Crash Movie Analysis

Crash focused on race and the effects it had on the lives of people living in the Los Angeles area. The movie showed how everyone was effected by race weather they there racist themselves or a victim of racism; many times they were linked. Despite what many people thing, or would like to believe, the world has not changed as much as we would like to think. Marilyn Fryes essay Oppression said that “The experiences of oppressed people are that the living of ones life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable.” (Rohenberg CITE) Throughout Crash you see examples of this over and over again. Racism and oppression are still a major issue in the world and unfortunately a lot of the time

In the Oscar award winning movie Crash, directed by Paul Haggis, a network of characters portray the lifestyles of different races in Los Angeles. In the movie, characters “crash” into one another, similar to pinballs, to spur new emotions and explain their actions. A main character Anthony, an African American male, steadily tries to prove why he does not and will not fall into the black male thug stereotype. He was slightly close minded and repeatedly had a negative outlook towards his environment. Anthony created contradictions between what he said and what his actual intentions were.

The movie Crash is in the streets of Los Angeles. If you notice all of the characters seem to play the victim and accuser in different racial situations. There is a story behind each character over a two day period. There is the detective who is prejudice against his own race whose younger brother is a criminal. There is Jean who is prejudice against black people after getting robbed.

In this movie we see a number of races such as African American men and women, a Persian family, Hispanic people, and Asians. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the examples of these... ... middle of paper ... ...Crash", there was a lot of discrimination against not only different races, but different genders as well. Each and every person in this movie that had prejudices all intertwined and had to face the people that they had prejudice against, and put it aside to do the right thing. Showing viewers that no matter where that individuals stands in the community, whether a police officer, a district attorney, a movie producer, a store owner, a locksmith, or just a criminal they had to put aside their own personal beliefs for what was morally right in the end.

One it depicts the problems that African American male defendants have in getting a fair trial. Given the negative police actions, it is reasonable for many African Americans to accept that police racism exists, and that this racism would lead into false biases of framing African Americans defendants in a court setting. It also shows the difference in treatment of whites who are the exploiters, consistently showing up as the “good guys”. Their superiority is taken as justified while non -whites are the “bad guys”. In Kopplemans, Understanding Human Differences section one he describes how the majority group creates names and labels for the minority groups.

The film Crash, describes the lives of people of different ethnicities who encounter one another along with struggling to handle racism. It is rare that we see a movie combining several different stories presented in a way that addresses some of the most piercing problems in society today. The movie is set in the Los Angeles area, Crash tells the intertwining stories of different races, ethnic groups, social economic statuses, the people behind the law, and people running from it. Just as in the movie we “crash” into each other in life, which is an expected thing. The incidents in the movie stem from some form of prejudice.

There is a Caucasian attorney and his wife, who was carjacked by two black males. One of those black males turn out to be a black detective’s brother and the white attorney, black mails the detective to give false information about a murder. Along the road, there is a caring and loving white cop who mistakenly kills the black detective’s brother. There is also a Persian shopkeeper and his family, who are constantly threatened and mistaken for being Arabian. He hires a Hispanic dedicated locksmith to fix a lock in his shop, and he later tries to kill the locksmith after his shop was trashed.

Crash tells several stories involving interrelated characters that happen in 36 hours in Los Angeles. All the characters are racially connected, a black police officer with a mother who is addicted to drug and a brother who loves thieving; a white racist police officer, carries a sick father, who always harass African American people; a Hollywood director and his wife who face the harassment of the racist cop; two car thieves who use their race to take advantage from other people; a Caucasian attorney who uses race in politics. The stories in Crash happened in Los Angeles, which is a metropolitan, multicultural and diversified city. According to Simmel’s theory, the modern city, like Los Angeles, is “cold”. People are very indifferent and have a blasé outlook when they are walking on the streets.

Racial prejudice can also happen when a person sees a group of African American teenagers, and automatically views them as gangsters and trouble makers simply based on an unfounded preconceived opinion. An extreme example of racism is when African Americans were not treated as equals in many parts of America before and duri... ... middle of paper ... ...tract, some cultures view the negotiation process as being about building a relationship, not getting a signed contract. In this type of negotiations the culture who is more concerned about a contract must work at building a relationship, rather than just stating the positive facts of the contract for both companies. Such misunderstandings could result in the negotiations leading to the loss of a contract. If business people do not know more than just the cultural tendencies of the people they are negotiating with, then they will have a much harder time to relate, connect, and ultimately to get a contract.

The stereotyping of Blacks as criminals is so pervasive throughout society that “criminal predator” is used as a euphemism for “young Black male.” This common stereotype has erroneously served as a subtle rationale for the unofficial policy and practice of racial profiling by criminal justice practitioners” (Welch). This means that because of the racism that exists within our system, black people are labeled as criminals even if they have never had a run-in with the law. In the media black people are also all too often portrayed as the “sidekick of a white protagonist, for example, the token black person, the comedic relief, the athlete, the over-sexed ladies’ man, the absentee father or, most damaging, the violent black man as drug-dealing criminal and gangster thug” (Smith). Shetterly would argue that these stereotypes are damaging to the image of black people as a whole. On the other hand, there are several very successful black people in popular culture who seem to escape those stereotypes.