La Haine.pdf

‘So Far So Good . . .’

La Haine and the Poetics of the Everyday

Sanjay Sharma and Ashwani Sharma

In France today, the development of racism is generally presented as a crisis

phenomenon, the more or less inevitable, more or less resistible effect of

economic crisis, but also of a crisis that is political, moral or cultural (Balibar,

1991a: 217).

A lone youth shouts to a squadron of riot police : ‘You murderers! You can’t

shoot. We only have stones.’

Cue title: La Haine .

Roll credits: . . . This ﬁlm is dedicated to those who died during its making . . .

Voice-over: It’s a story about a guy falling from a 50-storey building. As he

falls, he tries to reassure himself by repeating: so far so good, so far so good.

Image: Icon earth from space – a petrol bomb hurtles toward the planet earth.

Voice-over: It’s not the fall that matters . . .

Image: earth explodes setting the screen ablaze in orange.

Voice-over: . . . it’s the landing.

Dissolve: stark black and white images of demonstrators clutching placards

and rampaging youth hurling rocks and running for their lives against riot

police.

Play: Bob Marley’s ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’ over these scenes of chaos . . .

T HE FILM La Haine (Hate) from its opening scenes begins as it means

to go on. The writer/director, Mathieu Kassovitz deftly intersperses

staged scenes of violence with actual television footage of demonstra-

tors and other youths in a pitched battle against armed riot police on a

French estate. The making of the ﬁlm coincided with actual ‘rioting’ in

Parisian suburbs during July 1995, and Kassovitz’s dedication in the

opening credits identiﬁes La Haine with the youth who have died at the

Theory, Culture & Society 2000 ( SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),

Vol. 17(3): 103–116

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hands of the police. The judicious selection of Marley’s prophetic song of

insurrection played over images of insurgent youth seeks to connect these

acts of resistance and rebellion to wider post-colonial struggles against racist

state terror and social injustice. The ﬁlm’s ‘realist’ aesthetic and depiction

of a savage and sanguinary 24 hours in the lives of three racial minorities of

France makes visible a social time-bomb ready to explode in the decaying

multi-racial suburbs of France. It led to the French Minister of Interior and

the Prime Minister viewing the ﬁlm privately three times in an attempt to

comprehend the eruption of violence (Elstob, 1997–8).

Released in 1995 La Haine drew international critical acclaim for its

raw and stark depiction of life in the ‘suburban ghettos’ ( banlieues ) of France.

These peripheral areas and those groups who live there have been relatively

ignored until recently by mainstream French cinema. La Haine in contrast

exposes the brutal spatial and social exclusion of some of France’s minority

populations. The ﬁlm presents a nightmarish glimpse of how its three male

protagonists attempt to survive in a racist milieu of surveillance, exclusion

and annihilation. It has been the most celebrated and most commercial of

the so-called ‘banlieue ﬁlms’ to emerge out of France in recent years. 1

The ﬁlm stands in marked contrast to a new-found discourse of multi-

culturalism born out of a World Cup victory in 1998 that portentously

claimed to have uniﬁed the French nation. At best this has been a multi-

culturalism that remains deeply assimilatory in its intent and, we would

maintain, a liberal alibi for obscuring a neo-racism of decolonization

(Balibar, 1991b). Alongside other western nations, France’s social formation

is permeated by racial exclusion. Le Pen’s Front National party electoral

victories gained over 15 percent of votes and it is in control of a number of

municipalities. In these localities multicultural texts have been removed

from public libraries, African youth organizations have been shut down, rap

groups have been banned from appearing live and hip-hop attacked for being

decadent ( CARF , April/May 1998).

However, La Haine is not simply a ﬁlm with a social message, expos-

ing the brutalized lives of minorities and pleading for the end to their exclu-

sion. It offers an apocalyptic vision of life in the banlieue: a French society

in crisis hurtling towards social disintegration. The ﬁlm’s startling images of

youth alienation, police brutality and racial terror, alongside complex and

humanizing representations of racialized minorities make this a compelling

text. Its aesthetic strategies draw on a multitude of genres and styles, from

MTV pop videos to cult directors such as Tarantino, Woo and Godard. La

Haine ’s embellished realism, coupled with an arresting soul/funk/rap sound-

track, undoubtedly has added to its appeal. It is difﬁcult these days to ﬁnd

examples of popular ﬁlm depicting urban youth without hip up-front music.

The success of ﬁlms dealing with racial conﬂict and urban unrest such as

Boyz ’n the Hood , Menace to Society and Do the Right Thing traded as much

on their ﬁlmic soundtracks as their enraged visual imagery and narratives.

La Haine was no exception, although Kassovitz’s promotional strategies were

far more intentional and selective. He fuelled publicity for the ﬁlm in a

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105

number of ways, for example, collaborating in creating a photographic exhi-

bition based on the ﬁlm while raising its proﬁle as artistic practice, and

exhibiting the ﬁlm directly to youth living on French estates. Moreover, he

brought together of some of the most noted French hip-hop artists such as

MC Solaar, IAM and Sens Unik to record an album inspired by La Haine .

The album also included samples of the acerbic dialogue of the ﬁlm and its

production was homage to the cultural impact and commercial popularity of

La Haine .

This is one context in which we wish to read La Haine – as a text built

on elements of a transnational hip-hop cultural sensibility. Moreover, we

want to interrogate the aesthetic strategies of this text in relation to what kind

of cultural politics it offers. Aesthetic representations of politics are invari-

ably found to be wanting. But our concern is to highlight the representational

politics of a racialized aesthetic. La Haine abjectly refuses to advance any

political solutions to or projects for an impending social crisis that will tear

apart French society. And following Balibar (1991a), this social crisis needs

to be understood as a racial crisis. La Haine ’s politics of representation are

articulated by ideological and discursive modes of racialized signiﬁcation.

However, we will contend that the ﬁlm’s language – a reﬂexive hyper-stylized

realism – is the performative site of an ambivalent politics. La Haine is

acutely cognizant of its own representational practices – a self-reﬂexivity

able to engender a (postmodern) authenticity. But we argue that this belies

the ﬁlm’s complicity in producing an aestheticized account of ‘ghetto life’

predicated on potent racialized signiﬁers: (sub)urban crisis, the banlieue,

aggressive black masculinity and hip-hop culture.

‘The bullet always arrives at its destination’

La Haine ends in a similar way to how it begins, with a voice-over: ‘ It’s about

a society in free fall. To reassure itself, it repeats itself endlessly. “So far so

good, so far so good, so far so good . . . . It’s not the fall that matters, it’s the

landing. ” ’ This anxious repetition of assurance, which one could dub the

inner voice of liberal democracy, underpins the sustained and spectacular

critique that the ﬁlm engenders. La Haine , by locating itself in a poor multi-

racial suburb outside Paris, draws attention to a volatile racial and class situ-

ation in contemporary France. The injustice of this situation is made more

compelling by the ﬁlm attempting to reﬂect actual events in the banlieues

of France. 2 However, the story of La Haine is organized deliberately around

the somewhat unlikely friendships between three young males, Vinz, Hubert

and Saïd (of ‘Jewish’, ‘Black African’ and ‘Arab’ background respectively).

This was a marked attempt to draw attention to the racial and racist dimen-

sion of a social crisis. Although, we need further to ask the question of ‘a

crisis for whom?’ (cf. Balibar, 1991a), La Haine ’s central message is explic-

itly about an impending crisis for French society. The exclusion of minority

populations from this society will lead to increasing violence and destruc-

tion of the social order. But the ﬁlm’s most compelling feature is that the

story is told from the perspective of its three central characters. It attempts

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to narrate a subjective account of an alienated existence in the banlieue. The

‘crisis’ for these youth is of the order of the everyday: the practices of

marginalization, brutalization and racial terror are integral to their subject

formation. 3

Moreover, Kassovitz seeks to present a humanized representation of

racial minorities in La Haine . Each of the central characters embodies a par-

ticular disposition and response to their hostile social conditions. Hubert is

characterized as the ‘thinker’, who possesses some hope and desires to

escape from the banlieue. Saïd is the ‘hustler’ of the three and just wants to

survive from day to day. Vinz is on the brink of psychosis and for him vio-

lence is ultimately cathartic. While each of the protagonists is depicted by

a simplistic social typing, their characterization and representation is,

however, complex because they are not psychologically driven by easily

understandable or rational motivations in the narrative. We identify (and

possibly empathize) with them as they desperately negotiate and attempt to

survive their victimization and racial exclusion.

The narrative of La Haine unfolds through a series of relatively uncon-

nected scenes that structure the events and activities of the three characters

over a period of 24 hours. The story is told in a style almost like that of a

sequence of vignettes. A documentary-like device of a ticking clock links

scenes together and adds further to an underlying anxiety and tension. La

Haine begins with a ‘riot’ scene triggered by the hospitalization of an Arab

youth (Abdel) by the police. It presents the main characters in constant con-

ﬂict and turmoil with different elements of French society. The narrative is

replete with a succession of confrontations experienced by the youth (and

which often involve the police). 4 For instance: Vinz, Hubert and Saïd are

antagonized by the police while visiting Abdel in the hospital; a larger group

of youth confront police detectives on a rooftop; the three characters are

abusive towards television reporters questioning them about the ‘rioting’;

Abdel’s brothers shoot at police in retaliation in a later scene and Vinz aims

a gun at a policeman in an ensuing chase; during their excursion to Paris,

Vinz takes out a gun again in a tense confrontation with a drug dealer; Vinz,

Hubert and Saïd hurl abuse at art aﬁcionados at an exhibition they gatecrash

in the city; Saïd and Hubert are later brutalized at a police station; the youth

are violently confronted by a group of skinhead neo-Nazis and Vinz nearly

shoots one of them in retaliation; and the ﬁnal murderous and self-destruc-

tive climax leads to the violent deaths of Vinz and Hubert at the hands of

the police. 5

The ﬁlm, has been noted for its depiction of raw, uncompromising vio-

lence, as signalled by its title (e.g. Elstob, 1997–8). While there is relatively

little actual on-screen violence it is nevertheless aesthetically charged,

highly explosive and shocking as it often appears unexpectedly. However,

these spectacles of violence and confrontation are also interspersed with

exchanges of both acerbic dialogue and mutual bonding between the three

protagonists. They also pointlessly hang out with friends and tell humorous

though meaningless stories to each other. Moreover, in contrast to the scenes

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107

of violent intensity there are many adjoining periods of relative inactivity

and indifference. The state of indifference and boredom in the ﬁlm provides

a certain critique of the value of life in the socially excluded suburbs. Kasso-

vitz, in an interview, highlights these aspects when asked about the location

of ﬁlming:

. . . it is a ‘ cité ’ meaning that 80% of the population and 100% of the young

have nothing to do. They don’t go to school anymore, they’ve got nothing,

they’re bored stiff. It’s the ‘hanging around’ syndrome. From morning to night

they hang around some building, and they just stand there, outside waiting

around and smoking joints. . . . They don’t even have drugs where we were

ﬁlming. Good thing too, because as soon as you’ve got the real drug dealers,

you’ve got the shootings too . . . (Kassovitz, n.d.)

This boredom, near nihilism, provides a powerful critique of the inher-

ent effect of the structural exclusion of poor youth from contemporary

society. Yet there is always an underlying tense atmosphere of impending

conﬂict in La Haine , and it is this tension of life on the margins – symbol-

ized by the urgency of the ticking clock – that is so well brought to the

surface by the ﬁlm. La Haine ’s cogency derives partially from the way it inte-

grates the threat of violence and confrontation into the everyday struggles of

the youth. Even though the ﬁlm follows in rough chronology the events of

the day, there is little explicit motivation and drive in the narrative. 6 The

relatively arbitrary nature of the development of the story and actions of the

youth is an effective allegory of the meaningless, unstructured and random

nature of life in the banlieues.

Kassovitz in his account above and in the ending of the ﬁlm in par-

ticular, ostensibly tries to offer a subjective account of the psychology of vio-

lence – how hate is bred and how it ends in self-destruction. But arguably

the violence that most pervades the ﬁlm is the everyday brutalization of the

youth and the hopelessness that this violence engenders. It is within this

context of boredom, indifference and alienation that the individual acts and

scenes of potential and actual violence can be understood. These scenes

encapsulate the inner turmoil of the fragility of existence for these margin-

alized youth. Their acts of confrontation and violence are often ‘necessary’,

nearly inevitable, for everyday psychological and social survival, as well as

possibly offering a way of transforming the social situation.

Kassovitz is both circumspect and provocative in his use of racialized

signiﬁers for the representation of banlieue life – a ‘ghetto aesthetic’ – in La

Haine . A police gun found by Vinz during the ‘riots’ provides a signiﬁcant

symbolic thread throughout the ﬁlm. Of the three protagonists, hatred and

the desire for violent revenge against ﬁgures of authority and an oppressive

social formation is most evident in the character of Vinz. The acquisition

and care of the gun endows him with a symbolic agency. His compulsive

mimicry of de Niro’s character in Taxi Driver in front of a mirror makes

explicit the performative and contingent nature of a marginalized mascu-

linity.

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