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ÿþ<titleÿþ>ÿþNew Socialist Magazine, Crash-death Orgasms - Articleÿþ</title>ÿþ

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ÿþ<bÿþ>ÿþCrash-death Orgasms 

ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ</b>ÿþ</font>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ



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by Bret Cemerÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ

ÿþ<iÿþ>ÿþNew Socialist Magazine, November 1996ÿþ</i>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ

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ÿþ<fontÿþ ÿþsize="1"ÿþ>ÿþFilm Review: ÿþ<iÿþ>ÿþCrashÿþ</i>ÿþ, directed by David Cronenbergÿþ</font>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ



At first glance, Crash is a story about a group of people who like to get fucked in, on, and around cars, especially if they are crashed or crashing. Well, it is and it isn't. It is a high-tech, chilly, manifesto about desire, the fragmentation of human society and its recomposition, now mediated by fetishised technology. 



ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ

Crash is of a piece with Cronenberg's extensive body of work which includes Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch. These works have been concerned with the malaise of the urban middle-class. Cronenberg's doctors, artists, and executives are jaded but hollow characters cut off from society, whose lonely, hungry, and self-destructive wanderings are propelled by subconscious forces and desires much more powerful than themselves. They most often take the form of unquenchable sexual obsessions, in which sex becomes a kind of window on the soul. 



ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ

Crash continues Cronenberg's work in this vein. A restless and lonely Toronto advertising executive James Ballard (James Spader) is involved in an auto accident with Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) and her husband, who is killed. While they recover from their injuries, they begin to discover that they have been transformed by the accident. With the guidance of the mad "international traffic systems expert" Vaughan (Elias Koteas), who wanders hospital wards in search of accident victims who might share his obsession, they uncover and follow the logic of their new world. 



ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ

It is a world in which cars have become new organs of the body, in which the changes wrought by crashes -- scars, mutilations, deformations, prosthetics -- have become new sex organs and devices, and in which crashes themselves have become sexual and artistic phenomena. It is a world in which crash-death is the ultimate orgasm. 



ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ

Crash throws a glaring and unsettling light on our shattered society, a society in which we are too often isolated, compulsive pawns of dangerous psychological, social, and technological forces over which we feel we have little control. For these reasons, along with its artistic and technical claims, the film is of at least theoretical interest. But like much of Cronenberg's work, it fails in its inability to show any way out of the chilling detachment and harsh determinism that it seeks to diagnose and transcend. 



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