Never Die Alone

Ernest Dickerson’s Never Die Alone, from the novel by the great Donald Goines, is a first-rate genre picture. DMX is ice cold charismatic as “King” David, a nasty, sadistic drug dealer who is shot dead just as he is about to repent and seek redemption. The direction is taut and concise, with economical naration, a complex temporal scheme, powerful (but carefully restrained) use of noir lighting and tilts and odd angles, and violent action sequences which pack a punch without being dwelt on (a la Mel Gibson) or inflated (a la Quentin Tarantino). On the evidence of not only this film, but all his work, Dickerson seems to me every bit the peer and equal of Don Siegel and Walter Hill, as far as action genre directors are concerned.
But of course, there’s more to Never Die Alone than just a genre picture. Because of Dickerson’s ambitions as a director; because of what it means to bring Donald Goines to film; and, subsuming both of the above, because this is an African American themed film.
Never Die Alone, to a certain extent, tries to have things both ways. It solicits (male) viewers with its gangsta cool at the same time that it claims to provide an edifying lesson on how wrongdoing and crime don’t pay.
Now in fact the film’s less guilty of this than many other films are, not to mention hip hop lyrics; overall, it’s a pretty grim movie, and its relentless speed doesn’t allow any time to revel either in bloodshed or in the glories of acquiring “money and pussy,” the only two things that matter according to one ganglord character. I really didn’t see this film as selling a minstrelized version of ghetto pimp cool blackness to white suburban kids, the way so many commercial enterprises do these days. (This is probably the reason for its relatively poor box office showing).
Indeed, the relation of the black/ghetto story to its white voyeurs and consumers is explicitly, and rather oddly, taken up within the film itself; David Arquette plays Paul, a white guy, a writer, who’s slumming (as his bourgeois black girlfriend tells him in no uncertain terms) in Harlem, ostensibly to find material for the novel he hopes to write. He gets this material. in the form of audio tapes that King David leaves behind. The film starts with DMX/David narrating from the grave; its flashbacks to his earlier career are motivated by Paul’s listening to the tapes. And the film’s penultimate scene has Paul producing the novel Never Die Alone, that was actually written by Donald Goines, and of which we are now watching the cinematic adaptation. Paul is told by the publisher that it’s too incredible a story to be believed; the irony resonates, even as genre conditions are fulfilled. While the film never quite resolves just what sort of jouissance Paul gets from witnessing (and identifying with, from a position of safety) King David’s career, we can’t doubt that something fairly unpleasant is at work here.
Nonetheless, there is one crucial respect in which the film treads on dubious ground, and does revel in its own nastiness. Its treatment of its protagonist’s misogyny is unpleasantly double-edged. The only thing that DMX’s nearly affectless character seems to get off on is reducing strong women (and especially strong black women) to abject misery and dependency, by hooking them on heroin and then cutting off the supply (and finally killing them, with a deliberately doctored dose). And although this is thematized (with an additional Oedipal twist) as the main reason why King David is brought low, this doesn’t negate a certain pleasure that the film takes in the process (i.e., that it proposes for the delectation of the viewer).
I suppose all this is not unfaithful to Donald Goines, a writer certainly not free of conventional misogyny, but whose power comes from his relentlessly horrific and dystopian view of the life of pimping and drug dealing in the ghetto. (The only exception to this downbeat vision being the black power fantasies of his final four “Kenyatta” novels). Goines, like hip hop artists of the 1990s and since, gained a cult following on the razor’s edge between proclaiming coolness and unsparingly “keeping it real”; but his negativity has never been matched by Biggie, Tupac, or anybody else. This is probably why so few films have been made from his novels, despite the way their genre aspects and ghetto settings seem to cry out for cinematic treatment. (I’ve never seen Crime Partners, the only one ever made prior to Never Die Alone, but it sounds like a stinker, and unfaithful to the novel to boot). Adapting Goines to the screen is much more difficult than it might at first appear to be; and though Dickerson hasn’t entirely succeeded in capturing the full measure of Goines’ bleak and disturbing vision — at once naturalistic and almost apocalyptic — he’s at least gone beyond blaxploitation cliches to make a largely compelling film.

Ernest Dickerson’s Never Die Alone, from the novel by the great Donald Goines, is a first-rate genre picture. DMX is ice cold charismatic as “King” David, a nasty, sadistic drug dealer who is shot dead just as he is about to repent and seek redemption. The direction is taut and concise, with economical naration, a complex temporal scheme, powerful (but carefully restrained) use of noir lighting and tilts and odd angles, and violent action sequences which pack a punch without being dwelt on (a la Mel Gibson) or inflated (a la Quentin Tarantino). On the evidence of not only this film, but all his work, Dickerson seems to me every bit the peer and equal of Don Siegel and Walter Hill, as far as action genre directors are concerned.
But of course, there’s more to Never Die Alone than just a genre picture. Because of Dickerson’s ambitions as a director; because of what it means to bring Donald Goines to film; and, subsuming both of the above, because this is an African American themed film.
Never Die Alone, to a certain extent, tries to have things both ways. It solicits (male) viewers with its gangsta cool at the same time that it claims to provide an edifying lesson on how wrongdoing and crime don’t pay.
Now in fact the film’s less guilty of this than many other films are, not to mention hip hop lyrics; overall, it’s a pretty grim movie, and its relentless speed doesn’t allow any time to revel either in bloodshed or in the glories of acquiring “money and pussy,” the only two things that matter according to one ganglord character. I really didn’t see this film as selling a minstrelized version of ghetto pimp cool blackness to white suburban kids, the way so many commercial enterprises do these days. (This is probably the reason for its relatively poor box office showing).
Indeed, the relation of the black/ghetto story to its white voyeurs and consumers is explicitly, and rather oddly, taken up within the film itself; David Arquette plays Paul, a white guy, a writer, who’s slumming (as his bourgeois black girlfriend tells him in no uncertain terms) in Harlem, ostensibly to find material for the novel he hopes to write. He gets this material. in the form of audio tapes that King David leaves behind. The film starts with DMX/David narrating from the grave; its flashbacks to his earlier career are motivated by Paul’s listening to the tapes. And the film’s penultimate scene has Paul producing the novel Never Die Alone, that was actually written by Donald Goines, and of which we are now watching the cinematic adaptation. Paul is told by the publisher that it’s too incredible a story to be believed; the irony resonates, even as genre conditions are fulfilled. While the film never quite resolves just what sort of jouissance Paul gets from witnessing (and identifying with, from a position of safety) King David’s career, we can’t doubt that something fairly unpleasant is at work here.
Nonetheless, there is one crucial respect in which the film treads on dubious ground, and does revel in its own nastiness. Its treatment of its protagonist’s misogyny is unpleasantly double-edged. The only thing that DMX’s nearly affectless character seems to get off on is reducing strong women (and especially strong black women) to abject misery and dependency, by hooking them on heroin and then cutting off the supply (and finally killing them, with a deliberately doctored dose). And although this is thematized (with an additional Oedipal twist) as the main reason why King David is brought low, this doesn’t negate a certain pleasure that the film takes in the process (i.e., that it proposes for the delectation of the viewer).
I suppose all this is not unfaithful to Donald Goines, a writer certainly not free of conventional misogyny, but whose power comes from his relentlessly horrific and dystopian view of the life of pimping and drug dealing in the ghetto. (The only exception to this downbeat vision being the black power fantasies of his final four “Kenyatta” novels). Goines, like hip hop artists of the 1990s and since, gained a cult following on the razor’s edge between proclaiming coolness and unsparingly “keeping it real”; but his negativity has never been matched by Biggie, Tupac, or anybody else. This is probably why so few films have been made from his novels, despite the way their genre aspects and ghetto settings seem to cry out for cinematic treatment. (I’ve never seen Crime Partners, the only one ever made prior to Never Die Alone, but it sounds like a stinker, and unfaithful to the novel to boot). Adapting Goines to the screen is much more difficult than it might at first appear to be; and though Dickerson hasn’t entirely succeeded in capturing the full measure of Goines’ bleak and disturbing vision — at once naturalistic and almost apocalyptic — he’s at least gone beyond blaxploitation cliches to make a largely compelling film.