../crash

Crash

At a glance...

Good God I love this movie. Time for my way-too-serious analysis of a film that was pitched to me as "the one where those people can only cum during life-threatening car accidents".

Firstly, this is a movie that could only be made in north America. As the public consciousness about the failings of car-dependent infrastructure grows, a movie like Crash feels like a sign from the 90's we didn't know we needed. Could you imagine the Dutch making their version of this film with people getting off from bicycle crashes? You can only make this movie when you live in a society that completely numbs itself to the insanity that is not just being surrounded constantly by cars, but accepting the mass death and injury that comes with completely orienting everything about ourselves in the name of the personal vehicle.

I love, for example, that the movie starts out with Catherine getting hot and horny during her flight class at the airport, and that planes are lightly sprinkled into this movie. The fact that so much happens on the way to the airport, coming back from the airport, literally inside the airport garage, but importantly, always in a car. Even when we fly, we are obsessed with cars. Our airports are surrounded by giant parking lots to park cars, parking lots to rent cars, shuttles to take us from one lot to another that are also cars. Of course a movie about the alien sexualization of car accidents would at least partially center an airport!

We have to drive everywhere, everything is about the car, we fetishize cars, we sell cars by appealing to sex, masculinity, desire. Why do you think the most common new car purchase today is a light truck/SUV that stands 8' tall, with a square front grill that emulates police and military vehicles? Crash is absurd and extreme, yes, but it gets to that point through the backdrop of the absurd and extreme lengths we go to connecting all our mobility and independence to the car. I haven't seen other Cronenberg films but I do suspect that much of the transgressiveness of Crash comes from the seeming mundanity of its origin.

This was a fucking insane movie to watch the day after I almost got into a car accident. I have a dashcam, and I ended up rewatching the footage multiple times over the next day and a half. Something about the thing James says, about the relief you feel after all the car safety stuff actually comes true and you actually get into an accident, really struck me. I found myself noticing way more just how many cars there were around me right after my near-accident situation, much like how James obsesses over highway traffic on his balcony, wondering if it's real or imaginary that the traffic seems much worse. And just like James, while I abstained from driving for a day after my near-miss with injury, I found myself getting into a car much sooner than I thought (or wanted). That's just how our lives work. We have to be in a car.

Then there's the allegory within the finger fucking and cock stroking of Crash that feels very related to bodily transformation-qua-disfigurement, and specifically, feels very relatable as a trans person (maybe this is a stretch but I don't care this is what I was thinking during and after the movie!!). The characters in this movie deliberately injure themselves, break themselves, and take pleasure in their scars and deformities in their bodies, and find a perverse and freeing pleasure out of pushing their bodies further and further, even towards death (this reminds me a lot of Lee Edelman's book, "No Future" as it pertains to futurism and its failure as a framework specifically from a queer and gay perspective, but I am not a queer theorist and only have surface level understanding so I am probably inappropriately connecting these two things). As the magnitude of the accidents increase, more and more collateral damage is incurred to the cars around them. This violent assertion of self (destruction), of fulfilling the self as far as possible, even if it means death, even if it means total annihilation of the world around you, makes me think of every trans person who gets their phalloplasty and vaginoplasty and orchiectomy knowing the risks such procedures might entail, while transphobes scream about how we are mutilating and destroying our bodies, destroying our ability to secure a next generation, destroying the very foundation of our society that requires fixed gender binaries.

Will I start pursuing car accidents to get that sweet, sweet orgasmic release? No. I hate cars, and I'm terrified of them, and I resent that I have to drive them. But Crash was, for me, a radical expression of self that surprised me in its relatability to my own personal experience, wrapped up in a big, absurd orgy in the backseat of a car. Extreme, yes, but worth watching.

/1996/ /essay-bait/