Brief Reflections on Rereading Crash by JG Ballard
I had first read Ballard’s Crash back when I worked night shifts, stacking shelves at ASDA nearly 10 year ago. The cover was glossy, like how AI would imagine human skin feels. The cover saw urban lights streaked across the page.
I had seen Cronenberg’s adaptation a further 10 years prior. I rewatched it obsessively. Intellectually inexhaustible, eschewing reductive readings through Freud’s death drive, this movie - its tone, pacing and performances - is pitch perfect. Although there are few films I’ve rewatched as much, I’m still not 100% sure what’s going in Crash’s third act. I could tell you what’s happening on screen, but it feels like a narrative dreamt by the harsh cityscape of Cronenberg’s Vancouver. Dreams are like playing with a Rubix’s Cube as a child: not about solving the puzzle but turning through variables.
The first nightmare I remember having was either a confrontation with Nicodemus from the 1982 film Rats of NIMH, a movie I loved as a toddler, or one where a lion chased me through Gloucester’s multi-storey car park.
In my 20s I found myself fixating on multi-storey car parks like they were the temples of a now extinct alien race. Although the world was very much in the Obama/Steve Jobs era, it still felt like the 20th century was beginning to die. It’s more likely I was projecting the dead end I had reached in my own life. Or maybe not, with the recession.
I maintain: the reason why the world is so anxious about the future now, in 2024, is because we’re at the true end of the 20th century. The post war project - US dominance, the proliferation of media, international tensions - has climaxed and is, in its anxious refractory period, disappointing its lovers. This means the world is at the true beginning of the 21st century.
One can imagine, if Ballard was writing today, huge domes on Mars with soft-padded interiors dedicated solely to orgies; the vibrations of rocket launches a housewife’s new sex toy, a reference to sitting on a washing machine that is, as an image from the 1950s, simultaneously the beginning of modern sci-fi and what the world might now recognise as sex positivity for women; zero gravity orgasms…
I remembered almost nothing about the novel, besides key differences between it and the film. The book is set in London, the film in Vancouver. Although Cronenberg keeps the spirit of the plot intact, it’s mostly redesigned for a visual narrative.
While I remembered the novel’s refrain, that these characters are bringing forth a new sexuality, I forgot the depth Ballard achieves. The highways facilitate intimacy, foreshadowing the digital connections of social media. Car crashes are no longer random acts but as charged with meaning as falling in love. The protagonist and his wife stare at traffic like it holds hidden knowledge. And it does. It was created by a higher power: the state.
Holly Rowland, curator of Liverpool’s Paraphysis Cinema, writes on her blog: The car crash functions pornographically [...] in the way it represents a need for liberation, not from life itself like Vaughan insists, but from the reign of a globalised system...
There was a bridge across a motorway near where I grew up in Gloucester. I knew someone whose uncle threw himself off it. I had heard about this years before I met her. When we did meet, it shifted a gap in the narrative from an abstract tragedy to an individual’s personal absence.
In Crash, the novel as with the film, the modern world doesn’t alienate so much as reform the terms on which desire is enacted. Not absence becoming presence, but rather the two remain distinct and form each other. Obviously, the same powers that denounce Crash are the same that create the conditions that produce alienation.
If I can make the claim that multi-storey car parks were, at least in part, influenced by brutalist architecture, then it would follow they embed socialist utopianism in their ideological structures. Is there a more damning image? Post war dreams turned to temples for pre-online capitalism, the initiation of shedding yourself (your car, your life’s time) to pass through the portal into numinous planes of shopping arcades?
Except the world is no longer crashing into itself. Digital infrastructures will be the targets of future wars, even over military manufacturers. There’s a more pressing need to kill connections between people than to kill people. And if this happens, the terms on which desire is enacted will reform as an indestructible force against oppression.