“Crash” (1996) Review

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How easy it would be write off David Cronenberg’s Crash as a film about weird people who are horny for car crashes. It’s not a big surprise considering Cronenberg’s resume of body horror from the flesh-obsessed Videodrome to the brain-exploding Scanners. Yet, the eroticism takes on such a cerebral and alluring tone that can make one succumb to its taboo temptations of metal and flesh. Where others would make a joke at the gaping vaginal hole of a fetish, Cronenberg plunges deeper into the darkness, forcing the audience to approach the unorthodox and understand it beyond our fundamental comprehension of sex.

James (James Spader) and Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) are trying to seek something more in their open marriage. They crave something new, trying to find new ways to have sex that get them closer to a bigger orgasm. They meet at the end of the day and relay their trials and failures for the perfect fuck, still longing for a new thrill. That thrill comes in the form of a car crash. James finds himself injured in a car crash. Upon the crash, another survivor, Helen (Holly Hunter), finds herself highly aroused. They share this allure. Soon, they’re making love in the back of cars while thinking about car accidents.

With a new kink discovered, James finds himself digging deeper into this world where bent metal and orgasms collide. This well runs deep, as a bond is formed with Doctor Robert Vaughan (Elias Koteas), a man committed to staging the most accurate of famous car crashes. His illegal street performances garnered a crowd, but followers were also obsessed with the act. The danger becomes an attraction, where the climax is either sexual satisfaction or death.

I must admit that there is an eroticism tapped into with this obsession. While embracing the lifestyle of a car-crash-seeker, James and Catherine have sex with a renewed passion. With Catherine having become a target of Vaughan’s reckless driving, she starts speaking openly about her fantasies. Heavily she breathes as she asks James if he’d suck Vaughan’s penis, going further with her imagination of his cum. Her progression only makes James more aroused. They’ve tapped into something grand and don’t want to stop at masturbating over news footage of accidents. They want more. Their bodies desire more.

As with most of Cronenberg’s works, transhumanism becomes front and center thematically. Vaughan pretty much lays this out in how he relates to modern technology reshaping the human body, even if he diverts into car crashes as a more mysterious philosophical route to puruse. The parallels between the human body and cars is made clear through the visuals, where scars intentionally look like vulvas to increase the horny pursuit of the next stage in human eroticism.

Crash taps into the brutal, wild, erotic, and philosophical ways we associate sex with tech. We already have plenty of devices we use to enhance the experience, ranging from vibrators to strap-ons. We already treat cars as sources of beauty, with some applying as much shine to the frames as makeup to a face. The sexual obsession with cars and their damage doesn’t seem so much like a weird kink as much as it does an inevitability of our hunt for pleasure. There’s a darkness to the picture that goes beyond the deaths that come with each crash. Even with this new kink, James still ends the film telling Catherine the same thing when her fetish doesn’t make her cum; “Maybe the next one.” The quest for more fulfilling sex will never end and, for many, something as wild as sex with cars may be little more than a common porn pitstop of the future on a road that never ends.