When
Light It Up begins, we view run-down Lincoln
High School in Queens. Principal Armstrong (played by Glynn
Turman) has assigned Dante Jackson (played by Forest Whitaker),
a highly decorated police officer who is on leave due to family
stress, to deter school violence by making his presence known
throughout the hallways. One of his first acts is to hassle
Zacharias "Ziggy" Malone (played by Robert Ri'chard), the
film's narrator, who is drawing on a sketchpad while seated
on a staircase; his idol is the artist featured in the Political
Film Society-nominated film Basquiat (1996).
Basketball playing champ Lester Dewitt (played by Usher Raymond)
comes to Ziggy's defense, whereupon Jackson asks him to "assume
the position"; the incident ends when Ziggy urges Lester to
back off. Lester and Ziggy then go to their next class, where
Mr. Knowles (played by Judd Nelson) presents a lesson on the
nonviolence of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.,
though not all students have textbooks or chairs. Soon, a
gust of wintry wind breaks the window of the classroom, so
Mr. Knowles asks the class to seek warmth in the hall while
he scouts for another place to hold class. Since the school
principal insists that the students must leave the hallway,
and both the auditorium and library are jammed, the teacher
takes the class to an adjacent fast food restaurant. The principal,
on learning that the class was held off campus, suspends Mr.
Knowles. Five students, however, object vehemently to arbitrary
punishment for such a dedicated teacher without due process;
in addition to Lester and Ziggy, they are straight-A Stephanie
Williams (played by Rosario Dawson), the Student Council President
(played by Marcello Robinson), streetwise Rodney Templeton
(played by Fredro Starr), and potsmoking Robert "Rivers" Tremont
(played by Clifton Collins, Jr.). Jackson, summoned by the
principal to end the altercation, uses excessive force against
Ziggy. When his service revolver falls on the floor, Ziggy
picks it up to hold the officer at bay; while trying to take
the gun away from Ziggy, Jackson is injured accidentally by
a bullet, and the gun again drops to the floor. At this point
Lester takes possession of the gun but does not know what
exactly to do until he realizes that he can hold the officer
hostage in the library. Four fellow students participating
in the altercation support him; a sixth student, already in
the library, becomes part of the rebellion without an apparent
cause. When a fire alarm is pulled, the school is evacuated
except for the seven in the library, as the principal makes
no effort to engage in dialog with the students. The rest
of the film deals with how New York authorities try to end
the unplanned taking of a hostage, while the media exploit
the situation. We also learn about some of the problems of
the students: Lester, it turns out, is trying to get back
at the fact that his unarmed father was shot dead by NYPD;
scars on Ziggy's back indicate that his father beats him;
Lynn Sabatini, the sixth student (played by Sara Gilbert),
is pregnant because she wanted to make love but did not even
receive the kiss that she wanted so badly. Captain Monroe
(played by Vic Polizos), the police officer in charge, seeing
one of his own in jeopardy, prefers to use force. Officer
Audrey McDonald (played by Vanessa L. Williams), dispatched
to negotiate an end to the hostage-taking crisis, is much
less successful than Kevin Spacey in The Negotiator
(1998) because the Captain trumps her with support from the
Police Commissioner, who wants the siege to end before the
morning news. The students make reasonable demands on the
Internet (reinstate Mr. Knowles, buy more textbooks, fix the
broken window and roof leaks), but none are met, and ultimately
the police break into the school. As the SWAT team draws near
the library, Ziggy takes them to the school's attic, a sanctuary
where he has painted a mural that impresses all, and then
Lester takes Jackson to the roof for a showdown. Unexpectedly,
Ziggy suddenly appears on the roof, is shot by helicopter
police sharpshooters by mistake, and the siege ends. In the
epilog we learn that Jackson testified sympathetically for
the students, most of whom served time, though Lynn had a
child and left town with a countenance radiating happiness
with motherhood. Lester and Stephanie went on to college with
ambitions of becoming a doctor and a lawyer, respectively.
Directed and written by Craig Bolotin, Light It Up
demonstrates that educational standards are going down because
students translate the signs of neglect of the school's physical
facilities to mean that they are expendable. According to
the tagline, "They don't want to be heroes, they just want
to be heard." In other words, students seek rational dialog,
while adults are too busy feeding egos, blindly obeying higher
authority, and calling for the use of force rather than reason.
Most characters in the film are African Americans; the whites
are the teacher, the pregnant teenager, and the police captain.
However, the issue is not race; instead, the message is that
inner-city school violence, urban disorder, and educational
decay can be traced directly to fin-de-siècle adult hypocrisy
or, as world-famous peace scholar Johan Galtung would say,
to the structural violence of American society displayed by
such obvious contradictions as the insistence that students
must excel while denying them textbooks, comfortable classrooms,
and supportive school administrators. Accordingly, the Political
Film Society has nominated Light It Up for an
award as one of the best films of 1999 in raising political
consciousness of the need for peaceful solutions to social
problems. MH
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