1.2 The Intention of the Director of the Movie Crash
Paul Haggis has said: “The purpose of my composing and shooting of this movie is to explore the relationship between people. I hope that the audience is not just to feel the problem what I had pointed out, more important is to promote people to share their love after watching this movie.” In this movie, everyone's survival pressure is too great, and they are suppressed and distorted, thus they became irritable. Actually the movie makes us feel not only the real and complex human nature, but also the conflicts and contradictions between the races. In the film, Haggis shew that everyone has good sides or bad sides and everyone has different problems and sins. The most wonderful thing is that when we saw each conflict or crime of the film, the abhor and compassion have been emerged at the same time when we went deep into this movie.
Actually at the beginning of the film, it has already explained the essence of the movie (You know, go through any city, you can brush past people, and people bump into you, but in Los Angeles, no one will touch you. We're always like be isolated by metal and glass. We miss the sense of touch, so we collide with each other, only in this way we could feel the
sense of touch). This is why the characters in the film are constantly rubbing and colliding with others. People living in modern society, like the water droplets in the sea, are continuously moving and are associated with others closely.
II. Theories Relating to Ethnicity
A conflict is a sign of discrimination, and there are many roots to cause discrimination among people, and the most typical one is derived from literary doctrine. There are three theories that can help us understand the source of discrimination better, and explore the evolution of discrimination in the changes of social development, in that we study the formation of multiple discriminations.
2.1 Ethnocentrism
The first theory is ethnocentrism. Simply we define the racial centralism as one person forces another ethnic group to accept value sand theories of his own nation’s, and ethnocentrism is often accompanied by prejudice and discrimination. People who hold this doctrine usually judge a group by their own consciousness, and then judge everyone of this group with this mistake conception. From here we can see the signs of discrimination. In this paragraph we mainly discuss the superiority of the white race. As early as in ancient Greece, some famous ideologists have already defended its aggression from the perspective of racial superiority. As Plato said: “The people of Athens can not enslave the people of Athens or initiate wars between themselves, because of the same lineage and emotion between the Greek city states”; however Plato is definitely on the alien war, and allows to take each other alien into their slaves. Aristotle also holds a similar theory that people with higher ration can give orders, and the lower one can only submit to orders. This racist idea is widely spread in European society later. And in the culture of white, white symbolizes goodness, purity and beauty, while black is a symbol of evil, decay and ugliness. In 1620, there was an English poet who described Africans as black and ugly, while the British were like God.
2.2 Cultural Relativism
Mel Hulse Covitz pointed out that the core of cultural relativism is to respect differences and require the training of mutual respect. Cultural relativism emphasizes a variety of values, and emphasizes seeking understanding and harmony instead criticizing or even destroying those who do not coincide with their original culture. It is simply to acknowledge and respect different cultures and to communicate on an equal basis. Many scholars have conducted studies of this doctrine later on.