Abstract
The police film Fort Apache the Bronx (1981) arrived at a turning point in images of the cinematic inner city, on the tail end of a string of films built around the idea of the “urban frontier,” and at the beginning of a call by inner city residents to control their on-screen image. Its police characters see themselves in a desperate last stand against urban violence and chaos: after an initial incident in which two officers are found killed in their car, another sarcastically asks, “What is this, Gunfight at the OK Corral?” By establishing this dichotomy of savage urban residents and cowboy-cops, the film offers a textbook outsider position for its spectator. And yet, contradicting this imperialist position, the film is prefaced with a title card that reads:
The picture you are about to see is a portrayal of the lives of two policemen working out of a precinct in the south Bronx, NY. Because the story involves police work it does not deal with the law abiding members of the community nor does it dramatize the effects of the individuals and groups who are struggling to turn the Bronx around.
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Notes
The term is from Eric Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!”: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
Selwyn Raab, “Film Image Provokes Outcry in South Bronx,” New York Times, February 6, 1981, C6.
See Jon C. Teaford, The Twentieth Century American City: Problem, Promise and Reality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); George C. Galster and Edward W. Hill, ed., The Metropolis in Black and White: Place, Power, and Polarization (New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1992); Steve Macek, Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic over the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), among others.
James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell, Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 136.
For overviews of American moral judgments on cities, see Robert Zecker, Metropolis: The American City in Popular Culture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008); Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (London and New York: Routledge, 2003); Teaford, The Twentieth Century American City; Macek, Urban Nightmares; Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Anselm Strauss, Images of the American City (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961).
See Peter Brooker, Modernity and Metropolis: Writing, Film and Urban Formations (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Peter Wollen, “Delirious Projections,” Sight and Sound 2, no. 4 (August 1992): 24–27; some essays in The Cinematic City, ed. David B. Clarke (London and New York: Routledge, 1997) and Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (Oxford, UK; and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001); Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City (New York: Free Press, 1997).
Stanley Corkin, Starring New York: Filming the Grime and the Glamour of the Long 1970s (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Pamela Robertson Wojcik, The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
Paula J. Massood, Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences In Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003).
Sam Bass Warner, The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
Jim Stratton, Pioneering in the Urban Wilderness (New York: Urizen Books, 1977).
Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
See Nicole Rafter, Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Neal King, Heroes in Hard Times: Cop Action Movies in the U.S. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999).
Thomas Schatz (Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981]) notes the central conflict of the Western is infinitely repeatable because it is one that can never be resolved. This futility takes on a particular meaning with the inner city, so that when police protagonists or vigilantes may be victorious in their particular goals, there is a sense that the social forces against which they fight are intractable. This tone reflects the era’s belief that the inner city was impervious to change. So even a film that ends in “narrative success” may have an underlying tone of cynicism or discouragement. There is no possibility of systemic change, so the most pleasant emotional experience for the spectator is to identify with an individual who can fight to keep himself safe and save some innocents, always knowing his real “home” is elsewhere.
Other accounts of the film that discuss its Western motifs are Eric Lichtenfeld, Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004); Corkin, Starring New York.
Gene Siskel, “‘Death’ Moves at a Killing Pace to Prove Its Point,” Chicago Tribune, August 9, 1974, Section 2, 3.
Such casting was carefully considered in order to avoid charges of racism; see Michael Winner, Winner Takes All: A Life of Sorts (London: Robson, 2004), 199.
Mike Davis uses this terminology when he describes the media’s “demonological lens” on city crime reporting in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 224. See also Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
See Macek, Urban Nightmares; S. Craig Watkins, Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Robert Dallek, Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). The geographic generalization of morally bankrupt coastal cities versus the heartland, frequently used in political rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s, is being developed here. It can be traced to the term “limousine liberal,” which was coined during the 1969 New York City mayoral campaign to criticize wealthy Manhattan residents who did not understand the needs of the white working-class and favored policies that helped African Americans. It went on to become a shorthand for all wealthy urban liberals who were insulated from the struggles of the so-called Silent Majority against the urban poor (the latter were supposedly soaking up tax dollars, taking advantage of affirmative action, etc.). See Geoffrey Nunberg, “The Liberal Label,” The American Prospect, August 31, 2003, http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_liberal_label. The more recent “latte-drinking liberal” label fulfills the same function. These political labels are often framed as class distinctions, but are highly geographical in their typing of urban residents from the Northeast and West Coast.
Sam Bass Warner, “Slums and Skyscrapers: Urban Images, Symbols, and Ideology,” in Cities of the Mind, ed. Lloyd Rodwin and Robert Hollister (New York: Plenum Press, 1984), 181–95.
Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Vincent Canby, “New York’s Woes are Good Box Office,” New York Times, November 10, 1974, AL141.
Vincent Canby, “‘Death Wish’ Exploits Fear Irresponsibly,” New York Times, August 4, 1974, AL85.
David Downing, Charles Bronson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 118; emphasis in the original.
Maureen Orth, “Deadly Deterrent,” Newsweek, August 26, 1974, 82; Siskel, “‘Death’ Moves at a Killing Pace”; Klemesrud, “What Do They See in ‘Death Wish’”; Canby, “‘Death Wish’ Exploits Fear Irresponsibly”; Downing, Charles Bronson, 111–12; Winner, Winner Takes All, 199; Bill Harding, The Films of Michael Winner (London: F. Muller, 1978), 103; Michael R. Pitts, Charles Bronson: The 95 Films and the 156 Television Appearances (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999), 61.
Charles Champlin, “Running Amok for Law, Order,” Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1974, Section 4, 1 and 13.
Daniel O’Brien, Paul Newman (London: Faber, 2004), 238.
Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: The Itch to Act,” New Yorker, February 23, 1981, 102.
John Urry, “Automobility, Car Culture and Weightless Travel: A discussion paper,” Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK, http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/urry-automobility.pdf, 2003.
O’Brien, Paul Newman, 237; Lawrence J. Quirk, Paul Newman (Dallas, TX: Taylor Pub. Co., 1996), 267–68; Elena Oumano, Paul Newman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 173.
Shawn Levy, Paul Newman: A Life (New York: Harmony Books, 2009), 327. Newman was surprised and upset by the criticism, much of which was directed at him personally. See also Quirk, Paul Newman, 269.
Raab, “Film Image Provokes Outcry in South Bronx”; and “‘Apache’ Film’s Debut Protested,” New York Times, February 7, 1981, Section 1, 9.
Betsy Kennedy, “‘Fort Apache’ Under Fire,” The Washington Post, February 6, 1981, C6.
Molly Ivins, “Council Rejects Call for Boycott of ‘Fort Apache,’” New York Times, February 27, 1981, B3.
Jack Kroll, “Battleground,” Newsweek, February 16, 1981, 81.
Mike Davis, “Bunker Hill: Hollywood’s Dark Shadow,” in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (Oxford, UK; and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 34.
Gary Arnold, “Bronx Cheer: Trouble at ‘Fort Apache,’” The Washington Post, February 7, 1981, C1.
Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: The Itch to Act,” New Yorker, February 23, 1981, 101–105.
Lawrence O’Toole, “So What Was All the Fuss About?” MacLean’s February 16, 1981, 62.
Editorial, “Censors to the Rescue at Fort Apache,” New York Times, February 19, 1981, A30.
Vincent Canby, “Screen: ‘Fort Apache, the Bronx,’ With Paul Newman,” New York Times, February 6, 1981, C6.
Sharon Willis, High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Christopher Ames, “Restoring the Black Man’s Lethal Weapon: Race and Sexuality in Contemporary Cop Films,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 20, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 52–60; Hernan Vera and Andrew M. Gordon, Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003); Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: the African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 127–34; Chris Jordan, Movies and the Reagan Presidency (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); and Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 115–46.
Violence at the theatres also occurred at The Warriors (1979), Boulevard Nights (1979), and The Godfather III (1990). See Laura Baker, “Screening Race: Responses to Theater Violence at New Jack City and Boyz N the Hood,” The Velvet Light Trap 44 (Fall 1999): 4–19; David Landis, “Is Message Lost? Violence Mars ‘Boyz’ Openings,” USA Today, July 15, 1991, 1D; and John Hartl, “New Black Cinema: Violence Has Distorted the Hopeful Messages of an Emerging Genre,” Seattle Times, July 18, 1991, F1.
John Stanley, “Mario Van Peebles Feature: Cocaine’s Crippling of Black Community,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 3, 1991, Datebook, 24.
David Mills, “The Ace behind ‘New Jack’: Mario Van Peebles, Director,” Washington Post, March 10, 1991, G1.
Amy Dawes, “New Jack City,” Variety, February 4, 1991, 89–90.
Susan Spillman, “‘City’ Success May Open More Doors,” USA Today, May 10, 1991, 1D.
Manthia Diawara, “Black American Cinema: The New Realism,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3–25.
Ibid.
Hood films retain an emphasis on poverty and other inner city social conditions, while, as I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, gangster films focus on their own internally created social world and the characters are either a notch above poverty (Mean Streets) or quite wealthy (The Godfather). Critics who have pointed to the films’ use of the gangster genre and the young filmmakers’ admiration of canonical directors like Martin Scorsese include Saverio Giovacchini, “‘Shoot the Right Thing’: African American Filmmakers and the American Public Discourse,” in Towards a New American Nation? Redefinitions and Reconstruction, ed. Anna Maria Martellone (Staffordshire, England: Keele University Press, 1995), 207–21; and Jacquie Jones, “The New Ghetto Aesthetic,” Wide Angle 13, no. 3/4 (1991): 32–43.
Doreen B. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 177.
Stephen Hunter, “‘Jack City’: Hard-Edged Folklore with Drug Message,” Baltimore Sun, March 8, 1991, Live, 9.
Mark Reid, Black Lenses, Black Voices: African American Film Now (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 56.
Some of the film’s unevenness may have been the result of the competing personalities on the project; see Nelson George, Blackface: Reflections on African-Americans and the Movies (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 110.
See Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1999); and Christian Hansen, Catherine Needham, and Bill Nichols, “Pornography, Ethnography, and the Discourses of Power,” in Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
Franco Moretti, “Kindergarten,” Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 1983), 173.
Rita Kempley, “‘Boyz’: In the Neighborhood of Fears,” The Washington Post, July 12, 1991, F1.
Janet Maslin, “A Chance to Confound Fate,” New York Times, July 12, 1991, C1; emphasis added.
David Landis, “Is Message Lost? Violence Mars ‘Boyz’ Openings,” USA Today, July 15, 1991, 1D.
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); Rey Chow, “Film as Ethnography; or the Translation between Two Cultures in the Postcolonial World,” in Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 173–201.
Edward C. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976), 53.
For sources on the limited mobility experienced by inner city residents, see Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Elisabeth Mahoney, “‘The People in Parentheses’: Space under Pressure in the Post-Modern City,” in The Cinematic City, ed. David B. Clarke (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 168–85.
Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling: On the Way to Figurative Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 12.
bell hooks, “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990), 41–50.
Some have criticized the overly masculine focus of the hood films; Boyz was singled out for its denigration of the role of mothers. See, among others, Michael Eric Dyson, “Between Apocalypse and Redemption: John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood,” in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins et al. (New York: Routledge, 1993); Michele Wallace, “Boyz N the Hood and Jungle Fever,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Michele Wallace and Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 123–31.
Peter Brunette, “Singleton’s Street Noises,” in John Singleton: Interviews, ed. Craigh Barboza (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 22.
Richard Bernstein, “Hollywood Seeks a White Audience for New Black Films,” New York Times, July 17, 1991, C13.
Frank Price (chairman of Columbia Pictures), “Letter to Editor,” New York Times, August 2, 1991, A26.
See Watkins, Representing; Giovacchini, “‘Shoot the Right Thing’”; and William Brigham, “Whatup in the ‘Hood? The Rage of African American Filmmakers,” in States of Rage: Emotional Eruption, Violence and Social Change, ed. Renée R. Curry and Terry L. Allison (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), 91–106.
Jeff Giles et al., “A ‘Menace’ Has Hollywood Seeing Double,” Newsweek, July 19, 1993, 52.
Deborah Reed-Danahay, “Introduction,” in Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social, ed. Deborah Reed-Danahay (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 4.
Other scholars have documented the discourses of authenticity around hood films—see Valerie Smith, “The Documentary Impulse in Contemporary African American Film,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 56–64; Giovacchini, “‘Shoot the Right Thing’”; and Watkins, Representing, who draw similar examples to those I have below from TV programs.
John Stanley, “Mario Van Peebles Feature: Cocaine’s Crippling of Black Community,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 3, 1991, Datebook, 24.
John Hartl, “Van Peebles Stresses Realism in ‘New Jack City,’” Seattle Times, March 3, 1991, L1.
Patricia Smith, “Ice-T Bucks His Image to Portray a Cop,” Boston Globe, March 3, 1991, B7.
Quoted in Kristine McKenna, “Up and Coming: Ice Cube Melts in Front of the Camera,” New York Times, July 14, 1991, Section 2, 13.
Susan Spillman, “Singleton Brings His Life in the ‘Hood’ to Hollywood,” USA Today, July 19, 1991, 1D.
Melvin Burke Donalson, Black Directors in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 129; George Alexander, Why We Make Movies: Black Filmmakers Talk about the Magic of Cinema (New York: Harlem Moon, 2003), 443.
John Leland et al., “New Jack Cinema Enters Screening,” Newsweek, June 10, 1991, 50.
Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 3.
Ibid., 20, 38–39.
Hazel V. Carby, “The Multicultural Wars,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Michele Wallace and Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 192.
Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 38.
Josh Sides, “Straight Into Compton: American Dreams, Urban Nightmares, and the Metamorphosis of a Black Suburb,” American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (September 2004): 599.
Amy Taubin, “Girl N the Hood,” Sight & Sound 3, no. 8 (August 1993): 17; and Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Blood Brothers: Albert and Allen Hughes in the Belly of the Hollywood Beast,” Transition 63 (1994): 174; quoted in Massood, Black City Cinema, 162. Also see the Hughes brothers’ interview on the Menace II Society DVD.
Caryn James, “‘Menace II Society’ Stakes a Claim to Bleak Turf,” New York Times, June 13, 1993, Section 2, 24.
Celeste A. Fisher, Black on Black: Urban Youth Films and the Multicultural Audience (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 73.
See French, “The Brothers Grim”; Tom Green, “Young Rebels with a Cause: Twins Command Attention with Gritty ‘Menace II Society,’” USA Today, June 9, 1993, 8D.
This point is also made by Maria Pramaggiore, Irish and African American Cinema: Identifying Others and Performing Identities, 1980–2000 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).
Tiiu Lukk, Movie Marketing: Opening the Picture and Giving It Legs (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1997), 240.
See Richard D. Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (New York: Routledge, 2006); Smith, The New Urban Frontier.
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© 2015 Amy Lynn Corbin
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Corbin, A.L. (2015). The Urban Frontier: From Inner City Tourist to Resident. In: Cinematic Geographies and Multicultural Spectatorship in America. Screening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-47971-6_4
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