Crash

David Cronenberg has his own film universe where he can with a cold and watchful camera eye register events and occurrences outside of the pattern of what is know as ''normal behaviour''. His films are basically dramatic with an inherent, sometimes repulsive, horror because of his intimate description of characters who are not socially normal. His ''heroes'' are morbid scientists, depraved writers and remarkable geniuses with strange talents. David Cronenberg is a discerning interpreter of the outsider. Crash is a natural step for Cronenberg's cinematic achievement, we find in its basic material all the bizarre ingredients which he looks for in a story. It is basically a naked description of humanity's desperate hunt for security and identification in a society where the individual is made invisible as a result of technical progress. This search manifests itself primarily in having sex - a situation where we get close to ourselves through others - in the car which is a symbol of freedom and security. In the film we meet Ballard, a man who like his better half has sexual contacts outside of marriage in order to try to discover better channels for their sexual and emotional relationship. A breakpoint is reached when on his way home from work one evening he has a head-on collision with another car, the driver of which is killed. Ballard and the female passenger in the other car are badly injured but discover that the near-death experience is sexually exciting. At the hospital they are contacted by Vaughn, a car crash Messiah who carefully investigates their injuries and initiates them into a society which reconstructs famous and fatal car crashes in minute detail. One of the highlights of the film is when we witness the staging of James Dean's car crash. It is in this scene that Cronenberg best conveys the controlled madness and restrained desperation which guides these individuals towards their final destination. At the film festival in Cannes, the film was accused of being pornographic, which says more about the users of the word than the film. In Crash, sexuality is used to move the story forward; sex is the physical power which the main characters use as their weapon in an alienated existence, and that it happens in a car is due to its construction of pure excitement. RS