24 FEATURE»FILM
“AMERICA IS NOT A MELTING POT. IT IS A SIZZLING CAULDRON.”
CRASH
AND
THE CITY
RACE & RAGE ON THE STREETS OF L.A. BY PAUL GORMLEY
T
he French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once wrote that ‘the American
city seems to have stepped right out
of the movies’ by which he meant that the
experience of visiting an American city itself
is one that is produced directly by experiencing it at the cinema first. Any tourist who has
seen the steam rising from manhole covers in
New York as yellow cabs roll over them or have
dared to negotiate Los Angeles freeways or
have even stood by the Golden Gate Bridge in
San Francisco will know the feelings to which
Baudrillard is referring – a confusing mixture
of stored memory-images and bodily affect
that can leave the tourist reeling, such is the
intoxicating power of celluloid America.
Yet one of the biggest challenges facing
Hollywood narrative film in the recent years
has been producing the contemporary American city on screen. The fragmented milieus,
different ethnicities, myriad, disconnected
spaces and speed of the late twentieth and
twenty-first century city and urban cultures
do not lend themselves easily to traditional
modes of Hollywood storytelling and images,
concerned as they are with linear narratives,
chronological structures of cause and effect
and the actions of an individual hero or (less
often) heroine at the centre. The films of the
period of so-called Classical Hollywood cinema tended to produce a homogenous space
where an individual could act and affect the
entire milieu of the city whether through the
 | intellect quarterly
Top
Officer Ryan (Matt Dillon) saves a reluctant
Christine (Thandie Newton) from the fire
Bottom
Cameron (Terrence Howard) makes a decision
criminal actions of James Cagney in classic
gangster films like The Public Enemy or the
skewed intentions of the hard-boiled cop and
detective of the more fragmented noir period.
However the most influential films of the
last 30 years have tended to eschew singular
linear plot lines and characters in favour of a
circular structure that plays with chronology
and have multiple characters and plotlines,
with dramatic centres dispersed throughout
rather than as culmination of the narrative.
Arguably Scorsese’s 1970s films such as Mean
Streets and Taxi Driver and Altman’s Nashville have been most significant in this respect
– though the work of John Cassavetes in films
like Shadows influenced both these directors.
These films began to realize that the dream of
the American city as melting point was a fantasy borne out of a repression of racial diversity
and rage.
More contemporary films have tended to
focus on Los Angeles as the city where this
fragmentation is most marked in contemporary
America. Films like Joel Schumacher’s Falling
Down, Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Altman’s own
Short Cuts and Paul Anderson’s Magnolia have
produced Los Angeles as a city where individual actions and causes and effects are localized
and often disconnected. Bubbling beneath (or
in Falling Down’s case over the top) the surface of these films is the idea that the visibility
of ethnic diversity has fundamentally damaged
certain central tenets of the American dream
25 FEATURE»FILM
“LOS ANGELES SEVENTYTWO SUBURBS IN SEARCH OF A CITY.”
– most notably that the actions of an individual
are significant and have the power to produce a
profound effect on the milieu or community in
which that individual is situated.
Characters in these films tend to be ultimately powerless in terms of intentionally having a significant effect on the cinematic worlds
they inhabit – even if, as is the case with the
Michael Douglas character in Falling Down
(a latter-day relation to Travis Bickle in Taxi
Driver), they still have the psychotic fantasy of
recognizing and being recognized by the various constituents of the modern American city.
Underlying this powerlessness, particularly in
Taxi Driver and Falling Down, is an often un-
plotlines of the film where a multitude of characters with different ethnicities and classes
come into violent conflict with each other in
various life-changing ways.
Indeed the film attempts to cover all classes
and ethnic bases in its narrative strands. Crash
begins at its narrative end with Walters and his
Mexican partner and lover, Ria (Jennifer Esposito), finding a man’s body by the side of the
road who eventually turns out to be Walter’s
missing brother (Larenz Tate). We then flash
back 24 hours to meet other characters including an unhinged Iranian shopkeeper who in a
mood of post September 11 anxiety attempts
to buy a gun for protection and comes into
can-American representation in film up to the
significant influence of the short-lived blaxploitation and hood films of the seventies and
nineties respectively.
The diminished power of white American
identity is most apparent in the storyline involving Matt Dillon’s character, Ryan. In many
ways Ryan is the contemporary descendant of
American anti-heroes whose ability to act is
underpinned and undermined by their racial
rage. There are elements of Ethan Edwards
(The Searchers), Travis Bickle, and Dfens
in Ryan as he attempts to solve his problems
in the manner of an American ‘action-taker’,
culminating in the rescue of Thandie Newton from a burning car while
unable to repress his racial
rage. White paranoia around
racial difference, miscegenation and the loss of power
is embodied in all of these
characters and they all expose the fact these anxieties
and racial rage underpin the
action-taking individual of
the American dream and its cinematic counterpart.
The African-American characters all accept this notion of a powerlessness to overcome social and political obstacles, whether
it is the characters played by Thandie Newton
and Terrence Howard accepting that they cannot single-handedly defeat the institutionalized racism they encounter, despite their class
privileges, or the black detective Graham Walters in bringing together his family and winning their mother’s love. All these characters
accept a localized, negotiated and contingent
degree of power in the city and in this way
Crash is indebted to black aesthetics of ‘realism’ as they are played out in the powerlessness of the characters in ‘hood films like the
Hughes Brothers’ Menace II Society (1993).
Indeed like many American urban films of the
1990s, Crash borrows its aesthetics of local
spaces within the city from the localized borders and tensions of the ‘hood as produced in
the ‘hood film.
The film is less convincing when it en-
‘CRASH EXPLICITLY LAYS BARE THE POLITICAL AND
HOLLYWOOD NARRATIVE FANTASY OF THE U.S.
CITY AS MELTING POT, WHERE THE ACTIONS OF
AN INDIVIDUAL CAN OVERCOME OBSTACLES AND
AFFECT THE ENTIRE WORLD OF THE FILM.’
spoken white racial rage demonstrated by Travis’ desire for a biblical rain to ‘clean the scum
off the streets’ and in Michael Douglas’ DFens
to ‘go home’ and resume his ‘all-American’
family life.
The recent American film release Crash,
directed and partly written by Paul Haggis, is
the latest attempt to put Los Angeles at its centre. Unlike most of the films mentioned above,
the question of race and ethnic division as the
cause for the diminishing of the powers of the
old American cinematic hero and his dream is
explicit in the various narrative strands of the
film and its moments of attempted cinematic
affect. The film opens with a dreamlike sequence where an African-American detective,
Graham Walters (Don Cheadle) in the aftermath of a car crash muses on the disconnected
and alienated experience of contemporary Los
Angeles. He notes that in New York City you
can walk around the city and brush into people, but in Los Angeles you just drive around
and nobody touches you – until you crash into
them. This statement underlies the various
conflict with a Mexican locksmith. Two African-American men (Tate and Chris Bridges)
debate the stereotyping of themselves as criminals before hijacking the car of a district attorney and his wife (Brendan Fraser and Sandra
Bullock). Finally a racist cop (Matt Dillon)
sexually harasses the wife of an affluent television producer (Thandie Newton and Terrence
Howard) after pulling them over.
Throughout the action, the film brings to
boil the various racial paranoia and anxieties
that these encounters spark off and explicitly
lays bare the political and Hollywood narrative fantasy of the American city as melting pot
where the actions of an individual can overcome obstacles and affect the entire world of
the film. Perhaps unsurprisingly it is in the
conflict between African-American and white
American identities that the film is most successful in laying bare the racialised fantasy of
the American dream and Hollywood narrative
aesthetics – unsurprising because this is the
conflict that has been at the heart of American cinema since the marginalisation of Afri-
intellect quarterly | 25
026FEATUREFILM
26
FILM»FEATURE
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW LIVING ALONE
FURTHER INFO. ON INTELLECT BOOKS & JOURNALS: WWW.INTELLECTBOOKS.COM
FURTHER READING
The NewBrutality Film:
Race and Affect
in Contemporary
American Cinema
By Paul Gormley
£19.95 / $39.95
Above Dist. Attourney Richard Cabot (Brendan Fraser) calls home
Above Detective Graham Walters (Don Cheadle) makes a discovery
‘IN TERMS OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN
FOREIGN POLICY THE CHARACTER OF
THE IRANIAN SHOPKEEPER IS PERHAPS
THE MOST DISTURBING, DEPICTED AS A
DERANGED, PARANOID INDIVIDUAL WHO
IS ONLY REDEEMED BY WHAT HE BELIEVES
IS A MYSTICAL ACT OF GOD.’
gages with more recent threats to the question of American identity in the city, notably in
the case of the character of the Iranian shopkeeper and the various Hispanic characters of
the film. In the case of the latter group all the
characters are ‘good’ and honourable, again attempting to negotiate the fragmented city in a
‘realistic’ fashion, perhaps betraying the film’s
liberal sentiments at a time when white paranoia around Los Angeles becoming a predominantly Hispanic city is at its height. In terms
of contemporary American foreign policy the
character of the Iranian shopkeeper is perhaps
the most disturbing, depicted as a deranged,
paranoid individual who is only redeemed by
what he believes is a mystical act of God. Western media images of the Middle East as being
full of deranged and fanatical peoples are not
really challenged by this portrait, and the contemporary threat to the western city remains
at the door of this other in the overall affect
of the film.
Nevertheless the overall affect of Crash
does prolong the pertinence of Baudrillard’s
 | intellect quarterly
comments around the connection between the
American cinema and its celluloid significance
and offers a necessarily updated experience of
contemporary Los Angeles. {
Paul Gormley is Field Leader of Media,
Communication and Screen Studies at the
University of East London and has just
published The New-Brutality Film: Race and
Affect in Contemporary American Cinema
(Intellect 2005).
TELL US WHAT
YOU THINK! IQ IS
LOOKING FOR YOUR
FEEDBACK. SEND
YOUR LETTERS AND
COMMENTS TO:
IQINTELLECTBOOKS.COM
The 1990s saw the emergence of a new kind
of American cinema, which this book calls
the ‘new-brutality film’. Violence and race
have been at the heart of Hollywood cinema
since its birth, but the new-brutality film was
the first kind of popular American cinema
to begin making this relationship explicit.
The rise of this cinema coincided with the
rebirth of a long-neglected strand of film
theory, which seeks to unravel the complex
relations of affect between the screen and
the viewer. The book argues that films like
Falling Down, Reservoir Dogs and Se7en
sought to reanimate the affective impact
of white Hollywood cinema by miming the
power of African-American and particularly
hip-hop culture. Available now.
Hollywood
Utopia: Ecology
in Contemporary
American Cinema
By Pat Brereton
£19.95 / $39.95
Utopianism, alongside
its more prevalent dystopian opposite
together with ecological study has become a
magnet for interdisciplinary research. The
book applies a range of interdisciplinary
strategies to trace the evolution of ecological
representations in Hollywood film from
1950s to the present, which has not been
done on this scale before. Many popular
science fiction, westerns, nature and road
movies, as listed in the filmography are
extensively analysed while particularly
privileging ecological moments of sublime
expression often dramatized in the closing
moments of these films. Available now.