Crash: Character Analysis of Officer Hansen

The movie Crash is an interesting look at a variety of perspectives regarding the interaction and socialization of several different groups of people and how sometimes their intentions can be misconstrued. In the movie, Officer Hansen proves to be a specially interesting character. Hansen is a white male who seems to have grown up in a fairly typical environment and doesn't stand out from the normative views of an individual coming from his social grouping. Unlike his partner Officer Ryan, Officer Hansen tries his best to set aside his differences with out groups and choose to treat everyone equally from the beginning and one of the main opening conflicts in the film is geared towards Officer Hansen feeling that his partner is taking advantage of a situation and grossly abusing his position of authority and being especially ruthless and vulgar towards a black couple. Hansen appears from the beginning to be one of the special cases in the movie that is willing to accept someone from another group with open arms and actively acting out against unfair treatment of the undeserving. Officer Hansen seems to portray a common, white man with a standard background that allows him to treat everyone equally and civilly, perhaps without taking into context any major events involving different groups that had occurred in his lifetime. What sets Hansen apart from many of the other characters in the movie is that he does not appear to have had a lot of interaction with other groups outside of his own before hand, and thus has not formed many of the same fears and falsehoods that other characters in the movie at times exhibit a sentiment towards. He could be viewed as either a major or a minor character, but I believe his extreme realization of how the world is not the place he thought it was, makes him one of the more important and intriguing characters in the movie. Even if only to exacerbate the character traits of others, Hansen becomes severely tangled in every story