To celebrate 100 years of Columbia Pictures, Robert Daniels reflects on John Singleton’s history making debut Boyz n the Hood and its varying success in capturing the inner lives of Black men and women.
This essay contains detailed spoilers for Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society.
“RICKY!” If you’ve watched John Singleton’s urgent 1991 directorial debut Boyz n the Hood, you can probably hear the exact tenor, feel the exact voltage, breakdown to your knees with the exact force felt by Tre and Ricky’s mother and girlfriend over Morris Chestnut’s slain football player. It’s a scream that has reverberated across Black film for more than 30 years. And while Singleton’s classic has always been regarded as a landmark film about the perils of being a Black man in a systemically violent world, its limiting legacy for Black women was equally forceful.
The narrow focus on the Black women characters of Boyz, however, doesn’t wholly negate the importance of Singleton’s groundbreaking feature—which gave a portrait of an early 1990s South Central Los Angeles relatively unseen in mainstream cinema. Following in the footsteps of Cooley High and Do the Right Thing, the story of these young Black men would birth an entire genre of “hood” films (or New Black Realism) that included Juice, Menace II Society, Clockers, Dead Presidents, Friday and more. “Singleton’s vision changed the way we looked at the hood, which is to say the way we looked at ourselves — which is to say, again, e’rythang,” wrote Eisa Nefertari Ulen for The Hollywood Reporter.
Boyz n the Hood launched the careers of Regina King, Morris Chestnut and Ice Cube, and offered the first meaty roles for Cuba Gooding Jr., Nia Long and Angela Bassett. In one fell swoop, Singleton totally changed the cinematic landscape.
Its significance is still felt even outside of Black audiences. Top 100 Narrative Films from Black Directors list (it’s literally number eleven).
Yet, despite its boundary pushing representation, Boyz n the Hood can be lacking in its treatment of Black women. “The majority of the characters and each Black mother in the film is to be ‘survived’ on some level or another,” explains Nicole Rousseau in her essay “Social Rhetoric and the Construction of Black Motherhood.” Since the release of Boyz n the Hood, other stereotypes of Black motherhood have followed, from John Q to Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
In Boyz n the Hood, Singleton often pushes Black mothers to the sidelines. A worried Reva (Bassett) sends her son Tre away from their Inglewood neighborhood to South Central, where his father, Furious Styles (Larry Fishburne), lives. Though Reva is working to earn her MA, thereby providing an opportunity for upward mobility, her reasoning is that Tre needs what she can’t provide—a strong Black male figure to show her young son how to be a respectable Black man. While living with Furious, the young Tre reconnects with the neighborhood’s other Black boys.
Fast forward seven years, and Tre (Gooding Jr.) is a smart, levelheaded teenager romantically flourishing with his girlfriend Brandi (Long). His best friend Doughboy (Cube), however, is just returning home from prison, while Doughboy’s football star brother, Ricky (Chestnut), is drawing interest from college recruiters. It doesn’t take much guessing to know which son the brothers’ hardened mom, Brenda (Tyra Ferrell) prefers. Both mothers—Reva and Brenda–are often juxtaposed to delineate the importance between having a strong Black fatherly presence and not.
For Singleton and many other Black men of his generation, the specter of the Black absentee father was haunting. Back in 1965, the Moynihan Report, for instance, declared that “Negro children without fathers flounder—and fail.” The report essentially blamed the economic decline felt by the Black family on the lack of fathers, along with Black mothers’ inability to create a functional household on their end. That cultural fear was bolstered by Singleton’s personal attachment to the story. As he told Oprah back in 1991, Boyz n the Hood was inspired by him going to live with his father at the age of twelve. “My father whipped me into shape,” he further explained. “We need more brothers, if they’re going to have a child, to [understand] they have to look out for the well-being of their children.”
To those ends, the way his film translates its themes of absentee fathers, over-policing, urban divestment, systemic abuse and gentrification has been viewed by some as didactic. Mike notes, “If push came to shove, though, I’d take 2 Fast 2 Furious over this earnest after school special,” while Asjad writes, “A lot of the times it’s just characters explaining stuff in these expository kind of dialogues rather than letting it come through impressionistically.” Jordan concludes, “It’s definitely obvious this is a first time writer/director here. It doesn’t match the technical and dramatic sharpness of Do the Right Thing. Yet that doesn’t mean that Singleton doesn’t have as much to say and he articulates what he’s saying surprisingly well considering.”
To Jordan’s point, it is of course worth noting that Singleton, fresh out of USC, made Boyz n the Hood when he was only 23 years old. The film catapulted him to a Cannes premiere, and minted him as not only the first Black person nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards but also the youngest director overall to be recognized. To date, he remains one of only six Black directors nominated in the category: Lee Daniels, Steve McQueen, Barry Jenkins, Jordan Peele and Spike Lee following in his footsteps. (No Black woman has ever been nominated.)
Singleton’s youth continues to surprise many newcomers to the picture. “How does a 22-year-old director already have such poetic license over the implicit and explicit,” asks Jos. “A 23-year-old made this movie. I’m 22. Yesterday I had a hard cider and then it made me throw up so I called my mom and she told me to get ginger ale so I GoPuffed it to myself and [watched] SpongeBob until I was calm enough to go to sleep. So,” Sarah playfully observes.
Singleton’s relative inexperience probably provided the film a greater frankness. Throughout Boyz, Black men have open conversations about women, dating, the neighborhood, their dreams and aspirations (or lack thereof). In one key scene, Ricky meets with a college recruiter but can’t fathom any academic or career goals. In another, Furious drives Ricky and Tre to a billboard and explains to them how gentrification works, pleading with their generation to band together rather than fight one another. And finally, just before Doughboy and the rest of his crew seek revenge against Ricky’s murderers, we see the group that killed him engage in a conversation about women they’re romantically interested in—showing how they are no different from Doughboy and his friends.
The Black women, on the other hand, are not afforded the same interiority. Rather, Singleton deploys a different kind of frankness to the women characters (particularly mothers), one that is psychologically and emotionally raw. Every Black woman is quick-tempered—except Brandi, who through her religious upbringing conforms to certain conservative standards. Shanice (Alysia Rogers), Ricky’s girlfriend and mother to his child, has a relatively small role that, at best, follows housewife clichés (she cooks, cleans, and cares for their baby).
Brenda raised Ricky and Doughboy as a single mother, as opposed to the resolute Reva, who nevertheless abdicates Tre and Furious. While Brenda hasn’t given up on Doughboy—she asks Tre to hang around him in the hopes that Furious’s qualities will also rub off on her son—she so clearly favors Ricky that she unconsciously drives a wedge between the two boys. In the film’s most didactic reach, there is a mother struggling with drug addiction who consistently allows her son to play in the middle of the street—demonstrating the danger single Black mothers can pose to their Black sons.
In more seasoned hands, the women in Boyz n the Hood could have been complex models for what ails the neighborhood. Instead, they are either pure rage or pure grief. It’s the latter that takes hold in the film’s most pivotal scene: Ricky’s death. Try as he might, he can’t actually escape. It’s telling that Tre, raised by a Black man, takes his father’s lessons about not picking up weapons against other Black men to heart. But Ricky, seemingly more attuned than Doughboy, ignores Furious’s speech by immediately getting into a shouting match with a gang member. That gang ultimately retaliates, gunning Ricky down in the streets. His lifeless body is dragged into Brenda’s home, and placed onto her plastic-covered couch.
Tre’s dramatic yell for Ricky’s name is all over Letterboxd reviews. Jourdain simply writes, “RICKY!” in her four-star review, and Lu’s four stars are accompanied by the plea, “no way Ricky no wayyyy.” Tre’s scream is also echoed heartbreakingly by Ricky’s mother and his girlfriend.
A similar death scene also plays out in Menace II Society when Caine (Tyrin Turner) is murdered in a drive-by. It occurs in John Q when a dying boy’s mother (Kimberly Elise) implores her husband (Denzel Washington) to save their son. It happens in Till, when Mamie (Danielle Deadwyler) brings her son’s body back home. Its residues can be found in T’Challa’s death in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. It could also be seen on the nightly news, which specialized in mining the pain felt by Black women for ratings. So pervasive was the image of the crying Black mother, it was immediately lampooned by the Wayans brothers in Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood.
While Singleton launched the careers of many Black actresses—from Regina King to Taraji P. Henson—his Black women characters follow a common trend: they’re strong, resilient and exclusively the objects of Black men’s desire. Rarely do we see their interior lives. In his early works, that oversight went hand-in-hand with the tenacity of a young artist who wanted to tell a gritty personal story. Singleton’s characters became emblematic of the director’s desired message: Black men need to be a presence in their families; they aren’t around because of systemic issues and their own skirting of responsibilities; Black women need to Black men; Black women can do so by being strong and upstanding. As such, Tre and Brandi make it out of the neighborhood, while Ricky and Doughboy, Black men raised single-handedly by a Black woman, don’t.
Singleton’s simplicity—the pure emotion he is acting from, bolstered by his incredible craft—is what tears apart the film, but also what makes it. You can feel his urgency in Furious’s gentrification speech, in Tre’s emotional breakdown and in Ricky’s death. The filmmaker doesn’t feel the need to expound on his women characters here because his task is too urgent (he did a much better job in his follow-up two years later, Poetic Justice), and his inexperience somewhat got in the way. “As the movie was going along, I was learning how to direct,” Singleton reflected to The Guardian.
This is why Boyz n the Hood, despite its more obvious melodramatic aspects and its short-changing of Black motherhood, remains an affecting, boundary pushing vision of the precariousness of Black male existence. At 23 years old, Singleton could never have made a perfect film. But the fact that he made it, warts and all, is what remains astounding. It’s hard to sum it up better than Carmen’s 4.5-star review: “One of those films you watch and think to yourself ‘it’s a miracle this exists at all.’”
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