Brugge Blog

A group of men from our church had a weekend getaway a few weeks ago, a time to relax and spend time together. It was a really good group, with an easy, trusting atmosphere around it all that made for important and healthy sharing.

And I’m glad that it was a place where honesty and feelings were respected, because our discussion time Saturday night came after watching a powerful and unnerving film, Crash. I was able to voice some of my discomfort with it that night, but it’s still something I’m chewing over and working through.

I first have to say that my interest in violence in any artistic form, be it movies or books or music, has waned dramatically in the past ten years or so. As a teenager I had probably pretty normal male taste in movies, with Clint Eastwood and Bruce Lee being way cool actors, and my reaction to violence being anywhere from cool to funny to righteous. So I’m not sure if there was any particular turning point, besides some gradual growing up, but I know that an essay by Barbara Kingsolver in High Tide In Tucson made a big impression when I first read it. In “Careful What You Let In The Door” she writes about the struggle she had in responding to a reader’s letter that told her how disturbed she was by the violence in her book Animal Dreams. The topic forced her to re-examine her own feeling about the role of violence in writing, or any art.

In time, with practice, you learn that violence isn’t a necessary component of exciting art. You can substitute metaphor and imagery for the clubfoot. And then comes the question: If you don’t have to, why would you want to create violence in art? Are there any good reasons? Maybe yes. Maybe no.

When it was suggested at the retreat that we watch Crash, it was brought up as an important movie that would test anyone’s racial prejudices. My first reaction, however, when it was over had nothing to do with race issues; those points in the movie were clear. What I felt instead was anger that with one scene they had turned what I might have recommended as an important and powerful film into one that seemed just a cut above most of what Hollywood “action” films have to be. The scene that did it was when one of the many cultural clashes that the film focused on was ended with murder. In all of the other confrontations, the tension was was always brought to the edge of violence, and then careened away; the fact that they felt that they didn’t have to in this case was to me of either a sign of weakness on the part of the director/producer, or perhaps just an involuntary reflex from people immersed in a world of violent media. And yet there was so much else in the film that was obviously the result of very careful thinking, that I can’t rule out that they hoped to convey some powerful message in that murder as well.

No matter, I couldn’t, and still can’t, buy any explanation for it. With as much intense imagination and thought that went into coming up with the plot lines for the story, I don’t see any reason why that particular plot line had to end in murder. I don’t see any way that it inherently helped explain motives or resolution better than a plot line that could have been created without violence. To me, it seemed gratuitous and cheap.

In our group discussion afterwards, some people felt that the scene had some important statements to make, but every one of those explanations, it seemed to me, could have been made without murder. Especially since it was the only murder in the film. In Barbara Kingsolver’s essay, she points out that when violence is not connected to its consequences, it is just part of the background, and we grow numb at some level to the results of violent actions. “If you had to sit through all of the funerals, most TV shows would be seven hours long,” she writes, “But you don’t.” And in Crash we don’t have to either. We never learn of any consequence for the murderer, and the effect that the murder had on the other players in the story wasn’t entirely clear, or at the least it’s purpose for the story wasn’t clear.

I agree that the movie presents very tough, gray issues of race relations in the United States, and I’d like to be able to suggest that more people watch it, but I’d rather see us be challenged by these issues without losing some of our humanity along the way.