Social Criticism in "Dead Presidents"
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The Hughes Brothers' recent film Dead Presidents does what many of the best recent films do--it takes a standard plot as a jumping off point both for social criticism and for a different sort of kinetic movie experience, shaping familiar material into a new form. The fact that this is a black story rather than a white is only one of the changes from what is at heart a buddy movie about a group of friends who face a bleak future and who decide to join together to commit a robbery as a way of making something of their lives. In this particular version, the protagonists happen to be black, and their bleak future is at least in part a consequence of institutional racism and societal neglect. The growing awareness on the part of these friends that their world is a dead-end is shown to be a consequence in part of their experiences in Vietnam, experiences which tested their courage while challenging their sense of survival. The Hughes Brothers have drawn on expectations of the genre in order to give a fresh twist to the heist movie, and they have done so in a way that allows them to comment on the problems of the poor and urban black community in America today. The heist movie has long been a sub-genre with a particular fascination for filmmakers, and indeed variations on this theme have been seen several times in the past couple of years. Some of these films may be more married to the particulars of the genre and so will not produce anything really different, while others wil
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idents to the Hughes Brothers' first film, Menace II Society. The films are very different in tone, and this seems to be one of the things that James is objecting to as she writes,
In Menace they trusted the audience more, immersing them in a violent world the film explained without condoning. Their lapse into youthful sincerity and didacticism is no improvement (James 41).
In fact, the filmmakers do trust their audience and allow that audience to find the connections between images in this film and generic images in earlier films and film genres as a way of getting their audience to consider the meaning of the original image and the deeper meaning of having that image transferred to a black milieu, illustrating graphically how much blacks have been excluded in the past while being forced to act out in the present a certain ritual of failure and destruction both in the jungles of Vietnam and on the streets of the average American city.
The early scenes in the film are relatively straightforward and reminiscent of films about young white men prior to World War II. The Hughes Brothers seem to be referring back to a wide variety of earlier American images from films about whites as they develop a new and unique black cinema, s
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Hughes Brothers, II Society, American American, Dead Presidents, Vietnam War, Reservoir Dogs, Hughes Brothers', Black Panthers, Forrest Gump, Quentin Tarantino, dead presidents, hughes brothers, james 41, black community, vietnam war, hughes brothers', heist movie, menace ii society, period american, reservoir dogs, world film, period american history,
Approximate Word count = 2339
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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