Abstract Crash is a movie about racial divisions and conflict in Los Angeles, a metropolis that now has a larger and more diverse minority-majority population than any city in the country, including New York. Asians, native and immigrant blacks from Africa and the Caribbean, Latinos from the Caribbean, Latin and Central America and especially Mexico, as well as newly arrived white immigrants, particularly Russians and Iranians, now comprise LA's demographic majority. Crash's ostensible or initial message is that these minority groups cohabit but do not cooperate; indeed, they dislike and fear one another as much or more as they dislike and fear white Angelenos.
Everybody in the film, one way or another, is or turns out to be a racist, which makes for a disturbing movie. Don Cheadle plays a conscientious and decent black police detective who nonetheless describes and thereby offends his Latina lover (and police partner) as Mexican, when she is in fact El Salvadoran and Puerto Rican. Matt Dillon plays a white cop who stops an upper-middle-class black couple, knowing full well that the van they are driving is not the one reported stolen. Dillon's character then creates a situation in which he can humiliate the man - a TV director in Hollywood - and grope the woman. The cop justifies his racist behavior in this instance by the fact that he caught husband and wife having sex in public in their big black van. Two young black men are amateur car thieves who work for a chop shop run by a Russian immigrant. One of them is constantly mouthing prejudice against whites, even as he fears them, and it is probably out of racial hatred and fear alike that, on the spur of the moment, he and his pal highjack the SUV of a white couple in a white neighborhood, Westwood, a venue usually off-limits to angry lower-class black youths. The white couple is not harmed, but the woman (Sandra Bullock) and her spouse, coincidentally the District Attorney of Los Angeles (Brendan Fraser), are stunned. The woman is portrayed as nasty, imperious, self-pitying (it is obvious that her husband, the DA, is cheating on her with his gorgeous young black aide) and a racist to boot. When, after the car theft, a Latino locksmith shows up to replace her house locks, she tells her DA spouse - the locksmith is within hearing distance - that it is another immigrant and olive-skinned gangster who will now have duplicates of her keys to distribute to his "homies." The DA is also a racist, but in a very special way that shows him as a political player, a man of power who will do or say anything to get ahead, but with little regard for the public good or for trivialities like justice or truth. What bothers him about his car being hijacked by two black youths with guns is that he needs black votes and black support for his political career and he fears that if he makes a big deal of the robbery he will seem like a law-and-order and anti-black politician. What is more, in the face of considerable contrary evidence, he wants to make an example of a white cop who has killed a black cop in the line of duty, just so he can make points with blacks. Lastly, there is an Irani shopkeeper who is both the object of racism and a murderous racist himself. When he goes to buy a gun to protect his shop against theft, the gun store proprietor insults him by calling him Osama. Later in the film, this same Irani shopkeeper is robbed because he fails to fix his back door. When his insurance company refuses reimbursement for the robbery because of the broken door, the Irani blames everything on a Latino locksmith who installed a new lock but also advised that the door be replaced. The Irani goes after the Latino locksmith (the same one who came to fix the locks on the DA's house) with gun in hand and intent to kill.
Paul Haggis, the director, has clearly laid out a complicated story involving many characters of diverse and divided races. This is a good start, but, happily, Crash gets better. It is a great film because it is about many things equally as important as race - for example, socioeconomic class and status. The DA's wife is not so much a racist as a classist; she despises herself and uses her high position in society to project her anger and self-hatred on immigrant servants - maids, locksmiths, etc. In Crash, class distinctions can be subtle and intra-racial as well as interracial: after a scene in which the upscale TV director saves the life of one of the car thieves, he tells the young hood: "You embarrass me"; and, more important for the kid's self-understanding and later transformation - "you embarrass yourself."
Crash is also about the city of Los Angeles itself, especially the spatial geography of this sprawling polycentric metropolis. Contrary to what many people who have never been there think, Los Angeles is not a suburban or exurban city or an aggregation of so-called "edge cities." It is about the extension of the urban in all directions on an apparently never-ending basis. |
New Labor Forum, Volume 15, Issue 1 May 2006 , pages 121 - 125 
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