David Cronenberg’s Crash was labelled “beyond the bounds of depravity” when it first hit British cinemas at the London Film Festival in 1996. Francis Ford Coppola refused to hand the Special Jury Prize directly to Cronenberg at Cannes despite his position as Head of the Jury. British tabloid media targeted Crash with a sustained campaign to “Ban The Car Crash Sex Film” from cinemas. However, the British Board of Film Classification concluded the explicit content was no stronger than in many other features. So, what is it about Crash that irked people so much, and would it slide today?
Crash follows sexually unsatisfied filmmaker James (James Spader), who, after being in an auto collision, discovers a community of people erotically fixated on car crashes. The film is filled with sex, the first three scenes being just that. Whilst we normally see sex as the pinnacle of passion and human connection, the appearance of the film itself, however, is cold, colourless, and lifeless; sterile hospital hallways and wards, abandoned brutalist parking lots, and unending highways.
The world of Crash is our world, dominated by technology, an inherently asexual thing. These contradictions between sex and technology, human and inhuman, hot and cold, are at the heart of the film. Sex is clinical; it takes place on a concrete balcony overlooking a freeway, or on the metallic bonnet of a jet. The characters try to locate passion in the absurdity of combining two extremes. As Cronenberg describes it, the film is an “existentialist romance” about how old forms of love and sexuality are no longer enough to satisfy us in a hyper-technological, atomised world. This message seems prophetic 30 years later, given the omnipresence of pornography and the growing overlap between artificial intelligence and intimate relationships.
This begs the question, how is Crash to be received in today’s world?
It’s hard to say whether Crash would be received with a similar barrage of condemnation from the public since our zeitgeist’s approach to sex is rife with contradiction. Sexual freedom is generally accepted in mainstream culture (at least in comparison to an age where homosexual and premarital sex were considered taboo), but at the same time, it’s no secret that Gen Z has less sex than any other generation. Consequently, a kind of liberal puritanism has risen.
There’s been recurring discourse about the necessity of sex scenes in film on X and TikTok, often from women condemning the unnecessary sexualisation of female bodies. And I can’t blame them, given how women have been sexually mistreated on filmsets over time. However, post-MeToo, intimacy co-ordinators have been a necessity on film sets, and, in the correct hands, like Cronenberg’s, sex scenes can not only be enriching to a film, but they themselves can tell the story, as in the case with Crash. So, I must insist that we don’t ‘horseshoe-theory’ ourselves back to the Hays Code.
Catch a showing of Crash at Bruntsfield’s Cameo Picturehouse on 15 and 16 February.
Photo by Thomas Hawk on Openverse