Crash is a novel full of ideas, concepts, warnings, and threats.  It goes to the bounds of endurance, and then takes a step farther.  Discussions of good taste simply don’t apply – the very idea that seeded Crash was in bad taste, how was a traditional view of beauty ever going to apply? 

Chapter Nineteen is certainly a tour-de-force.  It’s difficult, and probably not all that interesting, to pick out a single chapter and suggest:  “This is the best piece of writing here.”   Yet since I felt okay to do it for the film version (Vaughan’s love making with Catherine being the highlight for me cinematically) then I must say that it is the writing in this chapter that really encapsulates, for me, everything Crash is about.  

Both the movie, and to an extent the novel, has struggled to a point in fully and clearly describing just what this Crash thing is all about.  What is it these people are after?  What do they get out of the acts they perform?  What’s it all about?  JG Ballard deciphers much of it for us in this chapter.  

The chapter is short, a mere five pages, yet such is its power, and so many its ideas that it spawned two significant scenes within Cronenberg’s movie.  One can only wonder just how difficult it was for Cronenberg to come up with something that adequately represents the text.  Surely it would stretch the filmmaking expertise of anyone to portray the events, feelings, and dreams included here? 

The movie scenes represented are the visit to the car dealership with Ballard and Gabrielle, and Ballard and Gabrielle making love.  In the movie the first scene is used to inject humour into the film, indeed, during a theatrical viewing there were audible laughs from the audience.  The second scene, filmed in a confined space, is an erotic journey to the very heart of Crash.  However, it’s in fiction, in the written word, that the full potential is found. 

The setting for a good amount of the chapter is a motor show at Earls Court.  It is here that Vaughan, Gabrielle, and Ballard get to see and sit in new cars.  One can assume that in order to stick with lower budgetary requirements, this meeting of Gabrielle and a newly engineered car was moved to a show room, with a single salesman.  The “gag” with the tearing leather is missing entirely from the novel, so it seems it was an ingenious addition by Cronenberg.

The script for Crash included the following text:

INT. AUTO SHOW – AIRPORT CONVENTION CENTER – DAY

James and the crippled Gabrielle visit the annual auto show, which occupies the immense halls of the airport convention center. He watches appreciatively as she swings herself on her shackled legs amongst the hundreds of cars displayed on their stands.

This suggests that Cronenberg had ambitions to open the scene up onto a larger stage than was realized - although the script included many chunks of text cut and pasted from the novel as guidance. 

Further we have some new dialog, aimed at pushing the story forward, and injecting that dark vein of humour into the story:

"Gabrielle approaches the imposing Mercedes stand and, pivoting about on her heels, seems to take immense pleasure from these immaculate vehicles, placing her scarred hands on their paintwork, rolling her injured hips against them like an unpleasant cat.

She soon draws the attention of a young salesman who tries hard not to notice her scars and braces.

SALESMAN
Is there something here that interests you?

GABRIELLE
The white sports model. Could you help me into it, please? I'd like to see if I can fit into a car designed for a normal
body.

Both James and Gabrielle enjoy the salesman's discomfort as he helps her into the Mercedes sports car.

She does her best to make it difficult, deliberately snagging her leg brace clips on the soft leather of the driver's side armrest, forcing him to unhook her and to touch her deformed thighs and knees while manipulating her legs into the footwell."

It is in the love making, and the final comments about Ballard’s wife, Catherine, that things really begin to gather a threatening pace.  Whatever dangerous prose JG Ballard had sprung upon us in the novel thus far, what we read here is of a particularly fertile nature.   

Ballard doesn’t simply make love with Gabrielle.  Theirs is not a heated coming together.  Rather, he is exploring her body, sculpted as it is by her accident, travelling through his own feelings and the relationship between his desires, dreams, and reality.  It is here that we begin to fully appreciate what Ballard has found, what mine of desires he has uncovered:  "As I explored her body, feeling my way among the braces and straps of her underwear, the unfamiliar planes of her hips and legs steered me into unique cul-de-sacs, strange declensions of skin and musculature.  Each of her deformities became a potent metaphor for the excitements of a new violence.  Her body, with its angular contours, its unexpected junctions of mucus membrane and hairline, detrusor muscle and erectile tissue, was a ripening anthology of possibilities….. Our sexual acts were exploratory ideals.” 

Ballard has found the most obvious inspiration to draw out the dreams that had thus far been resident within him.  He has found an outlet in Gabrielle, in her new bodily functions.  Ballard is both exploring what is there, and also applying new logic to the injuries, finding uses for what might well repulse – or at the very least confuse – others. 

Of course, everything that follows is told in the context of not only Gabrielle’s body and its new form, but also in the context of the car.  Gabrielle’s car has been designed specifically for her, its form adjusted to her new body.  Ballard finds this as fascinating as he does Gabrielle’s injuries:  “As I pressed her left shoulder against my chest I could see the contoured seat which had been moulded around her body, hemispheres of padded leather that matched the depressions of her of her brace and backstraps, I slipped my hand around her right breast, already colliding with the strange geometry of the car’s interior.” 

The re-imagining of Gabrielle’s body gathers greater resonance as their love making continues, tt’s as though, the closer he has gotten in proximity to Gabrielle’s injuries, the fuller his dreams have become:  “In the inner surfaces of her thigh the straps formed marked depressions, troughs of reddened skin hollowed out in the forms of buckles and clasps.  As I unshackled the left leg brace and ran my fingers along the deep buckle groove, the corrugated skin felt hot and tender, more exciting than the membrane of a vagina.  This depraved orifice, the invagination of a sexual organ still in the embryonic stages of its evolution, reminded me of the small wounds on my own body, which still carried the contours of the instrument panel and controls.  I felt this depression on her thigh, the groove worn below her breast under her right armpit by the spinal brace, the red marking on the inside of her right upper arm – these were the templates for new genital organs, the moulds of sexual possibilities yet to be created in a hundred experimental car crashes.” 

It should be noted that the inspirations here are many fold:  Injuries to the body, the relationship of their bodies to the interior of the modified car, the car crash event, the touch of new bodies.  These work together to create a new reality for Ballard.  Since we never get to fully explore Gabrielle and her own feelings, we can only assume she feels the same way.  There is a feeling of familiarity about Gabrielle and her actions with Ballard, as though she had been exploring these realms for quite some time. 

In some places, such an IMDB, there is much debate about the sex act itself in this scene.  It’s undeniable that Cronenberg could have been more explicit, though whether it was censorial concerns or something else that caused him to tone down the explicitness is anyone’s guess.  The penetrative act is itself revelatory:  “My first orgasm, within the deep wound of her thigh, jolted my semen along the channel, irrigating its corrugated ditch……. During the next few days my orgasms took place within the scars below her breast and within her left arm pit, in the wounds of her neck and shoulder, in these sexual apertures formed by fragmenting windshield louvres and dashboard dials in a high-speed impact, marrying through my own penis the car in which I had crashed and the car in which Gabrielle had met her near-death.” 

Cronenberg made changes at this point.  Faced with the difficulties of translating long descriptive passages into exciting cinema, and perhaps faced with the censorial attitudes in target markets, things are changed to accommodate a more acceptable and forthright approach.  In doing so however, Cronenberg made Gabrielle more overt, giving her lines of dialog where she guides Ballard, in contrast to the novel:

"James exposes her breasts, feeling for the wound areas which surround them. As he tries to enter her, she puts her hand over his mouth.

GABRIELLE
Don't. Not there.

She spreads her left leg and exposes a deep, trench-like wound-scar in her inner thigh. She directs his hand to this neo-sex organ.

GABRIELLE
Do it there. And then after that, do it here.

Gabrielle rotates over him so that he can see the wounds of her right hip. James turns her back, pulls her thigh in between his own thighs and enters her scar. With his mouth fastened on the scar beneath her left breast, his tongue exploring its sickle-shaped trough, he comes almost immediately."

In the novel, further from the actual sex acts with Gabrielle, the chapter goes on with Ballard’s dreaming, as he extends it to other accidents that might occur, with the death of celebrities (his first overt suggestion that this obsession was becoming part of his fantasy cycle, Vaughan has clearly infected him as he had infected Seagraves) and the role to be played by his wife, Catherine, in this new arena. 

We read directly about this influence here:  “As I embraced Gabrielle I visualized, as Vaughan had taught me, the accidents that might involve the famous and beautiful, the wounds upon which erotic fantasies might be erected, the extraordinary sexual acts celebrating the possibilities of imagined technologies.” 

But it is when Ballard applies this sexual logic to others that the book begins to stretch once again toward the boundaries of taste – whether good or bad.  JG Ballard’s affiliation with the teachings of Freud come to the fore, and we’re presented with a list of secondary characters that cry out for psychological examination:  Catherine, film actresses, Ballard’s mother, paedophiliacs.  All become part of extensions of this new central sexual premise.   

Special attention is, of course, held over for his wife:  “A car crash in which she would die was the one event that would release the codes waiting within her.  Lying in bed beside Catherine, I would slide my hand in the natal cleft between her buttocks, lifting and moulding each of these white hemispheres, these plenums of the flesh that contained all the programmes of dreams and genocides.” 

Ballard and Vaughan had not grown closer, but perhaps simply more familiar.  Vaughan had pollinated Ballard at a time when one might have thought the latter would have been at low ebb.  Rather than convalescing through his injuries, Vaughan had shown Ballard how these feelings could be enjoyed, expanded, and enlivened:  “I began to think about Catherine’s death in a more calculated way, trying to devise in my mind and ever richer exit than the death which Vaughan had designed for Elizabeth Taylor.  These fantasies were part of the affectionate responses exchanged between us as we drove among the motorway together.” 

This chapter explores the sexual aspects of the Crash world in a most graphic and exploratory way.  Within its short (five pages in the edition I have) length there are so many ideas spilling out in every direction that it can be difficult to get a handle on which lines of thought ought to be followed.  Here we have Vaughan, Gabrielle, Catherine, and a long cast of characters, all put through the grind mill of sexual intrigue going on within Ballard’s mind.   

The material here is tough stuff.  I would note that there are elements I deem worthy of comment that I have withheld due to their sexual nature – how times have changed.  Not that the behaviours are any more acceptable, but that instead of talking about some topics more, we talk about them less.  This speaks to the power, the bravery, and the challenges this book posed both at the time it was published, and even today. 

This aside, this chapter stands out as something of a highlight within the novel.  Not in the development of the story, but rather as the true foundation for a new manifesto of perverse sexual intrigue.  Crammed within few words is the heart and soul of Crash and what it offers.