Life keeps tumbling your heart in circles
till you... let go
till you shed your pride and you climb to heaven
and you throw yourself off.
now you're out there spinning
in the deep.
in the deep.
in the deep.
in the deep..
("In the Deep" by Bird York from Velvet Hour)
A movie soundtrack is like wallpaper for the ears; it’s there, but we don’t pay much attention to it –– at least not at first. This song, the end of the sound track for Crash, encapsulates many of the themes of the film, which is also about the tumbling lives of many people.
Crash, directed by London, Ontario native Larry Haggis, has been criticized for looking like a made-for-TV movie, for “hitting us over the head” with its message about racism and for having an appropriated title. Nevertheless it won the 2006 Academy Award for best picture and has struck a chord with a lot of people. The woman at Future Shop who rang up the CD for me spontaneously commented, “That’s a good movie, some bad language, but a good movie.” The woman who does my hair said she liked it and called it a surprising movie, “There is a lot going on it. You could watch it over and over again and enjoy it.” Indeed you can. There are a lot of themes projected on the literal movie screen that are also projected on the screen of our collective imagination.
Fragments
The film opens with a series of fragments: snowflakes falling in the darkness, tire tracks on snow-covered pavement, blurry circles of light and the tips of a chain link fence. An unidentified voice talks about losing his "frame of reference" and another person observes how being spun around a couple of times in a car accident can jostle that frame. Protecting one’s fragile self from brokenness, being enclosed by a frame of belief, and spinning a story that might involve escape from this enclosure all define this film.
The conversation we overhear occurs after what seems too have been the first car accident, but this collision actually occurs near the end of the story –– an unexpected, disorienting change in our own frame of reference. The word, “Yesterday,” appears in the corner of the movie frame and with that, the audience is spun around to the past to observe the daily round of a group of people in Los Angeles. The title of the movie refers to many different kinds of collisions. What causes them to crash into one another? Is there any way out of their driven unhappy lives?
Knee-jerk reactions
One cause of their unhappiness is their knee-jerk habit of jumping to conclusions about situations. A burgled shopkeeper insists his locksmith is a cheat when the latter suggests correctly that the door frame needs fixing not just the lock on the door. This complex-driven judgment almost results in catastrophe later on. The ego-bound characters dislike the other, the stranger who can’t or won’t speak English. But likely they fear not just the alien in the exterior world, but their own alienated inner self. One character admits, “I feel angry all the time and I don’t know why.” An experienced police officer observes to his former partner, “You think you know who you are, but you have no idea.”
As a result of their lack of self awareness, they operate from a frame of reference with very fragile, easily permeated boundaries. Trespassing on each other’s personal space often occurs. This intrusion involves real physical space in the actual crashes, falls and assaults. The trespass also occurs because they seem to feel that their honour, dignity and self-worth have been apportioned to them by others and are in danger of being taken away. Humiliation is a constant threat. A wife tells her husband, “I was humiliated for you. That man took away your dignity.” One of the black kids, who theorizes constantly on black victimization (while making a living from car jacking) asks, “Why do they put great big windows in a bus – to humiliate people of colour reduced to riding the bus.” Later on, he is told, “You embarrass me; you embarrass yourself.” Honour lost and honour restored drive most of the characters.
The ego-imprisoned characters lack a relationship to Self, to their own integrity as opposed to the integrity accorded them –– or not –– by others. A young policeman is advised by his supervisor to lie about the real reason he wants to change partners. Behind them, on the police station wall is a poster advertising “integrity.” On the other side of the hall is a cement-block partition –– a series of small, rectangular, concrete boxes dividing up and enclosing the space. Later in the closed space of the front seat of his car, the young man pays a horrifying price for his unawareness of who he really is.
Lack of connection
That scene is one of the most intense of many that reveal the lack of a feeling connection amongst the characters. The crash victim we first encounter muses about the literal lack of touch, “You crash in order to feel something.” Later he is untouching and tactless towards his mother and his girl friend and suffers for it.
Almost everyone treats women poorly. The characters’ lack of connection to inward feeling values is projected onto the women they meet. Men repeatedly relate to women by ordering them to do things: to go home, to go to bed, to calm down. The women, failing to connect to an inner masculine and therefore in the throes of a negative animus, are demeaning and sarcastic. The politician’s wife snaps at her maid for not unloading the dishwasher; the actor’s wife accuses her husband of “shuckin’ and jiving” and when he reacts adds, “Anger… a bit late, but nice to see!”
Only the viewers are able slowly to put together the whole picture. We are the only ones who, seeing the cause of the events, can imagine different solutions from the ones the characters find unconsciously in a split-second. On a bus an old woman knits –– an unexpected image and one which suggest someone ought to be making whole cloth out of these fragmented lives. Spinning is unconsciously parodied by a politician who uses “spin” to describe the take he wants his media advisors to place on his story of being car-jacked. Ironically, the police are the tools the film writer uses to knit the stories together –– but only from a structural point of view. They are as unconscious and compromised as everyone else is.
Frame of reference
Only twice does the camera and thus our frame of reference rise above the action. The first occurs when the camera shooting the action from above pulls back to reveal a television series being filmed. What we think is the “real” movie is just a movie-within-the-movie. This irony might remind us to look outside the frame of our own personal stories –– or at least not to confuse what we think is real with what is merely our projection.
The other time occurs at the end of the movie when the final shot swoops up and reveals an empty intersection with the square box created by the lines for pedestrians clearly visible. There is no traffic. This box may be a symbol of the limits around the characters: many self-imposed, many imposed by chance encounters. The intersection is often a place of choice or new direction –– but not in this film. The shot ends by revealing one of the least likeable characters getting out of her car by the curb and then arguing over yet another collision.
Close-up shots
At the other extreme are the very few close-up shots –– all the more memorable because the film is shot mostly in a series of medium-range frames. In two of these situations, a male character is calming the fear of a female. In one, the policeman redeems his previously humiliating treatment of a woman when he asks permission before touching her in order to rescue her from a burning vehicle. In the other, the locksmith father weaves a magical story to his five-year-old daughter hiding under her bed, to encourage her not to fear that bullets may once again touch her life. In frightening situations, they calm down long enough to touch and look at the other and see who is really there.
What else can redeem these people? Ironically the action takes place at Christmas –– the time when, according to the Christian myth, the divine embodies wholeness in the person of the Christ-child. The incarnation is supposed to bring peace to both the inner and outer worlds. Images of crèches, Santas, Christmas lights, trees and parcels abound in the movie. But these reference to the promise of new life are either ignored, misinterpreted or not heard at all by the characters. When the car jackers drop their hit-and-run victim by the nativity scene at a hospital Emergency entrance, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” is on the sound track, heard only by the audience.
One of the characters carries a statue of St. Christopher, (literally the Christ-carrier), the patron saint of travelers, which his companion calls a “voodoo-assed” thing. In the end, it does not protect him. Another character completely under the spell of rage and frustration almost commits an unthinkable act. He believes he was prevented from doing so by an angel in the form of a little girl. The audience knows what really happened – or at least we think we do. Is the old man’s conviction in divine intervention just a sentimental belief in magic or has he been offered the miracle of an epiphany?
Final scene
We too want to believe there is more to life than accidents and chance. In a final scene, one of the car jackers makes a conscious decision to do the right thing. He no longer embarrasses himself. In another part of town, the politician’s wife is finally able to accept an embrace. Several characters wander about in the snowy cold or look out at the weather, which has been described several times as unusual for Los Angeles, the city of angels. They receive messages of love from home on their blackberries. This is not as amazing as angels singing from on high about the promise of peace and wholeness, but it is a start.
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