Sex and death and porn and traffic. I've finally found another Cronenberg I like, and for very personal reasons. I have an extreme disdain for cars, and avoid them wherever possible. One of the key motivators for moving to a small-ish town was so that I could walk everywhere. I witnessed a horrendous car crash when I was very young; I was only 50 meters away and that sort of thing stays with you. Ever since I have had an intense fear of driving, whenever I am behind the wheel I get incredibly anxious and agitated. Call it whatever you want but for me it's the huge power that comes with steering heavy machinery that causes me such inner turmoil.

I couldn't help but think of my own visceral emotions while watching Crash (1996), and how cool it is that there's this film that actually captures how I feel about the automobile. That the corporate push against mass transit throughout the 20th century was always tied to the erotic. Sex sells everything but growing up in the 90's, every second guy I knew wanted to get his license because he saw it as a prerequisite to getting a girlfriend. I believe that tethering consumption to intimate relationships at such a formative age is... problematic. But that barely scratches the surface when it comes to what Crash is playing with.

As well as tying crashes to sexual encounters, Ballard and Cronenberg conflate bodies with cars themselves. There's this beautiful dance in the film where at every turn we're reminded that the carnage is completely intertwined with sex which, at its base, is as mangled and sideways as any 9-car-pileup. No one's monogamous, boundaries are fluid, everyone's a voyeur and very, very horny. Crash victims become machines themselves as they increasingly need to rely on prosthetics to remain able, and you start to think that in the collision, the car becomes them and they become the car, the organic and the mechanical collide. But all of that does nothing to satiate their lust; they must veer closer and closer to total annihilation to get off. And in doing so, merge more and more with these cold machinations.

Well, what does it all mean? To me, Crash is sort of like a modern parable, it's as simple as that. You could dive into semiotics and simulacras all you like, but at the end of the day it's Ballard's heavy warning, telling the audience to rethink their position on how they relate to each other.

A weak 9, because a strong 8 doesn't do justice to how this one makes me feel in my bones.

P.S. You won't believe this but this very same day, a car accident happened just outside my house. Everyone got out okay, but honestly unreal that it happened today of all days.

I don't have a whole lot of experience with David Cronenberg's films and this is the first of his I've watched in a long time. Pretty obvious with the symbolism he was after but this isn't something I particularly engaged with despite the committed performances from the cast, although Elias Koteas was creepy good. No real plot with this one and by the end, while a unique movie for sure, not really sure I have much desire to watch again (at least anytime soon). **3.0/5**

One thing has to be said in my fellow Canadian David Cronenberg's favour--At least for the first 25-or-so years of his filmmaking career, he has always been one of the most surprising and brilliant minds of 'body-related horror', and from every conceivable angle. What other mind--out of 7 billion possibilities--could have come up with this, the combining of erotic pleasure with car crashing? He sure must have been an interesting catch in his early dating years, for the adventurous women out there...