'Crash'

Directed by Paul Higgis, the film Crash was made in 2004 before being released in 2005. Set in Los Angeles, a culturally diverse city where minority groups make up the majority of the population, it explores ideas concerning racial stereotyping and the prejudice and discrimination that can arise from this.
The film follows the lives of ten main characters, including a white cop (Matt Dillon), a black TV director (Terrence Dashon Howard), and a Latino locksmith (Michael Pena). The characters appear at first to be completely independent from one another but we soon realised their lives are closely interlocked when their stories begin to overlap – or ‘crash’. Shown from a retrospective narrative, the film begins with Detective Graham Waters, a black cop played by Don Cheadle, leading an investigation scene, before taking us back to the beginning of the forty-eight hours in which the complex and racially defined story unfolds.
Roger Ebert summarises the narrative and its themes well when he writes: “Crash tells the stories of whites, blacks, Latinos, Koreans, Iranians, cops and criminals, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless, all defined in one way or another by racism. All are victims of it, and all are guilty of it.”
I think Crash presents an interesting narrative, exploring the hardships and difficulties of belonging to a minority group in the Unites States. It highlights not only the racial tensions between white Americans and non-white Americans, but also between non-white groups with different and diverse cultural backgrounds. I think it successfully challenges ideological ideas of America as a great ‘melting pot’ where different cultures can come together, assimilate to the American lifestyle and live happily ever after as ‘Americans’. We can see from the representation given through Crash that assimilation to the American lifestyle and culture isn’t a simple or easy process, or even a process that is desired – especially when racism or racial stereotyping and discrimination are involved.