"Crash" - Movie with a Message
Caught a screening of "Crash" (2004) over the weekend at the Clearview, 62nd & 1st Ave.
Interesting film, and flawed in a number of ways. In case you've missed it, the basic premise of the film is the intersecting lives of strangers viewed through an auto crash in Los Angeles which opens the film. Eventually, we circle back around to that same crash after having explored the lives ~ and the racism ~ of a number of characters.
Written and directed by Paul Haggis, a white guy from Canada, who brought us the heavy-handed, "Million Dollar Baby." Haggis is also interested in social issues, and is co-founder of Artists for Peace and Justice, a member of the Board of Directors of The Hollywood Education and Literacy Project, among his other projects.
Back to "Crash." One of the central incidents in the film involves an African American couple who are stopped and harrassed by a couple of white cops. One of the white cops fondles the woman in the couple, and the couple quarrels about her husband's response to this assault. Later, the woman is involved in yet another auto "crash" (ok, it is L.A.) and the white cop who assaulted her is the one who comes to her rescue, thus illustrating our interconnectedness and how even the people you hate are people that you must a) rely on, or b) assist in the day-to-day business of doing your job. Once the cop rescues the woman, she looks at him with a mix of gratitude and resignation, realizing that her oppressor has now become her hero. After this "crash" we never see her character again to explore what the ramifications of this experience were for her, and she fades into the two-dimensional background of the story. We finally see her at the very end of the film, when her husband ~ who we've followed through yet another encounter with the police ~ decides to call her. (Apparently, nearly dying isn't enough to get him to interrupt his busy day.) The rest of the women in the film are similarly sexualized and/or frigid, shrill two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs of real women. Clearly, Haggis was so preoccupied with racial politics here that he couldn't be bothered to address the intricacies of gender politics as well.
There are a lot of ways in which "Crash" is also deeply problematic around the racism that it so earnestly wants the viewers to be critical of. The only character that is without blame and exists within a space of a kind of racial innocence, is the assaultive/rescuing white cop's father. The cop's dad is dying of prostate cancer after years as a janitor. According to the son's passionate re-telling, the father owned his own janitorial service which employed exclusively African Americans, then was put out of business when the city decided to only give contracts to minority-owned businesses. This blow resulted in the a total and devastating series of losses for the father, culminating in his health being held hostage by an unfeeling HMO run by incompetent affirmative action hires.
While the ostensible 'message' of the movie is that racism is bad, creating a character who is putatively innocent and untouched by racism, but only the victim of "reverse" discrimination policies such as affirmative action, undermines what could have been a progressive message film.
There is another problem inherent in the form of "message film," that I think Stephanie Zacharek speaks to in her review of the film in Salon. She writes:
"...for the most part, "Crash" works so hard at moral instructiveness that it's tedious to watch. That's a shame, because there still ought to be a place for the old-fashioned social-problem picture. I'm thinking of movies like "Bad Day at Black Rock," "Twelve Angry Men," "Norma Rae," or, to name two more recent examples, "Erin Brockovich" and "The Insider" -- movies that stem from liberal outrage and the need to speak out against racial or societal injustice. (A superb example from last year, though it's not an American movie, is Terry George's "Hotel Rwanda.") But "Crash" doesn't have the resonance of those movies, or even just the kind of storytelling that makes them so righteously entertaining. When Sandra Bullock hugs her Hispanic maid and says, "You're the best friend I've got," we, like her, may be overcome with warm fuzzies. But we haven't really been made to think, or even to feel. "Crash" only confirms what we already know about racism: It's inside every one of us. That should be a starting point, not a startling revelation."
To me, the dilemma with any sort of message film is the what Zacharek mentions with the "moral instructiveness" that makes the film "tedious to watch." It requires a kind of bluntness, in order to get a message across, a didactic quality that is, I would agree tedious to watch except for the most committed (and then, that's really just preaching to the choir, isn't is?). This kind of bluntness is juxtaposed against the demands of what makes an artistically compelling film. For something to be subtle enough to actual be a good film it is going to be too subtle to teach anything about racism or tolerance. I suppose that's still an open question.
Interesting film, and flawed in a number of ways. In case you've missed it, the basic premise of the film is the intersecting lives of strangers viewed through an auto crash in Los Angeles which opens the film. Eventually, we circle back around to that same crash after having explored the lives ~ and the racism ~ of a number of characters.
Written and directed by Paul Haggis, a white guy from Canada, who brought us the heavy-handed, "Million Dollar Baby." Haggis is also interested in social issues, and is co-founder of Artists for Peace and Justice, a member of the Board of Directors of The Hollywood Education and Literacy Project, among his other projects.
Back to "Crash." One of the central incidents in the film involves an African American couple who are stopped and harrassed by a couple of white cops. One of the white cops fondles the woman in the couple, and the couple quarrels about her husband's response to this assault. Later, the woman is involved in yet another auto "crash" (ok, it is L.A.) and the white cop who assaulted her is the one who comes to her rescue, thus illustrating our interconnectedness and how even the people you hate are people that you must a) rely on, or b) assist in the day-to-day business of doing your job. Once the cop rescues the woman, she looks at him with a mix of gratitude and resignation, realizing that her oppressor has now become her hero. After this "crash" we never see her character again to explore what the ramifications of this experience were for her, and she fades into the two-dimensional background of the story. We finally see her at the very end of the film, when her husband ~ who we've followed through yet another encounter with the police ~ decides to call her. (Apparently, nearly dying isn't enough to get him to interrupt his busy day.) The rest of the women in the film are similarly sexualized and/or frigid, shrill two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs of real women. Clearly, Haggis was so preoccupied with racial politics here that he couldn't be bothered to address the intricacies of gender politics as well.
There are a lot of ways in which "Crash" is also deeply problematic around the racism that it so earnestly wants the viewers to be critical of. The only character that is without blame and exists within a space of a kind of racial innocence, is the assaultive/rescuing white cop's father. The cop's dad is dying of prostate cancer after years as a janitor. According to the son's passionate re-telling, the father owned his own janitorial service which employed exclusively African Americans, then was put out of business when the city decided to only give contracts to minority-owned businesses. This blow resulted in the a total and devastating series of losses for the father, culminating in his health being held hostage by an unfeeling HMO run by incompetent affirmative action hires.
While the ostensible 'message' of the movie is that racism is bad, creating a character who is putatively innocent and untouched by racism, but only the victim of "reverse" discrimination policies such as affirmative action, undermines what could have been a progressive message film.
There is another problem inherent in the form of "message film," that I think Stephanie Zacharek speaks to in her review of the film in Salon. She writes:
"...for the most part, "Crash" works so hard at moral instructiveness that it's tedious to watch. That's a shame, because there still ought to be a place for the old-fashioned social-problem picture. I'm thinking of movies like "Bad Day at Black Rock," "Twelve Angry Men," "Norma Rae," or, to name two more recent examples, "Erin Brockovich" and "The Insider" -- movies that stem from liberal outrage and the need to speak out against racial or societal injustice. (A superb example from last year, though it's not an American movie, is Terry George's "Hotel Rwanda.") But "Crash" doesn't have the resonance of those movies, or even just the kind of storytelling that makes them so righteously entertaining. When Sandra Bullock hugs her Hispanic maid and says, "You're the best friend I've got," we, like her, may be overcome with warm fuzzies. But we haven't really been made to think, or even to feel. "Crash" only confirms what we already know about racism: It's inside every one of us. That should be a starting point, not a startling revelation."
To me, the dilemma with any sort of message film is the what Zacharek mentions with the "moral instructiveness" that makes the film "tedious to watch." It requires a kind of bluntness, in order to get a message across, a didactic quality that is, I would agree tedious to watch except for the most committed (and then, that's really just preaching to the choir, isn't is?). This kind of bluntness is juxtaposed against the demands of what makes an artistically compelling film. For something to be subtle enough to actual be a good film it is going to be too subtle to teach anything about racism or tolerance. I suppose that's still an open question.
posted by Jessie Daniels at
10:52 AM
