Just What Is the Film ‘Crash’ Driving At?

Sallie Tisdale is the author of several books, most recently “Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex,” published by Doubleday, and a contributing editor of Harper’s magazine. The Times asked her to screen David Cronenberg’s new film, “Crash,” about several people who find car crashes sexually stimulating, and comment on the film, and on eroticism and violence in movies.

In 1973 J.G. Ballard published a novel called “Crash,” about “a new sexuality born from perverse technology,” a sexuality fueled by the violence of cars. “The world,” he wrote, “was beginning to flower into wounds.” The book was censured, almost kept from print; but that was 1973, a long time ago in cultural reckoning. Now that “Crash” has been made into a movie by David Cronenberg--surely one of the most obvious pairings of writer and director ever to occur--isn’t the news that “Crash” isn’t news anymore?

Yes and no. “Crash” arrives with an NC-17 rating and a Cannes special jury prize for “originality, for daring and for audacity,” which clearly makes it news in Hollywood. Critics have pronounced it “exquisitely somber,” “an eroto-futuristic tale of truly lush proportions,” “chilly and clinical” and “one of the dirtiest movies you’ll ever see.” Cronenberg himself calls “Crash” both “an existentialist tragedy” and “an existential romance.” This is all true, more or less. The real news about “Crash” is what hasn’t been said--what in this barely framed, languorous film, doesn’t surprise anyone.

The main protagonist of “Crash” is James Ballard (James Spader), a TV producer married to Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger). Ballard causes an accident that injures a doctor named Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) and kills her husband. While still recovering from their injuries, Ballard and Remington meet Vaughan (Elias Koteas), a creepy scientist-turned-performance-artist obsessed with car accidents and the “benevolent psychopathology” of technology, and Vaughan’s other groupies, the disabled Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette) and Seagrave (Peter MacNeil), a brain-damaged stunt driver.

Nothing much happens after this, except frequent soft-core sexual encounters in cars, car chases and car crashes. Almost all the characters have sex or talk about having sex with almost all the other characters. More than one gets killed. The undirected promiscuity of Ballard and Catherine becomes focused on Vaughan and Dr. Remington; the unfortunate Seagrave willingly plays foil to Vaughan’s games; in one of the few funny scenes, Gabrielle shops for a nice Mercedes in a get-up likelier seen in a dungeon.

Cronenberg is working with old ideas here--the associative equation between sex and death, the question of whether to resist or surrender to one’s environment, the nearness of decay. For all the driving and speed on screen, the pacing is listless and slow. You become tempted to provide back story for characters as empty of motivation as these, but the lack is partly the point. Ballard described a “new algebra” of body and machine through which the wound of technology becomes a sex organ.

In “Crash” there is little difference between pain and pleasure, artifacts and flesh. There are no houses or sidewalks, no grocery stores or banks--no everyday life. The characters are mythically benumbed. Ballard, according to Cronenberg, was predicting that the abnormal states of mind personified by his characters would become a universal psychology, and the director shows what this abnormality looks like 24 years later. It looks familiar--so familiar, in certain ways, we barely notice it.

Ballard’s writing is mannered and famously baroque; his calculated fascination with the surreal has a labored quality. Reading “Crash” is a joyless enterprise--not because of the violent imagery but because of the grinding and repetitive banality with which the images are invoked. Cronenberg is largely true to the book, for better and worse. Much of the dialogue and staging is exactly the same, including the passive tone--although Vaughan as written by Ballard is a “nightmare angel of the expressways”--altogether darker and more deliberate.

In the same vein, the written Ballard is far more erotically and emotionally obsessed with Vaughan than the Ballard played by Spader. Cronenberg has been taken to task for his retreat from their relationship. (In one interview he said this is because it’s “not really a gay scene,” which isn’t going to help his cause.)

Such coyness from this director is surprising. Cronenberg has always been interested in the limits and potential of the body, in our resistance to the body’s fleeting reality. In “Videodrome” (1983), a far more emotional film, the characters suffer a growing inability to tell the difference between fantasy and reality; in the end they are seduced and destroyed by the possibility of what’s next, of becoming “new flesh.” “The Fly” (1986), his most successful film, has an almost operatic tone--staged, suffocating and overheated. Body and machine literally combine to make something both greater and more fragile than either. In comparison, “Crash” is ponderous and still.

More troublesome, Cronenberg has eliminated the most critical element, the one thing approaching a plot and driving the characters forward in the book: Vaughan’s ambition of causing the death of Elizabeth Taylor in a crash. (Cronenberg opts instead for reenactments of the deaths of James Dean and Jayne Mansfield.)

Vaughan’s obsession is a kind of reality fever, a too-clear vision of how we live, and it is Ballard’s conceit that his obsession is courageous--he’s the one active man in a paralyzed world. He imagines Taylor’s death, seeing “windshield glass frosting around her face as she broke its tinted surface like a death-born Aphrodite.” Why this seems logical to him, why he feels he must make it occur, is the closest thing to purpose in the story.

When I attended a Portland premiere of “Crash,” I was struck by the steadfast silence of the audience. Only one scene brought gasps and whispered comments: the long-telegraphed moment when Ballard and Vaughan make love. To a larger degree, this is the critical gasp, too: Whether kind or snide, criticism of the film has focused on the sex--the use of well-known actors like Hunter and Spader in nude scenes, the bisexuality, Arquette’s sadomasochistic leg braces and her gaping, vaginal thigh wound.

Cronenberg seems a bit stung by recent criticism that a film largely composed of episodic sex scenes (bloody or not) is pornography, not “film.” There are unmistakable elements here. Sex for the sake of sex alone, divorced from romance, is a major icon of the pornographic form. So are spontaneous couplings and recouplings between players. Arquette’s black leather is certainly nothing new here, nor is the bisexuality. The notorious nudity is, in fact, quaintly discreet, limited to breasts and the tiniest fragment of pubic hair, and the sexual acts completely soft-core.

“Crash” is not particularly arousing, in part because none of the characters seem to be having a very good time. But “Crash” isn’t pornography, or even remotely pornographic, because it is full of suffering--remote, little-remarked suffering. Those who greet the homosexual kiss with faint shock, those who titter at the use of a constructed vagina, are those who have seen too many movies, not too few. They are buried in the paradigm of the evening news.

Critics can ponder the propriety of Ballard using Gabrielle’s wound as a vagina only because they aren’t troubled by the camera showing a man hurtling through a windshield and then zooming in on the steady dripping of the blood from his torn corpse. We can be titillated by celebrities exchanging same-sex kisses only because we’ve grown used to the dazed gaze of a woman with a piece of glass embedded in her cheekbone. And we can wonder at the disengaged characters in their industrial landscape only because we spend so much time tensely driving through it ourselves, rigid with anticipation, as empty of questions as they are.

The most popular shows on television have captured the realm of tragedy and rescue, the mythic landscape of this near-miss. Shows like “NYPD Blue” and “ER” are hits because they’ve found a way to combine youthful sexual fantasy with middle-age fear of death. Almost every show combines the athletic sex of young men’s dreams with dead bodies and spluttering arterial wounds. They succeed because they’ve found a ratio between the two that just skirts the threshold of our embarrassment at these not-so-secret dreams.

Honest feeling disturbs that threshold. We’ve become inured to inauthentic emotion in action films, where all emotional reactions are either exaggerated or absent. The male protagonists indulge in adolescent glibness when being beaten or shot and pouty cries when presented with the mild dramas of ordinary life.

The case has been made that the quintessential American film is optimistic--something with a little pioneer spirit, a little triumph over odds. But the slightly tedious repetition of “Crash,” with its workmanlike sex and ambiguous intent, is closer to the mark.

Ballard wrote, “In his mind Vaughan saw the whole world dying in a simultaneous automobile disaster, millions of vehicles hurled together in a terminal congress of spurting loins and engine coolant.” “Crash” was filmed in Toronto, but it could have been filmed in a hundred, a thousand cities. The endless traffic on intertwining multilane freeways is so ordinary we rarely notice with more than half our attention. The continual anticipation and tension preceding the accident we all secretly expect to have as we drive through our days is so familiar we don’t even notice it anymore.

Vaughan’s increasing psychosis is (like all psychoses) based in a sense of immutable logic and inevitability. And so it goes. We clamor for airbags to protect ourselves from one another’s cars, and then live in fear of the airbags themselves. We talk ourselves to death on cell phones. We wrap our bumpers with stickers saying, “A drunk driver killed my child,” and go for a drive. In a world of lethal machinery we’ve accepted with astonishing indifference, to even point this out is to appear naive and unsophisticated. It isn’t the uncomfortable truth of Ballard’s vision that counts in “Crash” as much as the fact that our collective lack of interest in that truth proves his point.

When Catherine’s hand, sticky with semen, clutches the back of Ballard’s seat in what seems to be a spasm of pain, it’s the semen that surprises us--not the pain. Pain is something we’ve all grown used to seeing large upon the screen.