Deep Cover in Gansta Crown Heights

Tony Montana: commenting to mentalblog.com: Oliver Stone's visceral, angry tragedy: I think it's also especially significant how Tony Montana (not Don Corleone or Henry Hill et al) became a cultural icon of the 80s hip-hop counter-culture. It seems like whenever Jews generate cryptically self-symbolic art about the Jewish psyche for the mass media, it has an uncanny tendency to resonate with blacks. The Jewish story and (l'havdil) the African-American experience sometimes seem to be two sides of the same coin of hubris as the ultimate survival mechanism.

Tzemach Atlas: Are there other examples of Jewish "cryptically self-symbolic art" that merged with the black culture, I mean ahem, besides Jesus.

Tony Montana: I qualified the statement as pertaining only to art generated for the mass media. Obviously, the stuff that was too parochial never got outside of the Jewish community. But just one example that pops into my mind - probably because Scarface is making me think about hip-hop: Surely the most complex and challenging "gangsta" flick of the 90s blaxpoitation renaissance which included films by many black amateurs, was Deep Cover, written by a Jew, Michael Tolkin. The movie sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the other films of its genre. Whereas the other 90s 'hood movies told emotionally compelling stories of desperation, this movie was a head trip about the existential hell of moral ambiguity. Jeff Goldblum, in the performance of his career, portrays a creepy, amoral Jewish lawyer. Larry Fishburn, intense as always, is the tormented protagonist. Deep Cover wears the clothes of a hood movie, but its oozing with Jewish guilt over the elusiveness of moral firm ground.

Tony Montana: Crown Heights is the nexus between Jewish cultural values and black ghetto life so don't be surprised about the gangsterized version of chasidic culture that emerges from there. Now if only some of the lyricism of hip-hop would also influence Crown Heights culture and not just the bravado.

P.S. Tzemach Atlas: Tony, I watched the movie. A drama with blurred lines between the bad and good guys. The undercover cop Fishburn is only able to bring light into this world by becoming a drug lord, criminal and a murderer. His supervisor in the USA government who calls himself "G-d" and who sends him on this mission turns out to be a real bad guy. The movie came out in 1992. I was thinking of Dena Hamburger, trying to remember when did I come back to Boston. It was in the summer of 1992. The intensity of those years resonates with me. I wish I would have seen that movie then. Ironically references to Bush sound contemporary while obviously they are about Bush the father.

On the subject of Gansta Crown Heights. I don't see how a culture can sustain itself if it doesn't attempt to examine the confusion, juxtaposition and the eternal intimate dance between good and evil. One can not live on a diet of black and white children stories about the Rebbe, considering that the duality was the main contribution of the Alter Rebbe to the Jewish thought, the legacy of this thinking remains under Deep Cover.