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MOVIE REVIEW
Crash, directed by David
Cronenberg, based on the novel by J.G. Ballard
Bodies
colliding
By David Walsh
First, a few words in defense of Canadian director David
Cronenberg's Crash. The film, based on a 1973 novel by British
science fiction writer J.G. Ballard, has provoked a ridiculous
scandal.
A middle class couple--James (James Spader) and Catherine
Ballard (Deborah Unger)--seems bored and alienated. A serious car accident
shakes James out of his routine. He chooses to assign it some erotic
significance. Through the widow (Holly Hunter) of a man killed in the
crash, he comes into contact with a group, headed by Vaughan (Elias
Koteas), that derives sexual pleasure from car collisions. Its members
specialize in reenacting famous auto accidents--those of James Dean, Jayne
Mansfield, etc. James, Catherine, Vaughan and the latter's disciples
proceed to explore the various sexual possibilities of the automobile,
including some that involve risking their lives in highway
traffic.
The film's harshest critics, including Ted Turner, whose
Fine Line Features held up the US release of Crash for months, have
denounced the film as perverse and "sick" for its linking of sex and auto
crashes. At the Cannes film festival last year, two jurors refused to have
any part in rewarding Cronenberg's work its special prize--for
"originality, daring and audacity." They reportedly raised the possibility
that the film might provoke copycat incidents. All this is absurd from two
points of view.
The identification of sex, machinery (cars, planes, boats)
and high velocity--with the implicit thrills and dangers--is hardly
Cronenberg's discovery. It would be a serious challenge to name a single
major action picture of the past several decades that hasn't made that
largely unconscious association. Or, for that matter, a single
automobile advertisement carried on Turner's various cable stations.
Cronenberg was entirely within his rights when he commented, in an
interview, "I'm always a little taken aback when people say, 'What is this
weird connection you're making between sex and cars?' Are you serious? Do
they want me to explain that? It's pretty obvious!"
Literal
interpretation
Above and beyond that, there is another consideration: is
the artistic image meant to be interpreted literally, as the opponents of
Crash suggest? Why single out Cronenberg's protagonists? Isn't
there an equal danger, according to the pragmatic logic of these
arguments, that film and television viewers will seek to imitate the
absurd and often reckless exploits of the various law enforcement
officials, divine agents and time travelers who currently people the large
and small screens?
This issue has serious implications, particularly when the
state or corporate censor steps in. (This is the second work whose release
Turner has played a part in obstructing, the other being Anjelica Huston's
Bastard Out of Carolina.) It would be better to be guided by André
Breton's notion that an artistic work "is to be judged not on the
successive representations it makes, but on its power to incarnate an
idea, to which these representations, freed of any need for rational
connection, serve only as a starting point." (Emphasis added.)
Defending Cronenberg against the philistines is, however,
not the same thing as embracing his film. He has described Crash as
"an existentialist romance." He explained in an interview: "It's a story
about two people who have to reinvent everything you might think of as an
absolute in order to come back and find each other again, to find a way to
relate to each other.... When we first meet them, they're kind of in
despair, desperate--but quietly, because they're going through the
motions, just like everybody else. The car accident is an epiphany that
unleashes a kind of awareness ... of their responsibility to reinvent all
those things that have meaning."
In regard to the erotic elements of the film, Cronenberg
commented: "Despite the fact that every society has a way of enshrining
sex so that it's all right, so that it's socially acceptable ... there's
still the feeling that there's something subversive about it, deliciously
wrong, deliciously perverse. And, so, I think that connects very
definitely with what happens in a car crash or an accident--it's sort of
socially disruptive and socially unacceptable."
Cronenberg (The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly,
Dead Ringers, etc.), a talented and provocative filmmaker, has the
uncanny ability to seek out and probe areas of psychic discomfort, to
bring nightmares disturbingly to life. Crash has many legitimate
and even beautiful images. Yet ultimately one has to question Cronenberg's
somewhat glib references to the "subversive" and "socially
disruptive."
Something at the heart of the film seems untenable and
internally contradictory. One feels obliged to ask: what is the true
subject of Crash--the vast themes of human estrangement and
sexuality or the small change of auto collisions? These elements are never
convincingly brought together, nor, frankly, could they
be.
Cronenberg, following Ballard, has determined that car
crashes have a profoundly sexual content. This seems, in the final
analysis, rather arbitrary and subjective. Every human activity, even the
most catastrophic, has an erotic element, as it does an intellectual and
an emotional element. It seems the filmmaker could as easily have chosen
for his subject fighting (or setting) forest fires or swimming in
shark-infested waters.
Collecting a series of references to sex and automobiles,
with an inevitably eclectic variety of themes in tow, and forcing them
into a scenario is no guarantee of coherence. The lives and deaths of
James Dean and Jayne Mansfield, for example, have very little in
common.
In any event, the fascination, which no doubt contains a
sexual element, with certain deceased pop icons has less to do with the
manner in which they died than it does with the unhappy fact that large
numbers of men and women think that the fates of even certain dead
people are preferable to their own. Treating John F. Kennedy's
assassination as a peculiar kind of traffic fatality also somehow misses
the point, or at least fails to make an intelligible one.
Nor does the film, Cronenberg's explanation
notwithstanding, provide any proof that the renewed connection, if such
there be, between its central figures, has any relation to the automobile.
One of the more moving scenes takes place in their bedroom. James tenderly
examines the bruises on Catherine's body after her violent sexual
encounter with Vaughan. Whatever its intended significance, the scene
seems to say: here are the wounds, normally invisible, left by physical
and emotional contact. What does this have to do with car crashes? Surely
the critical exchanges in the film, and in life, take place between
people, not people and things, although something about the former
relationship is expressed in the latter.
Commitment to
characters
One has to question, in short, the depth of Cronenberg's
commitment to his characters. There are moments when his concern for their
fate seems profound, as in the scene mentioned above and the film's final
sequence. At other points the filmmaker seems distracted, more intrigued
by the look and feel of automobiles and highway traffic.
Cronenberg falls victim, and not only in this film, to a
technology fetishism. Like countless others in the science fiction field,
he is capable of exercising the most extraordinary imagination, except in
the sphere of social organization.
There is a historical and objective aspect to this
problem. It is not accidental that so many artists earlier in this
century, even those who primarily treated the world of nightmares, took
for granted a dissatisfaction, even hatred, of the existing social
reality. One would, however, be hard pressed to present Crash as an
incitement, of any kind, to rebellion. (Indeed the film exudes a certain
self-satisfaction. Cronenberg seems a little too pleased with his own
audacity in making a film out of Ballard's "scandalous" novel.)
The satisfaction of elementary human needs is indeed a
potentially revolutionary question, insofar as it becomes a matter of
satisfying the needs of humanity as a whole, i.e., insofar as it
becomes a social question. But Cronenberg's definition, cited above, of
what is "socially unacceptable" is surely narrow and
unsustainable.
Decades of political confusion and intellectual stagnation
have very nearly succeeded in uncoupling words like "revolutionary,"
"avant-garde" and "subversive" from their original content. This
film touches upon a critical issue--the bottomless and infinitely varied
character of human desire--but then, sadly, retreats into photographing
car wrecks. |
