Talking Trash: bell hooks in dialogue on the movie "Crash"
I wanted to say something in class when the movie Crash was mentioned because I was aware of this article, but I kept my mouth shut since I hadn't read it yet...
Trash on Crash
Anyhow, I'm reading it now, I'll comment on this post with my thoughts...
I have to say though, I really loved the movie... I saw it a year ago when it was all the buzz in my Gender Representations in Popular Culture class... which is interesting, since that class owed a lot to the work of bell hooks, so I'm pretty ready to hear what she has to say about it!
Trash on Crash
Anyhow, I'm reading it now, I'll comment on this post with my thoughts...
I have to say though, I really loved the movie... I saw it a year ago when it was all the buzz in my Gender Representations in Popular Culture class... which is interesting, since that class owed a lot to the work of bell hooks, so I'm pretty ready to hear what she has to say about it!
posted by Unknown at 11:10 AM
1 Comments:
Hrm... I read about half the page. (Hey! It's REALLY LONG!)
Anyway, my main question I'm left with is: Do bell hooks and Gilda Sheppard think the world is better or worse off for Crash? I think the film did portray stereotypes and character foils and all, but is this given any sense of redemption by the theme that stereotypes and prejudice automatically lead to conflict in a contained environment (in the movie, it's the crowded metropolitan of LA)...
I love the movie's thematic openner, along the lines of "Sometime to connect to people at all, to be able to feel one another, we have to crash into them"
I wonder if any portrayal of race and gender couldn't be analyzed to the point of being called racist and sexist... the cinematizing of a story always feeds into the cultural symbols that make the portrayal more stereotypical (in fact, isn't the definition of stereotypical, devoid of it's connotations, somewhere along the line of cultural symbols?)
I definitely appreciated the Jared Ball quote:
“Media are not merely “television, radio, film, books, Internet, etc. These are the technologies that make media available. Such a definition discourages a proper understanding of media as societal symbols, definitions, norms and ideology all intimately linked to questions of who will hold power and how that power will be maintained.”
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