Movie Review: Crash (1996)

Written by Grady Fiorio Original Publishing Date: August 21st, 2024 Rating 3.5/5

Cold dark sexuality… Crash

Crash

Director David Cronenberg Runtime 1 Hr 40 Min Format Blu-ray Release Date 1996

Every five seconds a car crashes in America. Every day 118 Americans die on the road. Every year 1.3 million people are killed across the globe. Car crashes are one of the most common causes of death in the world. It’s an undeniably tragic occurrence. But what if this tragedy became seductive? This is the idea explored in David Cronenberg’s wildly controversial film (a staple for this site) Crash. Adapting J.G. Ballard’s novel of the same name, Crash follows T.V. director James Ballard (yes I noticed that too), as he finds himself and his wife entering an underground group of swingers that have a sexual fetish for car crashes. Met with equal praise as it was boos when it premiered at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, it’s not hard to see why Crash caused such a stir among festival goers. Crash is so controversial for not only sexualizing something so odd and inhuman but also sexualizing a tragedy that affects nearly everyone, directly or indirectly. But amid this sexualized violence, does Crash have something to say, or is it just throwing caution to the wind?

For all the things you can say about Crash, you can’t call it false advertising. What you see is what you get. The 90’s hottest indie movie stars getting it on, fully nude, while crashing expensive cars on the Canadian freeway. However, what other directors would turn into mindless sex and violence, David Cronenberg approaches with a thoughtful brush stroke that is calculated and thought-provoking. As electric and insane as the film’s premise sounds, Crash is not a film about titillating the audience, but rather questioning a world where morality is nonexistent, and sex is as mechanical as the pushing of a piston or the wiping of a windshield. A means to an end, to get to where you need to go. Cronnenberg’s film is sterile and passionless, as he keeps the camera and his characters constantly at arm’s length, separating the sex and emotion. Despite the film’s seemingly absurd plot, it reflects our modern world, where passionate interpersonal relationships have been replaced by the dopamine slot machine of TikTok and reckless behavior for a hit of adrenaline.

But no matter how you feel about the subject matter, you really gotta give it up to the cast on this one. James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, and Deborah Kara Unger, along with a killer supporting cast, make up an all-star team that never falls short of Cronenberg’s cold and dark vision of automobile eroticism. There are many subtle touches to the performance that detail the darkness of these characters, such as the lack of eye contact during sex scenes. There is an element of spirituality that is removed from our protagonist and instead placed into the vibrating metal of the vehicles on screen, as Cronenberg frames these two-ton, death on wheels, like pornographic movies rather than cars on the freeway. For everyone on screen, the only sense of life they feel is on the road with someone else’s life at stake. The amount of vulnerability, trust, and bravery, to commit to something so intense and controversial, is often overlooked when people think of acting as an art form. Acting is all about vulnerability, and trust in a director. With a film where the cast is nude for 70% of the film and subject matter that could burn a career in the span of 100 minutes, it takes real guts to get in front of the camera and do something you believe in.

Crash undeniably wears its boldness on its sleeve, with characters that are unrelentingly cold, a brutalist message about the future, and a big fat NC-17 rating on the box. Speaking of its rating, films like this make me miss the days of real NC-17 movies being made, where somebody gave a shit and did something bold. At this point, it’s nearly satire to say that all movies are reboots, remakes, and blah blah blah, but there’s part of me that lives for that true 90’s confidence of a studio to say “Fuck an R rating. It’s time to make some people mad.” But of course, this was at a very different time in the film industry when the independent film scene was trying to make the NC-17 rating a viable movie-going experience, until it was hijacked by the MPAA, wrongly associated with pornography, and banned by nearly every theater chain. It became the death bell for any film unfortunate enough to get slammed by the “totally not a censorship board” from high heaven above and Jack Valenti himself. If you couldn’t tell by now, I’m not the MPAA’s biggest fan. Go watch the seriously underrated documentary, This Film is Not Yet Rated, to find out why.

As previously mentioned, Crash is cold and distant, which is fitting for its metallic subject matter, but it causes the film to lack an emotional draw to the characters. I wouldn’t say that this movie is driven solely by shock value, but the insanity and taboo are definitely a large factor of what kept me engaged. Even when I felt distant from the character I did want to see what fucked up thing they’d do next in the name of getting their jimmies off. Despite how unequivocally fucked up this movie is, it feels like Cronenberg at his most restrained, letting the audience’s mind do all the talking. And that’s not to say that Crash isn’t graphic, because without a doubt it is, but it’s not nearly as over the top as Scanner’s head explosions, Viggo Mortensen fingering a zipper grafted into his stomach in Crimes of the Future, or even some of Eastern Promises gang violence. It speaks to how we interpret graphic violence, compared to sexuality, especially when combined with taboos.

But Crash’s coldness is part of the point that Cronenberg is trying to make. The film explores the idea of inhuman attraction. People who “marry” bridges, fall in love with fictional characters, or disturbingly so with animals. It’s all part of exploring this idea of cold eroticism and attraction that has no reciprocated feelings of love or sex. In a world where love becomes meaningless, so does morality. However, Crash’s exploration of the coldness cuts off the audience, asking them to find ways of connection with no clear port. It’s certainly a tall ask, but Crash is a movie full of tall asks and was never intended for the mainstream audience. Despite this, I still enjoyed the film and found it thought-provoking, but it requires an acquired taste, not unlike the pulse-pounding heartbeat of bloody sex, against the cold twisted iron of a newly crashed car.