Director: David Cronenberg
Writers: J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg
Photography: Peter Suschitzky
Music: Howard Shore
Editor: Ronald Sanders
Cast: Elias Koteas, James Spader, Holly Hunter, Deborah Kara Unger, Rosanna Arquette, Peter MacNeill
Director and screenwriter David Cronenberg arguably went off the rails after the ‘70s and ‘80s, as his various signature exercises in hilarious, insightful outrage (Rabid, Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly, Dead Ringers) gave way to more literary ambitions. You could say it was already there, as The Dead Zone comes from a Stephen King novel, The Fly is from a famous midcentury horror story by George Langelaan, and Dead Ringers (believe it or not!) is based on real true-crime events (committed by a pair of identical twins who were gynecologists in New York City ... n.b., the tools are strictly under Cronenberg’s direction). As if stepping up to the literary plate and swinging for the fences, he next took on Naked Lunch (1992) by William Burroughs, Spider (2002) by Patrick McGrath, and, here, Crash by J.G. Ballard. I’m not sure, to continue the baseball metaphor, that he even gets the bat on the ball in these productions.
Full disclosure, I’m no fan yet of Ballard—or Burroughs, for that matter (except by fragments), though I’ve read and enjoyed a couple novels by McGrath. But I trust the taste of many of Ballard’s partisans and intend to try him again. For now I’ve read only Crash and some stories and haven’t got a lot from them. But the relative difficulty I had even getting a look at Cronenberg’s movie may speak at least in part to its dubious quality. It also has the dreaded NC-17 rating, which doesn’t help either. Our streaming world: I saw it was available a few weeks ago, via Amazon Prime I think, but when it came time to look at it the only way was with a Roku account. That left me with the adventure of an in-home VHS viewing and you know how that goes (see here). Crash (book and picture), to be perfectly reductive about it, concerns a group of polyamory- and BDSM-flavored folks who get off sexually on auto accidents. Quoth the cult leader Vaughan (Elias Koteas): “The car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event.”
Director and screenwriter David Cronenberg arguably went off the rails after the ‘70s and ‘80s, as his various signature exercises in hilarious, insightful outrage (Rabid, Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly, Dead Ringers) gave way to more literary ambitions. You could say it was already there, as The Dead Zone comes from a Stephen King novel, The Fly is from a famous midcentury horror story by George Langelaan, and Dead Ringers (believe it or not!) is based on real true-crime events (committed by a pair of identical twins who were gynecologists in New York City ... n.b., the tools are strictly under Cronenberg’s direction). As if stepping up to the literary plate and swinging for the fences, he next took on Naked Lunch (1992) by William Burroughs, Spider (2002) by Patrick McGrath, and, here, Crash by J.G. Ballard. I’m not sure, to continue the baseball metaphor, that he even gets the bat on the ball in these productions.
Full disclosure, I’m no fan yet of Ballard—or Burroughs, for that matter (except by fragments), though I’ve read and enjoyed a couple novels by McGrath. But I trust the taste of many of Ballard’s partisans and intend to try him again. For now I’ve read only Crash and some stories and haven’t got a lot from them. But the relative difficulty I had even getting a look at Cronenberg’s movie may speak at least in part to its dubious quality. It also has the dreaded NC-17 rating, which doesn’t help either. Our streaming world: I saw it was available a few weeks ago, via Amazon Prime I think, but when it came time to look at it the only way was with a Roku account. That left me with the adventure of an in-home VHS viewing and you know how that goes (see here). Crash (book and picture), to be perfectly reductive about it, concerns a group of polyamory- and BDSM-flavored folks who get off sexually on auto accidents. Quoth the cult leader Vaughan (Elias Koteas): “The car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event.”
James Spader gets top billing with Holly Hunter, but Koteas is more the star of this show, as the omnisexual cult leader. Spader plays TV director James Ballard—yes, that’s his clonking name, from the book. Ballard has a serious auto accident with Dr. Helen Remington (Hunter), which puts them both in the hospital and kills her husband. This is their entry point into Vaughan’s world when they meet him in the hospital pretending to be a medical worker examining and photographing their wounds. Among other things, Vaughan and his associates reenact famous auto accidents like those involving Albert Camus, James Dean, Grace Kelly, Jayne Mansfield, Nathanael West, and others. Sometimes Vaughan pontificates on the future and cyborgs, with the automobile and other technology as extensions of human capability, but later we learn that’s just a front. Auto accidents are a type of sexual intercourse and death is presumably the ultimate orgasm, or something.
I mean, all right, fair enough, you should never judge sexual kinks, at least as a general principle. When violence is involved it’s more tricky, of course. But like most sexual kinks this automobile crackup fetish can seem laughable in the cold light of a motion picture and/or way too brutal by the images. I like the way these peculiar characters are shown in thrall to their sexual charge, sinking into mumbling blanked-out trances as they confront the images and ideas and realities and unconsciously begin moving into position for sexy polyamory la-dee-dah. You will surely need a cigarette.
But Crash thus turns mostly into spectacle, all things considered. Scenes of disturbingly perverse sex, as in Rabid and Dead Ringers, are mixed up with a lot of brainstorm writer’s room connections that just don’t come off. An erotic carwash scene, for example. Or shopping for cars while wearing prosthetics, a scene featuring an admittedly sexy, previously wounded Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette) clanking around playing at a game of trying to seduce a car salesman. Severe scarring turns into a vaginal signifier. The dents in damaged autos have erotic appeal. Inevitably there are car chase scenes but now they have an air of dread, a mordant existential tang.
As with the novel (which is probably a little better), Crash might work on some abstracted intellectual level. Or maybe it’s a real kink and finding an audience that way. Some of these players—Spader, Hunter, Arquette—obviously seem interested in working with a creative, adventurous, “out there” director like Cronenberg, and they’re doing the best they can with this thin gruel. Howard Shore’s orchestral accompaniment never seems right. I’m not convinced automobile eroticism can be made to work at all, though I just realized there’s another example practically around the corner, brought off much more overwhelmingly, I must say. Stay tuned. And/or, meanwhile, get a Roku account and check this out. See what you think.
I mean, all right, fair enough, you should never judge sexual kinks, at least as a general principle. When violence is involved it’s more tricky, of course. But like most sexual kinks this automobile crackup fetish can seem laughable in the cold light of a motion picture and/or way too brutal by the images. I like the way these peculiar characters are shown in thrall to their sexual charge, sinking into mumbling blanked-out trances as they confront the images and ideas and realities and unconsciously begin moving into position for sexy polyamory la-dee-dah. You will surely need a cigarette.
But Crash thus turns mostly into spectacle, all things considered. Scenes of disturbingly perverse sex, as in Rabid and Dead Ringers, are mixed up with a lot of brainstorm writer’s room connections that just don’t come off. An erotic carwash scene, for example. Or shopping for cars while wearing prosthetics, a scene featuring an admittedly sexy, previously wounded Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette) clanking around playing at a game of trying to seduce a car salesman. Severe scarring turns into a vaginal signifier. The dents in damaged autos have erotic appeal. Inevitably there are car chase scenes but now they have an air of dread, a mordant existential tang.
As with the novel (which is probably a little better), Crash might work on some abstracted intellectual level. Or maybe it’s a real kink and finding an audience that way. Some of these players—Spader, Hunter, Arquette—obviously seem interested in working with a creative, adventurous, “out there” director like Cronenberg, and they’re doing the best they can with this thin gruel. Howard Shore’s orchestral accompaniment never seems right. I’m not convinced automobile eroticism can be made to work at all, though I just realized there’s another example practically around the corner, brought off much more overwhelmingly, I must say. Stay tuned. And/or, meanwhile, get a Roku account and check this out. See what you think.
"mordant existential tang"
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