Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center Mar/Apr 1997DAVID CRONENBERG IS cinema's patron saint of Symbiosis. At once Canada's most established and most successful filmmaker, and one of the few radical sensibilities operating in "greater Hollywood" cinema, his films depict the communion of characters with technology, disease, narcotics, telepathy, and Otherness. This moment - what is called a "fertilizing accident" in his new film Crash - is irreversibly transforming, a liberation from the prison of self and the oppression of normative social codes. The boundaries between individual and Other dissolve; identity is annexed. At one extreme it's the abandon of self to a collective gestalt or urge (Stereo, Shivers, Rabid); at the other, the merging of two beings (Dead Ringers, The Fly, ff. Butterfly); whereas the loners of Scanners, Videodrome and Naked Lunch surrender independence and are enlisted in conspiracies beyond their comprehension. Yet paradoxically, symbiosis and dispersal of self produce a more profound sense of isolation and estrangement than ever, as in The Dead Zone. So it is with Crash.
Based on J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel, Crash follows a film producer named Ballard (James Spader) who, after a nearly fatal head-on collision, drifts into a shadowy underworld of car accident survivors who seek cathartic/erotic release in the aesthetic minutiae of studying, reenacting, and staging death crashes. Ballard becomes an initiate of this cult of scarred casualties, an s&m subgroup with one foot in the car showroom and the other in the scrapyard, in search of the perfect crash. His mentor is the enigmatic Vaughan (memorably incarnated by Elias Koteas), a repellent yet seductive figure dedicated to the refinement of the crash into something between artform and science.
Ballard's feverish book is nothing if not lurid, but for all its tableaux of dispassionate, automated sex and mangled car bodies, Cronenberg's film exemplifies cool, hieratic austerity. His setups and cutting have never been more inhumanely deliberate and exact. This exquisitely somber film's metallic designs, stark electric guitar score, insinuating camera movement, and dazed, somnambulist acting maintain a tone of dreamlike repetition and attenuation. In its subdued, subtractive minimalism and almost oppressive formal control, Crash toys with the possibilities of enervation and entropy.
Simultaneously parodic and mournful, freakish and familiar, Crash's narrative is elliptical, trancelike, interiorized. Characteristically, there is no final narrative release - only dissolution. If this is a film about cars, fucking, and death, then it's about cars, fucking, and death as a state of mind, desecrating the automotive fetishist's fantasies of freedom, enclosure, and invulnerability. Never moralistic despite satirical tendencies, Cronenberg's films fuse the calm rigor of scientific research with the visceral shock of transgression.
Cronenberg's is a philosophical cinema based on subversive imagination, yet one that requires the viewer to grapple with the experience of deep revulsion. His films are studies in fantastic pathology that are typically punctuated by some pivotal gross-out or unimaginable physical violation: Scanners' exploding head is relatively mild alongside the mysterious orifices and appendages - genitalia one step removed ... if that - of Videodrome and Rabid, the fecal/venereal parasites of Shivers, the gynecological instruments designed for "mutant women" in Dead Ringers, The Brood's rage-generated externalized foetus - and in Crash, a scar on Rosanna Arquette's thigh that briefly serves as a sexual organ. These are not frivolous shock-value effects, although they convey authentically hysterical excess. In the context of his disruptive film strategy, Cronenberg is simply devising the most extreme and graphic visual manifestation imaginable for his anarchic pathologies. These scenarios of trauma, estrangement, and disintegration articulate the shock of the New Flesh, as it's dubbed in his magnum opus Videodrome - in which, fittingly for his entire oeuvre, a character observes: "It has a philosophy...and that is what makes it dangerous."
Cronenberg is seldom discussed as a Canadian filmmaker. Certainly his work shows no overt trace of the cultural inferiority complex that supposedly afflicts English-speaking Canada. But it shares with the cinema of Atom Egoyan, the nation's other leading international export and critical success, a subtly displaced, suspended urban ambience that ironically derives from the indefinable, un-American Otherness of Canada. (The exception is the Quebec-set Rabid, whose scenes of urban chaos consciously allude to the declaration of martial law in Quebec in 1970.)
Cronenberg's 20-year trajectory from morbid yet cerebral no-frills exploitation like Shivers to triumphantly commercial Hollywood horror/sci-fi like The Dead Zone to literary yet visceral art-movie psychodrama like M. Butterfly is a unique and intriguing one, particularly since throughout its evolution his cinema has maintained its thematic and conceptual unity. Aside from his Hawks-out-ofCorman 1979 hot-rod racing flick Fast Company, all of Cronenberg's films up to The Fly are essentially Pandora's Box narratives in which scientific research and new technology unleash threats to both the wider social order and the physio- and psychological integrity of his characters. From Dead Ringers on, though, they are all hermetic Throughthe-Looking-Glass narratives in which characters descend into their own psyches, triggering ruptures and deviations that are purely projections of the mind. The wider social realm recedes and the focus narrows to the kind of dysfunctional domesticity first explored in The Brood - with a consequent increase in claustrophobia and suspension. Dead Ringers' vicariously symbiotic twin gynecologists are the first of a succession of transgressive, codependent marriages involving junkies, transvestites, and bisexual adultery in Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly - and now Crash. Curious, then, that Crash's prevailing spiritual malaise and its overthrow by death-wish hedonism returns us to Cronenberg's first feature, Shivers, likewise set in a world of numbing urbanism and positing its condo inhabitants' infection with aphrodisiac parasites as a collective liberation from their repressed existences. -G.S.
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