Several years ago, my wife and I had car trouble in Vancouver BC. On the long drive from Seattle, somewhere along the way, the transmission developed a crack and lost its fluid. When we got to Vancouver and limped into the hotel’s parking garage, I discovered that I’d burned out my gears.
We had to call a tow truck to get the car to a local mechanic.
The tow truck driver seemed like a normal-enough kind of guy. Mid-twenties, mullet, frosted tips on top and in the front; a thin, eyebrow-y beard that was nonetheless carefully trimmed and groomed, so it was clear he’d spent his whole life growing it and this was the best he could manage so he’d make sure it looked as good as he could make it; Ali-G-style tinted sunglasses. Canadian trendy. 
My wife went to the hotel lobby to check us out while I dealt with the tow truck. I waited as he got the car hooked up, and then I climbed into the cab. He started maneuvering down the ramps and out of the garage, where we were going to pick up my wife on the sidewalk outside.
Midway down, we had to stop, as the way was blocked by a woman who was trying to pull into a parking space and making a mess of it. She had steered wide, missed the space, and was now executing a twenty-point turn, backing up, going forward, backing up, going forward, to get herself aimed into the spot. And in so doing, she made herself an obstacle to traffic, so we had to wait.
“Man,” said the tow truck driver. “Stupid Chinese drivers.”
I peered more closely, and saw that the driver was indeed a fiftyish Chinese woman.
“They just can’t drive,” said the tow truck driver in a tone of low-key exasperation. “You have bad Chinese drivers where you’re from?”
He wasn’t being gratuitously offensive, so I didn’t want to be unfriendly, but his comments were also pretty tasteless, so I didn’t want to encourage him either.
After a second of consideration, I gave this noncommittal response: “We have a lot of bad drivers in Seattle.” An empty reply that would give him the opportunity to clarify his intentions.
Which he did. “That’s right, you’re from the States,” he said, nodding, and looking at me. “You’ve got all the coloreds down there.”
I didn’t respond, and kept my gaze out the windshield, where the woman was jockeying her car back and forth. I needed the guy to tow my vehicle, but I didn’t want to get into this subject with him, so I let my long silence communicate my disapproval with the tenor of the conversation. He was quiet as well, because he knew right away he’d crossed a line, and that I disapproved strongly of his sentiment.
The interesting thing, though, was the way he said it. “You’ve got all the coloreds down there” was not said with anger, or disgust, or venom. It was a deeply racist remark, but it wasn’t spoken with obvious hate.
No: he said it with hope.
He was, in a real sense, reaching out to me as another human being. He was hoping to make a personal connection, hoping to find somebody who shared his attitude, and with whom he could bond. He was tentative, testing my beliefs, my worldview, carefully exposing some of his own, hopeful that he’d find a kindred spirit with whom he could be himself. He clearly kept these thoughts and feelings hidden, day to day, and offered them cautiously to strangers he thought he could trust.
But I rejected his overture, and made clear my distaste with his offer.
The silence stretched out for long seconds while we waited for the Chinese woman to park her car. Eventually she was done, and we pulled past. There was no conversation for something approaching a full minute when we left the garage and I pointed to my wife waiting on the sidewalk: “There she is.”
She got in, and with the dynamic changed, we were able to make meaningless small talk on the way to the mechanic.
That is what racism in the real world looks like. It’s subtle. It lurks and skulks. It is not approved behavior in polite society, which is absolutely the way it should be, but because of that, it hides in the shadows and speaks only in code. It slithers out with caution, seeking allies, pleading for companionship, and it scuttles back into darkness when it finds a hostile environment. It is elusive, a source of social shame; it is not to be wallowed in publicly. When its adherents do manage to identify one another, they latch on almost in desperation, and they work to inject their poisons into the world while hiding behind a veil of politeness and civility.
Crash turns this upside down and inside out. And while that can be a valid storytelling tactic, it’s cheating if the thing you’re reversing is the thing you’re trying to explore. You don’t get to claim you’re making valid points about human behavior if you’re distorting that behavior beyond any real-world recognition. In an odd sort of way, storytelling works sort of like a scientific experiment, where you isolate elements and control various factors in order to focus analytically on some aspect of the system. In a tapestry movie like Crash, just as with Short Cuts and similarly structured films, you establish the highly artificial interwoven relationships as an acknowledged contrivance in order to get at the deeper truths of human interaction. But Crash invalidates its ostensible observations by manipulating its people as heavily as it does its narrative framework.
Nobody’s saying racist cops don’t exist. They just don’t act the way Matt Dillon does in the film.
Crash says absolutely nothing, and says it over and over again.
That’s why I don’t respect it, and that’s why it’s undeserving of the acclaim it’s received.
(By the way, on the subject of Ebert’s advocacy, he’s been wrong about this kind of thing before. He gave Monster’s Ball four stars, with similar reasoning, and that movie is unnatural, manufactured, and false in the same way Crash is. I didn’t buy Monster’s Ball for a minute, and I didn’t buy Crash either: not because of the storytelling coincidences, but because I couldn’t see any recognizable human behavior through the haze of writerly manipulation in either movie.)
