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Si tratta piuttosto della manifestazione di una forma di attrazione e fascinazione per l’oggetto
inanimato, in definitiva per l’uomo-macchina deprivato di quelle caratteristiche che condivide con
l’essere umano vivente 341 .
In Crash attrazione e repulsione si mescolano rispecchiando ciò che da questo punto di vista
era già presente in Frankenstein, una mostruosità capace di affascinare che caratterizza l’essere
umano artificiale. In questo caso si tratta dell’intersezione uomo-macchina, l’automobile come
estensione dell’uomo, coniugata alla sua sessualità in modo disturbato e disturbante 342 . Sia il
romanzo che la sua versione cinematografica evitano il rischio di abbandonarsi a un cieco
parossismo emotivo attraverso la fredda precisione scientifica utilizzata per descrivere organi e
funzioni sessuali e le ferite nelle parti anatomiche dei personaggi coinvolti negli incidenti. Nel film
l’uso delle luci e dei primi piani produce un effetto di neutro distacco clinico. L’animalità dionisiaca
cede dunque il posto alla meccanicità apollinea 343 . Il corpo e la macchina sono complementari,
come dimostra la stilizzazione geometrica nell’accostamento di parti dell’uno e dell’altra 344 . A
differenza di altri momenti narrativi ballardiani in cui attraverso la figura del mandala viene
evocata, direttamente o meno, la ricerca del ricongiungimento in un tutto unico, in Crash gli
341 «While the protagonists feel the need to touch the corpse, there is, however, no necrophilia in the narrow sense of the
word in either the novel or the film. However, if we look at necrophilia in a psychoanalytic framework, then the
condition could certainly be diagnosed in the characters of Crash. Erich Fromm, who defined necrophilia not only as an
attraction to dead bodies but to everything that is lifeless and mechanical, saw “the spirit of necrophilia” as growing
preoccupation of twentieth-century culture, which “was expressed first in literary form by F. T. Marinetti in his
“Futurist Manifesto” of 1909.” [Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, London, Jonathan Cape, 1974,
p. 10]. Lacking all human characteristics, the Crash characters are an extreme realisation of Marinetti‘s mechanical
man. Dennis Foster diagnoses a split of body and self for Ballard‘s version of twentieth-century (wo)man; referring to
the wonder of the infant perceiving its body in the mirror he notes that in Crash the body as symbolic representation has
become uncanny. The lost body can only be recovered by being altered through the violent encounter with technology
in the crash. “Technology has covered the gap”, he writes, “providing […] a way of submitting your body to a larger
purpose, of deriving pleasure by becoming the object of pleasure.” (Dennis A. Foster, “J. G. Ballard‘s Empire of the
Senses: Perversion and the Failure of Authority”, PMLA, 108:3, maggio 1993, p. 531). The world of Crash is devoid of
all passion and emotion; even Marinetti‘s keen hatred and ambition have been abolished in favour of an endlessly
repetitive and mechanical sex drive.» Ivi.
342 «[Ballard] makes explicit our ambivalence – on the one hand our horror of mechanisation, and on the other the nearsexual
fascination of our attempts to turn ourselves into Frankenstein’s monster. “He [Ballard] raises issues about the
penetrability of bodies”, notes [Steve] Watts. “He’s interested in images of the hybrid fusion of man and machine, and
indeed woman and machine”.» Neil Fleming, “Outer Space – Inner Turmoil”
(http://www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/news/cam/archive/easter_2008/) [Ultima visita 15/12/2010].
343 «Ballard employs the neutral language of the engineer when he describes the geometry of anus, vulva, and penis. In
the film, the cold blue light, the precise close-ups of wounds and scars, and the repetitive drone of the music all make
the camera‘s eye appear analytical rather than voyeuristic. Like the Futurist utopia, de Sade’s Château de Silling, or the
Fordist factory, the world of Crash is suspended between chaos and order; but whereas in Futurism, Sadism, and
Fordism chaos is well contained by the superstructure of order – in Futurist painting quite literally the grid pattern, in
Sade’s Château the strictly regulated increase of violence, and in the Ford factory the graphs of the flow-chart – Crash
chooses a different path as the chaos of the accident and violent death is abstracted into the clarity of geometry and
order. While for the reader of the novel or the viewer of the film the technical language and the detached camera bring
order to chaos and neutralise the threat and transgression inherent in the chaos of the accident, within the logics of the
novel there is no neutralisation but rather intensification. Here it seems the transgression does not lie in the descent into
chaos but in the abstraction and sexualisation of violence into a highly aestheticised order.» R. Vidal, op. cit.
344 «In all the sexual acts or fantasies after his crash, James invokes the stylisation of the union of body and car achieved
through the mingling of body and car fluids on the one hand and on the other, the symmetric alignment of body parts
and car parts, the fusion of body and car on an aesthetic level of perfectly ordered geometry.» Ivi.
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