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How to describe the film Crash, made by Cronenberg, in 1997. It tracks a long gory slide from accident into perversion and obsession. The film details the gradual submersion of a couple in a series of deep, increasingly violent scenes of sex, automobiles and various forms of combustion, mechanical and libidinal. In the words of one of the many sex and violence-obsessed characters Vaughn (an alter or a stand in both for the movie maker, Cronenberg and for the lead character James Ballard but also for the author of the novel from which the film is drawn, J.D. Ballard), “this is about sexuality and its impact on the creation of new forms of embodied life, of cyborgs”.
Like many Cronenberg films, Crash seems to demand a psychoanalytic reading. In response, I am going to approach this difficult unsettling film, through four different readings-not all psychoanalytic.
The first reading is to see the film as an account of the traumatic (small t) instantiation of all sexuality, a Laplanchian reading. Desire, aim, object choice, and subjectivity are constructed or implanted and translated in a series of thunderclap encounters of flesh on metal. The sexual fluids in these scenes are variously blood, semen, and gasoline. Following Laplanche, sexuality is constructed in a moment of excess and intersubjective encounter, arising from inside and/also impacting from outside.
Secondly, I read the film as a meditation on the interplay of art and pornography, on the voyeurism and traumatization in any audience's reception of visual material. These two readings could be said to be immanent in many of Cronenberg's film. This film is about sexual obsession, to be sure, but it is also about the links between creativity and sexual excitement. Over and over again, in this film, a raw experience, usually of violence, and usually sexualized violence, is repeated in a story one character tells another. Raw experience is transcribed, represented, translated and reproduced for voyeuristic pleasure.