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Crash

Graham: "It's the sense of touch. Any real cities you walk, you know, you brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A. nobody touches you. We're always behind the metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something".
Cop: "You folks okay".
Nia: "I think he hit his head".
Graham: "You don't think it's true?"
Cop: "Stay in your car".
Nia: Graham, I think we got rear-ended, I think we spun around twice and somewhere in there, one of us lost our frame of reference. And I'm not gonna look for it".

No matter how hard you try it's virtually impossible to watch a movie like Crash without thinking about race. In 2006, it won Academy Awards for best picture of the year, best writing, and best editing. That's quite a feat for a film whose subject of racism has been around and talked about for many, many years. Did Crash depict a new innovative or creative way of dealing with racism? Did it offer any solutions to a problem that has plagued this world since its inception? The responses to those questions will vary, depending on who you ask. In the negative reviews I read about Crash, most people felt that for a movie that was supposed to deal with racism, it had very little depth. Dr. Joyce Middleton, in her article, "Talking about Race and Whiteness in Crash" she states, "By the end of the film, like many viewers and film critics, I felt disappointed and frustrated by the film's use of surface, sketchy characters; its failed attempt to challenge racial stereotypes, especially as most people of color (raced people) would recognize them; and its dominant pedagogical fallacy; that everybody's a little bit prejudiced" (321). A lot of opinions were similar to Dr. Middleton's but I have to say that my experience with the film was somewhat different.
In our class we are encouraged to make use of all of a film's components (dialogue, lighting, music, etcetera) to enjoy a full movie experience. Does it provoke...