the Corner," 435.
Kubrin, "I See Death Around the Corner," 435.
Menace II Society, 24:08.
Menace II Society, 24:18.
Ramsey, “Scoring a Nation,” 168.
Ramsey, “Scoring a Nation,” 168.
Menace II Society, 1:11:54.
Menace II Society, 1:00:13.
Bibliography
MC Eiht. “Straight up Menace.” Menace II Society (Music from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), Jive, 1993.
Menace II Society. Directed by Albert and Allen Hughes. 1993. New Line Cinema. N.W.A. “Dopeman.” Straight Outta Compton, Ruthless Records, 1988.
JanMohamed, Abdul R. Post-Contemporary Interventions: The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death. Duke University Press, March 2005.
Kubrin, Charis E. “I See Death Around the Corner: Nihilism in Rap Music.” Sociological Perspectives 48, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 433-459. Published by Sage Publications, Inc.
Massood, Paula J. “Mapping the Hood: The Genealogy of City Space in ‘Boyz N the Hood’ and ‘Menace II Society.’” Cinema Journal 35, no. 2 (Winter, 1996): 85-97.
Ramsey, Guthrie P. “Scoring a Black Nation: Music, Film, and Identity in the Age of Hip Hop.” In Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop, 163-189. University of California Press, 2004.