The image of a glittering downtown Los Angeles skyline turned upside down, which opens Stacy Peralta's sobering "Crips and Bloods: Made in America," is both striking and unnerving. With that image, Peralta telegraphs a theme that will resonate in chilling ways throughout his new documentary -- that geography matters and that we are heading into a world that's been upended.
Just as you settle in for what you hope will be new insights into the much-parsed history of the deadly Crips and Bloods gangs, Peralta's geographic dissection of their rise through aerial maps detailing their areas of control, he sends us back in time. We head to the cotton fields of the South, through industrialization, the migration North and West of the newly freed slaves, the Watts riots, Malcolm X, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rodney King -- stories that have been told many times before in documentary and narrative films.
Peralta broke into the field with his surprising, street-level look at the gritty skateboard culture in "Dogtown and Z-Boys," taking us into a world that was largely unknown at the time. Where an origins story made sense then, it doesn't work in his favor here. "Crips and Bloods" is often rough around the edges, and since much of the ground it covers has been so well-documented elsewhere, you can't help but think that if Peralta had not trained his lens so intently on the past, he might have found a fresher story.
The film, shot mostly in 2008, begins with the contemporary scene and seeds in history along the way. Ground zero, where gang wars have raged now for 30 years with a body count that the movie puts at more than 15,000, is largely confined to the central corridor of South Los Angeles, which Peralta maps out into zones of competing red and blue that form a patchwork across the region -- not a simple dividing line down the middle.
Particularly compelling are interviews with former members of the Slausons, the first known gang in this area. Ironically, it was formed by boys rejected from joining what was then a whites-only Boy Scout troop -- just one of the many sad twists of fate that will lead us to today. Not surprisingly, Peralta finds a largely fatherless community with young boys looking to gangs to figure out how to become a "man."
