Crash into Me

I saw the provocative and utterly stressful film Crash tonight. This movie embraces without subtlety the topic of racial tension in America, to the point where everything boils over in yelling, screaming, name-calling, fighting and shooting. While I am not impressed with the cinematic technique the film used, which is in the style of multiple interweaved storyline that combine with serendipity and coincidence, I am very disturbed by the effective social commentary. This is similar to the genre of films like Magnolia, Pulp Fiction, Lock Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels, Go!, Short Cuts etc., where coincidences occur as often as Stephen King uses italics. You'd imagine from watching this movie that the population of LA is around the mid-twenties and everyone hates each other, and they all drive black SUV's. The movie is both manipulative and realistic at the same time, dealing with issues that seem implausible but short reflection will find occurs too often. Black people get shot, Arabs are harassed, Asians are racially slurred, LAPD police profile minorities etc. All you need in this movie, is two people of different ethnicities and a gun, and the stress reaches an unbearable crescendo. I was stressed beyond belief at multiple points of this movie because I was so emotionally invested (both as viewer and a race researcher). While I am surprised at the frank and in-your-face displays of racism because it is an issue that is tiptoed around in cinema in general, I am also confronted with the thought that not ALL inter-racial contact is in the context of racism, as the film portrays. I can be wrong. The recurring theme is that racism is caused by fear of the unknown, self-anger and hubris. In one situation, one person might have power over another of a different race, but these can be quickly reversed. Regardless, the theme of the movie is straightforward. We're all victims of racism. We're all perpetrators of racism. There is good racism. There is bad racism. There is racism that destroys, that alienate, that kill. There is racism that leads to redemption, to epiphanies and to unity. This is a tale of one city where racial diversity is its strength and its own undoing at the same time.