Reading Post-9/11 America through the 78th Academy Awards

초록

This essay revisits the controversy surrounding the 78th Academy Awards held on March 5th, 2006, for films released in 2005, when Paul Haggis’s Crash, a blunt film about racial conflict, beat Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, a subtle and sophisticated film about the repressed lives of two cowboys who happen to fall in love with each other, to win the Best Picture Award in spite of many critics’ expectations of the opposite result, in order to suggest that the results of the Best Picture Award should be understood as a reinforcement of binary thinking and stereotyping that lie at the basis of the dominant American order, rather than simply as a homophobic reaction to an individual film. Seeing the 78th Academy Awards at the midpoint of the post-9/11 decade as a window into the crises, changes, and recurrent trends shaping 21st Century America, this essay seeks to read the privileging of Crash over Brokeback Mountain at the Academy Awards in terms of the tension between policing and contesting the dominant American order. Rather than read Crash simply as a film about race and Brokeback Mountain as one about homosexuality, this essay examines Crash as a reinforcement of the binary structure of American culture and Brokeback Mountain as a refusal to participate in such binary thinking and as a contestation of stereotypical understanding of American identity. Don Lee’s short story, “The Lone Night Cantina,” is used to frame this argument, in order to demonstrate how the implications of the 78th Academy Awards reach far beyond the film industry.

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