Introduction Three’s a Crowd: Crash (2005)

Abstract

Crash (2005), Paul Haggis’s account of racial intolerance in Los Angeles, stages a seemingly intractable conflict between white and black. The tension starts with a scenario of white racism familiar to most contemporary American audiences: an incident at a traffic stop. John Ryan (Matt Dillon), a working-class LA policeman, pulls over a young professional black couple, Christine and Cameron Thayer (Thandie Newman and Terrence Howard), ostensibly for a moving violation. While the husband looks on helplessly, the cop submits the wife to a body search, which she will characterize later as a “finger fuck.” Ryan pins the black woman against the couple’s car, first putting his hand between her legs, and then running his fingers slowly toward her crotch. The white policeman’s prurience aligns him with a common trope of the American slave narrative: the white plantation master who uses his black female slaves for sexual satisfaction.

It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.

—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents¹

And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited.

—Leviticus 16:22