Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie and Tupac

It was a fucking lovely day outside today, so I went and got a Tango Ice Blast and went to see Last Man Standing.

What to say man, fuck.

So, last night I rewatched Nick Broomfield’s first documentary on this subject, Biggie and Tupac. I had a vague memory seeing it back in the day, but it was out when there was so much stuff about this being put out, it all kinda merged together. In the trailer for Last Man Standing, Broomfield says that before a lot of stuff folk wouldn’t go on the record about, whereas now with Suge Knight put away for a long time, people were coming forward to talk. I wanted to remind myself about what exactly the gaps had been.

Because 20 years is a long time. Right after it happened, the line was that Bad Boys put out a hit on Tupac and Death Row put out a hit on Biggie. Then it started coming out naw, it was a gang thing, Tupac had beat up some guy from a rival gang, they’d hit Tupac, and then Tupac’s gang took out Biggie in retaliation. Broomfield’s first film came in about here in the timeline of stories, when word started going that the LAPD had been involved in Biggie’s murder. Now, LAPD covering up shit, or deliberately not pursuing shit wasn’t a surprise to anybody. What the Broomfield documentary laid bare was there were LAPD cops on the books at Death Row, being paid as protection (“security”), who dressed in gang colours, who were heavily involved with gang members, and who were there while all the crazy illegal drugged-up shit was going down at Death Row.

Biggie and Tupac is a very different documentary to Last Man Standing. It’s not just made 20 years ago, it’s made by someone with 20 years less experience. I watched Biggie and Tupac and was struck by how naive Broomfield seems. As experienced as he was at doing documentaries even then, he just rocks up at all these places in Compton, asking people what they know with a massive camera on his shoulder. He seems completely unaware of what it means to bring a white face and camera into Compton and start asking about gang affiliation and links to organised criminal activity.

I find his language kinda ill-considered too. Like, he talks about Snoop Dogg being terrified of Suge Knight getting out of jail, on that occasion for parole violation. It’s like, you can’t talk about Snoop Dogg being terrified, quaking in his boots at Suge’s shadow, are you crazy? That is the least diplomatic thing you could fucking say in what was, at that time, still an ongoing gang war.

Also, a lot of people he interviews speak differently to him than they do when speaking to each other, or recalling a conversation. A lot of that code-switching, which kinda showed to me they weren’t really comfortable with him. Your interviewees should be telling, not translating.

Also, he didn’t seem to have any backing from anyone in Tupac’s side of things, no support from the family. He kinda painted Afeni Shakur as a deadbeat mum, who ditched Pac to do drugs his whole childhood, but showed up to cosy up with Suge when Tupac’s royalties were up for grabs after his death. I think everyone would agree, that’s not a fair and accurate portrayal of Afeni.

It’s always really suspect when something doesn’t have the family’s backing. But Violetta, Biggie’s mum really took to Broomfield and felt she got a lot out of the movie. Broomfield put her in touch with Russell Poole, the whistleblower who uncovered the links between LAPD officers and Death Row, and they shared information and support. As a result of some of the things uncovered in the documentary, Violetta sued the LAPD.

So why go back 20 years later and make the film again?

Well, for one, because no one has been arrested or charged in the murders of Tupac Shakur or Biggie Smalls. In Tupac’s case the killer confessed, and boasted about that shit all over the neighbourhood. He could have been picked up any time, but he was killed in the subsequent waves of gang violence 18 months later. In Biggie’s case, you had enough evidence that Russell Poole wanted to proceed with charging officers David Mack and Rafael Perez, among others, and was shut down by the chief of police. It’s not like these cases are a whodunnit. There are extremely viable suspects. And you’d think with two of the biggest celebrities at the time being murdered on the street in public in the centre of the city, you would *think* that would warrant pull-out-all-the-stops, no-stone-left-unturned investigation.

It’s weird now, to communicate to someone who wasn’t even born at the time, to this generation, like how big of a thing this was. Tupac got killed on the Las Vegas Boulevard, right on the fucking strip! The night of a Mike Tyson fight. You could not have more eyes on you. I dunno what the equivalent today would be, but in terms of fame and money, imagine Beyonce getting shot in Times Square on New Years’ Eve. For nobody to be caught for that kinda crime, you have to be determined not to catch someone.

Anyway, Last Man Standing. I wondered if it would simply be retreading old ground, basically the same documentary as Biggie and Tupac with some of the holes plugged. But it’s not. It’s its own seperate thing. Biggie and Tupac is very much the story about Biggie and Tupac, their rags to riches story, their talent and their friendship, destroyed by needless violence. Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie and Tupac is about Suge Knight. It’s his story.

Because in Biggie and Tupac, all roads led back to Suge Knight, violence surrounded him like it was circling a drain, yet he remains illusive throughout the film. He does one interview, it is the film’s last scene, and he refuses to comment on the murders, but makes a not-so-veiled threat against Snoop Dogg and labels him a snitch.

In Last Man Standing, we begin with Suge Knight. Who he is and what he did are the central questions of the movie. As Biggie and Tupac ends on Suge Knight making death threats, and Broomfield wondering if Snoop is going to be next in what was, at that time, a seemingly never-ending list of rappers losing their lives to this cycle of violence, you are left with the distinct impression that Suge Knight is a dangerous man, that if he gets his way, the killing won’t end. As Last Man Standing starts, we begin with the scene of Suge Knight’s most recent murder, the killing of Terry Carter. It seems the ominous assessment held true to its grim promise.

The film traces Suge Knight from his fairly comfortable upbringing, his good home life, and his promising scholarship to college, and his career in college football, and briefly at a professional level. His origins are about the furthest you can get from where he ends up. He was never involved with the Bloods, although he knew people in the gang, even a couple of friends. He wasn’t involved in any street violence.

After his football career doesn’t take off, he uses his heavy set frame as a bodyguard, and manages to work for celebrities like Bobby Brown. He makes connections and sees a good business opportunity, becoming a black-owned label putting out the work of black artists at what was the birth of the rap genre.

And if it had stopped there, Suge Knight would be a millionaire, Tupac and Biggie would be old and be living off their investments like Jay-Z, and an untold number of ordinary kids on the street would still be kicking about the neighbourhood.

The gangsta image that sold so well, went from something that was projected to something that he wanted to live. You know how they say don’t get high on your own supply? Suge Knight sold an image, and he began to buy into the shit he sold.

Some of the shit they detail as going down in Death Row Records is insane. If it was happening in a corrugated tin and concrete shack in the back of a vacant lot, it would still have been a crazy place for all this shit to go down. The fact it’s a working business office, a place where people were trying to record tracks and put an album together, during daylight working hours. In-fucking-sane. To intimidate folk, Suge Knight used to keep a opaque tank full of black piranhas in his office, like a fucking bond villain. They talk about having bitch fights, like dog fights but with women. Have two women beat the shit out each other for the crew’s entertainment. There’s orgies right there on the red carpet, over the Death Row logo.

And he just sucks everyone else into his own vortex of madness, and power, and belief he was untouchable. When he signs Tupac, he draws Tupac from his goal to make socially conscious music influenced by his mother’s Black Panther activism, to this Thug LifeTM money machine, convincing him that only he had his back. The drugs, the paranoia, and the whole too-muchness kinda destroys Tupac, drawing him into increasingly self-destructive behaviour, especially lashing out at Biggie, an old friend who he feels betrayed and abandoned by, due in large part to Suge’s manipulations.

Last Man Standing holds Suge Knight morally responsible for the death of Tupac. You can’t invite your mate out to play on the motorway, then hold yourself blameless when he ends up dead. The shit that gets Tupac killed, is Suge Knight’s shit. It’s his poison that he stirred.

As far as Biggie is concerned, it’s not even that far removed. It’s as simple as Suge pays David Mack and David Mack shot Biggie. End of. If you can’t draw a line between that few dots…

When Biggie and Tupac ended, you felt that the story was unfinished, that the killing might continue. Suge Knight is now serving a 28 year sentence. He’s 56. He won’t be eligible for parole until his 70s, and he’s not gonna make it to his 70s because he’s had blood clots and all other sorts of shit. It’s over. He had to kill one more person, but yeah, he’s finally been stopped.

Last Man Standing is the story of how one egomaniac caused so much violence, loss and misery. And all the people caught in the crossfire.

The Killing of Two Lovers

The Killing of Two Lovers is the exact opposite of what you think it’s gonna be.

From the trailer, I thought it was gonna be a tense atmosphere thriller, which it is, but my big worry is it would be a sympathetic portrait of a wife-murderer, yet another tender look at the pitiable state of a white man denied his right to domestic bliss, and avenging what was his. You know, the usual toxic masculinity bullshit.

But it’s not. Or, it is about toxic masculinity, but it’s about grappling with it, not engrandising it. It starts at the place I expected it to end. It starts at the height of the crescendo. The main character stands before his sleeping wife and her lover, a gun in his hand. But this moment is not a culmination of tension looking for ecstatic release in violence. It is shown as the precipice of horror as the main character realises this is what’s become of his life.

And so the rest of the film is of him trying to find another way to deal with this problem. Not by kicking off his baggage and going to a counsellor to hug it out, coz life’s not like that. But you see him trying make more effort with his wife, trying to make more effort with his kids, and the whole time that tension is in the background. Does he know any way to handle this that doesn’t come cascading down in rage?

Because the film follows him through these cycles. As he tries to find some way of expressing the cacophony of emotions he’s feeling. And how, with frustration, it always ends up being funnelled into anger. Because that is the only emotion men are actually taught how to express.

So the structure of the film starts from this place of horror, and spirals through these attempts to pull away from it and finding its draw once more, each time the tension rising as you become more and more invested in the characters you’re getting to know.

Masterful build in tension, beautiful cinematography, wonderful acting, and actually surprising for what is such a by-the-numbers cliche of a premise. Will surpass your expectations.

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The First 54 Years: An Abbreviated Manual For Military Occupation

The First 54 Years: An Abbreviated Manual For Military Occupation is a documentary about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, framed as an instructive manual for the audience on how to occupy a territory on a long-term basis. Avi Mograbi, the filmmaker, directs his instructions straight to camera, directs them in the second person – this is how you go about an occupation, this is how you go about suppressing dissent.

Unlike so many films about the Israeli occupation, this film is not made by Palestinians, trying to get the word of their suffering out into the world. It is made by Israelis, and is composed largely of testimonies of ex-Israeli soldiers, speaking of their first-hand experience as part of the machinery of occupation. It is a film made by Israelis for an Israeli audience, talking about the reality and responsibility that must be taken for the occupation. The address to ‘you’, direct to camera, makes explicit the shared culpability in what exists.

Now, it can be a dicey area, having a discussion about oppression with only those on the oppressing side at the table. My worry would be it would descend into that Frankie Boyle joke about the Americans and the Vietnam war – that not only will they kill your people, they’ll come back 15 years later to make a film about how killing your people made their soldiers sad. But that’s not what this is at all. The First 54 Years shines a light on the people who make occupation happen, the faceless, nameless, anonymous soldiers whose daily actions perpetuate the occupation as a reality for those who live under it. It strips them of their invisibility and makes them accountable for what actions they took and what actions they failed to take. It shows the treatment of Palestinians as not some misfortune of history, whose misery has become almost seen as natural to us now, as if it simply rains bombs over Gaza instead of water. But someone is firing those bombs, someone is shooting those people, and these atrocities don’t just happen – they are done.

The manner in which the ex-soldiers speak is very matter-of-fact. The describe a reality that was, there is very little moral grandstanding or debate. Many stories follow the same format – this was the order, this was how it was carried out. But that’s not to say that their retelling is flat. Just the opposite. In their recounting is all the weariness of numbness to brutality, the everyday indifference to the absurd you find in a warzone, and the sharp, breaking clarity when the horror of what is going on finds a way to break on you afresh.

Many of the ex-soldiers were kids who were drafted into the military. They talk about how easily they accepted the normality of what they were being trained to do, unquestioningly. That they would run drills on local villages, not because anyone in that village had done anything, but because the new recruits needed to practice how to raid a village. The soldiers from the 90s and later talk about how it was as if it was a video game, some shoot-em-up they had been put in front of. The machine gun on the hill, and how guys would come on their lunch break, and line up to take a turn, spraying the city with bullets.

And what they all seemed to convey, over and over again, was how rudderless this whole thing was. How absurd. How they would be sent to an address and told to pull the place apart, and they would not know who they were looking for or what they were looking for. There just had to be *something*. And how they would lift men out their bed in the dead of night, cuff and hood him, beat the shit out him, and transport him to the nearest base for detention, only to find out he was being held for not paying his electricity bill. The whole thing just felt so abritrary.

As the soldiers serving in the 70s give way to the more recent generations serving in the 2000s, the sheen comes off the apple almost entirely, the mask slips, and the pretence of propaganda drops. No longer is even lip service paid to idea of targeting terrorists. The nightly duty is to ‘map’ a neighbourhood, by going door-to-door at 4am, and wake up everyone inside, to photograph and map the layout of each room, and make a list of everyone sleeping under that roof. And they were told the ‘why’ for this was not that this would produce any valuable intelligence, but simply to instill in the general populace the understanding that there would not be a night where they would go undisturbed or unsearched. That quite openly, the purpose was to grind them down, and put the fear of god in them.

So what do you get, after the first 54 years? Mograbi’s end is one of pessimism, that unless Israel faces the reality of what it has done and continues to do, that the conflict will only escalate in brutality, with no expectation or even hope of peace. That Israelis and Palestinians have both come to see this as an unwinnable war, and the goal has devolved from victory over the other to simply spreading the suffering.

This is how you run a military occupation, it says, with terror, and torture, and death. How do you want to continue?

The Story of Looking

So, a couple of things went up like flares that the filmmaker might be a twat. He starts the film lying naked in bed talking the camera next to him, like you’re lying on the other pillow, in this suffocatingly heavy-handed visual metaphor for being brought into an intimate and personal story. As he lectures the camera, I noticed his naked torso and arms were covered in tattoos, the signatures of famous people, in various fonts and scripts. I began to feel the dread that I’d somehow woken to discover I’d slept with yet another film fuckboy. He mentions he’s speaking from his flat in the centre of Edinburgh and the feeling of doom is complete.

The needless cockshot later in the film is almost surplus confirmation at that point.

So, is this self-indulgent pretentious bilge? Yes. Is it worthless? No.

The Story of Looking is an essay/poem/memoir on what visual culture means to the filmmaker, what looking is. The film explores art in photography, painting, film, and performance, while talking about the development of our sight in infancy and childhood. And there is a lot of interesting stuff said. He talks about growing up in a working class Catholic family, where the glory of God made manifest in art, in architecture, in beholding creation, was seen as positive good of looking. And how, when he got older and moved into a middle-class presbyterian environment, the act of looking was seen as a negative, that it was a shallow practice, open to deceit and distraction, in opposition to the transcendental nature of reading and inner imagination and thought.

He talks about the separation between light and colour, their respective forms and functions, in life and in art. He talks about the experiences of those missing colour through colour-blindness, or light through complete blindness. He talks about focus and blur, the blur of vision, the blur of memory, the blur of ruined film or smudged paint or ink.

The hook he hangs this semi-structured ramble on is that he has begun to develop a cataract in one eye, and it will be removed and replaced with an artificial lens. It is for this reason he beats you about the head with how personal and intimate this soliloquy is, up to and including flashing you his knob.

Except it’s not intimate or personal. It’s the opposite of that. He intellectualises the subject into the abstract, distancing us and himself from any emotion the prospect of his sight being lost or changed is actually causing him. Despite being literally brought into the folds of his skin, he could not push the audience further away than with this intellectual exercise.

As I’m educated on the use of light and colour in film, I spend 90 minutes learning almost nothing about Mark Cousins. And his sense of trepidation about his operation is effaced completely with this aria to visual culture. And beautiful though much of it is, it does what any intellectual exercise does – leaves me cold.

The Father

Jesus, what was I thinking? Staved off greeting til the last scene, then sobbed like a fucking wean. My mask is soaking.

At first you’re like, you’re an ol’ bastard aren’t you? Just coz you’re old, and ill, and pitiable, doesn’t mean you’re not a bastard, and probably have been a bastard all your days.

Then as the scenery and furniture change in subtle ways, and the cast are played by multiple actors, you get taken along on this unsettling sense of sliding through time, totally disorientated.

At first, the dad is hostile, seeing his constant confusion as a product of malicious agents, like his daughter or his carers, but as the story progresses, you just see him lose his bluster as he becomes truly scared. And you realise just what a vulnerability he is at with the people around him.

All through the film the dad, the daughter ask for reassurance from others, it is going to be ok, isn’t it? They tell each other it’s going to be alright. But it’s not. You’re going to get old, and feeble, and die. And everyone you love will leave or die or be forgotten to you.

But the world also turns the other way too if you look. The world is full of people looking out for you, loving you, caring about you. And outside, every day, is a new day. And you are alive for as long as you live to see it.

A really heartbreaking film about the absolute fundamentals of life and love.

My Name Is Pauli Murray

Wow. Like, wow. There is so much I didn’t know.

Not a stranger to African-American history or feminist history, but still never heard of Pauli Murray. And after watching this film, it seems incredible that could happen.

Who was Pauli Murray? Pauli Murray was arrested for refusing to sit at the back of the bus in the segregated South 14 years before Rosa Parks. She brought a legal challenge to the Jim Crow laws behind her arrest and used it as a platform to speak out against racism and segregation. She wrote a paper against the Separate But Equal doctrine, showing how it contravened the 14th amendment of the Constitution while she was a legal student, and was derided by other students and dismissed by her professor – the same professor who went on to use the arguments in her paper while bringing Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court, securing one of the most major wins of the Civil Rights Movement and sending a wrecking ball into the legal basis for segregation.

While working with the ACLU, Murray argued in White v. Crook that the 14th amendment covered discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race, succeeding in allowing women, as well as black men, to sit on juries in Alabama. 6 years later, her argument would be credited by Ruth Bader Ginsberg when she brought the same argument before the Supreme Court in Reed v. Reed, which upheld that discrimination on the basis of sex was in contravention of the 14th amendment of the Constitution.

She coined the term ‘Jane Crow’, and wrote about the intersectional oppression of African-American women on the basis of their sex and race. She co-founded NOW, the National Organization for Women, alongside Betty Friedan. She had a lifelong correspondence with Eleanor Roosevelt, who requested her appointment to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women’s Committee on Political and Civil Rights. She got Eleanor to use her influence on President Roosevelt in the case of a black sharecropper who had shot dead his white landlord, and he privately spoke to the Governor of Virginia to ask him to commute his death sentence.

Murray also worked for labour rights as part of the Workers’ Defense League. She taught Law in the newly independent Ghana, and how decolonisation was an opportunity to realise human rights. She organised student activists while at Howard University, and staged sit-ins in all-white diners with fellow women students 17 years before the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-ins of the 60s.

She was a writer, an essayist, a memoirist, and a poet.

She was the first African-American to get a Law Doctorate from Yale. She was the one of the first African-Americans, alongside James Baldwin, to be admitted to the McDowell artists’ residency. She became the first woman and the first African-American to get a residential college named after her at Yale. She was the first African-American woman to become a US Episcopal priest, and 2012 was named as an Episcopal saint.

She also may have been a trans man. Or perhaps transmasculine genderqueer. While during their life, they used she pronouns, now it would probably be more appropriate to use they or they/she. They spent their life perpetually in conflict with their assigned gender. They underwent surgery to find a pair of undescended testes that they were sure must be inside them, as it would explain so much about why they did not feel as though they were fully female. They spent their life seeking a doctor who would give them testosterone, as they were sure injections of the hormone were needed to correct an imbalance in their body. They struggled their whole life to find a language to put into words what they were feeling and who they were.

They described to doctors that they may be an ‘invert’, using the parlance at the time which covered lesbians, trans people, and even just butch or non-conforming women. Their loving relationships were exclusively with women. They were unable to be out during their lifetime, but they did have the support of their partner of almost 25 years, Irene.

It is so good to see a film which celebrates the contributions of gender minorities to the feminist cause. The feminist movements and achievements that we have today, are down the work, support, unity, and leadership of all those denied the privilege of the cis male gender.

Murray’s worldview was shaped by a life lived across arbitrary division. As a person of mixed racial heritage, with both black and white ancestors, that opportunities should be afforded to those labelled White and not Black was ridiculous, unjust, and cruel. As a person whose gender experience crossed the binary between man and woman, that a person’s potential should be denied or curtailed because they are labelled Female and not Male was preposterous, unfair, and obscene. They fought injustice everywhere they found it.

This film does a good job of boiling down an expansive life, each aspect of which could span a movie in its own right, to the the central thread of who Pauli Murray was – someone filled with deep compassion, who felt keenly the injustices of the world, and who worked tirelessly in every corner of their talents to promote understanding, empathy, and the shared bond of humanity. Pauli Murray is someone who sought only the successful outcome of their cause, and never pushed to the front for the limelight, or to establish personal glory. Pauli is seen in many photos of the century’s most recognisable figures, standing at the back or sat just to the side, almost a shadow in each great historical moment. And it is perhaps because of this effacing of ego, that it is necessary for us that come after to remember.

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