CRASH
Machine Dreams
While famous Hollywood hacks continue to replicate instantly forgettable blockbusters and genre ripoffs, less visible creators quietly follow their own path, forging distinctive and sometimes impressive oeuvres. Directors like Robert Altman, Peter Greenaway, and Abel Ferrera often work the fringes of the system, absent occasional ventures into the mainstream. These idiosyncratic talents may deliberately opt for marginal status in aid of pursuing their vision unimpeded by the relentless pressure of mogul or marketplace. More often than not, however, the peculiar nature of their preoccupations, conflated with a reputation for personal "difficulty" -- deserved or unmerited -- has denied them wider support. Such, poignantly, became Orson Welles' lifelong circumstances after the early triumph of Citizen Kane.
Canadian director/writer David
Cronenberg is exemplary amongst contemporary cutting edge auteurs for the
bold assurance of his talent as well as his ability to survive, even thrive
over a generation of authentically radical projects. Robin Wood has observed
that precisely because trash horror and sci-fi films are conceived/received
as so valueless, they can often be far more undermining than "works of
social criticism which must always concern themselves with the possibility
of reforming aspects of a social system whose basic rightness must not
be challenged" (l) (e.g. the liberally inclined oeuvres of Capra and Kramer).
Cronenberg's work has always
been profoundly informed by the best weird cinema's anarchic, scathingly
critical thrust. From early gross-out horror classics like Rabid (l976)
and Scanners (l980) to movies with more substantive aesthetic claims like
Naked Lunch (l99l) and M. Butterfly (l992-3), he's been conducting a subversive
inquiry into the impact of late Twentieth century techno-culture upon psyche
and soma, identity and the social contract.
Cronenberg's typical protagonist is a melancholy isolate inhabiting a dysfunctional urban milieu. He may be technology's helpless victim -- like the crazed telepaths of Scanners, or the post-comatose clairevoyant of Dead Zone (l983).(2) In the fashion of earlier mad scientists, he may originally have been a brilliant manipulator of technology, only to become its victim -- e.g., The Fly's (l986) eccentric physicist.
The monstrous forces erupting from within or outside a Cronenberg character never simply portend destruction. On the point of death, these grim energies challenge the bourgeois status quo, spur a perverse instinctual liberation (the febrile randiness of the virally infested apartment dwellers in Shivers [l975]); or engender a sinister sea-change beyond the merely human into some obscenely potent chimera of human and Other (the repellant "new flesh" created by aberrant television signals in Videodrome (l982); The Fly's horrific terminal recombinant of man, insect, and transport pod).
Science fiction cinema has consistently, if unconsciously manifested an intriguing split in its attitude towards the machine, treating it unabashedly as a dehumanizing oppressor while lovingly lingering over its gleaming gizmos. Crash, scripted nearly faithfully by Cronenberg from English sci-fi writer J.G. Ballard's l973 cult novel, knowingly interrogates this ambivalence in a harrowing exploration of the human/machine symbiosis -- specifically the human\automotive interface (one notes that the director himself has been an amateur racer and car enthusiast.)
The film/book's jaded anti-hero is yuppie television commercial producer James Ballard (the real-life Ballard claims the novel is an autobiography of his imaginary life, supplying no further details). The fictive Ballard lives with his stunning wife, Catherine, in a sterile luxury apartment perched at a dizzy height above a serpentine grid of arterials feeding the huge airport complex of an anonymous first world city.
Crash virtually eschews biographical
detail. The Ballards, like the film's other characters, float in an eternal
anomic present. Lacking nothing materially, awash in entitlement, they
seem totally oblivious to their good fortune. Shorn of children, family,
or friends, they express little interest in work, play, art. Their central
preoccupation is copulation, anywhere, at any time, with each other or
with anyone else -- described afterwards in exhaustive clinical detail
to one's partner. Away from sex, their contact is as tenuous as ghosts
trying to touch. Catherine's eyes forever slip langorously away from her
husband's searching gaze. Discourse is equally tentative, elliptical.
Their intercourse -- and coitus
elsewhere in the film -- frequently occurs a tergo (often implicitly anal),
staged to elicit hard-core pornography's effect of depersonalized manipulation.
At the supposed moment of greatest intimacy, the impression instead is
of narcissistic privatism, of being ceaselessly turned on a wheel of unslaked
desire. ("Did you come?", Catherine asks James, fresh from his frenetic
coupling with an assistant at the film's opening. "I was interrupted" --
is his signatory diffident reply).
One errs if a facile clinical assumption is made that the Ballards are trying to pump life into a moribund marriage through adultery. It's more likely that an exuberant promiscuity, little touched by tender regard, has always hallmarked their relationship -- indeed, may have drawn them together. Cronenberg infers that their compulsive carnality is a fallout of the pervasive alienation wrought by a relentlessly sensation-seeking consumerist culture. In this anhedonic milieu, one just as easily may employ orgasm as the spectacle of televisual/cinematic violence for anodyne against a profound inner deadening. Either cure serves only to entrench the core malaise.
James' complacent modus vivendi is demolished by a head-on collision on his way home from work. The other car's driver is instantly slaughtered. Across exploded windshields, the eyes of the deceased's wife, Dr. Helen Remington and James lock in a concussed libidinous stare. After recovering from their injuries, the two are drawn to the police pound where their wrecked vehicles have been stored. A chill passion is consummated in his car, then other automotive habitats; in dark garages, by noisy roadways; the lovers' pumping limbs shoved painfully against gearshift and steering column.
Remington reintroduces James to Vaughn, a forbidding yet strangely attractive character who had avidly inventoried his wounds and braces in the hospital. James had supposed him then to be a doctor, but he's actually a former computer researcher and media scientific popularizer. After a near-fatal motorcycle accident (genital injury is intimated), he has reinvented himself as a crash scholar/connoisieur, guru to an outlaw culture of fellow survivor addicts. James joins the weird band; quickly becomes Vaughn's apprentice.
Vaughn haunts accident sites, takes grisly photos which he prizes like holy relics; stages alarming performances of fatal celebrity collisions; pursues automotive sex with the same maniac intensity as his quest after some desperate truth amidst the broken bits and bodies. With James' prompting, Catherine falls under his sway. Vaughn takes her violently in his car (it's the model in which Kennedy was assassinated) while it glides through the fecund lather of a carwash as James looks on through the front driving mirror -- the sequence a elegant paradigm of voyeuristic obsession. Later, Vaughn seduces Ballard -- arguably his design from the first -- in another gritty jam of body against mechanism.
Vaughn's lunatic "research" spins increasingly out of control; he becomes a suspect in several hit-and-run deaths. Coupling with Ballard provides the terminal thrust to his escalating aggression. Thanatos overbalances Eros: in an intricate superhighway sarabande, Vaughn attempts to run Katherine's vehicle off the road, is himself rear-ended by Ballard (!) and dies in flames.
Flash forward to an eery Hitchcockian
crossing: James has assumed Vaughn's mantle, hungrily cruising after Catherine.
Her car hurtles over an embankment;
she tumbles upon the grass and James anxiously cradles her in his arms.
"I think I'm all right," she murmurs dazedly, a single tear coursing down
her cheek. Ballard moves upon her splayed body, whispering: "Maybe the
next one, darling...maybe the next one..." In a morbid epiphany characteristic
of Cronenberg's endings, the camera pulls back and ascends, tracking from
the Ballard's lovemaking to the nearby highway, with its hectic pour of
traffic.
Crash's scandalous transgressiveness -- of which its incessant anal penetrations constitute a prime signifier -- has predictably drawn fire even from Cronenberg fans (at the Cannes festival, it had the signal distinction of being simultaneously reviled and granted a special commendation "For Originality, For Daring, and For Audacity"). Upon repeated viewing, one's initial resistance -- indeed, repugnance -- gives way to respect for the unsalacious seriousness of the director's enterprise.
One particularly admires how Cronenberg has transformed the glacial precision of J.G. Ballard's style into an austere visual beauty. For instance, through James' eyes, the novel dwells upon the elegant designs constructed by the chance juxtaposition of body part against car part, or against some other chunk of the inanimate environment. Crash translates this hybrid aesthetic, essential to Ballard's subversive purposes, into hieratic, immensely resonant compositions. Picked out with a seeming artless randomness by Cronenberg's laconic camera, many of these frames could be lifted from context and hung on a museum wall.(3)
Crash pointedly refuses the glib excitement of action cinema, and the porn flick's crude enticements. Its wrecks are utterly devoid of conventional Hollywood slo-mo pyrotechnics, occurring in a shattered instant, or off screen. The director focuses instead upon the raw aftermath of collision, pervaded by the curious aura of stunned sensuality cited above. The coital sequences are dankly anti-erotic, emphasizing the participant's driven, stymied desire (one recalls the robotic sexual rituals in De Sade's cruel fictions).
Vaughn leads his post-traumatic collective in an odyssey to heal catastrophic injury by actively seeking to harness the machine's dark creative potential, rather than enduring its assaults as a passive victim. Accident is transmuted into eroticized performance art; the wounding of celebrities restaged in aid of mastery, thereby also endowing one's own wounds with a narcissistic shimmer. In an ultimate identification with the aggressor, Vaughn, then James go forth as automotive marauders, steering wheels tatooed into their bodies, harbingers of the death both have narrowly escaped. Inevitably they are drawn back into its embrace.
The demonic Vaughn dies, seduced by machine dreams of depraved, absolute power pitched at redeeming his damaged state.(4) In a valid supplement to the novel, Cronenberg assigns a more ambivalent fate to James and Catherine, holding out a faint intimation of redemption from their sordid self-absorption. Catherine's poignant tear could speak to her awakening from emotional anesthesia. Recognizing the harm his armored reveries have wrought upon her vulnerable flesh, James displays a moving tenderness, arguably for the first time in their relationship. His ambiguous last words -- "Perhaps the next one, darling..." could allude to the elusive orgasm attendant upon genuine intimacy.
But James might just as well be anticipating another turn on the ceaseless whirligig of his dispirited lust, or even the definitive crash which would liberate them both from their torment into the grave, into the big sleep which they have both been yearning for all along. Cronenberg leaves us thus exquisitely suspended between hope and despair, life and death.
James Spader, Deborah Kara Unger, Holly Hunter, and Rosanna Arquette project a requisite note of schizoid detachment as, respectively, James, Catherine, Helen Remington, and Gabrielle (a multi-crippled survivor whose ebon casing and gleaming braces are a fetishist's delight, whose scars excite James' most transgressive lasciviousness). Elias Koteas ferociously captures Vaughn's feral charisma. Crash's dominant affective tone of distanced melancholy is accentuated by a palette of "bruise" colors (Cronenberg's apercu) -- muted purples, blues, browns and yellows -- and the mournful rustle of Howard Shore's plangent score (over the years, Shore has been orchestrating Cronenberg's morbid apprehensions as aptly as did Bernard Herrman for Alfred Hitchcock).
Originally, my sole reservation about this daunting film was Cronenberg's decision to dispense with the novel's first person narration, thereby eliminating James' complex inner voice and many of his unnerving, mordant intuitions, e.g.:
"...the deviant technology of the car crash provided the sanction for any perverse act. For the first time, a benevolent psychopathology beckoned towards us, enshrined in the tens of thousands of vehicles moving down the highways..." (5)
However, rather than cavil at the omission, I now recommend that the film and novel should be read and seen closely together, received as complementarities that construct an even more satisfying whole. It's a felicitous articulation that holds for surprisingly few other matchups between the printed page and the moving image.
FOOTNOTES
l. Wood, Robin. "The Return of the Repressed", Film Comment, August, l978, p. 32.
2. The Scanners were conceived by mothers who were prescribed a mutagenic sedative by a cabal of ruthless physicians; a car crash renders John Smith of The Dead Zone comatose for several years. Upon awakening, he is both crippled, and able to read the future.
3. Cronenberg/Ballard's fusion of the human and the inanimate/mechanical has numerous precedents in early Twentieth century painting and theater which address a wide spectrum of ideological positions. The unabashed machine idolatry of many Futurists and Vorticists was informed by a prefascist sensibility. Russian Constructivism often valorized the human/machine interface in the name of the proletarian revolution. The leftist-inflected theatrical projects of Meyerhold in Russia, of Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser in Germany inter alia prominently featured "biomechanical" tropes in script, acting and set design. (For an extensive discussion, see The History of Theater, by Oscar G. Brockett, Boston: Allyn and Bacon, l974.)
The unsettling man/machine chimeras of Surrealists and Dadaists like Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp comprise some of the most complex, disturbing early Twentieth century problematizations -- by turns witty, sinister, even tragic - of the machine's impact upon the susceptible body. Cronenberg is an intellectual who well knows his art history. I submit that the influence -- knowingly or otherwise -- of the Surrealist/Dadist projects may be discerned in Crash and elsewhere in his work (notably in Videodrome, The Fly, and Dead Ringers [l988]).
4. Vaughn is described by J.G. Ballard as a homoerotic icon encased in leather, possessing "a hard mutilated beauty."[J.G. Ballard, Crash. New York: Noonday Press/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, l973/l994, p. l7l]). The novel and film intimate intriguing analogies between Vaughn's implicit "hardbody" fantasies and fascism's collective machine dreams -- blitzkrieg and panzers, blood and iron -- as well as the dire toll these exacted upon their fictive and actual dreamers.
The seminal reference in this regard is Male Fantasies, Klaus Theweleit's study of the Freikorps, a loosely knit fellowship of disaffiliated young men, many former soldiers, who gathered together after World War I to redeem the Fatherland's savaged honor in the context of what they perceived as the debasements of the Weimar Republic and the rising tide of Bolshevism (Male Fantasies: Volume l: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Trans. Erica Carter, Chris Turner, Steven Conway. Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, l987; Male Fantasies: Volume 2: Male Fantasies: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror. Trans. Steven Conway, Erica Carter, Chris Turner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, l989). Theweleit uses Freikorps mores and costumes as a springboard for a masterful analysis of masculine anxiety regarding castration and impotence, attendant terror of the feminine, and compensatory homosocial/homoerotic visions of mailed purity. This work has obvious, ominous currency regarding the contemporary American militia movement, as well as other renascent fascist movements abroad.
Recent studies extending Thewelheit's interrogations of the "armored body" include Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, by Scott Bukatman (Durham: Duke University Press, l993) and "The Horror Film in Neoconservative Culture", by Chris Sharrett (in The Dread Of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, Austin: University of Texas Press, l996).
5. Crash, Ibid., p. l38.