Stylin' The 'Hood: Friday in L.A.

Friday, a comedy movie starring Ice Cube, Chris Tucker and Bernie Mac, is a story about two friends, Craig and Smokey, one Friday in modern day South Central L.A. Friday might have the tragic destiny of death-by-content analysis, due to the explicit use of marijuana in the movie, and as Caryn James, film reviewer for the New York Times points out in her discreetly unflattering review of Friday, the moral message toward the end of the film about fighting out disagreements with fists instead of bullets is “more intriguing as a social problem than a movie.” (James 1) However tempting it may be to view the movie’s morality apart from the aesthetics, I would have to agree with something Susan Sontag has said. Sontag is an essayist who explains the value of leaving interpretation out of art criticism and the inseparability of style and content. She asserts in her essay “On Style” that we needlessly separate content and style from one another in our criticisms of art (5) and in so doing we miss something more spectacular by drawing attention to moral content, and allowing that content to smokescreen the artistic style that went into the making of movies.

Friday’s director, F. Gary Gray and the writers, Ice Cube and D.J. Pooh (“Friday”) took the time to make the movie specifically about the heart of Southern California; to be precise, 126th Street in South Central L.A. They stylized Friday to represent the stereotypical ‘Hood to engage the viewer in the whole experience of the movie. Our outrageously engaged stereotypes contribute to the comical effect of the movie, and help reunite the movie’s style with its content in a way that helps us to “recover our senses,” as Sontag has suggested (Against Interpretation 11), from merely watching a movie about getting high to experiencing a kind of high as we enjoy the art of the film.

The director alludes to one common stereotype about L.A., with the film’s set, and that is, that no one lives indoors, that the ‘Hood is just that, a neighborhood where people “hang out”. The vast majority of the movie takes place outside on Craig’s porch. In between we are scuttled from one neighbor’s house to another, most often just to the perimeter of the buildings. The insides of cars, or their openness to the outside are captured frequently on film for this impression as well. In fact, the majority of the cars in Friday are convertibles, or have their windows rolled down, and in the case of the ice cream truck, the vehicle is open for “business.” Not surprisingly, the houses have chronically open windows and broken security screens. The houses are obviously mere props for the overall atmosphere of the ‘Hood.

Another humorous stylization of Friday is the plethora of olfactory references. The director plays off our ideas of what L.A.’s distinctive smell must be, given the well-publicized stories about the city’s smog, traffic, squalid living conditions, immense population of people living together in tiny spaces and that L.A. is a very old city, with old, run down homes. All of these stereotypes are stylized in the movie to one extent or another, coming together in a few scenes that vividly capture the characters’ reactions to the overwhelming olfactory stimulus: Craig’s father spraying outrageous amounts of aerosol into the bathroom above his head as he relieves his overworked bowels during a heart-to-heart conversation with his son, Craig’s immediate reaction to the putrid smell in the room with his hand waving in the air and a wrinkled nose, the hypnotic rings of smoke curling upwards from Smokey and Craig’s lips as they waste the day away getting high on the porch, the noxious look on Smokey’s face as he lifts Deebo’s filthy underwear and flips them onto his face, and Deebo’s naively repulsed look as he inhales his own filth through the straw Smokey used to hoist his briefs. The emphasis, of course, is on foul smells, ones the director relished displaying on the screen for comedic effect.

The stereotypes of leisure and excess, even in the midst of an older, South Central L.A., are portrayed with mirth throughout the movie, too. For instance, two of the women in the film lounge around at home; one chats leisurely on the phone and the other has time to cheat on her husband. The only woman we see leave for work on Friday is Craig’s mother. Visually we see that Craig’s house is running over with food, although, as Smokey points out, everything is mismatched: If there is Kool-Aid, you will not find the sugar to sweeten it within the Jones’ cupboards. Though the Jones’ eat copious amounts of food (for instance, Mr. Jones appears in several scenes of the movie with food in his hands, licking his fingers in loud, ill-mannered fashion, and Mrs. Jones sees nothing wrong with cooking herself a multi-course meal for breakfast), the traditional family meal around the table has been stylistically replaced with a to-each-his-own, round-the-clock kitchen instead to emphasize the conventional loosening of family traditions in California.

Not every style worked into the movie is used for humor though. When a character tells a story from the past in Friday, shifts are deliberately and stylistically made from color film to black and white. The shift to black and white film embodies stereotypical California as “the” movie-making industry in a fond way. Movies, after all, were born here in Hollywood, in black and white. The retrospective scenes in the movie Friday are reminiscent of the great classics such as The Grapes of Wrath. The element of the black and white clips adds a touch of California nostalgia to the film that is likely the director’s nod to his past. For him, 126th St. was his ‘Hood when he was a kid and the house in the black and white scene where Deebo punches Red into the air was once Gray’s home. (Friday)

The lifestyle of the ‘Hood’, noxious smells, a lifestyle of excess, and a quaint nostalgia for the area’s film-making history; all of these elements are carefully stylized together in Friday to give viewers a humorous, trendy, laid-back experience of modern-day 126th Street between Halldale and Normandy in South Central Los Angeles. If we take the time to look past the smokescreen of drug use and watch as the film changes from color to black and white and back again and ask ourselves how film color adds to our experience of the film, or picture how anachronistic the film would appear, shot almost exclusively on Craig’s couch inside his house instead of on mismatched chairs on the porch with his parent’s salmon-pink and green trim house as the backdrop to the ‘Hood, we can begin to grasp what Susan Sontag means when she says, “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” (Against Interpretation 11) Friday is a film we can either dismiss as just another story about potheads and street violence, or, we can breathe each scene in, one at a time, laughing, gagging and waving our hands in front of our faces, but even still, experiencing the high Friday was meant to deliver to the viewer.

Works Cited

Friday. Dir. F. Gary Gray. New Line Cinema, 1995. Written by Ice Cube and D.J. Pooh.
“Friday”. IMDB.com. 1990-2009. IMDB.com Inc. 19 April 2009. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113118/.>
James, Caryn. “Friday (1995)”. NYTimes.com. 26 April 1995.19 April 2009. <http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=990CE7DA113DF935A15757C0A963958260>
Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation”. 1964. Coldbacon.com. 4/20/2009. http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/sontag-againstinterpretation.html
---. “On Style”. 1965. Lemming.mahost.org. 4/22/2009. http://lemming.mahost.org/library/onstyle.htm
The Grapes of Wrath. Dir. John Ford. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp., 15 March 1940. Based on John Steinbecks’s The Grapes of Wrath.