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David Cronenberg’s Crash: Breaking the Boundaries of Sex and Death
David Cronenberg’s film Crash (1996) was based on the novel by J.G. Ballard. This is an extremely controversial film about a subculture of people who have a sexual fetish associated with car crashes. The characters actively invite car crashes and fetishize both the damaged metal and the physical injuries that result. In the car crash, body and machine fuse in a chaos of destruction; human blood mixes with leaking radiator fluid; flesh and metal interpenetrate.
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The film suggests that technology dominates our lives and controls us. Every human need is answered by technology, which means that we’re becoming desensitised. There is no real sensation anymore. The film depicts a harshly technologised landscape that stretches from horizon to horizon. The world is swamped by metallic movement due to ceaseless streams of automobiles. In this context, everyone is numb and alienated; they become zombies. Even the cinematography of the film is pristine and minimalistic; it has a polished, fetishistic purity. This gives a sense of living in a soulless technoculture.
James Spader’s character has a car crash and it releases a current of sexual desire, which fuses with a new fascination with cars, traffic and accidents. He encounters a character called Vaughan, who is the ringleader of a cult of car crash fetishists. Vaughan describes his project as the reshaping of the human body through modern technology.
The film argues that technology has become too distant from the body. The car crash is a way of reconnecting technology and the flesh. It forces together the hard, mineral surfaces of the car and the softness of the human body, the cold indifference of metal and the yearning of the flesh. The human body is reshaped by the jagged metal of the car-wreck in the form of wounds. At the same time, the car is deformed and becomes an analogue of the wounded human body. This is a marriage of technology and the body.
This relies on the concept of the abject. The piercing and breaking of the body reveals us as abject and alive. Vaughan is a crazed prophet. He’s covered in scars, so he looks like Frankenstein’s monster, all pieced together. He has a sickly pallor , greasy hands and dirty fingernails. He has strange hunched movements and is constantly chewy gum. This makes him into a creature. He is totally abject. The car crash has revealed his abject nature and put him in contact with the body.
Through the fetish of the car crash, James is able to revitalise his jaded relationship with his wife. The logical conclusion is that James and Catherine kill each other in car crashes as an expression of mutual love. At the same time, car crashes represent the failure of technology and the crash de-technologises the car. It reforms cars into expressionistic sculptures of de-functionalised matter. So the car crash reverses the thrust of technology. The car has died as a sacrificial deliverance of humanity from the tyranny of a soulless technoculture.
