La Haine Rooftop BBQ

The scene begins with a pan across the rooftop showing all the people on the roof, here we see many people from different ethnical backgrounds and people of differing age; the reason for this is to show how all these different people have rejected French culture (or feel rejected by French culture) and instead have united under a surrogate (mainly American) culture. We can see they have accepted American culture as a surrogate because throughout the scene the characters make references to things such as Lethal Weapon (American film) and Desert Eagles (famous American Handgun) couple with the fact that this is happening while there is hip-hop playing in the back ground, we can safely assume the characters have adopted a primarily American culture (or at least it is more prevalent in their life than French culture. There is also a statement that perhaps all people who are not ethnically French seek a surrogate culture because they can’t relate to French culture, this is shown through one of the police officers; he is wearing a Notre Dame jacket but it represents Notre Dame the American university, showing that even though this man lives in the same city as Notre Dame the American version still resonates with him more than the French one he lives near.

Next we see the police come on the rooftop to try and move the characters off it. In this scene we can see that the police are the aggressors as they aggravate the characters and tell them to move despite them causing no problems before the police arrived. This is included to reinforce the films anti-police message, this is the reason the director shown us the characters just sitting around before the police arrived, to make the police seem like they are causing problems with the residents of the projects simply because they can.