Crash. (18.)
Directed by David Cronenberg. 1996.
Starring James Spader, Holly Hunter, Deborah Kara Unger, Elias Koteas and Rosanna Arquette. 4K Restoration from Arrow Video out on UHD and Blu-ray from December 14th. Also available to download. 96 mins.
This adaptation of J.G. Ballard's book about a group of car crash survivors who form a sexual fetish around the event, marshalled by "hoodlum scientist" Vaughan is a sick, sick film; you can't help thinking that the Ban This Filth crowd have a point with this one. It is also the greatest and most faithful of all film adaptations of literary novels. It perfectly captures the essence of the book, without being pedantically faithful to it. But more than that though, it leaves you the book, completely unscathed. Cronenberg's film is absolutely Ballard's book, but if you read the book after seeing it, his film doesn't intrude into your reading.
The key to this, banally enough, is switching location from the summery Surrey surrounds of Heathrow airport to the overcast skies of Toronto. The film's colour scheme is murky greys while for me the book always seems to be about clear white surfaces. The film is a night owl, the book is a degenerate daytime outing. Cronenberg claims that the film was shot in locations no more than a half-hour drive from his house, which is faithful to Ballard's methodology. He would sit in Shepperton, down a succession of G'n'Ts and create a brutal, surreal distortion of the world outside his window.
Crash is an extension of the standard Ballard narrative, a deadly romantic triangle where the protagonist has to fight against a mad scientist for the affections of the desirable female. Here the triangle is squared. The protagonist is a producer of commercials called Ballard (Spader) in a contest with Vaughan (Koteas) over Ballard's wife (Unger) and the widow (Hunter) of the man Ballard kills in a car crash early on. Everybody in the story is drawn into Vaughan's research project into how the human body is being reshaped by technology.
Due to its content, the book was considered unfilmable. Previously Cronenberg had largely failed to get any kind of meaningful grip on the unfilmable Naked Lunch but with Ballard, he achieved a casual twisted synergy. It's odd that William S. should have defeated him because right from his earliest films he seemed to be trying to channel Burroughs but when he came to tackle him full on he fell back on a disguised biography, with some of the more outlandish elements of the books stuck on as window dressing. Yet with Ballard the kinship is so perfect, perhaps because Cronenberg's body horror preoccupations were a parallel course to Ballard's interest in the way humanity was bending in acquiescence to the 20th century.
It also helps that of all the great writers, Ballard has a style that doesn't offer any barriers to visual interpretation. Once you've wiped away all the semen splashed onto dashboards it actually has a very straightforward, linear plot. In Crash, the language is ironic and repetitive and surgical. Vaughan can't appear on the page without some mention of his being scarred. It's a dirty book, a sexy book but it isn't saucy; sex is described as a mechanical process. The film version is one of the rare mainstream films to accept the notion that sex involves penetration. The sex scenes aren't the usual writhing around showboating, they are methodical and, though consensual, something of a violation. They are also alarmingly passive.
The central metaphor of Crash is to flip the way that by driving we casually acquiesce and rationalise the risk of being penetrated and violated in the most non-consensual way possible, and turn it into a choice, into a desire. Both book and film is the pornography of such a viewpoint. It isn't especially graphic sexually, but it is very pornographic. The characters have no motivation beyond sex and their motivation in those sex scenes is to create the most pleasing aesthetic shapes possible for the viewer. They all have an external focus: putting on a show for the viewer. And like porn, Cronenberg's film cuts away anything that isn't about sex and the sex is about the erotic architecture rather than communicating emotions. The sex though is not joyless and though the film isn't very explicit, it is on heat. It's a cold, detached heat, but it is heat. After watching Crash, you wonder what Cronenberg might have made of Basic Instinct 2.
It's all, of course, monumentally silly. The absurdity of it is built-in and there is humour in there but it is rarely obvious. When in the aftermath of the head-on collision that has just killed her husband, Hunt accidentally flashes her breast whiles trying to remove her seat belt, it's like Barbara Windsor's bra flies off in Carry On Camping.
Arrow are releasing Crash on their Video imprint, which they use for cult item, rather than their Academy one which they use for higher-brow material. The genius of Crash is that it fits equally in both and equally in neither.
As a film, it's perfect in all its doings. The book has been stripped down to the bare essentials and there isn't an inessential moment in the film's 97 minutes. He gets a lot done with very little. The high angle shot through the car window of Ballard sat in the rear as he leaves hospital for the first time after the accident, taken from a fixed camera looking down and back at him, perfectly expresses his newfound vulnerability. Another shot, similar high angle through a car window, but looking over Hunter's shoulder at her stocking-clad cross legs in the front seat, elegantly encapsulates the whole theme of compartmentalised eroticism.
The film also has four remarkable lead performances. (Arquette is great too, but she is ultimately a peripheral figure.) Given that the film is about transferring eroticism to inanimate objects there is a cruel logic to casting the utterly sexless Holly Hunter as Helen Rimington, the widow. I suppose in The Piano she was a form of sex object but prior to that, she had always been a brisk no-nonsense figure with a face set against all that sordid business. She was possibly the primmest and properest film star since Joyce Grenfell. Cronenberg switches that brisk no-nonsense attitude into a standard woman in uniform fetish. Just look at the red gloves and white coat she wears to the compound yard when she speaks to Ballard for the first time.
The showiest role if Koteas as Vaughan. He is so seedy he may even out scuzz James Woods in Videodrome. In the book, Vaughan is repeatedly defined by his smell – dried cum and gasoline – and you could swear that Koteas is externalising that smell.
As Ballard's wife Kara Unger sets the tone for the whole piece. She is almost entirely passive but defiantly so; she has a placid confidence that she can handle whatever is coming to her. She is constantly on heat: even the wind on her face seems to arouse her. I said at the top that the film doesn't intrude on the book but this performance does. My book Catherine may not exactly look like the screen Catherine but the way she moves and speaks is exactly the same.
Against that my book Ballard is nothing like Spader. Partly because a narrator is always a little anonymous and Spader, more than the other performers in this, is definitively North American. The anonymous, passive, first-person author's surrogate is always tricky role. In Naked Lunch, Peter Weller's somnabulthesp approach to the William Lee role definitely has a cool appeal but it also holds the film back. If Kara Unger sets the mood, Spader's vacant curiosity is what moves the film forward, stops it grinding to a halt. Without him the film doesn't work.
It's remarkable how clean and clear the film has moved through the following two and a half decades. If you found it laughable then, you still will now; if it thrilled you then it may do so even more now. It comes to us from the time of the first dial-up stirrings of the internet yet it looks and feels 21st century hard. Even though its given them a 24 year head start, it still looks to be a little bit further into the future than most of the art being made in 2020. It's a transgression for the ages.
Other Cronenberg reviews
Shivers
Rabid
The Brood
Videodrome
Cosmopolis
Maps to the Stars
A Dangerous Method.
Extras.
Arrow are releasing a 4K restoration of the uncut version, supervised by director of photography Peter Suschitsky, approved by Cronenberg.
The array of extras are overwhelming but, from what I've managed to get through, enthralling and informative.
• Brand new audio commentary with film scholar Adrian Martin
• Cronenberg Challenge – new interview with director of photography Peter Suschitzky
• Mechanical Animals – new interview with executive producer Jeremy Thomas
• The Shore Thing – new interview with composer Howard Shore
• License to Drive – new interview with casting director Deirdre Bowen
• 2019 Q&A with Cronenberg and actor Viggo Mortensen at TIFF
• 1996 Q&A with Cronenberg and source novel writer J.G. Ballard at the National Film Theatre in London
• Behind-the-scenes footage and contemporary press interviews
• Architect of Pain: The Cronenberg Project—brand new video essay by Caelum Vatnsdal on Cronenberg's use of architecture and location
• Crash! (1971, 18 mins)—short film originally broadcast as part of the BBC's Review series, starring J.G. Ballard and loosely adapted from his 1970 novel The Atrocity Exhibition
• Two short films inspired by Ballard and the novel Crash: Nightmare Angel (Zoe Beloff, 1986, 33 mins) and Always (crashing) (Simon Barker and Jason Wood, 2016, 14 mins)
• Two Cronenberg short films: The Nest (2013, 10 mins) and At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World (2007, 4 mins)
• Original Trailers
• Fully illustrated collector's booklet featuring new writing by Vanessa Morgan, Araceli Molina, Jason Wood and Zoe Beloff, and a reprinted excerpt from Cronenberg on Cronenberg
• Fold-out double-sided poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork
• Limited edition packaging with reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Gilles Vranck.
Directed by David Cronenberg. 1996.
Starring James Spader, Holly Hunter, Deborah Kara Unger, Elias Koteas and Rosanna Arquette. 4K Restoration from Arrow Video out on UHD and Blu-ray from December 14th. Also available to download. 96 mins.
This adaptation of J.G. Ballard's book about a group of car crash survivors who form a sexual fetish around the event, marshalled by "hoodlum scientist" Vaughan is a sick, sick film; you can't help thinking that the Ban This Filth crowd have a point with this one. It is also the greatest and most faithful of all film adaptations of literary novels. It perfectly captures the essence of the book, without being pedantically faithful to it. But more than that though, it leaves you the book, completely unscathed. Cronenberg's film is absolutely Ballard's book, but if you read the book after seeing it, his film doesn't intrude into your reading.
The key to this, banally enough, is switching location from the summery Surrey surrounds of Heathrow airport to the overcast skies of Toronto. The film's colour scheme is murky greys while for me the book always seems to be about clear white surfaces. The film is a night owl, the book is a degenerate daytime outing. Cronenberg claims that the film was shot in locations no more than a half-hour drive from his house, which is faithful to Ballard's methodology. He would sit in Shepperton, down a succession of G'n'Ts and create a brutal, surreal distortion of the world outside his window.
Crash is an extension of the standard Ballard narrative, a deadly romantic triangle where the protagonist has to fight against a mad scientist for the affections of the desirable female. Here the triangle is squared. The protagonist is a producer of commercials called Ballard (Spader) in a contest with Vaughan (Koteas) over Ballard's wife (Unger) and the widow (Hunter) of the man Ballard kills in a car crash early on. Everybody in the story is drawn into Vaughan's research project into how the human body is being reshaped by technology.
Due to its content, the book was considered unfilmable. Previously Cronenberg had largely failed to get any kind of meaningful grip on the unfilmable Naked Lunch but with Ballard, he achieved a casual twisted synergy. It's odd that William S. should have defeated him because right from his earliest films he seemed to be trying to channel Burroughs but when he came to tackle him full on he fell back on a disguised biography, with some of the more outlandish elements of the books stuck on as window dressing. Yet with Ballard the kinship is so perfect, perhaps because Cronenberg's body horror preoccupations were a parallel course to Ballard's interest in the way humanity was bending in acquiescence to the 20th century.
It also helps that of all the great writers, Ballard has a style that doesn't offer any barriers to visual interpretation. Once you've wiped away all the semen splashed onto dashboards it actually has a very straightforward, linear plot. In Crash, the language is ironic and repetitive and surgical. Vaughan can't appear on the page without some mention of his being scarred. It's a dirty book, a sexy book but it isn't saucy; sex is described as a mechanical process. The film version is one of the rare mainstream films to accept the notion that sex involves penetration. The sex scenes aren't the usual writhing around showboating, they are methodical and, though consensual, something of a violation. They are also alarmingly passive.
The central metaphor of Crash is to flip the way that by driving we casually acquiesce and rationalise the risk of being penetrated and violated in the most non-consensual way possible, and turn it into a choice, into a desire. Both book and film is the pornography of such a viewpoint. It isn't especially graphic sexually, but it is very pornographic. The characters have no motivation beyond sex and their motivation in those sex scenes is to create the most pleasing aesthetic shapes possible for the viewer. They all have an external focus: putting on a show for the viewer. And like porn, Cronenberg's film cuts away anything that isn't about sex and the sex is about the erotic architecture rather than communicating emotions. The sex though is not joyless and though the film isn't very explicit, it is on heat. It's a cold, detached heat, but it is heat. After watching Crash, you wonder what Cronenberg might have made of Basic Instinct 2.
It's all, of course, monumentally silly. The absurdity of it is built-in and there is humour in there but it is rarely obvious. When in the aftermath of the head-on collision that has just killed her husband, Hunt accidentally flashes her breast whiles trying to remove her seat belt, it's like Barbara Windsor's bra flies off in Carry On Camping.
Arrow are releasing Crash on their Video imprint, which they use for cult item, rather than their Academy one which they use for higher-brow material. The genius of Crash is that it fits equally in both and equally in neither.
As a film, it's perfect in all its doings. The book has been stripped down to the bare essentials and there isn't an inessential moment in the film's 97 minutes. He gets a lot done with very little. The high angle shot through the car window of Ballard sat in the rear as he leaves hospital for the first time after the accident, taken from a fixed camera looking down and back at him, perfectly expresses his newfound vulnerability. Another shot, similar high angle through a car window, but looking over Hunter's shoulder at her stocking-clad cross legs in the front seat, elegantly encapsulates the whole theme of compartmentalised eroticism.
The film also has four remarkable lead performances. (Arquette is great too, but she is ultimately a peripheral figure.) Given that the film is about transferring eroticism to inanimate objects there is a cruel logic to casting the utterly sexless Holly Hunter as Helen Rimington, the widow. I suppose in The Piano she was a form of sex object but prior to that, she had always been a brisk no-nonsense figure with a face set against all that sordid business. She was possibly the primmest and properest film star since Joyce Grenfell. Cronenberg switches that brisk no-nonsense attitude into a standard woman in uniform fetish. Just look at the red gloves and white coat she wears to the compound yard when she speaks to Ballard for the first time.
The showiest role if Koteas as Vaughan. He is so seedy he may even out scuzz James Woods in Videodrome. In the book, Vaughan is repeatedly defined by his smell – dried cum and gasoline – and you could swear that Koteas is externalising that smell.
As Ballard's wife Kara Unger sets the tone for the whole piece. She is almost entirely passive but defiantly so; she has a placid confidence that she can handle whatever is coming to her. She is constantly on heat: even the wind on her face seems to arouse her. I said at the top that the film doesn't intrude on the book but this performance does. My book Catherine may not exactly look like the screen Catherine but the way she moves and speaks is exactly the same.
Against that my book Ballard is nothing like Spader. Partly because a narrator is always a little anonymous and Spader, more than the other performers in this, is definitively North American. The anonymous, passive, first-person author's surrogate is always tricky role. In Naked Lunch, Peter Weller's somnabulthesp approach to the William Lee role definitely has a cool appeal but it also holds the film back. If Kara Unger sets the mood, Spader's vacant curiosity is what moves the film forward, stops it grinding to a halt. Without him the film doesn't work.
It's remarkable how clean and clear the film has moved through the following two and a half decades. If you found it laughable then, you still will now; if it thrilled you then it may do so even more now. It comes to us from the time of the first dial-up stirrings of the internet yet it looks and feels 21st century hard. Even though its given them a 24 year head start, it still looks to be a little bit further into the future than most of the art being made in 2020. It's a transgression for the ages.
Other Cronenberg reviews
Shivers
Rabid
The Brood
Videodrome
Cosmopolis
Maps to the Stars
A Dangerous Method.
Extras.
Arrow are releasing a 4K restoration of the uncut version, supervised by director of photography Peter Suschitsky, approved by Cronenberg.
The array of extras are overwhelming but, from what I've managed to get through, enthralling and informative.
• Brand new audio commentary with film scholar Adrian Martin
• Cronenberg Challenge – new interview with director of photography Peter Suschitzky
• Mechanical Animals – new interview with executive producer Jeremy Thomas
• The Shore Thing – new interview with composer Howard Shore
• License to Drive – new interview with casting director Deirdre Bowen
• 2019 Q&A with Cronenberg and actor Viggo Mortensen at TIFF
• 1996 Q&A with Cronenberg and source novel writer J.G. Ballard at the National Film Theatre in London
• Behind-the-scenes footage and contemporary press interviews
• Architect of Pain: The Cronenberg Project—brand new video essay by Caelum Vatnsdal on Cronenberg's use of architecture and location
• Crash! (1971, 18 mins)—short film originally broadcast as part of the BBC's Review series, starring J.G. Ballard and loosely adapted from his 1970 novel The Atrocity Exhibition
• Two short films inspired by Ballard and the novel Crash: Nightmare Angel (Zoe Beloff, 1986, 33 mins) and Always (crashing) (Simon Barker and Jason Wood, 2016, 14 mins)
• Two Cronenberg short films: The Nest (2013, 10 mins) and At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World (2007, 4 mins)
• Original Trailers
• Fully illustrated collector's booklet featuring new writing by Vanessa Morgan, Araceli Molina, Jason Wood and Zoe Beloff, and a reprinted excerpt from Cronenberg on Cronenberg
• Fold-out double-sided poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork
• Limited edition packaging with reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Gilles Vranck.
