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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
Crash is being advertised as a sexy thriller, in the Basic Instinct vein, which it's not.