Crash

Graham: "It's the sense of touch. Any real cities you walk, you know, you brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A. nobody touches you. We're always behind the metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something".

Cop: "You folks okay".

Nia: "I think he hit his head".

Graham: "You don't think it's true?"

Cop: "Stay in your car".

Nia: Graham, I think we got rear-ended, I think we spun around twice and somewhere in there, one of us lost our frame of reference. And I'm not gonna look for it".

No matter how hard you try it's virtually impossible to watch a movie like Crash without thinking about race. In 2006, it won Academy Awards for best picture of the year, best writing, and best editing. That's quite a feat for a film whose subject of racism has been around and talked about for many, many years. Did Crash depict a new innovative or creative way of dealing with racism? Did it offer any solutions to a problem that has plagued this world since its inception? The responses to those questions will vary, depending on who you ask. In the negative reviews I read about Crash, most people felt that for a movie that was supposed to deal with racism, it had very little depth. Dr. Joyce Middleton, in her article, "Talking about Race and Whiteness in Crash" she states, "By the end of the film, like many viewers and film critics, I felt disappointed and frustrated by the film's use of surface, sketchy characters; its failed attempt to challenge racial stereotypes, especially as most people of color (raced people) would recognize them; and its dominant pedagogical fallacy; that everybody's a little bit prejudiced" (321). A lot of opinions were similar to Dr. Middleton's but I have to say that my experience with the film was somewhat different.

In our class we are encouraged to make use of all of a film's components (dialogue, lighting, music, etcetera) to enjoy a full movie experience. Does it provoke us or stir our emotions? Is it trying to teach us a lesson? Is it trying to persuade us? In the case of Crash I would say yes to all three questions and while I would agree that race and race relations are important, critical aspects of this movie, I believe that there is another, more pervasive aspect of it - perception. How we perceive a person or situation will oftentimes determine our feelings. In talking about perception, hyperlinking in a film of this nature is particularly useful and effective because as Bolton stated in this article Hypermedia:

A hypertext has no canonical order. Every path defines an equally convincing and appropriate reading, and in the simple fact the reader's relationship to the text changes radically. A text as a network has no univocal sense; it is a multiplicity without the imposition of a principle of domination (25).

This is certainly true in the case of Crash. Not only were there perceptions by the characters of each other because of culture, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and class, hyperlinking also caused them (and us as viewers) to perceive something or someone in a particular way before they had all of the information. I am in no way suggesting that if we look at each other in a different way racism will disappear because not all perceptions are false. But when I watched Crash I was convinced that feelings of racism and thoughts of prejudice and stereotyping are sometimes the results of those false perceptions and not because of any concrete evidence. Does that statement make it any easier? No it doesn't. How can we decide if our perceptions are true or false concerning a person's behavior or attitude towards us? It's not easy; however, I do believe we have an example in the character of the locksmith, Daniel Ruiz (Michael Pena). He seemed to rise above it because he did not let people's perception of or behavior towards him affect him negatively.

It is this idea of perception that Haggis was trying to convey in the movie Crash and he used several devices for the desired effect. The technique of hyperlinking, the use dialogue to "guide the viewer's perception and the effective uses of the camera were integral in getting his point across. Make no mistake, Crash wanted to make a statement and though it may have failed in addressing valid issues like the "central role of whiteness in our understanding of racial formation in the United States (Middleton 324), its rhetoric on racism sparked a tremendous amount of dialogue, which to Haggis, is the first step towards solving the problem.

The movie's dialogue contains a lot of the traditional racial stereotypes that people use on each other but it is sometimes hard to tell if the person using it is racist. For instance, in the first scene of the movie Hispanic detective Ria (Jennifer Esposito) is