Monthly arts and media column

When Crash won its surprise Oscar for best film instead of Brokeback Mountain, the critics’ reaction was generally that Hollywood was chickening out by preferring to air the age-old race debate rather than confronting the more now gay debate.

Annie Proulx, the writer of Brokeback Mountain, followed the Oscars by commenting in The Guardian that the 6,000 film industry voters were segregated from current issues, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates, out of touch with the shifting larger culture living in the 1970s. It is an interesting point of view when we consider our own reactions to the two debates, and wonder which we would prefer to discuss with our friends. Having said that, there is plenty in the film to kick-start conversations about the universal problem of human nature.

Not just once

Crash (2004) is a film not just about race relations in Los Angeles. It forces us to consider how we perceive each other and make judgements about each other. It takes our prejudices and works with them to surprise and challenge us. The film’s writer and director, Paul Haggis (who wrote Million Dollar Baby), says on the DVD’s behind-the-scenes featurette that he wanted to show how, even though people have never met, they judge each other according to race: ‘We just didn’t allow ourselves to be put off by the ugliness of it’, said his co-writer, Bobby Moresco. ‘Race is nothing if not ugly and no one’s going to take any notice of the storyline if we try and get rid of it.’ Sandra Bullock, who plays against type in the role of a spoilt rich wife with little to do apart from berate the housekeeper, says: ‘We’ve allowed ourselves to get safe about [race], but we’re not. We’re not safe from ourselves, we’re not safe from our own prejudices or others’ prejudices’. Don Cheadle (Ocean’s Eleven, Hotel Rwanda) plays Detective Graham Waters. He considers that the film is powerful because this is how people think this is what happens when people aren’t being polite and can we be honest enough to admit that.

Beneath the surface

This theme of what we’re really like, beneath the superficial front that we present to the world around us, pervades the action of the film. The tagline of the film, taken from the words of Matt Dillon’s racist cop character, proclaims, You think you know who you are? You have no idea. There’s no doubt that the best moments of the film spring from its characters taking actions that run counter to our stereotypical judgements of them.

It’s a theme that should resonate with Bible-believers, who understand that human nature is utterly flawed, beyond the papering-over of our moral respectability. There are those in the film who we start off approving of, as Cathy Schulman, producer, says, we think this is a character who’s going to lead us through, he’s going to get us through this! Yet these are the characters who give us the biggest surprises and the most profound tragedy of the film. The film works because we have subconsciously adopted the popular premise that human beings are basically good or bad. We then become shocked when good characters do terrible things and when bad people redeem themselves with self-sacrificial acts of mercy.

Refreshing honesty

It is so refreshing when writers deal with human nature as honestly as the Bible does. Sandra Bullock’s character reaches her epiphany when she realises, ‘I am angry all the time, and I don’t know why’. She realises that she knows nothing about anyone. She has been making assumptions and drawing conclusions thinking that she has the status and the right to do so, yet these thoughts have got her nowhere. When she needs someone in an emergency, the only friend who answers the phone is too busy having a massage to help her. The message of the film is almost the realisation that no conclusions are possible. That humanity simply isn’t equipped emotionally to cope with the problems and prejudices in society. Even when we think that there is someone who could spearhead a solution, that same person falls from grace. For me, the power and value of the film was in its declaration loud and clear that no one is righteous, not even one.

Crash is now available on DVD, Certificate 15.

Eleanor Margesson

© Evangelicals Now - May 2006
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