I don't have the answers yet, but I have learned enough to be dangerous, and ask better questions..

The problem with making a statement on anything is that it comes across as necessarily too one-sided. Gay activists are too gay. Women's rights activists are feminazis. Whenever someone takes pains to initiate change, they have to make a huge case to penetrate consciousness. Then people get bored with the too-muchness, and turn off. "That doesn't affect me. Hope those people will shut up soon." Social change may happen, but soon the initiators become pariahs, and everyone nearby sighs when they open their mouths. "Why can't they just let it go?"

This thought was triggered by editorials I've seen in the LA Times questioning why Crash should have won best film. I question this myself - though I didn't see the film. My sense is that there were so many better films made last year. But these editorialists were particularly questioning the heavy-handedness of 'statement' films (emphasis mine) and the fact that while they do highlight an issue, they don't necessarily depict the everyday reality of a situation. In this case, the editorilaists felt that LA is not some racism-rampant place where folks just can't get along, and have no contact unless they crash into one another. Crash was too one-sided in its depiction of LA, or any city, and too harsh in its judgment on our inability to get along.

Hmm. To this, I would say this: does that statement arise from the cushioned safety of a nice, white male  priviledged view?

While I agree that statement films over-emphasize a situation which may not be happening every hour of every day to every person, they do so in order to highlight that in fact an out-of-balance condition exists, and needs rectifying. Perhaps it's not important to an LA opinion columnist that racism still exists. Perhaps it's not true, or so electrifying if it were true, that Crash-like situations are happening every moment. But the fact is, talk to people moving in and out of the invisible but staunchly defended boundaries of race and sex in this society, and you will see that their journey is rather different. Their experiences contain subtle reminders, daily nudges that things ain't as equal as they seem. They're constantly made aware that people don't love their neighbors like they should. And that those with priviledge are necessarily myopic in their views on these subjects, since it doesn't affect them differently.

To make a film with less commentary on racism might indeed be more reflective of daily reality, but since reality has done so little to nudge mainstream consciousness forward, how does a reality-based film achieve this miracle? It can't unless it moves what lies in the background to prime visibility in the foreground, and therefore draws your attention to that which is normally occluded from your view. Too-muchness is required in order to get your attention focused on a background that you've never before noticed. This is why filmmakers do it. The problem is of course that an overdose of anything frustrates as much as an underdose. So perhaps Crash was too heavy-handed, too moralizing, too condescending. I don't know, since I didn't see it.

But maybe it made some people see the background a little more clearly, and if they did, perhaps they noticed the places where here there be dragons. If so, then the filmmakers deserve some kudos for making a film that illuminates, even if illumination on social issues isn't what drives most of us to park ourselves in front of flickering light for 90 minutes.