A Dirty Prophesy, Made By Computers
The script for David Cronenberg’s Crash is 77 pages long. It is mostly a series of descriptions of very awful things happening to disaffected rich people. Also, there is a lot of sex. In the opening few pages, a film producer, James Ballard (James Spader), accidentally swerves his car into the path of an oncoming four-wheel-drive. Both he and the passenger of the other car are injured – the other driver dies. Bleeding out, concussed, Ballard notices that the surviving passenger appears to be masturbating, locked in place by a seatbelt, reaching orgasm while her car begins to burn around her.
Later, while he is healing in the hospital, he and the passenger reconnect, and she explains the plot of the rest of the film to him: she derives erotic pleasure from car crashes, and knows a lot of other people who do too. They are a cult, of sorts. Sometimes, their de facto leader, Vaughan stages his own controlled pile-ups, mock recreations of the vehicular accidents that killed celebrities. Other times, the cultists point their cars at walls, or other cars, and then drive as fast as they can towards collision. Ballard, instantly interested, takes part in it all. At one point, he has sex with a wound in a young woman’s leg, sustained in a brutal crash. Many of the cultists die. Some live. And then the film ends.
Crash doesn’t really have a plot outside those bare bones. There is no artificial tension between Ballard and the members of the cult. From the moment he meets Vaughan he becomes locked into a relationship that remains as still as the surface of a lake. They like each other. That’s it.
Ballard doesn’t really learn anything either, outside of the revelation that he too finds car crashes sexually gratifying, and that revelation happens about 10 minutes in. When the film ends some 80 odd minutes later, it is with a sex scene. Nothing has been gained, lost, altered. There is just sex, and also violence.
In its simplicity, Crash feels like an anthropological textbook written about the customs of an alien species. This is how they speak; mate; move around. And this is what they think about their cars. Roger Ebert once famously called the film a “porno made by a computer.” But it is more than that. It is a porno made by computers and starring them too, a glassy, mechanical simulation of human desires with all the humanity taken out.
Interpretation
Cronenberg once said that horror is the most literary genre because it is a series of metaphors made literal. That might not be true of every horror film, but it is certainly true of most of his. His remake of The Fly, about a man who slowly turns into an insect, is a metaphor for a relationship breaking down. And there’s the relationship breaking down literally, depicted onscreen – the heroic scientist’s body deconstructing into a vague, fleshy blob as he dies.
And yet there are no metaphors in the case of Crash. Crash isn’t really about anything, aside from what it’s about. There is no gestured, secret meaning. Sure, you can play the game of analysis with the film. But doing so requires talking around it, or trying to think of clever ways of restating what the film has already stated itself.
Crash is about our relationship with modern means of production – with cars – but not in any complicated or subtle way. Vaughan himself speaks that thesis aloud, plainly, some 20 minutes into the film, when Ballard asks him the meaning behind his simulated crashes. “It's something we're all intimately involved in,” Vaughan says. “The reshaping of the human body by modern technology.” He delivers the line almost with a shrug. That’s it. Later, in a metatextual flourish rare for Cronenberg, Vaughan refers to that early thesis “a crude sci-fi concept that floats on the surface and doesn't threaten anybody.” Vaughan’s own academizing – and the potential academizing of critics in the audience – is called out for being insufficient by the film itself. It’s crude. Simplistic. Better left unsaid. And so Vaughan stops bringing the reasons for his crashes back up. Intentions are never probed deeper again.
Cronenberg never give us much in the way of backstory. We know that Vaughan is a historian of car crashes, fascinated with the accident that killed James Dean, compulsive in his eye for detail. Why? Who knows. Crash is Cronenberg’s least Freudian film, unconcerned not only with thematic subtext, but also with anything that underpins or spawns the characters’ desires.
There is no suggestion that the cultists are attracted to violence because of some buried trauma, or an unhappy string of childhoods. When we meet Ballard, he is aimless and disaffected – plagued by the ennui that accompanies fame and success. But he is aimless and disaffected after he discovers the pleasure of crashes too. These desires aren’t puzzle boxes. They are just desires: viciously uncomplicated.
Anthropology
Such sparseness is reflected in the film’s visual style. Cronenberg is not the kind of director to ever draw attention to himself. But in Crash, he is more anonymous than usual. The camera is locked-down. There are none of the tricks filmmakers usually use – no zooms, pans, shifts of perspective. His framing is always close enough to symmetrical that you don’t pay much mind to it, without ever being so symmetrical that it seems artificially posed.
Now and then, Cronenberg makes a little fun out of using car windows as frames inside frames, creating nested images; faces hidden inside rectangular car windows hidden inside a rectangular cinema screen. But such a motif only really becomes noticeable after a few watches, and even then, there’s nothing much to say about it other than, “yes, there it is.”
Maintaining such anonymity proved challenging for Cronenberg, he has often said. “I like things to be deceptive in their simplicity,” he told Chris Rodley, back in the late ‘90s. “Sometimes the simplest things are the most difficult to do. The framing is not quite normal in Crash. The framing is unusual, but in a very simple way.”
The aftermath of the film’s first crash exemplifies such a style. Ballard, trapped in his wrecked car, is filmed in medium close-up, blood trickling down his face. We cut to his perspective: across from him, face twisted into a look of pleasure, is the passenger, also in medium close-up, also staring just past the camera. This is the moment that Ballard discovers the sub-culture that will absorb him for the rest of the film. But he doesn’t seem shocked, or titillated. He just watches. And we watch him too. It’s as primitive as cinema ever gets: sex and violence, captured with the cleanness of a cell sample under a microscope.
Sex
Critic and philosopher Ernest Mathjis has counted the number of sex scenes and car crashes in Crash. There are 14 of the former, and six of the latter. As Mathjis notes, the sex scenes usually come in clusters. The film opens with three of them, one after the other, filmed starkly, showing off distinct positions – a mix between the Karma Sutra and a medical textbook. Catherine, Ballard’s wife, sleeps with a stranger in an airport hangar. Then Ballard and an assistant fuck in an office on a film set. Then Ballard and Catherine slowly make love on their balcony, recounting their own individual sexual encounters while they do so. One, two, three.
The first audience to watch the film laughed at the mounting nudity, Cronenberg has said. “There are moments when audiences burst out laughing, either in disbelief or exasperation,” Cronenberg told Rodley. “They can’t believe that they’re going to have to watch another sex scene.”
On average, there is either a crash or a sex scene once every five minutes. And when people aren’t fucking each other or hurting themselves, they’re talking about how much they want to do one or the other. Sex scenes begin to refer to other sex scenes – Catherine and Ballard start wondering what it might be like to fuck Vaughan while they themselves are fucking, an erotic encounter nestled inside an erotic encounter.
Or maybe ‘erotic’ is the wrong word. None of it is erotic, exactly. Ebert was right. At certain points, you expect the copulating figures to split in two, revealing their insides, like they’re living diagrams designed to explain happens to human bodies while they’re having sex; this is how a man bends, this is how a woman turns around.
The other surprise is how little Cronenberg equates his cultists with queer subcultures. Most other filmmakers would do some version of this – make a hackneyed comparison to Vaughan’s buddies and S&M fetishists. But part of Cronenberg’s anonymity means he never sets his aesthetic goalposts. There’s no sense that the car crash fetishists exist outside the boundaries of some “norm”, because there’s no clear visual norm Cronenberg seems interested in establishing. Culture, counter-culture – it’s all shot the same way, from the point of view of some thoroughly disinterested party. An alien. Or yes, a computer.
Which is not to say that Crash features nothing in the way of queerness. The film is heavy on homoerotic desire: part of Ballard realizing he finds Vaughan exciting behind the wheel of a car involves Ballard discovering that he wants to fuck him in other less vehicular circumstances too. But Cronenberg simply doesn’t present such desires as “alternative”. They are what they are – bodies drawn to other bodies. Nothing more.
Death
In all of these ways, Crash is surprisingly like its source text, the novel by English cult hero J.G. Ballard – surprising in the sense that Cronenberg’s attempts at adaption usually involve gutting works, rather than reproducing them. Over the course of his career, Ballard became known for his skill at chronicling the peculiar sense of disgrace that comes from living under modern capitalism, skill that arose from his understanding that disgrace is something you feel, not think about. His novels sweep you up. They don’t unlock themselves to you. They just happen, often fitfully. Crash the novel is a collection of long descriptions of violence, dripping with fluid – blood, cum, sweat.
There is at least one difference between the book and the film, however. In Ballard’s work the threat of death is always present. Wounds are often fatal. For hundreds of pages, you sit there trying to guess which characters will make it and which won’t. The book’s central question, to crib from the tagline for that other great anthropological study, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is, who will survive and what will be left of them?
Cronenberg is interested in precisely none of this. Despite the fact that some of his characters do in fact die, there is no real sense of threat. When Vaughan’s co-conspirator, a lunk named Colin Seagrave, accidentally botches a recreation of Jayne Mansfield’s infamous car accident and kills himself, Vaughan isn’t upset. He’s irritated. “He was worried that we would never do Jayne Mansfield's crash, now that the police were cracking down,” Vaughan says when he learns of the accident. “So he did it himself.” Vaughan’s voice is high; whiny. He sounds like a child.
Then there’s the death itself, which is staged for the film’s only real laugh. Seagrave isn’t the only dead body in the wrecked car, Vaughan discovers – when he opens the crumpled car door, a chihuahua falls out, stiff as a board. “The dog,” Vaughan says, lit up, discussing the crime scene like it’s an installation at a gallery. “God, the dog is brilliant, perfect. I wonder where he got it?”
Endings
Because there is no threat of death, these characters never risk learning anything, or changing. We get the distinct sense that they will continue on like this forever, as though they are video game characters trapped in an abandoned console, walking the same routes over and over again, endlessly.
This is because Crash is a closed loop. You could assemble the film in almost any order that you like, picking a scene at random and starting it there. There’s no arc to mess up, so no preferred direction to watch it in. It’s not an arrow pointing forward. It’s a car, colliding into the same wall, over and over.
The film’s literal end – the scene before the credits roll – is a deliberate cop out. It’s more sex, but this time shot from half a mile away, Ballard and Catherine copulating on the side of the road after yet another crash.
The film contains no less sensual image. The pair are not even identifiable as human beings. They’re just smudges of colour. And then the camera pulls back even further than that. The score, an unadorned guitar loop, circles back on itself. There’s no summation. Just this: two people fucking, an overturned car, grass. And then Cronenberg’s camera grows bored of that too, and turns away, attention drifting over to the cars flying down the highway, thousands of them, pointed towards infinity.