At the moment of impact the man in the passenger seat of the other car is propelled like a mattress from the barrel of a circus canon through his own windshield and then partially through the windshield of James' car.
     The propelled man's blood spatters James face and chest, his body coming to rest inside James' car its head dangling down into the dark recess of the passenger footwell.[37]

     Because of a moment's inattention, Ballard becomes a murderer by negligence and the body of a total stranger hurtles through his windshield. As Ballard comes out of his post-collision (post-orgasmic) stupor, he finds himself only inches from a dying man impaled on the windshield glass, blood dripping running down his arm and dripping from the hand of his suspended body.
     Helen Remmington, the dying man's wife, remains relatively unscathed and strapped into the driver's seat of the other vehicle. She "stares at James in a curiously formal way, as if unsure of what has brought them together."[38] For Cronenberg, this is a moment of "desperate privacy.[39]" Oddly enough, it is also a moment of intimacy which binds the protagonists together. As J.G. Ballard writes in Crash, "Already I was aware that the interlocked radiator grilles of our cars formed the model of an inescapable and perverse union between us."[40] In the hospital, James tells Catherine that she should have gone to the man's funeral and asks: "What about his wife? The woman doctor. Have you visited her yet?" Catherine demurs, "No, I couldn't. I feel too close to her."[41] It's no accident that J.G. Ballard's style has the precision of one accustomed to cataloguing the bodily harm that results from a high-impact collision between soft flesh and the deceptively smooth and protective surfaces of a car's interior. Ballard read in medicine at England's King's College. Perhaps this was his training in the intimacy and pornography of violence. After all, what could be more intimate than systematically breaking the ribs of a patient to access and massage a heart or invasively plunging a slim rubber tube through a tender urethra? In his review of French painter and photographer Romain Slocombe's City of the Broken Dolls, an art book of false accident victims featuring young Japanese women in bandages, traction and mildly erotic dishabille, Wired reporter Richard Kadrey comments:

There's something savage in these false trauma documents, but there's compassion, too — even if it's a mechanically engineered pathos.[42]

     The damaged body is an invitation to intimacy. Where physical pain or injury exist, there will be a comforter; where a wound exists there will be someone to minister the wound. Vulnerabilty can invite great tenderness. Indeed, doctors who fail to convey compassion in their interactions with patients are criticized for neglecting the "human" side of tending the ill.
     All of them potential players in this techno-pornography, the protagonists of the film Crash are like so many objects, isolated from nature and the sensual by the geometry of technology, the strictures of modernity, and almost irretrievably isolated from one another. As James rides home from the hospital in a taxi, the camera reveals his face through a close-up of the half-opened window of the car. In a shot which offers sort of a split-screen effect, the spectator sees James' face juxtaposed with the reflection on the windowpane of the blurry highway below being rapidly traversed. As the camera pulls back, we see that James is first contained within the car, a car which is one of hundreds of others, occupied by strangers whom James will never know though he might see them picking their noses, talking to others, or even fucking as he drives a scant few feet away on an ugly and barren highway. Nothing but a collision will bring them into a closer proximity, nothing but tragedy.
     With modern life, privatization and the demise of the extended family, a person is not only individuated, but isolated. Like Russian Matryoshka dolls, each of us is encased within a body, contained within the "nuclear family," and then contained again within private spaces such as the bedroom, the apartment or house, and the car. Particularly in America, self-hood is tied to the car, sixteen is the age when a driver's license can be had. In many States, sixteen is the age of consent, when a child may be acknowledged as a sexual body and entitled to own that body in a consensual sexual situation (at least with other minors), and cars become privatized, mobile spaces for teenagers' furtive sexual encounters. But, like any container, be it the social construct of the "individual" or a "single-family dwelling," cars also separate us from intimacies with others, desired or not. In situations of "road rage," for example, where attention to the road is replaced by belligerent action towards another driver who has inadvertently violated one's territory, authorities advise a defense of avoiding the glance of the possible perpetrator, giving up ground to him, or just getting off the highway altogether. This is essentially a strategy for avoiding contact, avoiding intimacy. In Crash, Helen Remmington recounts to James Ballard the men she's fucked in cars:

James: You had sex with all those men in cars? Only in cars?
Helen: Yes, I didn't plan it that way.
James: Did you fantasize that Vaughan was photographing all those sex acts? As though they were traffic accidents?
Helen (Laughs): Yes, they felt like traffic accidents.[43]

In many ways, a traffic accident is simply the expression of a violent and accidental intimacy.
     In its exploration of technology and sex, Crash has a subtextual linkage of intimacy and violence, a linkage which, if acknowledged in culture, is taboo. But there is an uneasy kinship between intimacy and violence in society. For example, most murders occur between acquaintances or family members; most rapes are either date rapes or marital rapes; and most child molestations occur within the family. Random violence isn't always that random; many times, people perpetrate violence against their "intimates." But there are many other linkages of violence and intimacy which have been sanctioned or are at least tacitly acknowledged within society.
     There is a continuum of familiarity over which such acts of intimacy and violence can be located. Perhaps the least intimate is the passing of a stranger: Neither meets the eyes of the other; within the constraints of social convention this acknowledgement would not be proper. There is the handshake, that first touch of the other, that occurs with a proper introduction. This is respectful acknowledgement, the distance kept by the space of the extended hands. There is the touch of a hand on a shoulder to reassure a friend, or parental control of a child through the grasping of a small hand. Acts such as these are both less violative and more intimate. Perhaps this is why, with the current level of concern about improper touching of children in the schools, that some school districts are warning teachers off of touching their pupils at all. As the continuum progresses, the level of intimacy and the related level of potential or overt violence increases. Take, for example, a kiss between probable lovers: Tacitly a violation of the other's "space," there is the possibility of it being unwanted, a violation, even experienced as a violence. If the kiss is well-received, then further intrusion into a person's "space" may be forgiven, even desired. Of course, the ultimate is the excited physical coupling of lovers with the hopeful culmination of the little death of orgasm. On this continuum, rape is both violative and intimate in the extent to which it entails a physical trespass of the other. There is also the spanking of a child, a discipline both intimate and familiar, which is experienced as a humiliation of the self — a violation — and the tears of the chastened child are often described as "tears of shame." And then there is the intimacy of a crash or tragedy. Survivors of disasters such as the Oklahoma bombing often meet again and again in the years that follow, developing a great bond, an intimacy borne of a violence. Many "support groups" are formed based upon the shared experience of violence, such as those assisting survivors of abuse. Birth, too, marking both the separating the fetus from the body of the mother and the beginning the intimate relationship between mother and child, is a pain so violent that many women chose to be "out," to be anesthetized into a space without feeling or consciousness — a place of death — rather than to be subjected to this primal and violent pain. And, lastly, most murders occur between those who know one another. Yet we deny the underbelly of intimacy, the innate vulnerability of the body.
 
Notes

37. Cronenberg, David, Crash. London: Faber and Faber Limited (1996), p. 8.

38. Ibid, p.8.

39. Ibid, p.9.

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

41. Cronenberg, David, Crash. London: Faber and Faber Limited (1996), p.14.

42. Kadrey, Richard, "Crash Pathos," in Wired, November 1997, p.254.