Crash is a 1996 Canadian drama film written, produced and directed by David Cronenberg, based on J. G. Ballard's 1973 novel of the same name. Starring James Spader, Deborah Kara Unger, Elias Koteas, Holly Hunter and Rosanna Arquette, it follows a film producer who, after surviving a car crash, becomes involved with a group of symphorophiliacs who are aroused by car crashes and tries to rekindle his sexual relationship with his wife.
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received the Special Jury Prize, a unique award that is distinct from the Jury Prize as it is not given annually, but only at the request of the official jury (for example, the previous year, both a Jury Prize and a Special Jury Prize were awarded). When then-jury president Francis Ford Coppola announced the award "for originality, for daring and for audacity", he stated that it had been a controversial choice and that certain jury members "did abstain very passionately".[5] It continued to receive various accolades, including six Genie Awards.
The film's initial release was met with intense controversy and opened to highly divergent reactions from critics; some praised the film for its daring premise and originality, others aimed criticism for having such a strange premise filled with graphic violence. It has since developed a cult following and is now considered to be one of Cronenberg's best films.
Film producer James Ballard and his detached wife Catherine are in an open marriage. The couple engage in various trysts but, between them, have unenthusiastic sex. Their arousal is heightened by discussing the intimate details of their extramarital sex. She recounts sex that day with a stranger in a prop plane hangar. She was, however, left unsatisfied. When James replies he did not achieve satisfaction during his sexual encounter with one of his coworkers as one of the film crew interrupted them, Catherine replies, "maybe the next one".
While driving home from work late one night, James's car collides head-on with another, killing its male passenger. While trapped in the fused wreckage, Dr. Helen Remington, the driver and the dead passenger's wife, exposes a breast to James when she pulls off the shoulder harness of her seat belt.
While recovering, James meets Helen again, as well as a man named Dr. Robert Vaughan, who takes a keen interest in the brace holding James's shattered leg together and photographs it. While leaving the hospital, Helen and James begin an affair, one primarily fueled by their shared experience of the car crash. Attempting to understand why they are so aroused by their car wreck, they go to witness one of Vaughan's cult meetings/performance pieces, during which he thoroughly re-creates the car crash that killed James Dean with authentic cars and stunt drivers. When the Department of Transport officials break up the event, James flees with Helen and Vaughan.
James soon becomes one of Vaughan's followers who fetishize car crashes, obsessively watching car safety test videos, photographing traffic collisions, and recounting the deaths of famous people in road accidents. Catherine, whom Vaughan has followed in his car on several occasions, begins to fantasize about him and James having sex. Although Vaughan initially claims that he is interested in the "reshaping of the human body by modern technology", his actual project is living out the philosophy that the car crash is a "benevolent psychopathology that beckons towards us".
James drives Vaughan's Lincoln convertible around the city while Vaughan picks up and has sex with a prostitute in the back seat. A short time later, James invites Catherine on one of his and Vaughan's drives. On an interstate, they come across a car wreck involving Colin Seagrave, a member of the group, who had been planning to authentically recreate the car accident that killed Jayne Mansfield with Vaughan. Amongst the wreckage, the three see Colin's bloodied corpse, wearing a dress and a blonde wig to accurately resemble Mansfield. Vaughan photographs the wreck as they pass by. Afterward, when police search Vaughan's convertible regarding a pedestrian hit-and-run, James drives it through a car wash while Vaughan and Catherine have sex in the back seat.
James subsequently has another dalliance with Gabrielle, another of the group members whose legs are clad in restrictive steel braces and who has a vulva-like scar on the back of one of her thighs, an injury suffered in a crash. He tears her fishnet stockings open and penetrates her through the scar. Later, Vaughan invites James to visit a tattooist who tattoos car emblems on Vaughan's body. Afterward, James and Vaughan, both highly aroused, have anal sex in Vaughan's car.
When Vaughan rams his car into Catherine's while it is unattended, he and James aggressively pursue each other. On an overpass, Vaughan intentionally crashes his car, landing on a passenger bus below, killing himself. After Vaughan's death, Gabrielle and Helen visit a junkyard, and affectionally embrace while lying in the wreck of Vaughan's car.
Later, James and Catherine perform a similar stunt, with James pursuing her on a freeway at a high speed. Catherine unbuckles her seatbelt as she sees James approaching, and he rams into the back of her car, forcing it to topple down into a grass median. James exits his car and approaches Catherine's, which has flipped upside down. Catherine lies partly under the car, apparently superficially injured. When James asks if she is okay, she tells him she is not hurt. As the couple kiss and begin to have sex near the wrecked vehicle, James whispers to her, "maybe the next one", implying that the only possible apotheosis of their extreme fetish is death.
David Cronenberg had not read any of J. G. Ballard's works and first heard of the novel Crash in the 1980s from a critic that stated that he should adapt it into a film. Jeremy Thomas, who later produced Naked Lunch, spoke to Cronenberg about the book and that he should read it. Cronenberg was only able to read half of the book as he found it disturbing and said he could not make it into a film. However, he later finished the book and re-read it stating "it was obviously an extraordinary book" although "it's not a likeable book".[6] Cronenberg stated that his agent at Creative Artists Agency told him the film would end his career.[7]
Cronenberg wrote the script without having read any of Ballard's works except Crash and some interviews. Cronenberg's script was mostly faithful to the book, but the ending scene was created by him and he removed some scenes from the book during filming.[8] Attempts were made to add a voice-over in the film, but Cronenberg rejected it later stating "I mean, do you want someone to read from the novel?" and that "he somehow felt that you could explain the movie so people would get it".[9] The location was changed from London in the book to Toronto in the film.[10]
The shooting script for the film was purposely kept short at 77 pages due to budgetary constraints and Cronenberg wanting to "shoot slow, with a lot of attention to detail" and to "focus microscopically" on the shorter script. Cronenberg wanted to do a smaller-budgeted film compared to his recent films. The reduced budget forced Howard Shore to compose the film in Toronto, rather than London, for the first time since Videodrome.[11] Cronenberg was concerned that Peter Suschitzky would be unable to perform the cinematography for the film due to his commitments to Mars Attacks!.[12]
The film was an international co-production between the British company Recorded Picture Company, and Canadian companies Alliance Communications Corporation, The Movie Network, and Telefilm Canada.[14]
For Cronenberg, technology, including the production of automobiles, is the product of the human mind and a kind of natural extension of the human body.[15] He revisits his favorite subject, how modern technology affects people and their sex life, in Crash.[16] He noted that a moment has come in the history of mankind when sex-free artificial reproduction of the species became available: "We could literally put a moratorium on sex for 100 years and we still would not extinguish the human race." The director wonders what the place of sex is in these new conditions.[15]
The novel depicts the world of mankind so alienated and jaded that communication and emotions are possible only through traumatic experiences, such as a car accident.[17] In the fantasy, semi-abstract world of Ballard and Cronenberg, the vectors of thanatos and eros coincide in a single act of intercourse through man-made technology. Jonathan Rosenbaum notes that in the film, human skin is likened to the glitzy, fetishized surface of cars; the camera slides seamlessly from one to the other.[18] The "chosen ones", a secret society that reads like a fight club in Palahniuk's novel, perceive vehicles and accidents as a fetish.[19]
At the Cannes Film Festival, a screening provoked boos and angry bolts by upset viewers.[24] In a 2020 interview, Cronenberg stated that he believed Francis Ford Coppola, the jury president at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, was so vehemently opposed to Crash that other jury members in favor of the film banded together to present Cronenberg with a rare Special Jury Prize.[25] So great was Coppola's distaste for the film that, according to Cronenberg, Coppola refused to personally present the award to the director.[25]
The controversial subject matter prompted The Daily Mail and The Evening Standard to orchestrate an aggressive campaign to ban Crash in the United Kingdom. In response to this outcry, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) inquired with a Queen's Counsel and a psychologist, none of whom found any justification to ban it, and 11 disabled people, who saw no offense with its portrayal of the physically challenged. Seeing no evidence for a ban, Crash was passed by the BBFC uncut with an 18 rating in March 1997.[26]
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