Crash: The Wreck of the Century

The brochure for the 1961 Lincoln Continental line makes the six-seater luxury sedans look almost dainty. They come in pretty pastels: a cream called Sultana White, a fizzy yellow known as Sunburst, an ice-cream-parlor blue-green dubbed Turquoise Mist. A gloved female finger toggles the power-window switch—almost every picture has an immaculately accessorized woman in it, usually as part of a couple, sometimes posing with an equally well-groomed dog. It is hard to believe that this make and model, modified and in Presidential Black, will soon accrue a somber notoriety for the bit part it will play in the Kennedy assassination. Or that, a decade later and because of that grim pedigree, British writer J. G. Ballard will assign a ’61 Continental to be the automotive alter ego of Vaughan, the Conradian madman and car-wreck fetishist at the heart, or the place where the heart should be, of his 1973 neurasthenic nightmare of a novel, Crash.

Described as a “crazed, morbid roundelay of dismemberment and sexual perversion” in its New York Times review—and, to be clear, the reviewer regarded that as a bad thing—the novel’s reception prefigured that of David Cronenberg’s film adaptation twenty-three years later. Ballard apparently had his manuscript returned to him with a note from a publisher’s reader still attached, advising against the book’s publication and asserting—much to the author’s wry delight—that he was “beyond psychiatric help.” Later, the Daily Mail would launch a crusade to get Cronenberg’s film banned in the United Kingdom, succeeding only in one London borough—Westminster—whose denizens had to make the arduous trek to neighboring Camden to see it in a cinema. And this mixed-message moral panic came after the competition judges of the Cannes Film Festival had already awarded the film a Special Jury Prize—from which disapproving jury president Francis Ford Coppola pointedly distanced himself.

The novel was written and set in the gray, suburban, recently decimalized Britain of the early seventies, a time of social unrest, boil-in-the-bag dinners, and soccer hooliganism. All of which backdrop the novel only implicitly—the narrator, a producer of television commercials who is pointedly named after the author himself, is far too obliviously, onanistically bourgeois for any of that stuff. And anyway, Ballard’s curdled vision was formed almost as much by contemporary Americana as by the view from the windows of his Shepperton home. By then, the U.S.’s own self-image had also evolved darkly from the prelapsarian wholesomeness of the early sixties; the 1973 Lincoln Continental catalog is a whole different mood from the powdered-sherbet fantasy of 1961. The cars are bigger, aggressively angular, featured in masculine navy or boys’-club claret. The forced-perspective photography thrusts their distended hoods priapically off the page. The women are far-off, undifferentiated—in one sumptuous spread set on a harbor slip, they adorn a distant sailboat, wearing bikinis.

This was the car culture Ballard refracted into the concrete netherworld of his denatured, alienated Britain. It may even be that this transatlantic cross-pollination is a crucial factor in the novel’s vivid sense of dislocation. (It certainly meant that, when it came to Cronenberg’s North American reset—the film was shot in Toronto with a Canadian and American cast—the mood and themes could transfer losslessly: in some ways, Crash was coming home.) Like the bullish prowling of Vaughan’s incongruous, enormous hunk of imported Detroit steel through the traffic-clotted ring roads and knotted motorways of Greater London, Crash the novel uproots the American car obsession and plunks it down where it could never have grown organically, and where it can survive only by corrupting itself. In a landscape devoid of the unique mythos that fostered that obsession—one founded on individualism, freedom, unending highways that stretch to vanishing points on the horizon—the cars and characters in Ballard’s Crash have nowhere to go but around and around and, finally, into one another.

The cadence of Ballard’s language sometimes recalls that of a Beat-generation road poet. But whereas Jack Kerouac might dissolve into a delirium of prairies and long New Jersey skies, the equivalent litany in Ballard becomes, to paraphrase the title of an earlier book of his, an exhibition of atrocity, of “lesbian supermarket manageresses burning to death in the collapsed frames of their midget cars,” of “autistic children crushed in rear-end collisions, their eyes less wounded in death,” of “buses filled with mental defectives drowning together stoically in roadside industrial canals.” The mercilessness of descriptions like these is what makes Crash so scrupulously obscene. Well, that and all the fucking.

The fucking, explicit but almost comically joyless, makes it into Cronenberg’s film; those gratuitously cruel background details do not. When Vaughan, played with greasy, messianic zeal by Elias Koteas, picks up a prostitute in an underpass and has sex with her in the back seat of the moving Lincoln, we are spared the idea that she is, perhaps, as Ballard writes about an equivalent encounter, “a part-time cinema usherette forever worrying about her small son’s defective hearing aid.” In Cronenberg’s Crash, no one has a life story, a past, or a single recognizable emotional response. No one has much of anything, really, except for an insatiable, mechanical libido—a vestigial remnant of a vaguely remembered humanity—and a car.

The genius of the adaptation is that it feels faithful, when really it represents a complete overhaul that goes far beyond even the usual surgery required to translate a book of 224 cramped, crazed pages into a 100-minute feature film. This is especially notable given that the director’s previous adaptation of an “unfilmable” cult novel, Naked Lunch (1991), went to the other extreme, cramming metatext into an already feverishly overstuffed text. By contrast, Crash—a radically empty film reflecting radically empty times—is a work of ruthless excision and very few, very rare additions. In one such, Koteas’s Vaughan explains that his project is “the reshaping of the human body through technology,” a pretty perfect summation of a recurring theme in the first half of Cronenberg’s career, best exemplified by his 1983 masterpiece, Videodrome. So when Vaughan later retracts that statement, calling it “a crude sci-fi concept that floats on the surface and doesn’t threaten anybody,” it’s hard not to see Cronenberg slyly denigrating his own back catalog, or at least marking in boldface the end of his ongoing engagement with it. Sure enough, with the exception of a watered-down workout in 1999’s eXistenZ, Crash does represent a move away from the gleefully visceral grotesqueries of his early career, toward the more refined psychological grotesqueries of his twenty-first-century output.

Mostly, though, Cronenberg subtracts. The borderline-unbearable, repetitive interiority of the book’s deranged first-person narration is jettisoned in favor of a coolly objective remove, flattered by the blacks and blues and steely glints of Peter Suschitzky’s cinematography. Freed from the novel’s prison of subjectivity, Cronenberg’s film can observe its characters’ deviances with the dispassion of a scientist only mildly perturbed by the peculiar behaviors of some freaky new bacteria in a petri dish.

This subtraction may have carried an unforeseeable blessing: had the subplot remained, the 1997 car-crash death of Princess Diana might have been a correlation too uncomfortable even for the never knowingly comfortable Cronenberg. But the choice serves a broader agenda too. Without Vaughan’s celebrity obsession, there is no hope in the film for the kind of immortality he seeks in the book. This is vital for Cronenberg’s revisioning: his nineties are a time of endless endings that cannot be transcended, where there can be no life, however notional, after death. Another of the director’s whole-cloth inventions makes the point emphatically: When Vaughan and James are being tattooed, Vaughan complains that the tattooist is doing too neat a job. “This is a prophetic tattoo,” he says. “Prophecy is dirty and ragged.” But Cronenberg’s film, all sleek metallic surfaces and Teflon interactions, is anything but dirty and ragged. Mired in the peculiar midnineties moment when low-level millennial paranoia created a kind of hysterical blind spot, a collective failure of forward-casting imagination, it contains no prophecy. What good is prophecy if there’s only about five minutes of future left?

Ballard himself appears in the 1971 short film Crash!, made by Harley Cokeliss for the BBC based on fragments of the author’s earlier writing. In it, Ballard says his interest in car design came from what it conveys about how we perceive reality—“for example, that the future is something with a fin on it.” What Cronenberg did with Ballard’s novel was to strip out the upholstery, the walnut finish, the chrome detailing. He junked the tail fins and the snarling fenders, tore out the seats and the dashboards, till only the barest chassis remained, then built the story back up in the anodyne image of his own time. By the time of its nineties remodeling, the Lincoln Continental had long since lost its fins, and with them any futurist fantasy. Even in its marketing—more a manufacturer’s spec sheet than the tantalizing lifestyle spreads of yesteryear—the nineties Continental looks much like any other car, as if apologetic anonymity and sameness were the endgame all along.

“To die in a car crash is a unique twentieth-century finale,” Ballard once said. He was writing Crash when there was still a quarter of the century left to go, whereas with his version Cronenberg was reporting from its exhausted end. But what about now? We are now—only just—further in time from Cronenberg’s Crash than it was from Ballard’s. And for all that had changed between 1973 and 1996, the cultural gulf between the end of the last century and now feels even more chasmic. As if to prove that point, in July 2020, the Ford Motor Company announced that production of the Lincoln Continental, struggling for relevance in this new world, would cease at the end of the year.

So here we are in the future that Crash refused to envisage, in which technophilia of a different, digital flavor has come to make the film’s preoccupation with bodies melding with machines seem analog and almost quaint. Or at least it would, if Crash did not also repel any attempt to sentimentalize or nostalgize it. Ballard again: “Human beings have a terrible temptation to imagine a happier past.” But Cronenberg’s Crash will not allow us to engage in any such delusional project. Even now that its ticking engine has cooled, its upturned wheels have ceased spinning, and its mangled frame is partly grown over by the grass of the intervening decades, it remains exactly as fascinating, salutary, and instructive as a spectacular wreck on the side of the highway, and just about as lovable. But then, what Crash’s most passionate advocates feel for the movie has never been love—soft, warm, fleeting—but fetish, a cold, deathless, chromium fetish that will last forever. Welcome to the cult.

Crash: The Wreck of the Century

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