crash

This review originally written in 1999, edited 2003.

Information about David Cronenberg.

Crash, directed by David Cronenberg. Alliance Communications, 1996. Colour.  With James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Kotias, Rosanna Arquette, Deborah Unger.

Cronenberg makes confronting, uncomfortable films which explore sexuality and the psychology of perversity; Crash is no exception, but in the manner of Videodrome, Dead Ringers and The Naked Lunch, Crash is a cerebral narrative with no gratuitous confrontation.

Based on JG Ballard's 1973 novel of the same title, Crash explores jaded human sexuality diverted into the fetish of the automobile, and a macabre sexual obsession with damaged human flesh.

The story revolves around the tireless but unfulfilled quest by James and Catherine Ballard (Spader and Unger) for satisfying sex. After a serious car accident, Ballard meets Vaughan (Kotias), a car crash obsessive, and Helen Remington (Hunter), the passenger in the car Ballard collided with. Together these two characters draw Ballard and his wife into a morbid fantasy world of celebrity car crash recreations and the bizarre injury fetish which is central to the film's development of James Ballard's sexuality.

Cronenberg uses harsh gray-blue lighting and subdued colours to create a cool atmosphere which sets the tone for the impersonal nature of his characters. It is this impersonal nature which I found more disturbing than anything else about the film: the casual, emotionally detached coldness of people who seem to have no love for anything, not even themselves. They are as coldly beautiful as a well built car.

There is something undeniably sensual about the clean, smooth shape of a car, as there is about the clean, smooth curves of a human body. The perverse nature of the film's theme - sexual excitement generated by the destruction of these smoothnesses through car crashes - is intensely uncomfortable but also compelling.

Cronenberg's exploration of this fetish is fascinating, repugnant, riveting and highly atmospheric. The subject matter itself has a magnetic effect because it deals with the contemporary social taboo of the thanatos complex, doubly taboo because this exploration is rooted in the context of human sexuality.

It is highly likely that it was this breach of taboo which motivated Queensland's wowser busybodies to call for brutish censorship.

Cronenberg does not spare viewers. There are frequent and explicit sex scenes, but they appeared to me less erotic than narrative: the characters never achieved sexual fulfillment. The depiction of sex worked as a means of hinting at the desire for strange and perverse new means of attaining sexual ecstasy.

At the same time, the blandness of James Ballard, and the emotional coldness of Catherine, anchor their exploration of sexuality in the ordinary. The Ballards are no more than two middle class people searching for the excitement of the illicit. The audience is no more than middle class society practicing the cowardly catharsis of illicit voyeurism.

In Crash, the illicit turns out to be the rupture of human skin against the hard, sharp debris of wrecked cars.  It is a nihilistic vision of a meeting between the world of man-made machines and human desire, where the pornography that is the western car culture is no longer satisfying in itself.   It is only by the destruction of both body and car that James Ballard can pursue his ultimate sexual fantasy.

The ending of the film sets up the chilling possibility that Ballard in fact craves necrophilia, and that his wife is willing to endure a series of real car crashes in order to cater to this perverse fantasy.

While the Ballards are honest, almost indifferent, about their fetishes, viewers are confronted with their own sexual fantasies.

What is it that is compelling about Ballard's growing fascination with corrupted flesh and metal? Could it be the titillation of self-destruction?

What is it that is intensely uncomfortable about the sado-masochistic sexuality of Vaughan?    Could it be the conflict between ideology and desire in our own societies?

What is it that makes the homosexual encounter between Ballard and Vaughan so obscene?    Could it be the hypocrisy of contemporary sexual morality?

It may well be that the perversity of Crash lies not in the pursuit of fetish, but in the way western societies tightly prescribe what is sexually acceptable and what is not, and how this prescription affects the way we interpret the movie.

Ballard's intentions may or may not have been captured by Cronenberg, but his film Crash is a powerful work in itself which manages to pose some very uncomfortable questions.

It is, like his other recent works, a film I will revisit the same way as a good novel.

© 2003 Peter Strempel.  All rights reserved.