Where is the Peace? - MONICA WEIR
When I looked up the film “Boyz n the Hood” on the Internet Movie Database it showed the tagline to be INCREASE THE PEACE which I don’t believe accurately represented the storyline. For the most part, this posse of ghetto Los Angeles teenagers is looking for the exact opposite of peace. Instead we see them constantly flashing their handguns and swearing at anyone in sight. If the tagline is advertised as such to reflect the views of Furious Styles, Tre’s father, I don’t believe that it was successfully achieved by his character either. Throughout the film Furious preaches to his son and his cronies, about a conspiracy theory. While standing on a corner surrounded by a crowd of black men he asks, “Why is it that there is a gun shop on almost every corner in this community?” and answers his own question by explaining to the eager listeners, “For the same reason that there is a liquor store on almost every corner in the black community. Why? They want us to kill ourselves.” This theory represents that depicted by Kenneth Chan in his article, The Construction of Black Male Identity in Black Action Films of the Nineties. Chan recants a 1990s pole taken by the New York Times/CBS in which it was discovered that “60 percent of blacks in New York believe or at least admit the possibility that the easy accessibility of drugs in poor black communities is part of a government conspiracy” (Chan 36).
Rather than a tagline related to that of universal peace, I think this film successfully promotes finding personal peace. As Furious watches Tre experience perils of the hood, his role as a father is not to baby-step his son through them, but to guide him in the best direction. It is ultimately Tre’s inner strength and belief in right vs. wrong that gets him through hardships. By avoiding a potentially dangerous situation which he knows to be the wrong path of action he is demonstrating a single act of finding personal PEACE.