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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. |
