Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

Hong Sangsoo’s The Day a Pig Fell into a Well 209considerably more conventional multi-plot/multi-character Hollywoodfilm, Crash (Paul Haggis 2004), the winner of numerous awards, includingAcademy Awards for Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best ScreenplayWritten Originally for the Screen, and Best Achievement in Editing.Everything that the characters do in Crash, as well as the situations in whichthey find themselves as they interact with one another, result from racialand ethnic discrimination and misunderstanding. The intensity of thissingle thematic and motivational focus is heightened by the story takingplace in less than a day.Crash’s narrative is organized around the progressive development of avariety of situations related to its themes. For example, during an unnecessarylate-night vehicle stop early in the film, Tommy Hanson, a whiterookie policeman who believes himself to be racially tolerant, watches silentlyas John Ryan, his senior partner, sexually humiliates an African-Americanwoman in front of her husband, Cameron Thayer. Later that day, disgustedby what his partner did, Hanson asks for and receives permission to drivepatrol by himself when he resumes work that afternoon. As he begins workthat afternoon, however, Ryan, who knows why his former partner will nolonger work with him, warns Hanson that he really does not know himself.Ryan’s cautionary warning is fulfilled late that night, when Hansonstops on his way home, to give a ride to a young African-American hitchhiker.As they talk, Hanson slowly comes to mistrust the young man. Whenhe reaches into his jacket to show Hanson a religious statuette like theone on the dashboard of the car, Hanson assumes without sufficientprovocation that the man is reaching for a gun and shoots him, therebyconfirming Ryan’s earlier warning about his latent racism.The three stages of Hanson’s experience reflect the well-established,three-part or three-act structure common to most Hollywood narratives.Thus Cameron Thayer, the television director who helplessly watched thesexual abuse of his wife during that night-time traffic stop, finds himselfforced at work the next morning to reshoot a scene of the sitcom he is directingbecause its white star complains that a black actor delivered his linesin way that did not sound black enough. Thayer’s argument with his wifemoments later at lunchtime when she complains that he should haveasserted himself when she was sexually touched while being searched thenight before further accentuates his anger at believing that his survivaldepends upon acquiescing to white men in positions of authority. By thetime he leaves work to drive home late that afternoon he is so thoroughlyfrustrated by the racial humiliations he has suffered in quick succession