Straight Outta Compton (2015)

There is a book I like by David Mamet called On Directing Film, which even at barely over a hundred pages consists of repeating just a few ideas to the point (inevitable with Mamet) of self-parody.

"Tell the story in cuts."
"A movie is not just following the hero around."
"The most interesting thing is what happens next."
"The audience requires not information but drama."

Whatever you think of Mamet's own films, or his cult of Eisenstein and Stanislavsky, these are sound (if analytic) principles. A film may have many good artistic reasons, notwithstanding, for breaking those rules. Straight Outta Compton, however, systematically ravages any rational conception of dramatic or cinematic necessity. Each scene is an untransmuted lump of information. The major characters are stranded in undramatic limbo half way through the film. Nothing happens next, because no scene leads to the next. The few times that cuts are used to advance the story (I am thinking of the scene where the cops have NWA members lying face down on the ground outside their recording studio; or the montage where they lay down the vocals for the album) stand out from the overall plan of having one character tell another character the meaning of the scene. (There are also two notable Steadicam shots, deplored by Mamet but effective here: in a hotel suite full of guns and naked women, and in the opening scene in a drug den.)

Straight Outta Compton has all the narrative thrust of a Wikipedia page. The New York Times review compares it to The Social Network, but remember the intricate double-framing device of that film and its airtight editing: the retrospective structure borrowed from Citizen Kane but also the antagonism (the two lawsuits) competing over the story itself. But Compton never adopts a dramatic structure (in Kane, the reporter is looking for the truth of Kane's last words; so is Kane, you see), so the characters are only ever responding to the latest blip of Important Events on their timeline. Embarrassingly, then, Ice Cube writes "Fuck tha Police" directly after the events narrated in the song. A better strategy would have been that advocated by Georg Lukács in The Historical Novel, to show how Ice Cube's character and concerns arise from dramatic collisions within his social development (as, for instance, we learn about Michael Corleone's character in The Godfather from the way he responds to his family upon returning from war). The deplorable result is that "Fuck tha Police" seems like a narrow response to a specific incident of harassment, whereas the movie thematically wants to drape a concern about police white supremacy over the entire (unstructured) film.

This is the kind of movie where characters have to be announced with subtitles, which is unconscionable dramatic laziness. (Mamet: "To really make the audience understand that we're in a garage, what about a sign that says 'garage'?") How many characters and their nicknames and their specialties (and personalities! and accents!) did I learn from a film like The Great Escape (which is only six minutes longer than Compton)? The answer is fourteen. Not only that, but each of these marginal characters had little dramas (Donald Pleasance's blindness, Charles Bronson's claustrophobia) which added danger and irony. Characters like MC Ren or DJ Yella (the #4 and #5 members of the group) don't register at all. I know less about Ren now than I did when I started the movie, since his verses (i.e. his voice, his ideas) are almost entirely cut.

People have complained that the movie does not show Dr. Dre's history of beating women. At bottom, this is a dramatic problem, on two fronts. 1) There are no women characters in the film. Yes, women appear on screen (as sex objects ogled by the camera), they even have names ("Felicia"), they even have lines of dialogue. But in this last case they are never persons, but mouthpieces of exposition or directorial instruction. For instance, watching a clip of the "Sraight Outta Compton" music video years later, Ice Cube's girlfriend remarks how young they were back then, so that we will then notice this. One possible exception, Dre's mother, is not a character but a fantasy of approval and forgiveness. The movie, executive produced by Dre and Ice Cube, is incapable of reflecting on other characters, who are either obstacles (record executives) or temptations (Suge Knight) or blandly anonymous support (Snoop Dogg--what a sin to squander this most charismatic human!). Women fall entirely below even those lines. 2) The movie exists entirely to vindicate Ice Cube and Dre and Eazy-E as geniuses ahead of their time, as social realists, but really as innocents. Everything "bad" in the film is either not-bad (harmless antics like destroying someone's office in a tantrum or waving rifles around in hotel corridors) or is done by someone else. The "worst" thing that Dre does is (for no reason at all that I could discern) drive his car too fast in downtown LA--to signal his confused feelings about success.

Even the character of the manager-villain, Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti) is unclear. The story is supposed to be that Heller pits the members of NWA against each other by coddling Eazy-E, "taking care" of the charismatic star (you have to imagine this, the performance by Jason Mitchell is so terribly boring) first, at the expense of the real geniuses behind the group. It is suggested, though, by Giamatti's very good interpretation, that Heller truly cares for Eazy-E, almost like the blinding love for a favorite child (the Mildred Pierce story), even that Heller is actually "good" for Eazy-E, whom he always calls "Eric." But nothing is made of this dimension in the story: Eazy-E does not "see" this, and the dramatic collision with Heller is reduced to the much simpler idea that the scales just fall from his eyes when some financial paperwork is at last explained to him.

Finally, even the antagonisms between the three main characters are dissolved when they realize that it had all been a big mix-up (owing to their manager's deceptions). Huh?! The movie should ask me to BELIEVE in its dramatic conflicts. Instead it wants me to EXCUSE its having any tension between the three heroes. The result is that none of the characters have anything to do after the half-way point in the film, since the only interesting thing would be their turning-against one another. The movie, instead, is a kind of wish fulfillment that dispels interesting conflicts, scrubs out character complications, renders arbitrary any causality linking events, and has no consciousness beyond the grandiosity and banal self-appraisal of its heroes.