Title: Anatomy of a
Hate Crime |
Release Date: 1998 |
Nationality and Language: |
Running time: about 88 Minutes |
|
Distributor and Production Company: MTV films |
Director; Writer: Tim Hunter, Max Ember |
Producer: |
Cast: Cy Carter (as Matthew Shepard) |
Technical: |
Relevance to doaskdotell site: |
Review: MTV offered this film first on There are interesting details. For example, the girl-friend of one of the assailants testifies against the killer despite their having had a baby because they never got legally married. There is one scene where Matthew asks for HIV information (for asymptomatic disease), supposedly for a friend. There are a couple of scenes between Matthew and a friend that display an exciting, if reticent, tenderness. There is presentation of Matthew’s fluency in various languages and cultures. The scenes regarding his two assassins are somewhat stereotyped, almost “heterophobic.” In truth, the film presents the crime as not so much a homo-hatred crime (even given the talk about “rolling queers”) as a “class warfare” crime. The two young men seemed to react like animals who will exert violence against those not only “different” but who also have what they “want” (money, finesse, and, believe or not even in Laramie, a certain sense of privilege and social esteem). The actual assault scene is mercifully brief, but it contains the kind of
chilling shots that marked Of course, we want to see the studios able to invest in this kind of material on a larger scale, sufficient for a theater release. That is a goal I would like to work on some day. As for hate crimes laws, I’ll say here that I think that they are a
short-circuit or palliative to solving the real problems, which include
government-sponsored discrimination, even if they appear in a practical sense
to offer “relief” and a counterbalance to homophobia in the law enforcement
and criminal justice system. We don’t
want to send a message that the surest way to be protected by the law is to
set yourself up as a class of “victims.” The law must apply equally to
everyone. The law can consider malice
and motive behind a crime at an individual level without hate crimes laws,
and it did in And, of course, the country has learned that anyone can be a victim of a hate crime. HBO films aired a film version of “The Laramie Project”
on Matthew appears to have exuded an unusual charisma and interest in
engaging people, especially those older than him, in many kinds of
discussion. One incident of interest is when young Matthew quits a retail job
after refusing to dupe an elderly customer. He is totally turned off by the
greed that seems to drive job performance in the workplace (at least in
selling) and his boss thinks he is too “gay.” The campfire scene where he
comes out to his parents communicates well the idea that no one understands
what it is like to be him, to be different. He would have been a good friend
had I met him. Sometimes, as when he lived in On On Another important view of race comes from Australian
filmmaker Phillip Noyce and Miramax: Rabbit Proof Fence (2002). This film relates the
story of three aborigine girls taken to a state run camp to be “assimilated”
into the white race as domestics, and their journey home on foot. The wide
screen cinematography of the outback in Licensed to Kill (1997, DeepFocus/PBS, dir. Arthur Dong, 77 min) is a chilling
documentary in which the director interviews convicted killers of gay men.
Most of them are socialized into a self-righteous collective mindset
dependent on gender roles, which protect them from awareness of their own
personal shortcomings. They feel that gay men flaunt their “passivity” to
shame straight men who can’t “compete” and to remind
straight men that they can fail to measure up physically. At least two of
them mentioned their resentment of President Clinton’s attempt to lift the
ban on gays in the military, as one of them (a soldier then) has assaulted
men in a |
Related review: play The Laramie Project |
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