Dir: David Cronenberg
Starring: James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Deborah Kara Unger
I was watching a video a few weeks ago about the recent docuseries Quiet On Set—the Discovery/HBO venture about the malfeasance of many of Nickelodeon studios’ live-action producers—and the videomaker, Quinton Hoover, made an observation that stuck with me. He proposed that if you were to get in a time machine and travel to the year 1991 from the year 2024, your casual knowledge of fetishes would far outstrip all but some of the most dyed-in-the-wool perverts in the world, and were you to use some of the casual language people in internet subcommunities today employ, you would be fairly unintelligible. Crash, both the novel and the film by Cronenberg, make statements about the same overarching idea—that our relationship with technology and the overall societal advancement of technology has ushered in fundamentally more abstract modes of relating to our sexuality.
For those that may not already know, both the novel and film of Crash center around a group of people who find sexual fulfillment from causing, being involved in, and documenting vehicle crashes. The story is primarily told from the perspective of a man named James Ballard (Spader), and his fateful encounter with Drs. Helen Remington (Hunter) and, more significantly, Robert Vaughan (Koteas).
As I think about Crash, I find the shots of 1990s Toronto interesting. Every Cronenberg movie I’ve seen was shot in and around Toronto, and Cronenberg’s version of the city has this permanent gray overcast that often goes a ways in accentuating the characters’ relationship to the piece of technology (organic or inorganic) that is the subject of one of his films. In this respect, Crash feels like Videodrome and also, perhaps more obviously, Naked Lunch, Cronenberg’s other big attempt to adapt the work of a mid-century transgressive fiction writer. But while I feel like the film accurately recreates a good bit of the novel, I come away feeling a bit pensive with the film for the ways in which its setting feels distant for me.
I want to like Crash. I feel like the points it gestures towards about the intertwining of technology and sexual desire are interesting. In some ways, I feel like my appreciation for it is appropriately abstract and mirrors the relationship that the characters in the novel have with car crashes. However, I find that one consequence of Cronenberg’s correct point may be that I, as a millennial born in the early 90s whose sexuality developed alongside the internet of the early 2000s, find the proceedings of Crash to be pretty routine. My sense has always been that Ballard and Cronenberg accurately identify the pornographizing effect of technology but don’t extrapolate any sort of implication for that beyond the lives of the main characters. In the novel, Ballard begins to realize that the car crash signifies a kind of “autogeddon” that will end humanity, but this theorizing is largely absent in the film’s dialogue save a very Cronenbergian observation about the merging of metal and body/sex given by Vaughan at one point. Beyond that, the film is incredibly representational in its adaptation of the plot. The shots are realist, the score is kind of understated and 80s-synthrock-meets-orchestra, the realistic attention given to injuries and to the physicality of bodies is not as evocative as a film like Videodrome, but also not as grotesquely creative as the novel. We don’t ever hear what Cronenberg’s Ballard imagines, but for Ballard’s Ballard, here’s a paragraph of the not-quite ToS breaking stuff:
I dreamed of other accidents that might enlarge this repertory of orifices, relating them to more elements of the automobile's engineering, to the ever-more complex technologies of the future. What wounds would create the sexual possibilities of the invisible technologies of thermonuclear reaction chambers, white-tiled control rooms, the mysterious scenarios of computer circuitry? As I embraced Gabrielle I visualized, as Vaughan had taught me, the accidents that might involve the famous and beautiful, the wounds upon which erotic fantasies might be erected, the extraordinary sexual acts celebrating the possibilities of unimagined technologies. In these fantasies I was able at last to visualize those deaths and injuries I had always feared. I visualized my wife injured in a high-impact collision, her mouth and face destroyed, and a new and exciting orifice opened in her perineum by the splintering steering column, neither vagina nor rectum, an orifice we could dress with all our deepest affections. I visualized the injuries of film actresses and television personalities, whose bodies would flower into dozens of auxiliary orifices, points of sexual conjunction with their audiences formed by the swerving technology of the automobile. I visualized the body of my own mother, at various stages of her life, injured in a succession of accidents, fitted with orifices of ever greater abstraction and ingenuity, so that my incest with her might become more and more cerebral, allowing me at last to come to terms with her embraces and postures.
It’s intense! It’s cyberpunk body-horror that makes me think of Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Tetsuo honestly serves as an interesting contrast for this film. Although its presentation of queer desire and fetishism as partly a response to trauma is problematic, it uses its absurd premise and metaphorical imagery as a means of embracing the cybersexuality that Ballard and Cronenberg, while not necessarily condemning, do seem to portray as ultimately pessimistic and death-driven.
Another obvious connection to make to all of this is the Futurist art movement of the early 1900s. Some of the statements by Marinetti or Russolo seem to presage Crash in their fervor for the power and speed that technology was thought to bring to aesthetic enjoyment.
"We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched with a new form of beauty, the beauty of speed. A race-automoblie adorned with great pipes like serpents with explosive breath… a race-automobile which seems to rush over exploding power is mkore beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” - Filippo Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto
“Every five seconds siege cannons disembowel space by a chord TAM-TUUUMB mutiny of 500 echoes to gore it mince it scatter it to infinity. In the center of these crushed TAM-TUUUMBS width 50 kilometers square jump explosions fissures fists rapid-fire batteries Violence ferocity regularity this grave bass scans the strange very very agitated crowds high notes of the battle Fury breathlessness ears eyes nostrils open! Beware! Strength! what joy to see to hear to smell everything everything taratatatata of the machine gunners to shriek breathlessly under bits slaps traak-traak lashes pic-pac-pam-tumb bizarre leaps to 200 meters high by rifle shots Below below at the bottom of the orchestra pools to whip buffalo spurs trcuks pluff plaff horses rearing up flic flac zing zing sciaaaack hilarious winnies iiiiiii” - Marinetti, letter from Adrianople
Of course, there’s a political angle to this connection as well. For the futurists, the rejection of Romantic and classical aesthetics in favor of industrial ones was partnered with a radical rejection of “irrational” femininity and emotionality in favor of a “rational” mechanized approach to the world that would ultimately find some popular expression in the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany. But while the Futurists viewed technology in an ultimately revanchist and authoritarian register, I think that the versatility of technology permits a view of the relationship between the body, sex, and machine that is not so pessimistic as to fall into a kind of romantic pastoralism that imagines a purer form of sexuality prior to technology. I think of Donna Haraway and how her concept of the cyborg embraces an expansive definition of machine that looks beyond the inorganic/organic divide in favor of new couplings across biological and linguistic categories. I think of Octavia Butler, whose xenogenetic imaginaries at once envision new horizons for the species while also reminding us, through subtext, that such hybridity has been part of intercultural contact going back centuries.
I also think about my own experience with car crashes. I’ve been in several major crashes over the course of my life and am lucky to have escaped with no major injuries. I remember how, after the first crash I was ever in, I was astounded by the sound. How, when the crash happened, the music my mother was playing was suddenly cut off and replaced with the bang and crunch of the metal, the popping of the airbags, the pulsing buzz of the alarm and the now-ceaseless horn. Afterward, I began to really contemplate how horrifying cars are and how easy it is, as a driver, to forget about the reality of your soft flesh hurtling around within this casing of metal—occupying an ersatz hermeticism that’s buffered in all manner of hidden ways, but especially, I think, through music. When you’re in a sufficient car crash that breaks the music player of your car, suddenly the facticity of the metal rushes in, and the small parlor that you may have found yourself in is replaced with the recognition of your body and those of others. I still get visceral sensory flashbacks from time to time, remembering the smell of smoke and steam, the B’oMch of metal meeting metal, and the jerking abrasion of vinyl seatbelts along my neck. I wouldn’t say I fetishize it the way Ballard’s characters do, but I certainly find their attraction at least theoretically understandable, if practically unsustainable.
I think the most effective scene in the film version of Crash is the moment when our collection of fetishists are gathered at Vaughan’s house, silently fondling themselves and one another as they watch videos of crash tests. Helen, unfulfilled at the lack of a close-up shot she swears is in this particular video, begins to freak out, and her fellow fetishists ultimately play off the missing footage as the result of a mistake in the video player, calming her down. Something about the way that this scene is shot, with all of the characters reclined before the TV in the slightly messy wood-paneled apartment, felt evocative of stoner comedies, and while, again, I think this may have been intended as satire, its dark punch feels almost farcical. The irony in the scene, that either Helen has become so inured to this footage that she confuses one video for another, or that the fetishists effectively permit themselves belief in a mercurial video player that can decide what parts of a video it will or won’t show, is something I find funny. Not ‘ha ha’ funny, but funny in the way that the mall in Dawn of the Dead can now seem novel in a similar way that the characters in that film find it to be. Cronenberg notices the advance of technology and bio-mechanical thinking, but seems ironically unable to find the excitement in that, only able to observe it from a distance and not feel it himself.
Stray Thoughts
I’ve seen some people suggest that Ballard (the character) and Catherine (Unger’s) have “gotten bored” with regular sex, as evidenced by their very clinical manner of speaking to one another, and that the introduction of the car crashes is a bid by them to “save their marriage.” But the dialogue is mostly faithful to the way that the characters speak in the original novel, and while both Ballard and Catherine are at a point in their relationship where they take on regular lovers, they do so lovingly and with care for what the other person is getting out of the arrangement. It’s ironic because, aside from the inherent danger of the car crashes and the trepidation James shows around acknowledging his attraction to Vaughan, Catherine and James actually seem to have quite a healthy relationship with one another.
I’m curious to know if anyone is genuinely a car crash fetishist, and if so, how they go about fulfilling this desire.
I’ve now seen three films in which James Spader plays a troubled fetishist. For now, I think Sex, Lies, and Videotape is the most solidly paced and written movie of the bunch, though I think his and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s characters in Secretary will be my favorites in the long run.
Apparently, the movie was censored in some areas and opposed in others because of the depiction of James’s sex with the visibly disabled Gabrielle. I can’t speak to Gabrielle’s depiction in the film as a person with a disability, but I think this might just go to show another way in which culturally repressive forces work to marginalize the disabled and rarefy sex as some area of life that is outside of the human experience.
Blog note:
I’ve turned on paid subscriptions for this blog, and would appreciate anything anyone is willing to give. My intent is to leave the first few months of posts free, and to have whatever is the most recent month of posts available for free, but to begin slowly building up an archive that will primarily be for paid subscribers. I’ve been seeing an increase in subscribers lately, and I’m happy that folks seem interested in this project.