I write this letter in order to help you understand what a powerful and essential movie Crash is. I do realize it has some violence, language, and sexual content. However, its revelations about life in America far outshine its negatives.
Particularly being a part of an urban district, our students need to see this movie. This movie is largely about the urban experience in America, and it provides hope and redemption. Obviously the key to showing a movie like this is a thorough discussion with students afterward allowing them to decompress and share their feelings.There are some wonderful lesson plans and study questions that we could model a lesson from. In these times, when prejudice seems more covert than ever before and racism is still far too rampant, movies like Crash can bring us together and connect us in a way that very few things can. A good book or movie can change people’s minds; it can change their lives.
Crash is this kind of life-altering movie. The basic premise of the movie is that we cannot go through life without “crashing” into others. These “others” come from all walks of life.We are ultimately connected and we need to stop making judgments about others since we are all part of the human race regardless of our skin color or ethnicity.
In the opening scene, two people literally have a car crash. The statement is made that we don’t touch each other enough, so we have to crash. This is a theme for the movie. We need each other to survive; we need to make those connections.
Ultimately, we need to touch each other. Throughout the movie, people make judgments about each other, as we all do. Sometimes those judgments turn out to be true, and sometimes they turn out to be false.Again, this is just like life. As Anthony and Peter discuss how black men are always seen as the enemies, they reinforce the stereotype by carjacking the assistant DA. Later Anthony encounters Cameron who failed to stand up for his wife as she was molested by an LAPD officer.
Anthony attempts to hijack him and Cameron fights back. He “crashes” and is almost killed. After his tirade, he tells Anthony he is ashamed of him. As tough as Anthony is, this resonates with him. At the end of the movie, he ends up freeing the Thai refugees.
In another sequence, Daniel comes to change the locks for the couple that is carjacked.While he is there, Jean determines that because he is Latino, he is a gang member. He is, in fact, an upstanding dad and husband. When Farhad needs his door fixed, Daniel arrives.
Farhad is Middle Eastern, and it is clear that he has experienced much prejudice. However, when Daniel tells him he needs a new door; Farhad feels that he is being cheated. Farahad’s store is destroyed and robbed, and Daniel becomes the scapegoat. When Farhad attempts to shoot Daniels’s little girl, we witness the power of miracle. Now granted, some may not call it a miracle since the gun was filled with blanks.
The miracle is that the little girl was not killed. Farhad has done something terrible, but the act has changed him. We know that he will never again be the same man. There are many other themes of redemption. At the end of this movie, there is a powerful scene with Cameron warming himself by a fire and snow falling from the sky. No matter what has happened there is always redemption and hope.
He gets a call from his wife, and we know that everything will be okay. As you can tell, the characters all end up being interlinked with one another. And while they fail in some encounters, they succeed in others.Again, this is an important theme in life.
Just because we have made mistakes or failed to redeem ourselves does not mean that it is ever too late. Redemption is always just one act away. Nobody is ever all good or all bad. What a powerful message for the young people of today.
We make choices on a daily basis that affect our lives and the lives of everyone around us. We can choose to empathize and try to be moral human beings or we can choose not to. However, that choice plays out over and over again throughout our lives. But this movie also shows the destructive power of fear and how dominated many of us are by fear.Again, we live in a scary world, but we have to try not to make our choices based on fear.
When we live in fear, we stereotype more; we experience less. The movie has so much to say about life today. Nobody is really what they seem. The less we can be ruled by fear, the better our lives can be. The more we can empathize with people and get past issues of race and ethnicity, the more we can see that the human race is all linked together. It is a movie of tolerance, and we need more tolerance in the world.
Some parts are hard to watch, but so it the news every night.Unlike the evening news, this movie ends with the power of redemption. It may be graphic in parts, but we begin to understand the story behind every person and why they do what they do. We cannot excuse the actions of the characters, but we can begin to understand why they behave the way they do.
Empathy is so incredibly important, and we certainly don’t have enough of it. In summary, I provide just one quote from a student who studied this movie, “While some of the people in this film ended in a breakdown, or crashed, the characters mostly ended up redeeming themselves.The “bad” cop risked his own life to save the life of the woman he had sexually harassed, the robber who was not murdered let the Asian man’s captives go free instead of collecting a large profit on them, as he could have, the rich white woman changed the way she treated her maid, and these are just a few examples from the film, “Crash” (Hobbs). There are many more quotes on this web site from students who have studied the movie, and they are all positive.
The bottom line is that our students will see the movie anyway.Wouldn’t we rather them see it in a place where intelligent discussions can be led and difficult subjects can be broached in ways that will really make them think? As I stated, there are some great resources out there for teachers who want a comprehensive study guide for this film. These resources will help them to discuss the movie and all its subtleties. This brilliant movie is about the dangers of fear and stereotyping and the powers of choices and redemption should be shown to our high school students.
