Baby Boy.
I was hesitant to write about Baby Boy because when I like something too much (Book of Clarence, Bottoms, American Fiction), my mind goes a bit blank when I try to write about it. It’s almost as if as much as I want to celebrate the things I like the most, my brain wants to sanction some things off for just private liking, for just—instead of an articulate breaking down of what exactly is working this in this work of art—a vague sense of happiness at having encountered the thing.
I wanted to write about Baby Boy though because I’m writing this essay about John Singleton for this book of essays on John Singleton and reading more about him in preparation gave watching this movie again some interesting context. Did you know, for example, that he’d written the role of Jody—the titular “Baby Boy”—for Tupac, and then Tupac died so he put the script away because he thought no one else would be able to do it justice until Tyrese came along? Did you know that along with the mural of Tupac in Jody’s room, there’s a poster of Tyra Banks in part (maybe) because John Singleton dated her for a while in the ‘90s?
And more interesting than these interesting facts is the fact that Boyz n the Hood, his most famous/commercially successful film came out when he was just 23. He got rocket launched to director fame for that movie—was hanging out with Spike Lee, Steven Spielberg—and then struggled, after that, to ever make anything that lived up to that particular kind of hype. He made Poetic Justice—another excellent movie that I guess didn’t sell that well—and Rosewood, about a Black town that got destroyed by a White lynch mob, a movie that he wrote a heroic Black character into so that it wasn’t all about Black subjection, so that it wasn’t—á la slave movies—Black trauma porn for the sake of historical accuracy. Singleton didn’t ever make anything again that Hollywood at large loved as much as Boyz n the Hood but he made some quirky, endearing, spectacular movies, and Baby Boy, I think, is a great example of this.
It’s the third in Singleton’s “hood trilogy” on South Central Los Angeles, where he grew up. Boyz n the Hood is the first, and then he wrote Poetic Justice as part of this trilogy and then Baby Boy. What I like about Baby Boy now that I know more about John Singleton is that it feels like it was made with a steadier hand than Boyz n the Hood. And that doesn’t mean it’s perfect in all of the ways we ask a movie to be perfect or even made for a big enough audience to be commercially successful. I guess what I mean by steadier hand is that it’s specific and confident in its specificity in a way that I think ultimately is more impressive than making a movie that the greatest number of people can watch and relate to. The characters in Baby Boy feel more individual than they do symbolic. In Boyz n the Hood, as compelling as the characters are, they perhaps are different paths someone watching might be able to take: you can be like Tre, someone who gets out of the neighborhood, or like Doughboy, someone who doesn’t; you can be like Doughboy, someone who chooses violence as your coming-of-age, or like Ricky, someone who chooses sports. In Baby Boy, no one is quite like Jody, who is twenty-years-old riding his enormous and fancy blue bike along with the children of the neighborhood because he hasn’t figured out how to grow up yet. No one is quite like Jody, who can convince a salon full of people to buy stolen dresses from him because of the way he compliments their skin tone, the way he brags about the fabric. No one is quite like Jody, who loves his mother so much that he’s getting in the way of her having her own life and yet cannot see how this is a problem—she’s his mother so what else is he supposed to do but love her this intensely?
John Singleton decided to write this movie after hanging out at Crenshaw Mall in the ‘90s and seeing these guys in their twenties who—like Jody—haven’t quite grown up yet, who spend their time trying to holler at teenage girls (eventually becoming the reason these girls become teen mothers). So maybe it’s not totally accurate to say no one is like Jody (as he’s modeled after these guys), but what I mean, I guess, is that he’s so specific that he isn’t like the symbol for these guys, you know? He’s one of them more than he stands in for them. (Though there isn’t an evident age gap between him and his girlfriends, which maybe makes him easier to like.) All of the characters in Baby Boy are specific like that—Jody’s mother, who is young and hot and just trying to get her own, even if it makes her now grown son uncomfortable. There’s Jody’s girlfriend Yvette—played perfectly by Taraji P. Henson—who, even though Jody is out here constantly cheating on her, somehow sees the good in him (or at least has loved him for so long that she—exasperated—just wants to see it through). The way Yvette fights is specific and the way she loves is specific and her fears are specific, even if there are girlfriends out there that she is similar to.
I think it’s this being specific instead of being symbolic that makes the movie so good to me. It’s quirky and it’s weird and it’s—especially in everyone’s earnestness to love and be loved—relatable. It is not the epic fight to live of Boyz n the Hood, and John Singleton didn’t get the respect for this that he did in his early days, but maybe, in its specificity, in its energy, in the way that everybody seems to be into the roles they’re playing, making all of the scenes buzz, Baby Boy is, in its own way, an enormous success.
Image: Columbia Pictures
