Of Stereotypes, Delusions, Institutions and Crashes

Saw Crash this weekend. "In L.A., nobody touches you," says Don Cheadle who’s a sort of focal character in a movie liberally littered with characters. "We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something."

That's the sort of screenplay that can make intellectuals thinking they're onto a deep and lovely thing. Crash is packaged as the movie of the thinking person. It deals with racism and offers a slice of life in the homes and the roads of LA. It asks all the big questions and is a bigger, more convoluted dissection of the colliding of different worlds than Changing Lanes.


In Changing Lanes, brash rich boy met rash poor boy and that got them thinking. In Crash, there are lots of cops meeting each other and other people. There are people from the Middle East and Hispanics and African Americans and Chinese and Cambodians and Whites. There are rich people and poor people. The single connecting thread between them seems to be that they're all obnoxious, painted entirely in black, moving to white in the end of the movie. No subtle shades of gray here.

Men and women of color in positions of power stick on to their places by being corrupt or by compromising on their principles. There's the black TV Director who has to change his script because the white producer felt that lead character didn't “talk black.” The black cop that made it and who sleeps with his Hispanic partner. His brother who's a carjacker's lovable sidekick.

There's Sandra Bullock who's the pampered paranoid racist rich babe makes random appearances in a few scenes and Brendan Fraser a shrewd upcoming DA. I looked at him and wondered what George of the Jungle and Encino Man was doing in teh big bad world of politics. Brendan? Corrupt? Kabhi Nahin!!!! And besides them there were just too many people, doing too many things and ending up impacting each others lives in the movie. Crash is a little bit about A, B, C...Z on the roads of LA. It looks at the home life of all 26 or so of them so we see them as real persons. (????!!!!????) But thet's a rather large number of people to get personal about in 2 hours.

But like all of Hollywood's takes on any subject, the views were stereotyped, just as the subject was stereotyped. Are people this helpless? This bad? And do they suddenly have such wonderful change of hearts? The cop who feels up a woman he pulls up, risk his life to rescue her from a pile-up the very next day. The carjacker who goes around pronouncing conspiracy theories on everything, pays for and sets free a vanload of illegal Cambodian immigrants. Bullock looks beyond her Mexican housekeeper's inefficiency and finds in her a friend who was there by her side when no one else was (that bit was so saccharine; it almost made me throw up).

Crash to me made sense in one aspect only. It showed up the provinciality of most Americans. It was a reinforcement of the stereotypes that prevail in the US. Including Hollywood. It did serve as an educative experience to let people know that Persians are not Arabs, people with Puerto Rican-El Salvador heritages are not Mexicans. It stated that people kind of get offended when you put groups of them in large boxes labelled in accordance with one’s highly limited knowledge of geography and world politics. A few more of this and people will actually get their world history and geography right.

As a nation, I have always felt that Americans have no idea that they are in a sort of Truman Show which the world is watching. It's a whole different world out there. And the funny part is that they think that their view and what they have is the world view. They're probably the only nation that plays baseball and they have a World Series for Christ's sake. In which only America plays.

Most countries in the world use a voltage between 220 and 240 volts. America and Japan (which America kind of gave a rebirth to) are the only nations that use between between 110 or 120 or so volts. The whole electrical socket system is different. The kids are raised to think that freedom is something that only they value and possess, whereas the harsh truth remains that they live in the most tightly brainwashed institution that parades under the name of democracy.

Look, for instance at the whole war thing and America. They are the only people who can be cheated into thinking that they are making war on and tearing apart other culturally rich nations and heritages because they allegedly have terrible weapons. They don't stop to think that countries with such weapons could have done a Nagasaki on America for what they did to them.

They have forced what the American brand of capitalistic democracy on the world with an iron hand. which has done more massive damage than a cantankerous dictator could do. They live in a fairytale world and believe everything they are told. They sit around and watch an American soldier going to war, sitting in a heavy artillery tank and raining ammunition on a family walking by. And the voice over tells them that it’s a noble thing, so they believe it.

Television and computer games take up their leisure hours and playing ball games well is the ultimate achievement in school. Many drop out at that stage. They are so little in touch with reality as their imagination and creativity is allowed to soar till reality is left far behind. Which probably is why fellow students and several of their parents at University were surprised that I didn't actually go to school on an elephant, I wasn't persecuted for being Christian, I knew English even though I wasn't adopted by a kindly European family and taught the language by the civilised of the world. Am I being bitter? Not really, for it didn't offend me. As I looked at the bungled attempts to either know my "culture," "mysticism" or to infantilize me or treat me like a toy they loved, I was mostly amused. If I said I was blue-blooded and slept on a gold cot they'd have taken my word for it. But this ignorance mostly filled me with a sense of immense pity.

As I watched Crash, it brought all these thoughts into my mind. Like KFC's chicken, Crash is heavily flavored and deeply fried so no one will know that the meat inside is not of the best quality. Like everything else American, it is packaged well, passes off for something else, makes moralistic statements about not categorising while all the while it underlines stereotypes. It's about inefficient Mexicans, helpless Cambodians, chattering and incomprehending Chinese, corrupt politicians, compromising or criminal blacks, and touchy Persians. Identified by their right names at last. But the sterotypes stick.