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David Cronenberg's latest film, "Crash," is based on J. G. Ballard's novel of the same name. Cronenberg dealt with the book's themes of sex, technology and violence in the film.

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In 1974, JoG. Ballard wrote in the introduction to the French edition of Crash, that he conceived of his book as the first pornographic novel based on technology. Pornography, according to Ballard, is the most political form of fiction because it throws into relief the ruthless ways of human exploitation. And technology, embodied throughout the novel mainly in the car, becomes a site of that exploitation as well as its instrument. More specifically, Ballard asks whether the car crash can be seen as a sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology. He explores this question via his protagonist who, after a car crash, gets involved with a secret crash survivor subculture obsessed with the erotic power of cars and collisions. Ballard claims that throughout Crash he used the car not only as a sexual image but also as a "total metaphor for man's life in today's society." "Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our own psychopathologies?," the author asks, and "Is the harnessing of our innate perversity conceivably of benefit to us? Is there some deviant logic unfolding more powerful than that provided by reason?"

These questions and their concerns with the outer limits of sex, technology, and human existence in general have been the familiar territory of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, who, in 1996, adapted Crash to the screen in his capacities of writer, producer, and director. Cronenberg first read the book ten years earlier and initially considered it unfilmable because of its relentlessness. "It's as obsessive as the people in it are obsessive and their responses to everything are not nearly what you would consider normal. But they're not abnormal either." He reversed his decision when he found an ally in Naked Lunch's producer Jeremy Thomas, who was equally fascinated by Crash, and ended up as its executive producer.

Unlike Naked Lunch, which draws on diverse elements of William Burroughs's larger oeuvre, Crash is a surprisingly tight and straightforward adaptation. It suggestively visualizes the novel's key characters and, with a few notable exceptions, remains true to the narrative events. What got dropped were Ballard's long porno-philosophical ruminations on the London cityscape, on its traffic (whose depiction in the film does not come close to its metaphorical connotations in the novel), and on one character's obsessions with crashing his car in a sexual frenzy into the limousine of Elizabeth Taylor (the ultimate star fuck).

According to Cronenberg, what helped make the film both a successful adaptation and a work of art in its own right is his identification with Ballard, the author, and with Ballard's own identification with the protagonist of Crash, whose name-surprise!-is Ballard. Ballard the character embodies the imaginative life of his author, and Cronenberg has pointed out that he, like the latter, tends to distinguish between his imaginative life and his 'ordinary' daily existence. Ballard, in turn, has since openly endorsed the film, claiming that it expresses all the ideas in the novel in visual form. As auteurial signature and authorial handshake harmoniously complement one another, we are able to discover in the fictions of these authors a thing or two about the authors of the fiction, or better said, the author as a fiction. The book is a fictionalization of Ballard's subjectivity, related to us in confessional mode, and Cronenberg also ac- knowledges a certain personal interest in the subject matter: "It's a dangerous film in many ways. It does violence to people's understanding of human relationships, it does violence to people's understanding of eroticism...But I think that's a primary function of art. To do violence to the little cocoon that we sometimes find ourselves enveloped in."

Even before he gets exposed to the secret and violent rituals of the crash survivors, the sex life of James Ballard (James Spader), the protagonist of Crash, is not exactly run of the mill. His relationship to his wife Catherine (Deborah Unger) is fueled only by their separate sexual exploits, which they then recount to each other as foreplay for their connubial bliss. Bluntly reducing their marriage to sex, the Ballards, who think they've seen it all, coldly explore the fetishistic far side of carnal knowledge. Little do they know.

Ballard's life skids off its beaten track after a head-on collision with the car of Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) that sends her husband through the windshield right onto Ballard's own dashboard. Not concerned with the (at least potentially) tragic side of this incident, the film renders this death as an almost ritualistic exchange between Helen Remington and Ballard, one that instantly establishes a strange intimacy between them. While both remain seated in their cars and stare at each other as if in a trance, Remington casually bares her left breast to Ballard as she unstraps her seat belt. When they encounter each other weeks later at the police garage, Ballard is simultaneously repulsed and aroused by the fact that Remington came to pilfer a part of his wrecked car as a souvenir and sex aid. The two clearly turn each other on, and, after some highway foreplay (which in Crash always spells a deliberate near-collision), they pull into the airport garage to consummate their bond.

Through Remington, Ballard meets Vaughan (Elias Koteas), a former medical photographer and leader of a secret menagerie of zombie-like people, who might best be described (with a nod to cartoonist Gary Larson) as a bunch of `crash fest mummies.' They survive crashes; they reenact them; they get their erotic booty from them; and they've become addicted to them. Vaughan, their high priest, is a dark, otherworldly figure who could well be the offspring of Robert De Niro, Boris Karloff, and Bela Lugosi combined. His crash-worn muscular body-dark, dank, and hairy-is covered with thick scars that seem to ooze a mixture of sweat, sore secretions, and machine oil. Vaughan has the stare and the perverse appeal of a modern-day Nosferatu, and his m.o. bears a certain resemblance to vampirism. He roams the highways in his black '63 Lincoln convertible, the model in which Kennedy was assassinated; he seeks out his victims with a sixth sense (for example, he always magically appears behind the cars of Ballard and his wife); often, he draws them into his world by involving them in crashes; or he simply scavenges the roads for accidents that have already occurred. Like an aroused teenager in a porn shop, he 'browses' these crash sites and comes in his pants at the site of mutilated bodies getting cut out of car wrecks by rescue crews.

Vaughan has assembled an illustrious coterie of allies. There is Seagrave, his mechanic and assistant, who meets his end by reenacting in drag Jayne Mansfield's fatal 1967 accident. This scene dispels the myth that the truck under which Mansfield steered her car in thick fog decapitated her. Seagrave gets it right: after the crash, his wig is stuck on the same door as had been Mansfield's, which led the first eyewitnesses to deduce decapitation. The lowly Seagrave is to Vaughan what Renfield is to Dracula. Seagrave is Vaughan's assistant in all important affairs. Together they reenact famous historical crashes to an audience of connoisseurs.

In a delightful addition to the plot of the novel, Cronenberg has dramatically fleshed out one such clandestine scenario: the night James Dean drove his new Porsche Spyder on an open country road at full speed into another car. The scene is a cross between a Black Mass and a Hell Driver's Road show. Before the action starts, Vaughan, ever a stickler for authenticity, relates with gusto all the details to the audience, including the date (September 9, 1955) and the `performance cast.' Dean, played by Seagrave, will slam into the side of the Ford driven by college student Donald Turn upseed who, according to Vaughan, was very important. "The two would meet for a moment," he gleefully shouts to his fans on the bleachers, "a moment that created a Hollywood legend. I myself will play engineer Rolf Wutherich from Zuffenhausen, Germany..."

But this scene is not just thrown in for reasons of spectacle. The Dean intertext of Fifties drag strip races, teen rebellion, and car sex suggests the close link between the sexual revolution and the car culture. The camera emphasizes that Dean's toy had an identity. It was called "Little Bastard" and, according to Vaughan, Dean had named it after himself. Crash thus gives the fetishistic techno-play of its characters some historical grounding. As Cronenberg explains: "The first guy who had a convertible in High School was the guy who had the sex...He had a mobile bedroom."

A sci-fi film that portrays a world just the other side of the millennial divide, Crash proceeds to showcase the evil flowers of that car/sex culture. Baudelaire's modernism reflected a society undergoing industrialization, one that had been jolted out of its agricultural past and that had lost its organic social structure and was adrift in urban alienation. By complementing it with a little Fifties history and suburban sociology, Cronenberg simply takes this society one step further. Or perhaps only half a step, for the alienated, antisocial character of Vaughan and Ballard's world is still a product of the late nineteenth century, as is the automobile. The only addition is the cool, deliberately fetishized merger of this technology with sexuality. True to the nature of J.G. Ballard's science fiction, Crash's future is not one of computers and the Internet, but of steel and metal. Screws, burned rubber, and rusty tin sheets are metaphors for a crumbling future to which the author has a very ambivalent attitude.

Bowdlerizing Baudelaire for a vision of tomorrow, Crash flaunts a by now almost traditional world which is deranged and upside down, in which bad is good, and anything seems to go as long as it takes place on shiny metal hoods or faded vinyl seats. The film's corrosive philosophy sometimes gets juxtaposed to the sheen of the yuppie car world, whose underbelly it really is. In one scene, Ballard has taken up with the robot-like Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), a former crash victim whose body is an erotic high tech analogy-half-human, half-prosthesis-to the famous chicken woman in Tod Browning's 1933 horror classic, Freaks. Together they visit a Mercedes Benz dealer and, to the dismay of the nerdy sales rep, appropriate one of the showcased black convertibles for a vehicular quickie.

Ripping the roadster's leather-clad cockpit with her metal leg supports, Gabrielle dutifully desecrates the youthful alibi of what is otherwise considered the avatar of haute-bourgeois sedan culture. Although amusing, the contrast the film suggests between Gabrielle's subversive, underworld fetishism and the shiny, antiseptic sales room at best makes for mild satire.

Fetishism, as it were, has never lent itself easily to social critique. Cronenberg knows this and concentrates instead on fetishism's erotic impact. This strategy helps him recoup metal as the material of and playground for sex. The shiny substance fetishizes the body with arms and armor, for harness and harm. Gabrielle's body constitutes a celebration of metal's cleaving capacity to cut the body into parts and to rejoin it. In another tryst, Gabrielle has Ballard lick her metal frame and her zipper-long scars and wounds like a lap dog, which had Sight and Sound quip that "not since actor Udo Kier fucked his own monster in Andy Warhol's Flesh for Frankenstein have audiences witnessed the erotic opportunities offered by an open wound: to Cronenberg, a neo-sex organ."

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Notwithstanding its perverse teleology of carnage, techno-sex is profoundly ambiguous. Crash attempts to spell out its frightening and dangerous aspects, but also exploits its inherent thrills. If one wants to believe the film, techno-sex bestows a certain radical potentiality on humanity. For all its dangers, it allows us to jettison bourgeois notions of who has sex with whom, in what kind of environment, in what manner, and for what purpose. The sexual encounters featured in Crash exploit these aspects to various degrees.

One such scene-steamy in more than one way-has Ballard, his wife, and Vaughan take the squalid Lincoln to a drivethrough car wash to get rid of some blood stains left on the fender by Vaughan's latest prey. As soon as the car is under the protective cover of the revolving brushes, Vaughan and Catherine start making out on the back seat, while Ballard watches from behind the wheel. On one level, this scene is all about sperm, and Cronenberg delivers it in various forms. He shows us a close-up of semen dripping off Catherine's hand and running down the vinyl, and he frequently cuts to shots of the milky soap that engulfs the car in this perverted cleansing ritual. Cronenberg's use of soap might be said to constitute his attempt at `art porn,' as it helps him deliver the ultimate cum shot without the requisite X-rating.

Bourgeois culture's desire for swapping sex partners had been one of its best-kept secrets until it became somewhat more publicized in the personals of porn magazines. While the car wash scene, on this level, is old news, its character dynamics are nevertheless interesting. They bring into the open the homoeroticism between Ballard and Vaughan the film has suggested since their first encounter in the hospital, when an instantly aroused, almost panting Vaughan examines Ballard's wounded neck and chest at close range. Although the sexual exploits shared by Ballard and Vaughan during the film are all heterosexual, the relationship between the two men, which is the film's narrative spine, is determined mainly by their mutual attraction. Viewed this way, Vaughan's tactics to get under Ballard's skin are a classic strategy of male homoerotic bonding. He uses women as decoys to get to his male object of desire. The film throws light on male homoeroticism from more than one side. Catherine, too, has noticed the tension between her husband and Vaughan. In another notorious sequence, she talks herself and him to orgasm by baiting him with such fetish questions as, "Do you find him attractive? Do you want to fuck him? Have you seen his penis? Would you kiss it or suck it? Do you know what semen tastes like?"

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Importantly, however, neither the book nor the film are about the political vindication of traditional sexual identities. The narrow meaning of such terms as 'straight' and 'gay' seem to get eradicated in techno-porn's larger attack on conventional sex. Instead, Crash's fetishism proposes an inherent bisexuality that would strictly revolve around sex acts instead of proclaiming sexual identities. While contemporary audiences find themselves mired in these identities, science fiction is supposed to give us a vantage point from which we may critically examine them and entertain the potential benefits of dissolving them.

Read as a confessional narrative, then, Ballard's Crash becomes a fascinating record of a hetero-identified author's attempts to negotiate his latent homosexuality within these new parameters. The novel's narrator vacillates between a purported indifference to Vaughan and such lines as, "A sharp but not unpleasant smell rose from his white jeans, a blend of semen and engine coolant," or, "He sat facing me, one arm along the seat behind my head, his heavy penis pointing towards me in the crotch of his jeans." Finally, the fetishistic qualities of the car, the crash, and technology in general activate Ballard's already latent homosexuality and facilitate the same-sex encounter with Vaughan.

Up to a certain point, the film version of Crash consistently supports and even enhances this homoerotic attraction. For example, the scene in which Ballard's wife talks him to orgasm by invoking a homoerotic fantasy of Vaughan leaves a different impression in the book. The narrator inserts into their kinky dialog several passages that emphasize to the reader that he is actually quite indifferent to the homoerotic fantasy initiated by his wife. By contrast, the film systematically cuts these passages. The book also emphasizes that Ballard, when he finally does have sex with Vaughan, is under the influence of drugs administered by the latter. This additional effort by the author to distance himself from the same-sex act, however, is missing from the film. On one level, then, the film seems to strengthen the book's broader philosophy of experimentation and validate its search for new sexual frontiers.

Those viewers who pin their liberatory faith in Crash's techno-porn exclusively on its same-sex aspects will be disappointed, however, by the way in which the film visualizes the sex scene between Ballard and Vaughan. In contrast to the graphic nature of the other sex scenes, this one is extremely obscured. We do get a beautiful close-up of Ballard and Vaughan kissing, but otherwise the scene is characterized by long shots, extremely low-key lighting, and a camera which tracks behind a beam, thus obscuring our view most of the time. The scene also appears to be heavily edited, possibly against Cronenberg's will, and thus makes clear that even science fiction is produced in the real (read: political) world.

By contrast, the scene that features a tryst between Helen Remington and Gabrielle is not obscured at all. Significantly, this scene is also missing from the book and was added by Cronenberg to counterbalance the male scene. Not surprisingly, Cronenberg's camera is much less cautious when depicting the two women having sex. In fact, it is rather voyeuristic and panders to a straight male fantasy. One suspects that Crash's seeming repudiation of bourgeois sex practices, which purportedly accounts for its noholds-barred pornographic egalitarianism, is nevertheless still based on sexual difference and unequal power relations.

On one level, Cronenberg deserves credit for endowing the film's characters with a certain anarchism, a potential for true nihilism that goes beyond a simplistic subversion of bourgeois conditions. When Vaughan speaks to Ballard about the fertilizing effects of car crashes, this fertilization is truly perverse, for it has nothing to do with traditional paradigms of reproductive sex. In this context, the director himself has pointed out that the film's showcasing of rear-entry and anal sex is meant to express its practitioners' disconnectedness from and defiance of the world. It is a metaphor for their profoundly antisocial attitudes. They don't seem to fuck each other so much as they fuck the world from which they're alienated. As rear-entry sex involves a refusal to face the sex partner and to confront his or her humanity, the film uses it as a close analogy to the cult members' practice of crashing one another's cars. This practice, too, involves a calculated refusal to see the crash partner as a human being.

On this level, Crash's metaphoric deployment of anal and rear-entry sex is much more interesting and complex than the treatment it usually receives in contemporary mainstream culture. It is also part of the film's kink appeal and one of the most prominent expressions of its search for new sexual frontiers. Crash thus flaunts anal sex in order to express its hipness and legitimize its cutting-edge nature. As such, it constitutes Crash's already mythical, semi-underground status, promptly borne out by the fact that the film has been banned in Britain and that its U.S. release has been delayed. Even film-industry insiders did not hesitate to call the film "morally reprehensible," which will undoubtedly fuel the interest of at least urban audiences with a hunger for the new, the hip, and the marginal.

On another level, however, the anal and rear-entry sex, of which there is much in both the book and its film adaptation, is still perfectly compatible with a conventional male phallicism that flaunts its frontal assets while hiding its vulnerable behind. What becomes apparent in Crash's unequal treatment of the two same-sex scenes is then further reflected in the way Cronenberg (but also J.G. Ballard) identifies with Ballard-theprotagonist. Significantly, he is the only one who doesn't get fucked, neither in the book nor in the film. The book, at least, grants Vaughan the pleasure of being orally serviced by Ballard before having to bare his behind. Yet there is no question that it is Ballard who will do the fucking. Some may consider this observation an act of PC nitpicking, but, clearly, anal sex here comes to reflect the logic by which Crash deals with sexual difference in general. The male protagonist must always be the penetrator, whether in same-sex acts or during sex with women. For all its sexual frenzy and kink factor, Crash clearly suffers from a fear of anal penetration.

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To be sure, Vaughan, too, sees Ballard only as an object which he transforms in the course of the film. Ballard's lasting interest in car crashes is a mark that Vaughan has permanently left on him. But when Crash gets down to the nitty-gritty details of who does whom, Ballard's erotic engagement with Vaughan is little more than an act of slumming and, as such, a longstanding tradition among hetero-identified men. In addition, this slumming foregrounds the economic differences between both characters. Even though Vaughan deliberately chose his world of small and grimy repair shops, and even if he prefers his habitat of highway flyovers and garage backrooms to a 'proper' abode, the film fashions him in the image of white trash and juxtaposes him to Ballard's clean yuppie world. Vaughan is the embodiment of human and cultural detritus and he also carries the film's most radical sexual elements. He is not only truly bisexual, he is also a sadomasochist, a murderer, and a vampire. Since Vaughan is human waste, the logic of the film dictates that he must get wasted before the end. While this logic doesn't necessarily leave Ballard in a better place after Vaughan's death, it still links Vaughan's function as waste directly to Ballard's phallic impenetrability.

Significantly, this critique of the film's strict regulation of male penetrability must also be made on behalf of women. Initially, it may seem `only natural' that women, in the scenes that feature rear-entry or anal sex, are always on the receiving end. But wouldn't a film such as Crash, with its gleeful celebration of sex without limits, precisely be the kind of forum where this practice is reversed? While women may not have penises, Crash endows them with paraphernalia that can more than adequately replace the male sex organ. But the no-holds-barred philosophy of Crash bars women from using their fetish toys and implements in this specific way. Forsaking the bliss of dildos, sticks, and metal bars wielded by women, Cronenberg and Ballard keep their sphincters fortified.

Considering that both men are innovative, cutting-edge artists, this is hard to understand, especially since they wouldn't have to perform such acts themselves-they merely need to imagine them. With Crash's agenda in mind, they ought to know that the penetration of the male anus arguably implies one of the more radical attacks on bourgeois sexuality. It would significantly add to Crash's future world by making it either more promising or more abhorrent, depending on the eye of the beholder. But Crash, upon arriving at the gates of this future, refuses to pry them open and, instead, beats a hasty retreat into the past.