Looking at the newspaper ad for Colors (photo of Robert Duvall and Sean Penn, clad as cops, striding forward purposefully shoulder to shoulder), I anticipated a film in the Joseph Wambaugh mode: a study of policemen as latter-day Roman legionnaires trying vainly but nobly to stem the tide of barbarism; a film that might be tough-minded in its examination of police methods, even condemnatory of incidental police corruption, but mainly eulogistic of the men and women who are paid to put their bodies between us and urban violence.
I was wrong. Dennis Hopper’s new movie, at its best, is a war film. It has more in common with Platoon than with The Blue Knight. Though the two policemen pictured in that advertisement are the ostensible heroes of the movie, Colors fully comes alive only when their foes, the L.A. drug gangs, take over the screen. In an interview for American Film magazine (March, 1988), Hopper remarked that “…the movie’s about the police, not the gangs. Although if I’d made this movie on my own, I’d probably have made it strictly about the gangs.” Hopper’s instincts as an artist took their revenge on his willingness to accommodate the businessmen backing the movie. What is best in Colors is strictly about the gangs.
Watching the two patrolmen—the aging, humane Hodges (Duvall) and the young, bullheaded MacGavin (Penn)—negotiate with the Grips and Bloods (Hispanics and blacks, respectively), confer favors in exchange for information, and mop up the bloody remains of savage battles, is like watching a dedicated but woefully understaffed United Nations task force trying to curtail a devastating civil war fought by two huge, bloodthirsty and murderously well-supplied armies.
These gangs, in fact, are armies in every respect save legal recognition: aside from the snazzy firepower, they have their own uniforms (the insignias and tattoos that give the movie its title), a speeded-up version of boot camp (beatings of would-be volunteers to see if they can “take it”), the usual soldierly relaxations (sex with camp followers, booze, narcotics), combat pay (in cash and drugs), and, though they may not have military march music, some rap music is just a new way of singing arms and the man.
But what is unusual about this war—unusual for our times, anyway—is that these armies are not fighting for any ideology, not the advancement of democracy or communism or nationalism or any other “ism.” Nor is there any cultural integrity being threatened or preserved by the fighting: rap and the colors aren’t products of cultures under stress but rather are products of that very bellicosity that puts the black and Hispanic cultures under stress. Nor is the war strictly mercenary, though drug money is the catalyst of violence. The combatants get little of the huge sums amassed by the crack cocaine profiteers, who often don’t even live in this country, much less in the embattled neighborhoods. Most of the money must be spent on maintenance of cars and weapons, on bail, and on getting quick, expensive highs.
The money keeps the war going, to be sure, but if the movie is correct in its portrayal, this war is kept alive for the most ancient of reasons: the sheer need to have an enemy, the thirst for the self-definition an enemy gives. In one of the film’s best scenes, a black community worker collaborating with the L.A.P.D. tries to reason with some gang members in the usual way of community workers: trying to make them aware of how they’re wasting their lives, warning them of the imminence of their deaths. But the kids have an answer that eludes all rationalizations; they defiantly, spasmodically, almost joyfully rehearse the sign language of their gangs, performing sinister semaphores that proclaim the only loyalties they care about. Brief lives? Why not, if they can have a few intense thrills before dying? Futility of death? No, it’s honorable if they die killing for their gangs, for their colors. This scene, desultory while the community worker has his say, explodes into a ballet of tribal loyalty. The most sophisticated small arms weaponry ever invented is being wielded by kids whose aims differ in no way from those of a cave man hurling a rock.
Dennis Hopper benefits from the fact that there is no complex ideology behind the warfare he portrays. In the current spate of Vietnam war movies, the ideology motivating all combatants was skimped, so that no matter how impressed we are with the delineation of combat, we feel confused about the overall vision of that war: was the Vietnam intervention a debacle for Americans because it produced so much pain and death (true of any war) or because American goals were confused or evil or simply unrealistic? This problem doesn’t exist for Colors. Here, the violence we see is the motivation for the war. If there is any ideology, it is machismo. The closer these young men come to death, the more alive they feel.
Hopper and his genius cameraman, Haskel Wexler, capture the heat-on-asphalt throb of urban violence, the way it seems to come out of nowhere, the way it’s underscored and even encouraged by the ugly music that pours out of “ghetto blasters” perched on warriors’ shoulders, the fact that it cannot be limited to the usual battlefields of ghetto or barrio but spills over into commercial districts where bystanders too are picked off.
But Hopper and Wexler aren’t content to heat up action sequences. They also capture the context of violence: the awful listlessness that fills the lives of the gang members when they’re not fighting, the squalor of hang-outs, the visual outcry of graffiti, the funky joyousness of parties where the new dance steps seem to be warm-ups for street fighting.
Imagine, however, a movie about American servicemen in Vietnam from which audiences emerge with more understanding of the Viet Cong than of the Americans. That is rather the case with Colors. Here, the centurions of the law cannot compare in vividness with the barbarians they are fighting. The vines of the urban jungle grow so luxuriously in this movie and are captured in such vivid colors that they overwhelm and finally nearly hide from view the soldiers trying to hack their way through the undergrowth.
Hopper responds to the kill-today-die-tomorrow nihilism of the hoods but not to the middle-class respectability that Officer Hodges represents. Only when Hodges is himself caught up in violence, while chasing criminals or challenging his upstart partner, does Hopper respond to him in the same way that he responds to the gangs: with gusto and resourcefulness. And though Robert Duvall can, fleetingly, invest Hodges with dignity and force, the script gives him no dramatic layers to work through. When Hodges isn’t chasing or fighting or blowing his top, he doesn’t exist. When we see him at home with his family, setting and action seem no more than a West coast update of Saturday Evening Post covers. It’s as if Hopper had had to research a normal middle-class family the way a documentary filmmaker would have to research head hunters in New Guinea. In this case, however, the research inspired no interest in the researcher.
By contrast, Hopper’s investigation of the gangs and the police methods of dealing with them is informed by passion. The Crips and the Bloods, no matter how briefly they’re on screen, are individualized. But nothing in Hopper responds to a middle-class barbecue or to the joys of holding a baby or to the intimacies, spoken or unspoken, that pass between husband and wife. In the schema of the script, Hodges’s family-guy decency is set up as an alternative to the maniac existence of the gangs. Yet since the criminal milieu has vitality in this movie and the middle-class alternative has none, the alternative evaporates.
The role of MacGavin, the younger partner, is both more promising and more problematic. In outline, he is the most dramatic character, since his outlook on life is the only one in the film that is transformed. He starts out as a violence-loving punk (nicknamed “Pac-man” because he likes to eat up street punks with fast, brutal arrests) not much different from the hoods he collars. By the end, he has been transformed into a junior version of Hodges: patient, compassionate, canny. What brings on the transformation? Hodges’ influence? But there is no moment in the film that shows MacGavin the error of his methods and the efficacy of Hodges’s. In fact, the only time MacGavin is moved to admiration of the older man is when Hodges beats into submission a punk getting the best of MacGavin in a street fight. Why should a display of physical prowess influence a hothead into behaving more reasonably? How can Hodges be a maturing influence on Pac-man when he himself is acting most like Pac-man?
The other influence on MacGavin is his romance with an Hispanic woman. Reversals in her character are probably meant to jolt the young man into reconsidering his attitudes towards her people. But this romance, as filmed, is just a series of the usual tableaus: first teasing meeting, initial date, hot sex (filmed, as most bedroom scenes are nowadays, like an MTV video), estrangement, further recrimination, and finally the discovery for MacGavin that his girl is a gang member herself. These scenes just fill out an outline, not a characterization. And how would the final discovery make MacGavin more humane? Surely it would embitter him, make him more of a bigot than before.
Sean Penn does yeoman work. He sketches a young prole who uses racist epithets as he does his club or his fists: just tools of the trade, nothing personal. Not for the first time in a current Hollywood movie, an actor has demonstrated more freshness of observation than his scriptwriter.
I suspect that Hopper took on this project partly as an expiation for the drug binges of his youth which laid waste to his early career. (Colors is only his fourth directorial achievement in twenty years.) Having once portrayed druggies as near-saints (in Easy Rider), he now wanted to show the hell that drugs have made of our cities. He has succeeded. Colors is a convincing portrayal of a form of urban violence that has become an end unto itself. And, like any artist who explores hell, Hopper can’t help but explore the vividness of the inferno. The garish uniforms, the search beams of helicopters, the profusion of graffiti, the pulse of rap, all keep us hypnotized until the film ends.
But when the film ends—then what? We have been licked by the flames of the film, but have we seen very much human nature in their light? If Hopper had managed to take us inside MacGavin’s head, or had portrayed Hodges as a valid human alternative rather than as the cliche old pro, we might have felt that MacGavin’s conversion wasn’t just an excuse to end the movie but was the beginning of a journey out of that chaos that the movie so well captures.