Crash: The Wreck of the Century

Inevitably, both book and film subsequently went through their badge-of-honor periods, each becoming a handy bellwether of broad-minded cool versus uptight, censorious conservatism. And eventually, Crash the novel and Crash the film (which Ballard, incidentally, adored) were rehabilitated to the point that each now occupies a central position in its creator’s body of work. But if the similarity of those arcs suggests a slavish, to-the-letter adaptation, that’s misleading. Book and film provoked a comparable mix of outrage and appreciation because—united in spirit but separated by more than two decades, the Atlantic Ocean, and their authors’ complementary but contrasting sensibilities—they each rattled the cultural cages of their individual moments. As the women’s-lib movement gathered strength, coinciding with Britain’s most transformative phase of motorway construction and the so-called golden age of pornography, Ballard wrote a novel of masculine crisis, technoparanoia, and perverse sexuality. Cronenberg then brilliantly applied that story to a numbed society paralyzed, rabbitlike, in the headlights of the coming new millennium—making a numbed and paralyzed movie of it. Each saw fatalistic dissociation as his era’s obvious reaction to the terrifying onrush of modernity. And now we can watch Crash from the vantage point of our own “unprecedented” epoch and find strange, cool comfort in the narrowly averted apocalypses of the past. Apparently, the times have always been ending.

Crucial to the success of this experiment is the flat, disconnected, affectless performance style, mimicked in Howard Shore’s sparse score, with its solitary electric-guitar twangs recombining in ever-changing permutations but never harmonizing. Blank-slate protagonist James, played by James Spader, is a paradoxical concoction of social diffidence and unembarrassed kink, similar only to other James Spader characters. When he locks eyes with Holly Hunter’s Dr. Helen Remington across two crumpled hoods and the body of her dead husband; when he rips away those fishnets to get at the yonic leg wound of the minxish Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette); when he is introduced to us, buried nose-deep in the ass crack of an unnamed production assistant, there is less a sense of a human connection than of an alien or an animal enacting a pathologized pantomime of human connection. But it is Deborah Kara Unger who delivers the film’s signature performance: she plays James’s wife, Catherine, as a series of precisely posed ice sculptures. However ostensibly erotic Catherine’s behavior, her endothermic characterization robs it of all heat and friction. Even her dirty talk is clinically clean: the noneuphemistic, anatomical language she uses—penis, anus, semen—has all the pornographic traction of a vacuum robot reading The Merck Manual.

The characters are scarcely more than ciphers on which to hang fetishistic detailing—Catherine’s Veronica Lake hair and block-heeled nineties shoes; Gabrielle’s bondage-kink bodice with the single cut-out breast; Helen’s incongruous white trench coat and witchy gloves. The people of Crash are propelled fatalistically through its dystopia like carefully costumed marionettes, by forces they neither understand nor care overmuch about, endlessly acting on biological urges divorced from biological consequences. Vaughan may refer to the car crash as a “fertilizing event,” but the world of Crash is sterile and child-free, and the majority of sex acts are, or are heavily implied to be, anal, oral, masturbatory, incomplete, or otherwise of the nonreproductive, leg-fucking variety. Whatever species these people belong to, they are its last generation.

To that end, the most iconoclastic choice Cronenberg makes is to remove one of the load-bearing columns of novel-Vaughan’s psycho­pathology. In the book, the character’s obsession with fatal celebrity car crashes extends to its logical end point: he intends to arrange a crash in which he and Elizabeth Taylor will die. It’s in the ecstatic, orgasmic pursuit of this lethal fantasy that Vaughan dies on the page; on the screen, he dies a littler death, pursuing James instead. So although film-Vaughan recreates James Dean’s death, and his associate Seagrave ghoulishly reenacts Jayne Mansfield’s lethal collision, his deviant imagination only ever projects backward into the past. The absence of his greater goal—his grand plan—is palpable: a raised scar on the film’s otherwise glassy-smooth surface.

This subtraction may have carried an unforeseeable blessing: had the subplot remained, the 1997 car-crash death of Princess Diana might have been a correlation too uncomfortable even for the never knowingly comfortable Cronenberg. But the choice serves a broader agenda too. Without Vaughan’s celebrity obsession, there is no hope in the film for the kind of immortality he seeks in the book. This is vital for Cronenberg’s revisioning: his nineties are a time of endless endings that cannot be transcended, where there can be no life, however notional, after death. Another of the director’s whole-cloth inventions makes the point emphatically: When Vaughan and James are being tattooed, Vaughan complains that the tattooist is doing too neat a job. “This is a prophetic tattoo,” he says. “Prophecy is dirty and ragged.” But Cronenberg’s film, all sleek metallic surfaces and Teflon interactions, is anything but dirty and ragged. Mired in the peculiar midnineties moment when low-level millennial paranoia created a kind of hysterical blind spot, a collective failure of forward-casting imagination, it contains no prophecy. What good is prophecy if there’s only about five minutes of future left?

Ballard himself appears in the 1971 short film Crash!, made by Harley Cokeliss for the BBC based on fragments of the author’s earlier writing. In it, Ballard says his interest in car design came from what it conveys about how we perceive reality—“for example, that the future is something with a fin on it.” What Cronenberg did with Ballard’s novel was to strip out the upholstery, the walnut finish, the chrome detailing. He junked the tail fins and the snarling fenders, tore out the seats and the dashboards, till only the barest chassis remained, then built the story back up in the anodyne image of his own time. By the time of its nineties remodeling, the Lincoln Continental had long since lost its fins, and with them any futurist fantasy. Even in its marketing—more a manufacturer’s spec sheet than the tantalizing lifestyle spreads of yesteryear—the nineties Continental looks much like any other car, as if apologetic anonymity and sameness were the endgame all along.

“To die in a car crash is a unique twentieth-century finale,” Ballard once said. He was writing Crash when there was still a quarter of the century left to go, whereas with his version Cronenberg was reporting from its exhausted end. But what about now? We are now—only just—further in time from Cronenberg’s Crash than it was from Ballard’s. And for all that had changed between 1973 and 1996, the cultural gulf between the end of the last century and now feels even more chasmic. As if to prove that point, in July 2020, the Ford Motor Company announced that production of the Lincoln Continental, struggling for relevance in this new world, would cease at the end of the year.

So here we are in the future that Crash refused to envisage, in which technophilia of a different, digital flavor has come to make the film’s preoccupation with bodies melding with machines seem analog and almost quaint. Or at least it would, if Crash did not also repel any attempt to sentimentalize or nostalgize it. Ballard again: “Human beings have a terrible temptation to imagine a happier past.” But Cronenberg’s Crash will not allow us to engage in any such delusional project. Even now that its ticking engine has cooled, its upturned wheels have ceased spinning, and its mangled frame is partly grown over by the grass of the intervening decades, it remains exactly as fascinating, salutary, and instructive as a spectacular wreck on the side of the highway, and just about as lovable. But then, what Crash’s most passionate advocates feel for the movie has never been love—soft, warm, fleeting—but fetish, a cold, deathless, chromium fetish that will last forever. Welcome to the cult.