Chiming in on the Anti-Crash Sentiments

DISCLAIMER: You may want to only read my "two cents worth" version and skip the rest of this. I wrote this trying to work out what the movie Crash lacked as a story. So if you want, here's my two cents worth and you can dismiss what you see below and go about your day pursuing more profitable ends: Read William Faulkner's Light in August and then see Crash (if you haven't seen it already). Faulkner's masterpiece deals with the same sociological themes but does it more masterfully and carefully.

Here's the long version:

This is a little late, but nevertheless...Crash should not have won the Oscar for best picture. The characters are flat: they're more like caricatures rather than characters. There's no action in the story. If there is, what is it? Racial tensions and bigotry? Social issues cannot carry a story. They can be part of the story--part of the characters' surroundings and can even and should contribute the story's momentum--but they cannot be the central thrust of the entire work. Something more fundamental that fuels such cultural issues must be central to make a story. Good stories grant one a sense of pleasure--even tragedies. Crash does not do this. This is why Crash--well--crashes. The poet--or director--should help us see something about reality. Crash tells me reality is simplistic and that everything works out in the end--like a 50 minute T.V. drama. The reality he is dealing is far too horizontal to be interesting: the concern for racial tensions in our culture (which is, of course, a proper and justified concern) is presented in purely sociological terms. That is why the film smacks of science and not story--the sociological outweighs dramatic action--observational realities outweigh transcendent ones. Consequently, the plot is trite and reminiscent of Grand Canyon--minus the in-your-face, predominant theme of race. Various lives come together in modern day Los Angeles and something happens. The plot is tired and old--not Grand Canyon's but Crash's. I am not the first to complain about this: I've heard it from various sources on the web.

Whoever wrote Crash could have helped his storytelling by first referring to Faulkner's Light in August. Various lives are thrown together in a small Mississippi town and something happens: and what happens reveals something not merely about race relations in 1930's Mississippi but essentially about man (his greatness, his limits, his moral defects), love, and sacrifice. These fundamental themes are at the root of dramatic problems--or, conflict. I guess that's it: Faulkner understood good stories as representing "the heart in conflict with itself." Crash has conflict, but it lacks dramatic conflict--it lacks the kind of conflict that makes you think about universals.

All I thought about after viewing Crash was the last scene: two people of different racial backgrounds are involved in a fender-bender and they each blame, and make racially-charged derogative comments at, the other. Just before this, one of the main African-American characters has just released a load of illegal Chinese immigrants from a van he has stolen. This is to be understood a good deed done by this character played by rapper Ludacris. So what's the juxtaposition of these two incidents mean? Well, I am afraid it is supposed to go something like this: "There are some advances being made out there in race relations, but then, you know, there's still a long way to go." Okay, yes, this is true in American society, but I could have gotten this moral lesson from a news story or a documentary. Art and story are supposed to show you something that you could not have seen through any other medium (this is not original to me but is from Flannery O'Connor). If drama and story are supposed to be more philosophical than history (or sociology), then we should see universals emerging through their respective forms. This emergence, however, is subtle and requires something of its audience. Some may balk at this notion, but this is what makes art so appealing. It's not math or science: one can't merely plug a formula in and see a result and then assume that he has found his answer. Art and story are more like life--there's ambiguity and consequent moral responsibility placed upon a character (and the reader or viewer!) to make particular choices about particular things. This is where drama is created, and I felt like the characters of Crash were not forced into difficult choices: it was apparent what each character was there to do in the movie. They made the choices I expected each of them to make, and there was conflict between people but little conflict was revealed as going on within people--struggles that would imply the conflict within oneself to make a choice.

The moral of this story? Read Light in August then see Crash.