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David Cronenberg is cinema’s agent provocateur. Yes, he makes very provocative films but his filmography is more than mere provocation of the senses. He provokes the mind. He provokes our soul. In fact, Cronenberg provokes our every being. The pinnacle of this signature psychological deconstruction of sex and violence is his 1996 opus Crash.

Highly sexualized but never sexually erotic, Crash is based on J.G. Ballard’s novel and tells the story of Toronto film producer James Ballard (James Spader) and his wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger), and how they get devolve into a world of sexual perversion and hedonistic debouchery where ultimate satisfaction is achieved in car crashes. This underground group led by Vaughan (Elias Koteas) live their lives chasing for car crashes to derive sexual pleasure rather than avoiding them.

Filmed with such clinical precision by Cronenberg, these scenes of unease are more than just provocations but a blunt social commentary on the fleeting and irrational nature of human carnality. Coupled with an eerie musical score by Howard Shore and claustrophobic cinematography by Peter Suschitzky, Crash sets the atmosphere for and exposes a world of sexual taboo – immortalizing it in film.

Critics panned Crash because it is perverse, depraved, disturbing and yes, immoral. But Cronenberg’s treatise on sex and violence does not strike one as immoral for these themes are viewed with such scientific detachment. Indeed, Crash is ultimately an amoral film that perfectly encapsulates the alienation of the modern human spirit in a post-modern society.

Commonly, for most of us human beings, a car accident fuels our desire for voyeurism in a twisted way. It’s something behind our control, we need to watch. Ballard’s novel relates sex with technology written in a cold, detached way. Cronenberg’s movie is no different. Right from the start he puts you in the main role – you, as the voyeur, as the eyes that fuel every emotion; the technology and the characters as mere pawns in the twisted world of wreckage.

Filmed as an almost diabolical nightmare, there is no certainty of time, days become night almost vaguely, the characters are almost pathetically empty – yet, deeply disturbed, deeply rooted into their intense fetishism. More than a mere visual journey, it twists your brain as if you were in a permanent car crash.

Here, the crash is just a mere metaphor for our consumerism, for our detachment of emotions. We root in objects, in technology. Here the sex is the extreme personification of our evilness, of our constant pursue of the next object to attach.

(…)

Painful, but just plain gorgeous for those who don’t fear giving up their secrets and embrace their darkest sexual deviance

the rest of my essay: http://heartbreakmotel.net/crash-1996/

First and foremost, it must be noted that Crash is an incredibly bizarre film. Its plot mainly surrounds three car fetishists who derive sexual pleasure from crashes. Also, half of the film’s 100 minute runtime is spent featuring people having sex on multiple occasions.

However, the film is not about sex or car fetishism at all. Rather, it appears to be a keen critique of modern society, its fixation with violence and the ennui-ridden characters it produces. The theme of alienation and isolation is very prevalent here with all the sex in the film joyless and pretty unbearable to watch (to the extent that it becomes an anti-erotic film) with the characters completely unable to emotionally connect with each other. The fact that they need machines to instigate pleasure further strengthens this theme.

Thus anyone who is hoping to see a “car sex film” will be extremely disappointed. This is like a more graphic version of Antonioni, a renowned Italian director who explored ennui-stricken bourgeois archetypes in many of his films. The film can even be compared to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 masterpiece Weekend. In Godard’s film, burnings cars populated the streets, representing a kind of metaphorical hell where bourgeois values (or the lack of) thrive as a result of excessive capitalism. In Cronenberg’s film, cars are now subjects of fetishism. With the growth of modern society and the advancement of technology, humans have drifted apart and can only be reconciled (and reconciled to little success) by the intervention of a cold, metallic product. Of course, these are thoughts gathered immediately after the first viewing, so do take it with a pinch of salt. But for anyone keen on seeing the film, the key point is that this is not a pornographic movie at all. Anyone searching for that will be sorely disappointed and disgusted by one particular scene.