This weekend we rented the movie Crash on DVD. It’s a fascinating, but flawed, take on invidual racism in Los Angeles.
There isn’t a “story” to “Crash,” or at least not a single story. Instead, there are multiple story lines, one for each principle character: an Iranian shopkeeper, two white cops, a black TV director and his wife, a black cop and his latina partner, and a white District Attorney and his wife, and two black carjackers. Each character is both racist and the victim of racial prejudice. Their individual stories intertwine over the course of a day, and we observe how each character’s circumstances and attitudes contribute to the racism they express and experience. In this respect, “Crash” is a postmodern film, with many complex stories rather than one metanarrative, and many questions and perspectives rather than one simple resolution. And on this level, the film works splendidly.
If the refusal to establish a simple, predictable Hollywood plotline is “Crash’s” glory, it’s also where the film stalls. “Crash” offers no hope for redemption. It never hints that any of the characters can reconcile their racial and cultural differences. Instead, it gives us the Iranian shopkeeper’s eventual mystical acceptance of his fate, the black cop’s unrelieved guilt, the white cop’s unrelenting conflict over caring for his ailing father. We can escape into unreality, become cynical, or become hard; there are no other alternatives. I would love to see a film as unflinching and complex as “Crash” that nevertheless provides a glimpse of the forgiveness and reconciliation we can find, even over intractable issues of culture and race, in Christ.
If you’re interested in how a postmodern sensibility might play into a studio film, or if you’re concerned about racial reconciliation, take a look at “Crash.”
(A final word of warning — the characters in “Crash” frequently say exactly what they’re thinking; as a film that explores some dark corners of human nature, the characters are often thinking things that aren’t very nice. There are many bad words, including liberal use of the “F***” word, and one brief scene involving a sexual situation. In my view, just about all of this was appropriate to the context of the film, but at the very least, if you have kids in the house, you’ll want to watch this one after they’re asleep and keep your hands on the “volume” button.)