Crash

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Attempting to understand why they are so aroused by their car wreck, they go to witness one of Vaughan's cult meetings/performance pieces, during which he thoroughly re-creates the car crash that killed James Dean with authentic cars and stunt drivers.

Jeremy Thomas, who later produced Naked Lunch, spoke to Cronenberg about the book and that he should read it.A former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, Robert Vaughan gathers around him a collection of alienated crash victims. S. distributor Fine Line Features, refused to release the film in the United States, going so far as to pull it from an October 1996 release date intended to coincide with the Canadian rollout. I could compare it with Anaïs Nin with her absolute poetry of sex, but to do so would ignore the absolute grotesquerie of Ballard's coupling with mangled machinery. James subsequently has another dalliance with Gabrielle, another of the group members whose legs are clad in restrictive steel braces and who has a vulva-like scar on the back of one of her thighs, an injury suffered in a crash.

An obsession with automobiles and sex are twisted together liked conjoined twins and all of it is laced with a steady dose of pain. J. Hoberman praised the film highly, noting the melancholy overtones and unconventional dry humor that includes cars mimicking human sexual activity or vice versa (for instance, "a close-up of an automatic car window slowly rising, the running-gag equation of tailgating and rear-entry intercourse"). After Vaughan's death, Gabrielle and Helen visit a junkyard, and affectionally embrace while lying in the wreck of Vaughan's car. Jonathan Rosenbaum notes that in the film, human skin is likened to the glitzy, fetishized surface of cars; the camera slides seamlessly from one to the other. So great was Coppola's distaste for the film that, according to Cronenberg, Coppola refused to personally present the award to the director.He needs to stay close enough to get splattered with semen and blood, and drink the erotic cocktail of sex, cars, and pain. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.

Ballard has always had symphorophilia or car-crashsexual fetishism, but after his crash and meeting Vaughan it becomes more than just an obsession, but a full time addiction.e. "Vat's brilliant innit,' rather brilliant as in bright, crystalline, full of light; shining, strong saturation, sharp and clear in tone, finely cut with numerous facets - that brilliant.