Film Club Extra - Crash

Closing thoughts from last night's movie:


Film Club Extra
Friday 12/9/08
Crash

In a week when the scientific community all became very animated about crashing a few protons into each other, or at least trying to, it is interesting to see a film which reflects upon how our various lives crash into each other.

As a species, humans are extraordinarily amenable to each other. You might not think so but consider, for instance the progress of a crowd through a shopping mall. We make adjustments to our step allowing people to pass in the opposite direction. We accommodate each other. There are few collisions. By and large we drive to avoid each other.

The film Crash brilliantly looks at some separate lives which collide over 36 hours – two days and one night. None of the people is as you thought they might be at the outset.

It is, as you can now tell, a film about racism. But not the narrow racism of black/white suspiciousness. All the people in Crash have different ethnic backgrounds. They bring different baggage, preconception and, yes, prejudice to the table. And if we think we don't then Crash should have woken us up, at least a bit.

Movie reviewer Roger Ebert, reminds us that, until several hundred years ago on earth nobody ever saw anyone who didn't look like them. Now the amount of ethnic backgrounds which collide in a European or US city is remarkable.

TV chef Ainsley Harriet, researching his family background for the TV programme 'Who do you think you are?' this week found that on his father's side several of his ancestors were, not surprisingly, slaves in the West Indies. The shock came in the discovery that on his mother's side one of his ancestors was actually a white slave owner.

I have no idea if I am Celtic, Viking, Roman, Germanic or what. It doesn't matter in my day to day life. But I need to beware of the assumptions I make about others' ethnicity since I can never be sure it is not in my blood too.

Characters in Crash make errors trying to define each other by race. Are you Latino? Are you Arab? Are you white?

The strap line for the film is, 'You think you know who you are; you have no idea.'

So Crash is about racial prejudice and people's reactions to it? Many of the characters prejudge what another character is going to be like before getting to know them. They do this based only on the racial attributes they think they can see with their eyes.

The man who sells Farhad the gun yells at him about terrorism, assuming he is Iraqi when he is in fact Persian. Anthony points out that Jean draws closer to her husband when walking past him and Peter, assuming that they're going to hurt her.

Crash shows us some of the prejudice in everyday life and challenges us to recognise ourselves in the characters. It also asks if we see the prejudice or choose to ignore it.

There are other issues about which we might be prejudiced. Gender and sexuality are the more obvious two. In writing to the Galatians Paul said that in Christ there were neither slave nor free, male nor female, Jew nor gentile. It was an early anti-racist, anti-sexist statement. Jesus, a good Jew, chose to ignore the prejudice that would be stoked by touching lepers, menstrual women or dead bodies, despite clear Old Testament laws to the contrary. Princess Diana overcame many prejudices years later, when touching AIDS sufferers.

Whilst many of us would insist we do not judge by external appearances the film asks us if we're sure about that?

The backdrop of Los Angeles, where subways and car parks are anonymous and lonely, where roads divide up communities and disaster seems to be only just averted every time may be a recipe for complacency for us in mono-cultural and comparatively safe Nailsea. The film shows us not a people living in utter harmony, but a people just about succeeding to live together.
If we resolve to keep all hints of prejudice out of our hearts and be prepared to confront it, discuss it and welcome and embrace those who are different we may be spared such a desolate outcome. We can do better than that.

My friend runs a centre for asylum seekers. Most of the people she meets are fine, upright, honest people in deep, deep trouble. Some are spongers. She has to make regular phone calls to government officials. Many are fine, upright people in deep, deep trouble. Some are spongers. She has no choice, nor would she want it any other way, than to treat all who come into her sphere of influence as human beings.

Evil seems to care not the colour of the body it inhabits. Neither should we be surprised that people made in the image of God may display goodness, even if they do not yet know the one in whose image they are made.

May all your bumpings into people this weekend be happy and fortuitous.

Steve Tilley

(Further discussion at Damaris from where some of these thoughts were taken.)