Howard Who?

Roger Ebert loves Crash and he makes it clear why. It’s a modern day Dickens novel unwrapping in a movie. It’s generated letters to him from sincere people who say the movie made them think. It has the power to change our perceptions and make the world a better place.

And all those reasons above are why Crash makes me puke. It tries to be Dickens, but even in a Dickens novel you had a backbone. The story may have weaved in and out of various aspects of society and involved some deus ex machina coincidences, but they were centered around a main character or around a narrator that could see the forest for the trees.

Crash is a periphery without a center, all moth and no flame. It doesn’t provide perspective on events but rather a sort of omniscence that makes every character almost the same weight in terms of empathy. In other words, we understand everyone and no one in this film. Everyone is motivated to survive, and racism is just a tool for survival. It’s almost like watching the Discovery channel and hearing “from the dawn of time, man has invented fire, the wheel, the alphabet, and racism.”

But what about those lovely people writing about how the film is making them consider their bigotry? Well, I can’t argue against that per se as there are genuine people who don’t face other ethnicity or races on a daily basis and racism is something so ingrained it takes effort to think about it. I don’t begrudge them this film.

What I do begrudge however is Ebert using them to say that a film is good. I couldn’t care less if Ebert’s readers wrote him about how wonderful a film he recommended to them made them better people. That may well serve his ego, but it has little to do with filmmaking. And it points to one of the worst offenses in film critique: letting the tail wag the dog. It’s hard for me to believe that Ebert isn’t swayed by his readership to give gushingly positive reviews to movies that he feels they can use to better society. It is sanctimonious, and it has nothing to do with film. It more resembles politics, where they use a poll to determine what the public wants and then play to their base.

But for the sake of argument let’s say that Crash should be considered a good, even great, film for getting its viewers to identify the green little racist demons inside themselves, it would still be bad. Why? Because Crash ironically is not a film against racism.

I know this is shocking to some of you who considered Crash to be a standard “racism is bad” liberal-guilt jerk off. But the way I see it, Crash says something subtlely different. It says “racism makes the world go ’round.” It says “racism is a fact of life and can even be useful.” It says “we must learn to co-exist with racism and channel it into our lives.” Throughout the film, our characters go from being racistor to being the racistee and back again.

The one moment that most people say was powerful is when Matt Dillon’s racist cop saves Thandie Newton’s rich black girl who was molested by said cop. The problem with this moment though is indicative of what’s wrong with the film. Dillon’s act of rescue doesn’t really redeem him in any way, but just is part of his job. In other words, there are moments that require him to turn off his racism and during those moments he can be a perfect gentleman.

Why? Because racism in an emergency situation like that isn’t practical, not because he renounced racism. This one act doesn’t really forgive him of his past crimes in anyway. In fact, since he must rescue Newton as she helplessly sits in an overturned vehicle, Dillon still is exercising his power over her, except it helps her too. The fact that it is filmed and edited together so orgasmically (the slow-mo explosion is ejaculatory) makes it still feel sexualized. And after the amazing rescue, Dillon’s character walks away from the scene and is done…never to really ponder himself what the hell happened.

There may be something I’m missing and I hope someone can set me straight if this is true. But the fact is if I wrote Ebert a letter about Crash, it would read something like this:

“Dear Roger, Crash is a film about my hometown of Los Angeles. I both love and hate it here, but everyday racism is not one of my problems. I am Chinese-American mind you and get treated a certain way based on the way I look. But the film Crash fails to mention the difficulties that my fellow Asian Americans face (the Asian people in Crash are shown to be immigrants and not assimilated). In addition, the film made me angry. Not at myself though, but at the filmmaker Paul Haggis. He has crafted a film that has unfortunately helped generate the perception that racism is a healthy mode of thinking. He doesn’t argue for civility, but rather that people express their racism openly so as to clear the air. After all, if you are racist, isn’t it just cowardly if you don’t act on it? In short, Crash made me want to beat up some immigrants.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 at 7:21 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.