‘Colors’: A Monochromatic View of Gang Life in Los Angeles

Although gangs are all over the controversial new movie “Colors,” the film isn’t really about gangs. It’s a cop movie that uses gang territory and the black community as a setting. Veteran cop Bob Hodges (Robert Duvall) might just as well have taught freshman cop Danny McGavin (Sean Penn) to calm down and stop being so arrogant on fraud detail or in the vice division.

Would that he had.

As a cops-and-killers movie, “Colors” might be worth a couple of points, but as a social document, it’s completely unnecessary, and it’s too bad that it ever was made. Protestations from the film makers aside, “Colors” really does glamorize gangs and it puts the black community in a bad light unnecessarily. Furthermore, “Colors” has few redeeming characteristics.

“There’s nothing glamorous about this movie,” says Dennis Hopper, the film’s director. “There’s nothing glamorous about a drive-by shooting.” Robert H. Solo, the film’s producer concurs. “At no point do we glorify the gangs. They’re neither mythic nor heroic. Instead, we have attempted to portray what is happening in every major city in America.”

But the film makers don’t seem to understand that guys join gangs out of the need to belong. As long as the film shows camaraderie--dudes hangin’ with dudes--then (from the point of view of the alienated teen-ager) the film shows gangs in a positive light. The fact that a couple of dudes get shot up is as insignificant and irrelevant as realizing that you might get a ticket if you speed on the freeway. No one expects it to happen to them. And if it does, it just does. The risk-reward ratio is reasonable.

In truth, both kids and adults of all social and economic classes do some form of “hanging out”--always have and always will. But the alternatives for the middle class and the rich generally have been more socially acceptable, from associating at country clubs to a beer bust at a ball game. On the occasions when they “get caught” in unacceptable behavior, their social support systems keep the incident from having a long-term negative effect on their lives.

The times have changed, too. Years ago, teen-agers did daring things like smoking cigarettes and drinking booze, things that were reasonably affordable and usually would put you out of commission for only a few hours. Today’s gangs track teen-agers down paths from which they cannot easily recover. Drugs, and the things you do to buy them, put you out of commission for life.

And gangs are now technologically advanced. Switch-blades and pop guns have given way to shotguns and Uzis. Before, the payoff was joy-riding in a stolen car. Now it’s selling drugs to buy your own car, complete with telephone and a stereo better than most people have in their homes.

Selling drugs provides a way out of the ghetto that’s as reasonable to a teen-ager with a painfully small universe of possibilities as sports or entertainment have provided in the past. What’s a drug-selling 16-year-old with three BMWs to do? Get an MBA and work for XYZ Corp. so that he can have one BMW?

Because “Colors” uses gangs and the black community as a setting without adequately dealing with any of these issues, it blurs the distinction between the respectable and the reprehensible. Rather than looking to the social structure and the politics of racism for answers, one comes away from “Colors” with the feeling that the disadvantaged black community as a whole is functionally malignant.

Still, Dennis Hopper is proud of his film. “I think this film is entertaining,” he says. “I think it’s educational.”

In “Colors,” all the symbols--rap music, wall murals, graffiti, poverty, ethnic hair styles, hip-hop dancing, the Watts Towers, housing projects, big radios--get thrown in the same pot with gangs and drugs. It’s realistic, but irresponsibly one-sided. The real education that happens in “Colors” is in schooling white people on why they should be fearful of young black men carrying big radios.

Now, I don’t want to fall into the trap of denying that there are things in the black community that truly need to be fixed. We did that through the 1960s and 1970s and spawned a generation that seeks the easy way out, equates working for “the man” as selling out and hollers racism every time things don’t go its way.

Therefore, if “Colors,” had been a documentary describing and analyzing gang culture in the black community, I’d say, let the negative cards fall where they may. But this is not a scholarly report. It’s an entertainment designed for our amusement. It doesn’t just describe what it portrays; as part of the mass media, it helps make it what it is.

When you portray something as sensitive and as serious as gang violence in an ethnic community, you have a responsibility to be attentive to the implications of your enterprise. Creating a well-made, well-researched film isn’t enough. In trying for accuracy, “Colors” has lost out on truth.