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.