American History X is centered on the savagely sexual performance of Edward Norton. Taunt, muscled, posed, and powerful, he’s a poster boy all right. Remove the Nazi tattoos and he’s what most young men want to be: assertive, in control, sexually satisfied. He’s a take-charge guy. He’s resourceful. He’s Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, but articulate, and pulled out of that simpleminded, jingoistic world (though he’s ruled internally by a similar simpleminded, jingoistic credo) and put into our own. Actually, he’s smarter than Dirty Harry. When Norton proposes a blacks-against-whites basketball match as a turf war, his ingenuity is uncomfortably impressive. It’s a non-violent solution, for which as an audience we are both grateful and at the same time disturbed because it’s still a choice propelled by hate. (And it isn’t like Norton’s character has no thirst for violence.) It confuses our responses, as it’s meant to, as it confuses his brother and others who gravitate towards him as a leader. His strength, flexibility, his championship spirit is intoxicating. You have to remind yourself you aren’t supposed to cheer his victory.

Of course, we are seeing this through the adoring eyes of his younger brother, Edward Furlong, who idolizes his brother as a father figure, a role model, and a rebel combined. Norton exists for Furlong as both a patriarchal and an anarchic figure, the way self-chosen role models often do for young teens (because half the time they want to overthrow the world, and the other half of the time they just want to be shown the ropes to survive in it). The disturbing nature of Norton’s character is twofold. We note how we respond to it, even as informed adults, and worse we can see how he has warped his brother’s unformed mind. And it’s chilling that even after all the changes that occur in Norton’s character, Norton can still walk through a room filled with Nazi propaganda and react so casually to it, as if it’s no big deal, the way in another era he might have looked at a sister’s Bobby Sherman posters. Just something you outgrow. This is how thoroughly the hate imagery has been imbedded in their lives.

The world they live in gives ample testament why Norton went the route he did and his brother does. A world of poverty in which people feel they have no control, and so have to take it by whatever means necessary. A world in which a man feels exactly what men are told they shouldn’t: impotent, no more than pawns in a bigger game beyond their control. And the only way to feel one has regained strength, one has subdued that environment, is in a gang, and the mixture of loyalty and dominance it provides. And it is in no way restricted to whites. But the difference between what the blacks and the whites feel, and that hits a white viewer so strongly, is of course the difference in history. American history for blacks has always been about oppression. But I think most whites, even the most liberal, enjoy a subconscious satisfaction that they have been spared this, that while there are injustices in the world, luckily they themselves aren’t the victims.

Not any longer. The characters live in Venice Beach, which many moviegoers are familiar with from 1960’s teen movies, but we don’t see Annette Funicello or Frankie Avalon here. We see thugs and drug dealers and poverty, and we can share their despair and sense of impotency. It’s probably an accident, but the high school used for exteriors is the same used in Grease, and seeing the more or less squeaky clean Rydell High (even if we did see it from the point of view of dirty-minded greasers) turned into the location of turf wars has a primitive, almost subconscious effect. What has happened to our neighborhood? (We should ask ourselves why we are so sure it’s “ours.”) In a neighborhood going down the tubes, economically, there is already a hit to that. And as minorities come to be the majority (the idea expressed to Norton later in prison, “you’re the nigger here” in fact has been true all along), an even more defensive edge creeps in. And when affirmative action is introduced, another fear is unleashed. All this is unreasonable, intellectually indefensible. But fears don’t work through rationality. It’s through the unknown, that irrational, that so many of our fears are governed. It’s the new turn in American history for whites, and gives the movie’s title a haunting resonance.

But the movie, of course, isn’t a propaganda poster for white supremacy, and what keys us in that the material has been handled so effectively, so responsibly, is that when Norton commits the brutal act that will land him in jail, we are not remotely on his side, even though the people he assaults are hardly innocent. I could watch every atrocity performed in Schindler’s List clear-eyed and undisturbed because Spielberg’s characters were so unreal, I didn’t believe humans were being sacrificed. The boorish, cartoon Nazi and the innocent-lamb victims and the fatuously wise Ben Kingsley were just the typical ingredients of melodrama, empty of personality and so without impact. But I had to hide my face during Norton’s rampage because I was watching real people, a frighteningly determined man programmed with hate and gang members who were certainly not innocents but obviously not deserving of the brutality inflicted on them. The whole nightmarish spectacle was just too much to deal with, and I couldn’t look. I had a similar response in the painful rampage on the Korean owned supermarket. (Both sequences show us Norton performing the actions we usually associate with an assured, galvanic hero: he’s not only the strong man white supremacists might want to emulate but the hero of every American action film.)

I stress the unspoken power of the visuals, because it is largely through these means that the story makes its point. The movie’s release was damaged by a hardly behind-the-scenes wrestling match for control of the final cut. The version we see is, presumably, not that of director Tony Kaye. It’s hard to endorse a version you know doesn’t have the director’s approval. The DVD contains additional scenes as an extra features item, but that only further clouds the issue, since Norton claims that Kaye actually wanted to the movie shorter than the eventual running time of the released version. Adding the extra scenes could arguably be farther from the director’s vision than what we have now. And the basic difficulties wouldn’t be helped anyway, as they lie in a script that often can’t deal effectively with the compelling issues it raises, and an often ineffective supporting cast. The movie captures lightning in a bottle in terms of confronting its subject matter head on emotionally, but intellectually it lags far behind.

Stacy Keach’s snarling villain with the dramatic scar is too easy a target, as is Ethan Suplee’s overweight goon (though you have to give it to Suplee, so likable and harmless on cheesy sitcoms like Boy Meets World, for his willingness to be thoroughly disgusting here). Their mechanical function, of course, is to take the heat of Norton, and allow us to direct our hate elsewhere. Norton isn’t “really” bad; he’s just had his mind screwed with by the “real” bad guy, Keach. Likewise, Suplee is supposed to show us (or audience members who might miss the message) that most Nazi punks aren’t chiseled tough guys like Norton, but bloated losers. Of course, that’s quite true, and it’s equally true that men like Keech’s character are manipulating a lot of the Aryan movement (though probably without the scar), but the movie would be better off without them. We should confront what Norton is about singularly, and if that means we hate him all the more as the worst thing we see on the screen (redemption or no) so be it. And if we’re disturbed by seeing how appealing he can be, so be that, as well. We should be disturbed, that’s the whole point. Scapegoats don’t help anything, and that’s just what Keach and Suplee’s characters are providing. The movie is on slightly better ground with William Russ as Norton’s dad, but he’s only got one scene and, again, it’s frustratingly schematic. A son doesn’t become a racist as a result of one dinner conversation. And since when do teens dutifully imitate their parents’ political beliefs, anyway? (There’s a frustrating 1950’s quality to all this. The wise figure from the world of education rectifying the shortcomings of a weak home, and the fear of “outside” influences taking the place with both. This is the cant that marred Rebel Without a Cause.)

I did like Edward Furlong as Norton’s younger brother. Ostensibly, this should be his movie. His assignment is the spine of the story, and the struggle for his salvation is the key, but Furlong doesn’t have the same charisma as Norton, and he’s closed off as an actor. In a sense this is provocative, as is his squeaky, always ironically modulated voice. We don’t know how to take his interaction with the white supremacists. Is he really influenced by them, or does he just get a kick out of subversion in writing a paper on Mein Kampf, and letting loose at a beer blast (at an age where the link between playing at ideas and reality of imbibing them are not as easy to gauge)? But this is diffused by the voice over narration, one of the issues Kaye and Norton argued over (Kaye didn’t want it). Personally, I think it would be a stronger picture without it, because it would force us to do more of the work ourselves, instead of being handed our evaluation pre-packaged. But I find the narration inoffensive, and there are spots the narrative itself, as it now stands, doesn’t clarify.

At least screenwriter McKenna knew what he was doing in not giving any of the liberals a speech comparable with the various racist monologues. What those speeches show is us how empty cant is, how easy it is to manipulate with words. Putting similarly charged words into a liberal spokesman would only make him or her seem equally manipulative. It’s better the way the message pervades the movie by tone and by the simple example that the people we side with (in particular, of course, Avery Brooks as the high school teacher) are the only ones doing anything positive.

Another big problem is that the movie simply has too much material. Considering how empty most movies are, if feels ungrateful to complain, but there are storylines here for several three-hour-plus movies. The influence of Norton’s teacher (Avery Brooks, one of the best thing the movie has going with it, and the rare liberal spokesman onscreen in any movie who doesn’t come across as a fuddy-duddy) on him. Norton’s relationship with Guy Torry in the pen. The Aryan gang movement. Norton’s relationship with his family itself has so much going on between his weak, and ailing, mother (and her Jewish boyfriend, a terribly misused Eliot Gould improbably also a teacher at the high school), his cheerful, supportive, racist dad, his liberal sister, and his lost brother. The result is that every storyline is, to a greater or lesser extent reduced to its most shallow possibilities and all we have to go on is the visceral emotion of the movie.

Still, I can’t put the movie down when it happens to be better than just about any movie I’ve ever seen at explaining why someone could choose to embrace a life of hate. This movie addresses, largely non-verbally, important ideas about how hate is made compelling, how people make frightening choices, and how much we are wrestling with these concepts today. Up until this movie, the mix of American propaganda with Nazi propaganda always rang so false, I didn’t see how anyone could fall for it. But the images make the jingoism in our own patriotism, the crack in our myths of rugged individualism, startlingly obvious. I happen to think American History X is the best movie on the evils of racism ever made.