Critical Reception
Described as wildly perverse and extraordinarily sexually deviant in its New York Times review, and, for clarification, the reviewer viewed it negatively, the reception of this novel closely resembles the adaptation of David Cronenberg’s twenty-three-year-old film. Later, it emerged that Ballard returned the script to him with attached notes from the publisher’s readers, suggesting that they should not publish the book and asserting that psychiatrists could not assist him, much to the author’s delight. Subsequently, the Daily Mail initiated a campaign to ban Cronenberg’s film in the UK, succeeding only in one area in London, Westminster, where residents had to travel to the neighboring Camden to watch it in theaters. This moral panic, with its varied messages, occurred after the Cannes Film Festival competition jury had bestowed a Special Jury Prize upon the film, and the jury president who disapproved, Francis Ford Coppola, distanced himself emphatically.
Rehabilitating Crash
Without a doubt, both the book and the film later experienced significant phases, each becoming a pivotal influence in the ongoing struggle between open-mindedness and stern conservatism, as well as between tension and condemnation. Eventually, both Crash the novel and Crash the film, strangely commended by Ballard, underwent a process of rehabilitation, now holding central positions within their creator’s body of work. However, if the resemblances between these narratives suggest excessive adaptation, it could be misleading. The book and the film stirred anger and admiration because, despite their spiritual alignment, two decades separated them, the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, and the author’s contrasting sensibilities. They both managed to break free from the cultural restrictions of their respective eras.
As the women’s liberation movement gained momentum, coinciding with the most transformative phase in developing British highways and the so-called golden age of pornography, Ballard crafted a novel exploring masculine crises, technoparanoia, and unconventional sexuality. Cronenberg then ingeniously transposed this narrative onto a society that had become desensitized and immobilized, akin to rabbits caught in the spotlight of the impending new millennium, resulting in a film mirroring this desensitized and immobilized state. Both sides regarded fatalistic disassociation as a genuine response to the rapid modernization of their times. Now, we can view Crash from the perspective of our unprecedented era and find an odd yet soothing comfort in a past apocalypse that humanity could have averted. Eras inevitably come to a close.
The author penned this novel against the backdrop of a gray England, its suburbs, and the recent decimalization of the early seventies, a period marked by social upheaval, enjoyable dinners, and football hooliganism. These elements collectively form the implicit setting of the novel. The narrator, borrowing the name of a television advertising producer from himself, is firmly ensconced in bourgeois life, oblivious to these societal facets. Moreover, contemporary Americana molded Ballard’s bleak vision and the view from his window in Shepperton. The American self-image had also deteriorated from its healthy state before the early sixties collapse.
Contrasting Catalogs
The 1973 Lincoln Continental catalog emitted a vastly different ambiance than the 1961 all-encompassing dream. The cars had more substantial, aggressively angular designs and adorned themselves in masculine navy or club-like colors. Forced perspective photography made their protruding hoods leap from the pages. The women appeared distant and indistinct, clad in opulent dresses placed on harbor ships; they adorned distant sailboats while donning bikinis.
It is the car culture that Ballard transposed into the disenchanted and alienated real-world setting of England. This transatlantic cross-pollination played a pivotal role in the striking dislocation depicted in the novel. Naturally, this implies that regarding Cronenberg’s adaptation in North America. They produced the film in Toronto with Canadian and American cast members. The mood and themes can transition seamlessly, without any loss; in some ways, Crash returns to its roots.
Like the exuberant joyrides in the oversized Detroit steel chunks imported by the mismatched Vaughan and navigating the congested ring roads and complex highways of Greater London, Ballard’s Crash novel extracted American car obsessions. It thrust them into an environment where they could never naturally thrive, a place that could only perpetuate itself through self-destruction. In a landscape devoid of the unique myths that nurtured such obsessions, rooted in individualism, freedom, and never-ending highways stretching towards vanishing points on the horizon, the cars and characters in Ballard’s Crash had no purpose other than to revolve and, ultimately, merge.
Contrasting Delirium
Ballard’s prose style occasionally evokes the rhythms of Beat Generation street poets. However, whereas Jack Kerouac may have become immersed in the delirium of never-ending meadows and the vast New Jersey skies, a similar litany in Ballard’s writing transforms into, if we were to rephrase it from the title of one of his earlier books, an exhibition of brutalities. Examples include lesbian supermarket managers burned to death amidst the wreckage of their small, crumpled cars, autistic children rear-ended, their eyes relatively unscathed upon their passing, or buses filled with mentally disabled individuals serenely sinking into industrial canals by the roadside. These unrelenting descriptions make Crash so shocking.
The explicit, albeit nearly joyless, elements seamlessly integrated into Cronenberg’s film. They did not omit any of the brutally vivid background details. In Cronenberg’s Crash, no one possesses a discernible life narrative, a history, or identifiable emotional reactions. In reality, hardly anyone possesses anything besides an insatiable mechanical libido, a faintly remembered vestige of humanity, and an automobile.
Embracing the Emptiness of the Era
The brilliance of this adaptation is its ability to maintain faithfulness despite undergoing a complete overhaul that goes far beyond the typical process of translating a narrow and eccentric 224-page book into a 100-minute film. It is particularly noteworthy when considering the director’s previous adaptation of the so-called unfilmable cult novel Naked Lunch, which took the opposite approach by incorporating metatext into an already dense narrative. In contrast, Crash, a film that exudes a strong sense of emptiness reflective of profoundly vacant times, employs a combination of rigorous editing and thoughtful additions.
For example, Koteas’s Vaughan character describes his project as reconstructing the human body through technology, encapsulating recurring themes in Cronenberg’s early career, exemplified by his 1983 masterpiece, Videodrome. Consequently, when Vaughan later dismisses this notion, referring to it as a rudimentary science fiction concept that emerges without posing a threat to anyone, it becomes challenging not to perceive Cronenberg’s subtle downplaying of his previous works, or, at the very least, signaling the bold conclusion of his ongoing engagement with them. Indeed, except for the lighter exploration seen in eXistenZ in 1999, Crash signifies a shift from the profoundly bizarre elements of his early career towards the more psychologically peculiar aspects of his 21st-century output.
However, for the most part, Cronenberg employs a strategy of subtraction. The persistently unbearable subjectivity found in the deranged first-person narrative of the book is discarded in favor of a detached and objective perspective, accentuated by the use of black and blue tones and the metallic gleam captured by Peter Suschitzky’s cinematography. While liberated from the constraints of the novel’s subjectivity, Cronenberg’s film can observe the deviations of its characters with the detachment of a scientist only mildly perturbed by the peculiar behavior of some new bacteria in a petri dish.
The Art of Detached Style
The key to the success of this experiment lies in the deliberately flat, disconnected, and emotionally detached style mirrored in Howard Shore’s minimalist music, where the individual electric guitar notes are reconfigured into ever-shifting yet never harmonious arrangements. The central character, James, brought to life by James Spader as an enigmatic figure, embodies a paradoxical blend of social awkwardness and shameless resilience, much akin to other characters portrayed by James Spader. Whether he is locking eyes with Dr. Helen Remington, played by Holly Hunter, through the tangled mesh of two hairnets and the lifeless body of her late husband, tearing apart a fishnet to reach Gabrielle’s injured leg, or being introduced to us while immersed in the anal crevice of an unnamed production assistant, the sense of human connection is less than that of extraterrestrials or animals mimicking distorted human interactions. However, Deborah Kara Unger delivers the film’s exceptional performance: she embodies James’ wife, Catherine, as a sequence of meticulously posed ice sculptures. Regardless of how erotic Catherine’s actions may appear, her emotionally cold characterization removes all warmth and friction. Even her explicit language is clinically sterile: the anatomical terms she employs, penis, anus, semen, possess a pornographic allure akin to a robotic vacuum reading The Merck Manual.
The characters primarily serve as vessels to showcase fetishistic elements—Catherine’s Veronica Lake-inspired hairstyle and ’90s high-heeled shoes; Gabrielle’s corset with a missing breast segment; Helen’s peculiar white suit and enchanted gloves. The world’s inhabitants depicted in Crash are inexorably driven through their dystopian existence, akin to meticulously dressed puppets, by forces they neither grasp nor concern themselves with. They perpetually act on biological impulses divorced from their biological consequences. While Vaughan may liken car crashes to fertilization events, the world of Crash is barren and devoid of offspring, with most sexual encounters being, either explicitly or implicitly, of non-reproductive and frustratingly incomplete natures, encompassing acts like anal, oral, masturbatory, or others. Whatever species these individuals belong to, they represent their final generation.
Cronenberg’s Caution
Cronenberg’s adaptation of the novel Vaughan’s psychopathology involves removing one of the load-bearing columns, allowing the character to project backward into the past. This subplot may have been uncomfortable for Cronenberg, but it serves a broader agenda. However, Cronenberg’s Crash will not allow us to engage in any such delusional project.
Bibliography
- Bradshaw, P. (2020). Crash review – Cronenberg’s auto eroticism still has impact. The Guardian.
- Kiang, J. (2020). Crash: The Wreck of the Century. Current | The Criterion Collection.
- Newcomb, M. L. (2019). David Cronenberg’s Crash getting an uncut NC-17 4K restoration. Consequence.
- Robey, T. (2010). David Cronenberg’s Disembodied Cinema. The Point Magazine.
- Robinson, P. (2022). Cult Classic series: Cronenberg’s “Crash” Under the Lens of Toxic Internet Culture. Cinema Femme.
