Alpha Dog

Alpha Dog

Justin Timberlake, Bruce Willis, Sharon Stone

This summer I was walking my dog in the hood. Well, the hood as close as you can get in small town Iowa. Which is not very close at all. But you would have thought it was the hood, the way the young teenagers sat underneath the streetlight. Their car vibrating with the hip-hop they were listening to. The music was at just the level where you know they will be fit for hearing aids in 2 or 3 decades. Even in their gangsta gear, I recognized a couple of the kids, having known them from the time they were little in their Norman Rockwell-like Father Knows Best families. One of the young men nodded his head at me. I said, “Nice to see you Pat.” The young man looked puzzled because he knew that I knew his name was not Pat. It really doesn’t matter what his name was because he was just another Pat Boone wannabe fifty years later. I figure that I could be fished out of an iceberg a century from now, be defrosted like Captain America, and one of the first things I will see is some white bread teenager trying to model what is cool in African-American culture. When contemporary Richie Cunninghams started to listen to 50 Cent, Half-a-Buck stopped being cool. We show our individuality by adopting the attitudes, tastes and dress of those around us. In trying to figure out who we are, we spend most of our lives imitating others and that is what makes white teenagers hilarious. In the last few years, skater dudes listen to Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, not because they suddenly have discovered that I have great taste, but because the peers have told them that is the cool music. Alienated rebellious kids continue to be uniform in their dress, like they had been stamped out in a factory somewhere. The same goes for adults. I can usually predict a person’s attitude by the community they hang out in. Most conservative Christians are conservative Christians not because it is the way of Jesus, but because they are surrounded by others in church and want to be apart of something larger than themselves. If bottled water is in, even if it is one of the biggest rip-offs in American history, yuppies will swig the stuff like it is going out of style. Maybe a lot of our modeling is because we are afraid that we are like an onion, peel back the layers and there is nothing left.

What is true about the modeling in the rest of life also applies to violence. From about age 2, little boys model themselves after the males in their lives, as if they can absorb what it means to be masculine in the air they breathe. This modeling and its results can be seen in the life of Jesse James Hollywood.

It is the kind of name that sounds like it was made up by a bad writer hammering out a pulp novel, not the kind of name a 5’4, 140 pound kid from the wealthy community of West Hill, Los Angeles wore. His childhood was filled with soccer games. His dad coached his t-ball team and his mom was the June Cleaver type. Yet, Jesse James saw himself as a tough guy and eventually started being a small time dealer to the other spoiled white high school kids. By the time he graduated, Jesse moved into a 3-story, $200,000 stucco home. He made a $41,000 down payment in cash and owned a sports car and black Mercedes. His pad became a clubhouse for disenfranchised young men in the standard uniform of blue jeans and tank tops and young, undressed women with no self-esteem who allowed themselves to be passed around like a joint at one of their parties. One of the young men who hung out at his place was Ben Markowitz, a friend from high school who was a couple of years older than Jesse. One little problem with this friendship made in heaven. When Ben turned 22, he decided to clean up his act. He had gotten a steady job, moved back into his dad’s house, and was even engaged to be married. One hanging chad, Ben owed $1,200 to Jesse James for his former habit and Jesse was going to get his cash. The drug dealer repeatedly threatened his former friend and even went to the restaurant where Ben’s girlfriend worked. Ben returned the favor by driving to Jesse’s place and smashing a window. Tit for tat, it was Jesse’s turn to show his crew how tough he was. Ben smartly kept a low profile, but his teenage brother Nick didn’t. One August evening, Jesse and his crew spotted Nick outside the gym, beat him up, and threw him inside their van. The teenager was going to be Jesse’s insurance policy to insure that his brother paid what was owed. Bound and gagged, the teenager was thrown into one of Jesse’s bedrooms even though a party was going on. Several of the guests noticed the tied up youngster but did nothing. Jesse realized he might have been over his head and called his lawyer who informed the drug dealer that kidnapping in California carried a life sentence. The young boy’s fate was sealed. Fed a diet of booze, marijuana and Valium, over the next couple of days, the young victim was hidden out in various houses around Santa Barbara. They even made the young man feel like everything was going to work out so that the gang could untie him. Nicknamed ‘the stolen boy,” the teenager was made to feel apart of the gang. On the same day that the Markowitz filed a missing person’s report, Nick was taken to the Lemon Tree Inn. He swam in the pool, drank rum-and-cokes, smoked a little dope, and flirted with the older girls who hung around Jesse like flies. He thought it was like a lost weekend - the kind of tale you tell your grandchildren – because thought his brother would show up at any minute to take him home. What Nick did not know is that Jesse had called Ryan Hoyt, who owed Jesse a grand, and offered to erase the debt if Hoyt killed the boy. Neither party thought twice about saying no to the deal. The gang and Hoyt then drove the boy out to the Los Padres National Forest and killed the boy at a scenic campsite known as “Lizard Mouth.” Nine bullets riddled the body. There would have been more if the gun had not jammed. The crew celebrated at an Outback Steakhouse. Four days later, a hiker noticed an awful stench and spotted the boy’s clothes peering out from the shallow grave. Nervous that the cops would swoop in at any time, Jesse withdrew $25,000 from his bank account, bought a Lincoln Town car, and hit the road with his girlfriend. Jesse, with the help of his father, made it all the way to Brazil until authorities arrested him on a Brazilian beach, living with a woman 15 years his senior.

It is a story meant for Hollywood, especially when powerful director Nick Cassavetes’ eldest daughter attended high school with Jesse. In order to avoid lawsuits, names were changed, but Alpha Dog is Jesse James Hollywood’s story. Former boy band member Justin Timberlake is the lead of this $13 million indie flick. Given Hollywood’s long history of true crime tales that get into the psyche of the criminal (In Cold Blood, Badlands), this film does not quite accomplish what it sets out to do. It tries to show how a young man’s image of himself can lead to violence, but never really manages to do what a movie like A History of Violence does when it comes to showing the reality of violence. Jesse James saw himself as a tough guy, not the 5’4 spoiled momma’s boy that he was. This model of who he was took him to its logical conclusion and the death of a little boy.

Verdict: Middle of the Road