Crash (Bob Yari Productions, DEJ Productions, Blackfriars Bridge Films, Harris Company, ApolloProScreen Filmproduktion, Bull's Eye Pictures, Incognito Pictures, Lions Gate Entertainment, 1994)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at about 9:20 I played my husband Charles a DVD I’d got at a library sale of a movie I’ve been curious about for years: Crash, the 2004 film produced, directed and co-written by Paul Haggis (he received sole credit for the original story and co-credit with Bobby Moresco for the screenplay)/ It won the Academy Award for Best Picture over the heavy critical favorite, Brokeback Mountain, much to the disgust of a lot of people in the Queer community who thought the Academy voters had rejected Brokeback Mountain out of homophobia. (Twelve years later a Queer-themed film, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, finally did win Best Picture.) Actually Crash and Brokeback Mountain have at least one flaw in common: both took themselves way too seriously. Crash was inspired by an incident that happened to Haggis hismelf when he and hos wife were carjacked by two young Black men as they drove home from the premoere of The Silence of the Lambs, and he nursed the idea of a film centered around his sudden run-in with the thug life for over a decade. Haggis got his chance to make Crash when his script for the 2003 film Million Dollar Baby, directed by Clint Eastwood and co-starring him and Hilary Swank, became the basis of a major hit and multiple Academy Award winner. It also enabled him to find financing from a patchwork of production companies in various countries (when I saw all the credited producing studios I joked, “It takes a village of corporations to make a movie!”) to both write and direct his personal project, Crash. Crash bgins with a voice-over saying that in other, more pedestrian-friendly cities, people rub up against each other in the streets and this human contact gives a city life. In Los Angeles, everyone is so dependent on their cars to move them about that sometimes people deliberately crash into each other just to have a sense of human contact.

We then see the titular crash, though it’s little more than a fender-bender between a Black woman and an Asian man, and racial insults fly between the drivers as well as the white police officers who respond to the call. Then there’s a single-word chyron, ”Yesterday,” and a number of interlocking plot lines ensue. In fact there are so many leading roles in this film the Screen Actors Guild gave the movie’s entire cast an award for Best Ensemble. The carjacking that was Paul Haggis’s inspiration for the movie happens to the District Attorney of Los Angeles County, Rick Cabot (Brendan Fraser), and his wife Jean (Sandra Bullock). The two young Black men who committed it are Anthony (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges) and Peter (Larenz Tate, a fine Black actor I’d previously liked as the hero of a 1997 romantic comedy called Love Jones), and they take the Cabots’ SUV and go on a joyride during which they run down a middle-aged Asian man named Ken Ho (Art Chadabala). They steal his van and dump his body in front of a hospital emergency room before they drive off again, where they offer the van to a chop-shop owner who turned down the Cabots’ SUV because he was fearful the cops could find blood stains on it with their high technology. Meanwhile, Black TV director Cameron Thayer (Terrence Howard) is pulled over by a pair of white cops, openly racist Sergeant John Ryan (Matt Dillon) and his partner, Officer Tom Hansen (Ryan Phillippe). They accuse Cameron’s wife Christine (Thandie Newton), who was in the car with him, of performing oral sex on him while he was driving. Hansen persuades Ryan to let them off with a warning, but not before Ryan, under the guise of searching her, essentially rapes her with his finger as he reaches under her dress. Hansen reports Ryan’s conduct to his immediate superior, Sgt. Graham Waters (Don Cheadle), but Waters says Hansen can only get out of his partnership with Ryan if he lets the department put out the story that he needs to work solo because he has uncontrollable flatulence. Later in the movie, Christine is involved in a car crash and she;s about to be blown up in a gas explosion when a cop comes onto the scene and tries to rescue her – only she recognizes him as Ryan and tries to fight him off before she finally realizes that no matter what he did to her before, in this encounter he’s trying to save her life (which he does).

In a plot strand that didn’t make it into the plot synopsis on the film’s Wikipedia page, a family of Persian immigrants who own a convenience store have an encounter with a locksmith (Michael Peña), who we’ve previously seen working at the Cabots’ home (he was called in to change their locks but Jean Cabot is convinced that he’s a gang-banger who’s going to sell copies of their keys on the street, so she insists that the following day Rick have their locks changed again). This time the locksmith explains to the family that he can't fix the lock because the entire door needs to be replaced, and sure enough the shop is broken into that night. The thieves vandalize the place and spray=paint anti-Arab slogans on the walls – predictably the family is upset that once again an ignorant snot has failed to understand that they’re Persians from Iran, not Arabs – and their insurance company refuses to pay their claim because the locksmith had told them their entire door needed to be replaced and they hadn’t done it, so the break-in was their fault. Earlier we’d seen the iranian couple in a gun store buying a weapon for self-defense, only the gun-store owner made racist comments against the man and ultimately threw him out of the store. He went ahead and sold the gun to the woman, but out of ignorance the box of bullets she bought for it were blanks – though we don’t know that until years later, when the man takes the gun and tries to shoot the insurance agent with it. The man’s eight-year-old daughter tries to get in the way and stop the bullet for her dad, only because the gun is blank-loaded she’s unhurt and the Iranian proclaims her “my angel.” Meanwhile (in Crash, as S. J. Perelman said of the 1916 silent version of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, “Everything … happens in the meantime; the characters don’t even sneeze consecutively”) Graham Waters is at home having sex with his police partner Ria (Thandie Newton), is interrupted by a phone call from his mother (Beverly Todd). Ria urges him to ignore the call, but he answers it anyway and mom berates him for having a non-Black girlfriend (though she looked quite Black to me) and for having lost track of his ne’er-do-well brother.

While all this is going on, Ryan is also involved in an investigation of another officer, Conklin (Martin Norseman) by the LAPD’s Internal Affairs department for having shot a Black man by mistake. The victim turned out to be a fellow LAPD officer and a search of the car Conklin was driving when the shooting occurred (not his regular vehicle) turns up $300,000 in cash hidden in the spare tire, probably proceeds from a drug deal. Waters is told by the internal affairs officers that he will get promoted to being an investigator for the D.A.’s office if he goes along with the department’s official story that Conklin was a dirty cop who shot the officer that was on to him, and the discovery of the $300,000 eases Waters’ conscience. Anthony offers the van he stole to the chop-shop owner but finds out that there were six undocumented Cambodian immigrants in the van space; the chop-shop owner offers to buy the immigrants, but Anthony refuses and instead sets them free in the streets of L.A. Eventually the story comes full circle as we see the original accident that kicked off the flashback, which turns out to be between Kim Lee (Alexis Rhee), wife of the Asian human trafficker,and Shaniqua (Loiretta Devine), a Black woman who works for a health insurance company and had just denied Ryan’s claim to get his father covered for a prostate operation. Shaniqua turned down Ryan because she got tired of his racism, and in a chilling indication of the absurdity of America’s health care system and how often people’s access to care is dependent on the whims of bureaucrats, she tells Ryan that if his dad had come to her himself and told his story, she’d have approved him, but Ryan is such an asshole about it his dad can just suffer.

Meanwhile, Officer Hansen picks up a Black hitchhiker who turns out to be Anthony’s sidekick Peter (ya remember Peter?). The two struggle over Peter’s gun and Peter is shot dead, whereupon Hansen dumps the body and sets fire to his own car to destroy the evidence. Later it turns out that Peter was Sgt. Graham Waters’ long-lost brother. Crash is a frustrating movie not only because it has the typical flaw of multiple plot-line films – the moment we get wrapped up in one storyline, we’re suddenly wrenched away from it and pulled into another one – but because Paul Haggis seemed to be going after a Brechtian “alienation” effect. Bertolt Brecht’s theory of alienation and so-called “epic theatre” was that the characters should represent economic or social interests and therefore should be presented in a way that detached the audience from emotional identification with them. In practice that meant a lot of Brecht’s plays become caricatures, and much the same thing happens in Crash. Also I told Charles about 10 minutes into Crash, “Isn’t there going to be anybody in this movie we actually like?” That’s another major pet peeve of mine about modern movies: instead of being given heroes, even flawed ones, for whom we can root, we’re given people of various degrees of despicability. Even Hansen, whom we begin the movie liking for more or less standing up to his partner’s racism and open sexual exploitation, ends up shooting a Black man and covering up his crime. I’m sure some people will defend Crash for showing human nature in all its complexity and not dividing its people into recognizable “heroes” and “villains,” but the main message I got from Crash is that people are basically despicable and driven by prejudices they literally can’t transcend or even get rid of.