Cash: Falling back on Stereotypes

I think one of the first things I noticed about the racial tensions in the movie Crash by Paul Haggis, was that people seemed to fall back on racism and stereotyping when stressed or angry. You see at the beginning of the movie and the end that after the car crash the two drivers without missing a beat, use stereotypes to insult each other. This are complete strangers, yet it seems completely natural to them to just make racially base generalizations about them. The detective comments sarcastically how she is “surprised” that the driver of the other vehicle who struck her is Asian. The gun store owner calls the Persian shop owner Farhad , Osama, associating him with Arab terrorist even though Farhad again is Persian. Everybody in this movie aside for Michael Pena’s character the locksmith, at some point falls back on racism and stereotypes. In contrast to Bamboozled, they use racism and stereotypes viciously attack people they don’t like. They do this in a way that comes off as so natural for the characters. Often, they justify their actions using the skewed viewpoints. Sandra Bullock’s character suddenly feels justified in her racist uneasy and fears, because she was actually carjacked by to black men who looked like thugs. The thugs can feel justified in committing crimes because it’s against racist white people.

The movie also tries to hold up a mirror to the audience. We may make quick assumptions about the characters at the beginning of the movie but by the end of the movie we have gotten to know most them on a deeper level. We see what motivates them, their true feelings and emotion and it is easy to realized seeing them in this way that they are defined by so much more than their race. Yet each of them seems set to define themselves if not by at the very least against other people’s race and gender. Officer Hill is far more complex than just a white bigot. He cares about his father and feels bitter at his father losing his job to what he feels was affirmative action. We see how horrifically awful a man he can be and yet also see that he is not utterly soulless. He both risked his life to save and molested the same woman. Like a mentioned before there are very few good people in the movie and it feels like given enough time spent with any of these characters you will so both the good and bad in them. Human beings are ultimately so complex a creature and yet we try to simplify ourselves so often. We feel driven for whatever reason to categorize and separate or species. We assign our characteristics and can feel justified we see them in reality but then try moments where our assumptions are false often as the exceptions. As office Hill says to Shaniqua he hopes she is not “one of them”, them being non-white people who he feels got their jobs “unjustly” due to affirmative action. Yet this is what he believes is likely the case even knowing absolutely nothing about her.

I find this movie to be a fascinating movie and a great movie to use to examine race in America.