Los Angeles and the Affect of Racism in Crash

Though Paul Haggis' 2006 film Crash took home the Oscar for Best Picture, the popular press reviews were mixed with, for instance, The New Yorker's, David Denby calling the film “hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood's Mystic River” and Michael Sicinski of the Cineaste insisting, “It has an air of truth, without ever saying anything truthful.” And while we're all fairly used to disagreements about the quality of pop cultural productions in the public sphere, perhaps the stakes this year were a bit higher, with two overtly political films (Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain being the other), winning the top two awards at the Oscars and provoking a lot of attention in the news. But while nearly all of Crash's interconnected storylines revolve around the effects of racism in Los Angeles, and while Haggis speaks proudly, both in the press and in his DVD Director's Commentary, about his success in representing racism, I'm not so sure that the film actually addresses the real politics of race in America. In the DVD commentary, Haggis explains that his inspiration for the film came from a carjacking he had survived ten years earlier and his subsequent questions about the carjackers—if they'd known each other well, for how long, and what, in general, their lives were like. He describes waking up one night burning to write a screenplay about the “notion of how strangers affect other strangers” and so he chose characters of different races in order “to thematize [this] strangeness” and wrote the outline of Crash. While Haggis' open curiosity about how other people live and feel creates space—in this case, cinematic space—for discussions about difference, his use of the word strangeness, and his conflation of “racial other” with “stranger,” suggest to me that Crash was conceived as a film about the affects of racism (curiosity, feelings of estrangement, for instance) and not its material and