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Essay on Crash
"Live your life at the point of impact. You think you know who you are. You have no idea. Moving at the speed of life, we are bound to collide with each other." (www.crashfilm.com) The opening lines in Crash are from Detective Graham Waters, who has just been in a traffic accident, being philosophical about L.A. versus other big cities. He points out that in other cities there are crowds and people bump into one another all the time. But L.A. is a city on wheels. We are always surrounded by steel and glass, and so, he concludes, we crash into each other just to have some human contact.
The film Crash deals with races, and the struggle different races have just to survive, because they have been stereotyped to a certain image. It shows the corruption in the American police forces, and the way they deal with certain races. Writer-director Paul Haggis' Los Angeles is a world of alienated people struggling to connect across vast barriers of language, class, and culture. It can help cure racists by making them realize that the players manage to connect which is testament to their depth as characters more than some trite message of brotherly love. The movie has a contagious upbeat belief in the revelation that everyone is capable of good, despite how easy it is to hate those different to you.
The scene where Matt Dillon, who plays a racist cop shows that he has a good side as well and explains why he hates black people. This can help those who hate racists to try to understand their point of view as well. Crash is a movie of interlocking stories of whites, blacks, Latinos, Koreans, Iranians, cops and criminals, the rich and the poor, the....
