It’s difficult not to let the backlash get to you. I’m writing this review after seeing Paul Haggis’ Crash for the second time; during the first, I knew pretty much nothing about it aside from the fact that Roger Ebert liked it. I had a fresh, deeply felt admiration for it; I anticipated that many people would have problems with it, but I had no idea as to the extent of their vitriol and how so few seemed to be up to the challenge of the film. What’s even worse is that the people who liked it don’t seem to understand it either. Seeing Oprah Winfrey’s painfully superficial special on racism with the cast of Crash was considerably more aggravating than an equally superficial special-on-why-Crash-sucks, as it pigeonholes the Crash defenders as intellectual lightweights.

I probably should have written this review after the first viewing, when I was still dumb enough to say that it was a superior film to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. (I think that I still feel that way, but the perceived pressure from the legion of detractors is preventing me from waving that comparison around.) Reviewing the film a good year after its release, you’re going to have to expect me to compensate for the hatred the film has faced over the course of the last twelve months with a good deal of defensive anger. And it goes without saying that this is a review from a guy who considers Crash a bonafide masterpiece, a nice lengthy review by somebody who “bought” into it, and if you think that this the worst film to ever win the Academy Award for Best Picture and liked my work in the past, you may want to skip what I have to say lest it raise your blood pressure to dangerous levels. I mean, right now I’m seeing rave reviews for John Hillcoat’s The Proposition, a film that I saw ahead of time and found unbearably awful, and I’m finding that I can’t bear to hear a positive word spoken about it. It’s too painful and makes me too angry. I then would like to believe that I can empathize with how obnoxious this review may sound to the ears of those who have already decided that this is a terrible movie. And of course, for those who haven’t seen Crash already, I’m afraid that my defense of it, written and submitted at this time, is not likely to change your mind.

But still, these things need to be said and they need to be said on the record. Let’s start with that idea that Crash is the worst film ever to win the Academy Award. It’s not. It’s not even the worst film to win the Academy Award this decade. Of course, I believe that Crash is one of the better films to have been awarded the top honor by the Academy, but specifically both 2000’s Gladiator and 1996’s The English Patient are much worse films. If Crash is the worst film to win the Academy Award, then it would follow that those making the claim believe that both Gladiator and The English Patient are superior films.

What bothers the Crash critics is the film‘s lack of realism. They do not believe that the actions of the characters, their dialogue or the serendipitous events portrayed in the film are realistic. Essentially, this is what appears to separate the film from Gladiator and The English Patient and makes it particularly vulnerable for attack. They’re right; Crash is not a realistic movie. Neither are Apocalypse Now, where a renegade colonel moves into Cambodia and creates his own mini-empire among the natives and other defected soldiers; Being There, where a mentally retarded, socially inexperienced man gains audience with the President simply because he dresses and talks like an upper-class WASP; or Raging Bull, where boxing matches are photographed in spaces big enough to contain the Civil War. Plus, unlike reality, it’s shot in glorious black-and-white. Of course,Apocalypse Now and Being There lost the Best Picture Oscar to the more realistic Kramer vs. Kramer, and Raging Bull lost to the more realistic Ordinary People, indicating, I think, that this equating of “realistic” with “good” is largely responsible for the kind of dull middlebrow cinema, a cinema without nerves, brains or soul, that has bled the Academy Awards of all and any credibility.

Artifice and the cinema go hand in hand. I would think that anybody who has ever seen a movie before would know that they do not represent the world as it is. The cinema, by its very nature, is an abstraction of and comment upon the surrounding society, showing it in an idealized or otherwise exaggerated state in an attempt to make sense of it. Art is not designed to show the world as it really is. Paintings of apples are meant to say something about apples; they are not meant to replace the existence of the fruit itself. Complaining that Crash is not a realistic movie is, to put it plainly, just fucking stupid. A more pertinent question, indeed, the question that we should really be discussing is: does this film use artifice in a way that is useful or interesting to the audience?

Personally speaking, I found Crash to be extremely provocative, and provocative in a way that could not have been conveyed through a nuanced approach. The film is ambitious and considerably larger than real life, but sometimes it’s near-impossible to discuss or even see the complexities of a problem such as racism unless it’s blown up onto a larger canvas. It’s important to note before we dig in much deeper that Crash is about racism in much the same way that Traffic is about the drug trade and Syriana is about oil in the Middle East. Along with the complaint about Crash not being realistic, the complaint about everybody in the film being a racist should be taken off the table entirely. It makes about as much sense as complaining that everybody in Traffic either deals in, uses or fights drugs. Well, yeah, that’s the whole point.

Pretty much every character in Crash is maybe twenty percent flesh-and-blood human being and eighty percent mouthpiece to divergent attitudes about their host race. The idea of these characters embodying divergent attitudes is an important one. The film has more than one major white character and it has more than one major black character, preventing any one person from exclusively defining their racial group. Campaigning white District Attorney Rick Cabot (Brendan Fraser) represents the powerful white man trying to use his white power for Good. When he and his wife (Sandra Bullock) are carjacked, he cries out, “Why did he have to be black!” understanding that no matter how he spins it, it’ll look awful for him. Later, one of his underlings or possibly one of his controllers convinces black detective Graham (Don Cheadle) to bury his discovery that a black officer possibly murdered by a white one was selling drugs on the side, as it would strike a blow to the image of blacks in America. The righteous white cop, it seems, is just collateral damage.

Indirectly representing this righteous white cop, that is to say a blue-collar white suffering from the fallout of the image-sensitive white elite, officer John Ryan (Matt Dillon) desperately tries to find his father a physician outside of his HMO plan. He insults his black caseworker Shaniqua by implying that she was probably hired over a more qualified white applicant and then tells her a story about how his father worked as a janitor all his life before opening his own street cleaning business where he hired an all-black crew, paid them equal wages at a time when nobody else would, and worked out on the street with them side-by-side. But then the city decided to favor black-owned businesses and cut his father’s contract, effectively putting him out of business. But still, in spite of all of this, his father holds no ill feelings toward blacks. Shaniqua responds that his father sounds like a great man, but since he didn’t come in and his son did, she is refusing the request and doing so purely out of spite. Out of frustration over his father’s condition and out of a general anger toward blacks, Ryan pulls over a wealthy biracial couple, Cameron (Terrence Howard) and Christine (Thandie Newton), for performing a sex act while driving. He then molests Christine in front of her husband under the thin pretense of a body search. The good intentions of liberal whites as seen through their affirmative action policies ironically only push the wedge between the races in that much further.

After being humiliated by the assault, Cameron and Christine get into a heated argument during which they accuse each other of not being black enough. Neither seems knew how to deal with being pulled over and molested by a white cop, and they attribute this to the fact that their wealth has separated them from their naturally tough black skin. If they were “real” black people (i.e. not wealthy) they would have been better able to deal with this. Cameron is a director for a black-themed sitcom and is told by his line producer that he needs to redo a scene because the lead character, who is a Jimmie Walker kind of comic relief, doesn’t sound black enough (i.e. he doesn‘t say “whatchutalkinbout," he says “what are you talking about“). The line producer is vilified in an audio commentary by Paul Haggis and Don Cheadle, but I wonder. Does Ebonics really pigeonhole blacks into easily dismissible terms, or does it help to define the black identity in terms distinguished from whites? Or is it all essentially the same thing? How is black defined, and if we can’t ever really decide upon a formal definition, does the concept of blackness become meaningless? This is the great paradox of racism; discrimination and race exist hand in hand and if we want to destroy the former, we ultimately have to destroy the latter.

Crash takes this all to another level when looking at Graham and his relationship to his brother Peter and his sickly mother. Peter (Larenz Tate) participated in the Cabot carjacking with his militantly racist friend Andrew (Ludacris). Andrew robs white people because he hates white people; he looks down on an acquaintance who steals from other blacks. Peter, on the other hand, doesn’t really have any beef in particular with his victims, he’s just looking for a free lunch. Peter appears to still live with their mother, and she worries constantly about him, depending on Graham to keep track of where he is. We quickly realize that the enabling behavior of Peter’s mother prevents him from ever having to grow up. At the end of the film, Peter is killed, and his mother blames Graham for not looking out for him, concerning himself instead with his work.

This calls to mind the harsh critique of the culture of poverty as nourished by America’s welfare system in last year’s Haggis-scripted Million Dollar Baby, where Hilary Swank’s mother chastises her for buying her a house instead of just giving her the money under the table, as her caseworker may just cut off her payments if she were to see evidence of income. And then she makes fun of her daughter for being a prizefighter and says she’s ashamed of her, despite the fact that fighting is not only what she loves to do, but is a means to escape poverty. In Crash, Haggis depicts the matriarchy of the African-American subculture as a major stumbling block toward their collective social mobility. The idealized mother figure was no doubt a major contributing factor to the survival of blacks in America, but she has become obsolete. By staying in survival mode and protecting her baby boy, Peter’s mother is preventing him from ever becoming a man and is in effect keeping both of them on the bottom rung of society. The idealized mother figure is detrimental to the social mobility of blacks while at the same time being essential to the black identity, suggesting that, to at least some extent, the socially constructed concept of blackness itself perpetuates black poverty.

It probably goes without saying that Andrew’s conscious choice to target whites for carjacking is completely counterproductive. Most black crime is committed against black victims; the incidence of black-on-white crime has been completely blown out of proportion. By attacking whites for political reasons, Andrew is artificially inflating white fear which in turn is meted out by more driving-while-black pullovers by the police and the near-shooting of Cameron during one such stop. Cabot’s already hysterically racist wife becomes even more hysterically racist after having her car stolen by Andrew and Peter and takes the overflow of her hatred out on her Hispanic maid and locksmith. Near the end of the film, Andrew discovers that a van he has stolen is filled with Thai immigrants that his Russian fence wants to sell into slavery. Although he previously exhibited a very casual racism against Asians (not only does he refers to them all as “Chinamen,” but he feels little guilt when running over and possibly killing an Asian man during the van’s theft), and despite all the money he could make in selling them, Andrew opts to free the immigrants into L.A.’s Chinatown.

His self-serving parody of black militancy has been replaced with a more evolved sociopolitical consciousness; he doesn’t see himself as a black man fighting against the white man anymore, but as a member of a formally enslaved race who now has a moral duty to liberate the currently enslaved. But hold on. Did Andrew really do these people any good in releasing them in Chinatown (where they don’t speak Thai, but Cantonese and Teochiu) with only forty dollars to “buy some chop suey”? Aren’t they just going to join the sweatshop/brothel circuit sooner or later? I can’t imagine that they have the skills or the resources to really do anything else.

I’ve talked mainly about how blacks and whites are portrayed in Crash, as those are the races that seem to have the most time onscreen. I think it’s necessary though to talk about the other races depicted in the film, particularly if they are largely invisible. I can’t say this without a small amount of politically correct backpedaling, but with all due respect to America’s Native American population, blacks and whites make up the country’s indigenous population. They are not immigrants or aliens. Or at least let’s say in being the first immigrants to the country, they make up the existing cultural identity of the United States. I was about to include Hispanics as being indigenous, but that’s a complicated issue with our country’s reformed borders, et cetera. Anyway, the point is that non-black-or-white Americans have a unique challenge in attempting to assimilate into a culture that is itself rather ill-defined.

Asians are sort of the sacrificial lambs in the film. While everybody in the film is a racial caricature in a sense, the Asian characters are the most broadly drawn, are defined the least as individuals, and are the most uniformly negative. But still, as with the whites and blacks in the film, Asians are caricatured in a diverse number of ways and helps to deconstruct how we see race in America. The modern yellowface depiction of Asians as shrill and incapable of speaking fluent English is depicted in the first scene. We also see the Asian in the largely extinct terms of the yellow peril through some slave traders who are selling some Thai people. Said Thai people embody white America’s tendency to infantilize other inhabitants of other countries as downtrodden and in need of saving. Later in the film we see an Asian detective, whose very brief presence speaks of superficial tokenism. There is no reason for him to be Asian and we soon pick up that he is basically just a white guy with yellow skin. This is the end point of a utopian society without racism; his Asian identity has been destroyed and we regard him as being one of “us”.

Asian-Americans are likely the racially-identified immigrant group with the greatest history on screen. Their depiction in Crash helps to illustrate the dilemma of racism in a particularly lucid way. Asians don’t have a form of Ebonics; they are either speaking English the wrong way or they are speaking the right way. In the former they are unquestionably marginalized and discriminated against; in the latter they are conclusively no longer Asian. The yellow peril stuff acts as a handy illustration of America’s distrust of immigrant populations in general. The anti-Chinese sentiments of the 19th century were clearly and unquestionably motivated out of fear of economic competition. By depicting Asians in general as working in the black market and as having little moral character, the film ties anti-Asian sentiments, and by extension all anti-immigrant sentiments, into a distinctly Marxist context.

A family of Iranian store owners covers similar ground; a white gun shop owner doesn’t show his nasty side until he sees his customer carry on a conversation with his daughter in his native tongue. “Plan the Jihad on your own time,” he cracks. Said daughter is American-born, however, speaks fluent unaccented English, and is treated more or less as an equal by the owner. Appearances aren’t insignificant, the film suggests, but the lack of a common language provides the crux of our alienation from one another, again reinforcing that dilemma of racism—either several preserved individual cultures or a single collective one in which brotherhood can thrive; gotta have one or the other, we can’t have both. After an attack on their store with vandals putting anti-Arab graffiti on their walls, the mother of the family wonders aloud, “When did Persian become Arab?” The idea of a single race being put under the umbrella of a single ethnic group is repeated with Graham’s Latina lover protesting about being referred to as Mexican and of Andrew referring to all Asians as “Chinamen”. Having an Iranian protest about being attacked as an Arab is a tidy way of showing them as both being victims of racism and perpetrators. They aren’t saying that Arabs shouldn’t be attacked. Not at all. They are saying that they shouldn’t be attacked because they aren’t Arabs.

You know, I’ve begun seeing the ending with Andrew “rescuing” the Thai slaves as expanding the problem of affirmative action to America’s policy of intervention into struggling foreign countries. Yes, suffering is suffering no matter where or who you are, and yes, ideally those with the means to end suffering should do so. But can Americans really transcend their own ethnocentrism and see the complete effects of their interventions ten or twenty years from now? At what point does our help amount to placing Thai into Chinatown and telling them to buy some chop suey? No matter how good our intentions are, these problems are often far too complex for us to conclusively solve, and our intervention will inevitably produce unforeseen catastrophe. A butterfly flaps his wings in Brazil, he creates a tornado in Texas, you know? So what are our options? Do you go into Thailand and stop the slave trade because slavery is wrong, or do you turn your head away because both traders and sellers need an industry and you’re unable to provide any alternatives? Do you take out Saddam Hussein because he is a tyrant who kills his own people, or do you leave him in power because he is quelling a revolution that could possibly turn Iraq into an even more inhumane theocracy? And on the other hand, do you stop the massacre of the Tutsi by the Hutu because the Tutsi are human beings or do you ignore it because doing so would quell a revolution that might have needed to happen to better the state of the Hutu? There are no good answers; no matter which one you pick, you further the suffering existing in the world.

Crash has been accused of being “a message movie”, one that hits you over the head to make its point. Critics are again misreading obviousness of the vehicle and the content--it’s a melodrama about racism, no argument here-- for superficiality of insight. I don’t feel that Crash has any solutions, simple or otherwise for racism, and in fact presents the problem as insolvable. On race issues, we could probably begin to describe Paul Haggis as a liberal who has gradually moved to the right. The official conservative line on race is that it doesn’t exist and we should ignore racial and ethnic distinctions. Presumably, they believe that all our problems with race would be solved if everybody was white, or the next best thing, if everybody acted white. Crash would not have been made if Haggis didn’t believe that race both exists and matters, and yet throughout the film he makes strong arguments against affirmative action and policies directed toward improving race relations, as well as arguments against a racial identity that has long since exhausted its utility. He seems to agree that racism would die out if everybody acted white, and he seems to agree that help to fight the problem from powerful well-meaning whites alienates the less powerful and feeds back into the original problem. But I don’t sense any glibness from him. I think that he sees the trade-off and laments our lack of solution. He’s torn between his head and his heart in a discussion our critical establishment is either unable or unwilling to engage in.