Crash

Between Munich, Crash, and Brokeback Mountain, the Academy set the stage to offend Jews, gays, blacks, Asians, Latinos or almost any other group by picking this year's Best Picture. Crash miraculously seems to have offended more people than the other two movies put together, and so by rights should not have won. But then, my reputation as an Oscar predictor was solidly established in 2004.

Crash is a film about racism. It shows 12 or 13 Los Angeles natives interact and collide over the course of a day chock-full of chance encounters. (The plot, with all its coincidences, is horribly contrived; but then, so are all stories, otherwise they wouldn't be stories.) All the characters--white, black, Asian, Latino, and Persian--are racist towards one another.

Some friends when describing this movie get a look in their eye like they're discussing Scripture. They talk about how the movie changed them, challenged them, made them reexamine their lives. I'm happy there are movies that can do that for people, and moviegoers who are willing to be changed.

But I wonder what in them was so challenged by a stark portrayal of racism. Some unkind pundits have said liberals are plauged with white guilt and liked a movie that showed racist non-whites. To anyone who still has a liberal friend or two, that is obviously wrong.

More charitably, we could assume that many viewers, liberal or otherwise, recognized a racist attidue or two in the movie that they've noted in their own hearts. If so, the movie is indeed challenging. But even that would not account for the seriousness with which some liberals have embraced this film. Finding racism in oneself is only life changing if first you believed it wasn't there.

I think many good liberals felt authentically challenged by the thought that racism endures. Liberals actually believe in moral progress, that liberalism will gradually spread around the world with enough education and time, and so they are shocked by the idea of rank evil still at large in 21st Century America. "Didn't we solve this problem?" they think. "Isn't liberalism spreading?" Liberals are challenged by knowing that in a world where liberalism is an available option, not everyone is a liberal.

I am not a good liberal; I am a slobbering Calvinist. I believe in some old rugged truths like the total depravity of mankind. I reacted to Crash not with eye-opening awe at a newly revealed truth, but with a shoulder shrug. "People are racist. Duh."

I liked the movie. It was well-acted and told some powerful stories. I was annoyed at the over-heated melodrama that intervened at some points, and the wonkish policy lectures that came at others. I admired the film's daring and its willingness to treat of a serious subject. But, for one already convinced that "the heart of man's imagination is evil from his youth," it was hardly life-changing or even very provocative. I am not surprised by racism--not my own, and not other's.

The persistence of the liberal's naive worldview is fascinating. If Crash--two hours of decent Hollywood fare--made so many liberals think so deeply about their unexamined assumptions, one dares think that a few good history books would see the end of the left as we know it. But then, that would be to believe in moral progress. Better to trust that some things, like racism, total depravity, death, taxes, and liberal credultiy will be with us until Kingdom Come.