In 1996, the Cannes Film Festival opened to pouring rain. The usually sun-soaked red carpet was a washout and the stars of 90s cinema were left to brave the wet weather in their finery. But la pluie would be the least of the festival’s worries – the jury, headed by Francis Ford Coppola, was already bracing itself for a polarizing Palm D’Or entry.
“There was a whiff of scandal in the air a full week before anyone even saw it,” wrote Jonathan Romney of The Guardian in 1996. “In the Cannes press screening, someone in the row behind me muttered a refrain of ‘Sick . . . sick . . .’” The credits rolled to a split chorus of boos and standing ovations. Though it won a ‘Special Jury Prize’, a category offered at the discretion of the jury, some members strongly abstained from this decision; and whilst accounts differ over the specifics, some would have you believe that Coppola refused to hand the winning director the award himself. Post-festival the storm of controversy continued to follow the film, delaying its planned roll-out in US and UK cinemas.
Crash, written, produced and directed by David Cronenberg was considered shocking in 1996, the year that Danny Boyle presented Trainspotting’s zombie babies and tides of shit; a year after David Fincher’s graphic serial killer flick Se7en, and several years after the boom of erotic thrillers like Fatal Attraction (1987) and Basic Instinct (1992). Cinema of the late 80s and early 90s, in an increasingly permissive landscape, was pushing boundaries along the lines of sexuality and violence. Even so, for cultural gatekeepers in 1996, Crash was a step too far. So what was it about this film that rocked the audience and jury so much? And does that same shock factor still hold up 30 years later?
Crash is a film about people who receive sexual gratification from road traffic accidents and is based on a similarly controversial 1973 novel by J.G. Ballard. The story: James Ballard (named by the author after himself) is a bored film producer in an open marriage with pilot-in-training Catherine. The pair use their extra-marital encounters as fuel for their own sexual relations: the first time we see this, James and Catherine both admit to failing to climax in each of their trysts earlier that day. “Maybe the next one,” Catherine suggests.
One night when driving home from work, James collides head on with another car, sparing the driver Helen, but killing her husband in the passenger seat. After a second encounter with Helen in the eerily empty airport hospital, they begin an affair and she introduces James to Robert Vaughn – the ringleader of what can only be described as a car-crash fetishist polycule. Everything from photographing existing accidents to staging them is within the purview of these folks and from here, we see a long string of car sex scenes in every possible configuration; guy on girl, girl on girl, guy on guy.
In many ways Crash does not deviate very strongly from its contemporaries. Cronenberg resuscitated Ballard’s novel with a steely pre-millennium ennui: where Ballard’s prose sparkles in rainbows of scar tissue and bodily fluids, Cronenberg’s script is stern, laconic. Dialogue is staccato:
CATHERINE
I can’t believe you’ve done this.
KAREN
This is the exact same car as your
old one, isn’t it?
CATHERINE
Yes, it is.
(to James)
Are you planning to have another car
crash?
JAMES
I’m not thinking about the crash at
all.
Scenes unfold in lonely pseudo-third spaces: empty hospitals, parking lots, the highways looping around Toronto Airport. The colours are cold. Attention is repeatedly drawn to the connection between body and car. Leather jacket, leather seats. Bare flesh on chrome, stockinged thighs reflected in passenger windows. There is an underlying current of post-modern alienation that is never quite named: on a spectrum of subtext between Fight Club (1999) and Lost Highway (1997), Crash sits just below the Lynch and a head above the Fincher. “It has to be a cautionary tale,” remarked Cronenberg of his adaptation. “If not, it’s a psychopathic statement.”
Perhaps it is the absence of passion that makes Crash unsettling. In recent years, online commentators have identified the ‘Puriteen’: a small but vocal online minority who – both on the left and on the right – are shifting towards an attitude of ‘sex-negativity’. This discourse is characterised by a central debate of sex scenes in movies, and whether or not they are ‘relevant to the plot’. But in Crash, sex is the plot: a cavalcade of empty fetishistic vignettes. Sexual acts are often performed with the penetrating partner entering from behind, eyes averted. Rarely does anyone climax. The film is a string of frustrated, insatiable, relentless copulation as devoid of meaning as it is of enjoyment. As Adam Naymer wrote for The Ringer in 2020 about the film’s initial reception: “the only thing scarier to cultural gatekeepers than a movie that was too sexy was a movie filled with sex that wasn’t conventionally or marketably sexy at all.” It would almost feel sex-negative if there weren’t so damn much of it.
The same goes for the film’s treatment of violence. It’s not just the car crashes that give Crash its power to shock in 2026. For one, whilst road traffic accidents still happen, they are fewer – and in the UK have decreased by almost a third since the novel’s publication. Cronenberg’s James makes a sly reference to this after his crash: “After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda, it’s almost a relief to have found myself in an actual accident.”
As a result, the car crash doesn’t have the same cultural potency that it did when Ballard was writing in 1973. In his imagination, the car crash is a uniquely modern concern, an avatar of the 20th century in all its guts and glory. In his novel, Vaughn is drawn to the car crash for its association with celebrity, spectacle and legacy, something that is weaker but still present in the adaptation: Cronenberg’s Vaughn and friends still stage the famous car crashes of James Dean and Jane Mansfield, reflecting on how their fiery deaths cemented them as legends. This idea was still palpable in the 90s – after all, just a year later, Princess Diana would die in precisely this manner.
But in the 21st century (outside of Formula 1 racing) the concept of a ‘famous car crash’ has all but evaporated from public consciousness. This is not to say that we no longer care about car crashes. It is to say that the motivations of Cronenberg’s car crash fetishists are even more inscrutable to us now than they were in 1996. The car crash is no longer a glamorous way to die: and that makes the whole thing so much worse.
The few crash sequences in Crash are uncannily mundane. There’s none of the action-flick hyperrealism: cars don’t soar through the air or slide improbably into walls; no cartoon logic permits the injured to get up and walk away. Instead crashes happen as they do in real life – briefly, horribly. Often, they happen off-camera altogether and attention is drawn instead to the aftermath: shattered glass, bloodstained tarmac, ambulance lights. All the while, Vaughn, the mouthpiece for whatever is supposed to be behind the car crash fetish goes back and forth on his rationale. He says it’s about “the reshaping of the human body by modern technology,” – then waves this away as “a crude sci-fi concept,” preferring instead to call his work an exercise in “psychopathology”. Even he doesn’t seem to know what the point of any of this is.
Vaughn might not be interested in the “reshaping of the human body by technology” but Cronenberg certainly is. He delights in showing it to us: fishnets worn under steel leg braces, medical tattoos over scar tissue, jagged stitches where torn flesh kisses itself. The car is a machine that is over 100 years old and is so unwieldy when compared to the microcomputers of the modern day it scarcely feels like ‘technology’ at all – but this almost proves the point of how close our relationship to machines has become. If Crash is, as Cronenberg says, a cautionary tale, we haven’t listened.
And so 30 years on, the film shocks and awes for the same reason it was reviled and celebrated in 1996: the circular, nihilistic pointlessness of the whole thing. We haven’t moved on. We haven’t learned anything. We’re just driving around the highways, looking for a place to get off.
