Menace II Society: The Truth Hurts

Menace II Society is set in early-nineties Watts, which, as the filmmakers see it, has become far more tumultuous and plagued by hopelessness than it was even when it erupted in riots in response to police brutality during the sixties (which the movie briefly takes you back to in the beginning via news footage). Menace is told mainly from the perspective of Caine, a recent high school graduate who also sells dope. He unfortunately got that flair for slanging from his dad (Samuel L. Jackson, in a brief “special appearance”), a drug dealer who didn’t have any problem pumping bullets into a guy who didn’t have his money—which, as we see in flashbacks, Caine witnessed as a child.

Caine spends most of the movie going through a series of unfortunate events, including multiple hospital visits (one for taking a bullet in the shoulder when his cousin gets smoked during a carjacking) and a brief stint in jail, where he is memorably interrogated by a detective (Bill Duke, the director of the stylish 1992 cop drama Deep Cover) about the convenience-store shooting. 

Of course, several people in the community want him to concentrate on not just staying on the straight and narrow but staying alive: his grandparents (Arnold Johnson and Marilyn Coleman), who have served as his guardians ever since his parents died; Ronnie (Jada Pinkett), the girlfriend/baby mama of his incarcerated mentor (Glenn Plummer); his Muslim pal Sharif (Vonte Sweet), whose teacher dad (Charles S. Dutton) also tries to talk some sense into Caine. But, mostly thanks to pals like O-Dog and A-Wax (rapper MC Eiht, who also performs the movie’s theme, “Streiht Up Menace”), he keeps getting called to the streets, ready to jack a car, stick up an unsuspecting mark for some quick cash, or avenge the death of his aforementioned cousin in a bloody, late-night shoot-out.

At times, Menace plays like Goodfellas n the Hood, with Caine as a ghetto Henry Hill (his character also does voice-over narration) and the volatile O-Dog and veteran A-Wax serving as his resident Tommy DeVito and Jimmy Conway. Williams has said he based O-Dog on Joe Pesci’s sensitive psychopath Tommy. The brothers have also cited Martin Scorsese and his 1990 film as an influence on Menace, and they share Scorsese’s flair for showing criminals getting what they want in graphic, profane, sometimes funny, nonjudgmental detail—occasionally via long-take Steadicam shots like his. The scene where Caine introduces his boys at a house party via voice-over is a bravura allusion to the corresponding scene in Goodfellas. The directors also throw in moments of unexpected humor, as when Caine robs a guy at the drive-through restaurant and demands that the guy also order him a double burger with cheese. Another influence is the black-and-white gangster movies of the early sound era. The directors even make it obvious by having Caine watch one of those on TV during one of his hospital stays. Despite the nineties setting, hip-hop soundtrack, and predominantly Black cast, Menace is the kind of bullet-riddled cautionary tale that would make sense in the company of thirties gangster epics such as The Public Enemy and Scarface (the Howard Hawks version, not the Brian De Palma version—but the brothers have said they’re fans of that one too). 

The hood in Menace is a savage place. Superficially, at least, it might remind you of the ghettos of seventies blaxploitation movies. But (for all the badass brown-skinned heroes that came out of the genre) blaxploitation’s depictions of the ghetto tended to be as lurid lands, parts of the city that anyone would be too afraid to venture into for, well, anything. What the brothers make clear in Menace is that the hood may be a place where guys can collectively beat down on a dude, or worse, at the drop of a hat—but it is also a place where people do live, where they work, go to school, go on dates. That said, the Watts of Menace is just as far from the reflective, working-class world that Watts native Charles Burnett captured years earlier in his acclaimed 1977 film Killer of Sheep (or his little-seen 1983 follow-up, My Brother’s Wedding) as it is from the ghettos of the blaxploitation movies. Burnett’s vision of Watts is more communal, and hopeful. Sure, there were knuckleheads around who drove some of the other residents to keep a pistol in their homes for protection. But people always looked out for one another. Menace’s Watts is far more destitute—and deadly. The streets are strewn with garbage, when they’re not strewn with bodies.

The film had its detractors, especially in the African American community. Before it even came out, a group of powerful Black producers circulated a petition against the filmmakers. But to the Hughes brothers, Menace is an antiviolent film. “Any time that you’re dealing with reality, if you’re dealing with drug dealers, people are going to get hurt,” Albert told GQ.com in 2010. “Some people are going to die. Some people are going to get shot, stabbed, raped. I hate that word responsibility, but as long as you’re showing what’s actually going on in that world, it’s an antiviolent movie.”

Menace doesn’t present Caine and O-Dog as figures who should be emulated or worshipped. (“Look, if O-Dog is your idol, then we can’t help you,” Williams told Little White Lies in 2018.) In fact, right from the jump, it presents the hood as a jungle, a wasteland that is filled with ruthless boys and men. It’s a place where males live and die by the gun, and females are mostly there for sex and food. (Sometimes we see that all in the same scene: before Caine smokes his cousin’s killers, we see them disrespecting the hell out of a female hot-dog-joint employee who won’t hook them up with a couple dogs.) As Henry Louis Gates said of Menace in his 1994 New Yorker profile of the brothers, “The film gets at the way the ghetto has become the social equivalent of what scientists refer to as a ‘black hole’; it’s a place where the American id collapses in on itself.” Watching the movie again reminded me of a 1991 interview MTV journalist Kurt Loder had with Ice-T, then riding high as both a rapper and an actor, regarding the state of America’s inner cities. Ice-T bluntly lays it all out: “I say leave the ghetto as a barren wasteland. Nobody lives in the ghetto by choice . . . They’re not Black communities, they’re poor communities. Economics is why you stay there. But in the ghetto, they have a real stupid mentality—Yo, if you leave Brooklyn, you selling out! It’s the stupidest thing in the world.”

Caine gets a couple of opportunities to break out of his hood surroundings. First, Sharif and their pal Stacy (Ryan Williams) invite him to tag along with them to Kansas. And later, Ronnie urges him to go with her and her young son to Atlanta. But even though the hood keeps giving him reasons to skedaddle (at one point, he gets a girl pregnant, and let’s not forget his reluctant appearance on O-Dog’s tape), Caine still has trouble seeing the point of it. “I mean, I’m still gonna be Black,” he tells Ronnie. “Just another nigga from the ghetto.”