Format: Loaned DVD on basement television
Crash, the David Cronenberg film and not the maligned 2005 Best Picture winner, is a film I have been looking for for some time. Cronenberg is the king of body horror, and his films are always at least visually interesting. Crash is based on the novel of the same name by J.G. Ballard, who is an author I like a great deal, almost despite his subject matter. I have a fondness for Ballard in no small part because I discussed his books in my comps exam for my Master’s degree. Ballard often deals with human atrocities and physical degradation, a self-destructive impulse that he seems to feel is a natural part of human nature.
Crash is absolutely in the heart of that element of Ballard’s work. Much of his writing looks at people living lives on the extreme edge of existence, barely surviving, but seeing how far they can go while still managing to be alive. Crash specifically is about people who get erotic satisfaction from car accidents, both those that they see or witness and those that they are involved in. It’s as perverse a fetish movie as Salo in some ways, the sort of film you watch with the blinds drawn (not unlike Cruising).
James Ballard (James Spader), clearly named after the author, is a film producer in an open marriage with Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger). The two engage in as much extra-marital sex as they can and use this to fuel their own intimacy. Their descent into a very dark world of sex begins when, driving home from a film set one night, James is in a head-on collision with another car. As he waits to be freed from the wreckage, James sees the driver of the other car, a doctor named Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) exposes herself intentionally, despite her husband being dead in the passenger seat next to her.
While at the hospital, James encounters Vaughn (Elias Koteas, who is not actually Chris Meloni) who appears to be working on research regarding crash survivors. In reality, Vaughn is a fetishist for car accidents, heading up a sort of club where famous car accidents are re-enacted. Once out of the hospital, James begins an affair with Helen, mainly due to their shared car accident experience. The two go to one of Vaughn’s shows where he and a few stunt drivers recreate James Dean’s fatal accident.
Soon enough, James, Helen, and Catherine are diving deeper and deeper into this particular kink culture along with a woman named Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), who is in permanent leg braces from an accident, and who has a particularly shaped scar that will eventually be used for sex. Yeah, I can’t believe I typed that, either.
I don’t always agree with Roger Ebert or his reviews, but when the man was right, there was no one better. Ebert said that Crash was a film that was “pornographic in form, but not in result,” and that’s a good a description of what Crash actually is that I can think of. This is a film that is not merely meant to be challenging, but is meant to attack the view in real ways. The intent is to scar the person watching, much like French Extremity films. You leave Crash a different person than you were when you started.
What Crash does incredibly well is capture the nature of Ballard’s writing. In my comps mentioned above, the question I answered was about identifying an author’s world view based on their lexical choice. I used Ballard, saying that he speaks clinically about human atrocities and horror because he finds such things inevitable. For Ballard, humanity is on a road to self-destruction. Much of his short fiction is about human life becoming more and more artificial and machine-driven. This is clearly a part of Crash, along with the depictions of traffic and industrialization. In Ballard’s world, humanity has become numb, and only extreme events like a car accident can bring forth any emotions or feeling, or in this case, any sexual desire.
Sexual fetish, of course, has long existed in film, and Cronenberg is no stranger to it. There’s a direct line from the sexual perversity of The Brood or Shivers to the sexual fetish that doesn’t actually exist in Crash to the sexual fetish that cannot really exist in Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. It’s also unlikely that a film like Titane would exist without Crash going there first.
I’ll revert back to Ebert to discuss whether or not this is a film I liked. Ebert called the film “challenging, courageous, and original,” and it’s hard to disagree with that. He also said that it’s a film that can be admired, but that it’s not really a film that anyone can like, and I think that’s pretty accurate as well. If nothing else, there is a perverseness in seeing what in any other film would be a terrifying moment of one person trying to push another off the road instead be used as foreplay. And it ends exactly as it should—an ending I won’t give away and that won’t seem right, but that truly is the way it should finish.
Why to watch Crash (1996): You will not be the same person once the credits role.
Why not to watch: Seriously, James Spader humps a vagina-shaped scar.
I love this film. It is confrontational, unsettling, violent, and is not afraid to make people uncomfortable. It is also one of the sexiest films ever. I think this is one of Cronenberg's best films as it is pure Cronenberg. Francis Ford Coppola HATES this film when it premiered at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival where he was the jury's president for that year's Palme d'Or competition. He did not want to give that film an award but the jury outvoted him as it won the Special Jury Prize. Coppola is starting to lose it lately. That explains why I prefer his daughter as she is a better filmmaker.
ReplyDeleteThis was certainly something, and it is incredibly confrontational and transgressive, and that's what gives it a lot of its power.
DeleteI am a huge Ballard fan. I've read a ton of his work and I have a small collection of his books. High Rise is a favorite of mine, the sort of book I've read half a dozen times.
James Spader takes a lot of roles that are overtly sexual--sex, lies and videotape and Secretarybeing two others that come to mind, and his role in Wolf is pretty sexually charged as well. Shifted a couple decades backwards, he's the obvious choice for your sexy, sparkly vampire.