Crash - Racism as Manifestation and Hopeless Wandering

Paul Haggis' Crash analyzes a group of people living in Los Angeles over a two day period who are grappling with loneliness, hopelessness and alienation in a city overflowing with people. What's more, the film which critically examines the concept/theory of America's meltingpot uses the ethnically diverse city as a microcosm for a country where de facto segregation is the reality and where racism manifests itself often times as the displacement of the angst people feel. The characters are disconnected from those that do not look like them, but in truth they are disconnected from those that look like themselves as well.

This movie is absent of any characters who are completely bad and whom we cannot feel sympathy for, but it is also devoid of just about any (save one) characters who we can completely empathize with. No one's hands are completely clean nor dirty.

What Haggis asks us to consider is that in this country where we are so disconnected from one another, there is quite possibly some cosmic connection that binds a random group of us together where the fate of one becomes the fate of all. He also suggests that under duress so many of us might be pushed to utter racial epithets or the allow our stereotypes to take form in words and actions. At the same time, these extremely tense and emotional situations gives ordinary people the chance to rise to the occassion and become something greater than they thought possible. One need only think about the firemen who acted and died so valiantly on September 11th to realize the truth in this observation.

Crash is about racism on a very profound level. In a country where political correctness and social sanction goes so far as to scourn a public official for using the word (correctly mind you) niggardly, racism covertly lies in the hearts, minds, and actions of individuals, but almost never outwardly in their words. Indeed, it is only when extreme tension mounts that an epithet is even uttered. The film seems to argue that how we respond when a crash takes place (here: a metaphor for an extremely emotional collision/event) is the more accurate indicator of where race relations are. The unspoken truths in our day to day actions lie within whom we cohabitate with, whom we live around, and the respect we afford people.

But if Crash were about racism only, it would be well done. What makes this a great film is that racism is itself the subject matter at a very basic level, but racism as the manifestation of loneliness, hopeless, and alienation is the subject matter at a deeper level. Everyone knows that racism originates from fear and ignorance etc, but Haggis asks us to think of racism as the locus of displacement for what we really feel. We are disappointed with an outcome, so we must find someone to blame. We don't feel connected to those with whom we should be close, so we lash out at others. We simply feel like the agency we were supposed to have as human beings living in America - land of the free, filled with limitless opportunity - is missing, so we must strike someone else down. With our limited imaginations, our segregated upbringings, learned racism and stereotyping, we turn toward the other. That ethnic person so different from ourselves whom we feel justified in tearing down is an easy target, certainly easier than confronting our own deamons, or to even face an even scarier conclusion: that we are perhaps powerless to change what's wrong with our own lives. Confronting our own deamons is challenging enough because they require leaving our comfort zones and introspectively examining the painful parts of our souls. But think of being forced to accept that which we cannot change. Think of what it is to be Don Cheadle's character who tries to reach out to his mother, but who will always be treated with some level of disdain and worse than his younger brother who (unlike him) has amounted to little in life.

After Million Dollar Baby we have learned that we must try and find the silver lining in Mr. Haggis' tales. Crash paints a pretty dismal picture of race relations in our country. L.A. is segregated with whites, blacks, hispanics, Asians all living in their ghettos. From their respective loci of habitation, they each inflict hurt onto outsiders and onto their own as well. What is common is that they are struggling, every last one of them. They are struggling in their personal relationships, struggling with jobs, struggling with life, struggling to survive. The hispanic female sees the Asian female and vice versa and they see no connection. They see only the exotic other and not a human being who shares their same suffering. So then what is the silver lining? Haggis seems to argue that our lives are interconnected no matter how far away we try to move and how many barriers we try to errect. There is a sense that we are not just some random assortment of individuals playing out our lives here on Earth, but that there is some metaphysical interplay happening between all of our fates. And yes, life is difficult and filled with adversity, but we each experience it no less than the next man and there has to be some comfort in this - in truth, we really are not alone.

So what the film asks us to do is to look past harsh exterior facade that others often project. Haggis wants us to look past skin color and to listen to more than accents. We are pushed to look at ourselves and question our own shortcomings and inner demons. There is also a pretty stinging indictment on our society as we busy ourselves with our lives that crashes are the only times in which we come into contact with one another. Mr. Cheadle's character in fact questions whether this isn't some subconscious decision to find human connection. Our lives are filled with the potential to enjoy genuine human interaction and relationships, we just do not. The tragedy of Crash is that its characters do not find each other and were it not for the hand of fate, they would not know one another at all.