Why I hated Crash

What a funny world we live in. If you had been an extraterrestrial eavesdropping on America's most glamorous social event, the 78th Academy Awards, you'd be led to believe there are no racists in this part of Planet Earth, just as there are no homosexuals. Light years travelling and years observing this strange human race, and suddenly all your beliefs are turned on their heads. "What?!?? - you might say - Hang on a second! The two top films contending for the most prestigious prize, Crash and Brokeback Mountain, addressed exactly the topics of racism and homosexuality"!! Well, on the surface, yes, but underneath it, not at all. The second issue is easily dealt with: check this review by Lee Harris for example, which echoes the bold statement by Jake that this film was really about two straight men falling in love, or consider the fact that there are virtually no gay actors in Hollywood nowadays (yeah, right!). So, indeed, BBM talks about homosexuality as the mere physical act of a man having sex with another man, but NOT about homosexuals, or their identity in a homophobic world. Gays are barred from the movie just as they are from Hollywood's echelons. But since I LOVED Brokeback Mountain, I will not shoot my arrows at Ang Lee's masterpiece - not for the moment at least - and I will concentrate on explaining why I hated Crash so much.

Crash talks about racial relations in Los Angeles today. It boldly aims to do so in just under 2 hours - 113 minutes to be exact - by following the lives of 8 main characters as they part and collide in the space of 24 hours. By the end of the film, shaken and tormented by uneasy questions (do I love my Bosnian cleaner enough?!!?!), we are left wondering where it all came from, as the films offers no answers or solutions to the racial problem itself, but just a powerful glance at this human interconnexity that surrounds it. Gazing at this faux-Buddhist temple, in which the characters do not know how to communicate except when their racial hatred emerges from deep inside, we are told that what goes around comes around, that being racist is bad, that we are all racist at some point in our lives, and that we can avert this, if we just choose to.

Some have found this preaching tone annoying. Others have even been irritated at the moral assumptions of the director, arguing that "[...] the script is founded on the belief of any good liberal: [that] everyone in the world is a seething, hate-filled racist... except the filmmaker, of course, whose job it is to enlighten the American people". Oh how far from true. Paul Haggis does indeed know better, at least better than the idiotic right-wing above reviewer who'd better consider a career in the car-retail industry. And what he knows better about is how to clear the conscience of middle class America.

Crash dresses up as a moral film, but sends out a far more alarming, subtle and vicious message: that racism isn't after all a social malaise in LA (and in the entire US), which ensures the socio-economic structures of the country remain in the firm hands of the white dominant classes, but rather a personal mistake of circumstance, one that can be averted (or committed) easily in the height of a moment. THIS is what white middle class America wants to hear and believe, that after all, underneath, it is capable of showing affection to its Latino maids, of even hugging them when the pressure becomes too much. Let us forget about those thuggish white policemen savagely beating Rodney King to a pulp and about those terrible riots that followed and caused so much economic damage, frankly. These things don't happen in LA any longer. Now, why should they? After all, if a police officer shoots a black kid, it's a mistake committed by a confused and angelic-looking Ryan Philippe, and he wasn't even a racist!!!!



The powerful symbolism of the climatic crash scene, in which a heroic Matt Dillon (representing the cruder side of white male America) drags out of a burning car the beautifully terrified Thandie Newton (representing all black and otherwise minority-ethnic women), cannot be missed. He - the white lord - has been capable of really bad things, like viciously forcing his hands up her skirt just hours before the accident during a routine traffic stop, but ultimately, when the REALLY bad things happen, and the important decisions need to be made, he is there to save her and protect her, a redemptive move which absolves at once himself and all white male America. And must have made his mum so proud. Needless to say, Thandie Newton/black women do not have the luxury of a U turn like Matt Dillon/white men, but they gratefully or resentfully - depending on the circumstances - have to accept whatever scrap of meat they might throw at them.

So who is a racist at the end of the movie? No one. Full-time racists would behave in a totally coherent manner, the film suggests, and no one is THAT coherent in real life. We change our behaviour according to many different factors, which are too difficult to explain, dear audience. In this evolution of behaviours we at times display racist tendencies, but that's different altogether. So does racism exist in LA? Yes, of course. But no one is a racist as such. We can only blame circumstances if "stuff" happens. Now isn't that convenient? Isn't that a big "go and say 3 Hail Marys and all your sins will be forgiven"-type of approach? Isn't this spreading of blame across the whole board an absolutely irresponsible way of seemingly lifting any true responsibility off the shoulders of white America?

Well, it is for me, because just as Crash was screened in cinemas across the world, thousands of black, latino and otherwise mostly NON WHITE men and women were flushed down the gutters of New Orleans as Katrina played with the "circumstances" and "behavioural tendencies" that kept them all trapped inside the economic squalor and social hypocrisy of racial America. The contrast between the rose-tinted racial tensions of LA described by Crash against the backdrop of the monochromatic devastation of New Orleans could not be starker. But like the three proverbial monkeys, the Oscar judges and raving audiences chose to eliminate one of their senses so that they could deal more easily with the bi-dimensional reality offered by the cinema screen. The fact that the world out there is entirely contraddicting what we're seeing on screen is beyond the matter, because it's more comforting to believe in this humanised approach, it pleases our intellectual ego to think that society can be pulverised so minutely that in the end generalisations do not matter. The fact that these two old ladies dragging themselves and their few belongings in the murky waters of New Orleans are black - the film ultimately leads us to believe - while those sitting on the tank in the background are white is entirely coincidental: a crash between the atomised lives of contemporary Americans.



So here's my final question to those of you who loved the movie and think this is a well deserved Best Film award: did you love it because it gave you some real, hard answers about the planet in which you live, and the racial prejudices that forcibly shape the lives of most of its inhabitants? Or rather because it stroked your ego into believing that you too were part of this beautifully constructed and morally vacuous cinematic collision for the simple fact that you skin displays a tone of colour, making you feel - in the words of the eminent LA Times Film Critic Kenneth Turan - that you had done your moral duty and examined your soul when in fact you were just getting your buttons pushed and your preconceptions reconfirmed?