[T]he balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decade. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind…. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.[29]

And so it was that the "storybook" life of the Princess Diana of Wales would come to a tragic end appropriate for the public mythology. "It's irresistible," Don Hewitt, executive producer of CBS News's 60 Minutes declared in the aftermath of Princess Diana's death, "A high-speed crash kills the mother of the future King of England. She was beautiful, glamorous, running around with an Egyptian playboy whose father owns Harrod's. You couldn't make this up."[30]
     In Crash the reenactments of the automobile accidents of James Dean and Jane Mansfield are not only an ode to the mythologized immortal bodies of the stars, but also evidence of this slippage between the real and the fictive. Helen Remmington and James join a group of spectators to see the reenactment of James Dean's death, announced and narrated by Vaughan, who then takes his place as the hapless Rolf Wutherich in the passenger seat of James Dean's "Little Bastard," a lithe and sexy Porsche; his collaborator Seagrave will drive. To provide the "ultimate in authenticity,"[31] all the "actors" in this reenactment wear no seat-belt, no helmets, use no safety-gear whatsoever. "It's strange," James muses from his place in the stands, "I thought this would be far more popular." Helen responds, "The real thing is available free of charge."[32] After the fateful collision is successfully reenacted no one moves towards the cars to see if the passengers' injuries are in fact real or only feigned for the sake of "authenticity," not even Dr. Remmington. They do not want to disturb the narrative. James asks Helen, "Is that part of the act or are they really hurt?"[33] The spectators await the unfolding of the story, excited, yet respectful in the face of the terrible spectacle they chose to witness. Rendered passive, witness to something greater, they share an unimaginable intimacy. Like the survivors of a plane crash who meet again and again to grieve, who share an understanding of the immensity of what has passed, not unlike those who witnessed the accident of Princess Diana, the viewers of Vaughan's car crash reenactment are marked and joined together, compassionate witnesses made complicitous by their sighting of these damaged bodies. With the sound of approaching police sirens they disperse rapidly, in much the same way as the paparazzi scurried away from the accident scene of Princess Diana, although perhaps with less guilt. As the landscape is perverted by the twisted metal of car crashes, so too have the lives of the landscape's inhabitants been perverted, transformed, changed forever.
     Although the crash of Princess Diana was not performance art, it too is read as spectacle by the rapacious media and a ravenous and hypocritical public. We are caught in the act of looking at the sight of the Mercedes 280 pummeled against the walls of the tunnel, then stopped by the brute force of a supporting beam, its sleek lines and good styling gone, reduced somehow to a tawdry show of destruction. Our eyes glued to the television coverage of the accident, we condemn the paparazzi who must have chased Diana to her death. The sight of this wreck is criminalized, someone must be blamed. We jump back from the site of an abyss, all too close to the violation of societal taboos on voyeurism, too close to breaching the quietude of death with the iconicity of the camera lens. Discussions abound about the morality of the photographers there who photographed the scene, and about the morality of those who claim they didn't, missing an unrepeatable "photo opp." As Hot Wired's Jon Katz said in his postmortem of the coverage of Diana's death:

Were I one of the news photographers in the Paris tunnel, I would have checked to see if Princess Diana was alive, helped in any reasonable way I could, made certain the police were called, then pulled out my camera and started shooting like crazy. Whatever pious posture I might wish to adopt now in retrospect and far from that awful crash, had I the opportunity to capture the death of the world's most famous person, I wouldn't have hesitated. My jaw drops at all those who are so sure they would have reacted differently.[34]

Vaughan would have been there too, and not for money.
     Curiosity is relentless, little by little societal censure lessens, a publisher's fear is lifted, the German tabloid Bild Zeitung is the first to publish an actual photograph of the accident scene, a color image taken of the wrecked Mercedes S-280 while rescuers still labored to free Diana. Curiosity begets a justification: need to know, it is news, these images have already appeared, will appear soon, it's like any other crash. Footage from the accident scene is replayed endlessly, albeit "tastefully," and it is news when the damaged Mercedes is returned again to the tunnel for accident experts to reconstruct the scene in the name of science, in the name of history. Diana's death and the days leading up to and even after her funeral are dominated by a public gang-bang of emotionalism — emotions which will now never be spent, can no longer be projected upon the corpus of Diana, Queen of Hearts, emotions which must be coughed up in a hurry, like phlegm, because their object and the bearer of a supposedly shared intimacy is dead. Comments Catherine Ballard in Crash, "They bury the dead so quickly. They should leave them lying around for months."[35] Ironically, Diana's death brings us to the moment of the greatest possible intimacy, the moment of death.
     Though stunt driver Seagrave emerges from the wreckage of the James Dean crash, his reenactment of the death of James Mansfield becomes his last act; he is found dead by Vaughan, James, and Catherine as they happen upon the accident scene. Vaughan records it with his camera, documenting this reenactment of a former reality as both reenactment and the real death of a partner in the "benevolent psychopathology" that continues to beckon him towards his own sudden demise. Much like the "false documentary" of the British filmmaker Peter Witkin and others, through the sexualized economy of Vaughan's recordations and documentary efforts Crash constructs its own realities enfolded upon even more interior realities and cultural mythologies borne of the immense and destructive power of the car crash. On a night not long after Seagrave's death, Vaughan swerves from his menacing position on the highway tailgating the car of James and Catherine, careening with a war-like scream across several lanes and plummeting over the guardrail to his own long-awaited and fiery immortality.
 
Notes

28. A Bunim-Murray advertisement on MTV's The Real World website, September-December, 1997.

29. Ballard, J.G., as quoted in Re/Search No. 8/9, ed. V. Vale and Andrea Juno. San Francisco: Re/Search Publications (1984), p.97-98.

30. Hewitt, Don, as quoted in an article by Robin Pogrebin, For American Press, Diana's Death Is End of a Love Affair, in The New York Times on the Web, September 4, 1997.

31. Cronenberg, David, Crash. London: Faber and Faber Limited (1996), p. 28.

32. Ibid, p.29.

33. Ibid, p.29.

34. Katz, Jon, , Discovering the Paparazzo Within, Part 1, in HotWired, September 9, 1997