Dry Leatherette: Cronenberg’s Crash
| September 21, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 07, Number 3, May 1997 |
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Terry Harpold
School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology
terry.harpold@lcc.gatech.edu
David Cronenberg, Crash. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Deborah Unger, Rosanna Arquette. Fine Line Features, 1996.
The unfamiliar planes of her hips and legs steered me into unique culs-de-sac, strange declensions of skin and musculature.1
Crash begins with a brilliant visual and aural segué. The title credits, dented chrome letterforms, pull out of a vanishing point into the glare of oncoming h eadlights. (Those of an automobile driven by the viewer? These first frames establish the film’s equivalence of cinema screen and windscreen, driver and audience; any reflective field in the visual landscapes of Crash–chrome, glass, vinyl, p ainted steel, and flesh–may be a projective screen.) Behind the credits, Howard Shore’s spare soundtrack repeats this tropology of approach, echo, reflection, abstraction. Cut to a floating POV shot that repeats the swerving movements of the credits: an airplane hangar, parked, partially disassembled private planes, gleaming surfaces of steel and glass. Catherine Ballard (Deborah Unger) is bent over a plane wing, caressing her bared breast (she holds an erect nipple against the wing’s rivets); her skirt is raised over her hips, presenting the curve of her buttocks to her lover’s face.
The opening scene leads immediately to two further couplings. James Ballard (James Spader), a producer of television commercials, grapples vigorously in a darkened supply room with his camera assistant (his face and then thrusting groin buried in her buttocks), as his assistant director calls from outside for his approval of a tracking shot. Cut to James and Catherine, standing on their apartment balcony, describing to each other the day’s earlier infidelities. Her back is turned to him. She quietly raises her skirt to reveal the cleft of her buttocks, and he enters her from behind as they continue talking in low tones. Her white-knuckled hands grasp the balcony rails, as the camera roves over her shoulder to a panoramic shot of the urgent, perpetual traffic jams on the flyovers below.
This opening triptych is noteworthy for its audacity–only a porn flick, says conventional wisdom, should begin with three uninterrupted sex scenes–and for its cool, detached anality. Since its controversial debut at Cannes in 1996 2 critics have complained of the film’s deadening, counter-erotic repetitions; the sex-scenes disconcert by both their frequency (nearly always occurring in sequences of two or three) and peculiar, inhuman grace: “Crash makes you nostalgic for the ersatz heartiness of porno performers,” writes Anthony Lane,
at least they're pretending, for the viewer's sake, to have a good time, whereas the characters in Crash are so unsmiling--so driven, in every sense--that they make you ashamed of ever having enjoyed yourself. ("Off the Road" 107)
This formalist sexual monotony is obviously intentional. Like much of Cronenberg’s work, Crash‘s narrative structure is determined more by the conventions of cinematic form than by its subject matter (this is one of its weaknesses, but for re asons other than monotony). Why not, Cronenberg proposes in a 1997 interview with Gavin Smith, construct a plot on the basis of a series of sex scenes? Why must film have a progressive narrative that gets anywhere? Why should the characters elicit sympath y, or evolve between the first and last scenes? (“Mind Over Matter” 20) Crash is obviously not unique in travelling a narrative route of uncertain shape or destination. It may be that the early repetition of sex scenes in the film makes it di fficult to resist comparing them to the enthusiasm and blatancy of porn. In that regard, the cerebrality, disconnectedness, and abstraction of the sex in Crashare likely to disappoint.
The principle of disconnection and abstraction accounts for the film’s determined rear-endedness: nearly every act of intercourse shown in the movie is anal or rear-entry, Cronenberg’s trope for a disjunction at the center of his characters’ intimate embraces:
It's been suggested that I'm obsessed with asses, but I like everything, you know. I don't think that I'm too overly obsessed with asses. It's more, "How do you have sex when you're not quite having sex with each other?" That kind of thing. (Cronenberg on Cronenberg 198)
In the longest sex scene in the movie, Catherine and James make love after her first meeting with Vaughan (Elias Koteas), the “nightmare angel of the expressways,” toward whose cadre of accident victims James has gravitated, following his collision with Helen Remington (Holly Hunter), and through whom he has discovered the sexual possibilities of the automobile crash. James penetrates Catherine from behind, as she urges him on with questions about Vaughan’s body:
Is he circumcised? Can you imagine what his anus is like? Describe it to me. Would you like to sodomize him? Would you like to put your penis right into his anus, thrust it up his anus?... Have you ever sucked a penis? Do you know what semen tastes like? Have you ever tasted semen? Some semen is saltier than others. Vaughan's semen must be very salty... (Cronenberg, Crash 37)
Despite its verbal directness (never raunchy: sex-talk in the film and book is always clinical), this scene is among the coolest of the film–Catherine’s monologue aims at evokin g an image of an absent object of desire (Vaughan’s penis and anus), but the evocation is not sustained outside of the scene. Vaughan’s penis is never shown in Cronenberg’s Crash, though it is repeatedly remarked upon in the novel, in various stages of tumescence and detumescence, in and out of Vaughan’s jeans, pissing and crusted with dried semen, and so on. Although the film shows James and Vaughan’s eventual sex–James sodomizes Vaughan in the front seat of Vaughan’s ’63 Lincoln–Vaughan’s anus is obviously not depicted, not accorded Ballard’s exacting description (“…as I moved in and out of his rectum the lightborne vehicles soaring along the motorway drew the semen from my testicles…” [Ballard, Crash 202]).
I say, “obviously” because it is precisely in this limit of the showable that Cronenberg’s movie differs most from Ballard’s novel. Crash was released in t he U.S. with an MPAA rating of NC-17, the hardest rating short of the “X” reserved for pornography. (The film was assigned a similar “18” BBFC certificate in the U.K.) The film’s U.S. release, originally slated for October, 1996, was delayed until March, 1997, reportedly following the personal intervention of Ted Turner, Vice Chairman of Time-Warner, Inc. (parent company of Fine Line Features), who described Crash as “appalling” and “depraved.” Release dates in the U.K. and Italy were similar ly delayed, following excoriating editorials in the conservative press. That a film of Crash should provoke censorial apprehension and retribution will surprise no one who has read the novel. But the surrogate strategies and directorial gambi ts required of a commercial film made of a novel like Crash determine the filmmakers’s product in ways that necessarily exceed his esthetic or technical aims. Whereas Ballard’s novel catalogs in frank and extended detail the shape, s mell, taste, and tactility of erectile and invaginated flesh, the varieties of matter within and expelled by the body, and elaborate grotesqueries of skin, steel and concrete, Cronenberg’s representational palette is more circumscribed, limited by the dic tates of the censor’s blade and the financial concerns of commercial theatrical release.
The unshowable is filmable, of course, through indirection. That possibility accounts in large part for the stagy talkiness of much of Crash 3; the cinematic erection of the viewer’s gaze (reaffirmed, as I’ve noted, by the film’s many plays with reflective surfaces) is a substitute for the missing object of which cinematic convention prohibits direct exhibition. Bu t Cronenberg’s project since Shivers, “to show the unshowable, to speak the unspeakable” (Cronenberg on Cronenberg 43), runs up in Crash against a guiderail of sexual abjection that it never quite crosses.
Each of her deformities became a potent metaphor for the excitements of a new violence.
Missing from the film are the novel’s extended repertories of accident positions, real and imagined configurations of broken car parts, concrete, flesh, and viscera that can go on for paragraphs and whole pages. The film includes only a few players, and fewer accidents, restrictions dictated by a small budget, but perhaps also markers of a deeper incommensurability. Cronenberg’s screenplay for Naked Lunch suggests t he problem. The film of Burroughs’s novel is an extraordinary exercise in reduction and translation from a textual to a visual mode. The film avoids any attempt to linearize Burroughs’s expressly counter-narrative textuality, electing instead to follow a hallucinatory but mostly coherent storyline that sutures William Lee’s peregrinations in the Interzone to excerpts of more legible narratives from other Burroughs works. Burroughs’s 1951 accidental shooting of his wife Joan, an event central to Burroughs ‘s career as a writer but nearly indiscernable in the novel, becomes in Cronenberg’s version a defining frame, the openly biographical border of its counterfeit territories. The film repeats the counter-narrative provocations of the text in the resistant , stark unreality of its scenery and effects, the flatness of the characters’ performances, and the explicit awkwardness of its transitions. Naked Lunch is a film very conscious of its materiality; its obvious facticity repeats on a visual re gister the irreducible textuality of Burroughs’s writing.
The visual landscapes of Crash recall the detached unreality of Cronenberg’s earlier films (Shivers, Rabid, The Dead Zone)–in this regard Crash cannily recasts the scopic dereliction of much of Ballard’s fiction. Whereas Ballard’s novel is a first-person narrative, most of the film is shot from a point of view that matches closely the objectifying eye framing the opening credits and the aureole of Catherine’s breast, pressed against the plane wing. This reinforces the viewer’s identification with that supervening voyeur, but it excludes from the film consciousness of the textual resistances of Ballard’s w riting, without substituting for them the explicit unreality that worked in Naked Lunch as the trace of Burroughs’s compositional methods. The novel is framed by a retrospective narrative (it begins and ends after Vaughan’s death); several chapters describe events that are out of sequence, or separated from one another by gaps of time that might be equal to hours or weeks. The elaborate multiple profiles of wounds, victims, and victim-positions are written in a bland prose modeled on the clinical voice of the hospital file or the coroner’s report, and staged in a sort of neo-Sadean grammar of excess: the characters imaginatively rehearse accident positions; they study and re-present the bodily postures of crises before they enact them.
The film captures some of this temporal disjunction in implied delays, evidenced indirectly by healed bruises or scars. But the verbal excesses of Ballard’s novel translate less effectively to the screen. There, the literalness of the visual favors more denotative representations, or at best, perspectivalist re-presentations that are very different from the audacious similes of Ballard’s writing:
The carapace of the instrument binnacle, the inclined planes of the dashboard panel, the metal sills of the radio and ashtrays gleamed around me like altarpieces, their geometries reaching towards my body like the stylized embraces of some hyper-cerebral machine. (Crash 200)
Cronenberg’s decision to structure the film in essentially sequential episodes closes off the possibility of showing multiple, inconsistent points of view. Whereas Ballard’s novel is told in the first person, the film is shot from the same objectifying eye that frames the opening credits and the aureole of Catherine’s breast, pressed against the plane wing. This approach foregrounds the viewer’s identification with the presumed subjectivity of that supervening eye, but it excludes from the film any consciousness of the textual resistances of Ballard’s writing, without substituting in their place the explicit unreality that worked in Naked Lunchas the trace of Burroughs’s compositional methods.
The clinical character of Ballard’s narrative voice is to some degree carried over into the spareness of the script (only 77 pages for 100 minutes of running time) and the subdued, at times affectless, performances of the actors. Lacking the baroque intensity of Ballard’s prose-style, their lines are divided by long silences that appear meditative at first, but over the course of the film come to signify nothing at all. (In this respect, Crash recalls The Dead Zone and Dead Ringers, in which a similar eccentric quietness frames much of the dialogue.) The rare exceptions to this principle are reserved chiefly for Vaughan, when he is called on to speak as thaumaturge or philosopher of the auto-erotic. Those moments are, as I’ve noted, the most Ballardian of the film, but they seem for that reason expressly prosaic, and out of place with the rest of the dialogue.
The result is that the neo-Sadean theatricality of the novel–deeply rationalist, explicitly artificial–is traced in the film only in abiding and disconcerting absences. One has the uncanny feeling that something–some thing–is missing, and that this lack accounts, paradoxically, for both the film’s success in representing the perverseness of the collision, and for its failure to translate the novel’s audacious extremity and perpetual crisis.
Her body, with its angular contours, its unexpected junctions of mucous membrane and hairline
The first caresses of Crash set the tempo and esthetic of the film: a new geometry of the libido sprung from the intimate contact and resistance of flesh and steel. This geometry is figured in the opening scene by the explicit comparison of Catherine’s raised nipple to the hard roundness of the wing rivets. Her breast is doubly-valanced here: presented to the steel surface (and, indirectly, to the viewer) as both an erectile organ and an focal point of primary orality, an invitation to both anaclisis and perversion. This doubled valence is one of the film’s anchoring tropes. When Helen struggles to free herself from her seatbelt after her head-on collision with James, she tears open her blouse and exposes her breast to him, as they stare at each other over the crushed hoods of their cars and the mangled body of her husband, thrown into James’s windshield. When James and Helen drive to a carpark for their first sexual encounter, she directs his hand to the same breast, his first contact with her flesh. When Catherine submits to Vaughan’s depredations in the car wash (as James looks on in the rear view mirror), she first bares a single breast to Vaughan; he caresses the nipple intently with an oil-dirtied finger, as she looks down “with rapt eyes, as if seeing it for the first time, fascinated by its unique geometry” (Cronenberg, Crash 49; Ballard, Crash 160). Later, as James comforts a bruised Catherine in their bed, his hand is drawn to the abrasions on her breast left by Vaughan’s hand and mouth.
The nipple is the only organ that may be openly shown in a state of erection in mainstream cinema, and this accounts for its tendency to often stand in for the erect penis. In Crash (the novel and the film), breasts may be the focal point of oral (as well as phallic) desire, but they are never maternal; there is never fluid expressed from these nipples, except as a result of mechanical injury. This may in part account for their effectiveness as substitutes for the penis, within the restrained erotic economy of Cronenberg’s film. The sexual organs shown in the film–and this includes the depraved orifices opened by the crash injury–are remarkably clean: debrided and drained, sutured and sterilized. Crash is almost entirely free of the organic mess that spills out of the cerebrality of Ballard’s prose.
The novel is a catalog of crisis fluids: blood, vomit, urine, rectal and vaginal mucus, gasoline, oil, engine coolant. And most of all: semen; in dried, caked signatures on car seats, dashboards, stiffening the crotch of Vaughan’s fouled jeans; drooling across the gradients of seat covers, streaking instrument binnacles, hanging from steering columns and mirrors. Vaughan’s seminal glands seem infinitely capacious: their ebb and flow trace the tidal rhythms of the new sexuality awakened by the automobile: “As I looked at the evening sky,” James muses after observing one of many assignations between Vaughan and a prostitute in the back seat of the Lincoln, “it seemed as if Vaughan’s semen bathed the entire landscape, powering these thousands of engines, electric circuits and private destinies, irrigating the smallest gestures of our lives” (Ballard, Crash 191).
In Powers of Horror Julia Kristeva excludes semen from her inventory of the abject substances expelled from the body and unrepresentable to the cultural psyche. (She classifies it with tears: “although they belong to the borders of the body, [neither has] any polluting value” [71]. 4) The ubiquity of that substance in Ballard’s novel, and its explicit, intimate connection to the violence and desubjectification of the auto-erotic, suggests, however, that seminal fluid belongs among the privileged forms of the abject, along with excrement and menstrual blood. Semen is, I would contend, the patently abject trace of phallic desire: a nugatory leftover of erotic satisfaction, obscene in its counter-utility, messy, smelly and sticky, unrecuperable in its organic extremity.
Outside of the porn film, semen is the filmic epitome of the unshowable, the unwatchable.5 It is nearly always unseen, a secret substance deposited in rage or passion, demonstrated only by indirection: a sigh, a grimace, a woman’s hands held fast to the small of her lover’s back. Shown directly, it is the among the identifying marks of the contemporary pornographic film, where it appears chiefly in the “money shot:” in cascading pulses tracing the abdomen, rump, breast or face of the partner, proof of the “reality” of the male actor’s pleasure and the abjectness of his partner (who in her or his open-mouthed desire literally swallows up the abject, internalizing and identifying with it.) What counts in the money shot is the controlling effect of the emission, a gesture of mastery over the field (the body) against which it is cast. What is missing is the disorder of pleasure’s aftermath, the sticky mess it leaves behind. The wet spot has no place in a regime of phallic privilege, unless it is recuperated as a trait of the other over whom the phallus presides.
The essential abjection of semen accounts, I think, for its omnipresence in Ballard’s novel. There, it marks a sly subversion of the novel’s insistent phallic construction of desire–the new organs of the automotive body are always invaginations; the renovated act of sexual congress is always one of penetration by a male organ, and usually of a vent in the female body; the novel seems deeply male and heterosexual in this regard–if only because there is too much of it. Its excess dribbles out, stains, the dispassion of the prose; it marks a material sign of male (Vaughan’s, James’s, perhaps Ballard’s) resignation to the essential deviance of desire and the impossibility of absolute, efficient satisfaction.
There is no money shot in Cronenberg’s film–as there is none in Ballard’s novel–but there is one remarkable depiction of the seminal abject. James, Catherine, and Vaughan have left the scene of a multiple-car collision, in which Seagrave, a member of Vaughan’s troupe of crash enthusiasts (he is Vaughan’s chief stunt-driver) has killed himself in a remake of Jayne Mansfield’s fatal crash (complete with wig, false breasts, and pet Chihuahua.) The accident scene is the most classically, cruelly gorgeous of the film: steam and smoke rise from the overturned cars, merging with the dense fog; sparks arcing from the rescue workers’ chainsaws fragment the beams thrown by jammed traffic, flares, and flashing emergency lights; the accident victims (living and dead) stare numbly into space, as spectators gape, and police and fire fighters methodically reposition their crushed limbs, as though they were broken dolls or crash-test dummies. James sits off to the side of the accident, watching Vaughan and Catherine, who move through the scene in a state of increasing sexual arousal. Vaughan photographs her sitting in the front seat of one of the crashed cars, leaning against a crumpled panel–the fact that he is shooting her as a crash victim is emphasized by a long shot that places her profile (for our eyes) directly in line with that of a woman who slightly resembles her, except that her face is shattered on the side we can barely see by something horrific protruding from her cheek.
Blood has spattered on the door and tires of Vaughan’s car, and the threesome drive to a nearby automatic car-wash. As the car is drawn into the brushes and spray, James, who has been driving, watches quietly in the rear-view mirror as Vaughan and Catherine have violent sex in the back seat. During their struggle, her hand is thrown across the top of the front seat, and James sees in it what he has been straining to locate in the mirror: her palm glistens, dripping with semen, casting back the light refracted through the trailing soap suds and streams of water running down the outside of the closed windows. The moment is remarkable–I can think of none other like it in recent mainstream films–but it is isolated, Cronenberg’s one tip of the hat, as it were, to the centrality of this abject substance in Ballard’s novel. What moisture there is elsewhere in the film comes largely from outside the body–fog, rain, soapy water, oil, gasoline, and engine coolant–but these fluids are seldom mixed with the organic fluids.
By comparison, the sex scene with which this coupling is paired–James’s sex with Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette)–is curiously dry. There is little trace of an organic disarray in the well-lit interior of her car, as they maneuver among the forest of machinery that she uses to steer and control it. (Gabrielle was the victim of a near-fatal crash before Crash begins. She hobbles through the film wearing an e xtensive body brace, her thighs and torso enclosed in a leather and steel apparatus that resembles the product of an Erector set from Fredericks of Hollywood.) Her flesh is barely exposed–one nipple is shown briefly, the scarred outline of the other brea st is hinted at. The object of James’s heated fumblings is the “neo-sex” organ (Cronenberg’s term, Crash 52) on the back of her thigh: a deep, invaginated scar that he tears open her fishnet stockings to reveal, and which he penetrates with h is penis. For all the breathless heat of the players, the new erogenous opening is revealed as something dry and cool, looking nothing like, for example, the ragged mess of Max Renn’s abdominal tape slot in Videodrome, or the dripping bodily openings/excrescences of Rabid and The Brood. The scene, one of the most arresting in the novel, seems awkward and hurried in the film–its potential subversiveness stems almost entirely from its near-comic clumsiness; the only e rections in the car are the among the mass of cables, knobs and controls protruding from under the dash, and these appear mostly to get in the way.
detrusor muscle and erectile tissue, was a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities
Cronenberg’s Crash aspires to a kind of fleshy, abject raggedness, but never quite makes it. It is perhaps undone in the end by the abstractness of the bodily vents that its collisions open. Near the conclusion of the film, Vaughan and James are tattooed with stylized imprints of automobile parts, Vaughan with the fluted lower edge of a steering wheel (on his abdomen), and James with the lines of the hood ornament of Vaughan’s car (on his inner thigh). Vaughan complains to the tattooist that the marks she is etching into his flesh are too clean.
Tattooist: Medical tattoos are supposed to be clean.
Vaughan: This isn't a medical tattoo. This is a prophetic tattoo. Prophesy is dirty and ragged. Make it dirty and ragged. (Crash 54-55)
Afterwards, James and Vaughan drive to an abandoned auto-wrecker’s yard. In the shadows of piled, rusted automobile hulks, bumpers, and wheel covers, they complete the erotic series that has been building from their first meeting. Each exposes his tattoos and scars to the other, and guides the other’s flesh
to the beckoning injury sites on the interior of the car, to the pointed sills of the chromium ashtrays, to the curtain of wheel covers hanging on a web of twisted wire just outside the car window. (Cronenberg, Crash 55-56)
They embrace, kiss (the first open-mouthed kiss of the film) and Vaughan lies face down the car seat, presenting his rear to James, an obvious mirror of Catherine’s position at the start of the film.
The tattoos are Cronenberg’s invention. In the novel, the sex between James and Vaughan is the culmination of an extended LSD trip, during which the two drive over an industrial landscape that transforms into towering concrete cliffs and racing waves of golden light. The cars on the highway swim the thick air, “delighted as dolphins” (Ballard: 196). James feels that he is fusing with the automobile:
The bones of my forearms formed a solid coupling with the shift of the steering column, and I felt the smallest tremors of the roadwheels magnified a hundred times, so that we traversed each grain of gravel or cement like the surface of a small asteroid. The murmur of the transmission system reverberated through my legs and spine, echoing off the plates of my skull as if I myself were lying in the transmission tunnel of the car, my hands taking the torque of the crankshaft, my legs spinning to propel the vehicle forwards. (Ballard 196-97)
The acid trip completes the novel’s neuronic odyssey, sanctioning the characters’ final embrace automotive desubjectification. Vaughan submits himself to James because the latter’s imaginary fusion with the automobile completes the deepest secret of Vaughan’s fantasies of the crash: through James, Vaughan is finally fucked by his car.
In the book, the sodomy is described in detail, and culminates in the image of James’s semen leaking from Vaughan’s anus onto the vinyl upholstery of the seat. The film, of course, shows none of this (arguably, the camera pulls away from their embrace more quickly than it in fact needs to in order to stay within its rating.) The filmed scene captures some of the frankness, but little of the exhilaration and affection of Ballard version:
In our wounds, we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic-slain dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die. (Ballard 203)
When James climbs out of the car and into a nearby junker to rest, he seems to leaving the site of a crime, not one of disorienting intimacy. Vaughan’s effort to crash the Lincoln into the junker seems in the film oddly like an act of revenge for sexual humiliation, rather than the gesture of reciprocation that it clearly represents in the book.
At this point, the film rushes to its conclusion: Vaughan leaves his mark on Catherine’s car with his own, in the form of a vaginal tear in her door; James and Catherine go out driving, looking for him; he dies in a hurried attempt to crash into them; Helen and Gabrielle are shown embracing in the back seat of Vaughan’s junked car; James and Catherine retrieve the car from the pound, fix it up, and begin rehearsing their own crashing games, he in Vaughan’s Lincoln, she in her car. The film ends with their embrace beside her overturned car (he has driven her from the highway). He asks if she is hurt; she replies through tears that she thinks she is all right. He caresses her bruised and mud-streaked thighs, promising, “Maybe the next one, darling… Maybe the next one”–the same words that Catherine says to James in the third sex scene of the film, as he complained of being interrupted with his “camera girl” before she could come.
Though James’s last thoughts in the novel are of “the elements of my own car-crash” (224), it is unclear in Ballard’s version that he will repeat Vaughan’s collisions in so exact a form as Cronenberg shows. The literalness of the film’s depiction of James and Catherine’s embarcation on the route to the perfect crash is, I think, another sign of Cronenberg’s compromises in moving Ballard’s text to the screen. On the last pages of the novel, James and Catherine visit the police junkyard and make brief, ritual love in the back seat of the wrecked Lincoln. (In the novel, Vaughan leaves his Lincoln at their apartment building and steals James’s car, eventually driving it off a flyover in an attempt to crash into a limo carrying Elizabeth Taylor.6) James gathers up his semen in one hand, and walks with Catherine among the cars, anointing their binnacles and instrument panels with his come. They stop at the wreck of James’s car, and James deposits the remaining fluid on the bloody imprint of Vaughan’s buttocks on the deformed seat, and on the “bloodied lance” of the broken steering column (224).
This final gesture in the novel binds the two men to the violence and abjection of the perpetually-erect automotive phallus–to precisely the gory extremity of the phallus that Cronenberg cannot show on film. The cultural impossibility–and here, I mean an intersection of the “cultures” of the commercial film industry and of the filmgoing public–the impossibility of showing both the extent of the embrace of the film’s male characters and its nugatory residues, is the boundary against which the film finally stops. The tattoos, the wrecked Lincoln–these are Cronenberg’s recastings of the unrepresentable abject, across which James and Vaughan achieve a degree of transitivity; within the limited erotic economy of the film, they function perfectly well toward that end. Cronenberg’s Crash disappoints because its translation of Ballard’s inventories of the abject is necessarily imperfect, but that imperfection is itself the hallmark of the film’s specific abjection. Like much of Cronenberg’s work, the film is a mixed product, its successes paradoxically traced in its open intimations of its limits, its inability to figure Ballard’s perpetual crisis of the auto-erotic except by indirection. The unshowable and the unfilmable are not identical, and the unshowable may leave its stain at the edges of the filmable–a fact long ago observed by critics of cinematic subjections of the gaze. Cronenberg’s most audacious work labors at the margins of what can be made to appear on the screen. Crash exhausts, and collides against its own limits, depositing something unmentionable by the way.
Notes
2 The film was awarded a Special Jury Prize “For Originality, For Daring, and For Audacity” at a ceremony at which several of the prize judges were conspicuously absent, or departed prematurely.
3 Vaughan describes the car crash to James as a “fertilizing rather than destructive event–a liberation of sexual energy that mediates the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form” (Cronenberg, Crash 42). This strikes me as one of the most Ballardian moments of the film, as no one but a Ballard character would talk that way in an informal conversation.
4 Calvin Thomas’s Male Matters includes a rare analysis of semen-as-abject. His focus is on the “shameful visibility” of spilled semen: “When the penis lapses and allows its productions to become visible, it does not assert but rather collapses the rigid distinction between the essential and the excremental, the beyond and the beneath. This collapse provides the very contradiction that phallologocentrism must efface or displace to go about its powerful business of generating, reproducing not only itself but the conditions of production that prevail and predominate at the historical moment” (54).
5 And not, as is often proposed, an erect penis–or, to be more precise, the dry-and-erect penis. Movies of all stripes are run through with obvious hard-ons. It matters little that viewers rarely see “actual” penises in partial or full engorgement–they are always present, in the erectile structures of architecture, the phallic profiles of combat weaponry and all manner of machinery (especially in the projectile forms of speeding cars), in the body language and verbal inflection of nearly every character in the presence of an object of her or his desire. The erect phallus is marked out in the penetrative logic of the camera’s point of view, its prosthetic extension of our eye into the field of the screen.
6 Vaughan dreams of dying in a head-on crash with Taylor that will join their torsos and crushed genitals with the collapsing bulkheads of their cars. He is first drawn to James because the producer is working on a film in which Taylor appears in a wrecked automobile. The abstracted torso and visage of the film actress is a perpetual presence in Ballard’s fiction of the 1960s and ’70s, especially in works like Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition. Cronenberg’s decision to excise the entire Elizabeth Taylor narrative from the novel was probably motivated by her decreasing role in 1990s popular culture as a figure of erotic mystery and satisfaction.
Works Cited
- Ballard, J.G. Crash. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.
- Cronenberg, David. Crash. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.
- Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
- Lane, Anthony. “Off the Road.” The New Yorker, March 31 1997: 106-107. Rodley, Chris, ed. Cronenberg on Cronenberg. Rev. ed. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1997.
- Smith, Gavin. “Cronenberg: Mind Over Matter.” Film Comment 33.2 (1997): 14-29.
- Thomas, Calvin. Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety and the Male Body on the Line. Chicago: University of Illinois, 1996.