Narratives play an important role in the creation of the world, making sense of our lives and constructing the ideologies and values we live by. Narratives are a significant playing a powerful role in conveying ideas and values by forcing us to consider ourselves and the world around us. The purpose of a narrative is to simply tell the audience a story, a report of events that could either be written fictional or non-fictional. Ideas are the crucial meaning of one’s particular actions when facing certain situations. Values are the moral principles that guide us to separate what is right and wrong from our thoughts and actions. It allows us, the audience, to view the world from various perspectives, which further helps us to draw the ideas and values emphasized in the narratives that could possibly benefit ourselves and the society around us. The famous movie ‘Crash’ has perfectly captured this as they reveal the racism and the abuse of power present in modern society. It highlights these ideas by using all sorts of film techniques that help convey these ideas that exist in our society. This allows this narrative to effectively expose the viewing audience to the harsh reality of the world as racism and abuse of power and how it can put certain types of people at a disadvantage. Therefore, proving the statement that narratives play a powerful role in conveying ideas and values.
The 2005 movie ‘Crash’ sets itself on focusing on the racial and ethnic tensions that exist in Los Angeles and tells us a fictional story that revolves around a series of criminal events in the Los Angeles area involving the interactions of a racially and ethnically diverse mix of characters. The movie focuses on the lives of the 23 main characters and how the lives of these characters cross paths in indiscriminate ways.
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The idea of racism plays a major role in the structure of the movie. As it is clearly shown, there are certain characters in the storyline who have an existing or developing sense of discrimination that is specifically directed against someone of a different ethnicity based on the belief that their race is superior to another. In 'Crash' Paul Haggis exposes the existing prejudice, and racial stereotypes built to aim down on the people of color within the story. This subjects the viewing audience to trigger a sense of thought in their minds, exposing them to the reality of racism and how it affects the discriminated and disadvantaged minority.
Haggis presents us with the reality of how individuals have prejudices against other people simply based on their race and socio-economic status, and how they are difficult to influence a change in mind and are strongly swayed by the past. This is evident when in the scene when the gun shop owner sparks an argument by yelling out, “Hey Osama! Go plan a jihad on your own time”, revealing the gun shop owner's true prejudice against Farhad due to his racial background and chooses to tie Farhad to a well-known terrorist because of his visual Middle Eastern appearance and the language he spoke. This causes Farhad to become infuriated and pursues to have a heated argument between him and the owner. The gun shop owner orders the security guard to kick Farhad out of his shop. Farhad then labels the owner as ignorant and in response, the owner replies, “Oh yeah, I'm ignorant? You're liberating my country and I'm flying 747s into your mud huts and incinerating your friends”. This is a clear reference to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre that occurred on the 11th of September 2001, conducted by a terrorist organization, al-Qaeda. This suggests that the gun shop owner's prejudice and hatred towards Farhad are strongly motivated by the horrors and distress of the terrorist attack that had occurred. Paul Haggis incorporates multiple close-up shots of both characters to capture their individual facial expressions, showing the prejudice one has against another out of clear ignorance.
Even in the next scene where Anthony and Peter leave the restaurant, Haggis makes an effort to insert racial stereotypes. When Anthony and Peter exit the restaurant, Anthony continues a conversation with Peter outside: “Did you see any white people in there waiting an hour and thirty-two minutes for a bowl of spaghetti, huh? And how many cups of coffee did we get?”. Paul Haggis inserts the use of rhetorical questions in the dialogue between Anthony’s and Peter’s conversation to reveal how African-Americans are unable to have the same quality of life as white people due to their ethnicity and the racial hierarchy built to keep them below the white Americans.
In ‘Crash’, the abuse of power is also highlighted. Power is represented in its most basic form by handguns and leverage. A handgun, like leverage, is an expression of power: whoever holds the gun can compel others under threat of death or injury to submit to his or her will. Officer Ryan uses both his leverage as a cop (backed up by raw force in the form of his handgun). In the scene, Officer Ryan unlawfully chooses to pull over an SUV, belonging to Cameron Thayer (a television producer who was African-American), who is in the vehicle with his wife, Christine (who is also African-American). Christine displays a strong sense of attitude against Officer Ryan, as she labels him as a ‘cracker’, a provocative word used against white people by mostly African-Americans. He abuses his bestowed power by choosing to molest/sexually abuse Christine. Christine is powerless to defend herself as she knows she would be easily overpowered by Officer Ryan, even for Cameron as he is forced to watch the dreadful acts that are being committed against his wife.
Overall, both the ideas of racism and the abuse of power are evidently shown in the movie ‘Crash’, Haggis has perfectly created transparency to these ideas by using multiple close-up shots of the individual character’s faces to emphasize how these ideas affect them, proving a point that creates a powerful picture for the audience of how complicity can negatively affect interracial interactions.
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