Symbolism in Baby Boy

This is my favorite movie by John Singleton, because of the symbolism. Check it out!

Baby Boy is full of ghetto philosophy. The type of stuff that makes sense when you are smoking weed. However, being that the main character is still a child this is about as far as he can reach. That is the first lesson presented to us in Baby Boy.

In the scene where Jody sits in front of the TV set, he intentionally checks out ignorant television content; Divorce Court, an informercial by a non infamous (and dead, RIP) salesman. Melvin tries to impart knowledge to him, laying on the bed. He wants to sit in front of the idiot box and absorb this garbage into his psyche but Melvin tries to get in his ear. Wisdom in the back, indifference in the middle, and total, utter garbage and ignorance in the front. Great scene from the movie.

Jody continues to return to the garden where his mother likes to relax. This was long before urban gardening was chic in parts of Philadelphia and other underutilized, or left for dead, urban areas in the city. They are even farming in Cleveland, OH today. The urban garden represents a back to basics approach to the days of old; fist fights instead of guns, knowing what you eat instead of relying on the garbage the government is trying to poison us with, real music instead of hip-hop, being self-sufficient instead of being on welfare. Jody thinks that he is in the garden to spend quality time with his mother, but the fact that there even is a garden suggests wisdom he cannot even begin to comprehend.

Melvin was a thug, Jody is trying to be a thug. Jody was incarcerated back in the day, but we aren't told why, it is briefly mentioned when Yvette is in an argument with him. Melvin, even though he is no longer in the streets, is a lot harder than Jody will ever be. Jody tries to hustle, but he doesn't have a legitimate business, Melvin does. Jody hates the fact that Melvin is more of a man that he will ever be, he just doesn't realize it; then again a child wouldn't, he just hates the fact that Melvin is dating his Mom.

Melvin chokes Jody from behind. Notice the way that he tells Jody that if he were in jail he would make Melvin go down and "fix it". He emasculates Jody, at the same time choking him. Jody tries to emasculate others in the film, but he can never do it alone. The women in his life think he is a joke. He is beat up by little kids and needs the help of Sweetpea to handle his business. If you are less of a man, you can forget about emasculating anyone else.

Jody thinks that he is going to die. He wants the women in his life to cry out for him at his funeral. He wants to go down like a soldier. But this punk is not going to be celebrated in that way because he is not going to die at the hands of the streets. He really needs to stop listening to Tupac; if it weren't for Sweetpea, he might have died at the hands of Rodney's clique, if anything.

Jody tries to "fix it" with Yvette by giving her an orgasm. Typical ignorant, childish, "baby boy" behavior. This "baby boy" cannot give Yvette an orgasm through intercourse, so he is reduced to this. A baby boy tries to fix everything through sex.

Why did Jody allow himself to be in a compromising position with Pandora in the first place? He only lost interest because Pandora would not humor him about her reasons for wanting him. So he asks the obvious, and she doesn't give him the answer that he is looking for and he is out the door. The only reason he did not have sex with Pandora, is because his ego wasn't stroked. It had nothing to do with his love for Yvette.

Jody is obsessed about making money, only because Melvin got in his ear about going into business with his whole "guns and butter" analogy. He tries to sell Sweetpea onto the idea, but Sweetpea is more interested in getting right with God. Sweetpea is actually a lot harder than Jody, and angrier about his position in life, but disagrees with Jody about how to fix his situation. Sweetpea was in an even worse, more humiliating, and more emasculating, situation with his girlfriend than Jody was with Yvette.

Baby Boy is a fascinating, but disturbing movie because it really digs into the reality of ghetto life. It doesn't focus on the violence of the streets, like Boyz In Da Hood. Yvette works at a call center, a sign of things to come for those who are out there working without a college degree (or even with a degree in some cases). Jody and Sweetpea are in a "transitional stage" from the streets into becoming young men without even realizing it, and they are having trouble dealing with the reality of their situation. The women in their life emasculate them, but it is an accidental emasculation, it is not true hostility towards them (unlike what happened to the protagonist in Boyz In Da Hood). These men are also playing characters that were arguably older, and more likely to live on their own if their situations were different, than the characters in Boyz In Da Hood. It would have been interesting to see what this movie would have been like if Tupac Shakur were able to play the lead role. It definitely would have taken his acting career to a different level.

The movie is also prophetic in many ways; the dead end jobs at call centers, urban farming, and the disenfranchisement of young Black men who completely fall out of society were things that did not happen to all of us, but some of us. John Singleton actually presents a dystopian view of the future of Black America, though it is wrapped up under the guise of an intelligent commentary about life in the ghetto.