Crash (1996 film)

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For the 2004 movie, see Crash (2004 film).

Crash

Directed by	David Cronenberg
Produced by	David Cronenberg
Written by	Novel: J.G. Ballard Screenplay: David Cronenberg
Starring	James Spader Holly Hunter Elias Koteas Deborah Kara Unger Rosanna Arquette
Music by	Howard Shore
Cinematography	Peter Suschitzky
Distributed by	Fine Line Features Columbia Pictures
Release date(s)	May 17, 1996
Budget	$10,000,000 (estimated)
IMDb profile

Crash is a 1996 film written and directed by David Cronenberg. It is based on J. G. Ballard's novel Crash. It caused very considerable controversy on its release, being that it is a feature film about a group of people who take sexual pleasure from car accidents. Cronenberg has said that his agent at the time told him it would wreck his career, and begged him to direct The Juror instead.^{[citation needed]} The film stars James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Deborah Kara Unger and Rosanna Arquette.

It was opened to mixed reactions from critics. S praised the film for its daring outline and originality, others criticised it for its graphic sexuality mixed with violence. It was nominated for the Golden Palm at the Festival de Cannes, in the end it won the special prize for daring, audacity, and originality.^[1]

1 Plot outline
2 Responses
3 Awards
4 External links

[edit] Plot outline

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Set in Toronto, James Ballard (James Spader), a film producer, has a disconnected relationship with his wife, Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger). The couple are shown early on in the film engaging in various infidelities, and later having laconic sex, with their arousal only heightening when they discuss the intimate details of their extramarital sexual encounters.

While driving home from work late one night, Ballard's car collides head-on with another, killing the passenger. Trapped in the fused wreckages, the other car's driver, Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter), exposes her breast to Ballard, perhaps deliberately.

While recovering, Ballard meets Dr. Remington again, as well as a man named Vaughan (Elias Koteas), who photographs the brace holding Ballard's shattered leg together.

On leaving the hospital, Remington and Ballard begin to have an affair, one that is fueled primarily by their shared experience of the car crash (all of their sexual assignations take place in cars). In an attempt to make sense of why they are so aroused by their car wreck, they go to see one of Vaughan's cult meetings/performance pieces, an actual recreation of the car crash that killed James Dean with authentic cars and stunt drivers. Transport Ministry officials break up the event, and Ballard flees with Remington and Vaughan.

Ballard becomes a member of Vaughan's followers who fetishise car accidents, obsessively watching car safety test videos, photographing traffic accident sites and planning to recreate the crash that killed 1950s movie star Jayne Mansfield. Ballard drives Vaughan's Lincoln convertible around the city while Vaughan picks up and uses street prostitutes, and later Ballard's wife. In turn, Ballard has a dalliance with one of the other group members, Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), a beautiful woman whose legs are clad in restrictive steel braces, and who has a vulva-like scar on the back of one of her thighs. The film's sexual couplings in (or involving) cars are not restricted to heterosexual experiences; while watching videos of car crashes, Dr. Remington becomes extremely aroused and gropes the crotches of both Ballard and Gabrielle, suggesting an imminent ménage à trois. Vaughan and Ballard eventually turn towards each other and have a homosexual encounter. Later on in the film, Gabrielle and Dr. Remington begin having lesbian sex at one point.

Though Vaughan claims at first that he is interested in the "reshaping of the human body by modern technology", in fact his project is to live out the philosophy that the car crash is a "fertilizing rather than a destructive event, mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity that's impossible in any other form".

The film's climax begins with Vaughan's death and ends with Ballard being involved in another car accident, this one involving his wife. The fetish for car crashes apparently has a strengthening effect on the Ballards' marriage; as he caresses her bruised frame in a field of grass near the accident, Ballard and his wife display much more affection for each other than they had previously shown at the start of the film.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Responses

The film was extremely controversial, as was the book because of its graphic depictions of lurid, graphic sexual acts mixed with violence. This caused the UK tabloid press to condemn it as sick and evil,^{[citation needed]} though a few papers pointed out that it was based on a novel by a respected author.

Although passed by the British Board of Film Classification with an 18 Certificate, the film was banned by Westminster Council, meaning it could not be shown in any cinema in Central London. In the United States, the film was released in both NC-17 and R versions. The ratings controversy has now subsided and the film is readily available on DVD. In Australia, it was given a very limited release due to controversy, showing only cut versions with an R18+ rating, it was later released uncut on VHS in early 1997, and then on DVD in 2003 with an R18+, in the American NC-17 version, it was branded with the tagline "The most controversial film in years".

Daily Mail film critic Christopher Tookey famously opposed the movie.^{[citation needed]}

Parveen Adams, an academic who specialises in art/film/performance and psychoanalysis points out that the flat texture of the movie, achieved through various cinematic devices, prevents us from identifying with the characters in the way one might with a more mainstream movie. The viewer instead of vicariously enjoying the sex and injury, finds him or herself a disempassioned voyeur. She also points out that the scars borne by the characters are old and bloodless, in other words that they lack vitality. The wound is "not traumatising" but, rather, "a condition of our psychical and social life".

[edit] Awards

The film was nominated for the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival. In the end it won the special prize for daring, audacity, and originality.^[2]

In 1996 the film won the Genie Award from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television in six categories including awards for Cronenberg as director and screenwriter. The film was also nominated for two further categories, among them for Cronenberg as producer.

Crash was nominated in 1998 for the USA Motion Picture Sound Editors Award.