Moving at the speed of life, we are bound to collide with each other.

You think

you know who you are. You have no idea.

These are taglines from the film “Crash” (2004/I) from director and screenwriter
Paul Haggis. "Crash" is a movie that brings out bigotry and racial stereotypes.
People are born with good hearts, but they grow up and learn prejudices. The
movie is set in Los Angeles, a city with a cultural mix of every nationality. Issues of
race and gender will cause a group of strangers to physically and emotionally
collide as their different paths cross inadvertently and unperceived. Several stories
interweave during two days in Los Angeles involving a collection of identifiable
characters, each of which will bring to the film a distinct vocabulary and syntax
which also reflects the cultural background of the character.

The movie starts off with a minor car accident in where Kim Lee rear-ends Detective
Ria and Detective Graham Waters. In the scene, Ria is approaching Kim Lee who is
ranting to the Police Officer shouting
“It’s her fault! MEXICANS don’t know how to drive-They brake too fast!!” At least
that’s the message she intended for the decoder. Detective Ria responds with
quick sarcasm, while illustrating perfect examples of phonetic and phonological
differences between English and other languages or non-native English speakers.

Motorcycle Cop: Calm down, ma'am.

Kim Lee: I am calm.

Motorcycle Cop: I need to see your registration and insurance.

Kim Lee: Why? Not my fault! It's her fault! She do this!

Ria: [approaching] My fault?

Motorcycle Cop: Ma'am, you really need to wait in your vehicle.

Ria: [appraoching] My fault?

 Kim Lee: Stop in the middle of street! Mexicans! No know how to drive! She
blake too fast!

Ria: “I /bleik/ too fast, I /bleik/ too fast? I’m sorry, you no 'sE my /bleik/ lights?

Motorcycle Cop: [to Ria] Ma'am...

Ria: [to Kim Lee] See, I stop when I see long line of cars stop in front of me.
Maybe you 'sE over steering wheel, you /bleik/ too.”

Motorcycle Cop: [to Ria] Ma'am...

Ria: Officer, can you please write down in your report how shocked I am to be
hit by an Asian driver?

Kim Lee: I [kawl] [Im-i-gley-shuhn] on you!

Note how redundancy plays a major role in this statement, as she clearly identifies
her intentions of mocking Kim Lee. Though Ria might be shown to be racist toward
Asians, as she criticizes an Asian woman's driving, she also highlights some of the
phonetic differences listed in our textbook, A Concise Introduction to Linguistics,
Second Edition, ©2009, Pearson Education, Inc. On page 72, Box 3-3, it reads:
Japanese speakers tend to substitute the r sound for the l sound. As seen above
with /bleik/. This is due to the lack of /l/ phoneme in Japanese, though they do have
allophones that sound similar for letters l and d. Please note, I am not trying to
make the same cultural reference as Detective Graham Waters, a black cop (Don
Cheadle), when he constantly refers to Ria as Mexican when in reality she is Puerto
Rican. Nor am I trying to confuse Chinese with Japanese, only listing the similarities
between the two languages. I am also going along with the fact that the Chinese
couple are actually, Koreans and were intentionally cast as the "Chinese" couple to
underscore the fact that most non-Asians cannot or don't care to differentiate
between the various Asian nationalities and instead choose to refer to all of them
(Chinese, Korean, Thai, Japanese, etc.) as "Chinese", like the characters in the
movie do.

Graham: [on the phone] Mom, I can't talk to you right now, okay? I'm having
sex with a white woman. OK, where were we?

Ria: I was white, and you were about to jerk off in the shower.
 Graham: Oh, shit. Come on. I would have said you were Mexican, but I don't
think it would have pissed her off as much.

Ria: You want a lesson? I'll give you a lesson. How 'bout a geography lesson?
My father's from Puerto Rico. My mother's from El Salvador. Neither one of those
is Mexico.

Graham: Ah. Well then I guess the big mystery is, who gathered all those
remarkably different cultures together and taught them all how to park their cars
on their lawns?

The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds

and so have far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The
total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand,
including tonal variation, which is only about an eighth as many as English. They
make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. Chinese
features Subject Verb Object word order, and like many other languages in East
Asia, makes frequent use of the topic-comment construction to form sentences.
Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words, another
trait shared with neighboring languages like Japanese and Korean.

The next scene will also display language miscommunication between different
cultures. Farhad (Shaun Toub) is a Persian store owner who is afraid for his safety.
He is depicted as frustrated by the racial harassment he experiences in the United
States (despite being an American citizen), as well as deterred by difficulties with
speaking English. To protect his store - the only thing his family has - he goes to a
gun shop and attempts to buy a gun. The gun store owner quickly becomes
frustrated with Farhad's conversation with his daughter Dorri in Persian, leading to
harassment from the owner, who believes that Persians are Arabs and therefore,
terrorists, one of these comments being "Yo, Osama, plan the jihad on your own
time." The owner refuses to sell Farhad a gun, but finally sells the gun to Dorri after
being cryptic and lecherous about which bullets she needs. The gun shop owner is
also showing ethnocentrism in this scene.

Dorri: [to Farhad] Go, wait in the car.

Farhad: [to Dirk] You are ignorant man! –Example of shortening

sentences
 Dirk: I'm ignorant. You're liberating my country, and I'm flying seven four
sevens into your mud huts and incinerating my friends. Get the fuck out of my
store! – Shows us with tone of voice
and word choice he clearly is very upset.

Farhad: I am not yelling! I am upset! -Example of how tone of voice

can change
interpretation of a message.

Ethnocentrism is the act of judging other cultures by the standards of your

culture; it is also the belief that your culture is superior to other cultures.

Ethnocentrism is another concept that the Persian shopkeeper demonstrates. As

cross cultural understanding increases, the opportunity for static or interference

in communication decreases, pg 5 in our text.

It is ironic that even though on multiple accounts the shopkeeper is discriminated

against, he still judges other cultures and considers his culture as inferior to others.
I will discuss further later in the report. (I was about to correct my double negation
in the previous sentence but thought I would point out a common characteristic of
(HE), Hispanic English.)

Rick Cabot (Brendan Fraser) is the white District Attorney of Los Angeles who
manipulates racial politics in order to further his career. He and his wife Jean are
carjacked by Anthony and Peter, both of whom are black. Jean Cabot’s (Sandra
Bullock) racial prejudices clearly have escalated after this incident. When Daniel
Ruiz (a Mexican-American locksmith) changes the locks to her house, she insists
that the locks be changed again the following morning in fear that Ruiz is keeping
an extra copy of their house key. Jean uses compounding words such as ‘gang-
banger’ and ‘homies’, short for home-boys.

Jean: Oh really? And he's not gonna go sell our key to one of his gang banger
friends the moment he is out our door?..Now I am telling you, your amigo
(borrowed word) in there is gonna sell our key to one of his homies and this
time..

Her tone of voice and pitch eliminated any possibility of static interference in
delivering the message to not only her husband but to everyone in the house,
including Daniel. Daniel in this scene displays non verbal communication as he
leaves the two sets of keys on the counter and gives Jean a modest smile, as if
saying “You’re wrong about me lady.”

Another subtle example of HE in this film is when Maria, Jean’s housekeeper, says
“I'm sorry Mrs. Jean. It's okay? I go home now?” –Example of HE (verb deletion)

Jean later displays to Maria gratitude and calls her “her closest friend.” Jean’s
vocabulary includes words like patronize, while still using more average slang words
like “gonna.” Despite the fact that Anthony (Chris Bridges, aka Ludacris), dislikes
white people as much as Jean hates blacks, they both share some of the same
vocabulary and syntax. Take a look at the following:

Anthony: Look around! You couldn't find a whiter, safer or better lit part of
this city. But this white woman sees two black guys, who look like UCLA students,
strolling down the sidewalk and her reaction is blind fear. I mean, look at us! Are
we dressed like gang-bangers? Huh? No. Do we look threatening? No. Fact, if
anybody should be scared around here, it's us: We're the only two black faces
surrounded by a sea of over-caffeinated white people, patrolled by the triggerhappy
LAPD. So you tell me, why aren't we scared?

Peter: Because we have guns?

Anthony: You could be right.

Anthony uses many compound words as

well as analogies, which would make one
assume though he is a thief and lives in
the ‘hood’, he is an educated black man.
Ludacris plays on my favorite characters in
this film. Scenes such as:

Anthony: Listen to it man. Nigga this, Nigga that. You think white go around
callin' each other "honky" all day, man? "Hey, honky, how's business?" "Going
great, cracker, we're diversifying!"

Anthony: You see any white people in there waiting an hour and thirty two
minutes for a plate of spaghetti? Huh? And how many cups of coffee did we
get?

Peter: You don't drink coffee and I didn't want any.

 Anthony: That woman poured cup after cup to every single white person
around us. Did she even ask you if you wanted any?

Peter: We didn't get any coffee that you didn't want and I didn't order, and
this is evidence of racial discrimination? Did you happen to notice our waitress was
black?

Anthony: And black women don't think in stereo types? You tell me something
man. When was the last time you met one who didn't think she knew everything
about your lazy ass? Before you even open your mouth, huh?

Anthony: That waitress sized us up in two seconds. We're black and black
people don't tip. So she wasn't gonna waste her time. Now somebody like that?
Nothing you can do to change their mind.

Peter: So, uh... how much did you leave?

Anthony: You expect me to pay for that kind of service?

Instantly after watching that scene, I remembered why this was and still continues
to be one of my favorite movies.

An extremely powerful part of the film is when Christine Thayer Thandie Newton) is
molested by Officer Ryan after she and her husband, Cameron are pulled over for
her giving oral sex to her husband while he was driving them home. She becomes
furious with her husband because he does not act to defend her. Keep in mind,
they are upper class African Americans who use vocabulary such as: appreciate,
warning, cocktail dress, satisfied.

Cameron: I mean, sooner or later, you gotta find out what it's really like to be
black.
Christine: Oh, fuck you man! Like you'd know! The closest you ever came to
being black, Cameron, was watching "The Cosby Show". Thank you Mista
Police man, you’ve been mighty kind to us black folk!

Cameron: Yeah, well, at least I wasn't watching it with the rest of the equestrian
team.

The next day, Tony Danza plays a producer of the show Cameron directs. He
approaches a very key part in the film by pointing out to Cameron that one of the
actors is talking “less black” Using the following example: “Don’t be talkin bout dat”
to “Don’t talk to me about that”. The AAE changed to SAE.
If you have not seen this scene, Thandie Newton (Christine) does a wonderful job of
illustrating AAE despite her the fact she is British and has an accent in real life.
(Thandie Newton is the daughter of a Zimbabwean mother from the Shona people
and a British father). Later, by a twist of fate, Officer Ryan is the man who willingly
endangers himself to save her life as she is trapped in an overturned car due to a
car accident.

My favorite part of the film, though is when Daniel, the locksmith, tells his daughter
the following story:

Lara: How far can bullets

go?
Daniel: They go pretty
far but they usually get
stuck in something and
stop.
Lara: What if they
don't?
Daniel: Are you thinking about that bullet that came through your window?
(….He goes on to talk to his daughter about a visit from a fairy.)

Daniel: She had these little stubby wings, like she could've glued them on,
you know, like I'm gonna believe she's a fairy. So she said, "I'll prove it." So she
reaches into her backpack and she pulls out this invisible cloak and she ties it
around my neck. And she tells me that it's impenetrable. You know what impenetrable
means? It means nothing can go through it. No bullets, nothing. She told me
that if I wore it, nothing would hurt me. So I did. And my whole life, I never got
shot, stabbed, nothing. I mean, how weird is that?

This scene in the film was probably the most heartfelt in my opinion. We can

analyze this further by referring back to chapter 6- Pragmatics in our textbook.

Pragmatics is the study of the interaction of context and meaning. By telling his

daughter this fictional story he is assuring her of her well being despite the bad

neighborhood they might live in. Speech acts are performative sentences in which
the speaker is actually performing an action, not merely conveying information by

speaking the sentence. Later in the film, this ‘invisible impenetrable cloak’ will save

him from a bullet, as his daughter jumps to protect him from the Farhad. After all

the hardships the shopkeeper experiences, focusing on his store being destroyed,

he assumes without any proof that it was the doing of the Hispanic man who

replaced his lock the day before.

This piece will circle back to the beginning of the story when Dorri is at the gunshop

and purposely buys blanks for her father’s gun.

Culture Shock is displayed at the end of the movie when Ludacris releases Asians

for sale in China Town area of LA. You see a young Asian in front of a TV store in

awe.

Anthony: [as he let go all the Asian people that are in the truck] Look, here's

40 bucks. Buy everybody chop suey. You understand?

[an Asian man takes the money and doesn't say anything as he leaves]

Anthony: Dopey fucking Chinaman.

When and why we laugh is an example of verbal and non verbal

communication, which also lead to death of Lawrence Tate’s character, Peter.

In fact, Peter expressed shock in his face as he opens his hand to show

Hanson his exact same St. Christopher. Hanson thought Peter was pulling a

gun from his pocket based on his appearance.

Officer Hanson: Something else funny?

Peter: [laughing] People, man... people.
 Everyone code switches between styles of speech or registers. Word Choice is

probably the single most important indicator of formality or situational dialect,

including the use of everyday slang, pg 225. Many of the characters switch from

being bad-person-to-hero in ways that will surprise you. I love this movie and I

am glad I watched it 4 extra times. Each time I noticed something that was new

about the characters and recognized linguistic characteristics. The director, Paul

Haggis, did a brilliant job in my eyes of portraying the cold reality and issues of

race while making each of the characters real.

By:

Laura Aguilera

8/14/09