Crash (1996)
Directed by David Cronenberg
A car crash victim inexplicably finds himself aroused by car accidents and becomes involved with an underground subculture of like-minded souls.
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17 films that influenced Crash
What critics say influenced Crash
As the movie opens, Catherine strokes the sleek curves of airplane fuselages, echoing the camera's loving pans à la Kenneth Anger's Kustom Kar Kommandos, as her flight instructor services her from off screen.
Imagine the angels from Wings of Desire investigating the highway pile-up from Godard's Weekend -- that's the paranormal mood at this crash scene.
Long before David Cronenberg's Crash there was the longest automotive pile-up in history in Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend , as the audience witnessed a petite bourgeois couple's reactions to an entropic universe descending into anarchism.
And the result is so far from being involving or compelling, so intentionally disconnected from any kind of recognizable emotion, that by comparison David Lynch's removed "Lost Highway" plays like "Lassie Come Home."
His unnerving Dead Ringers (1988) made disquieting use of a gleaming, fetishistic toolkit of gynecological instruments for operating on mutant women, and now Crash suggests that our obsession with ever more tortuous permutations of sexual stimulation is itself a mutation -- or, perhaps more chillingly, an evolution.
Director David Cronenberg, whose work includes "The Fly," "Dead Ringers" and "Naked Lunch," seems bent on interpreting art at its cruelest and narrowest.
Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Rabid, and The Fly) play like coming attractions of our inevitable demise, focusing on the excruciating period between the knowledge of death and its occurrence--which is why they're so much scarier than the sum of their (severed) parts.
Make no mistake, Cronenberg, a veteran filmmaker ("Rabid," "The Brood," "Videodrome," "Dead Ringers") who has always been intrigued by what's out of conventional bounds, has made exactly the film he, his devoted cast and expert cinematographer Peter Suschitzky intended.
Writer and director David Cronenberg (The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch) has made a disturbing film about the tendency of modern people to eroticize danger and to seek transcendence in detached sex animated by fetishes.
Films like Videodrome, The Fly, and Dead Ringers; are too disturbing to be excited about at the time.
Director David Cronenberg, whose work includes "The Fly," "Dead Ringers" and "Naked Lunch," seems bent on interpreting art at its cruelest and narrowest.
Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Rabid, and The Fly) play like coming attractions of our inevitable demise, focusing on the excruciating period between the knowledge of death and its occurrence--which is why they're so much scarier than the sum of their (severed) parts.
Writer and director David Cronenberg (The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch) has made a disturbing film about the tendency of modern people to eroticize danger and to seek transcendence in detached sex animated by fetishes.
Films like Videodrome, The Fly, and Dead Ringers; are too disturbing to be excited about at the time.
And there are times when Crash recalls Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, The Fly, or (that other unfilmable project) Naked Lunch, in its warnings about modern-day obsession, transience and alienation.
After making what may have been his closest approach to respectability with the sufficiently brilliant Dead Ringers, Cronenberg retreated into distinctive but comparably tepid adaptations of the famous work of others -- in 1991, Naked Lunch's loose interpretation of the life of William S. Burroughs and in 1993, M. Butterfly's squandering of a major studio's resources on a singular treatment of the famous gender bender that could best be described as, well, odd.
Director David Cronenberg, whose work includes "The Fly," "Dead Ringers" and "Naked Lunch," seems bent on interpreting art at its cruelest and narrowest.
ALT="[Crash]" align=right width=225 height=140 hspace=15 vspace=5> For more than 20 years, from the cerebral schlock horror of Shivers (1975) to the rarefied literary perversities of Naked Lunch (1991), David Cronenberg has explored with shocking imagery and uncompromising insight the blurred boundaries between living and inanimate, human and non-human.
And who can forget the gruesome, sadistic medical instruments used by the twin doctors (Jeremy Irons) in Dead Ringer, or the giant bugs in Naked Lunch?
Writer and director David Cronenberg (The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch) has made a disturbing film about the tendency of modern people to eroticize danger and to seek transcendence in detached sex animated by fetishes.
He followed that up with films featuring, among other things, mutant sex organs (Rabid, 1977), mutant superpowers (Scanners, 1981), and mutant cable TV ( Videodrome , 1983).
Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Rabid, and The Fly) play like coming attractions of our inevitable demise, focusing on the excruciating period between the knowledge of death and its occurrence--which is why they're so much scarier than the sum of their (severed) parts.
Make no mistake, Cronenberg, a veteran filmmaker ("Rabid," "The Brood," "Videodrome," "Dead Ringers") who has always been intrigued by what's out of conventional bounds, has made exactly the film he, his devoted cast and expert cinematographer Peter Suschitzky intended.
His first commercial feature was the quasi-hedonistic Shivers (also 1973), which in its apocalyptic treatment of venereal disease weirdly prefigured the AIDS epidemic.
ALT="[Crash]" align=right width=225 height=140 hspace=15 vspace=5> For more than 20 years, from the cerebral schlock horror of Shivers (1975) to the rarefied literary perversities of Naked Lunch (1991), David Cronenberg has explored with shocking imagery and uncompromising insight the blurred boundaries between living and inanimate, human and non-human.
He followed that up with films featuring, among other things, mutant sex organs (Rabid, 1977), mutant superpowers (Scanners, 1981), and mutant cable TV ( Videodrome , 1983).
He also created a character (James Woods) whose stomach developed a slot for VCR tapes in Videodrome.
Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Rabid, and The Fly) play like coming attractions of our inevitable demise, focusing on the excruciating period between the knowledge of death and its occurrence--which is why they're so much scarier than the sum of their (severed) parts.
Another connection Cronenberg explores in Crash is the one between sexual orifices and wounds caused by accidents (see also Videodrome).
Make no mistake, Cronenberg, a veteran filmmaker ("Rabid," "The Brood," "Videodrome," "Dead Ringers") who has always been intrigued by what's out of conventional bounds, has made exactly the film he, his devoted cast and expert cinematographer Peter Suschitzky intended.
Films like Videodrome, The Fly, and Dead Ringers; are too disturbing to be excited about at the time.
He followed that up with films featuring, among other things, mutant sex organs (Rabid, 1977), mutant superpowers (Scanners, 1981), and mutant cable TV ( Videodrome , 1983).
He's the guy who blew up heads for his early horror film, Scanners.
Make no mistake, Cronenberg, a veteran filmmaker ("Rabid," "The Brood," "Videodrome," "Dead Ringers") who has always been intrigued by what's out of conventional bounds, has made exactly the film he, his devoted cast and expert cinematographer Peter Suschitzky intended.
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You'd have to go back to the late Louis Malle's Damage -- like Crash, all too appropriately titled -- for a more embarrassing or wrong-headed film by a major filmmaker.
Rather than a film like Fearless, in which Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez played plane-crash survivors who could no longer connect with the living world, Crash takes the even darker, more difficult decision to represent the world created by the collision survivors—not necessarily to understand them but to imagine what their lives, particularly their experiences of their bodies, are like.
Crash is being advertised as a sexy thriller, in the Basic Instinct vein, which it's not.
Imagine the angels from Wings of Desire investigating the highway pile-up from Godard's Weekend -- that's the paranormal mood at this crash scene.
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Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky went on to photograph David Cronenberg movies, The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988), Naked Lunch (1991), and Crash (1996).
Ace cinematographer Peter Suschitzky (the D.P. for most of Cronenberg's recent work, as well as the Force behind The Empire Strikes Back) often lights the sex scenes so we see the ribs rub against the skin, the pelvis rotate, the fingers clench—the body as a mechanized, automotive device.
Based on a 1973 cult novel by science-fiction writer J.G. Ballard (whose equally cold but quite different "Empire of the Sun" attracted Steven Spielberg's attention), "Crash" is set in an undefined time frame, half present, half future.
Based on a book by J.G. Ballard (who also wrote Empire of the Sun), Crash tells the story of an adulterous filmmaker named - ha, ha - James Ballard (James Spader) who gets in a head-on car accident driving home from work one night.