Person and machine gets twisted in a bloody mess of futurism and sexual depravity.
Making the shift from horse drawn carriages as transport to cars has had two effects on our society; some, actually a lot of us use our cars as an extension of our repressed sexual desire and secondly, the roads have turned into a death trap. Billions of cars travelling at high speeds, bobbing and weaving through one another, trying to get from point A to point B as quick as they can give the uncanny impression of an entire colony of ants trampling over each other. Of course, cars don’t drive themselves (I’ve come to be told that some cars do drive themselves), ok most cars don’t drive themselves so when they crash, they take us with them. The chance of the driver walking away unscathed from a high-speed collision are as thin as a human hair, you’ll probably wake up in a hospital ward with shattered ribs and your bones held together in a brace. Your body is gripped by blunt force and psychological trauma for a very long time and you probably won’t want to look at a car for the rest of your life.
David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) follows a group of people who get turned on by this prospect. It’s a strange take on body horror as the human wreck and the motor wreck become one, twisted and mangled together in a bloody metallic mess of broken glass, torn upholstery and ripped skin. Playing on our instinctive reaction of closing our eyes when a crash occurs, the film keeps us on its string till the very end. When film producer James Ballard gets totalled in a crash, while he’s recovering, he begins a strange sort of affair with the wife of the man he killed in the crash, meeting through her, a group of symphorophiliacs (people who get their kicks from watching and staging accidents). On their strange adventures around town, they restage famous roadside deaths like James Dean and Jayne Mandfield, taking pictures and documenting in merciless detail any car crash they come across. Oh and I forgot to mention the amount of sex in this film which leaps right over into the realm of pornography. I admire why all of the sex is there, a reflection of our sexualities bound up with our machines, and everyone has a weird kink to do with cars and as we know, all kinks inevitably lead to sex. I can’t say that I like it though, the entire second half of the film has barely any dialogue in it, and sure the sex itself is a progression of the plot and in no way is it gratuitous, for me personally it just got a bit repetitive and stultifying, which is ironic for me because body horror films seek to break through this barrier of desensitivity.
Not your traditional road movie, the bulk of the film is on the road though, and the camera frames the road as this deadly dangerous tunnel full of maniacal motorists who’ll run you down without a moments notice. Aerial and wide-angle shots of densely packed motorways create the aforementioned picture of ants scurrying over each other in the same direction. The characters fetishist obsession with car crashes and every bit of paraphernalia related to it like car crash dummy videos, bubbles to the surface and the camera captures those little tics with extreme close-ups, augmented by the subtle acting from the cast. All the characters have a very strange dynamic with one another, James and his wife Catherine being in an open marriage where they end up screwing countless people yet still ending up back with each other, tethered by a peculiar love. Each member of the car crash trauma club has strangely sexualised wounds left by car accidents and with their bodies relying on frames and prosthetics to keep them barely whole, they explode with repressed sexual energy upon one another. The wounds we see on them aren’t bloody or fresh, they’re old and scarred, reflecting our bent fascination towards vicarious injury and thrill. These invisible scars are everywhere upon our psychical selves.
As the film progresses, the nature of the car crash turns, imperceptibly, from a tragedy to an awakening. Anyone who walks away to tell the tale of it, is altered both physically and psychologically. There’s an intimate exchange between the cars and the people driving them and this is exactly the dragon these collision freaks are chasing.
Loud, driving and twanging guitar chords make for a cacophonous score, like two guitars slamming into one another, I can’t say it doesn’t for the film, it’s perfect for it!
What’s driving these people is a strange sense of religious preoccupation with their close crushes with death. That’s what everything boils down to if you grasp at enough straws. They obsess over the ground mechanics of a car crash, they know it like clockwork and like a clockmaker they throw themselves into it, speeding straight towards death, headlights shining into his face and just when you thought they’d swerve away at the very last moment, they smash straight into each other, with bravery, with epiphany and with transcendence.
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