Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
aptly-named British councillor John Bull said that in
the light of the Dunblane massacre, you’ve got to look
a lot more closely at the effect on the audience of films
like Crash. Ballard’s heart sank when he read those
comments: “For God’s sake, what can we do when
people jump to make connections like that?”
So why is it that people have got Crash all wrong?
Why do we find the idea that there might be a sexual
component to driving and crashing so abhorrent? You
could say that by this very response Ballard and Cronenberg
have tapped into something. There appears to
be a lot of denial going on. Ballard notes that “people
seem to be excited by car crashes or film-makers
wouldn’t film them. David [Cronenberg] said to me,
‘Jim – the problem with car crashes is that they’re
damn difficult to film!’ Film-makers wouldn’t make
all this effort if they didn’t think people were getting
a thrill from them’”
This is borne out by the experiences of Crash’s
stunt co-ordinator Ted Hanlon. “Usually with car
crashes, you just line up two cars and let them hit. The
more damage and the bigger the explosion, the better.
In this film, it’s the opposite. Cronenberg wanted
the crashes to be brutal, nasty, intense and quick,
as crashes are in real life, and without the attendant
explosions or clichéd slow motion tracking shots, in
order to convey the immediacy such events.”
That people should think, upon hearing what Crash is
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
about, that these usual Hollywood conventions would
apply to the film is hardly surprising and, further, that
they should find a realistic representation of crashes so
alien is testament to the domination of the Hollywood
blockbuster genre. A sarcastic Ballard complains that
“Bruce Willis can behave just as sadistically as the bad
guys, but because he’s working for the NYPD it’s OK
… Add a layer of sexual excitement and you’ve got
the film culture that dominates the planet. We all know
as drivers that there are young men who cannot bear
being overtaken by a woman driver. Young men feel
powerful sexual emotions – half of America used to be
conceived in cars. There is nothing revolutionary in the
idea that there is a sexual component to our idea of, our
excitement by, car crashes.”
How does he think that Crash differs from this?
“Crash is honest – it says we won’t put a reassuring
moral frame around it. We won’t pretend this is a
story with a happy ending, and all it’s ambiguities are
up on the screen. I think that’s what so original about
it.” The real problem, as Ballard sees it, is will Crash
encourage people to imitate the behaviour. “People
aren’t going to take this film literally,” he reasons, “it
doesn’t invite being taken literally. It’s a very cool,
almost glassy, rather eloquent, mysterious film …
it’s obviously something more than what you see on
the screen at any moment. There are no Buicks slomoing
through the air, crashing into buses; obviously
033
More
Spike
email
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z