A
more chilling treatment of domestic terrorism can be found
in this year’s Pariah, which goes beyond last
year’s American History X
in showing how skinhead gangs operate. We are not surprised
to learn that the gang members are obsessed with sex, and
filmviewers see the brutality of their sexual encounters,
which are heterosexual simulations of prison rape. Women who
associate with the white and black gangs were molested as
children and now survive mostly as sex slaves; some are hooked
on drugs. In Pariah, the white protagonist,
Steve (played by Damon Jones), is held down by a skinhead
gang, forced to watch while his black girlfriend is gang-raped.
When she commits suicide after the incident, Steve resolves
to join the skinhead gang to exact revenge. To establish his
legitimacy in the gang, however, it is not enough that he
is beat up by a black gang
or that his girlfriend Sissy (played by Aimee Chaffin) is
a member of the skinhead gang; he is forced by the leader
of the gang Crew (played by Dave Oren Ward) to execute a transsexual
in a park. The film graphically shows violent crimes perpetrated
by the various gangs, led by young studs who have had bad
interracial experiences, either while they were growing up
or in prison. Pariah, an independent film that
was first released to the general public in Los Angeles during
May 1999, shows upward spirals of first senseless and then
brutal retaliation beatings and a discourse in which the only
adjective known by gang members seems to be the word "fucking."
If there ever was a film to justify locking up perpetrators
of hate crimes, this is it; yet prison life seems to be a
rite of passage to prove one’s manhood. Once out of prison,
the gang members try to return to live at home, are rejected
by their parents, and soon reconstitute on the streets. Randolph
Kret, director and screenwriter of this film noir, suggests
that there is no easy answer to stop the violence-begets-violence
scenario depicted in which even a gay gang is portrayed as
retaliating against the skinheads over the death of the transsexual.
MH
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