Cronenberg's 'Crash' - A Reaction

David Cronenberg's 1990s film adaptation of Crash is a movie that, for me, succeeds and fails on two different levels. Like most film adaptations, there are several superficial changes to the landscape of the story in comparison with the JG Ballard book, the biggest change being that the book takes place in and around London, while the movie takes place in Toronto. That's fine. The characters being British or Canadian or American is really irrelevant, because just as in the book we have the same labyrinthine highways and car parks,the same detached, almost surreal atmosphere.

The casting makes sense. Perhaps with the slight exception of Holly Hunter as Helen Remington (who just really annoys me), all the characters felt and looked very much as I'd imagined in my mind. In fact, Elias Koteas was almost exactly like the Vaughn I had pictured in my mind, both physically and in his mannerisms. His performance was my favorite of the film.The overall tone of the film, too, mirrored for me in many ways the tone of the book. Everything was very stark, very gray, very detached. Even presented with the mundane images of an overpass or an airport or a hospital corridor, there was something still very strange and alien about this world.

I think Cronenberg did a very good job of staying true to the book dialogue-wise, there are scenes that lift whole passages from the novel, which you rarely find it book to film adaptations which tend to truncate a lot of important speech. But then, for me, Crash is a book that does not rely heavily on actual dialogue to begin with - it is rather what happens in between and especially what happens in Ballard's mind that is the driving force of the narrative.

And in that way, the film failed as a successful adaptation. It's interesting that throughout the past several weeks everyone has been talking about how "cinematic" the book is. And here we are with the visual representation of the visual manifestation of that cinematic quality and it's like: "Oh, yeah. Traffic. This looks cool." The movie is visually striking (the last shot of Ballard and Catherine is pretty amazing), but it is missing some of the pathos that makes the novel not just a never ending series of violent sexual escapades in cars.

The movie, to me, comes to nothing. It makes a strong effort of capturing and distilling the meaning of these characters' actions, but somehow it all rings even more hollow than the book. It's disturbing, but not in a thought provoking way. It even, at time, got to be a little dull. I think the story also suffered a great deal from the absence of an "Elizabeth Taylor" like figure for Vaughn to be obsessed with. I think it's important that while the Ballard/Vaughn/Catherine dynamic is important, Vaughn's quest for immortality should be embodied in a movie star and not in the couple.

I think Cronenberg made a bold attempt at adapting the novel. Crash is most certainly unlike any film I've ever seen, and I'd very much like a second viewing to try and wrap my head around how I feel about it definitively.

In any case, I've found the last ten minutes of the movie with commentary from David Cronenberg himself. It's interesting to hear him discuss the impetus behind the choices he made - for instance, in the sequence in which Ballard is chasing Catherine, James Spader had originally played it as more predatory and ruthless. But Cronenberg decided that wasn't the right tone, that he should be "playful and exuberant," and so the whole sequence was reshot. Anyway, enjoy:

Final Crash

As I finished the last pages of Ballard's Crash, an acute feeling of uneasiness came over me. Why, I don't know. Perhaps it had to do with the strangeness, the eeriness in how we leave the characters. Or perhaps it had to do with the fact that I had no idea what to think, and I generally try to know exactly what I think at the end of any book, any movie, any TV show.

I can't say that I can work through, at least not on a first reading, what Ballard's full "intent" behind Crash was. I think, perhaps, his intent was what we discussed in a past discussion in class: a novel which would serve as a fractured mirror to our own world. From its setting to its characters, to even the way the story is presented, nothing in Crash is recognizable or "right." It's "wrongness," too, is not presented as glamorous or exciting, perverse in the way some late night movie on Showtime is.

The elements of technology, of the melding of flesh and chrome, create a sensibility so odd that all I could really take form it was "OK. This is disturbing." But what's also interesting, what might also speak to what Ballard's intention was, is that after a while...it isn't disturbing. It all becomes just as matter-of-fact and commonplace as Ballard's own descriptions of his world.

The reader is conditioned to and desensitized to the clinical, detached descriptions of human sexuality and behavior. So that, for me, is what I mostly took away from Crash. Perhaps that in fact is what the uneasiness was - an uneasiness with my eventual acceptance of the world in which I was a visitor.

I'm excited to watch David Cronenberg's film adaptation of the book - partly because the book struck me as very cinematic despite its limited and claustrophobic setting, and also because I've always been interested in Cronenberg's own sort of twisted view of reality. Perhaps watching these characters speak, move, and interact with one another will add another layer of understanding to my reading experience.

The Composite

This is great, I found a blog that posts images of literary characters using law enforcement composite sketch software. Below is a composite of Vaughn, using the following description from Crash:

"His exhausted face, with its scarred mouth…As his pock-marked jaws champed on a piece of gum I had the sudden feeling that he was hawking obscene pictures around the wards…But what marked him out was the scar tissue around his forehead and mouth, residues of some terrifying act of violence…Heavy black hair…Broken and re-set nose bridge…His features looked as if they had been displaced laterally, reassembled after the crash from a collection of faded publicity photographs. The scars on his mouth and forehead, the self-cut hair and two missing upper canine gave him a neglected and hostile appearance…His hard mouth, with its scarred lips, was parted in a droll smile."

Is he how you imagined him?

imitation of sorts

If there was something wrong with him, or me, I couldn’t tell. We couldn’t tell, because the reality of the situation had escaped us long ago.

There were four of us that night, or two, that night at the lake, which in the winter gloom was like a smooth black mirror against the black sky, mottled with violently blinking stars and a muffled moon.

In the summer we had come here, to be all alone and together. And in the summer, here, by the lake in the daytime when it was a murky, ineffectual green, the color sludge, he told me what he wanted us to do.

It had to be us, he said, because we knew. We knew listening to someone speak and processing the speech, the words falling out of their lips and tripping over their tongues in a burbling stream of bullshit, and we knew what it was to be only half there, to be in several places at once all at the same time, and we knew what it was to look at a person (like a mother, a teacher, or a sanitation worker) and imagine with explicit detail choking them to death, or shooting them in the skull at point-blank range, a cartoon spray of blood speckling our faces as we blew their brains out.

This is what he did sometimes, he told me, to comfort himself. “I picture people that I love die.”

We knew like no one else could know or cared to know and so, really, it had to be us.

At the lake, in the relative silence of the evening I could see, refracted in the light that glinted off the cool steel handle of the knife, the tiny fragments of all our lives that had led up to this exact moment. It was an intricate mosaic of cause and effect, of action and outcome, all so deafeningly clear that it was almost disgusting.

He said nothing. I remember he held his hand up, briefly – a strange, jerky motion that we couldn’t understand and therefore did not bother to process. When the blade sliced through the thin layer of skin that had lain taut over his Adam’s apple it had been simultaneously the most glorious and most mundane thing I’d ever witnessed.

Glorious, of course, in its banality.

It was rather easy, after that. I had the strange, almost comical image of a ripe tomato in my mind as I watched the blade slice through skin and muscle, sometimes hitting bone.

“See how you’re brother’s blood cries out to me from the earth,” one of us whispered – a half remembered Bible verse.

It went on like this for some time.

We laid his body out along the lakeside. This long, useless thing. Blood, bright, the color of a dress I’d seen once at a party once, was gushing from the wound his throat in spurts, in stops and starts, as if his body hadn’t decided yet whether it wanted to die.

We sat next to him, but we didn’t touch him, or look at him, not even when he moaned something, inaudible, and reached out his hand. Acknowledging the act would have ruined integrity of the thing.

Eventually one of us said, “Is he dying? I think he's dying.”

And then, "I want to go home...I don't like it here. It's dark. I'm scared."

Another one of us laughed. I don’t know who.