Sociology and Sociological Perspective

The movie Crash, created by Paul Haggis, shows the many struggles faced by today's racial stereotypes, by showing a group of various interconnected, cultural dilemmas encountered by the film's multi-ethnic cast. Paul Haggis uses the dialogue and physical actions of his characters to illustrate the various racial stereotypes that are given to each race by every individual. Crash is an exciting, suspenseful movie that gives insight when dissected using sociological perspective. There are three ways to look into this perspective; the Structural-Functional, the Social-Conflict, and the Symbolic Interaction.

Sociological Perspective is the view of sociology to see general patterns of in the lives of particular people. Each of the areas of the sociological perspective is evident in this movie. Every person in this movie has some kind of connection to the others.

This creates a large sociological impact on each one of them in a different way. In this paper I will be defining the three theories of the sociological perspective (conflict, structural functional and symbolic interaction), and explaining how they pertain to the film crash.

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It is easy to relate the movie Crash to the conflict theory. The conflict theory is defined as “the idea that society consists of different groups who struggle with one another to attain the scarce societal resources that are considered valuable, which can be anything from money, power, prestige, or the authority to impose a person’s values on society.”

This movie fits into this theory because there are many groups (blacks, whites, etc.) that are constantly struggling and belittling each other so that their group can be the one in power.

It is this struggle that has created racism, prejudice and stereotypes between cultures throughout history. The Structural Functional theory studies social structures, which are patterns of behavior that people tend to follow. Some of these patterns are religious rituals, class structure, political views and educational views.