80) Crash

Crash (1996)


Director: David Cronenberg

Starring: James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Deborah Kara Unger, Rosanna Arquette


David Cronenberg's Crash is not to be confused with Paul Haggis's Crash, the one which pipped Brokeback Mountain for the Best Picture Oscar a few years back. If you mix the two up, you are in for a rude shock. The tagline for Cronenberg's film reads: "The Most Controversial Film You Will Ever See", and I tell you what, it isn't kidding.

James (Spader) and Catherine Ballard (Kara Unger) are a married couple who rely on recounting the details of their infidelities to each other in order to maintain some sort of flame in their sex life. Driving home one evening, James causes a car accident in which leads to the hospitalisation of Dr. Helen Remington (Hunter) and the death of her husband as well as his own hospitalisation. In subsequent encounters between the two, James discovers that Helen is strangely aroused by the sense of thrill and danger of car accidents. She takes him to a secret, underground performance/reenactment of the car crash which took the life of James Dean. The mastermind of this performance, Vaughan (Koteas), was once a scientist, but after being disfigured in a car accident has become obsessed with the fusing of man and machine that takes place in car accidents. Vaughan welcomes Helen and James, who in turn invites Catherine, into his society of like minded fetishists.

Ok, so I knew that Crash was supposed to be a very confronting and highly controversial film, and I knew roughly the area that it would be exploring. But I also knew that it was supposed to be a pretty good film. It won the Jury Special Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Palme D'or, and there is a book in the BFI Modern Classics series published on it. So despite knowing what sort of stuff to expect, I figured that I'm not usually all that squeamish when it comes to sex, violence, etc on screen so I figured I'd check it out. But woah!

This movie is full on, and it is full on from the very beginning. There are three sex scenes and one car crash in the first 7 minutes and it pretty much continues at that rate for the whole film. But for a film which contains a great number of sex scenes and sexual themes it should be noted that there is absolutely nothing sexy about this film. However, the film is not really seeking to be sexy. It is, rather, an exploration of the psychology behind fetishes, the compulsion which draws you to do things which defy all common sense and inhibition, and it does this by choosing a fetish so outrageous and hyperbolic that it becomes unrelatable. As a viewer you are not really invited into the mind of the characters. Rather than seeking to engage the viewer in the fetishistic behaviour, Cronenberg seems determined to make Crash an anti-erotic film. So a warning, don't come into this film expecting titillation, because the sexual content is more likely to make you feel sick than aroused. I think the moment that tips it for me is a sex scene between James and Gabrielle (Arquette) in which it is suggested that he uses the gaping wound on her leg that she sustained in a crippling car accident as a faux-vagina. Yep, that's the sort of gear we're dealing with here.

I will make special mention of the performance of Elias Koteas as Vaughan. Koteas is not a name or a face which will spark recognition for a lot of people. I certainly didn't know who he was, though having done a bit of research I see that he played Laeddis in the brilliant Shutter Island and possibly even more notably he played Casey Jones in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. But his performance in Crash has an incredibly intensity. There was something about his face, the way he talked, the way he moved, which really made me think of early Robert De Niro. I'm talking De Niro around the time of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, although the connection with the face is probably more related to De Niro's performance as the creature in Frankenstein. The character of Vaughan is just awful, he is grotesque, but the performance of Koteas is very strong.

It has been a long time since I've watched a film which I wanted to walk away from as badly as I did this one, and were it longer than 95mins I may well have. I cannot in good conscience recommend Crash to anyone. It's not that it is a badly made movie, it's won it's fair share of awards and perfectly achieves what it sets out to achieve, it is just a movie which is impossible to enjoy.