History Film / AmericanHistoryX

* FirstRuleOfTheYard: Variation. Derek Vinyard is sentenced to three years in prison for manslaughter, and knows he has to join a gang to survive. He does this by deliberately working out in front of a black gang with his massive swastika chest tattoo on full display, in view of a group of onlooking Neo-Nazi gang members.

* IHaveNoSon: After Derek attacks his own sister during a family dinner and drives his mother's Jewish boyfriend away, she realizes how lost her son is to her and disowns him. When she later visits him in prison she tells Derek that Danny worships him and is starting to follow in his path, going as far as to bitterly state that Danny is "flushing his life down the same toilet" as Derek. After Derek gets out of prison and becomes TheAtoner, his relationship with his mother has improved a lot.

* TheIllegal: The focus of some of Derek's rants and at least one raid.

** Derek's villain dinner, ranting about Rodney King and the L. A. riots that culminates with him grabbing his sister by the hair and choking her with a handful of ham, then delivering an anti-Semitic screed chasing away his mother's boyfriend. This is also when we see the murder that landed him in prison.
** Every time Cameron shows up.

* TheKlan: As a joke, the black prisoner Lamont holds up a piece of cloth as a Klansman's hood and mocks the DeepSouth hick stereotype associated with it. Earlier, Derek also dismisses them as a bunch of disorganized idiots and claims to have higher standards. In fact, [[IResembleThatRemark that describes his own gang quite well]].
* KnightTemplar: Derek before he gets out of prison. He thinks he is absolutely right in spouting his racist ideology even when he organizes attacks and horrifying brutalities against minorities. By contrast, the Aryan Brotherhood are presented as {{straw hypocrite}}s. Which is largely the point that the film tries to get across. The reason destructive ideologies like white supremacy can become so powerful is because their adherents believe themselves to be the heroes, not the bad guys. ForTheEvulz is not a motive many real life humans actually use to justify their actions, especially to themselves.

* BeingEvilSucks: Derek turns away from his neo-Nazi lifestyle as he realizes how unhappy and crappy it has made his life: "And I kept asking myself all the time, how did I buy into this shit? It was because I was pissed off, and nothing I ever did ever took that feeling away. I killed two guys, Danny, I killed them. And it didn't make me feel any different. It just got me more lost and I'm tired of being pissed off, Danny. I'm just tired of it." The ArmorPiercingQuestion that prompts his HeelFaceTurn; "Has anything you've done made your life any better?" essentially marks the contrast between this trope and EvilFeelsGood.

* AngryBlackMan: Sweeney says he was an angry young man, admitting that he was NotSoDifferent from Derek in being consumed by hatred earlier in his life. While visiting Derek in prison, he admits that he knows that place all too well.

* AssholeVictim: Those thugs who broke into Derek's home and threatened his family aren't really going to be missed, but killing them only showed Derek's descent into madness.
* TheAtoner: Derek at first was a violent and racist {{Jerkass}}, but he tries to save his little brother from the same fate once he gets out of prison. However, Derek still bears the consequences of his legacy, as illustrated by his swastika tattoo [[spoiler:and ultimately his brother's death]].

* IHaveNoSon: After Derek attacks his own sister during a family dinner and drives his mother's Jewish boyfriend away, she realizes how lost her son is to her and disowns him. When she later visits him in prison she tells Derek that Danny worships him and is starting to follow in his path, but she doesn't want to give up both her sons. After Derek gets out of prison and becomes TheAtoner, his relationship with his mother has improved a lot.

* KarmaHoudini: Henry seems to get away with [[spoiler: killing Danny]] at the very end of the film.

* KnightTemplarBigBrother: Derek threatens to feed Cameron's heart to him if he continues trying to corrupt Danny like he did with him.

* ManHug: After Derek gets out of prison, he and Danny share one. Even includes the line, "What's the matter, too big to give me a hug, tough guy?"

* OnlySaneMan: Daviana can feel like this to the family before Derek was arrested, given his racism and the others passivity towards it.

* StereotypeFlip: The black inmates not taking their revenge on Derek, after the Aryan Brotherhood has dumped him. It's later heavily implied that Lamont protected him from them, and this further leads to an erosion of his racist views.

%%* CoolOldGuy: Sweeney.

* TheDragon: Derek was one to Cameron.

* EmbarrassingTattoo: Derek's no longer proud of the giant swastika on his chest.

* EvilCannotComprehendGood: The neo-Nazis all assume that prison messed with Derek's head or that he's scared of revenge for the murder he went to prison for.

** Seth is a fat neo-Nazi who's also a BigEater. In one of the most pointlessly petty acts of racism possible, he eats a scale full of jelly beans, but picks out a single black one first. There's no one else in the room so he's not trying to impress any of his Nazi friends, it's not directed against a member of any race he hates, he ''[[PokeThePoodle rejects a piece of candy]]'' that no one will know about simply because he's a racist.

* FanDisservice: The prison shower scenes show a lot of men nude, but the setting doesn't make it appealing in any way. One instance even ends in a PrisonRape on Derek.

* FauxAffablyEvil: Cameron Alexander is friendly, polite and seems to have affection for the kids under his rule, seeing himself as a father figure to many of them. This makes him even worse as it shows just how much power he has on these impressionable, misunderstood kids. Derek also points out that Cameron has no problem selling out any of the youngsters in his movement to save his own ass, seeing them more as tools to further his fascist beliefs than kids he thinks he needs to take care of.

* FirstRuleOfTheYard: Variation. Derek Vinyard is sentenced to two years in prison for manslaughter, and knows he has to join a gang to survive. He does this by deliberately working out in front of a black gang with his massive swastika chest tattoo on full display, in view of a group of onlooking Neo-Nazi gang members.

* ImportantHaircut: Derek shaves his head when he becomes a skinhead. Danny wears his hair cropped very short when he comes under the sway of the skinheads. {{Inverted}} later on when Derek grows his hair out to demonstrate his disaffection with the neo-Nazis.

* {{Jerkass}}: [[WorldOfJerkass A great deal of the characters.]] But Derek himself counts, at first.
%% * JerkToNiceGuyPlot:

* MenDontCry: Averted with Derek. Most men would cry after they've been put through a gang rape or [[spoiler:witness their little brother having been shot to death]], even if they try to project a "tough guy" image.

* MrFanservice: A jacked Edward Norton spends an awful lot of time with his shirt off.

* ScrewThisImOuttaHere: Derek to Cameron.

* ShutUpHannibal: Via a punch to the mouth.

* SlasherSmile: Look at Cameron's expression when [[spoiler: Seth points his gun at Derek.]]

* StereotypeFlip: The black inmates not taking their revenge on Derek, after the Aryan Brotherhood has dumped him. He later learns Lamont protected him from them, and this further leads to an erosion of his racist views.
* StraightEdgeEvil: Derek does not allow his followers to smoke marijuana. Real life white supremacists often look down on pot due to its association with black culture.

* StrawHypocrite: The Aryan Brotherhood in prison is shown to make use of racist imagery, while not actually believing in it themselves. It's left a bit ambiguous whether the alliance their leader makes with Mexican gangs is a case of PragmaticVillainy or hypocrisy, but it's shown either way that he doesn't care about the hateful ideology he pretends to speak for (in real life it may be the latter, as they originally allied against the black gangs).
* StupidCrooks: Lamont is hesitant to tell Derek about how he got in prison because it was by robbing a TV store... [[DonutMessWithACop next to a doughnut shop]]. However, this leads into a darker reveal when Lamont tells Derek that the racist cops conspired to get him a very harsh sentence because the stolen TV that Lamont was holding accidentally fell on one of the officer's feet, and they wanted payback which they got by falsely claiming this was deliberate, making it an assault.

* TwistEnding: After the heavy implication that the neo-Nazis are plotting to exact revenge on Derek, [[spoiler:Danny is shot by the ChekhovsGunman]].

* AxesAtSchool: [[spoiler: Danny is shot to death in the school bathroom by a black kid he had earlier dissed.]]

* CruelAndUnusualDeath: The murder that lands Derek in prison-paralyzing a black robber, then dragging him to the curb, placing his mouth against it, and stomping on it.

** The gangsters themselves decided to barge onto Derek's property with guns and steal his father's car because he beat them in a basketball game. Derek was an openly racist jackass on the court, but the guys themselves were after all Crips, so it's probably less about moral outrage and more about deciding to teach someone they consider an enemy a lesson.

* ExpositoryHairstyleChange: Derek's hair growing back out in prison shows his change of heart and the passage of time.

* ClusterFBomb: From beginning to end, all Derek says in the rape scene are "Fuck you!"

* {{Jerkass}}: A great deal of the characters. But Derek himself counts, at first.

* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler:Derek has sworn off racism, but not before he could prevent his brother's death in race-related violence]].

''American History X'' is a 1998 crime drama film directed by Tony Kane.

* DiedInYourArmsTonight: [[spoiler:Danny died before Derek got to the scene in the climax, but his balking brother cradles his corpse in agony]].

* AngryBlackMan: Sweeney says he was an angry young man, admitting that he was NotSoDifferent from Derek in being consumed by hatred earlier in his life.

The film is framed as starting near the end, with Danny writing a paper about the events that led to Derek being sent to prison. The film covers the transition from hatred to the gradual realization of the pointlessness of resentment, as well as the nature of racism.

* AmericanTitle: Of the subversive variety. The film covers the changing views of two Neo-Nazi brothers on contemporary America; at first they advocate white supremacism, then through CharacterDevelopment realize that the ideology is a load of hogwash and adopt a more sensible outlook on life.

* TheAtoner: Derek at first was a violent and racist {{Jerkass}}, but he tries to save his little brother from the same fate once he gets out of prison. However, Derek still bears the consequences of his legacy, as illustrated by his swastika tatoo [[spoiler:and ultimately his brother's death]].

* BaldOfEvil: The skinheads. Could be considered an InvokedTrope, although [[KnightTemplar they're deluded enough to think they're the heroes]]. Derek subverts it on both counts when he decides [[TheAtoner to atone for his own racism]] by growing his hair again.

* BeingEvilSucks: Derek turns away from his neo-Nazi lifestyle as he realizes how unhappy and crappy it has made his life: "And I kept asking myself all the time, how did I buy into this shit? It was because I was pissed off, and nothing I ever did ever took that feeling away. I killed two guys, Danny, I killed them. And it didn't make me feel any different. It just got me more lost and I'm tired of being pissed off, Danny. I'm just tired of it." The ArmourPiercingQuestion that prompts his HeelFaceTurn; "Has anything you've done made your life any better?" essentially marks the contrast between this trope and EvilFeelsGood.

** Henry, the kid at the end who [[spoiler:murders Danny]] did it because his big brother told him to.

* BrokenAesop: In a clearly unintended, but quite tragically ironic way, the very ending ([[spoiler: Danny, reformed under Derek's influence and ready to renounce racism, being shot by a black gangbanger]]) can come across as this. While the message of the film is intended to be "Racism is wrong as there are good and bad individuals of every race and racial prejudice only perpetuates violence", those last minutes can almost make it seem as if the message were "Be nice to the minorities, otherwise they'll just kill you for no reason", in what jarringly feels like an invalidation of the entire movie's point. There's a bit from the script that was cut from the final film that clears this. The black gangbanger was pressured by his brother into killing Danny.

* ButtMonkey: Derek and Davina are both more than happy to berate Seth in the present. He's a fat racist, which makes him an AcceptableTarget, but you wonder why he sticks around. He used to be Derek's bestest, most racist friend when Derek was the DarkMessiah of Southern California's Neo-Nazi movement.

* CardCarryingVillain: {{Played for laughs}} in a rare moment of humor in the film. Seth asks Danny what he believes his creed as a Neo-Nazi is. Danny sarcastically replies that he believes in "death, destruction, chaos, filth and greed!" Even his sister Davina has to laugh at this, but after more prompting by Seth, Danny then goes on a more articulate and genuinely vile racist rant, to which Davina responds how much it pains her to see her brother become like this.
* CategoryTraitor: The Neo-Nazis at the party, including Derek's ex-girlfriend Stacey, consider Derek a traitor simply because he refuses to espouse their ideology after his stint in prison. This gets really obvious when they make it clear that they don't even consider him white anymore, shouting the N-word at him like it's some sort of proof of his inhumanity.

* CruelTwistEnding: [[spoiler: Dereek renounces his racism and convinces Danny the same. They destroy their [=NeoNazi=] paraphernalia. It's headed for the inevitable HappyEnding it should have....Then the black kid Danny taunted earlier pops up out of nowhere and murders Danny!]]
* CurbStompBattle: In the fight that lands Derek in prison, Derek takes on three men, two of them armed, with only a handgun and the element of surprise. He quickly shoots the two, and the third while he tries to drive away. He then drags the remaining man over to the curb and has him place his mouth on it before killing him with a vicious stomp to the head in the trope-naming murder.
* DarkMessiah: Derek was an evil messiah figure to the Neo-Nazi movement in Southern California. After he gets out of prison, the reformed Derek is referred to as "Father Vinyard" by some impressionable youths.
* DeadManWriting: The ending. [[spoiler:Danny, after his murder, narrates the film's ultimate aesop that hate drags people down and traps them in cycles of never-ending revenge. He's actually reading out the conclusion of the paper he wrote for Principal Sweeney, which he had finished before his death.]]
* DebateAndSwitch: In a FlashBack, Derek and his deceased father Dennis discuss the banning of now-politically incorrect literature from school curriculums and the affirmative action policy. In regards to the latter, Dennis bemoans the practice of hiring lower-skilled people on the basis of immutable characteristics like skin color, especially in regards to high-risk professions such as his job as a fireman. However, he follows this up with a bunch of racist remarks directed at Derek's black teacher, showing that Dennis is arguing in bad faith without addressing the merit of the argument itself.

** Derek curb-stomps a man for trying to steal his truck, but moreso for simply being black.

** Henry [[spoiler: murders Danny]] for giving him a dirty look and blowing smoke in his face. There was peer pressure and reputation involved, but that's all Danny actually did to warrant it. Note: the deleted scenes show that the act was the young man's gang initiation, although this is unclear in the theatrical cut.

* EccentricExterminator: Seth, though how he works in the service industry with visible Neo-Nazi tattoos is anyone's guess.
* EmbarrassingTattoo: Derek's no longer proud of the swastika on his chest.
* EvenBadMenLoveTheirMamas: Derek loves his family. He turned to Neo-Nazism from grief over his father. Even in his most militantly racist, he's around to "protect" his mother from a liberal, Jewish suitor. {{Deconstructed}}, as he may love his mother, but she despises his racist actions and spitefully tells him that [[IHaveNoSon she's ashamed he came out of her body]]. They reconcile later on as Derek loses his Neo-Nazi ways, though.
* EvilCannotComprehendGood: The Neo-Nazis all assume that prison messed with Derek's head or that he's scared of revenge for the murder he went to prison for.

** Seth is a fat Neo-Nazi who's also a BigEater. In one of the most pointlessly petty acts of racism possible, he eats a scale full of jelly beans, but picks out a single black one first. There's no one else in the room so he's not trying to impress any of his Nazi friends, it's not directed against a member of any race he hates, he ''[[PokeThePoodle rejects a piece of candy]]'' that no one will know about simply because he's a racist.

* EvilMentor: The white supremacist leader Cameron Alexander manipulates whole scores of youngsters into the Neo-Nazi lifestyle by presenting himself as a wise mentor. Like a true evil mentor, he also has no problems selling out his followers when it suits him.

* FourEyesZeroSoul: Cameron Alexander is the sinister xenophobic leader of the Californian Neo-Nazis. He is indirectly responsible for all the bad that happens on the course of the movie, since practically every action is made by the brainwashed youngsters as a result of nothing but his hideous manipulation and evil influence.

* GoodSmokingEvilSmoking: Good people are portrayed as victims of smoking (Derek's mom), evil people enjoy smoking (all dem Neo-Nazis). Derek specifically criticizes Danny for smoking and gently criticizes his mother for the same.

* HeelFaceTurn: Derek loses his racist ways in prison and breaks ties with the Neo-Nazis after he gets out.

* ImportantHaircut: Derek shaves his head when he becomes a skinhead. Danny wears his hair cropped very short when he comes under the sway of the skinheads. {{Inverted}} later on when Derek grows his hair out to demonstrate his disaffection with the Neo-Nazis.

* KnightTemplar: Derek before he gets out of prison. He thinks he is absolutely right in spouting his racist ideology even when he organizes attacks and horrifying brutalities against minorities. By contrast, the Aryan Brotherhood are presented as {{straw hypocrite}}s. Which is largely the point that the film tries to get across. The reason destructive ideologies like white supremacism can become so powerful is because their adherents believe themselves to be the heroes, not the bad guys. ForTheEvulz is not a motive many real life humans actually use to justify their actions, especially to themselves.

** The Neo-Nazis and the black gangbangers. In particular, Danny and Henry. Both are raised in a gang subculture and both worship their brothers and try to emulate them.

* PoliticallyIncorrectVillain: Cameron Alexander is a Neo-Nazi leader and remains a villain throughout the film.

* PsychologistTeacher: Dr. Sweeney chose to be the principal of a Venice Beach high school despite his high credentials and is a law enforcement liaison on the local youth gang activity. He is familiar enough with the Vinyard family that he goes through some effort to turn the two sons Derek and Danny away from their Neo-Nazi racism, but he makes it clear that he's not a saint; his help is not unconditional and the Vinyards ultimately have to effect their own salvation.
* RapePortrayedAsRedemption: After Derek is {{prison rape}}d by his "comrades" for associating with a black inmate (ironically, [[{{hypocrite}} the man who rapes him deals with a Mexican]]), it's one of the turning points for him abandoning his Neo-Nazi ways. The rape occurs because Derek, as a Neo-Nazi who got his start before going to prison, disapproves of the prison Neo-Nazis associating with non-whites. They later rape him to teach him a lesson.
* ReCut: Differences between the theatrical cut and the workprint can be found here http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120586/alternateversions?ref_=tttrv_sa_4.

* ShootTheShaggyDog: [[spoiler:Danny learns not to be racist only to be killed by a black kid he made fun of earlier.]] [[spoiler:An alternate ending features Derek shaving his head and giving a Nazi salute in response to Danny's murder. So after turning into a skinhead, spearheading the Southern California Neo-Nazi movement, committing murder, going to prison, realizing the error of his ways, and then saving his brother from a similar fate, Derek winds up being a Nazi again.]]

* {{UsefulNotes/Skinheads}}: The film focuses on the Neo-Nazi kind.

* StepfordSmiler: Doris. Davina's much more willing to call her brother out.

* StrangerInAFamiliarLand: Derek gets this feeling after returning home from prison. He is a changed person who no longer fits in with his former Neo-Nazi skinhead gang and their racist ideology.

* ThoseWackyNazis: The Disciples of Christ (DOC), a racist skinhead gang headed by Derek.
* TragicBigot: Derek became a Neo-Nazi after his father, a fireman, was murdered by black drug dealers when he tried to extinguish a fire at a crack house. [[spoiler:Although the end of the movie shows that dear old dad was already planting some racist thoughts in a young Derek's mind prior to dad's death. These were ''far less'' racist and hurtful things than what Derek later wound up swallowing wholesale from the Neo-Nazis, but nonetheless...]]

* TwistEnding: After the heavy implication that the Neo-Nazis are plotting to exact revenge on Derek, [[spoiler:Danny is shot by the Chekhovs Gunman]].

* WhamLine: In-universe when Derek reveals to Cameron that he has reformed since they last spoke, because to the audience it's not a real shock.

* YouKilledMyFather: Derek's father was killed by a black man, and this is how he comes to view all blacks. Right before Derek murders the car-jacker, he screams out: "You ever shoot at firemen?! You ever shoot at my father?!"

* StupidCrooks: Lamont is hesitant to tell Derek about how he got in prison because it was by robbing a TV store... [[DonutMessWithACop next to a doughnut shop]]. However, this leads into a darker reveal when Lamont tells Derek that the racist cops conspired to get him a very harsh sentence because the stolen TV that Lamont was holding accidentally fell on one of the officer's feet, and they wanted paybackm which they got by falsely claiming this was deliberate, making it an assault.

* AlliterativeFamily: Dennis and Doris Vinyard name their children Derek, Davina, and Danny. Averted with the youngest, [[OddNameOut named Ally.]]

* BrokenAesop: In a clearly unintended, but quite tragically ironic way, the very ending ([[spoiler: Danny, reformed under Derek's influence and ready to renounce racism, being shot by a black gangbanger]]) can come across as this. While the message of the film is intended to be "Racism is wrong as there are good and bad individuals of every race and racial prejudice only perpetuates violence", those last minutes can almost make it seem as if the message were "Be nice to the minorities, otherwise they'll just kill you for no reason", in what jarringly feels like an invalidation of the entire movie's point.
** There's a bit from the script that was cut from the final film that clears this. The black gangbanger was pressured by his brother into killing Danny.
** The story would've worked better with Danny's redemption and a brighter ending. After all the crap folks saw they deserve a message of hope and the truth that hate can be overcome, one can escape from a bad life, that the cycle can be broken.

* DeadManWriting: The ending. [[spoiler:Danny, after his murder narrates the film's ultimate aesop that hate drags people down and traps them in cycles of never-ending revenge. He's actually reading out the conclusion of the paper he wrote for Principal Sweeney, which he had finished before his death.]]

%%* DeadManWriting: The ending.