‘The car crash is a fertilising rather than a destructive event...’
You know when uttering the phrase ‘this film is weird even for David Cronenberg’ that you’ve just watched something truly freakish. Crash, Cronenberg’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel, arrived in a storm of controversy back in 1996. Francis Ford Coppola reportedly hated it so much that he refused to present Cronenberg with the Special Jury Prize at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival despite being the jury president that year. The film’s extreme content led to a media outcry in Britain, led by the Daily Mail (natch), that resulted in the film being banned by various local authorities throughout the UK. In America, the backlash was no less fierce, with U.S. distributor Fine Line Features refusing to release the film at all and AMC Entertainment, the second-largest U.S. theatre chain at the time, posting security guards outside 30 screens to ensure that nobody under the age of 18 got in to see the film. While it still has the power to shock thirty years later, Crash is not a film that I’ll be rushing to watch again…
After being involved in a horrific car crash, James Ballard (James Spader) finds himself increasingly attracted to the concept of car accidents in general. Ballard, who already engages in freaky sex games with his wife, Catherine (Deborah Unger), finds an underground subculture of other little weirdos that are turned on by car crashes. This list of oddballs includes Helen Remington (Holly Hunter), Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette) and Vaughan (Elias Koteas).
As with much of Cronenberg’s work, Crash is a meandering, fever-dream of a film, with little to offer in terms of plot. Instead, we are presented with a man in freefall who succumbs totally to his twisted desires. While it is compelling to see someone fall in this way, and Spader sells it beautifully, the continued reliance on lengthy sex scenes renders Crash repetitive and, dare I say it, quite dull. Nobody watches adult cinema for it’s plot, and Crash is structured more like a softcore adult movie than a cohesive ‘proper’ film. The concept of technology becoming a natural extension of the human psyche is something Cronenberg has explored many times, most notably on Videodrome, and while Crash has several striking visual moments, it never threatens to rival the Canadian director’s finest work.
Crash should be admired for its audacity and its originality, but this is not a film that I connected with in any kind of meaningful way… which is probably for the best.
