Having never encountered noir before, one of my questions coming into the class was and continues to be – what constitutes noir? This is, in part, to ensure that the story that I craft at the end of the class adheres to some loose structure. But genre is a messy thing. Categorization is always uneasy and there are always outliers.
At the start of this course, we had a productive discussion on what the foundational elements of noir might be. We attempted to articulate our own trialectic of noir, but we never reached an easy consensus. What we did decide was that pain was a crucial component of noir. It had to breech taboo subjects. It often addressed some kind of social injustice. But always at its center was pain – both physical and psychological agony.
I mention these two issues because I was surprised to see Crash included in the list of films we were watching for a noir class. Having previously viewed the film, I couldn’t understand how it “fit” into the noir genre. After having read the stories in Los Angeles Noir 2 and watched films that are more clearly and intentionally part of the genre, like Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, I wondered how it fit into the logic of noir. And then I remembered why I never watched that film again after the initial viewing. Pain.
If noir is about pain and injustice, then Crash fulfills both those requirements in full. As an added bonus, it is a film that causes me a great deal of stress while watching it. It induces pain. As a queer woman of color, it is painful to watch.
We want a good guy to cheer on. We want easy resolutions. Like so much of the noir we have covered in the course, this film denies us our requests for a solution. Crash destroys that hope and focuses, instead, on our deep flaws and the violence (here, mostly in the form of racism and sexism) that we visit upon each other. White supremacy is the villain; hegemonic ideologies are our bad guy. And they are pervasive, invisible and ideological forces that manifest materially through our actions, our words.
But, the film is not without its issues, and viewers will likely walk away thinking that the violences of the white, racist characters are ultimately “forgiven” or allowed some kind of resolution. This is why the film is particularly painful to watch. It touches on some crucial issues of social injustice and then allows those most guilty to walk away unscathed. But in that sense, it is not unlike real life.
At the start of this course, we had a productive discussion on what the foundational elements of noir might be. We attempted to articulate our own trialectic of noir, but we never reached an easy consensus. What we did decide was that pain was a crucial component of noir. It had to breech taboo subjects. It often addressed some kind of social injustice. But always at its center was pain – both physical and psychological agony.
I mention these two issues because I was surprised to see Crash included in the list of films we were watching for a noir class. Having previously viewed the film, I couldn’t understand how it “fit” into the noir genre. After having read the stories in Los Angeles Noir 2 and watched films that are more clearly and intentionally part of the genre, like Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, I wondered how it fit into the logic of noir. And then I remembered why I never watched that film again after the initial viewing. Pain.
If noir is about pain and injustice, then Crash fulfills both those requirements in full. As an added bonus, it is a film that causes me a great deal of stress while watching it. It induces pain. As a queer woman of color, it is painful to watch.
We want a good guy to cheer on. We want easy resolutions. Like so much of the noir we have covered in the course, this film denies us our requests for a solution. Crash destroys that hope and focuses, instead, on our deep flaws and the violence (here, mostly in the form of racism and sexism) that we visit upon each other. White supremacy is the villain; hegemonic ideologies are our bad guy. And they are pervasive, invisible and ideological forces that manifest materially through our actions, our words.
But, the film is not without its issues, and viewers will likely walk away thinking that the violences of the white, racist characters are ultimately “forgiven” or allowed some kind of resolution. This is why the film is particularly painful to watch. It touches on some crucial issues of social injustice and then allows those most guilty to walk away unscathed. But in that sense, it is not unlike real life.