Crash

Sex drive, David Cronenberg-style. With Cronenberg’s career turning full circle with the return to Body Horror in Crimes of the Future, what better time to revisit one of his most controversial mid-career highlights? Few filmmakers have been so fixated on the human body as the vessel of desire while also probing the outer limits of carnal recreation… just as Seth Brundle wants to escape the confines of his physical form in The Fly, so the car-crash fetishists who orbit JG Ballard’s metropolis here (they include James Spader, Deborah Kara Unger, Holly Hunter and Elias Koteas) obsessively seek a fusion of metal and flesh… fender bender as the ultimate orgasm, always just tantalizingly out of reach. Crash is a sleekly seductive sex comedy stripped of passion, laughter, comedy and human connection.

In the UK, Crash was banned by several councils after a tabloid controversy spearheaded by the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail, newspapers which failed to appreciate the witty nihilistic comedy inherent in Cronenberg’s circular couplings. “Some of the most perverted acts and theories of sexual deviance I have ever seen propagated in mainline cinema,” fumed veteran critic Alexander Walker. “The point at which a liberal society must draw the line,” pronounced the Mail’s Chris Tookey. Meanwhile in North America, mogul Ted Turner disowned the movie his own company picked up. Today it’s these gentlemen’s outrage which seems perverse. Beautifully contained, the film is dispassionate auto-erotica, clinical, uncomfortably numb, and very deeply in sync with our times.

Content Considerations: Perverse & sexually explicit scenes

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