The Cronenberg Crawl: The Bummer Fetish Edition

Crash (1988): In a movie only slightly more believable than the 2005 drama of the same name, a group of car crash fetishists watch their lives donut out of control as they obsessively fuel their sexual compulsions.

For those of you who enjoyed living in a world where no one had conceived of wound sex, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but David Cronenberg has not only thought of it but has also filmed his actors doing it. After about three quarters of this movie’s running time, we are treated to a scene in which the enterprising James Spader gives a fellow car crash fetishist the hamstring stretch of a lifetime when he makes inventive use of a puncture scar in her thigh. Unfortunately for this movie’s shock value,  by the time we get to this highly improbable orgasm we’ve seen so many tableaus and varieties of vehicle lovin’ in the brisk 100-minute running time that Spader’s decision to fall short and hang a hard right on his way up a lady’s leg barely registers as a ping on the audience’s radar. This movie’s plot does not progress. It really just descends. 

"Ouch."

Meet James (James Spader) and Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) Ballard. They’re married but flexible. In the opening scene we see that they have a lot of sex with a lot of people, and they don’t like it. They’re bored. “Maybe next time,” Catherine says hopelessly, after one more anticlimactic tryst. But moments later, through sheer bad luck, Spader make the unhappy discovery that he is extremely aroused by the experience of wrecking his own car. He discovers this by plowing into Helen Remington’s (Holly Hunter) vehicle and killing her husband. Lucky for James; Helen likes it too. Joined by fate and and a shared burden of sexual inclinations that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, they set out into the underground world of extreme fetishism and test their boundaries and limits therein. They meet more car crash enthusiasts. They recreate famous car crashes. They watch videos of crash test dummies and hook up after watching them. They troll the highways for car crashes, have sex with car crash victims, hook up in parking garages, and so forth.

And that’s the movie.

There’s really nothing else to talk about. Their compulsion to have dangerous car-related sex just finds crazier and crazier outlets and manifests itself in newer and stranger sequences. So what’s the point? The coldness and misery with which the film ends (James and Catherine having bloodied dispassionate sex on a highway median) seems intended to preach a message too obvious to be the point of the movie: it sucks to have a car crash fetish. That’s ridiculous. Everyone knows, whether they’ve thought about it or not, that it would suck to have a car crash fetish. So what’s the point? That the modern world’s obsession with sex can be ratcheted up to dizzying new heights, but at the end of the day, meaningless sex is still meaningless? That all the hype and distraction in the world can’t comfort a disquieted soul? That even sex filtered through the wild lens of adrenaline eventually gets old?

If so, it’s a good message, and, I’d argue, a true one. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” But just because it’s true doesn’t mean it makes for good film.

"You know what's cheaper than car insurance? Vibrators."

What you have, then, is one hundred minutes of malcontents showing you just how dull and unfulfilling a life run by excess and compulsion can be. And when it’s done, you feel dull and unfulfilled. Mission accomplished, I guess, but I still wouldn’t recommend this to my friends.