Brief Reflections on Rewatching Cronenberg's Crash at the London Soundtrack Festival
Spoilers ahoy!
This is a follow-on from my previous post, ‘Brief Reflections on Rereading Crash by JG Ballard’.
This weekend I rewatched Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash, a BFI IMAX screening for the London Soundtrack Festival. The film was introduced by a short Q&A with Howard Shore, who composed its soundtrack, and the esteemed Mr. Cronenberg himself.
I wrote about the film in my previous post:
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.
Before entering the screen, I really sat with how many times I had seen Crash. I watched it repeatedly in my early 20s, then had a break from it for many years. When I revisited it last year I remembered how it might be my favourite Cronenberg film, even over the fan favourite/legitimate outright masterpiece Videodrome.
I can barely go to the cinema anymore. I get too annoyed at people eating. But there was a moment when I waited in the very long queue for the BFI toilets and thought, All these people have the same pre-movie rituals that I do…. They turned up early… They’re going to the loo so they don’t need to go during the film…
It felt radical - in both the original sense of the word (relating to root) and radical-as-revolutionary - to be watching a very strange horny movie with hundreds of people. An audience turning out en masse for transgressive cinema felt revolutionary, while cutting through to the root of consumption: pleasure. We were implicitly owning our libidinal impulses in public; we witnessed each other.
There is so much sex in Crash. I never really think about it when I’m watching it alone. Sex scenes have always been like a texture for me, something to add to a movie’s tone and dynamics. They rarely, if ever, have real charge. I think. I need to write another post about this because I’m not sure if that’s really true. The fact remains Crash has so much fucking. There are three sex scenes in the first threeish minutes, discounting the title sequence.
I had never booked an IMAX screening before. I thought I booked a seat three rows from the back but had booked a seat three rows from the front, begging the question of just how much tit I would be able to contain in my sightline. The screen was great tbh. It was very big, but I still felt like I could settle down to watch the movie.
When I think about Crash, I usually think about the ways in which late capitalist industrial hellscapes generate and reform desire. First and foremost, the sexualisation of motor accidents enables these characters to be scarred by the erotic. Their bodies are reshaped as their desires are. The inverse is also true. Something the novel makes explicit, that the film has in the background, is how car crashes smash the characters out of heteronormativity. This is in line with Vaughan’s true motive, which is made explicit in the film: that the crash leads to total sexual liberation.
What do these characters need liberation from? There seems to be gap in the film. Catherine is upset, but we’re never sure why. The group magnetises around Vaughan without any critical thinking, as if by impulse. When the audience look for a reason, the film shows cold mechanical urban planes stretching out and nothing more. The nearest thing the audience is given to an answer is: the drudgery of day-to-day life.
But I’ll repeat, it’s this drudgery that generates and maintains the sexual transgressions it claims to be opposed to.
I did have more of a sense of what’s going on in the third act this time around. I usually feel intoxicated by the film’s opaque, emotionally detached, yet perpetually horny tone. It scrambles my critical faculties. The key is in the tattoos Vaughan and James get. Vaughan declares them a prophesy. The film’s final act is its fulfilment. The doctor asks Vaughan, Is this a global prophesy or a personal prophesy? (I’m writing from memory.) Vaughan replies, Is there a difference? The film’s closing scenes would imply that, yes, actually. There’s a huge difference.
Vaughan, after receiving the tattoo, drives off a motorway to his death. James and Catherine close the film with their attempted suicides. These characters can only conceive of their sexual liberations through their bodily annihilation.
This is why there’s a huge difference between the global and personal: Vaughan imagines a world in which all are saved through the car crash, that all might be freed from capitalist desire into their own autonomous desire-productions, but the prophesy is only fulfilled for Vaughan on his terms: death. The world continues to apathetically whirl around these characters.
All this leads me to ask: Is Crash a sex-positive film? On reflection, I think sex is neutral in the film. In fact, it’s a necessity. It’s the only pressure release the characters have. That sex leads them to death isn’t their fault. They should pursue sexual liberation. But it can’t be pursued on their terms. They can only pursue it according to the desire and dreaming of late 20th century industrialisation.