The movie Crash takes place in Los Angeles in the aftermath of 9/11.It intertwines numerous linked stories about skepticism/distrust of people towards different ethnic groups, as well as problems in society, social-class, gender roles, and crime. In the beginning they show different characters and we see a glance of their life story, which at first seems completely unrelated to the other characters and their stories.
Throughout the film, we learn more and more about every character and the adversity they face on daily basis. Most of the movie displays racial discrimination that they all reveal in their unintended intertwined web. Unlike most movies there is no apparent good/positive or bad/negative characters. This makes it more realistic, because they are just ordinary people. Who aren’t fully noble or evil but somewhere in the middle. As all people they all have a story on why they are the way they are, some with certain advantages and disadvantages.
Throughout the movie you start to see how all of their lives are connected.In the movie there is several times where you will see deviance. In the movie the racist rude son is also a police office of the Los Angeles Police Department, Officer John Ryan. He also shows deviance when he unlawfully pulls over Mr. Cameron Thayer, a wealthy black man and his wife Christine and tells them to step out of the car and searches them, he touches Christine inappropriately under the pretense of looking for a gun.
Also, embarrassing her husband and forced him to make an apology also. Obviously, as a social norm he wouldn’t have even pulled over the black couple and sexually harassed the wife for no reason. Simultaneously, Ryan is trying to assist his father, who most likely suffers from prostate cancer but whose treatment is unsuccessful because they diagnosed him with a urinary tract infection. He went to the doctor 3 times after and he continues to get nowhere with the doctor or his staff. This shows him as compassionate individual, but later he reveals his rage in discrimination.
He start to shows his bigoted manner towards Shaniqua Johnson, a black HMO employee who doesn’t allow his father visit a better doctor who isn’t over worked or at least get a second opinion. On the other hand the black HMO employee who states she is a supervisor also shows deviance because she states she is going to deny the ill fathers request because the son was rude and racists towards her. As a social norm that as a HMO supervisor you are supposed to help anyone that has the insurance that you are working with.
She violated this norm because the racists’ rude son is not the policy holder of the insurance and she should have treated the request as she would any other case that is important regardless of what was said and kicked him out. Instead she denied the case and kicked him out. It seemed very unethical and she showed a lack of integrity for someone on the administrative side of the health care field.Throughout the movie they show labeling theory.
An example is when the district attorneys wife Jean did not want Daniel the Mexican locksmith to change the locks in her house. Due to the fact he was Mexican she assumes he is a ‘gangbanger’ and had tattoos which she assumed was prison tattoos, she believed that he was going to sell a copy of a lock to his ‘homies’, so they can rob their house. Another example of labeling theory is when people vandalized Farhads store. After they saw their store destroyed a on the wall they noticed ‘towelhead’ and other racial offensive annotations were written on the wall.
When in actuality they are not Arabs but they are Persian. Persians live in what is now Iran but they are not Arab nor do they speak Arabic. But because of how they look and the color of their skin, the people who committed the vandalism assumed that Farhad and his family were Arabs. So due to the social ignorance after the 9/11 event it lead to a backlash in the form of hate crimes and discrimination on Middle Eastern people and Muslims.In the movie you still see differential association between Peter Waters and Anthony, the two young black men. Peter decides to follow his friend and steal cars and brings them to a chop shop for money, instead of getting a job. This also goes hand in hand with secondary deviance, as they steal cars throughout the movie.
Between them you can also see assimilation, Peter stated he enjoyed country music; he was starting to ‘get it’ and wrote a country song himself. He even stated he liked skating and hockey, which was unbelievable to Anthony. He thought he just said that to ‘piss him off’, but in actuality Peter truly did enjoy those things. Anthony didn’t believe it because skating and hockey are not favored with the Black community but are culturally popular with Caucasians. This leads to Peters demise as the young police officer Tom Hansen does not believe Peter truly likes country music and ice skating and is pulling his leg.
Officer Hansen thinks Peter is making fun of him and racially stereotyping him. When in actuality it is office Hansen who is because he cannot fathom m Peter liking ice skating and wanting to be a goalie. Peter notices the saint on Officer Hansen’s dashboard which make he gets a kick out of because he has the same one. Before he can explain it escalates to Office Hansen yelling at Peter to quit laughing at him and Peter telling him to chill out and Peter is shot by Officer Hansen. This leads to primary deviance as he throws Peters body out of the car and burns his own car so there is no trace that he committed an isolated act of murder.
