DVD Review: David Cronenberg's Crash

Crash (1996) ****
Directed By: David Cronenberg.
Written By: David Cronenberg based on the novel by J.G. Ballard.
Starring: James Spader (James Ballard), Holly Hunter (Helen Remington), Elias Koteas (Vaughan), Deborah Kara Unger (Catherine Ballard), Rosanna Arquette (Gabrielle), Peter MacNeill (Colin Seagrave).

I’m not sure that I think can think of another movie that contains as much sex as David Cronenberg’s Crash and yet is so completely devoid of eroticism. That’s not a criticism - it’s a complement. One of the main problems with movies that seek to seriously explore human sexuality is that the sex gets in the way. There is something about watching beautiful people having sex on film that distracts from whatever serious intentions the filmmakers may have. But Cronenberg avoids that trap in Crash, by making the sex so cold and clinical, and so un-erotic to any audience member who doesn’t share the characters fetishes, that are we are free to concentrate on what the sex in the movie actually means.

The characters in the movie are hollow and empty. Long before the action of the movie begins, the characters have become emotionally dead. It is no mistake that we meet the Ballards, a married couple, separately, yet both engaged in sex. She is having sex in an airplane hangar with some random person, he in a camera room with one of his assistants. They come home and compare notes about their sexual exploits, and then have sex with each other. What you will immediately notice is that neither of them seems to be enjoying the sex - either with their random partners or with each other (and, that from the beginning of the film, Cronenberg is linking together sex and technology, but we’ll get back to that later). The Ballards are bored, not just in their sex life, but in all facets of their lives. There is obviously some sort of love between them, because they are staying together, but we don’t really see it. Maybe they’re just together because it’s easier than being apart.

Things change, at least for James (James Spader), when he is involved in a traffic accident. He gets distracted, jumps the median and ends up heading the wrong way down the street where he collides head on with another car. He and the driver of the other car, Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) are injured, but they’ll live, but Helen’s husband ends up going through both windshields, and dies bleeding onto James’ floor. The two will have a tense meeting in the hospital, both of them riddled with scars and limping around on crutches or canes, but it isn’t until the meet in the car graveyard, where their mangled cars have been destroyed. “In find myself driving again” James says, even though he complains that the number of cars on the road have increased since the accident. He and Helen drive away, and end up having quick, dirty sex in James’ car, which is the same color, make and model as the one that was involved in the accident.

This is when Helen introduces James to Vaughn (Elias Koteas). Vaughn is obsessed with car accidents, and the damage they do – both to the cars themselves, and the human body – and he leads a small, exclusive group of people who are sexually aroused by them. He re-stages famous accidents, like the one that killed James Dean. He lives with a woman, Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), whose legs have been horribly disfigured by an accident. They are being held together by braces. They accident has created some new orifices on her legs, that she and others, explore sexually (like the “portals” that are drilled into the backs of the characters of Cronenberg’s next film eXistenZ, Arquette’s wounds are both sickening real, and somehow erotic – they look very much like a vagina, and hence why they are penetrated).

Vaughn is probably the most Cronenberg-ian character in the film (is that the correct phrase?). Like the twin gynecologists played by Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers or Jeff Goldblum’s science geek in The Fly, he is essentially a mad scientist character, recreating everything in his own image. Sex, death, love, God all of them, in the form that most of us conceive them, has become meaningless for him. So he seeks out answers in another form, and they end up taking the perverse form we see in the movie. Physiology and technology are linked very closely in the movie. The changes that happen to both the cars, and the humans inside those cars, when an accident occurs are mirror images of each other. The cars become crumpled and bent, somehow broken like humans, whereas the human become harder and colder, more like the machines. This group of people has perverted it all in the search of answers. That they fail in undeniable, unless of course you think that they have found something that works for them. Obviously James and Catherine had problems at the start of the movie – we see them involved in separate perversity by fucking other people, and then describing it to each other. By the end of the film, they are just as perverse, or even more so, but they are connected again. They now share a perversity, rather than keeping it separately. This is probably as close as you can come to a “happy ending” for this story. Their marriage, will in fact survive, in this new perverse form, until of course, their fetish kills them.

I said at the beginning of this review that characters in the film are hollow and empty. Normally when I use that phrase in regards to movie characters, it is meant as an insult. But that isn’t the case here. These characters are supposed to be hollow and empty. Like characters in an Antonioni film, they walk through their lives unfeeling and uncaring. The fetish brings them to life in a way they were not before. They are no longer hollow and empty by the end of the film. They most likely aren’t going to live much longer, but at least temporarily they have found the answer they are looking for.

The performances in the movie are surprising effective, especially when you consider how internal most of the characters are. Spader has always struck me as a bit of a pervert anyway, and he makes James into almost a blank slate, completely driven by his desires as the film progresses. Hunter, one of the few major actresses who would even consider a movie like this, is quietly effective as the woman who eggs James on. Koteas is all raging id in the film, the most supremely confident in all that he does. He almost takes on the air of a cult leader. But the key performance in the film is by Deborah Kara Unger as Catherine. She remains an outsider to the group for most of the movie. She always appears to be looking away from James, not out of disgust, but because of something far different. She tries to join him in his quest, and valiantly tries, but I'm not quite sure she can. Even in the films last scene, after she has "her" accident, she still doesn't really seem to be drawn into it with James. She is the films most complex character.

Cronenberg has moved on from Crash, and in recent years has directed two much more mainstream films in A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Both of those films are great (in fact, A History of Violence was my favorite film of 2005). Recently, it was announced that Cronenberg plans to direct Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington in an adaptation of a Robert Ludlum novel. Although both A History of Violence and Eastern Promises still show a Cronenberg-ian flair (both easily fit into his filmography, and confirm his auteur status), and I have faith that the new film will as well, I hope at some point Cronenberg returns to the type of filmmaking on display in Crash. Many people could direct a great spy thriller, but only Cronenberg could direct Crash.