Helene

While I feel like Jazmine in Boondocks who protests, "Hey, I LIKED Glitter!" I saw Crash when a black male friend of mine visited Seattle last summer, and he picked the movie. (I knew nothing about it beforehand.) In the long discussion afterwards I had with him, I know there's at least one black male in America who disagrees with Syl Jones' conclusions: that it wasn't heroism that compelled Officer Ryan (Dillon) to save Christine (Newton) from the burning car, it was training, and it was a public situation, unlike his groping scene. Not for a second did Officer Ryan's treatment of his father excuse a single revulsive action of his: while it showed that he wasn't entirely a cartoon, it was the daily exposure that to his father's illness and his burden that fueled the circle of his racism. When Jean (Bullock) falls into her housekeeper's arms, it's pathetic, not cathartic: being the powerless one in the relationship puts her housekeeper in the classic role of being both abused and comforter, and there was nothing in the performance to suggest that the housekeeper thinks otherwise. It's hardly an "awwwww" scene. As far as Christine being unrealistic, I went to college with a Christine, a privileged young black women whose family came from several generations of privilege and money and not just in the black community. And I saw first-hand the disregard she had on occasion not just for her own safety, but for the safety of others around her, and also her view of class. Because underlying and undermining the relationship between Christine and Cameron is her distain for him on the basis of class: he's not "black" enough, because he can't/won't flash the finger, like she does to Officer Ryan, because he's in the process of making it, and she's already there. He calls her on it -- someone from the horsey set saying he isn't black? -- but it doesn't stick. When she gives it to Ryan, it has nothing to do with institutional racism: she's making an example of Cameron for taking it from The Man and surviving another day, and she underestimates Cameron's anger and understanding of his own situation. It's rather stomach-turning when her fantasy of the macho man is fulfilled by the working class Ryan after he pulls her from the burning car. Yes, Graham, Cheadle's character is offered his brother's temporary freedom under the guise of "affirmative action," but it seemed clear to me that this is a cynical dig from a better-dressed, bureaucratic Tony Soprano: the casualness of the offer and the "much more sophisticated and systemic hustle" that it represented seemed pretty obvious. It was all too clear that the deal Graham made was a waste of his "get out of jail free" card, but when you throw in the Oedipal card, family can be blinding. I didn't see Crash as advocating any kind of "we're all racist in some way or another, so it's all even," which was why Angel's, I mean Anthony's character stuck out for me like a sore thumb from the movie, although I didn't get a sense that Haggis' point was that black and white relations were hopeless and that Latino-America was the only source of hope. I came away with one more sense of the long-term consequences of the original Devil's bargain in American history: acceptance of slavery in return for a Union.

I'm afraid the old amazon link is no longer available from their site, and our old code modifications were overwritten in the upgrade.

Many thanks -- we're just hoping it stays put! (It was slightly different last night...) The other options flashed. Yigads.

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