Mettle fatigue

Cronenberg's Crash is just a fender bender

by Peter Keough

CRASH. Directed by David Cronenberg. Written by Cronenberg, based on the novel by J.G. Ballard. With James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Deborah Kara Unger, and Rosanna Arquette. A Fine Line Features release. At the Avon and Jane Pickens.

For more than 20 years, from the cerebral schlock horror of Shivers (1975) to the rarefied literary perversities of Naked Lunch (1991), David Cronenberg has explored with shocking imagery and uncompromising insight the blurred boundaries between living and inanimate, human and non-human. So for him to get around to adapting J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel Crash, a sophomoric diatribe on sex, lies, and high-speed collisions that's become a cult classic, seemed, well, like an accident waiting to happen.

You'd have to go back to the late Louis Malle's Damage -- like Crash, all too appropriately titled -- for a more embarrassing or wrong-headed film by a major filmmaker. Fetishism and perversity always make an uncomfortable transition to the screen; if they're taken too seriously or too lightly the effect is the same -- laughter. Although he's outrageous and coldly brilliant, Cronenberg is a humorless filmmaker, and when he confronts head-on the kinky obsessions that haunt his best work, the result is more silly than not.

Sex in Crash is meticulously casual and torturously stylized. James Spader is pallid and fuzzy as James Ballard (yes, it's that kind of novel), a filmmaker of some kind with an open marriage to Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger, who's very good at rolling her eyes back and parting her lips). As the movie opens, Catherine strokes the sleek curves of airplane fuselages, echoing the camera's loving pans à la Kenneth Anger's Kustom Kar Kommandos, as her flight instructor services her from off screen. Meanwhile, husband James is enmeshed in the paraphernalia of his craft while checking out the equipment on his buxom young assistant. Back home, watching the torrent of traffic pass on the freeway below their balcony, they compare notes on orgasms.

Technology, you see, has become grafted onto carnality, alienating people from one another and their own experience. In other words, these people need more than a good lay to knock them out of their chi-chi malaise. James gets a wake-up call of sorts when, driving home buried in papers from work, he loses control of his car, which leaps the median strip and plows into a car in the opposite lane. The other driver is ejaculated through the windshields of both cars, coming to rest next to James on the front seat. In the following stillness, James gazes from his bent hood ornament to the imprint it has made on the dead man's hand.

It's one of the few moments of the stark, surreal poetry that suffuses a film like Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, but it's effaced by a cut to the other car's surviving passenger, a stunned, vaguely come-hither Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter, who metamorphoses in the course of the film into something that looks as if it had fallen off a charm bracelet). Fumbling at her seat belt, Helen somehow exposes a boob.

Perhaps the movie should be called Crass. That quality is embodied in the character of Vaughan (a charmless Elias Koteas), a car-crash groupie who hangs around hospitals and stalks accident victims after they are released, photographing them when they inevitably succumb to having sex in a car. He's got a couple of live ones in James and Helen, who after some initial stiffness gravitate to one another and engage in rote-like coital re-creations of their first encounter.

Catherine goes along for the ride; her fate is to be pawed and mauled by everyone. Vaughan gives her especially rough treatment. As her husband docilely chauffeurs them (in a 1963 Lincoln, the same model that Kennedy was assassinated in, but that's another obsession), he unloads on her the ugly bruises and lacerations that James later fondles in one of the film's creepier, more misogynistic scenes.

Then there's Vaughan's "project," which involves re-enactments of celebrity accidents such as James Dean's and Jayne Mansfield's, and tailgating people on the freeway. One wishes that one of the latter had been Robert Loggia from David Lynch's Lost Highway, or that Cronenberg had taken on a little more of Lynch's goofy ingenuousness.

In one relatively light-hearted scene, Rosanna Arquette -- a crippled crash victim tricked out in a leather brace/dominatrix outfit that looks like a costume reject from Dune -- flirts with a salesman in a Mercedes dealership. More such outré absurdity would inject into this allegory of flesh and steel some of the blood it needs. Otherwise it's more about mechanical than human failure. Lacking compulsion, Cronenberg's film is just repetition. It may crash, but it doesn't burn.