(Crash)
Stop the presses: yuppie housewife needs a pair of shoes like Ludacris needs more white middle-aged rock critics fawning over his cuts (wait a minute...). His appearance here is just another grenade casually flung into a veritable ideological war-zone, and one that I guess vaguely evokes thought (/concern) over the way that one of the most cloistered, race-centric musical outlets has been appropriated for the self-justification of not-intended-audiences everywhere. Which begs the question of whether the entrenched mythology rap evinces is a case of hyper-aware pandering, or the sad acknowledgement that things must inevitably be downsized/streamlined if they have any hope of breaking into mainstream light. In other words, which came first: the gang-star or the record deal?

But rap and hip-hop are just a playground where people can flirt intimately with danger within the safety net of a club, and then still have to compulsively Cross The Street on the walk home. It’s under the veil of like-minded contradictions that we’ve just about lost our grip on where certain cultural signifiers end and others begin, in their interactions with one another; they’ve mutated into a polymorphous blah that’s perpetually unstable, and trying to chart its progressions is like trying to catch rain with your hands. The only solution might be a kind of post-post-modern all-over homogenization, but where does that leave us? (and as if the hipsters would let that happen anyway). It’s just about enough to drive one insane, and you can sense Ludacris’s character tapping into that stacked undertow of frustration when in one scene he (deep breath) moves from discussing with a friend racial-power reversal and blacks-as-social-victims, to robbing a rich white couple as the fulfillment of a stereotype because the wife was affirming that stereotype in the first place by huddling close to her husband upon sighting them. It totally doesn’t make sense but also totally does, insofar as it’s that whole post-feminist self-aware-sexual-exuberance-as-a-form-of-empowerment type deal all over again.

Paul Haggis’s Crash is a whirring arena of racial bumper-cars getting in one another’s way, but nothing feels quite so geared to the 2k5 sensibility as Ludacris trying to keep his dick hard in a cruel and harsh world. For the most part, Haggis is content to ride his fourth-hand Anderson-via-Soderbergh-via-Altman buzz, a lineage that leaves me wondering why directors are constantly drawn to LA when looking to dump their bang bus of A-listers alongside x pounds of cocaine. Might be a geographical thing – isn’t LA notably sprawling, a kind of open-top counterpart to NY’s glass ceiling? – that leaves it suited to the whole bit about lives gradually converging in small, separate bursts across its surface. Plus, it’s also the epicenter of celebrity culture-slash-$$$the american dream$$$, which rhymes perfectly with having to watch the prettiest people do tha ugliest things.

But just how necessary is a straight-faced, megaphone-aired treatise on racism now? Okay, I guess since it’s an essentially irresolvable point, the question answers itself, but there’s also something slightly dangerous in the way Haggis colour-codes the world so vehemently because it – paradoxically – leaves almost no room for degrees of interaction: characters are reduced to slugging racial slurs like they’re some kind of apocalyptic currency, and I don’t know if a post-911 society is the kind that needs to be shouted at. Haggis has the right idea here; he just needs to turn the volume down.–DL

» crashfilm.com