The passenger compartment enclosed us like a machine generating from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen and engine coolant. My finger moved into Helen's rectum, feeling the shaft of my penis within her vagina. Those slender membranes, like the mucous septum of her nose which I touched with my tongue, were reflected in the glass dials of the instrument panel, the unbroken curve of the windshield.[16]

Vaughan unfolded for me all his obsessions with the mysterious eroticism of wounds: the perverse logic of blood-soaked instrument panels, seat-belts smeared with excrement, sun-visors lined with brain tissue. For Vaughan each crashed car set off a tremor of excitement, into the complex geometries of a dented fender, in the unexpected variations of crushed radiator grilles, in the grotesque overhang of an instrument panel forced onto a driver's crotch as if in some calibrated act of machine fellatio. The intimate time and space of a single human being had been fossilized for ever in this web of chromium knives and frosted glass.[17]

     This pornography of detail has been present since the 1600s and is represented in the works of DeSade as a compendium of sexual transgressions ranging from bestiality to forced sodomy and rape, to lustful murder. What shocks is not simply the act itself, but the lurid and microscopic nature of its description, the extent to which it is belabored and embellished, and the duration it is given within the text. The iteration and reiteration of such acts, ad nauseum, is cumulative, and potent, if nothing else, in its ability to disgust. Through the camera lens, this excess of vision might in still photography take the form of the close-up or, in an exhibit, the repetition of a theme over a body of work. With the moving camera it is represented not by the close-up alone, but also by the zoom, shot-length, and the reiteration of a particular mise-en-scene over the course of a film-strip. The scrutiny of the close-up dominates pornography with "snatch shots" (one wants to see the hole one fucks) and "cum shots"; in documentary photography we see the lines of a weathered face, the wrinkles of age, the eyes which are the mirror of the soul. Taking its cue from the immaculate precision of J.G. Ballard's prose,[18] the film Crash relies both upon the detail of reiteration and the detail of language.
     In modernity, society has amassed great powers of scrutiny, from advances in the camera, to computer software including databases capable of holding and manipulating more data than a single person could digest. Yet, information is knowledge, knowledge is power, its acquisitive gathering is performed with the meticulousness of fetish, the avariciousness of the hungry. "Stories from the Front Line," in the November 1997 Wired, reviews the Privacy Journal, a chronicle of privacy invasions. Among other things, the Privacy Journal reports on a known sexual offender who from his jail cell operates a database containing detailed information on children.[19] This mobilization of technology for the gathering and compiling of information constitutes a pornography of the real.
     Medical records detail a person's suffering on a cellular level, documenting and describing the faults and torments of the objectified body. Autopsy reports are nothing if not a rigorous compilation of the results of an inspection of the body. In an autopsy the external body is examined for discolorations and signs of trauma, for scars, birthmarks and other anomalies through which the body may be identified. The data collected in hospitals so threatens to overwhelm the physician and the medical infrastructure that information designer Edward Tufte labors to complete software targeted at the medical industry which will sort and print this voluminous information in a visually comprehensible manner. Perhaps such software could even describe the precise curvature of President Clinton's penis as discovered by his physician in the course of Paula Jones' litigation against Clinton for alleged sexual harassment.
     FBI files record the daily activities and associations of their "subjects." Surveillance society extends its vision to supervising highways and intersections, apartment entrances and the workplace. In the name of protection, these mechanisms chart activities of a highly personal nature, and when this information is accessed by unexpected sources and possibly disseminated, its use becomes violative, obscene, even pornographic. Here pornography refers to a violation, one directed first through the camera lens and then through the dissemination of such information. This constitutes a heightened invasion of privacy, a breach of the self. The experience of such information as pornography is largely because it is private information inappropriate within the public context. Like sex which has left the loving confines of the legally sanctioned marital bed for the genital abstractions of the video screen, this information has lost its societally-approved context.
     Some experiences are coded within society as more "personal" than others, certainly among them sex and death. And if inappropriate for the protagonists of Crash to possess a sexual curiosity of each others' wounded bodies, it is nearly doubly criminal to perpetrate an act of violation in order to view the even more taboo face of death. Unless, of course, it can be justified or another can be faulted. What is essentially wrong with the prostitute is that, having left the domesticity of the patriarchal family, she is a public woman. This condemnation was also bestowed upon the Princess of Wales who, upon divorcing from her husband Prince Charles, left the protection of the Royal Family and, according to some, basqued too pleasurably in the public eye. Upon her death many sought to blame her for her own demise. Said Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani, "Rather than running away and being followed, why did she never let herself be photographed calmly with Dodi at her side? She always played hide-and-seek."[20] There are some privacies which should not be aired, some secrets which should not be divulged. If Princess Diana's death was one such privacy, so too were the images of Fergie's bared breasts, Diana's dalliance with Dodi, and the secretly tape-recorded illicit and erotic remembrances of Prince Charles and his lover, Camilla Parker Bowles. These secrets made public contributed to an eroticization of the Royal Family, recasting them as actors in a royal soft-core drama and drawing the public into an intimacy of violation through the paparazzi lens and the libidinous prying of the tabloid press.
     In "Pictures of an execution: how to look at Diana's final photos," an article in Salon magazine, author David Bowman explores with a poetic style the question of whether it is moral to view any images that might surface of the fatal crash scene of Diana, Princess of Wales. Such images, Bowman says,

…may or may not show the woman blown backwards against the rear of the front seat, her head facing the Mercedes' back window while her hand touches the bloody leg of her companion, Dodi Fayed… But if the photos do show her face, it's unlikely that she'll be looking into the camera. Her eyes will be closed, although her expression will not be peaceful. Her jaw will be clenched in a grimace, as witnesses have reported that the dying princess didn't stop groaning.[21]

As the car swung left and raced into the second underpass, below the Pont de l'Alma, the driver appears to have lost control of the vehicle. Skid marks, streaked with black paint, were visible yesterday on the central dividing wall marking the point where the vehicle veered to one side.
     The Mercedes then ricocheted off an opposite wall before slamming into pillars supporting the tunnel roof. The pursuing motorcycles appear to have braked before they reached the wreckage.[23]

     To allow the reader to better imagine the carnage, The Guardian centered its investigative reporting on the wrecked vehicle providing a detailed account of the Mercedes model S-280 which contained the Princess and Al Fayed at the time of the collision.
      Among other features, this model provided driver and passenger air bags, anti-lock brakes, the power to accelerate from 0-60 miles in 10.7 seconds, and a maximum speed of 130 miles per hour. We were additionally informed that the Mercedes S-280 that carried Princess Diana to her death measured 5,115mm in length, 1,890mm in width. Author Traynor added,

While a top-range S-600 sells for about £70,000, the basic model of the S-280 driven by {Henri] Paul retails for just over £30,000.The more expensive car has a 12-cylinder engine, while the S-280 has a 193 horsepower six-cylinder engine.[24]

This was the structure, the elegance, which incarcerated the Princess Diana of Wales while she lay dying after the impact of the car accident.
     The Guardian avoided the morally corrupt purchase of any of the accident scene photographs, instead providing its readers with scientifically exacting diagrams of the path the S-280 took along the Alma tunnel to destruction and the seating arrangement of the four passengers within the doomed vehicle. Within a week or two of the accident the totaled Mercedes was ferried back to the Alma tunnel so that accident reconstruction experts could better analyze the scene, envisioning the moments that led to the crash. In the name of knowledge, and with the rationale of future prevention, fortunes are spent on accident reconstruction each year. As in autopsy, we search the remains for an answer, a futile defense against our own mortality.
     In Crash, the prophetic figure Vaughan takes documentary, medical and scientific images as his personal pornography. Culled from morgue records, surreptitiously photographed from a distance and cut out of newspapers, these images are catalogued, studied, inscribed with notes and sometimes used as a blueprint for his next car crash reenactment. Vaughan hoards these images, obscene momentos of the imprint of technology upon our sex.

Last came that group of injuries which had most preoccupied Vaughan — genital wounds caused during automobile accidents. The photographs which illustrated the options available had clearly been assembled with enormous care, torn from the pages of forensic medical journals and textbooks of plastic surgery, photocopied from internally circulated monographs, extracted from operating theatre reports stolen during his visits to Ashford hospital.[25]

From Cronenberg's script where the character James Ballard is looking through the contents of Vaughan's briefcase:

The photos are culled from a variety of sources — newspapers, magazines, video skills, film frames — blown up to uniform 8" x 10" size. Each one depicts a famous crash victim in the prime of life, and each one has the wounds to come marked up very explicitly — lines circling their necks and pubic areas, breasts and cheekbones shaded in, section lines across their mouths and abdomens. Handwritten notes complement the circles and arrows.

A second packet of photographs shows the cars in which these famous people died. Each photo is marked to show which parts of the cars destroyed or fused with which famous body part: for example, a close-up of the dashboard and windshield from the Camus car — Michel Gallimard's Facel Vega — is marked 'nasal bridge', 'soft palate', 'left zygomatic arch'.[26]

These images come to fit within the current vogue in graphic design of using modes of scientific illustration to persuade. Items of specific interest, Michel Gallimard's Facel Vega, or the section lines running over an ablated abdomen, these elements are emphasized with the attention of good design: arrows draw the viewer's eye away only to reinforce with annotation the fragility of a particular body part when confronted with the hard metal of the steering wheel, the grill of a radiator. The very precision of these images, their exactitude and fetish for accuracy, complete the narrative of death and destruction. "Its very … satisfying," James says, "I'm not sure I understand why."[27]
 
Notes

16. Ballard, J.G., Crash. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux (1973), p. 81.

17. Ibid, p.12.

18. If only most writers of pornography were as capable of manipulating language as their protagonists are expert in genital manipulation — perhaps then there would be enough textual pleasure to merit a read.

19. Garfinkel, Simson"Stories from the Front Line," in Wired. November 1997, p.252.

20. Riding, Alan, Paparazzi Dilemma: The Public Loves the Photos, Hates the Photographers, in The New York Times on the Web, September 2, 1997.

21. Bowman, David, Pictures of an execution: how to look at Diana's final photos, in Salon Magazine, September 8, 1997.

22. Ibid.

23."How a game of cat and mouse ended with carnage in Paris," in The Guardian, September 2, 1997.

24. Traynor, Ian, Boon,in The Guardian, September 2, 1997.

25. Ballard, J.G., Crash. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux (1973) p.133-134.

26. Cronenberg, David, Crash. London: Faber and Faber Limited (1996), p.41.