So Crash, one of the most philosophically objectionable movies that I’ve seen in a long time, won yesterday’s coveted Academy Award for “Best Picture.” Crash has two major themes: everyone is a racist, doesn’t know it, and no one is a hero, even if they perform heroic acts.
For example, when the Ryan Phillpe policeman character (after redeeming his earlier moral failure to act) kills the gang-banging hijacker–who was pulling out a religious trinket instead of a handgun: that was vicious depiction. When the Don Cheadle defective character is to blame for his brothers death by his strung out mother-that was vicious setup too.
Every part of Crash–every one of its intricate plot threads–was dedicated to portraying that mankind barely survives in the face of his omnipresent flawed perceptions. Yet if life were really like that, day in, day out, no matter what one does or how hard they strive to be just, we’d be paralyzed and forever rioting in the streets.
So what if Crash was stylishly filmed and well acted. All of it was in order to communicate an utterly corrupt Marxist view of how people think. The Marxist theory of racial conflict is that the races are utterly subjugated by the dominant race’s power and there’s nothing anyone can do about it save for blow things up. Why? Because we are all blinded by of our racial compositions-none of us can never hope to see beyond our myriad of prejudices.
So much for the rational faculty as man’s only tool for survival.
From all this you get spectacles like when the cast made a guest appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show and members of the audience asked a Black studies professor if they were racists. If you have to ask someone if your everyday contempt for people of a different race actually makes you a racist, you have just achieved a new low in mental acuity.
The fact is we do have a free choice when dealing with others. We can either choose to judge people by relevant criteria, or by irrelevant criteria. We can either find a common bond with others, or reject any commonality that exists. This is a conscious choice. It may get automatized over time, but somewhere, each of us makes a deliberate choice that will shape our destiny: we either choose to think, or not to think.
Yet in Crash, we are all just victims of unconscious fate–a product of a racial composition we have no control over and utterly paralyzed by the fact we have judge and act.
Wicked. Where Jarhead sought merely to smear the United States Marine Corps, Crash seeks to smear all of the the United States.
