John Singleton's influence upon this film isn't that he read about it in a book, it's that he experienced it happening to him or people he knew growing up. His idea for the film was one that initially helped him to get into film school. And Singleton specifically wrote the role of Doughboy for Ice Cube whom the young director met while he was working as an intern on Arsenion Hall's show.
Singleton has mentioned that the film technically gets better as it goes on because he was settling in as a director with the camera work, and grew in confidence over the course of shooting. The final scene where Doughboy fades away as he crosses from Tre's porch to his home was inspired by Stand by Me. What Singleton nails is the reality of community. Many times we watch films that aren't rooted in the reality of the environment they are meant to be in, or they are heightened in a way that dramatizes the every day. Singleton took the every day life and created a drama from the reality of what these characters face from an internal perspective about what it means to be a man, and a black man in a society that's systemically pushing them out and forgetting about them. This cycle of violence that Furious Styles teaches Tre to rise above is the day to day environment for these characters, and the types of survival that one must choose are starkly different.
The final scene is also impactful because the violence doesn't just end because one person decides to stop choosing the cycle. There remains great cost even to the higher choice, that's the reality that Singleton created in this film and the experience translates to an audience because these are human beings struggling for something better, something good. That is relatable across all of the borders we self-impose upon one another in our so called modern society. Every human being desires more, and must rise above the circumstances of their life in order to become it and achieve it. And there are always casualties, and for once the experience of the black community in Los Angeles is expressed clearly on-screen. It's not hidden in plain sight like the media report Doughboy talks about with Tre where they name the most violent places on earth, and no one mentions South Central LA. Singleton created a contemporary piece of art with his storytelling that remains relevant in this post-Civil Rights era world.
