Urban marginality in Los Angeles as seen through the film Boyz N The Essay

Urban marginality in Los Angeles as seen through the film Boyz N The Hood - Essay Example African Americans in the US have been an insignia of perpetual degradation historically as they have been shuttled and chained all the way through the slave economy to the capitalist economy. Charles Scruggs wrote, â€Å"The forms of the invisible city are joined at key points: The invisibility of Afro-Americans in this culture, their reduction to stereotype, is closely related to the phenomena of the mass media and the world of consumer desire, part of an economics of mass consumption† (Scruggs cited in Massood 85). The Significance of Suburbs in Movies Suburb in the movies is used as a contested idea. A vast majority of Americans think of suburb as any type of establishment around a large city’s periphery, though they may be present in small cities as the populations settled around the points of intersection of main highways are also referred to as the suburbs. A movie can be included in the category of suburban movies if it is shot in suburbs for its major part, and also it is important that its characters significantly relate to the imagined or real ethos of the suburbs. The movie Boys N the Hood fulfills these criteria of the suburban movies as hood is the central location of the movie in which all its events happen. A Brief Review of Boys N the Hood The movie Boys N the Hood portrays the life of a group of young African Americans living in South Central Los Angeles, who are struggling to escape the widespread violence in the city. Some are keeping their hopes high to get educated and excel in sports, while others become victims and part of the violent gangs. The movie i s not perfect as it makes an attempt to capture every single challenge that the African Americans living in Los Angeles are exposed to in a matter of just one and a half hours of screen time, that is practically too less to do justice with any of the issues discussed. Too many issues shoved into such a short movie make the whole movie in general and the symbolism in particular appear forced, and the audiences sometimes find the movie unbearably heavy-handed. However, the audiences tend to draw the intended meanings of the sounds and images temporarily abandoning their disbelief in the theater’s darkness, so as to gain full essence of the movie. â€Å"Of course, viewers recognize that movies do not present unfiltered reality: The characters are actors, the speech is scripted, and probably most of the artifacts are phony† (Muzzio and Halper 548). Indeed, filtered reality is in a way, the strength of the movie since the fundamental reason why audiences opt to go to the ci nemas to watch the movies is that they want to have the unfiltered reality of the real world replaced with the filtered reality shown in the movies. Reflection of Urban Marginality in Boyz N The Hood Boyz N the Hood reflects the efforts of young film-literate director of the African American descent, and gives a detailed account of the difficulties experienced by their young protagonists as they come of age. The narrative in Boyz N the Hood has been placed in the geographic boundaries of hood that has precise coordinates i.e. South Central Los Angeles in the case of this film. The selection of hood as the canvas of the story has a solid reason as the hood encompasses a variety of metaphorical meanings that apply to the characters as well as their lives as