Crash (E)

Based on J.G. Ballard’s controversial novel, “Crash” is a highly erotic film about an advertising executive (James Spader) who finds himself aroused by the imagery of car wrecks after surviving a car accident. He soon finds himself involved in a secret society in which disability and damaged limbs are fetishised and in which the sex act is most venerated the closest it comes to approximating death. Cronenberg’s cinema of horror has always focused on our secret fears and terrors about our own bodies. Ballard’s novel was about an all too recognisable dystopia where the automobile rules and in which the human body has become secondary to the mobility and mechanical perfection of the automobile. The combination of these two artist’s temperament has resulted in a motion picture which is at its most sexual the closer it gets to an audiences primal fears about speed and technology. Though controversial and confronting, the film is also undeniably exciting and visually mesmerising. With Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Rosanna Arquette and Deborah Kara Unger.