AMERICAN HISTORY X ANALYSIS

AMERICAN HISTORY X CHARACTER ANALYSIS: ‘US’ AND ‘THEM’ MENTALITY

Scratching the cinematic surface with closer examination, the lawlessness in Venice Beach, California, as depicted in American History X, has proven to be a vivid metaphor for the people’s history broadly beyond the United States. A hard-fought competitive environment, defamation rhetoric towards rivals, racial, religious, and social intolerance on one level, and thought for the family, a sense of social belonging, rehabilitation, and liabilities on the other. The principal characters and DEREK VINYARD notably were to become archetypes, mirroring the biblical myths and stories of ancient literature and overinflated behavioral patterns of modern society, shattered by prejudices and dividing lines. Looking broadly back from two decades since the premiere, Derek Vinyard has gotten on board the public consciousness well beyond his fictional cinematic nature and deserves its American History X analysis. 

Derek Vinyard is a young man in his early twenties, grinningly takes the voice attributed to such archaism as Ku Klux Klan, relatedly overemphasizing a swastika tattoo on his chest. The bottom line is that Derek finds a little credence in the Nazi ideology as well as later his young brother Danny, in disregard of wall posters and reading ‘Mein Kampf’. The overstressing of one’s radical attribution serves to make his presence known: at the basketball field, at the table in the face of his mother’s elderly boyfriend, or within a prison yard. Once devastated by a personal tragedy (the loss of a father), Derek came under the sway of an experienced persuader (Cameron), who used to fulfill one’s deformed ambitions for an account of the insulted youth of his neighborhood. The law enforcement authorities come across Vinyard as no more than an antisocial archetype, whose deeds say more than any words. Along with that conventional unidirectional perception, Dr. Robert Sweeney, who had himself lived through a period of desolation and hatred, appreciates Derek as one of his most talented pupils: the one who may have the guts to reshape himself and have a voice over the others, as Sweeney himself. The headmaster is poised to take Derek Vinyard out of prison, giving him a second chance—a privilege previously denied by Murray. In parallel with his renewed connection with Derek, Dr. Sweeney endeavors not to lose Danny Vinyard in a way he had allowed with his older brother. 

None of them are all right, Danny.

They’re all a bunch of fucking freeloaders.

“We don’t know them, we don’t want to know them,

they’re the fucking enemy.” 

As affected, the brilliant pupil Derek Vinyard, who had used to honor teachers and experimental literature, the best basketball player in the neighborhood, made his way to the leader of a nationalistic clique and a convicted murderer. In this vein, one should pay attention to a short sequence within Cameron’s car, with Derek ready to take over the leadership of a group of local young men, insulted in one way or another. Now forged with distorted rhetoric of hatred, Vineyard carries a violently deformed scheme of things toward a group of coevals who regard Derek Vinyard as their ‘prince’. The offshoots of unwealthy families, self-destructed in personal tragedies, are now cultivated with a crooked alternative to their mediocre life: placing blame on supposed enemies. Like generations before them, this dozen of young men prefer to shift the responsibility for their own lives to others, friends, or enemies. They accuse someone else and not themselves of a low-wage job, the outlook of the neighborhood, and the crime rate—the latter a group provokes firsthand by harassing a store. Later on, Derek would challenge his younger brother to steer away from Seth, whose life would hardly push the boundaries of insectology, fast food, and cliched rhetoric. Seth is also neglected by Cameron. 

There’s nothing funny going on here.

This is about your life and mine. 

It’s about decent, hard working Americans falling through the cracks. 

As is commonly known, the most severe negative emotions are being cultivated with a sense of jeopardy and danger, and Derek Vinyard voices out a new actuality for his followers, which had been imposed upon himself. Nothing gives rise to anxiety and concern more than a restless, compulsive idea about the enemies around. Emotions are generally brought into poor correlation with the facts; therefore, all but every Derek’s demagogic insult is based on empty shell prejudices. In a scene within a parking lot (before an assault on the store), the ‘Prince’ voices yellow-paged figures on millions of immigrants and billions of dollars of social benefits. He urges the group to open their eyes and to look over the enemies who used to rape the country; they all (Derek Vinyard and his followers) love. Looking further forward to a wisdom-like question of Dr. Sweeney: ‘HAS ANYTHING YOU’VE DONE MADE YOUR LIFE BETTER?’, none of the present young men, including Derek, have done anything that made this country or their lives better. All while stigmatizing the government for a standstill, Vinyard pushes for action: with violence and intolerance instead of self-improvement, and endeavors to make the state a better place. With an assault on the night store, Derek Vinyard makes himself an enemy of the state, the one he used to see in the others around his clique. 

Amid a family dinner, Derek Vinyard expounds on the born villainy and depravity of the other people, all while he expresses humiliation and even harassment toward the closest people in his life. As early as being a convicted felon, Vinyard would get wise to the fact that violence provokes violence. The disturbing sense of constant anxiety among this radical clique of a young generation is being cultivated with extremes. The ‘NON OF THEM IS ALL RIGHT’ phrase dramatizes the lack of rationality and obvious closed-mindedness. Danny Vinyard, another talented pupil and a bright-headed young man, is conscious of the reality that the world is not rudely divided into ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’. At the same time, wanting to follow the steps of his elder brother and being a part of his social environment necessitated that Danny voice ideas he did not believe in. He does not echo the rhetoric of his father, Derek Vinyard, or Cameron on the relation between unwealthy living conditions and the ‘others’: Danny takes care of his mother and sisters. In a wider meaning, even the monochromatic nature of every retrospective scene of American History X accentuates the fact that the world around us mostly exists in tones of grey, beyond the widely disputed ‘black’ or ‘white’ or ‘good’ or ‘wrong’. 

Finding himself in custody, Derek Vinyard at first follows his adopted behavioral pattern. He makes a claim about himself with a swastika tattoo and joins the ranks of a prison entourage. Derek’s landscape of things and orientations is shattered when the racial foundations he had believed were given away to make some money. The so-called ‘friends’ and ‘us’ come to be enemies and haters who harass Derek with humiliating, maiming injuries. Adhering to the mob mentality ultimately brings the main character to a restless dilemma and an inner conflict. Either you join us, or everyone is against you and us above all. Later on, Derek’s ex-girlfriend Stacey cauterizes her ex-lover and ‘prince’ as a traitor and an enemy: Stacy renounces the idea of leaving the neighborhood and starting a new life. The former mentor Cameron unveils his indeed nature as a greedy puppet who used to rake up the fire with the hands of insulted young men. The old man sets his sights on Danny Vinyard as a heritor of Derek’s ‘mission’. The day-old friend Seth points a gun at Derek Vinyard in an attempt to kill a man he had been devoted to. Along with that, Vinyard expresses anything but weakness or inactivity: he sandbags the former tutor to take a younger brother out of this environment. 

That’s why you have to stay open

Right now, your anger is consuming you

Your anger is shutting down the brain. 

Derek Vinyard now sees reason in the fact that the corrupted scheme of things he was cultivated by his father, and Cameron dealt poorly with the particular race or skin color, or passport registration. It has always been about belonging to one or another social group, regardless of its system of coordinates and principles. Either you follow the leader and hate people announced as the enemies, or you become a victim yourself, particularly at the hands of those you tend to consider friends. LAMONT, Derek’s associate at the prison laundry, was convicted more severely than Derek for a crime of much less criminal significance: another bottom line to Vinyard’s prejudices, who used to demagogue on justice. Lamont comes to be a friend, whose humor and neighborliness tear Derek’s racial cliches to pieces. As the story goes on, Vinyard appreciates the fact that it was Lamont who saved him from being killed in prison. Dr. Sweeney turns out to be the only man from the outside world, apart from the family, who offers his helping hand to Derek and even forwards an early release. As the prison curtain is drawn, Derek Vinyard is fully mindful of the fact that his family—his mother, young brother, and two sisters—matter the most to him in the whole world. He is ready to reshape himself from scratch for his close ones. One of the unevindent clues to Derek’s shift is to be found in his decision not to get shaved anymore. 

DEREK VINYARD: OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY

Examining the matter of environmental dominance, parenting, and cultivation of personality, the American History X movie takes a view of the years-long and eventful makeover of the main character. Chronologically, in the earliest scene at a family table, a young man, Derek Vinyard, expresses a sincere delight in his own studying experience at school. Being open to something new, this intellectual boy showcases no signs of hatred, social frustration, or racial intolerance. He enthusiastically shares his thoughts on Dr. Sweeney and the educational concepts with his father, the household patriarch of the Vinyard family. This evident sequence reveals the dominant weight of Vinyard Senior as a sovereign authority at that time. The parent speaks up about his prejudices and cultivates a grain of doubt in the heads of both his sons. In a wider sense, the Father ruins Derek’s values and his motivational mindset. 

All this stuff about making everything equal. It’s not that simple. 

You gotta question these things, Derek.

 You gotta look at the whole picture 

The Vinyard senior (Father) discourses upon a triumph of the ‘racial’ origin over talent, thus neglecting literature according to this prejudice. The man himself finds no pleasure or sense in reading books, though his criticisms of the literature bear poor equity and credibility beyond this family table. In all likelihood, Vinyard senior antagonizes the authority of Dr. Sweeney, a man with two academic degrees, on the mere color of one’s skin. The household patriarch explicitly judges that he, as a fireman, gets the short straw in virtue of this ‘forcing the tolerance through’. The voiced example of testing the professional competency among the firemen loses all its credibility, while the man ends up with humiliation toward ‘them’. This short yet significantly important sequence at the family dinner gives a demonstration of a single episode of such kind, denouncing Derek’s and Danny’s openness to education. With the death of his father, Derek Vinyard would blame the whole world around him, his entourage, and his family, and voice the previously cultivated matter of things on the camera. On second thought, he has always praised the authority of the police and made no resistance to arrest and go to jail, bearing no regrets about committing the crime. It must be said, it is unlikely for his father to be proud of what his son has become and done. 

In the aftermath of his father’s death, Derek’s life is being dramatically altered in contrast to a talented pupil and a basketball star. His long-life paradigm of values is to be shifted with a new actuality of hatred and social frustration. It was at this very period in his life, on the heels of the TV reporting, that Derek Vinyard came under the manipulative mentorship of Cameron. The new tutor substitutes for the vanishing authority of a dead father and Dr. Sweeney to infiltrate his ‘prince’ with a new ideology. As time goes on, it is Derek who takes the patronage over other young men: an insulted youth from Venice Beach. He is now an undisputed leader himself, a messiah to lead these frustrated youth toward the hatred and trespassing of the law. In this respect, his relations with Stacey were based not so much on love as on following the image of a leader, indeed damaging for Vinyard himself. Once in state prison, Derek sets aside the local group, and his system of values once again is fated to be devastated. At this breaking point, Dr. Sweeney, a former example of educational admiration for Derek, submits a way to transformation. The headmaster himself did break off the vicious circle years ago, and Derek Vinyard would not say an abusive word about Sweeney. 

Sweeney is a good teacher. You can learn from him 

So don’t fuck it up with small-fry shit like that.

You gotta be smarter than that. 

As for DANNY VINYARD, he has always been a victim of idolizing a single man: his brother. While the family dinner scene gives a clue about the fact that the Father is frustrated with both his sons, Danny always tries to catch sight of Derek’s reaction: his approval or condemnation. In a strict sense, Danny has always followed exclusively Derek regardless of the social environment. He keeps up with Seth on the bare account of the fact that his brother used to do this before prison. Danny spends his time next to Cameron to impress Derek, though he finds no core credibility in the rhetoric of hatred. He intellectualized the ‘Mein Kampf’ of Hitler, expressing protest, particularly against Murray, the man who had been looked down upon by Derek Vinyard. Along with all that, their Mother Doris loses her health and the will to live after the death of her husband and a loss of connection with Derek. Davina is meant to be one of the few characters (next to Sweeney) who express admiration for Derek’s transformation after prison. 

In the sequence with Derek killing the robbers outside the house, Danny is screaming with frustration in his eyes, perceiving the occurrence as horrible even through the prism of his admirable brother. With the institutional confinement of the elder brother, Danny loses a guiding star in a way that Derek had experienced after the death of their father. Now dropped down by a new Derek, who rejects the former corrupted actuality, Danny loses his nerve, yet only to hear the full version of the story. Apart from his social environment and behavior at school, the boy used to take care of his sisters and mother, and did not reject Sweeney completely, even before Derek’s appeal. In a dramatic sense, it is an admiration of his brother; his feigned confidence would cost Danny his life on the back of his actions on the basketball field and in school. In a moment when Derek Vinyard finds his younger brother in a puddle of blood, he says, ‘What did I do?’. The death takes Danny the day after he rejects the false principles, tearing down the wall posters, and his enthusiasm to follow Derek toward new values.