Piotr Szyja Boyz'n the Hood Viewing Questions 1. How are the three mothers portrayed in the film.

Reva, Tres mother. She is an example of a black person that left the black community and become socially white. And she considers that to be better than other options, so she wants the same for her son, wants him to follow her footsteps and adopt certain standards, which results in arguments with Furious. Ricky and Doughs mother. She is a stereotypical black woman. She experiences all the typical problems of a woman in the neighborhood. Her two sons have different fathers, and she is a single mother. She loves more the one son who has more perspectives, he realizes her dreams of getting out of the Hood. Dough, that as a boy is being accused of doing noting and being useless, eventually ends like that. Ricky, who was more ambitious, got her approval, and her love. She clearly prefers the better son over the other, puts all her hopes in him, and more and more detesting the other. Despite all of that, because of her experiences, she is a very strong, tempered woman. The girl addicted to crack. She is the example of a person ruined by drugs. She does not care of her child, her little daughter runs the streets unattended, putting herself into great danger, that her mom does not care about. The girl is a completely lost case, for life. She will do anything for drugs, she keeps offering guys sex if only they gave her some drugs. She is dirty, filthy, and the little girls as well. We can see how pathology re-creates itself, because if the little daughter will be lucky enough not to be killed somehow she will not receive any education or anything. 2. Comment on the motif of helicopters. The helicopters, or rather their sound, accompanies the characters during almost every action. Theyre there where Ricky is visited by a person from the University, during Tres intimate moments with Brandi, but also during all the shootouts. But we never can see them getting involved into anything, theyre just there. I can think of two explanations of the helicopters. On one hand, they may suggest that the Hood is in fact a Panopticon, being 1

constantly watched by police, or the media, or both. On the other hand, and this second explanations gets to me better, they can be interpreted along with Furious theory about gentrification. Since we can always hear the police or media, but never see them, we can think they dont really care about whats going on, they just make sure it does not leave the Hood. As soon as everything is kept within the limits of the neighborhood no one cares, which is confirmed by the behavior of the policemen. No one cares about solving any problems, or helping anyone, they just keep the trouble from spreading into other parts of the city, and let the black community suffer. 3. Who are the white people in this film? The first white person we see in a movie is a president on poster, hanging on a wall that bullets were shot at. Other white people who appear are connected with authority. That is a school teacher (a clearly ignorant lady, ionizing about having to address Indians as Native Americans) and then the police. Although policeman often have a partner of a different race, the black policeman is not really black, what Furious points out. But in general there are very few white people on the screen. 4. What does gentrification mean? According to Furious Styles, gentrification is a process of a sophisticated land process speculation. At first we can observe a decreasing property value in a certain area, due to the fact of social problems in the neighborhood, like crime, violence, substance abuse etc. After some time massive amounts of land are being purchased at a cheap price, and then the people are forced to move, which removes all the problems, and that results in property prices rising again. The new owner of the land sells it then at a price much higher than the one he initially paid. 5. List some references to education. In one of the first scenes, when the teacher calls Tres mother about the incident at school, she is kind of surprised to hear Reva is pursuing Master Degree. When Reva leaves Tre to Furious, she tells him she needs to finish her studies, which will allow her to get a better job, and maybe buy a house. 2

 At the welcome party for Dough to be out of jail girls talking about Tre and Ricky exchange remarks on which schools they attend. Rickys mother, after the visit of a person from the school, is so proud her child is going to attend a university she cries. When boys talk, one of them says he goes to college to pick up girls, and Dough answers him that hes not going to lean anything by talking to girls. When a guy from the university visits Ricky the boys accost him about scholarships, saying partially joking, they would like to get them, because without them they would never be able to go to any university. 6. Ways in which the hood is shown as a trap. We can constantly see or hear people talking about how many people are simply not getting anywhere, dropping school, starting drugs or alcohol, getting involved in crime, being locked up in jail, or simply doing nothing. There is no optimism about the future, no one even talks about it. Furious warns young Tre that his friend are not getting anywhere (they have no one to teach them how to be a man), and he has to prevent his son from such a fate. There are two scenes where we can see that being explicitly given to understand, not just implied. First scene is the welcome (from jail) party for Dough, that is first scene where we can see the boys grown up. We can see that those kids we saw a second ago or most of them - just became what everyone else is. The second scene is the last scene of the movie, that basically tells us that for the kids there are two ways of getting out of the Hood. That is either hard work, and self-improvement through college education (Tre, Brandi) or death at a young age (Dough).