Last time we saw ol’ Davie boy here on the Marathon, I was covering one of his earlier films, Scanners. A film of psychic cabals and head explosions that hinted at the body horror he would experiment with in later films, hampered by some painfully wooden acting and kind of a dumb plot. Before that was the...whatever it was that Videodrome supposed to be, where James Woods gets a gun arm and Debbie Harry stars in a snuff film. It’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder how Cronenberg actually convinced people to give him money to film this stuff, but at the same time makes you wonder just what this guy is going to try next. Maybe a movie where a scientist experimenting with transportation technology accidentally combines his DNA with that of a fly? Well, not this year folks!. Although it is based on a book by a science-fiction writer.
James Ballard (James Spader) is a man that’s good at two things: Making movies and having sex, and technically he’s only a producer. He has sex with his wife Catherine (Holly Hunter), he has sex with the film staff, he has sex in public places, he has sex on his veranda, the dude is neck deep in the stuff. When he ends up hospitalized after a car accident it appears at first to be a sobering moment, but it’s there he’s introduced to a subculture that he had never heard of before. Car crash fetishists, people who derive sexual pleasure from the act and the aftermath of colliding vehicles, seeing beauty in the mangled, bloody forms of its victims. ‘Reshaping the human body through modern technology’, as Vaughn (Elias Koteas) puts it, the mastermind behind a series of very real reenactments of famous car crashes, James Dean, Jayne Mansfield and so on. A bizarre idea, maybe even reprehensible to some, but to Ballard it’s the biggest turn on he’s ever experienced, and he’s eager to dive into the deep end. Ballard is on the fast track to the depths of lust and perversion and he’s got no intention of slowing down.
As a filmmaker Cronenberg deals in violence and sex like Grecian traders deal in olive oil and feta cheese, and of all his films, Crash seems to be the culmination of that obsession. If you’re not seeing cars actually crashing, you’re seeing the wreckage and the bloody, twisted victims. Men are having sex with women, women having sex with women, men having sex with men, licking each others scars and what not, and they’re usually doing it in a car. The scenes of violence are explosively visceral, as car crashes often are, and the way it gives context to these sexual removes any sense of eroticism from those acts and replaces it with this cold, uncomfortable feeling of disgust that lingers on your soul. Cronenberg is not a merciful man either, he hangs on every scene like a vulture, making the audience squirm before moving onto the next stop through Dante’s Inferno. I dunno, there’s something about how realistic this movie is, at least in Cronenberg’s terms, that makes it far more unsettling and dehumanizing than his other films in my opinion. I guess because rich weirdos killing people so they can have orgasm sounds like shit that actually happens in this world, depressingly enough.
Unfortunately, although Crash is a great idea on paper (it was a book after all), the translation to the silver screen ends up kinda dull. That atmosphere of creepiness is there, especially at the beginning and end, but to get there you have to sit through seemingly endless scenes of people talking about car accidents, looking at car accidents and banging each other (and sometimes they drive somewhere). None of the characters are especially engaging, in fact most of them barely talk at all except Vaughn, who sticks to rambling about dying in a car gives you the biggest boner ever. It’s as if Cronenberg saw Eraserhead for the first time and took the exact wrong advice from it, so you’re stuck with characters who emote once per hour and make vague airy statements to one another. If I actually liked James Ballard, if I thought he was an interesting character, then his downward spiral towards debauchery would have a much greater impact. As it is, the only thing I gathered about him was ‘Guy who has sex’. Not exactly revelatory.
That fucking music, too! I don’t know how money Howard Shore got paid to play the same three notes on a guitar every five minutes or so, but it was far too much. Now sure, movie scores are about enhancing the atmosphere of a film, and what that entails can range from orchestral compositions to straight-up ambient tracks, but it’s the exact same thing every. single. time. It’s not a groundbreaking bit of sound, it doesn’t really enhance the scenes it’s repeatedly thrown into, it just ends becoming a nuisance. Why not change things up? Why not play 4 notes sometimes, or maybe just one really long one? Why does a movie made in 1996 feel like someone just discovered copy-and-pasting?
Ultimately Crash is a film daring in its subject matter but bogged down in matters of execution, and whether you can overlook those issues will determine your enjoyment. When it comes to recommendations however, I’m on the fence. I like Cronenberg as a filmmaker, Crash is a dark & weird movie, and Halloween is a time for the dark & weird, but at the same it’s not really a fun dark & weird. It’s not a film you break out for your friends, unless your friends are a bunch of movie nerds that are comfortable with their own sexuality, it’s one to put on when you’ve run out of Smiths records but you still want to feel miserable towards the world. As always, the power is in your hands. Just remember to keep them to yourselves when you’re driving to work tomorrow.
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