Crash

About a month ago, I saw a movie called Crash featuring quite a start-studded cast, including Matt Dillon, Don Cheadle, Brendan Fraser, Sandra Bullock, Thandie Newton and more. I got the distinct feeling that I was seeing a good movie after a long time!

Don Cheadle speaks these opening lines at the scene of a car crash: "It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something."

The movie is about several sets of people with different ethnic backgrounds living in LA, and how their seemingly separate lives "crash" into each other over a series of plausible events. The movie evokes mixed feelings of sympathy, anger, sadness and hope in the viewer; and I must admit I believe the plot writer deserves an oscar for this. The direction and acting were outstanding as well.

I'm not going into the details of the movie; you can find the plot and reviews at any of a thousand sites on the web. Rather, I wanted to talk about how the movie correlates with the real world.

A storekeeper returns one morning to find his shop vandalized and large green letters on the wall abusing Arabs. His wife stares at the wall and cries, "Arabs? We're not Arabs! When did Persian become Arab?"

In real life, I heard stories of people getting lynched by drunken gangs in the US simply because they "looked like Osama bin Laden" or "acted suspicious, like a terrorist". On most occasions they were, in truth, Indians or Turks or Pakistanis, and most certainly not terrorists. It seems to me that the objective of the terrorists is achieved, at least in part, if this is the paranoia with which people are behaving. Read this post by my friend Rahul, talking about his experience on a PATH train near New York City. It ought to help you understand what I'm talking about.

"We need votes from the black community. What we need, is for the people to see me pinning a medal on a black man.... ok, who was that guy who saved those people at that landslide a few days ago?"
"Er... that wasn't a black man, sir. He was an Iraqi named Saddam (some muslim sounding surname)"
"He was.. what? Iraqi? You want me to pin a medal on an Iraqi named Saddam? Get out of my sight!"

The racial and ethnic background of a person has become more defining today than the actual character of that person. The moment you see a non-white person, what is your first impression of that person? Is your opinion coloured by the colour of his skin? It's really sad today that people can't treat individuals as individuals. University towns are usually quite liberal and broad-minded, but step into the "real" world you'll be surprised by what people think they know about you.

Two black men try to do a carjacking, and it goes awry when it turns out that the driver is also black. After an intense sequence in which one thief runs away and the driver hides the other from the cops, the man tells the thief before letting him go: "Look at me. You shame me. You shame yourself."

In spite of all my talk about individuality, statistics do not lie. There is some measure of logic even in the paranoia. That one fact is even sadder than all the things I've said uptil now.

The USA is quite a cultural milieu, and has begun to come apart at the seams. Terrorism has probably just catalyzed the inevitable. I don't quite blame anyone; I think the paranioa and the stereotyping is natural for any country forced to endure the presence of a hundred different cultures. I wonder what the future holds; but I think that the gradual absorption of people from eclectic backgrounds over generations has had a moderating and healing effect. Perhaps one day in the future people can truly interact as equals. One can only hope.

Cheers,
Prashanth.