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Nazis old and Nazis new: our texts for today. "American History X," which has a subtextual story of who got to edit the movie we're seeing - the director of record has taken to fulminating about what we've got, though it's quite worthy as is - reminds us that bad ideas don't necessarily go away when the prime repository of the ideas (Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia) collapse. Bad ideas have lives of their own, and in fairness to this particular bad idea, white racism, the movie doesn't hesitate to let its advocates make their case with some persuasiveness.
Can one oppose affirmative action (or active retribution) quotas without being labeled a racist? One hopes so. Can whites who feel that the Zeitgeist is against them, that immigrants, even illegal ones, get certain goodies if their melanin content is darker than your garden variety Caucasian, be faulted as if somehow they were hallucinating? "American History X" posits an angered group of ne'er-do-well young people, motivated by a cynical, manipulative businessman (Stacy Keach) and inspired by a fast-talking, bright young man, Derek Vinyard (Edward Norton), whose father, a firefighter, was killed by blacks when in the line of duty he went to put out a fire in a black residence.
One critic, David Ansen, in Newsweek, has faulted the father as a "racist," a typical Ansenesque take on life, and this because the father is querulous about his son's initial response to a black teacher's black-oriented curriculum in high school. Dad merely asks whether this is all as good as the teacher (Avery Brooks) would have his students believe, for which the critic lashes out with "racist!" This helps explain, by the way, why neo-Nazi rhetoric is hardly below the radar screen in America. But all this is back story.
The central story is about Derek's younger brother, Danny (Edward Furlong), ordered by the teacher, now the principal, to write an essay about what his older brother had done to wind up in jail. What he had done was kill two black men who had come to rob him. We learn about how the bright young Derek had become a rabid neo-Nazi, how the demographics of Venice Beach, California, had changed and the influx of blacks and Hispanics intimidated and infuriated whites, how the conflict had been egged on by the manipulative businessman and how, most importantly, Derek had found his metier as a rabble-rousing stump speaker.
But there's more, and when Derek is released from prison he gives the second flashback story, his conversion, in prison, if not quite into a spokesman for the United Negro College Fund then at least into a racial moderate. Can he get his adoring kid bro Danny to see the error of his ways? This is the poignant final section of the movie, which has Derek reborn, Danny in the process of intellectual rebirth and yet the situation remaining poisonous. "American History X" is choppy and often overbearing. It is also smashing.
Written by David McKenna; directed by Tony Kaye