On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative

3. Liberal Anger: Technologies of Anger in Crash

Chapter 3 liberal anger: technologies of anger in crash Do you wanna hear something funny? . . . You’re the best friend I’ve got. jean cabot to her maid, crash Why was the 2005 film Crash so popular? Critics have discussed how Crash actually exacerbates the racial problems that it strives to critique. Directed by Paul Haggis, the film spans two days in Los Angeles , focusing on characters of various races whose lives intersect to varying degrees of calamity. Crash was lauded for its unflinching portrayal of race relations; Roger Ebert called it “a film about progress ,” and Oprah encouraged everyone to go see it (Glaister). The film won numerous awards, including the Academy Award for best picture in 2006, and is used in schools and institutional “diversity training ” programs (Ahlquist and Milner). But ethnic studies scholars and others have repeatedly pointed out that the film actually reinforces racial and gender hierarchies; Crash characterizes “racism” as an individual failing, rather than a product of histories, structures, and practices of power that give shape to our current racial formations. As Hsuan Hsu writes, the film’s “reduction of racism to the scale of individual characters [attitudes and practices] occludes crucial and harmful institutional, legal, and historical aspects of racism” (144). Lundegaard adds that today covert racism, rather than the overt kind displayed in the film, is the real problem.1 The liberal multicultural model of race is limited and ultimately harmful because it contradictorily relies on notions of individual attitudes and “stereotypes,” while also flattening group differences into discrete, relatively homogenous racial and/or ethnic categories, unsituated in space and time. In other words, the dominant model of race relations in the Kim-final.indb 70 Kim-final.indb 70 7/9/13 2:52 PM 7/9/13 2:52 PM technologies of anger in crash 71 U.S. naturalizes racial formations and encourages all parties to stay within those lines, rather than critically historicizing and challenging such formations. Critiques of the film point out crucially important conflicts in ideological framings and constitutive histories, but the question remains , why do audiences have such strong but varying emotional responses —rather than consciously political ones—to this film? This chapter explores how we can understand the film and reactions to it by thinking in terms of ideology as a cognitive tool that produces emotions. Although there are a lot of angry people in the film, why and how does the film try to make us feel good? The film uses representations of the characters’ anger to elicit certain reactions in viewers , whose emotions have ideological effects in the contemporary U.S. In short, the film’s technologies of affect justify and naturalize a liberal multiculturalist and neoliberal worldview that ultimately exacerbates racial oppression. Robyn Warhol defines technologies of affect as popular “established conventions for inspiring certain feelings at particular junctures of the story” (7). Such narrative structures can be ideological instruments, “devices that work through readers’ bodily feeling to produce and reproduce the physical fact of bourgeois subjectivity” (8). She explores the conventions producing Western gendered experiences , and in this chapter I focus on how Crash reproduces liberal multicultural views of race, at the level of the storyworld (i.e., the universe of the characters), the viewers (our world), and the interactions between them. Although the film purports to be about race and racial anger, it actually obliterates the structures that produce race. The kinds of reactions the film seeks to (and does) produce are emotions that assuage guilt and elicit relief from culpability and responsibility . Viewers are supposed to judge negatively characters’ racial anger because the film presents racial anger as ubiquitous (everyone is angry), structurally equivalent (everyone’s anger is as personal as everyone else’s), and ahistorical. By rendering racism a personal failing rather than a structural condition, the film assuages white guilt while also maintaining white supremacy. The film manages this feat through the racial ideology of liberal multiculturalism. Although there are different models of multiculturalism ,2 liberal multiculturalism is the version based on a notion of cultures as homogenous, discrete, and equal—as E. San Juan describes it, “plural cultures of ethnicities coexisting peacefully, without seriKim -final.indb 71 Kim-final.indb 71 7/9/13 2:52 PM 7/9/13 2:52 PM 72 on anger ous contestation, in a free play of monads in ‘the best of all possible worlds’” (Racism 6). Liberal...