But the riots, which lasted six days and resulted in $1 billion in property damage and the deaths of more than 60 people, were also the result of everything hovering in the background. The immediate occasion was the acquittal of the four police officers accused of severely beating Rodney King on March 3, 1991: another violent, racial crime caught on tape. Saturday, April 29, 2017, marks the 25th anniversary of the start of the riots that rocked the city of L.A. It’s this tape that I can’t help but think of today. Stealing the tape, though, revises the narrative. But do you watch it again and again, in a masturbatory way, afterward? Do you show it to your friends, offering up live commentary like it’s a football reel? O-Dog wields the tape like it’s the secret to his celebrity had he not stolen it, and had it made its way onto news stations to be played over and over, it might have been. You kill a guy in front of security cameras, you make sure to get the tape. He shoots the man point-blank at the counter, and before he kills the man’s wife, he drags her into the back room and demands she give him the security tape. It’s O-Dog (Larenz Tate) who does the shooting. You never knew what was gonna happen - or when." "It’s funny like that in the hood sometimes. "Went into the store just to get a beer, came out an accessory to murder and armed robbery," he says in a voice-over as we watch him and O-Dog fleeing the scene. Caine, the hero of the movie and its narrator, puts it wisely. It all happens kind of fast: suspicious glances, defensive remarks, a stray comment about O-Dog’s mother, and a bullet to the chest. That’s how the trip begins, at least: It ends with the two store owners, a middle-aged Korean couple who had warily watched Caine and O-Dog’s every move, starkly dead. In the opening moments of the 1993 film Menace II Society, Caine and O-Dog, two young black men growing up on the streets of Los Angeles, step into a convenience store to grab 40s. This monthly column, The Politics of American Movies, will explore everything from racially progressive Westerns and anti-fascist comedies to documentaries about the working class and popcorn flicks with subversive bite. And we, the people, are hungry for political art. The essence of the current cultural discourse is that everything we watch is at least latently political.
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