By Elaine Cassel

“In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.” So begins the movie Crash, a riveting story that illustrates the power of the situation to change people and outcomes. The movie also explores how stereotypes and prejudices shape behavior and affect outcomes. All of these topics are central to social psychology, which studies the effects of people and situations on human behavior.

Written and directed by Paul Haggis, Crash never seems forced or contrived, even as the characters drift in and out of situations with each other where roles and outcomes are not constant. Several stories are interwoven with these interrelated characters. The characters and the stories set up well-known stereotypes of police officers and minorities.

However, the movie has another level. Victims of stereotyping stereotype others. People who were victimized become victims. These role reversals are played out as the situation changes. The cop who thinks he is not a racist (unlike his partner, Sgt. Ryan) mistakes an innocent gesture of the black hitchhiker to whom he offered a ride as a threat and kills him with his service revolver.

Sgt. Ryan, the stereotypical white cop who preys on blacks, throws his weight around and may be top dog when he is on patrol, but he is low on the food chain when tangling with a welfare worker who does not want to certify Ryan’s father’s need for financial assistance. The welfare worker is a black woman—and even though we have sympathy for Ryan’s father, we can’t help but feel the justice of the moment as the black woman gives the white Ryan a dose of his own medicine.

A Persian shop owner is mistaken for an Arab and, thus, a “terrorist.” Although it is a false stereotype to think that all Arabs are terrorists, it is even a bigger error to think that people with a certain physical appearance and accent are Arabs. The movie makes the point that Americans often don’t know the difference between Iraqis and Syrians, who are Arabs, and Iranians, who are Persians. “They all look alike,” is the unspoken message that explains the stereotype.

But the Persian shop owner, coming in one morning to find his shop trashed, falls into a prejudice trap of his own. He assumes that the Hispanic locksmith, who changed the locks on the shop the night before, must be the culprit. In a rage, he sets out to kill the innocent man—though through a twist of fate, the gun he fires at the man and his daughter turns out not to be loaded. The locksmith is also thought to be a gang member by a wealthy woman—to her that is what all Hispanics are.

Ryan’s abrasive, sexist behavior comes back to haunt him when he comes face-to-face with one of his victims in a literally life and death situation. In that scene, Ryan seems to gain some insight into his piggish behavior. And although the movie doesn’t beat us over the head with the message, we get the sense that many of the characters join Ryan in experiencing the reflective mirror of bigotry being turned back on them—so that they see themselves through the same lens as others saw them.

Crash is a movie that makes you think the writer must be well versed in social psychology. But that’s only because social psychology puts labels and explanations on behaviors that are all too common in real life. And unlike the movies, real life is often missing the symmetry of a perpetrator becoming a victim and gaining insight into the misperceptions and injustices that are often the ultimate outcomes of prejudice and bigotry.

Elaine Cassel, Marymount University and Lord Fairfax Community College