In the film La Haine these subcultures are located in a specific place, the banlieue, or the suburban of cities, and they have a similar background, the second or third generation of immigrants. “Subcultures must exhibit a distinctive enough shape and structure to make them identifiably different from their ‘parents’ culture. They must be focussed around certain activities, values, certain uses material artefacts, territorial spaces, etc which significantly differentiate them from the wider culture”. (K. Gelder & S. Thornton. 1997: 100)
The Hip Hop culture in France is an example of subculture, and it is widely referenced in the film La Haine through the soundtrack. Hip Hop, as the black community did before in some cities in the United States, it is a form of youth subculture, that manifests the ways in which a younger generation from diverse ethnic backgrounds are creating their own idiosyncratic culture. The music producer and film director Mark Shimmel said, “One thing that is applicable to every generation of teenagers is urgency.” (Walker, 2006, un-paginated) This hybrid culture is the testimony of life of the youth generation and the sound, lyrics, style and language, the expression of that sense of urgency, change and reaction against the popular culture. It is the faster and more effective way to manifest everything that is important and is concerned to this sub-culture.
The story of La Haine is organized from the perspective of its three central characters, Vinz, Hubert and Said, representing respectively the Jewish, Black African and the Arab background. It attempts to narrate a subjective story of an isolate existence in the banlieue, stressed by different values from their parents’ culture. It is reflected in the film in the breakfast scene, in the Vinzs’ parents flat, where his grandmother speaks angrily to him for no longer going to the synagogue. In the other hand, this sensation of isolation caused by the absence or limitation of public transports, and long distances to the city centre from the banlieue, tend to create a sense of neighbourhood, clear represented in the film with continuous greetings between the male trio and other members of the banlieue. “The isolation of the immigrant and racial colonies of the so-called ghettos and areas of population segregation tend to preserve and, where there is racial prejudice, to intensify the intimacies and solidarity of local and neighbourhood.” (K. Gelder & S. Thornton, 1997:17)
When racial prejudices arise and isolation aggravates this situation, solidarity against everything that represents the cause of their exclusion, is the only way of self-protection. This enforces and joins the community to create alternative subcultures in defence of their integrity and identity. As Michel de Certeau maintains, “cultures can be an invisible fibre of little tactics by which people maintain some sense of possibility in lives lived in spaces always under someone’s control.” (McKenzie Wark 1997, un-paginated) One of the forms of reaction against the ways of control is the riot. Rioters feel alienated from the French police, judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers and social workers, in part because minorities are still underrepresented in all these fields. Many of them have friends or family who experienced police abuse: use of excessive force, racist insults, recurrent identity checks, unwarranted arrests and gratuitous harassment in police custody. In fact, the film starts with the images of the riots, in response to the abuse of a young North African descendent during his custody in a police station, causing coma and his posterior dead.
The main issue that gave birth to the film is the racist violence, but it quickly disappears to give way for a consensual point of view of and from the three friends united in their social exclusion. Although La Haine is not simply a film with a social message, exposing the brutalized lives of minorities and the demands for the end of their exclusion, the movie is also a representation of life in the banlieue (suburban), in a French society in crisis towards social disintegration.
This disintegration is related with long-term unemployment, in some cases a multigenerational problem inherited from parents to sons. In the other hand the young generation enter into the vicious circle of schooling failure and labour market exclusion derived from this situation. Family employment and prosperity is fundamental to provide social integration. Indeed, living in a suburb and being surrounded by people who are in social transition, does not promote and incentive school performance. “The 41% of boys and 32% of girls in Middle-Schools are one year late or more against around 25% for the French average including the suburbs numbers… the unemployment rate varies dramatically depending on your education: a man with more than 2 years at the university will face an unemployment rate of 15.3% when living in a project, and 5.7% otherwise. A man with 2 years at the university will face an unemployment rate of 8.9% when living in a project, and 4.8% otherwise. A man without any diploma will face a rate of 26.6% when living in a housing project, and 10.2% otherwise. The overall unemployment rate for men living in a suburb is 19.3%, and 6.9% elsewhere”. (Warin T. 2005, un-paginated)
Unemployment and lack of perspectives and prospect, force those young communities’ members into delinquency and drugs dealing. This issue is a direct consequence of the boredom, isolation and unemployment lived in the banlieue, provoking the exclusion of their members from the mainstream culture and society. There are some examples of social and cultural exclusion during the film, when the male trio is thrown out of the hospital, Asterix’s flat, the nightclub and the art gallery. This last example points a cultural behaviour, which can be a barrier for the integration and acceptation by other members of the same culture who are educated in a different way. It means understand, accept and behave according to the codes and rules of a standard culture and society in specific situations. “La Haine situates its heroes in a space beyond any possible identity, whether it is political or cultural. What the film deals with is the impossibility to cultivate any identity, personal or collective.” (Vincendeau G. 2005:69)
La Haine was one of the most successful films when it was released in 1995, winning the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival, and also the César Award for Best French Film. Its relevance resides in the debate opened after its release, over police-brutality against second generation of French citizens immigrants. These increased by time minority’s communities, have been suffering social exclusion for many reasons as unemployment, geographic isolation and racism, but especially by cultural discrimination. This discrimination is plausible in a French politic that promotes the integration of a common citizenship’s model, unmarked by ethnic, racial or religious differences, however, the idea of groups or diversity is missed. “The 2004 law banning ‘conspicuous’ religious symbols (read, headscarves) in French public schools cast France as an intolerant and radically secular state hostile to the manifestation of difference, especially Muslim difference, in the public sphere.” (Fernando M. un-paginated) This situation exacerbated the impossibility of create an identity either personal or collective, for the new generations that turn its eyes to America to assimilate subculture models as a reaction against the mainstream culture. Mass media communication is a great source of influence that transmits values and ideas, absorbed by the youth as part of their culture. This influences joined to personal experiences, social background and geographic setting, affects people’s behaviour and consequently their understanding of the dominant culture, having as a consequence the rising of subcultures of members with the same meaning of culture. How we have seen culture and subculture is one consequence of the other and influences each other.
La Haine is not only a film that analyzes deeply reason about ethnicity, racism, violence, discrimination and the situation of young immigrants in France. However, it points the problems, shown through raw and real images of riots, veridical fact of police violence and racial discrimination of young minorities living in France and trapped between the French and parental culture.
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