Menace II Society: The Fifth Post by Davis Rivera

“Menace II Society”
Written and Directed by Allen and Albert Hughes
Released in 1993

Synopsis: A young street hustler attempts to escape the rigors and temptations of the ghetto in a quest for a better life.

Scene: O-Dog and Caine enter a Korean owned convenience store and attempt to purchase two bottles of liquor.

Shot One: The screen is completely black. We hear Caine and O-Dog discussing a party that they intend on going to later in the night. A homeless man interrupts them in an attempt for change. O-Dog reacts violently and tells him, in a vulgar manner, to go away, foreshadowing the extremely violent temper we will see out of O-Dog throughout the scene.

Shot Two: Using the most common shot transition, the cut, we finally are able to see, through exposition, the two men talking as Caine and O-Dog enter the convenience store smiling and continuing to discuss the party. The camera’s height is slightly lower than eye-level and Caine and O-Dog are seen in a medium shot producing a sense of intimacy by allowing viewers to focus on their excited faces as they prepare for the night’s events. At the end of the shot, a black man in the background turns his head to watch Caine and O-Dog as they are nearing the halfway point of the store.

Shot Three: A medium long shot is used and suddenly Caine and O-Dog aren’t the central focus of the shot giving way to the assortment of food and domestic products found throughout the store. As the camera tracks the passage of Caine and O-Dog we suddenly cross over a Korean woman who works in the store and is staring at the young men, not out of the ordinary after the shot of the black man seen earlier. The camera eventually comes to a halt and pans back as Caine and O-Dog reach the liquor section, leaving them in the background. Into the foreground immediately appears the Korean woman from earlier unconvincingly acting like she’s dusting to disguise her obvious suspicions.

Shot Four: A medium close-up signifies Caine’s discomfort and O-Dog’s anger at the woman as O-Dog voices his frustration and lets her know he knows what she is doing. Both O-Dog and Caine’s eyes are seen at the upper right hand corner of the screen, one of the main focal points. Behind them glares the fluorescent lighting illuminating the men in a saturated mix of vibrant colors much in contrast to the way the Korean woman is depicted in the following scene. Caine’s necklace depicting a Christian cross is especially evident below his face full of uneasiness.

Shot Five: A close-up of the Korean woman, one eyebrow arched and grimacing, is seen in extremely desaturated colors. She repeatedly looks down then back up again in a desperate attempt to continue her ‘cleaning up’ ploy that has long since been exposed by O-Dog. She, too, is seen at one of the focal points of the screen, this time at the upper left hand corner. In the background is a drink container, much like the one behind Caine and O-Dog, only now there is no light emitting from it, juxtaposing their brief innocence with her unwarranted skepticism.

Shot Six: O-Dog again expresses his thoughts out loud with his proclamation, “they always think we gonna steal something” as he averts his eyes to the liquor, opens the door and allows Caine to make a selection of what he would like. The saturated colors continue as Caine disappears from the shot leaving O-Dog in a medium close-up.

Shot Seven: An almost exact replica of shot five, again shows the Korean woman nervously looking from the wine bottles she is fictitiously cleaning to Caine and O-Dog going about their business in picking out beer to consume. The mise-en-scène in these two shots emphasizes Caine and O-Dog’s power in controlling a racial motivated event, regardless of their age difference with the woman and it being her own store.

Shot Eight: A medium close-up shows O-Dog closing the liquor case as Caine opens his beer and takes a massive drink lifting the bottom of the bottle to the sky. Immediately after this a swish pan occurs, producing a blurred image of everything Caine and O-Dog passed earlier, ending at a Korean man at the register, unseen earlier due to the black man’s presence, telling Caine not to drink the beer in the store. An important diegetic instrument used during this first pan is the sound of a loud car horn heightening the already unnerving tension the viewer has been privy to this entire scene to its supposed extreme. After the Korean man is finished, the camera again swish pans to Caine who, for the first time in this scene, becomes visibly upset and announces that he intends to pay.

Shot Nine: A close-up shows the Korean woman speed walking and no longer brushing away invisible dust, in an attempt to get closer to Caine and O-Dog. The eyeline match is so pronounced that we no longer question what has captured this woman’s attention but instead focus on her unblinking eyes, unsure of whether, uncharacteristically, she will be the one who does the harm to the two young men.

Shot Ten: These ruminations are thwarted when, in a medium cut, O-Dog stops her in her tracks and yells at her to stop following them around.

Shots Eleven through Twenty-Four: Maintaining a steady medium shot of Caine, O-Dog and the Korean woman, the shot/reverse shot is employed to substantial effect as O-Dog and Caine are told to hurry up and leave while O-Dog tries to calm the situation by saying that’s exactly what he intends to do as Caine now becomes the verbal aggressor intensifying his voice each time the man at the register tells them to leave. Caine and O-Dog arrive at the counter, followed in the foreground by the Korean woman, and pay for the beer. When seen, the man at the counter is shown using a wide-angle lens and in close-up, tightly framed making it easy for the viewer to understand his feeling of constriction as the shoulders of both Caine and O-Dog can still be seen, both at focal points, forming a V-formation as he nervously watches Caine get out his money. Caine asks O-Dog to get his change, which the man at the counter has already put back in the register. O-Dog calmly asks for the change as the verbal attacks on the two men to get out continue repeatedly. Just as the cringe-inducing scene is seemingly at an end as O-Dog and Caine approach the exit, the man at the register, in a medium shot, tells O-Dog, ‘I feel sorry for your mother.’

Shots Twenty-Five through Twenty-Seven: The camera zooms in to an extreme canted angle close-up of O-Dog who is justifiably upset at what has been said to him. The man at the register is then seen in a medium shot at the center of the screen, moving back to a focal point once he realizes the trouble he’s in. The final shot shows O-Dog and Caine in a long shot, revealing the Korean woman in the foreground and placing emphasis on the suddenly minuscule depiction of O-Dog, an abrupt contrast to the towering man at the register emphasizing the opposition even more.

Shots Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Nine: The camera zooms in to an extreme close-up on Caine as he drinks his beer in the same fashion as earlier when suddenly two gunshots are heard in the background. Caine, startled, drops his bottle to the ground as it shatters. A cutaway to a close-up of the broken beer bottle, the only object thus far shown in a single cut, proves important, as the viewer will later learn when Caine’s fingerprints are found on it during an investigation of the murders.

Shots Thirty Through Forty-Five: O-Dog shoots the man at the register two more times then, switching to a normal lens, the Hughes Brothers maintain a series of handheld shots for the remainder of the scene providing a sense of the immediacy required of every one alive. O-Dog grabs the Korean woman, who is by now screaming, and drags her to the back of the store insisting that she tell him where the surveillance tape is. Using harsh lighting and a series of low-angle shots, the Hughes Brothers smoothly draw an urgent attention to the viewer to pay attention to the important details of the story space. The timing of each shot after the murder allows just the right amount of time for each individual character to gather the effects of what O-Dog has done, through brief snippets of the cashier’s dead body behind the counter and Caine’s incredulous face in a fragmented close-up. The camera then zooms in to a plastic curtain distancing the viewer from the violence heard off-screen and ends with the sound of two more gunshots and a halt to the woman screaming. O-Dog returns smiling, the tape seen in the waistline of his pants, and in a low-angle shot robs the dead cashier. Caine eventually gets tired of waiting for O-Dog and leaves. An important aspect of his departure is it happens just as the unopened bottle of O-Dog’s beer is seen in the foreground of the shot, occupying most of the screen, again drawing the viewer’s attention to the bottle so they won’t forget its significance. O-Dog, unlike Caine, does leave with the bottle however as the camera swiftly tracks O-Dog as he follows Caine out of the store and into an unseen car. Like the previous shot of O-Dog killing the Korean woman, the viewer doesn’t see the action taking place but the distinct sound of tires screeching away makes their actions very clear summing up a scene that synthesized the cinematography and mise-en-scène of individual shots into a series of images that, when taken as a whole, transcend the limitations of any one of the images in isolation. For two men who had never made a previous film, this is an impressive feat that few experienced directors have been able to reach.