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.
 
Technology: the purveyor of pornography
     Pornography, literally, the writing of harlots, is a term these days often invoked. Video and the democratization of its technology beginning in the late 1960s brought inexpensive production, albeit with the shoddy production values of early video. The popularization of the videocassette recorder in the 1970s in combination with the convenience of neighborhood video stores ensured great accessibility, and privacy. In the late 1970s and 1980s cable TV spawned a variety of "pay-per-view" options to view pornography without leaving home at all. During this period, too, there came the innovation of the non-professional porn flick — couples who would videotape and sell their own oftentimes scripted sexual liaisons. Private intimacies became pornographies for public consumption. Also popularized was the recordation of one's own sex acts for later private consumption. The remembrance of one's arousal is arousing. In this way the VCR enabled a kind of sexual shape-shifting: from subject to object, and back to subject again. Such permutations were eloquently described in Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan's film Family Viewing.[6] And on the Internet, the realm of the one-handed typist, the ease with which pornography may be distributed has increased yet again.
     The result of these technological developments has been an increasing awareness of pornography as an aspect, even a force, in culture. For conservative feminists and the religious right, pornography is the theory, the rape and murder of women the practice. For queer culture, the production of their own pornographies can be a self-affirming form of representation in a straight culture where a "lesbian kiss" on TV is so unheard of as to be a matter of public debate. It is desirable that one's sexuality be represented. And in the age of AIDS, even in the porn industry where so many "stars" have died, the well-endowed porn star who possesses a longevity both on and off the screen is elevated to cult status within the pages of Manshots and Unzipped, "fanzines" of gay porn stars charting their bodies of work, their lives, and their deaths. In other media, feature stories explore the lives and motivations of women who make a living dancing and working in the sex trades, and many twenty- and thirtysomethings know women and men who've gone to make a killing working as "hostesses" in the Japanese bars often run by the Yakuza. The Internet becomes a censored territory because of the ease with which pornography or somehow unacceptable images and ideas can be transmitted. The development of software to limit access to "unacceptable" sites demonstrates the American confusion over what is and is not pornography since such software may prohibit the viewing of sites based on the presence of nudity alone.
     It is appropriate that the pornographic sensibility lives so well in cyberspace: a place of dislocated bodies, private spaces and personal computers operated by the one-handed typist, multiple and projected identities. Here the Internet not only enhances this dislocation, it caters to its results.
     On the Web, the porn site is ubiquitous, a common complaint on some listservs is how to avoid being spammed with invitations to visit such cyberspace outposts. It is said that best way to make money on the Web is to build a porn site. In Seattle's closely-knit high-tech community, it's not uncommon to know or hear of someone who is making big bucks on a porn site. I've worked at computers in Internet cafes where the person next to me was developing one It's not difficult — there are enough erotic and porno stock photography collections so that their copyright infringement is a recurrent problem in the world of internet pornography and sites are frequently shut down for this reason. Several prominent adult sites in the Seattle area commonly advertise in local newspapers for their employees; I unwittingly showed up for an interview to contract with a company which turned out to not only be a major porn site (complete with 3D porn cartoons and "live" simulated sex shows, which with a lack of seamless delivery over a 28.8 modem must provide for a rather unsatisfying progression towards denouement at the jerky rate of often no more than one to seven frames per second), but a live sex and strip video supplier as well as an outsource agency building porn sites for others. It may be that with its increasing financial potency pornography will come to represent the American Dream of the next millennium, perhaps its distributors will market a "software" more lucrative than Windows '95 and the number of porno and soft-core household names will increase beyond Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, and Linda Lovelace (Linda Marchiano).
     Yet, with the exception of the pornographies of gay, lesbian and other societal groups commonly denied representation, these pornographies are by and large devoid of much political significance — in many ways they are just another diversion for the masses, a form capable of quelling social dissent because the one-handed typist is focused on him or herself. Perhaps, along with Xanax, Prozac, TV, and a slew of other tranquilizers, most pornographies are less a threat to society than another "opiate" to quell the masses. Pornography, stripped of its potentially radicalizing nature, these days signifies little more than consumption — it's just another form of "retail therapy, after all. Pornography becomes little more than style, co-opted by mainstream society and the vehicles of consumption in much the same way that S/M images were popularized in the last ten years. At Urban Outfitters, a trendy clothing and home furnishing store, one can purchase a t-shirt brand-named "porn star" which bears its logo on its front, sometimes prefaced with the words, "I am a [porn star]." Wearing such a t-shirt is perhaps less subversive than it might seem.
     Indeed, pornography is such a prevalent aesthetic in culture that numerous artists have appropriated pornographic images and film and video clips, manipulating and distorting their aesthetics in a subversive manner generally reserved for signifiers of the dominant paradigm. San Francisco-based found-footage filmmaker Craig Baldwin exploited and subverted such footage in Skin Flick, a product of his living for a time in a projectionist booth above a porn theatre.
     J.G. Ballard intended Crash to be pornographic and wrote in the preface to the French edition of Crash, "…I would still like to think that Crash! is the first pornographic novel based on technology."[7] But unlike the pornography of capitalist consumer culture, this pornography was to be an assault as much on the underpinnings of capitalist techo-culture as it was an assault on the human body. Ballard elaborated on his goals: "In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way." In Crash, the subversive mixings of the geometries of the car with desire, blood and gism would harken back to a different pornographic tradition.
 
The cultural origins of pornography
     French philosopher Rene Descartes' ontology of mind/body dualism outlined in his 1633 work De homine set the stage for the appearance of pornography, a vehicle specifically intended to arouse the bodies of its audience through stimulating the mind. With the intellectualization of sex originating in the 1600s came the invention of sex aids. Italy took the lead in this industry and Italian dildos and condoms became available in London during the 1600s.[8] By the 1680s, Les Academie des Dames and L'Ecole des filles, recognized as two classics of the form, were available to largely privileged upper-class gentlemen.
     From its origination, pornography was inextricably linked to the development of the novel (DeSade's Justine, Fanny Hill) and technologies of dissemination. But early pornography was also inherently political, a provocative strategy of political sedition and cultural subversion. The French Revolution is a exemplary of this usage, DeSade an eager participant in the overthrow. Lynn Hunt writes in her essay, Pornography and the French Revolution: "Politically motivated pornography helped to bring about the revolution by undermining the legitimacy of the ancien regime as a social and political system."[9] It is difficult to say if in condemning the confrontational art and performance of cultural provocateurs Andres Serrano and Karen Finley the fact that such art might give impetus to a radical altering of socio-cultural realities was a point heeded or lost upon detractors such as Senator Jessie Helms in their raging against the National Endowment of the Arts for bestowing grants upon such artists. Despite Supreme Court protections on socially critical and provocative works, the validity of such challenges to the status quo seems to have been lost in these days of blanket condemnation of confrontational art. Examples include photographer Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, the much-maligned representation of a cross standing in a jar of urine; and the chilling monologues of the sometimes nude, glitter-bespeckled and raw egg-slimed performance artist Karen Finley on child abuse and violence against women.
     Despite pornography's pivotal role in agitating for social change, it was not until 1857 that it was defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, then only described as the "writing of harlots." Pornography was not recognized as a form separate from the novel until advances in print technology threatened to increase its availability. The genre of pornography was created to shunt off from literature that which, from the view of the upper classes, might be a danger to the masses. Before advances in printing technology, pornography was enjoyed by the upper classes alone. As advances in print technology made possible the dissemination of these pleasure books to a wider audience, shunting them off to the sidelines was the first step began their regulation and hence, the suppression of dissent and control of pleasure.
     Capitalist consumer culture has denuded pornography of much of its subversive meanings, rendering it little more than a means of displacing desires which have no satisfactory aim. In examining its 20th century function Susan Sontag elaborated in The Pornographic Imagination,

Most pornography… points to …. the traumatic failure of modern capitalist society to provide authentic outlets for the perrenial human flair for high-temperature visionary obsessions, to satisfy the appetite for exulted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness. The need of human beings to transcend "the personal" is no less profound than the need to be a person, an individual. But this society serves that need poorly.[10]

If this is true, then perhaps with the advent of 20th century pornography culture, this failure looms even larger.
     Science fiction, however, has represented a great source of "high-temperature visionary obsessions" in the modern and postmodern eras. Likening science fiction to pornography in aspiration, Sontag asserted that it engenders disorientation and "psychic dislocation."[11] Perhaps it is not surprising that writers such as J.G. Ballard have combined the two forms towards the creation of new utopias, dystopias, and emblems of cataclysm culture. In Crash, however, it is this transcendence that is the goal of the coarsely sexual and intimidating Vaughan who instructs protagonist James Ballard:

…the car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event — a liberation of sexual energy that mediates the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form. To fully understand that, and to live that… that is my project.[12]

It is also this desire to transcend the isolation of the personal in modernity which leads to our adulation of the "star" who becomes larger than life. In Crash the star is fixed in time, saved from the ignominy of age, and immortalized as transcendent symbol by his or her violent fusion with the automobile. As Salon writer Andrew Ross ruminated in a discussion with Camille Paglia: "Perhaps [Princess] Diana did us all a favor by dying when she did, at 36, with her beautiful image frozen in our minds, before she got older and went even further downhill."[13]
     According to Steven Marcus, pornography strives "…toward the elimination of external or social reality." Crash conforms readily to this project, wherein the frames of the film-strip chart the duration of "the repetition of sexual encounters [and bodies] reduced to sexual parts and to the endless possibilities of their variation and combination."[14]
     This subsuming of the pornographic into the genre of science fiction is common, representing a reclaiming of pornography as a device of cultural criticism and subversion from a capitalist culture hungry to appropriate renegade expressions. As well as being seen in Ballard's work, there is a subculture of so-called slash fiction, that subversive subgenre explored and circulated by Trekie fans and writers wherein Captain Kirk and Spock are eroticized and depicted in the various poses of a decidedly homosexual ardor.[15]
 
The pornography of documentation
     Pornography is characterized by a great explicitness, by detail and gross description, by the visual and textual cataloging of minutiae. It is this detail, sewn into the pristine and profane language of J.G. Ballard, which compels in Crash:

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]
 
Abandoning fiction for the real
     Trends in broadcast television in the last decade indicate a fascination not so much with fictive events and their encapsulization into a narrative structure, but with the real. Following fast upon the heels of those couples who found pleasure in recording and distributing their own couplings, television audiences have avidly participated in documenting their lives for the consumption of others. Shows depicting the private indignities of family members are shown for the amusement of others; parties in often petty but no less bitter disputes agree to air their grievances on CourtTV; the MTV show The Real World, is now "casting" for its sixth iteration; Unsolved Mysteries, with the resonant and other-worldly voice of Robert Stack, became a hit TV show after its origination in 1986; and numerous other shows such as Rescue 911 and Cops have been released to audiences hungry for emotional experiences greater than their lonely lives can provide, followers of a tabloid culture whose "spreads" cater to a rapacity not far outdistanced by the porn-"addicted." It's a virtual reality life where fictions are more real than reality, where vicariousness passes for experience, where watching the foreplay of others is enough to make a person cum. Bunim-Murray Productions advertises on The Real World website for subjects for a proposed Boulder, Colorado documentary series: "If something dramatic is happening in your family life or in the lives of people you know, e-mail us!"[28] With the flip-flop of fiction and reality, those 15 minutes of fame can be had for the price of entertaining a lost America whose citizens can only locate themselves in the world in relation to the traumas and tragedies of others. According to J.G. Ballard:

[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.
 
Modernity and sensory deprivation
     In their sensory-deprived and regulated modern world, the protagonists of Crash exhibit a kind of compassion, an empathy for one another which, although oddly expressed, is remarkable. Perhaps it is also because in this chaotic world of car crash victims they no longer fear their own mortality. Rendered helpless in the face of the binnacles of the car, the crushing weight of the radiator, each has become a passive participant in something greater than themselves — embracing the "benevolent psychopathology" that is Vaughan's project. Sensitized to the possibility of the automobile accident, roadway skirmishes begin to occur with increasing frequency; in fear and anticipation, their traumas not yet vanquished, these characters too are sensitized to the sensual, to erotic possibilities through which they can feel the edges of the containers, the edges of the body, and the couplings become increasingly frenzied and desperate. None of the injured are coddled, none are seen as repulsive reminders of the vulnerability of the flesh (The dead are a danger to those left behind. — Bataille).[36] Instead, wounds are inspected with a tender curiosity, an empathic intimacy, wounds become more intimate passageways to being, a way of knowing the self and the other.
 
Intimacy and the damaged body
     One of the moments of greatest impact in the film Crash occurs when for a brief moment the character James Ballard, reviewing materials held in one of his hands while he navigates the highway at night, takes his eyes off the road to pick up off the floorboards of the passenger side of the car some papers he has just dropped. In this brief instant the vehicle hits a deep puddle at 60mph and James loses control after a tire, forced up against the central reservation, explodes. The car veers left, over the reservation and onto an exit ramp where James is faced with oncoming traffic. The first two cars he manages to avoid; the third he meets in a head-on collision. From the script:

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.
 
S/M and the mastery of technology
     In The Invention of Pornography, Lynn Hunt posits a correlation between debauchery and tyranny through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If Crash, dismissed as "beyond the bounds of depravity"[44] by The Evening Standard, exemplifies debauchery, then perhaps it signifies a greater determining tyranny of this century: the tyranny of technology.
     Crash locates sex as an S/M relationship between modern technology and the body. Overwhelmed by girth and weight, speed and momentum, the protagonists of Crash are rendered passive by the dominance of the car, its sleek styling and the eroticism of its leather upholstery. The car is the top, minor road skirmishes are its lessons, and the moment of impact the climax, that essential loss of control which Vaughan calls a "liberation of sexual energy"[45] Just as in consensual S/M, the relationship with the car is intense, exclusive, and must be protected at all costs. The driver is snugly fitted by the seat-belt into the pocket between steering wheel and seat-back, as though a bound within a corset. The physical space of the car becomes the limits of one's self — indeed, it defines the self. And when this union is breached on a highway by one driver cutting off another, "road rage" may be the result. You think you drive the car, you think you own the car, but with its mass, its proclivities for velocity and impact, the car is driving you. The good and omniscient Top it is, the car only takes you where you want to go. As in desire, with ignition comes a heightening of the senses, with speed there is the quickening of the heart. As in that first coupling, the rush of adrenalin signifies danger. The coupling between people and cars is a situation of danger, the physical intimacy formed by the nexus of driver, steering wheel and gearshift a potential situation of violence. In romance literature, he "takes" her, "possesses" her, relieves her desire for transformative experience, loss of control, and for the abnegation of the self (she gives herself to him). Like cyberspace and S/M sex, the car crash is yet another opportunity for bodily transgression and disembodiment in a sensorily deprived culture whose inhabitants cannot experience embodiment without transgressing its margins. Cronenberg's envisioning Renata's garb as conforming to the specifications of the sadomasochistic project is not simply a fashion statement, it is a reference to the diametrically opposed roles of slave and master within the corporate techno-culture of the 1990s. Tattoos may be said to stand in for the knowledge of society, the wounds of culture:

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]