Thoughts
on the book by J.G. Ballard
Going into "Crash"
for the first time, I already had a distant familiarity with director David
Cronenberg's 1996 film adaptation, which, even without the benefit of having read
the book for myself, had always struck me as a truncated if still suitably
provocative palimpsest of Ballard's text. Having now finished the book I'm
perhaps better able to contrast and compare the experience of the two versions,
with Cronenberg's film now appearing weaker, more inert and vastly more limited
in its scope, imagery and psychology. This isn't to say that the Cronenberg
film doesn't stand on its own merits, but rather, to do justice to the book, as
an actual experience, the resulting film adaptation would have to be genuinely
pornographic in order to fully capture how visceral, prescient and
transformative the psychological study at the centre of Ballard's story
actually is.
So much of the book's
ability to confound, provoke and even disgust its audience, comes from the
central conception of its characters finding sexual gratification through road
accidents. While Cronenberg's film was controversial at the time of its initial
release - actually generating the kind of ultra-conservative "ban this
sick filth" tabloid outrage campaigns that are now the rhetoric of
middle-class liberals afraid of being challenged or upset - it was too
restrained, too polished even to put into images what the words of the book so
daringly suggest.
Crash [J.G. Ballard,
1973]:
Throughout the book Ballard
describes vehicular atrocity as if transcribing sex scenes from a hardcore porn
film; finding something in the crumpled ruins of chrome and steel that's evocative
of a genuine orgy of flesh and physicality. The fetishistic treatment of the
automobile - in which the author goes to extraordinary lengths to describe each
curve and contour of a car's bodywork (or the flashing lights and dials of the
instrument binnacle) as if describing the corporeal form a current companion -
is contrasted by the graphic physical descriptions of the human body locked in copulation.
The association that Ballard creates between the two - which forms the central
crux of the text - is intentionally graphic so as to humanise the automobile
and to imbue it with an inherent physicality, while at the same time
dehumanising the actual characters; reducing them to physical objects defining
space.
For the protagonists of
the book, who each seem to get drawn into the same strange auto-erotic delusion
of self-discovery, it isn't just sex and death, or sex and injury detail that
becomes the main preoccupation, but an actual union between the car and the
human body. More specifically, the physical and psychological symbiosis between
the car, and the destruction of it, and the human body and its own self-destruction.
What Cronenberg's film
wasn't able to depict was the obvious associations between the visceral
contrast of engine fluids and bodily fluids spurting out across vinyl interiors,
or across the wet tarmac of an accident site. The contrast of the car, not just
as a legitimate sex object, or icon of fetishisation, but the crash itself as a
genuine act of intercourse. Ballad's book sees no distinction between the car
crash and the act of coitous; they're both, in a way, presented as perverse
encounters, of flesh against flesh, or metal against metal. The physical coming
together of the two forms of the mechanical and the human, the organic and the
synthetic. Penetrations across different forms.
Crash [David Cronenberg,
1996]:
One area where
Cronenberg's film does arguably improve upon Ballad's source material is in its
ending, which manages to convey the sense of hopelessness implicit in the
book's image of civilisation; that existential, almost pre-apocalyptic feeling
of dread and dissolution, of societal collapse. As the world and highways of
the film become less and less populated, more empty and deserted, it's almost
as if the disintegration of these characters' lives and their acts of
transgression and self-destruction are a part of a wider cultural shift that's
effecting the entire world. It captures the very 'Ballardian' notion of
technology as a kind of virus or contagion; something that infects people, and
drives them towards madness or acts of irrational violence. The ending of
Cronenberg's film is fittingly absurd but grounded in an emotional
plausibility. It has something tragic about it, suggesting the physical reunification
between man and woman, husband and wife. It's much better and more affecting
even than the book's ending, which I won't spoil, but which seems weakly
symbolic by comparison.
However the film misses much
of what makes the book relevant beyond its obvious sensationalism; the literal "car-crash"
nature of its imagery and plot. For instance it never really feels like a
character study. Because it loses the first person narrative of the book, its
unable to place us in the thought-process of its central character. In the
book, so much of the story can be read as kind of personal chronicle of
obsession and mental collapse. There's an irony and self-awareness to the voice
of this narrator, which is lacking in the film. There's an element of
unreliability, which forces the reader to question how much of the book is a
fantasy on the part of the protagonist, or if it's an actual attempt to make
sense of something as destructive and irrational as an automobile accident (one
that in this instance has resulted in the death of a fellow driver). In the
book there is a strong implication that the character is dealing with unchecked
issues of guilt, as well as obvious post-traumatic stress disorder, which are each
leading him on a journey of self-destruction. Cronenberg's film lacks this
important aspect while also neutralising the homosexual fantasies of the
character, which he projects onto the scarred, similarly damaged figure of the
obsessive Vaughn; the book's (sort-of) antagonist.
"Crash" isn't a
book that I love as much as Ballard's subsequent works, such as "Concrete
Island" (1974) or "High Rise" (1975), however it does explore
much of the same interest in the collapse of western civilization. It's
engagingly written, grotesque, sometimes funny, but always thought provoking. Its
hints of depression narrative and suggestion of PTSD following an encounter
with violence, disfigurement and death point the way forward to the author's later
hypothetical studies on the fallout from acts
of irrational violence found in the books "Running Wild" (1988), "Super
Cannes" (2000) and "Kingdom Come" (2006).
