Sunday, May 22, 2005

What's in a Lincoln Navigator?

In any real movie, people walk out. They brush past you, spilling popcorn. You make eye contact, but it doesn't last. And you want to know what they're thinking. You're thinking like, it can't be completely unlike what I'm thinking, can it? Maybe I'd walk out too if only....


But these thoughts aren't quite original. What the bloggers are saying about Crash:



What Fido the Yak is saying about Crash:



  • If a hypermodern intertextualizing atom smasher didn't exist, it would have to be invented to explain Paul Haggis' new film. Resonances: Magnolia, Amores Perros, Do the Right Thing, 13 Conversations About One Thing, Traffic, Code Inconnu, Short Cuts.... The list goes on. The allusions to Magnolia are overdone, and perhaps unfortunate. Snowflakes possess a quiet thrill all their own.


  • People still say that Lincoln freed the slaves, often right before they say that Lincoln didn't really free the slaves. (A long story, if you have to ask.) The dead presidents featured in Crash might be there by accident, but don't bet on it.


  • Quilting, northstar motifs--not directly, but pointed to by the invisible traffic cops of the metaphoric.


  • Haggis accomplishes through transposition what other storytellers accomplish through transformation. The characters survive being plugged into mythemes rather nicely. A testament to the power of fictions, good acting, and the close-up. Trajectory does not enter into it.


  • Trajectory really doesn't enter into it, but Haggis plays with the viewer's expectation that it should--so it does enter into it. We could say this is a case of projection rather than trajectory, but I'm saying Haggis has calculated the trajectories of his film's many leads and their refractions through wetwire viewing apparati. These calculations do make it into the film, become part of what it means to see the film. What could possibly be left on the cutting room floor? The Uncanned.


  • It would be really cool to instantaneously become aware of the totality of Ibn al-Haytham's optics. Crash's epiphanies occur against a panoptic horizon, absent fixity, immutability, or totality. Sometimes they are painted on a garage door, and we think we know the characters, where they live, but we don't. What exactly is it that we want our epiphanies to reveal? Ironies?


  • Safety belts. One minute they save your life, the next minute....



posted by Fido the Yak at 1:12 PM.

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