"Crash"

What kind of film could make James Ferman - head of the British Board of Film Classification during the scandals over Natural Born Killers (US, Oliver Stone, 1994), The Last Temptation of Christ (US, Martin Scorsese, 1988) and the ‘video nasties’ - unhesitatingly name it as the biggest challenge he ever faced?

The answer is not the visceral gore-fest you may expect. It contains a lot of sex, but the explicit detail of contemporary European films like Idiotern (Denmark, Lars von Trier, 1998) or Romance (France, Catherine Breillat, 1999) is absent. There are not many elements of David Cronenberg’s 1996 film Crash where it could be said to be breaking new ground in what can be shown on screen. What we have instead is a case much like that of A Clockwork Orange (UK, Stanley Kubrick, 1971), where a combination of disturbing content and even more disturbing ideas produces a different, more ideological censorship scandal.

BBFC

You could, perhaps, have seen it coming. Famously, J.G. Ballard's source novel was rejected by one publisher with the note 'This author is beyond psychiatric help'. (Waterman, 1996) It reworks ideas that had appeared in Ballard's work as far back as his 1969 story Crash!, in a story about James Ballard, an emotionally numbed man in an open marriage who finally finds his thrill when he meets Dr. Robert Vaughn.

Vaughn's previous career was as a TV scientist, but now he has made his greatest discovery - what Ballard describes as 'a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology' (Ballard, 1973, 13). The technology in question is cars. Vaughn believes automobile accidents can be a sexual encounter, the rear-end collision as penetration, the wound as a new orifice. 

Even Cronenberg admitted that, when he first read Ballard's book, 'I read half of it and I put it away because it was disturbing'. (Grünberg, 2006, 138) Yet fans will recognise a lot of shared ideas between Cronenberg and Ballard. Vaughn is a natural successor to the distant scientist figures Ron Mlodzik played in Cronenberg's earliest films, or perhaps Brian O'Blivion - a more literal kind of TV personality than Vaughn - in Videodrome (Canada, David Cronenberg, 1983). 

Even the most notorious scene, where James Spader's Ballard sexually penetrates the wounded leg of the disabled Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), finds echo in his next film eXistenZ (Canada, David Cronenberg, 1999). The core plot of eXistenZ, after all, revolves around Jude Law's character learning to accept being penetrated. This time, though, it was a mutant orifice being penetrated by a bio-tech tentacle, so the film was released to no controversy whatsoever.

Crash was less fortunate. It received the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, but this was reportedly because one prominent juror barred it from winning the Palme d'Or. Stepping up to receive his award, Cronenberg noticed that jury president Francis Ford Coppola refused to hand him the award in person. Other noteworthy non-fans included Ted Turner, who apparently intervened personally to prevent Fine Line Features releasing Crash in the USA. A theatre owner in Oslo refused to screen it, citing her husband's recent car accident. 

Nothing, though, can compare to the pile-up Crash caused in the United Kingdom. This may be less about the film and more about the campaign waged against it by the Daily Mail, which reduced BBFC examiner Margaret Ford to tears when the paper's reporters began doorstepping her. But there is no doubt that Crash is some (internally) combustible material. 

Those wishing to get a taste of the censorship campaign in full flow should head to YouTube, where you can find an edition of the BBC discussion show Heart of the Matter devoted to controversies around Crash and Visions of Ecstasy (UK, Nigel Wingrove, 1989). The Daily Mail's Christopher Tookey, who spearheaded his newspaper's crusade against Cronenberg, appears alongside the Evening Standard's Alexander Walker, who despised the film but did not wish for it to be censored. 

Francis Wheen, writing in the Guardian, summarised Tookey's argument as follows: 'if we are allowed to see Crash, thousands of us will immediately yearn to have sex in a multiple pile-up on the M25. If Tookey believes that, he'll believe anything'. (Wheen, 1996) Tookey denied that he believed such a thing, but his appearance on Heart of the Matter proves that he absolutely did. His argument switches contradictorily between dismissing Crash as a boring arty film which no-one wants to see, and fretting that the film is also so compelling and magnetic that viewers will be unable to resist recreating it. You may recall the eighth point of Umberto Eco's oft-quoted essay Ur-Fascism, that in fascist rhetoric 'the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak' (Eco, 1995)

It wasn't just the expected voices who found Cronenberg's film alienating. Perhaps the oddest review comes from Alastair Dalton in The Scotsman, who confidently declared that Crash 'certainly will not entice people to go out crashing cars for sexual gratification.' (Dalton, 1997) That would be a thoroughly level-headed point to make in defence of Cronenberg's film, but it occurs as the conclusion to a piece entitled 'Crashing Bore is All Talk, No Action'. The implication is that Crash would be better if it was what Tookey accused it of being - a full-throated advertisement for amoral sexual violence. It is hard not to feel that Cronenberg's work is being lambasted for not being the thing it is pretending to be.

The thing it is pretending to be - and this is particularly obvious now, looking back through decades of changing fashions - is a 1990s erotic thriller. Every stylistic ingredient of Crash, from Peter Suschitzky's moody neo-noir cinematography to the wailing guitar solos in Howard Shore's score, is speaking the language that 1990s Hollywood used to arouse audiences, but it is being applied to a fetish no-one has. 

Yet it also makes a perverse kind of sense. There are countless songs, advertisements and films that eroticise fast cars, and there is also a broad consensus that danger is sexy as well. The erotic appeal of stars like James Dean and Jayne Mansfield is also a thanatopic appeal; thanks to car accidents, they’re forever young. Surely combining these elements would result in something even sexier? But it doesn’t. If Crash repels, this is evidence that its satire is working.

The sex scenes are constant but antiseptic. It’s true that Cronenberg removed some of the more explicit detail in Ballard’s novel. Yet even compared to works in his own canon, this is nothing compared to the violent orgies in Shivers (Canada, David Cronenberg, 1975) or the variously tender and aggressive marital sex in A History of Violence (US, David Cronenberg, 2005). Crash’s sex scenes look much more choreographed, a lot of writhing and back-arching with little spontaneity. 

This is entirely intentional; James and Catherine are drawn into Vaughn's world not because they're impulsive adrenaline junkies, but because a car crash is the only thing that can shake them out of their blank complacency. Even in the aftermath of a particularly brutal crash, James wonders 'why are the police taking this so seriously?', a level of indifference which borders on psychopathy. (Readers of Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test will know Crash was one of the films used as research by Tony, a man faking mental illness in order to get a more lenient sentence)

Perhaps part of the reason why Crash sparked such unease is that people saw such unnerving moral blankness in the world around them. So many moral panics of the 1990s betray a fear of directionless nihilism, the diffidence of slacker culture suddenly becoming weaponised. Now that the West was comfortable, without war or struggle, how far would people go to feel alive? Remembering this surrounding discourse explains why so many apparently reasonable, professional adults spent twelve months across 1996 and 1997 terrified that Britons were about to start crashing their cars for kicks.

The most interesting participant on the Heart of the Matter is Christina Rees, later the Reverend Christina Rees CBE. She is the one who links Crash to the then-growing trend for piercing, tattooing or sadomasochism - a connection that Cronenberg himself acknowledged, inventing the detail of Vaughn's steering-wheel tattoo to heighten the theme. (Rodley, 1996, 200) But getting a tattoo is not the same thing as smashing into a Volvo. Cronenberg and Ballard know this; this is part of their central irony. Their opponents appeared not to. 

The campaign against Crash was founded on such a preposterous premise that it had nowhere to go but self-parody. The Daily Mail exhorted their readers to boycott Columbia TriStar's parent company Sony: worth recalling, the next time the paper fulminates about Stop Funding Hate. Tookey overshot the mark to even more embarrassing effect, as Cronenberg notes with some pleasure:

...it got very ridiculous, with one guy writing about how sex with cripples was disgusting. And he thought he had everybody on his side, he was writing for a very conservative paper, and then of course he got many letters from the disabled [...] they started to make Rosanna Arquette's character a heroic figure, because she is crippled and disabled, but she is still fully sexual and she is going to enjoy sex. (Grünberg, 2006, 141)

This response is echoed in the most fascinating by-product of the whole circus, Martin Barker, Jane Arthurs and Ramaswami Harindranath's book The Crash Controversy: Censorship Campaigns and Film Reception. Here, a panel of research subjects do what Britons were so nearly forbidden to do: they watch Crash. Some of the most positive responses come from people who have experienced car accidents themselves, and even those who disliked the film are spurred into productive thought by it:

...normally disabled people are sort of disabled and in a wheelchair and I feel very sorry for them and that's it. I mean, there's no sort of sexuality involved [...] initially I remember thinking that I'd be quite offended if I'd been disabled, and that's a point I've thought about in more detail and thought maybe I wouldn't, actually. Maybe it's quite exciting. (Barker, Arthurs & Harindranath, 2001: 130)

In the end, Crash was released in the UK on June 6th 1997, over a year after its Cannes premiere. It was quickly discovered to be less a destroyer of civilisations and more what it always was - a haunting, darkly funny and beautifully acted drama that is nevertheless of limited interest to anyone uninvested in Cronenberg's running themes and ideas. The poor box-office was heralded as a victory by the Mail, who, Barker notes, decided that 'the British public, about whose vulnerability they had been panicking for a year, suddenly proved to have the "commonsense" necessary to reject the film.' (Barker, 2002)

In fact, the film faded from view for a very different reason. Much as 9/11 finally forced the British press to focus on something other than the Brass Eye Special (Channel 4, 2001), Crash's time as a tabloid obsession was ended by another, even more sensational car crash in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris at the end of August.

SOURCES:

Ballard, J.G., Crash, Jonathan Cape, 1973

Barker, Martin, Arthurs, Jane and Harindranath, Ramaswami, The Crash Controversy: Censorship Campaigns and Film Reception, Wallflower Press, 2001

Barker, Martin, 'Crashing Out', Screen, Vol. 43 Issue 1, 2002

Dalton, Alastair, 'Crashing Bore is All Talk, No Action', The Scotsman, 27 March 1997

Eco, Umberto, 'Ur-Fascism', The New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995

Grünberg, Serge, David Cronenberg, Plexus, 2006

Johnson, Brian D., 'Waiting for Crash: Is Ted Turner playing film censor?', Maclean's, 10 November 1996

Rodley, Chris, Cronenberg on Cronenberg, Faber and Faber, p.194

Sterling, Bruce, 'David Cronenberg mulling over JG Ballard's Crash', Wired, 27 November 2015

Waterman, Ivan, 'Ballard makes a pile out of pile-ups', The Independent, 15 June 1996

Wheen, Francis, 'Crash, Bang, Wallop', The Guardian, 27 November 1996