CRASH @ 25

Successful yuppies in Toronto, Katherine and James, take their sex lives beyond their marriage by mutual consent. With all their needs won or catered, they seem well on the path to rendering even sex as beige and designer bland as their decor and day to day lives. One night, James, distracted at the wheel reels off the freeway, rolls on to the lower level and crashes head on to the car of Dr. Helen Remington whose husband has gone through the windscreen and into James's passenger seat. In hospital, both with corrective scaffolding on their limbs, they meet Vaughan, a medical imager who seems to be taking more than a professional interest in his photographs of the wounds. Later, James and Helen meet when they inspect the mangled remains of their vehicles. They sense an immediate attraction to each other and a fascination for Vaughan. Vaughan runs sporting recreations of famous car accidents in front of mesmerised audiences on bleachers. When James and Helen go to one, their curiosity is replaced by compulsion and then transformation. No U-turns permitted.

David Cronenberg was a perfect match for J.G. Ballard's novel. Ballard himself described the book as a psychopathic hymn but one with a point. Vaughan's noodlings on the psychosociosexual implications of car violence on the human form and mind variously float on the surface of his obsession or drift away, leaving only the image of his compulsion to damage. 

Cronenberg's lifelong fascination with automotive culture mixed with his own tales of science-led body horror put him and only him in the director's chair. If you ever considered The Dead Zone an anomalous afterthought in compiling favourite Cronenberg movies, it's probably because you've never seen Fast Company. The action adventure made between Rabid and The Brood, which does involve a taste of Cronenbergian machine fetishism but that is rapidly absorbed by the TV movie standard plot. By the time Crash came up, Cronenberg had a little over twenty years experience of honing his ever more nuanced imaginings of the mesh of science and the body.

In Crash the significant dichotomy is between the control of the affluent home with the scarred and stained realm of the car cult. James Spader and Debra Cara Unger are exact fits for their roles as the bored yuppies at the centre of the story. They are so cleanly surfaced they seem varnished, addressing each other in whispers which have the reverence of devotees, compounded when, during a designer sex scene, Katherine speaks in a near hypnotic voice while imagining Vaughan's genitalia, anus and how he and James might have sex themselves. Holly Hunter brings her Texan managerial toughness to a character who, trying to find a way out of grief, has chosen confrontation with the most violating of its opposites. But it is Elias Koteas who steals everything as Vaughan, scarred and smelling of sex and petrol, growing increasingly drawn to the oblivion at the end of his obsession.

With such fiery issues on show you might expect Crash to be thrill a minute but Cronenberg has got there before everyone and turned everything down. It opens with three sex scenes that have neither animal lust nor sensual eroticism. They are functional and mechanical, the antithesis of the interminable passionate first scene of a Betty Blue. At the stress point of the first car crash we start feeling something for these societal phantoms until we see them resettle into blandness. Even when Vaughan stirs them from their cultural torpor with real violence it is to keep them as tethered as junkies. The only warmth we feel in this disturbingly humourless film is in the final act but even then it is a nightmare reading of warmth. Crash works as an entire text. You might well remember specific scenes (there are plenty) but it wants to get into your head in its entire fogging whole.

Aiding and abetting Cronenberg in his anti-fun pursuit is one of Howard Shore's most severe scores. Three harps and six electric guitars (recorded clean, not even with the lightest rock distortion) are sparely augmented by woodwinds. What is absent from the music is that most cinematic of groups, the bowed strings. The effect is spiky here and cooling there, never quite friendly. I watched the extra where Shore is interviewed about the score and it's worth it if you get the chance. Apart from the inspired arrangement choices he describes is his own memory of growing up in the same neighbourhood as David Cronenberg who was sufficiently older to appear as a kind of local god in leather on a motorbike. From there to the sound of Crash there is a long and rich trail.

It's hard to know how effectively this film would be to younger audiences now. Like the deliberate alienating chill of other later films like Cosmopolis or Spider but entirely unlike the more conventional Eastern Promises or A History of Violence, Crash doesn't welcome anyone who isn't there for the whole running time and with minds open enough to admit characters whose lines of thinking can turn repugnant in a second. I wonder, has the car lost enough of its sex cache in this age of global alarm. Is there at least the knowledge of its history as a Western essential object? Will audiences foreseeably to come understand the allure? Perhaps, beyond it they will feel the horror of it all the more.

Viewing notes: I saw this on Arrow's 4K. Done perhaps before their routine upgrade to Dolby Vision but the HDR 10 is pretty stunning. The audio is a DTS HD Master which you might want to ride as the massive dynamic range will have you turning up the whispers and clamouring for the volume button for the crashes. A superb disc. This was only my third viewing of the film since seeing it at the still missed Lumiere back in early 1997.