Trinity Goes to the Movies: Crash-Totally Depraved
Mark 15: 6-15
August 26, 2007
Have you ever had one of those dreams where you find yourself falling from some terrifying height? When you wake up, you are perspiring heavily and your heart is pounding. It's a truly frightening experience. Interestingly this dream of falling is one of the most common of all dreams, it crosses cultures as wells as individuals. Psychologists tell us that dreams of falling symbolise a fear of letting go, a desire to be in control. Free falling through space, arms flailing wildly, is a truly horrifying thought.
But that is exactly the image that theologians have long used to describe the human condition. Using the story of Adam as a template Augustine, Martin Luther and John Calvin in particular developed the notion of fallen human kind. Human beings have fallen into sin and can't get out.
As Saint Paul writes in Romans, “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” This verse says that all people fall short of the glory of God. That means that we are completely unable to reach the perfect goodness that God requires of us. We fall short. We miss it. We may try to reach it, but we can't. We fail completely. Protestant theologians have consistently argued that we fail completely and utterly in any attempts to be obedient to God. John Calvin, the grandfather of Presbyterianism, chose the rather depressing term “total depravity” to explain this. He didn't mean we were totally evil. It does mean that of all of us are sinners and secondly that every dimension of the human self is corrupted by sin. Properly understood this doctrine means that although Christians and non Christians can do much good, no part of our being; body, mind, soul or spirit and nothing we do are free from the corruption of sin. It means that although there may be all kinds of progress in history, we stay basically the same.
On the surface the movie Crash, which won the Academy Award for best picture in 2005, is just another movie about racism in the United States. But scratch just a bit below the surface and a much broader and more sophisticated theme emerges. Crash is about the total depravity of human beings. This is a movie about sin.
Crash takes place in L.A., a city with no center but a network of highways and suburbs. The story unravels over a 2-day chain-reaction period during which the lives of strangers intersect. The characters belong to many different ethnic groups, who all suffer from prejudice, and who all practice it. The movie doesn't assign simplistic "good" and "evil" labels but shows that the same person can be sometimes a victim, sometimes a victimizer.
Crash is a film that depends for much of its effect on the clash of coincidental meetings. A white racist cop sexually assaults a black woman, then the next day saves her life. His white partner, a rookie, is appalled by his behavior, but nevertheless later kills an innocent man because he leaps to a conclusion based on race. A black man is so indifferent to his girlfriend's Latino heritage that he can't be bothered to remember where she's from. After a carjacking, a liberal politician's wife insists all their locks be changed -- and then wants them changed again, because she thinks the Mexican-American locksmith will send his "homies" over with the pass key. The same locksmith has trouble with an Iranian store owner who thinks the Mexican-American is black. But it drives the Iranian crazy that everyone thinks he is Arab, when they should know that Iranians are Persian. Buying a gun to protect himself, he gets into a shouting match with a gun dealer who has a lot of prejudices about, yes, Arabs.
And so on, around and around. The movie is constructed as a series of parables, in which the characters meet and meet again; the movie shows them both sinned against, and sinning. The most poignant scene is probably the one in which a mother can see no evil in her son who is corrupt, and finds nothing but fault with her son who is a kind man and good to her. She thinks she knows them.
The themes of the film include social class, power, and politics, but the primary theme is race. Without exception, each of the characters in the film carries deeply held stereotypes about people who look differently. Just like you and me. What separates them from you and me is that we are privileged to hear them actually voice their stereotypes and act on their racism unbridled by political correctness. This happens as each character collides or crashes if you will with another.
This is where the tension of the film is engrossing. It is also, where the film is most genuine. Real people are forced to confront their stereotypes. Some find their stereotypes confirmed; others find their stereotypes contradicted, some experience both. Through this process, no character is left untainted by racism and yet no character is irredeemable from its evil. We are shocked to find the most hated character performing the most heroic act and the most likable character committing the most deplorable act. It doesn't mesh with our Hollywood expectations but it corresponds to our real life experience. As we will see its also good theology
There are not many redeeming or likable characters in this movie. Early on as the racism of the characters is exposed, we desperately start to search for a decent, caring, tolerant person just like us. We begin to identify with a young white police officer, Tommy Hansen. Tommy's partner abuses his power in humiliating a black woman and her husband. Tommy, like the viewer, is horrified as he watches it happen. The next day Tommy tries to atone for his partner's racism by saving a black man from being shot by other white police officers. We too have wanted to stop the cycle of violence and racial hatred, and we are relieved that someone has done so. Tommy appears to be a good man.
But late at night, when Tommy is off duty and in his own car, he even picks up a black man hitchhiking through Los Angeles. The two of them have an awkward conversation in which their racial stereotypes of each other lurk just below the surface. The black man starts laughing. Tommy is insulted; he pulls over and orders him out of the car. The black man refuses to get out. He says he'll show Tommy, and reaches into his coat pocket. Tommy orders him to put his hands where he can see them. The black man screams, “You want to see what's in my hand? I'll show you what's in my hand! At this point, our view shifts to the outside of the car, and we hear the gun go off. We have a moment just long enough to wonder whether the black man might have accidentally fired in panic. Then the camera moves back into the car, and we see that Tommy has shot the black man and killed him. The black man's hand contains a statue of St. Christopher, just like the one on Tommy's dashboard. We realize that this decent guy we identify with, who is horrified at racism and can even be heroic in standing up against it, also has racism lurking within himself, a racism which springs out in his moment of fear and makes him
the one character in the movie who kills someone. And we viewers have participated in his fatal mistake.
Watching this movie is a little like being in church on Palm Sunday. We begin by identifying with the cheering crowds as we wave branches and shout “Hosanna!” just as they did. We know who Jesus is and we are used to praising God in church. Then the liturgy turns on us and we find that the crowd betrays Jesus and shouts, “Crucify him!” and we participate in their fatal mistake.
We don't like to think of ourselves as the kind of people who could ever say such a thing. Crucifixion and the scourging that went with it are not far short of torture. And yet Palm Sunday brings us face to face with the truth that we are capable of both love and hatred; we are capable of both worshipping God and killing God; we are created in the image of God, and yet fallen. It is only in recognizing the evil lurking in our hearts that we can receive redemption.
Jody Reis Johnson is a psychotherapist who has devoted her life to helping political refugees who have been victims of torture. She writes movingly of the excruciatingly difficult struggle her patients face as they attempt to overcome the effects of trauma on their shattered psyches. She describes their desire for revenge. Certainly, if there is anyone who is justified in wanting revenge it is these survivors of genocide, the innocent victims of atrocities. However, Johnson's years of work have shown her a different reality. She writes, “The victims who fare best psychologically in the long run are those who are able to confront their own capacity for sadism, thus finding some common ground with the perpetrator that sets the stage for forgiveness and letting go.” I wonder whether the writers of the gospels, and the writers of the Palm Sunday liturgy, knew that those who fare best spiritually in the long run are those who are able to confront their own capacity for crucifixion, their own total depravity.
Our temptation is to believe that only other people can do terrible things. Yet I have the sense that our refusal to admit that we can do terrible things is one of the main reasons we keep doing them in the first place.
The news that we are all totally depraved, that the capacity for racism and violence lurk within each of us is deeply disturbing. If we so totally depraved who will save us from ourselves?
In Crash we meet Jean the rich, pampered wife of the District Attorney. She explodes with loud insults against blacks and Latinos, paying no attention to the fact that a Latino locksmith can hear her from the next room. She screams at her husband and her Latina housekeeper, Maria. Finally, in a cell phone conversation with her friend Carol, she says that she has just realized that she wakes up angry every morning and doesn't know why. And just as she gets to this crucial point, her friend ends the phone conversation. When Jean slips and falls on the stairs and is lying in pain unable to move, she calls Carol again, because she's considered Carol her best friend for ten years. But Carol says she can't help her because she's getting a massage. Jean calls all her other friends and gets no response. In the end, her housekeeper Maria takes her to the hospital, brings her home, makes tea for her, and arranges her pillows as she lies in bed. Jean gives her a totally unexpected embrace, and says, “Do you want to hear something funny? You're the best friend I've got.” Secular language has no word for moments like this. In the Church, we call it a moment of grace; grace expressed in the form of a Latina servant who has been disregarded, insulted, despised, and yet who remains humble and kind toward the very person who has mistreated her. That is about as much as a secular movie can give us.
But here is church we have a deeper answer. Here we are brought face to face with the bad news about our situation, we are all sinners, we are all totally depraved. Yet here we can hear the good news. On his own initiative, God does what we cannot do; saves us from our own sinfulness. By nature our minds our darkened, but God enlightens us. By nature spiritually blind but God enables us to see. We are spiritually deaf but God opens our ears. By nature we unable to believe but God gives us the gift of faith. In Crash redemption seems in doubt. Here it is a certainty. We are totally depraved; but God loves us anyway. Thanks be to God. Amen.