Heather Edwards
April 30, 2012
Nature of Evil
Film Essay
In the movie Sleepers, we follow the friendship of four boys: Shakes, Michael, John, and Tommy are childhood friends. One hot afternoon, the boys see business is slow and decide to play a prank on a street vendor that ends up resulting in some very serious consequences. The boys are sentences and sent to The Wilkinson's Home For Boys, which was like a detention center. The time spent in the detention center really seems to change the boys entirely and completely destroys their innocence, and scars them physically and emotionally. The time spent at Wilkinson’s Home For Boys will never e forgotten. Their friendship continues to stay strong, but even that has changed. As they become adults, two of boys have gone out and began working legally. Shakes is a writer for the local paper, and Michael is an assistant district attorney. The other two boys, Tommy and John, have continued and have became more of criminals. They later become suspects in several unsolved murders, the use illegal drugs, and are the founders and leaders of an Irish gang in West Manhattan. The four never forget their time at Wilkinson's, nor do they forget their friendship to each other. The film culminates their vengeance served to the guards at Wilkinson's.
The culture they are raised in is Hell's Kitchen in New York during the 1960's. Hell’s Kitchen is a racially and ethnically mixed, working class neighborhood that the boys describe as a “place of innocence ruled by corruption”. It is it's own culture of street rules and operations. Children are safe to play and be children; however, the people that run the neighborhood are often found to be criminals. The people running Hell's Kitchen have their own sense of street justice, and own means of carrying out sanctions against those that dare intrude upon or those who diverge from it. For example, there was a drug dealer that moved in to the neighborhood. The drugs that he...