by Madisen Fong
[ PDF ]
For decades now, activists have been trying to combat racial injustice and police brutality, and with the recent surge of support for the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd, the public’s denunciation of racist police has never been so vocal. And yet, Black Americans continue to be murdered by police, such as Tony McDade, who was fatally shot a mere two days after Floyd’s death.
When facing this never-ending cycle of violence and death, I repeatedly ask myself: Why? Why does this keep happening? Why hasn’t anything changed? And to my chagrin, I have never known how to answer these questions, in part because their complexity makes it challenging to know where to even start. So, when formulating my response to Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine, which portrays police brutality in France, I challenged myself to use context as means to formulate an answer to these questions. Research was a key component in this process. I aimed to dig deeper and deeper to outline how the systems of the past created the injustices of the present. As I dug, the clearer these connections became, almost as if I was trying to figure out the schematics of a labyrinth by walking around inside of it before being handed a map. Returning to my original question, and applying the concepts I uncovered during the writing process, I realized that injustice and oppression continue to prevail because they have been woven into the fabrics of our society to such an extent that they have integrated themselves into the human condition.
—Madisen Fong
About halfway through La Haine (1995), three teenage Parisian boys find themselves in a public restroom. Up to this moment, the trio has acted like archetypical adolescents: boisterous, carefree, and crudely humorous. But in this moment, in the heart of Paris, a city many viewers would recognize from films, guidebooks, or their travels, tensions that have been bubbling below the surface throughout the film, tensions born out of alienation from a society that took these boys in before carelessly throwing them out, begin to rise. These three come from the Paris banlieue, low-income suburbs that are home to many recent immigrants and their (often French-born) children. Despite having been born in France, many do not consider children of such immigrants true French citizens, and their mere existence generates regular violent altercations. A lethal example of this hatred plays out in this scene.
The camera focuses on the martyr of the group, Saïd, who is using a conveniently located telephone in the restroom to call his brother. On either side of him are the other two protagonists, Vinz and Hubert, who we see through reflections in the bathroom mirror that give the impression of a split-screen, representative of the rift between the men. Earlier that day, Vinz showed Saïd and Hubert a gun he found after the previous night’s riots, a response to the fatal beating of their friend Abdel at the hands of the police. In an earlier scene, Vinz went so far as to actually point the gun at an officer while the boys were being chased. This action angered Hubert, whose boxing gym was burned down in the very riot Vinz had participated in. Soon, simmering tension turns into a heated argument as both boys unleash their frustrations. Vinz, infuriated with his friends’ apparent apathy, asserts, “I’m fuckin’ sick of the godamn system playing us every day like assholes! We live in rat-holes like pieces of shit and you guys do fuck-all to change things! . . . You know what, I’ll tell you guys something. If Abdel dies, I’ll fix the scales and I’ll whack a pig. Then they’ll know we don’t turn the other cheek” (00:52:16-00:52:38). Hubert retorts that killing one cop will not make the rest disappear, nor would it have kept Abdel from dying. They continue this back and forth in each other’s faces until they are interrupted by a stranger exiting a bathroom stall and fall silent.
La Haine (which translates to Hate), directed by Mathieu Kassovitz, is a black and white film chronicling about twenty hours in the life of three young men from immigrant backgrounds—one Afro-French, one Jewish, and one North African—their time split between their familiar turf of the banlieue and the unwelcoming streets of Paris. The film, aptly named, was made in conjunction with real events that occurred during the mid-1990s in France, and it addresses police brutality and social alienation frequently imposed upon residents of these banlieues. In portraying this subject, Kassovitz reveals the cyclical nature of the violence that plagues these suburbs. He focuses on the most vulnerable demographic: young men of immigrant descent whose ancestors were also victims of French colonization.
The scene illustrated above provides viewers with key insight into the cycle of brutality Kassovitz attempts to represent. Vinz and his community have clearly faced violence at the hands of the police, but it is Vinz’s reflexive response to this violence that truly reinforces the pattern. He wants to “fix the scales,” approaching the situation with a polarized ‘us or them’ mentality; however, in doing so, he resigns himself to the inevitability of the very system he is trying to break. Viewers of the film, removed from the situation, understand that Vinz’s response may ultimately lead to destruction. Hubert sees this too, warning his friend with one of the most compelling lines of the film: “Si t’étais à l’école, tu saurais, la haine attire la haine. La haine attire la haine!” (00:53:08-00:53:13). This line, echoed in the title of the film, translates to “hate breeds hate.” Forty years prior, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. expressed the same view during a 1958 speech when he said, “Hate begets hate; violence begets violence” (“Struggle for Equality”). However, King also later acknowledged the feelings of helplessness in poor communities like Vinz and Hubert’s, calling riots “the language of the unheard” (“September 27, 1966”). Both men observed how violence and hatred ravaged their communities, and both men knew that matching the cruelty would only perpetuate the deadly cycle.
By the end of the film, in the sobering light of the morning, Vinz heeds Hubert’s advice and gives him the gun as a symbolic gesture of his refusal to continue playing into the system. But it is too late for Vinz: a mere thirty seconds after the boys part ways, Vinz and Saïd are stopped by an officer with whom they’d had a confrontation earlier that day. The cocky, power-hungry officer slips his finger on the trigger and we are forced to watch as Vinz’s limp body falls to the ground in front of his two best friends. Now, we hear nothing but a ticking clock. Hubert raises his gun and the officer does the same. The camera zooms in on Saïd’s grief-stricken face: the final shot. He squeezes his eyes shut, and another shot rings through our ears.
As heart-wrenching as this final scene is, it also feels inevitable. Kassovitz once revealed in an interview, “I knew the ending before I knew the storyline. Everything is about the end, the last five seconds” (Vincendeau 44). A ticking clock that marks the progression of the film now imitates a time bomb waiting to explode. The ticking of the clock coupled with the masterful way Kassovitz incrementally increases the tension in a stepwise progression tells us that Vinz’s death, while tragic, is the period at the end of a sentence that has already been written.