Introduction
David Cronenberg’s 1996 film Crash follows a cast of characters who commune over their shared sexual fantasies surrounding car crashes. Based on J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel of the same name, Crash is a notoriously explicit and visceral experience of cinema, described as a “forbiddingly frigid piece of esoteric erotica” by Variety’s Todd McCarthy.[1] In fact, the film received a one-time Special Jury Prize at Cannes “For Originality, For Daring, and For Audacity.”[2] The film (and novel) have been theorized through methods of psychoanalysis focusing on characters’ internal paraphilic drives; but, as I suggest, the film offers an opportunity to understand the impact of the external on characters’ psychology through functions of urbanity and the night.
The main challenge of Crash is that extreme narrative ambiguity, lack of character expression, and dislocated settings make it difficult for the viewer to contextualize the plot. The film explores life on the outskirts of a North American city, and how proximity to an urban center has the affinity to alienate people from one another. In the film, a direct correlation is made between a lack of intimacy between the two protagonists, Ballard (James Spader) and Catherine (Deborah Unger), and their alienation from the urban environment. Through a series of increasingly intense interactions with a group of people who fixate and are sexually stimulated by the event of a car crash, Ballard and Catherine begin to remedy their intimacy issues. Their reconnection is prompted by the contrast of day and night; nighttime illumination and darkness enchant their experiences with each other and the members of their newfound community.
In this essay, I will explore how Ballard and Catherine’s landscape alienates them from one another via the presence of freeways. Then, I will look at how the car crash becomes a form of intimacy and connection in their environment. Finally, I will examine the nighttime as an enchanted space that ultimately changes Ballard and Catherine’s relationship for the better.
Chapter 1 : The Canadian Urban Context
While the novel Crash takes place in London, UK, the film was shot just outside of Toronto. Toronto is the fourth largest city in North America by population.[3] As opposed to Montreal and Vancouver, whose city limits are more well defined by the fact that they are encapsulated (for the most part) by water, Toronto’s metropolitan region spreads northwards. The unbounded nature of Toronto’s urban limits has encouraged a large landscape of “exurbs”, or extra-urban areas, that have little independent cultural significance besides their periphery to the city.[4] Crash mainly occurs in one of these unnamed Toronto “exurbs”; the landscape is really only visualized as made up of vast freeways. Thus, Ballard and Catherine exist in a liminal space that offers little stimulation besides the traffic outside.
A 2012 report titled “The Life and Death of Urban Highways” prepared by members of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy highlights the alienating nature of freeways in North America.[5] The forward, written by former Milwaukee Urban City Planning Director Peter J. Park, is seminal to highlighting the divisiveness produced by urban freeways (also known as highways or expressways) that Cronenberg visualizes in the setting of Crash. Park notes that “Massive public spending on freeways in the last century reduced the capacity of cities to connect people and support culture and commerce”.[6] Hence, freeways have caused the “demolition, dislocation, and disconnection of neighborhoods” in cities, “creat[ing] barriers that erode vitality—the very essence of cities”.[7] Indeed, while freeways are at once routes that maximize flow and mobility, they are also physically divisive and disruptive to the urban environment, causing relative alienation and isolation for those outside of the city. In Crash, which was made two decades after the heaviest development of the Toronto freeway system, it is made obvious even Ballard and Catherine's relationship with one another has been eroded by their exurban environment.
Exurban Intimacy
Ballard and Catherine’s high-rise condo in exurban Toronto has a top-down view of the constantly flowing highway network outside (see fig. 1). The condo is the pinnacle of their alienation: Cronenberg uses flyover shots of the busy highways to imply Ballard and Catherine’s dislocation from the city and ground below. Their home is only ever depicted from the inside or the balcony, high in the sky. Rarely does a concrete image of the landscape appear on screen. The de-situated nature of their condo establishes the idea that they exist in between these freeway networks - which are also networks of people, information, and objects that they cannot fully grasp. Thus, Ballard and Catherine’s home is environmentally fragmented and isolated from their urban setting, which rears its head figuratively in their intimate relationship.
In the opening sequence of the film, three vignettes occur in succession that hone in on the alienated intimacy that permeates Ballard and Catherine’s relationship. The sequence begins with Catherine in an enclosed airplane hangar in white lingerie. She holds her breast to the metal of a small plane; as she leans up against it, she arches her back, her eyes staring emptily into space. She is approached by a nondescript man who begins to perform oral sex on her from behind. No words are exchanged between the two. Then, there is a cut to Ballard giving a nondescript woman oral sex, also from behind, in his office at the film studio where he is a director. With little dialogue in each scene, the adulterous sexual acts both Ballard and Catherine perform are bereft of true intimacy. They are not shown engaging with their mystery partners emotionally, just sexually. In the next cut of the sequence, Catherine stands on the balcony of their high-rise condo, overlooking the highway in front of them. She raises her skirt and Ballard approaches her as they discuss in hushed tones the lack of pleasure they each experienced during their sexual escapades during the day. Ballard begins to have sex with Catherine from behind as they both look over the highway. The camera moves over their shoulders into a birds-eye view of the eight-lane highway, busy with cars heading home as dusk settles in (see fig. 2). “Maybe the next one,” Catherine whispers.
Cronenberg centralizes the highway as a character just as much as he does with both Ballard and Catherine. He intertwines the ideas of this transitory space with their issues of intimacy and alienation from one another; positing that the highway is at once a cause and metaphor of their disconnected relationship. He makes it evident that sex and intimacy are not conflateable in this cinematic world; also proposing that sex is not entirely satisfactory or pleasurable for Ballard and Catherine. The two may have sex, but they are not truly connecting; a sentiment pinnacled by the final cut of the sequence, where the highway becomes the backdrop, and then the figure, of their lovemaking. Like their bodies, the cars may be unified, moving together, but they do not connect until one of them crashes.
In this opening sequence, the stream of traffic is equated to the transitory, streaming, and hyper-informational psychological nature of the postmodern city that seeps into the exurban environment (with much less bravado). The highway is like an internet cable, a physical carrier of abstract information, incomprehensible to one person alone. It spreads out from the center into indiscernible horizons, carrying information in the form of people, objects, ideas, and intentions of being on the road. This postmodern quality exacerbates the sense of exurban alienation in the film; the highway is the detached spirit of the bustling city nearby, but nothing like the real thing. Ballard and Catherine's condo is alienating in the fact that they are confronted with city traffic while being completely disconnected from the source.
Likewise, the highway is like a busy Manhattan sidewalk. Both are routes that a diverse range of people must navigate in order to move from place to place, bodies decontextualized and flowing. On the Manhattan sidewalk, one confronts the colors, textures, smells, and sounds of other people as they move with the streams of bodies. These viscera permeate the experience of physically moving around a city; rapid rates of information are confronted by the body. On the highway, the viscera is stripped: one interacts solely with the colors, sounds, and smells of other cars, and not people. Although it is still a collective experience of movement, the speed and isolation of the car only grant the driver fleeting, surface-level information delivered at high speeds. Those driving cars on the highway still experience other people and information in a similar way as the city sidewalk (windows, billboards, buildings, the radio) but from a devisceralized, isolated bubble inside their car. Moreover, this information is witnessed through the window or screen. Thus, the highway as a stream of detached information and monotonous collective movement is a symptom of exurban alienation. As the landscape of Crash is primarily made up of these highway networks, Cronenberg’s emphasis on the aligned movement of bodies with no point of connection is made clear visually.
Chapter 2 : Car Crash Intimacy
Immediately following the opening sequence, Ballard is shown driving his car late at night. As he is driving, a shot from just outside his car’s rain-spotted windshield watches him drop a stack of papers on the floor. Leaning down to pick them up, Ballard loses sight of the road and control of the steering wheel. The camera shifts into a head-on profile of the car swerving off of the dark and rainy freeway, over the grass divider, and into an oncoming lane. Ballard’s car immediately collides nose-to-nose with another car. Like a passionate kiss, the cars enmesh in the moment of impact.
Ballard, in a daze, opens his eyes to see a man’s bloodied body catapulted through the windshield into his passenger seat. Looking through his eviscerated windshield, Ballard faces the woman in the passenger seat of the car opposite (who we later discover is Dr. Helen Remmington (Holly Hunter)). She has survived by her seatbelt, which, in an attempt to rip it off, exposes her bare breast to Ballard as she makes eye contact with him through the shattered windshield. This pivotal scene is the conclusion of the opening sequence that establishes the relations of intimacy and environment in the film; when Dr. Remington and Ballard crash, they are brought together intimately by chance. “The car crash is a fertilizing rather than destructive event” describes the car crash sex cult messiah Vaughn (Elias Koteas) later to Ballard. The crash reinserts a vitality to an ever-flowing network of mundanity. It pinpoints a random, visceral moment of connection between two people, two objects that would otherwise never meet.
Thus, as Ballard recovers at home and passes his time overlooking the highway through binoculars from his balcony, his fascination and fixation derive from finally capturing a piece of information in the network in the form of a crash. He is shown staring at passing traffic entrancingly, his mouth slightly agape and eyes moving back and forth rapidly. Traffic is no longer a mundane flow of uncapturable information, but a territory of opportunity for enlightenment. Here, the “highway is transformed from an everyday landscape into a purgatorial space in which the boundaries between life and death are blurred”.[8] Ballard’s understanding of the environment, his relationships, and himself are transformed by his near-death experience, feigning his perverse curiosity with car crashes. His conceptions of the world are not quite uprooted and flipped around, but inserted with a newfound adrenaline that de-alienates him from the environment; especially when he connects with the pseudo-sex cult led by Vaughn, who also experiences fascination with car crashes.
Chapter 3 : The Day and Night
Another function that the opening sequence serves is to establish the distinction between day and night. The three-scene vignette of Ballard and Catherine’s sexual escapades occurs during the daytime. Catherine and Ballard’s first two individual experiences play out in closed, indoor spaces with little natural light; the third cut on the balcony is taken with low light, but still during the day (assuming they have both just returned from work, around 5:30 or 6:00 PM). As I have argued, this three-scene vignette is when Cronenberg most aptly establishes a feeling of disconnection and alienation between the two characters, especially juxtaposed by the stark nighttime crash scene that occurs directly after.
As the emerging field of night studies suggests, the night is a territory that is navigated differently depending on place, identity, and intention.[9] The night can shroud or expose the activities of people and circumstances of events. Darkness and illumination are actors in distinguishing the nighttime territory and dictating how people interact with it. The night figures most prominently in urban city settings, because of the common conception that through the prominence of subcultures, nightlife, and criminal activity “a city turns inside out at night”.[10] City lights, shadowy corners, and dim clubs are images of the city night. But, the nighttime in Crash departs from this principle slightly because of its exurban setting; with no real “city” for nighttime activity to take place in, the film recalculates what the nighttime means via the group of car-crash paraphilics. The highway and cars become a space for nightlife through these nocturnal principles: mysticism, illumination, darkness, sexuality, voyeurism, and intimacy. In Crash, the night brings lucidity, spectacle, and playfulness to characters whereas the day is a time of haziness, stagnation, and disconnection. As such, the nighttime is essential in two pivotal scenes of the film: one, in mediating the intimacy of the crash between Ballard and Dr. Remington, and two, when Vaughn, Catherine, and Ballard witness a devastatingly large and fateful crash late at night.
Darkness most often procures a sense of enchanted mystery and sensuality in Crash, as the senses are heightened and made more erogenous. Parts of the landscape are made invisible, engulfed by darkness, distributing focus to other realms: objects, people, and events. Thus, when Dr. Remington and Ballard face each other through broken windshields after they have crashed, Dr. Remington’s bare breast is exposed, and the sense of environment is annulled by the heightening of the object. Furthermore, the dark of night makes the crash private, unseen to many witnesses. The meeting of Ballard and Dr. Remington is something intimate and devastating, made sexual by her exposed breast. Ballard thus psychologically conflates the crash with a spotlighted sense of intimacy and sensuality. Here, intimacy is mediated by the intersection of the highway and the nighttime, unlocked at this moment and entirely juxtaposed to the scenes of empty intimacy between Catherine and Ballard.
Further on in the film, Vaughn, Catherine, and Ballard cruise around the exurbs in Vaughn’s Lincoln convertible at night. As they drive down the highway, they approach a large car crash disrupting the flow of traffic. Vaughn gasps with excitement, pulling out his camera and breathily exclaiming “This is a work of art.” Their car approaches the scene, where firefighters use the jaws of life to break open car windows, and smoke forms silhouettes of the dazed victims wandering around. The flashing lights of traffic illuminate the nighttime; ambulances, stopped cars, and hazard lights fill the night with blues and reds in between the smoke. Vaughn paces the scene, taking photos of the victims and freshly colliding steel with his Polaroid camera. He notices that one of the victims is his friend Seagrave, who had caused the crash in an attempt to recreate Jayne Mansfield’s death. A bloodied blonde wig and dead chihuahua lie near Seagraves' lifeless body suspended upside down from his vehicle. Vaughn is moved by the scene, gasping and scolding the dead Seagrave: “You did the crash without me?”
After investigating the scene of the crash, the three get back into Vaughn’s convertible and drive off onto the highway. Noticing that the car had driven through some fresh blood on the way through the crash scene, the three go to a hands-free car wash. As the car is enveloped in soap and whirling brushes, Ballard sits in the driver's seat, peering through the rearview mirror at Catherine and Vaughn, who have sex in the backseat. Despite his recent confrontation with Seagraves’ gruesome death, Vaughn violently makes love to Catherine while Ballard gazes idly into the mirror. The two later investigate the cuts and bruises in the shapes of Vaughn’s hands and teeth on Catherine’s body back in their condo. Ballard caresses Catherine’s freshly beaten body as they lie in bed together, lightly kissing, grazing her skin and mouth with his. The nighttime skyline of the distant city is made clear through the window of their bedroom (see fig. 3).
Here, the nighttime is the ultimate catalyst for the rearing of intense desire and intimacy between characters. As Will Straw notes, “lighting nourishes the fetishes of night… night enchants through practices of illumination”.[11] The scene of the multi-car crash is made sensual and enchanted via the contrast of illuminated red and blue light amongst the darkness. In a similar nature to the crash between Ballard and Dr. Remington, just enough of the crash scene is made visible to the characters by the low illumination, forcing their eyes to focus on the most intense details. Vaughn’s exclamations that the crash is a “work of art” underline the way that the event appears as enchanted via the contrast of darkness with smoke and illumination. As Ballard, Catherine, and Vaughn experience the scene of the crash, they are confronted with the adrenaline of a true disaster, yet the nocturnal mysticism allows them to experience these effects as sensual and not traumatic.
Vaughn’s ensuing violent encounter with Catherine in the backseat is thus equated to a kind of traumatic car crash. Vaughn’s fixation on the scene of the crash is translated to Catherine’s body. His body crashes violently into hers. Consequently, this sequence most aptly depicts the visceral reconnection of intimacy that occurs between Catherine and Ballard during the nighttime ignited by the traumatic event. Their physical connection in the scene differs from their empty sexual encounters preceding; as Catherine’s eyes well with tears, Ballard is gentle with her naked body.
Conclusion
It is but one minute detail of the previously described scene that truly forms the apex of this essay. The appearance of the city skyline in the film occurs in the scene where Ballard and Catherine lie in bed. In their darkened bedroom, the illuminated city emerges through a large window as yellowy-green rectangles on the horizon. Here, as Catherine and Ballard share their first truly intimate moment in light of a traumatic event, the city appears; they are fleetingly de-alienated from the city and one another. In the shadowy, seductive night, the distance of the landscape is contextualized and closed in, just as the distance between Catherine and Ballard’s relationship closes in.
Despite the entirety of the film existing in an environment plagued with networks of highways that confuse and dislocate characters from their environment and each other, this scene takes hold of the center. Just as Ballard watches cars streaming past his apartment, waiting for a crash, a solid piece of information, the viewer watches the film, trying to decipher relationships, distances, emotions, and context. The exurbs are depicted, but never really contextualized; viewers Barely receive information about where characters truly are, what they are truly feeling, and what drives them. Thus, the emergence of the cityscape shows us the center, the pulse, that weakens as it spreads out through veins of highways. Illuminated and sparkling, the environment reconnects us to a space, as Ballard and Catherine reconnect. Vagueness permeates Crash, but in the presentation of the city on screen, clarity emerges as the intersections of urbanity, nighttime, and intimacy are located.
[1] Todd McCarthy, “Crash,” Review of Crash, by David Cronenberg, Variety, May 17, 1996.
[2] Terry Harpold, “Dry Leatherette: Cronenberg’s Crash,” Postmodern Culture 7, no. 3 (May 1997): 0.
[3] James Maurice Stockford Careless, “Toronto,” in Canadian Encyclopedia, March 11, 2022.
[4] Alex Teranu, “A Challenge for Today and Tomorrow : Urbanizing Suburbia - the Canadian Way,” CanU, February 14, 2022. https://www.canu.ca/post/a-challenge-for-today-and-tomorrow-urbanizing-s....
[5] Freeways and highways are used interchangeably in this essay.
[6]Anthony Perl, Matt Hern, and Jeffrey Kenworthy, “Streets Paved with Gold Urban Expressway Building and Global City Formation in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver,” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 24, no. 2 (2015): 92.
[7]Perl, “Streets Paved with Gold Urban Expressway Building and Global City Formation in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver,” 92-93.
[8] Bernice M. Murphy, The Highway Horror Film, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 85.
[9] Will Straw, “The Urban Night,” in Cartographies of Place : Navigating the Urban, ed. Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault (Montreal : McGill-Queens University Press, 2014), 190.
[10] Christopher Dewdney, Acquainted with the Night : Excursions through the World after Dark. (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2004), 89.
[11] Straw, “The Urban Night,” 190.