In primitive tribes with their elaborate tatoolike designs etched over the body, pain serves to inscribe a tribal knowledge directly into the flesh. The scars and markings that result thereby enfold the individual within the larger social order whose laws and customs are reflected in the visible written form of a bodily statement or design.[46]

In Crash the protagonists' abject bodies are bound together by their understanding of the laws and customs, the wounds of technology, and by their transformation of that understanding into their own perverse subculture. If modern techno-society can guarantee any one transformative experience in life, it is the experience of the physical body, particularly that of sex, and of death. This is the experience that is essentially sought by Vaughan and Catherine Ballard. As Vaughan tells the medical tattooist who is inscribing on his torso the "fluted lower edge" of a steering wheel, "This is a prophetic tattoo. Prophesy is ragged and dirty. So make it ragged and dirty."[47] And so it is that Catherine Ballard waits in her car for the moment when she and James will attempt to approach that moment of intensity that is the car crash, idly picking at the only rough-edged surface available — the edges of a parking sticker on the windshield of her Miata. Life should be ragged and dirty, passionate and well-lived, and yet within the streamlined confines of modernity while we strive to build technologies which allow endless possibilities for our mutilation, disablement and death, we worship a faith of safety, the cult of the plastic surgeon — we want, we expect, to be untouched, unmarked.
     Ballard's Crash is an accusation of hypocrisy in a society which worships speed and power, but rejects their consequences. In a sort of safety-related feature-creep, we take instruments of power and try to make them "as safe as possible." But protective devices often have their own drawbacks — airbags save many, for example, but they kill others. No child should ever be hurt, no adult should ever suffer. We choose drugs over pain — both emotional and physical — we sue those who inflict heartbreak upon us, where there is tragedy a lawsuit will often follow. We teach our children about an idealized life which excludes injury. They have learned their lessons well. Perhaps, with our technologies of danger and death, we can make everything safe, perhaps we can make everyone die of boredom too. But one cannot live without dying, and to become a subject is to acknowledge one's own power and to become a powerful agent in the world — one who must occasionally hurt others; one who must likewise be hurt. As we systematically guard ourselves from pain, we distance ourselves from life.
     There is something in knowing pain, there is something in knowing one's own pain that the protagonists of Crash have learned. According to David B. Morris, "Pain is the mark and medium of sacrifice."[48] As the protagonist James Ballard says after the car crash:

After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury had long been blunted or forgotten. The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years. For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body, an inexhaustible encyclopedia of pains and discharges, with the hostile gaze of other people, and with the fact of the dead man. After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.[49]

      Cronenberg's Crash is simply another document of culture — no more pornographic than the culture from which its heroes were borne, and no less obscene, it is simply a journey over the wasteland highway of modern techno-culture chronicled through the wounds that mark the body, the couplings that mark the soul. Crash can be seen as another form of autopsy, another document proving the truth of the material body, enclosed and bound though it is within the strictures of society, dominated by technology, and imprinted by culture. Post-punk writer Kathy Acker, now sadly dead yet immortal as Vaughan, commented in her all-too-brief essay on Crash:

Art is metamorphosis: Cronenberg has transmuted my violent society into a world in which I want to be alive, in which I want to be human.[50]