If You Like the Sopranos... by Leonard Pierce

Author:Leonard Pierce [Pierce, Leonard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER010020 PERFORMING ARTS / Television / Guides & Reviews
ISBN: 9780879104337
Publisher: Limelight
Published: 2012-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

Menace II Society and How Gangsters Became Gangstas

By the 1980s, the game was up for big-time African-American organized crime. Blacks had always been disproportionately targeted for drug crimes, and harsh new sentencing guidelines meant that the heroin kingpins of the ’60s and ’70s would be sent away for good. Crack, a devastating new form of cheap and highly addictive cocaine, would ravage the inner cities and create generations of desperate addicts. A moral panic over cocaine would lead to even more strict punishments for drug dealing. And the attempts by high-profile gangsters to organize and control their criminal enterprises would fall apart, leaving the drug trade in the hands of dozens of brutal street gangs who would rack up body counts on the level of a full-scale war.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, these conflicts, which would turn South Central Los Angeles into a free-fire zone so lethal that even the police were reluctant to visit it, would generate a wave of crime dramas, heavily influenced by both the great gangster epics of the past and the new wave of G-funk rappers, who spun violent but celebrated stories about the hard life and the crack trade. Films like New Jack City, Juice, Colors, Belly, Deep Cover, Boyz N the Hood and South Central all portrayed a new urban reality previously unheard of in crime films, infinitely more nihilistic, hopeless, and despairing than what had come before.

One of the best and most influential of this wave of “hood films” was 1993’s Menace II Society. The directorial debut of African-American siblings Allen and Albert Hughes, who would go on to become a significant Hollywood presence, the film became a touchstone of hip-hop culture and helped launch the career of Larenz Tate, who is unforgettable in the role of the rage-filled O-Dog. Menace II Society walks an extremely fine line, showing the wide range of factors that lead young black males to a life of crime and violence, but never completely excusing any of its protagonists for the choices they make. O-Dog and Caine, the two young men who are the film’s primary focus, are faced with endless pressures: boiling inner-city racial tensions, absent or incarcerated fathers, poverty, substance abuse, police brutality, and a criminal underworld that can lead to quick money or an early death. The Hughes brothers manage to convey all these in a grimly unsensational manner, creating an oppressive mood that is hard to shake off.

The influence of hood films such as Menace II Society continued to resonate well into the 2000s, culminating in the HBO miniseries The Wire, an incredibly ambitious attempt to tie together all the social problems the Hughes brothers nodded to. The world of The Sopranos is intimately connected with the brutal inner-city drug trade: when Tony laments that some parts of New Jersey have become impassable thanks to the vicious, easy violence of the street gangs, he evinces a typical denial of the role he played in that ruination by extorting legitimate businesses and profiting off of the sale of drugs.

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