It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know?

Rating: 10/10 (12 March 2006)

It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.
The opening quote of this movie demonstrates the lack of a connection between members of our society. Although Los Angeles is the city specifically mentioned in the quote, LA symbolizes our American society as a whole. The speaker, Graham, has the belief that we are looking for a connection to each other. We cannot find this connection on an emotional level which is what would be ideal, so we find it on a physical level where we "crash into each other" in a figurative way. Although the "crashing" is figurative, literal violence can be a way of "crashing". An example of this happening in the film is the Persian shop keeper "crashing into" Daniel the locksmith. The shop keeper lacks a connection to society that is mostly due to a language barrier; his spoken English is fairly poor and he is unable to read English but he has to work with people who speak and write only English on a daily basis. He feels isolated from society and is unable to obtain an emotional connection with anyone except his wife and daughter. He has trouble communicating with Daniel the locksmith which leads to his shop being robbed. After he feels like he has lost everything, he comes to the conclusion that Daniel must have robbed his store. He makes the decision to find Daniel and threaten him to get his money back. The crash occurs when the shopkeeper pulls his gun out. He fires it toward Daniel but Daniel's daughter jumps in front of him so that the shot is fired at her. The result is great distress for only several moments, most likely about ten to fifteen seconds. The shopkeeper is distressed because he thinks that he has killed a child and Daniel is distressed because he thinks his daughter has been killed. Because there were blanks in the gun, Daniel's daughter is not killed. The end result of the crash is the shopkeeper feeling like his life is not over and Daniel feeling grateful for his daughter's life.
One truth of American society that is depicted in this film is that racism can be found in most everyone. There is more to the movie, but this is the most prominent theme and easiest to talk about. The director, Paul Haggis shows this by revealing racism toward and by many different races instead of just focusing on two different races. Many other films have made themes with racism of white people toward black people, occasionally black people toward white people. More films have depicted, but rarely made a theme of, racism toward Latino minorities. However, this movie showed all different angles of racism such as black to Asian, Asian to white, white to Middle Eastern, Middle Eastern to Latino and almost any other mixtures of these races. Paul Haggis also showed the truth of racism by portraying how the little, every-day type of comments that we usually ignore or maybe laugh at can be hurtful. As these comments were spread to others, anger in society grew.