Friday Night Movies

E - Dora

M - The Parent Trap (Hayley Mills)

Whatever.

I got Crash, though I didn't actually watch it till Saturday night. I'm not quite sure what I thought of it, so I'm going to ramble. I don't remember the reviews and I haven't looked them up, so this is me unfiltered. If you haven't seen the movie but plan to, you might want to stop reading now.

Crash made me think about Film. I'm pretty good with literature. I know what I like and what I don't, but I also have no problem identifying what's good and what's bad, and I don't care if you disagree, because I'm right. But movies I'm not so good with. I know, for instance, that Nashville is a great film, no matter what anyone else says, though pretty much everyone agrees with me. But I also know that I love Dirty Dancing, and I couldn't care less whether it's any good. And damned if I know why everyone thinks Cinema Paradiso is so great.

I'm not quite sure this is the issue, but maybe it's related.

I found Crash totally compelling, but I'm not quite sure it's a good movie. There was car crash imagery and gun imagery and door/window imagery, all of which had clear thematic significance. I get imagery and themes in literature a lot, but whenever I get them in film, I'm all excited and think what a sophisticated film it is and what a great film viewer I am. But then I think that maybe I only got it because it was so obvious, which means maybe it's not such a good film.

Same thing with moral ambiguity. Lots of it in this movie. The good black guy sacrifices his integrity for his brother, but then his mother blames him for his brother's death. The good white guy shoots a black kid. The bad white guy saves a black woman's life. Is this true to the complications of life, or is it just formulaic and cheesy? Not quite sure.

Here's the thing: in contemporary film, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Let me give a simple example: romance. If you let the couple overcome their differences and live happily ever after, you're capitulating to the hegemony of the marriage plot. But if you don't let them live happily ever after, well, you're still basically capitulating to the hegemony of the marriage plot by resisting it, i.e. what will register is that you are breaking the rules, not whatever substitute narrative you think you are enacting (Deconstruction 101--see Derrida for further explanation).

With regard to Crash, if you demonstrate the unceasing inevitability of race and racism in contemporary America (i.e. L.A.), you've got a totally depressing movie. If you let tolerance shine through, you've got the American happy ending cliche. Is there an alternative? Does this movie pull it off? I'm not quite sure. There's a lot of bleakness, and then there's some hope: the little girl lives, the rich black couple appears to be reconciling, and, most importantly, the bad black guy does not sell the van of Chinese people to his fence, but instead sets them free in Chinatown. But by the time we get to his rueful grin as he drives away, I'm afraid we're in the realm of redemptive cliche. And when the black cop (alias the good black guy) finds his brother's little saint statue in the sand by the side of the road, well, it was just too obvious even for me (though the other thing about me and movies is that I almost always know what's going to happen [The Sixth Sense? totally obvious that he was dead]--really, I should have been a screenwriter). Then there's the scene where the rich black guy throws a piece of wood on the burning car alongside the poor black people, just in case you hadn't realized that he has realized the preeminence of his racial identity and the importance of solidarity.

And I think that's ultimately the problem with Crash, for me, at least. It was interesting and complicated and made a lot of good points about the intractability of racial conflict in America, but it was just too heavy-handed. As is proven by the snow. When it rains frogs in Magnolia, it's totally believable and beautiful, indeed, it pulls the whole movie together. But this snow, with its odd evocation of "The Dead," just seems forced. Especially since throughout the movie people have been saying "I hear it's going to snow" (nobody in Magnolia says "I hear it's going to rain frogs").

Then again, race and racial conflict in America are heavy-handed. So maybe the movie was ahead of me once again. After all, I watched the whole thing, though I thought I was going to bed, and I seem to be going on about it at great length. And I haven't even said anything about gender, which was the first thing I wanted to write about.

I wish S had stayed up to watch it with me. Maybe it's time to go read some reviews.