The movie Crash is centered around the everyday interactions and the stereotypical assumptions we hold over complete strangers. One of the most important distinctions the plot asserts to the audience is that every person is “profiled” in their everyday interactions, no matter the race or social class they represent. The movie does a good job of portraying this realization in the way the characters interact with one another, given their life experiences up to their intersecting points in time.
The frantic Asian women, who burst in yelling her husband’s name when she came to check to on him in the hospital presents a problem with how profiling people can lead to misunderstanding. The nurse automatically went to the assumption that she couldn’t speak English, not knowing that she was only yelling her husband’s name. Another character, a Hispanic male with a shaven head, is profiled as being a gang member while simply doing his job. One of the more deadly consequences of profiling was the young cop who was able to save the black television producer from being shot by the police, ended up killing another black character when he thought he was pulling out a weapon from his pocket.
I think that it’s important to take note of the use of profiling by the characters in this movie. The majority of the “profiling” was done whenever someone was agitated, angry, or overstressed. They were used, in spite, to hurt other people. For example, the opening scene of the movie depicts an argument between a hispanic woman and an Asian woman. The two women taunt each other using stereotypes about each other; the Asian woman threatening to call immigration services on the hispanic woman and, in kind, the hispanic woman makes fun of her accent and talks about the stereotype of Asian women being terrible drivers.
The lady who was robbed in the movie presents the largest character development in the entire cast because her prejudices actually changed, instead of simply being more sympathetic to the struggles of others people like the overwhelming majority of the cast. In the beginning, she justified her prejudice attitudes and stereotypical allegations towards the hispanic men by using her victimhood from the robbery incident. Her character was the best representation of becoming self aware when she realized that it was her own unexpressed resentments that was driving her prejudiced attitudes and not her fear of being hurt by men of color.
Stereotyping is rampant throughout the world because the population is much too big for any one human to process every instant and every variable that exists among human interaction on a daily basis.. In order to process the world, humans result to stereotyping because it’s the summary, or average of the world. In order to get a better control of our inner prejudices, we need to examine the roots of our prejudices and what drives them. We need to learn to be more self aware of our unconscious motives and the underlying causes that influence them.
