One Honky's Thoughts on the Movie Crash

So I've had the Crash DVD staring at me from its Netflix envelope for the last few weeks. I didn't want to watch it. I had no interest in it. But after it got all those Academy Award nominations and whatnot, I felt like I had to give it a shot. So, last night Karen and I tried.

We made it through 20 minutes. We just had to turn it off. It was such an irritating movie. I hated it.

I have to say, it's a pretty big thing for me to say I hated a movie/book/album/restaurant, etc. I'm a silver lining kinda guy. I try to see the best in things, and generally speaking, I succeed. I'm easy that way. But with Crash, I just couldn't get into it. All of these people walking around, ranting about race in such overblown, ridiculous ways. The parodies have been done and done well. The thing is, the parodies aren't so far off from the real thing. I'm only glad I didn't go with my original plan to play a drinking game wherein I'd take a drink every time someone utters a racial epithet that seemed completely forced and unrealistic. The liver failure would have been quick and catastrophic.

I guess the whole point of the movie was to drag America's issues with race and racism out into the open, but it was done so tactlessly and artlessly that there seemed to be no depth of thought to the discussion. Seriously, trotting out one character and then having another character list off all of the negative stereotypes associated with that first character's race isn't thoughtful commentary, it's provocation without substance. Crash desperately wants to be the movie that bravely and bluntly shows the way people of different races and classes mix in this country and how racial biases, conscious and subconscious, play a role in everything we do in America. The filmmakers apparently feel like they're really pioneering in this field, as if no one else is addressing this.

The thing is, for all the pomp and circumstance and awards-show posturing around Crash, it comes nowhere close to the subtle, intriguing take on race and class in, of all things, a teen drama series, Veronica Mars. Like Crash, VM is set in a racially and culturally mixed Southern California milieu where people are divided by class and skin color. Unlike Crash, VM has some degree of subtlety and thought, showing how characters actually experience the reality of being black/white/hispanic/rich/poor in day to day life, where racism is much more often experienced as an accumulation of inferences and assumptions than as a shrill white woman shrieking, "Get that beaner out of my house!" Also, since VM isn't so busy trying to "teach" us about race (read: banging us over the head with racial slurs), it's able to do other things, like be entertaining and funny and show us how Veronica knew who stole the money from the school carnival. One other key difference between Veronica Mars and Crash: Veronica Mars is awesome, and Crash completely sucks ass.

I've disagreed with the Oscar choices before, and I generally follow the hipster party line: Pulp Fiction should have beaten Forest Gump, Saving Private Ryan and/or The Thin Red Line should have beaten Shakespeare in Love, and neither Million Dollar Baby nor A Beautiful Mind nor Chicago were actually even great movies, much less the best movies that came out in their respective years. But I liked all of those movies to greater or lesser extent. They were all good movies, if flawed. Crash, though, is just a flaming pile of crap. If it claims any of the prizes from the vastly superior Brokeback Mountain next weekend (Crash seems like the only other real contender for Best Picture, or so the award season buzz would have it), I'll be legitimately pissed off.

On the plus side, it did inspire the following conversation between Karen and I the second we turned the movie off:
Me: Go back to your own country.
K: Why? Are you worried I'm going to steal your wallet because I'm not white?
Me: Oh, so solly! Learn how to drive!

See, we're all about confronting race in America as fearlessly as Crash does.