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Crash 21 December 05

Section: article

Categories: Film / dvd

A weak film which tries to grapple with racism in the U.S. and deserves some credit at least for that. The film has some scenes which can give a sense of what it might be like to be Black in the U.S. and be targeted and abused by cops.

I don’t know who this filmmaker* is and I don’t know if he got cold feet in the development of this project, or if it simply represents his outlook. In the end the latter is the case, because that is what he put out there, the film. And I don’t know if he is conscious of the real irony in the fact that certain positions he takes as a filmmaker reflect of those of some of his characters who are forced to bow to the status quo, to submit themselves to the powers that be, to compromise their dignity in the process.

A scene which for me echoes the filmmaker’s outlook: a main Black character, as a director of commercials, is forced to change the way a Black character speaks to make it more in line with the manner his white boss thinks a Black kid should speak (Ebonics).

This same character, earlier in the film, had to submit to watching an LAPD "cop" sexually molest his wife.

Where the filmmaker’s outlook is an expression of bowing to the system:in what he likely considers to be an attempt to give "balance" to his already restrained depictions of racism, he in fact reverses these valid judgments. (Note: these comments are of course a "spoiler" in the event that you want to see the film.) For example, the white cop, characterized in the film as a "racist prick," who humiliates the above-mentioned upper-middle class Black couple, sexually molesting the woman, later "heroically" saves the same woman from a burning car (There are a number of car accidents in the film, hence the title). The purpose is of course to essentially redeem the cop and show that he is one thing (a racist prick) but he is also this other thing (a hero).

Plausibility in movies has to be considered in light of the overall narrative and thrust of the story, and sometimes subordinated to that, but in this case the filmmaker was bending over backward, and over-stretching the plausibility, in order to hammer the message of the film into the mainstream mold of Hollywood and to avoid breaking one of its taboos, namely that cops cannot be completely bad. Even when a cop is completely bad in a mainstream movie it is always only to serve as a foil for some "good" cop, or to emphasize that it is just an individual, an exception. So here we have one cop who is a racist and sex offender, and he is a hero. That will warm the hearts of some in the audience and certainly make them feel better about having drawn any negative conclusions from the scene involving his abuse of power, or having changed their outlook on cops based on that. So, what is this cop? What is his dominant role? If a person is condemned of child molestation there is no such eclecticism (justifiably so). Whatever internal contradictions such a cop may have, or good intentions, the question still remains as to what his dominant role is. A cop’s role is to "serve and protect"—the status quo, this system which engenders, among many other things, the racism touched on in this film.

*It turns out that Haggis wrote Million Dollar Baby.

  • Title: Crash
  • Directed by: Paul Haggis
  • Writing credits: Paul Haggis
  • Starring: Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Jennifer Esposito, Thandie Newton, Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser
  • Year: 2004