| |
 LIGHT
IT UP ILLUMINATES THE NEED TO END STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE
When Light It Up begins, we view
run-down Lincoln High School in Queens. Principal Armstrong
(played by Glynn Turman) has assigned Dante Jackson (played
by Forest Whitaker), a highly decorated police officer who
is on leave due to family stress, to deter school violence
by making his presence known throughout the hallways. One
of his first acts is to hassle Zacharias "Ziggy" Malone (played
by Robert Ri'chard), the film's narrator, who is drawing on
a sketchpad while seated on a staircase; his idol is the artist
featured in the Political Film Society-nominated film Basquiat
(1996). Basketball playing champ Lester Dewitt (played by
Usher Raymond) comes to Ziggy's defense, whereupon Jackson
asks him to "assume the position"; the incident ends when
Ziggy urges Lester to back off. Lester and Ziggy then go to
their next class, where Mr. Knowles (played by Judd Nelson)
presents a lesson on the nonviolence of Mohandas Gandhi and
Martin Luther King, Jr., though not all students have textbooks
or chairs. Soon, a gust of wintry wind breaks the window of
the classroom, so Mr. Knowles asks the class to seek warmth
in the hall while he scouts for another place to hold class.
Since the school principal insists that the students must
leave the hallway, and both the auditorium and library are
jammed, the teacher takes the class to an adjacent fast food
restaurant. The principal, on learning that the class was
held off campus, suspends Mr. Knowles. Five students, however,
object vehemently to arbitrary punishment for such a dedicated
teacher without due process; in addition to Lester and Ziggy,
they are straight-A Stephanie Williams (played by Rosario
Dawson), the Student Council President (played by Marcello
Robinson), streetwise Rodney Templeton (played by Fredro Starr),
and potsmoking Robert "Rivers" Tremont (played by Clifton
Collins, Jr.). Jackson, summoned by the principal to end the
altercation, uses excessive force against Ziggy. When his
service revolver falls on the floor, Ziggy picks it up to
hold the officer at bay; while trying to take the gun away
from Ziggy, Jackson is injured accidentally by a bullet, and
the gun again drops to the floor. At this point Lester takes
possession of the gun but does not know what exactly to do
until he realizes that he can hold the officer hostage in
the library. Four fellow students participating in the altercation
support him; a sixth student, already in the library, becomes
part of the rebellion without an apparent cause. When a fire
alarm is pulled, the school is evacuated except for the seven
in the library, as the principal makes no effort to engage
in dialog with the students. The rest of the film deals with
how New York authorities try to end the unplanned taking of
a hostage, while the media exploit the situation. We also
learn about some of the problems of the students: Lester,
it turns out, is trying to get back at the fact that his unarmed
father was shot dead by NYPD; scars on Ziggy's back indicate
that his father beats him; Lynn Sabatini, the sixth student
(played by Sara Gilbert), is pregnant because she wanted to
make love but did not even receive the kiss that she wanted
so badly.
|
Captain
Monroe (played by Vic Polizos), the police officer in charge,
seeing one of his own in jeopardy, prefers to use force. Officer
Audrey McDonald (played by Vanessa L. Williams), dispatched
to negotiate an end to the hostage-taking crisis, is much
less successful than Kevin Spacey in The Negotiator
(1998) because the Captain trumps her with support from the
Police Commissioner, who wants the siege to end before the
morning news. The students make reasonable demands on the
Internet (reinstate Mr. Knowles, buy more textbooks, fix the
broken window and roof leaks), but none are met, and ultimately
the police break into the school. As the SWAT team draws near
the library, Ziggy takes them to the school's attic, a sanctuary
where he has painted a mural that impresses all, and then
Lester takes Jackson to the roof for a showdown. Unexpectedly,
Ziggy suddenly appears on the roof, is shot by helicopter
police sharpshooters by mistake, and the siege ends. In the
epilog we learn that Jackson testified sympathetically for
the students, most of whom served time, though Lynn had a
child and left town with a countenance radiating happiness
with motherhood. Lester and Stephanie went on to college with
ambitions of becoming a doctor and a lawyer, respectively.
Directed and written by Craig Bolotin, Light It Up
demonstrates that educational standards are going down because
students translate the signs of neglect of the school's physical
facilities to mean that they are expendable. According to
the tagline, "They don't want to be heroes, they just want
to be heard." In other words, students seek rational dialog,
while adults are too busy feeding egos, blindly obeying higher
authority, and calling for the use of force rather than reason.
Most characters in the film are African Americans; the whites
are the teacher, the pregnant teenager, and the police captain.
However, the issue is not race; instead, the message is that
inner-city school violence, urban disorder, and educational
decay can be traced directly to fin-de-siècle adult hypocrisy
or, as world-famous peace scholar Johan Galtung would say,
to the structural violence of American society displayed by
such obvious contradictions as the insistence that students
must excel while denying them textbooks, comfortable classrooms,
and supportive school administrators. Accordingly, the Political
Film Society has nominated Light It Up for an
award as one of the best films of 1999 in raising political
consciousness of the need for peaceful solutions to social
problems. MH
NOMINEES
FOR 1999
DEMOCRACY:
East
of Hope Street, Fight
Club, The
Insider,
Naturally
Native, Three
Kings
EXPOSÉ: Bastards, Cabaret
Balkan, East of Hope Street,
The Insider,
Naturally Native, One
Man's Hero, Three
Kings, Three
Seasons
HUMAN RIGHTS:
The
General's Daughter, Hard,
Naturally
Native, One
Man's Hero, Three
Kings, Three
Seasons, Xiu Xiu
PEACE: Cabaret
Balkan, Earth, Light
It Up, One Man's Hero,
Three Kings,
West Beirut
|
|
