Crash - a post by Ian

I recently sat down with a friend to watch the movie “Crash”. I’ve seen this movie many times before but the reason I watched it this time is because my friend had never seen it before and I thought they really should. Anyway, usually when I watch it the same things grab my attention, like the portrayal of racism in Los Angeles, and some of the repercussions that come from such racism. But this time something else caught my attention that I never really thought of before. During the scene with the father and his young daughter (who is hiding underneath her bed because she thought she heard a gunshot), the father tells his daughter a story about a magical cloak. This cloak, given to him by a flying fairy, was meant to protect him from all of the dangers in the world, and he was supposed to pass on this cloak on his daughter’s fifth birthday. It wasn’t the idea of protection from the outside world that caught my attention, but the fact that although the story was really far fetched, because it came from her father, she believed it. This screamed out at me and made me think about how children are so vulnerable to believe whatever adolescents tell them, and a lot of what they believe comes from an opinion based upon what someone from an older generation has told us. Is this universally true? I’m not sure. But what I’m wondering is if our generation of children and the generations before are even given a chance to think for themselves anymore, or if they base their beliefs on what they are told by those they look up to.

This reminded me of two things from class this semester. Firstly, the Simpson’s episode ‘Homer the Heretic’ which we were told to watch. In one of the scenes, the Simpson family is sitting in their kitchen and Homer is talking about why he shouldn’t have to go to church and Bart (his son) gets himself all worked up into the “preach it!” type mode and therefore this is a reflection not on Bart’s beliefs, but himself mirroring what Homer is saying. It is basically justifying it, with the though “if dad can do it, so can I.” The second thing this reminded me of was the Smith reading, who suggests that what we think is often triggered by the media and most of the time we are not prone to think for ourselves anymore.