Crash Paul Haggis\'s 2004 Film

Crash

Paul Haggis's 2004 film "Crash" -- as viewed through the eyes of African-American theorist bell hooks

In her book Outlaw Culture the African-American social theorist bell hooks states that women of color are marginalized both in daily life and in the cultural wars over media representations in the academic curriculum. The author stresses that white feminists in particular, and also other cultural critics who attempt to universalize the nature of prejudice into an easy polarity of victim and victimizer, must recognize that the experiences of different oppressed groups varies greatly. Class and race cannot be used as sold, coherent, and universal categories of analysis that always trump religion or ethnicity. The experience and self-perceptions of a black woman will not be the same as a white woman, for example, in regards to working outside the home, despite the fact that both individuals are women, because of their different group identification. However, hooks does not confine her analysis solely to the African-American experience. She states that supposedly coherent cultural narratives of the 'self' can blind anyone's ability to see the contradictions about identities in their perceptions.

For example, one of the protagonists of "Crash," is a black director who is told by a white producer that the characters in his television segment do not sound 'black' enough, as if there is one coherent way to be black -- and in ignorance of the fact that the director does not sound 'black' himself. Characters who are black or white agonize if they are 'black' or 'white' enough, despite the fact they inhabit such bodies deemed black or white in American culture. All individuals live in a permanent state of angst and identity crisis in "Crash," underlining hooks stress that all members of marginalized groups are outsiders in some fashion, at certain points in their cultural dramas, but their experiences of being 'outsider's differ from context to context, even while their supposed 'race' or gender may remain the same.

Crash" continually highlights the fictional and constructed nature of identity by contrasting 'real life' with produced media life and the ways racial minorities are represented in both contexts. Although "Crash" does not provide a solution to the fact that there is no one way to view gender, race, or religion in a stable fashion, by showing with humor and irony the false nature of our assumptions it accomplishes part of hook's stated project in her essays enclosed in Outside Culture. The author writes "since the disruption of the colonized/colonizer mind-set is necessary for border crossings to not simply reinscribe old patterns, we need strategies for decolonization that aim to change the minds and habits of everyone involved in cultural criticism," so that black women are not, like the author says she was in her twenties, "inwardly homeless." (5; 9) This state of inward homelessness, or lacking a coherent identity is something, hooks acknowledges, that can be experienced by all marginalized peoples and ethnic groups in contemporary society -- and only by acknowledging the fact that we are all potentially, inwardly homeless, can the pain of past prejudice be assuaged.