It is time to trash “Crash.” The film slipped through its deserved excoriation last week, but now it is time to confront this film, and recognize its failed nature. Let’s start with the failed execution of its premise. Here is what the film wanted to do: create a concept film that uses an interwoven tableaux of characters that shows everyone is racist. Here is what the film actually is: a sloppy conglomerate of racist caricatures. The difference between character and caricature is so important that it can’t be stressed it enough. A character is a well fleshed out person that has motivations, and more importantly a sense of depth to them. A caricature is a one-dimensional person who lacks a distinguishable personality. They are shallow to the point of allegory, metaphor, or symbolism, but they don’t represent anything other than themselves. The caricatures in “Crash” are only ever shown in two modes that oscillate to manipulate the audience: sympathetic/victim (1) and racist (2). One such example is Don Cheadle’s character. He is first introduced as a victim when a racist comment is directed at him (1), however, when in bed with another caricature he makes a racist comment that upsets her (2). Later, he is shown to have a difficult family life, (1) and finally tragedy strikes that further cements him as a sympathetic character (1). The film is designed such that depth emerges from that dichotomy, but instead the audience is just given a binary system that suggests people are either clearly in the wrong or wronged. Almost all of the characters are designed around this unintuitive binary, the result is a film that treats these caricatures more symbols for racism (e.g. white on black or black on Hispanic).
The film’s structure is the single worst thing about the film. It is an undeniable creative vacuum. The film relays between a handful of stories that show different racial interactions but there is something that suddenly dawns on the viewer: everything connects. Stories and interactions loop back together and intersect no more than one story away, and most are directly connected. The stories have NOTHING to do with each other and often the connections are contrived at out of a desire to not introduce new characters. The most egregious is this scenario: racist white cop wrongs black couple, then saves the black woman later. Here lies the fundamental flaw of the film’s stance on race; that these actions make him ambivalent or sympathetic. No, he is racist, racism doesn’t have to mean that the cop lets black people die. It means he randomly stops them and humiliates them. That action is racist and he is not redeemed by not committing a worse action. Racism is so much more subtle, so much more nebulous than how “Crash” portrays it. While it is absurdly lazy to give the caricature that overt of a “redemption,” what makes the film worse is that Haggis bothered to have all of the caricatures interact. There are millions of people in LA and in a two day period the two dozen or so caricatures all happen to interact in a succinct manner. It’s a dearth of ideas that permeates all of the dialogue and the various denouements. Ironically, a film attempting to hold a candid discourse on racism, is itself racist. The Persian man is portrayed as a paranoid lunatic who would murder someone except for a “divine intervention” which portrays a middle eastern man as a superstitious, and does nothing to justify or redeem his attempted murder.
The film’s acclaim comes from two places. The first, is that the non-chronological structure and snappy dialogue obfuscate the worthlessness of the film’s commentary on race. It sounds smart, so it must have something worthwhile to say. The reality is far less eloquent and profound, it’s just ersatz shit. Secondly, it acts as a cathartic outlet for people who don’t want to have an actual conversation on race. People think that instead of confronting the nation’s problems, this film can solve the issues, or at the very least conduct the conversation for them. It’s cowardly writing confronting nothing, and those with that exact same disposition eat it up. Fortunately for socially minded people, “Crash” fails as a film as well, making it pointless both in its core message and its promulgation. It is an undisciplined movie, that is the bottom-line. The structure, its maddening interactions, lazy binary code for characters, infuriating, constant self-contained looping, and its pretentious racial commentary are all signs of someone who has nothing to say but thinks he does. Haggis is not a visionary writer who has lucidity on the topic, but rather a privileged asshole who thinks he can possibly explain the insane complexity of racism in a tidy 112-minute movie.
