Crash and Minority Culture - Movie Review Example

Crash and Minority Culture Although movies are generally seen as a means of escaping the everyday worldinto a few hours of fantasy delusion, they can also have a profound impact on how we view the world around us, including our concepts regarding racial issues. The media is typically blamed for our impressions and understandings regarding the various elements of society – the majority, the minority, the various racial groups that exist within these structures. “Broadly speaking, the media exist in a very close, sympathetic relationship to power and established values. They favor a consensus view of any problem: they reflect overwhelmingly middle class attitudes and experience. Basically, this unfits them for an authentic portrayal of the black community and its problems” (Hall, 1974). While we may wish to blame the media for all the racial ills of society, though, it remains true that the media, including Hollywood, reflects as much as it relays. It is also up to us, as the audience, to determine how we will interpret the messages sent and to investigate our own responses, both within the media setting and within daily life, to understand how we may also act in conscious or unconscious ways to reinforce damaging minority stereotypes. For adults, this process of learning about ourselves and our own attitudes generally takes the form of transformative learning. An understanding of this term applied to the 2004 Paul Haggis film Crash and personal experience reveals that film as a genre can provide an excellent point of view from which transformative learning can take place. Transformative learning in its most basic sense is the way in which adults more consciously learn to adapt and shape their behavior in given situations. Officially, it is described as “the process of effecting change in a frame of reference” (Mezirow, 1997: 5). As Mezirow explains, adults tend to behave according to a set series of assumption that define the world as they know it. These can consist of “associations, concepts, values, feelings, conditioned responses” (Mezirow, 1997: 5), anything that provides the adult with a frame of reference for dealing with the particular situation at hand, whether it be a simple transaction at the grocery store or an unusual encounter with an individual of a different race not typically interacted with. While the transformative learner will use this opportunity to expand their knowledge and move toward a more self-reflective and inclusive frame of reference, the more common tendency is for the individual to fall back on pre-conceived and often not well-considered concepts housed deep in their psyche. As Mezirow describes it, the frame of reference is actually comprised of two different elements. The first of these is the habits of mind, which are described as “broad, abstract, orienting, habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting influenced by assumptions that constitute a set of codes” which may be “cultural, social, educational, economic, political or psychological” (Mezirow, 1997: 5-6). The point of view is the way in which these habits of mind become evident to both the individual and the people who are witness to its expression. As we become aware of our point of view through various experiences and events, such as witnessing a film like Crash, the transformative learner will examine their reactions and assumptions, realizing where they erred in judgment and assumptions and attempt to reconcile this new awareness with what has been learned, either for positive or negative effect. The movie Crash was released with the tagline, “You think you know who you are. You have no idea.” This suggests the intention of the film was not so much to illustrate and reinforce the various stereotypes people have regarding race and ethnicity, but to force the audience to engage with their own preconceived ideas regarding these issues and perhaps begin to confront the fallacies and realities involved. The film starts, appropriately enough, with the images and impressions of a car crash as the first characters we meet seem to be an interracial couple – Detective Graham Waters is a black man suddenly highly contemplative about the way in which people live their lives in LA, each locked within an ethnocentric world to the exclusion of all other races despite their close physical proximity, while Detective Ria is a female Hispanic who has a few prejudices of her own. Just as Detective Waters seems on the verge of a very unpleasant discovery, the film shifts back in time to the day previous and the attempts of an Iranian man attempting to purchase a handgun in a gun shop. He speaks mostly in Farsi to his daughter, who serves as translator and facilitator for her father, who is buying the gun to protect his family from the persecution they have received following 9/11. In this way, the film jumps back and forth through time, showing the stories of a variety of people of many races who meet in strange ways throughout the city as they go about their daily lives. The white district attorney and his wife are carjacked by the black younger brother of the detective and a friend, who run over the husband of the Asian woman who rear-ended Hispanic Ria and free the Asian people the husband was going to sell into the slave market. The Hispanic locksmith attempts to help the district attorney’s wife feel safer by changing her locks for her, but is insulted by her racist attitudes that are only repeated by Farhad the Iranian when the locksmith attempts to warn him about a faulty door. The black film producer’s wife is forced to submit to sexual violation by a police officer while her husband looks on yet is later saved by this same police officer as he risks his own life to save hers. Meanwhile, his partner, sickened by the sexual behavior, discovers he has murdered a black boy who was merely trying to make a connection. This black boy turns out to be one of the carjackers and Detective Waters’ younger brother. The interconnectedness of these people’s world serves to highlight the lack of connection they have to one another. Although they interact and pass each other every day, none of them seems to really recognize another as an equally viable human being. Through this portrayal, Haggis manages to shine the spotlight on the habits of mind under which many people operate without even seeming to notice. While Ria is frequently irritated by Graham’s failure to appreciate her cultural background as something different from his, she is incapable of extending this same courtesy to Kim Lee when their cars collide on the freeway. Although Officer Hansen is disgusted by Officer Ryan’s behavior toward Christine during their traffic stop, he is equally guilty of retaining a strong ethnographic approach to the world which is seen when he shoots Peter Waters just for reaching into his coat while laughing. The movie demonstrates how personal assumptions can blind us to our own habits of mind and thus bias our own perspective. Assuming I was immune to the cultural biases of my own race, I discovered that my attitudes toward the Asian woman were tempered but still decidedly against her. My preconceived ideas based upon her clothing, her car and her attitudes were that she was a superficial snobby Asian typically pushy and demanding. The film even rewarded me in my assumptions by depicting her in just this light. However, it also provided a means of looking more closely at her life to understand her as a person with equally valid feelings and concerns. This seeming contradictory action of focusing attention on the stereotypes being displayed as a means of overcoming them begins to illustrate the important role being played by the audience itself in interpreting the movie. Although it had been proven by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s that media has demonstrable social effects upon its audience, further investigation into the theory in America illustrated why the idea of the media as an all-powerful straightforward tool for social manipulation was incorrect. It was determined that the audience itself had a lot to do with how information being presented would be interpreted. “The viewer came to be credited with an active role, so that there was then a question … of looking at what people do with the media, rather than what the media do to them. From this perspective, one can no longer talk about the ‘effects’ of a message on a homogenous mass audience, who are all expected to be affected in the same way” (Morley, 2005). This realization led to the development of Stuart Hall’s ‘encoding/decoding’ model of communication at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. This model suggested that the same event can be encoded and decoded in more than one way. “Messages propose and ‘prefer’ certain readings over others, but they can never become wholly closed around one reading: they remain polysemic (i.e. capable, in principle, of a variety of interpretations)” (Morley, 2005). If one is a transformative learner, one will be able to begin reshaping attitudes and opinions as a result of these types of experiences while those incapable of engaging their inner thoughts will have difficulty appreciating the message. Works Cited Crash. Dir. Paul Haggis. Perf. Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon and Jennifer Esposito. (2004). Hall, Stuart. “Black Men, White Media.” Savacou, Journal of the Caribbean Artists’ Movement. Vol. 9/10 (1974). Mezirow, Jack. “Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice.” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. N. 74, (Summer 1997). Morley, David. “Audience Research.” Courtesy of The Museum of Broadcast Communications, 2005. April 13, 2009 Read More