'CRASH' IS NO PICTURE OF THE REAL LOS ANGELES.

Byline: Joe R. Hicks Local View

``YOU'VE got to see this film,'' my friend said. He touted ``Crash'' as the best thing he'd seen in years about race.

So I went, regrettably.

Los Angeles has endured riots, floods, fires and the murder trials of high-profile celebrities. Now the city's race relations have been given another black eye from ``Crash,'' a film written and directed by Paul Haggis of ``Million Dollar Baby'' fame. According to this movie, the city's white, Asian, black, Latino, Jewish, Muslim and other residents are always on edge, poised to assault each other at the drop of a hat.

But this is nonsense. The version of life in L.A. depicted in ``Crash'' is not the city most of us know or would recognize as real.

Haggis can sling the stereotypes with the best of 'em. The film's chief characters seem to have been ordered directly from central casting: The shallow, amoral white political candidate; his shrill, privileged wife; struggling but noble Latino workers; jive-talking black carjackers; an Asian female who doesn't drive well; a bourgeois black couple who jab at each other not being ``black enough;'' an irrational Iranian shop owner; and the ubiquitous white racist cops.

The reality of life in L.A. is far different than that presented by this movie. The city is perhaps the nation's most diverse. The intermarriage rate here is five times the national norm. According to the 2000 Census, beyond the numerous ethnic enclaves, there are areas of the city so diverse that no single ethnic or racial group is dominant.

``Crash'' leads filmgoers to believe, however, that it is precisely this diversity that is getting on people's nerves. Were this the case, fistfights would be breaking out on every block in L.A., at every hour of the day and night.

In fact, the L.A. County Commission on Human Relations could only conjure up 692 such crimes in the entire county in 2003 (its last report issued). One hate crime is surely one too many, but this has to be balanced against 90,000 violent crimes and another 113,000 ``lesser'' crimes that same year, in a county of 9.3 million people. Taken in perspective, that's a thankfully small number.

The recent outbreak of racial brawls at Jefferson and other L.A. high schools are blips, albeit troubling ones, on the larger screen of the city's human relations. They are perhaps more indicative of other issues - a nihilistic youth culture, poor parenting, teachers and district officials who overemphasize cultural ``differences'' among students, neighborhood gang wars, racial tensions in jails and prisons - than the actual state of relations between the city's black, brown and other residents.

Haggis is wrong if he presumes that his film could be a precursor to novel, fresh discussions about race. ``Crash'' may spark some discussions around the water cooler at work, but conversations informed by something this heavy-handed and ideologically skewed - where race trumps nearly all human interactions - will not provide the positive grist for that mill. In fact, it is this kind of politically correct ``dialogue'' that most people avoid like the plague. To mean anything, the proper starting point for any discussions of race must be open-ended and sincerely inquisitive. That's hardly what's offered by ``Crash.''

The shame of it is that this film first appeared in theaters just as Antonio Villaraigosa was celebrating his victory in the mayor's race. The portrayal of Los Angeles as a den of racial hostility is refuted by the facts of this election. Polls showed that Villaraigosa won in almost every sector of the city, spanning race, ethnicity and religion. Most voters simply didn't care about the winner's Mexican heritage. This would not have been the case in Haggis' Los Angeles - a city supposedly obsessed with skin color and national origin.