I can tell myself that repugnance and horror are the mainsprings of my desire.
     —Georges Bataille[1]

Somewhere beyond the regularity and banality of the modern life, threaded among the interstices of the social fabric we call "civilization," there are private worlds where the chaotic pounds out its own tumultuous rhythms, where desire untrammeled by convention is propelled by a primal sense of urgency and experimentation. The place of imagination inhabited by the protagonists of J.G. Ballard's cult novel Crash, now a David Cronenberg film, is one such world.
     First published in 1973, Crash is a tenderly brutal apocalyptic novel depicting the violent couplings of the body with technology. Crash eroticizes, even fetishizes, the car crash and all of its players, the intensity of desire directly related to the intensity of the impact and its creative transformation of the soft and yielding body. Non-narrative in structure, Crash is impelled by dint of the desire and sexual liaisons of its similarly-minded protagonists. This is no ordinary "road trip."
     Cronenberg's low-budget adaptation of Crash paints with a realistic brush images of isolation over a barren highway "landscape." The natural world seldom intrudes upon the narrative, the mise-en-scene alternating between bleak concrete highways and parking garages, the warmth of flesh tones, the gleam of chrome, and the drab and ugly furnishings of the modern age. There is the almost painterly composition of crash victims, the delicacy of the hair framing Catherine Ballard's face, and the darkened tonalities of the bedclothes which illuminating skin moistened by the steady exertion of sex. The protagonists speak in intimate, hushed tones — the better to hear the hum of traffic, to hear the roar of the engine as it accelerates, to revel in the shattering din of impact. Howard Shore's score is subtle, sparse, and with the dissonance of small twinges of pain.
     Despite being vilified as pornography and at times censored for its apparent amorality, Crash posits a society, an ethic, not unfamiliar; indeed, in some ways Crash is simply a peculiar love story, a narrative of empathy and tenderness surpassing the norm for the privatized spaces of modernity.
 
Pornography Culture
     Crash debuted successfully at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1996, taking the Special Jury Prize. In November 1996, it was awarded a Genie for best direction. All told, it has played uncut in 20 counties, with great box office success in some. That success, however, did not extend to Britain, the home of J.G. Ballard. For soon after its debut at Cannes, elements within the British press began a vociferous campaign for its suppression. That such a strident campaign was staged in Britain is particularly ironic in light of the condemnation of the British and other tabloid press which unfolded after the Princess of Wales was killed, an incident which struck a chord in many who had seen Crash or read the book.
     The indictment of Crash within the British press was based upon its perverse fusion of sex and technology. It didn't help that the couplings within the film were multiple and varied, blending auto-eroticism and other sexual combinations considered quite beyond the pale of sexual permissibility in proper British society. Presiding over the negative review run in the June 3, 1996 Evening Standard was the headline, "A movie beyond the bounds of depravity."[2] The November 9th issue of the Daily Mail proclaimed, "Morality dies in the twisted wreckage."[3] Perhaps more to the point was the related front-page article on the Daily Mail of the same date headlined "Ban This Car Crash Sex Film."[4] Especially disturbing to the Daily Mail was the fact that "the initially heterosexual characters lose their inhibitions [and] they experiment pleasurably with gay sex, lesbian sex, and sex with cripples."[5] In short, these articles condemned Crash as pornography.
 
Notes

1. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality. San Francisco: City Lights Books (1986), p. 59.

2. Kermode, Mark and Petley, Julian, "Road Rage" in Sight and Sound, June 1977, p. 16.

3. Ibid, p. 16

4. Ibid, p.16.