descent into relativism

Rating: 10/10 (25 March 2011)

As an unfurled roll of 35mm film, "Crash" provides vignettes of disconnected, but intertwined, lives spiraling into individual discovery of the collective reality that surrounds them. Normally plying their lives within their individual frames, a number of people are forced to face personal fears, biases, and insecurities. The director skillfully brings what are totally disconnected relationships and the normal interaction of lives in the metropolis of Los Angeles into an examination of the realities of how closely those lives are connected – and can often collide.
Too many to detail each person here, the main characters are intensely involved in their occupations and seek to overcome personal issues in the midst of internal and external struggle that fuels the issues even further. The thread within the film is a karma-like interconnectedness of these lives. In ways they will never know, each interaction provokes outward reaching ripples in the pond of each of the lives depicted here, causing them to search internally for answers. It brings to mind the story of the angry man coming home to yell at his wife, who yells at the kids, who yell at the dog, who barks at the cat, who jumps on the man – clawing him.
In a culture once embedded with absolutes, ours is growing so relativistic that we are losing any point of reference for our actions. A quote that beautifully book-ended the film (along with the crash analogy) summed this succinctly: "Graham, I think we got rear ended. I think we spun around twice, and somewhere in there, one of us lost our frame of reference. And I'm going to look for it." It is apropos that, in that scene, the detective discovers that the brother he tried to protect by compromising his own ethics, is now dead. The sacrifice of his values was ultimately worthless . . . and saved no one – including himself. This is a great picture to use in a discussion with this culture that is rapidly descending into relativism; the losing of ones' values leaves us with nothing.