Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 film La Haine adopts a Fanonian perspective, exposing from a psychological standpoint how post-colonial ideas have shaped today’s world and the impact of this psychology on individuals’ actions. As much as it draws its primary concern from the day in the life of 3 friends in a suburb in France, these characters are Jewish Vinz, Black Humbert, and Pied-noir Said. Now, in the lives of people, their relations, and their behavior throughout the film, we can observe the impact of the neo-racist approach. The first scene shows a recap of events happened in the suburbs one day before.

In sum, Abdel, a friend of the three, is nearly killed by a policeman and put in intensive care, whereas the second part of a policeman’s job is that he lost his gun during events, and Vinz found the policeman’s gun, and these are the things that happen within 24 hours. In the film, they go to Paris in order to take revenge upon a man who owes them money, and here it’s possible to comprehend why Kassovitz wanted to shoot black and white pictures. This film is about the immigrant people who remain in the shadows in the process of France’s urbanization.

This is done in the presentation of two completely opposite lives that are lived within the same city. In particular, this dilemma is addressed by the police. While the suburban police are much more truculent, the police in Paris are truly humane. We especially get to see this in Said’s conversation with the police in Paris city center. But one of the most common themes in the film is the theme of power; when Vinz finds the gun of the police, he finds himself in a state of mind he has never felt before: to be able to do something, to resist, and to fight back.

He had the power, and he would use it because it had been used against him since he was born. That is why I would like to go a little deeper into this concept of power. In Robert A. Dahl's 'The Concept of Power,' he defines power as 'My intuitive idea of power, then, is something like this: To say they both have power over each other, but A can make B do something he otherwise would not do,' which is incorrect.

This power has been used by others over the years, which Vinz has had the opportunity to use. Now he is trying to bring another into his control, according to Émile Durkheim—when norms collapse in modern society, people may engage in taking justice into their own hands. The theories we find throughout the film prove this theory. The film tells the story of a man falling from a 50-story skyscraper to a man who, in a building of the same height, designs and builds a huge safety net. The man who keeps falling from the roof of the building: Till here everything is all good, he keeps telling himself to comfort himself, or Until here; no, it is not about the fall; it is going hard on the ground. But these three friends had been falling all their lives, and it hadn't crashed yet. On the contrary, the film is the dichotomy in the characters of Vinz and Hubert, especially in the way they live.

As Hubert is clearly a more reasonable character, he believes Vinz's hunt for vengeance is both unhelpful and unreasonable. It can be said at this point that at this juncture Hubert’s power approach is similar to Michel Foucault’s Power-Knowledge Theory. This theory is that power isn’t just a physical thing; it’s a knowledge-based phenomenon. We can say that the end of the film is the climax. Vinz gives the gun to Hubert, realizing that it is impossible to solve the discrimination they have been subjected to only through violence after what they have been through all day, what they have seen, and especially after the life they have seen in Paris. At this point a police car cuts in front of Said and Vinz and accidentally shoots Vinz in the head.

Hubert comes running and points his gun at the policeman's face. At this point the camera zooms in on Said, and the film ends with a gunshot. A couple of things caught my attention at this point. Firstly, after the policeman accidentally shoots Vinz, he smiles slightly, which you might think is a sign of surprise or shock, but when Hubert runs up and points his gun in his face, he pulls it straight out, unlike a person in shock. And from this, we realize that he is really laughing because he finds it really funny. In the following, we see Hannah Arendt's theory of the Banality of Evil. This is one theory in which people anonymize themselves within the system, where they move aside their conscience and even think they are part of the system.

This is pretty much the situation in this scene of police who are a part of the machine and abuse the people in the suburbs. The director, however, does not indicate whether Hubert or the police, shot Hubert at the end—it is all for the audience to decide. On top of this, it is no accident that it is Hubert who is left in this state at the end of the film. Had Hubert struck the ground at the end of falling as a result of this building falling, because he was ever the man for common sense, did he recognize violence, or, in other words, physical resistance was warranted, or did this postcolonial effect bring this upon Hubert? That eats its own tail like the Ouroboros snake The director leaves this to us, the viewers, but the La Haine film received a lot of reason in society at the time of its release, and we can even say that it is the best-known film about the suburbs.

The reason why I describe this film in such detail is that the message and the political conjuncture are much more biased. In it we see racism, ghettoization due to the immigrant problem, and police brutality. What was the situation in France at this time? Immigrants and suburban society had lost confidence in politics, which led them to support the Front National party. As a party, FN made discourses that it would include these communities in the system with more populist discourses.