Crash

Crash was a very powerful movie, to say the least; I literally do not think that the producers could have fit more racism and confusing character connections into that movie. Every scene made you go “oh that’s that guy’s brother or that’s that lady.” A new insight I gained about human beings was that we are keeping stereotypes alive by treating racism as a joke. The majority of society is desensitized to racist comments and jokes, due to the abundance of it on TV, American culture, and verbal interaction. A great amount of people in the last few generations started to treat it as a joke. They crusaded a trickle effect down generation after generation until the point that our generation treats it in a complete joking manner.

This movie made me think about the question, is racism natural? Racism is both environmental and situational, it is not natural. For example, the cop in the movie was raised by a working class father that owned a janitorial company with many other guys, and the policies that stated that companies had to hire a certain amount of minorities lead his father to lose his job to a black man. The father lost his wife and house in result to the loss of his job. After this, the cop had predispositions about black people in the work force. The fact that he was a cop gave him the ability to oppress minorities because no one would ever speak against a white cop. When he pulls over the black couple, he had his way with the wife because it was on his terms and no one was in danger. However, when the black lady was in the car accident he had no second thoughts about helping her. When he saw the crash his human instinct kicked in and he was on the mission to save whoever was in danger. This shows that the racism is situational, he had pulled the couple over less than 24 hours before, therefore he did not have any mental shift in the way he felt about minorities.

The Persian daughter buying blanks was the best thing that happened in the movie. When she purchased the blanks, she knew her father was not fit to handle a gun, therefore she was ultimately protecting him from himself. And her hunch was just because in the end of the movie the father goes to kill the locksmith, who he thought had cheated him, and when the locksmith was bickering with the Persian in the driveway his daughter ran out and the trigger was pulled. The little girl thought she was ok because she was wearing the invincible cloak, but her father knew better. The director makes you think that the guy shot the daughter but she is miraculously fine. It makes you ponder if the fake cloak was actually real or if the guy simply missed, but then you remember that the daughter bought a special bullet which happened to be blanks. In an instant, the scene that brings tears to your eyes, is turned into a laughing relief. The Persian daughter obviously knew a lot about her father and she made the right decision to censor his gun. I can see why this movie one so many awards it was such a good balance of humor, humanity, and tragedy.