GRANT FARRED 487
distinctions have no bearing on how the men of Compton act because
for them the hood is a social structure in which class inequities do not
apply. The bourgeois Ilena's cousin is then, not surprisingly, as much a
home-boy as Caine or O'Dog. Home-boys, their inter-group antagonisms apart, share the same material and ideological relationship to the
world of Compton and downtown L.A. However, while women can be
uniformly named "bitches" or "hoes" or "pussy," descriptions which litter the script, that does not mean that those terms are devoid of class
identification. Bourgeois Ilena is not working-class Ronnie. Or, not to
put too fine a point on it, Ronnie is not a "bitch" in the same way that
Ilena is a "ho."
While Allen and Albert Hughes's portrayal of women relies upon
misogynistic language and shows itself to be unreflexively rooted in a patriarchal discourse, the movie's gender problematic operates in another
way which is more insidious. Menace II Society is remarkable for its ability to write into its linguistic designations of its female protagonists the
depictions of women as catalysts for catastrophe. The movie dramatizes
the female body as the site of male desire which rapidly transforms itself
into a lightning rod for male disaster. Compton's men can only conduct
their lives in relative safety when women are absent. The terms "bitch"
and "ho," which depend on popular understandings of women as sexually available, insatiable and promiscuous, rely less on their derogatory
connotations than on a reinscription of women as inner city femmes fatales-the bearers of male destruction. Thefemmefatale quality-or the
Eve factor-results from the entanglement of the men's sexual desire for
these women and the social forces which that desire sets in (fatal) motion. The fatality of male attraction to women can be demonstrated by a
brief comparison of Menace II Society's two most violent scenes. It is
striking that the only scene of group violence which does not originate
with women is infinitely more bloody-Caine is carried bleeding profusely into a hospital-but claims fewer lives. The scene to which I am
referring revolves unambiguously around Compton inter-group hostilities and deeply personal bonds. Harold, Caine's cousin, is shot by a rival
group in a carjacking. Soon after, Caine, O'Dog, and G exact revenge. In
terms of the plotline this episode is vital because Caine kills someone for
the first time, a rite of passage that marks this home-boy's coming of age
in the hood. Set against the larger narrative, however, the "Harold
scenes" merely signify a stage in Caine's development-the acquisition
of a certain hood maturity, overseen by G.
Although the violent culmination of Menace II Society strongly sug
