It would be easy to label Crash (1996) “incomparable”, but to do so you would have to forget that it is a David Cronenberg film, ignore that it follows (at some remove) Dead Ringers (1988), and overlook that it is, in many ways, a cinematic pre-requisite for eXistenZ (1999). Then again, neither of those works are based on original prose by J. G. Ballard.
Ballard’s prescient vision of the emerging (and consuming) fetish the Western democracies would soon display for the automobile was a necessary pre-condition to produce the film (and Ballard somehow recognised the trend from London, and eighteen years before the completion of the Interstate Highway System in the United States). That foresight was necessary though not sufficient to extend the work into a more contemporary context. In that respect, it took Cronenberg to do the work the justice it deserved, and (the book’s London setting notwithstanding) one has to credit Cronenberg with recognising that there was only one city in which the film could ever take place: Los Angeles.
Especially, but certainly not exclusively, in the context of the (highly recommended) uncut version, it is nearly impossible to discuss Crash without arousing rather dramatic exchanges about the sexual content of the movie. Less mature intellectual palettes, or those without sufficient experience with the body of Cronenberg’s work (and aren’t these really the same thing?), tend to see Crash as a weak excuse to lurch from one graphic sex scene to another. This view, while thin, might even be forgiven since, though the film has aged well, it is probably difficult to appreciate how much more avant-garde the piece was on its release than it is today. The book, while itself controversial, could not have stirred the pot quite so much. It was, after all, released in a year (1973) when “Let’s Get it On”, “Touch Me in the Morning”, “Pillow Talk”, “The Morning After”, “Love Train”, and “Keep on Truckin'” all made the Billboard Top 100, and the opening of Studio 54 was a mere four years away. The film, on the other hand, was forced to debut in the year of the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill hearings, Magic Johnson’s announcement that he had tested positive for HIV, and the death of Freddie Mercury. A little reflection, however, illuminates a texture and depth to the visual use of sexuality by Cronenberg that not only redeems the graphic content, but exposes it as essential to the body of the work. The merger of sexuality with the quasi-body horror of medical fetish benefits greatly from Peter Suschitzky’s expert work as the film’s Director of Photography.
Suschitzky, while probably best known as the Director of Photography for The Empire Strikes Back (1980), is a Cronenberg regular, having served as the director’s visual artist on Dead Ringers (1988), Naked Lunch (1991), M. Butterfly (1993), eXistenZ (1999), A History of Violence (2005), and so forth. It helps that Suschitzky is given near-perfect canvases to work with by Casting Director Deirdre Bowen, also a Cronenberg regular.
With only a few exceptions, there is a kind of sexual malaise, a bored ennui that sweats out of the characters in Crash. One cannot quite see Catherine Ballard in the Deborah Kara Unger of Blood Oath (1990) quite yet, (though there was precious little for the actress to work with as the harried Sister Littell, in that production), but by Whispers in the Dark (1991) Unger’s Eve Abergray has begun to find the breathless, detached sexuality that is honed to near perfection by the time filming for Crash begins in 1995, and is fully on display in The Game (1997) and Payback (1999) (though it is a pity that viewers of Whispers have to endure 103 minutes of Alan Alda to see the beginnings of Unger’s genius for the passive aggressive femme fatale).
James Spader is perfectly placed as the Author’s namesake, and the viewer’s window into the dark underworld Cronenberg will draw us into. Spader’s flash-paper intensity as Rip in Less Than Zero (1987) and Roger Barnes in Wall Street (1987) would seem to disqualify him for a part that requires as much of a dissatisfied, bland baseline as is required of him in Crash, but shades of his James Ballard can be seen in Bad Influence (1990) where his Michael Boll finds himself drawn into a similarly dark world (though in that instance by Rob Lowe, rather than the much creepier Elias Koteas in Crash), and by Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) Spader’s Graham Dalton could almost be a casting call for the damages, lost, and omnisexual (or perhaps asexual) character that emerges from Spader’s Crash performance.
Performances by Holly Hunter and Rosanna Arquette are equally gripping, and as Helen Remington, Hunter in particular somehow makes the case for the insidious seductive appeal of a secret cult of auto-accident fetishists even to formerly bland Los Angeles yuppies.
The sense of longing, searching for some sensation to transcend the stifling passivity the characters endure throughout the film is palpable, and, in typical Cronenberg fashion, the ending winds to less a climax, than a sort of perpetual edging. Even the main characters, huddled together after a quasi-intentional accident, are frustrated in their quest for release. Spader’s character is attracted first to the erotic appeal of the crumpled wreck of his wife’s car, examining it, penetrating it even, before thinking to check on his wife.
“Catherine?” he says. “Are you all right?”
“James. I don’t know.”
“Are you hurt?”
“I think I’m all right. I think I’m all right.”
“Maybe the next one, darling,” he says before reaching down between her legs. “Maybe the next one.”