Ballard is free.  Having risen from his hospital bed, we join him on his travels back to his apartment, Catherine in tow. She has grown new concerns for him, heady feelings of both fear and lust.  Ballard on the other hand is trying to get acclimatized with his surroundings, and his newly recognized status among them.

The roads, cars, and malls have all exposed their personalities to him, and perhaps for the first time, they have become characters within themselves.  It's almost as though the concrete structures are the coiled guts of some great beast that is finally exposing itself to another disciple.  Ballard is now aware of the roads, not merely as passageways connecting two points, but as the workings of a great machine in which everyone plays their part.

Cars too have taken on a new meaning.  There is particular emphasis on the relation of the car to the human body.  If cars were designed to fit around the human body, what do we make of the various random scars on Ballard?

The roadways come under close scrutiny.  Transformed from concrete monstrosities, JG Ballard now writes "..spur of the northern circular motorway which flowed past us on its elegant concrete pillars."  Elegant?  JG Ballard's view as to the beauty of these roadways is now becoming fully realized.  He even goes as far as to credit some creativity to its elegance, "I gazed down at this immense motion sculpture".  The roads were no longer simply tributaries; they live and breathe, and add all kinds of aesthetic value hereto unrealized.  In a conversation with Catherine he confides, "one almost expects to see Breughal and Hieronymous Bosch cruising the freeways in their rental-company cars."

The car itself is now elevated on several levels.  First of all, the vehicle itself, and its relation to other vehicles and the road, were stimulating Ballard.  Even in the cab ride home, he couldn't help but note the details of the car, things he had missed or simply not paid attention to previously.  "As I drove home with Catherine from the hospital I was surprised by how much, in my eyes, the image of the car had changed, almost as if its true nature had been exposed by the accident."

The ride home means Ballard is free again to play with his new outlook, to allow the thoughts and ideas in his mind to become tactile, more real.  Ballard seems sure this isn't simply a fantasy, but is rather the reality he had always denied.  "I found myself flinching with excitement towards the traffic streams on the Western Avenue interchanges." 

In this chapter we also have two hints at previous JG Ballard works, referenced obliquely, yet tangibly.  Ballard and Catherine live in an apartment building, and its description introduces us subtly to a book the author won't release for two more years, "High Rise".

Take this description as an example:  "The houses of our friends, the wine store where I bought our liquor, the small art-cinema where Catherine and I saw American avant-garde films and German sex-education movies, together realigned themselves around the palisades of the motorway.  I realized that the human inhabitants of this technological landscape no longer provided its sharpest pointers, its keys to the border-zones of identity." 

This description is at the same time droll and interesting.  At first it seems as though the toys of adults, alcohol and entertainment, are all at hand to be enjoyed.  On the other they seem languid, listed as ingredients for a recipe of suburban happiness.  Ballard is beginning to think about the relationship between the structures and those that live within and around them. 

And what of the people themselves?  "The amiable saunter of Frances Waring, bored wife of my partner, through the turnstiles of the local supermarket, the domestic wrangles of our well-to-do neighbours in our apartment house, all the hopes and fancies of the placid suburban enclave, drenched in a thousand infidelities, faltered before the solid reality of the motorway embankments". 

Within this brief piece of text, JG Ballard has planted the seed that would explode into High Rise.  Within the novel Crash, this angst flourishes on the highways, within cars, and in an inner self.  In a sense, the journey is a personal one, or shared only among a select few.  But what if an entire neighbourhood took it upon themselves to reject social norms, and exploit anarchy for the purposes of freedom?  High Rise examines this breakdown as Crash deals with the technological aspects.

Later in the novel we have the remains of another JG Ballard vision, The Crystal World, laying in remnants in the corner of Crash, "At my feet lay a litter of dead leaves, cigarette cartons and glass crystals.  These fragments of broken safety glass, brushed to one side by generations of ambulance attendants, lay in a small drift."  If JG Ballard's writing can be conceived as the fears living in the DNA of all of us, these crystals seem to exist outside us as a constant reminder of what things might become.  They offer up a tantalization instigation to investigate the authors other works.

Crash at this point has begun to concern itself with not only Ballard's position within the new world, but also how other drivers fit within it.  We hear of huge theatrical rehearsals, of drivers who are on the way to their own accidents.  We also have different technologies crossing paths, the roadways and its cars, the airport and the constant flow of planes.  It warns us that the new concepts suggested spread beyond ourselves and cars, outward to the very edges of our periphery vision.

Cronenberg was clearly enamoured of this chapter, taking scenes directly into his film, and even dialog.  In fact, the opening exchange between Catherine and Ballard appears in the film, "You're going to drive?  but your legs - James, you can barely walk!"  Albeit in a slightly modified form:  "How can you drive? James... your legs. You can barely walk."  However, in the movie this conversation is moved from the car, to the balcony of their apartment. 

The apartment itself offers a rather sterile view into the lives of a wedded couple.  The view from the balcony is key to Ballard who realizes that the roadways now somehow run directly through his head.  The line "I can't sit on this balcony forever. I'm beginning to feel like a potted plant," is taken almost verbatim from the novel, however, in the screenplay Cronenberg chose to change the word "veranda" for "balcony".

For those into minutia, Cronenberg also decided to reverse the order of the two lines mentioned.  In the novel Catherine's comment about Ballard's ability to drive come before this potted plant comment, in the movie, it's reversed.

The comment regarding potted plants is, of course, a sounding of frustration from Ballard.  Not only is his mind racing with these new feelings, he's also an invalid.  In the movie this frustration is played out with facial expressions and gestures.  The novel goes one step further and adds additional dialog.  Catherine replies, "I understand", to which Ballard responds, "You don't."  While I can't be sure why this was omitted (it's possible that it's simply a matter of making things tighter), I don't think the addition of these lines of dialog to the movie would have helped, indeed, it might have unbalanced things.  Cronenberg keeps the relationship between Ballard and his wife very cool, and perhaps this over-familiarity would have interfered with that.

In the movie, Ballard and Catherine are lovers.  Catherine is played as though she's in a trance, with her feet hardly touching the ground.  She is led by Ballard, happily following to the edge of whatever abyss he's discovered.  The dialog in the novel is another example of a rift between them, and the general feeling is that they're detached not only from the world, but from each other.  The movie benefits from the subtle playing of the relationship.

The movie includes all the footage from the drive home in the cab, and also the visit Ballard makes to the underground car park in order to see his empty parking space.  Catherine's interest in Ballard's injuries, caressing his wounds as he sits back in a chair, looking out through binoculars, is also here.

Some might find pieces of dialog from the movie difficult to appreciate - not in what is said, but in how it is delivered.  Mostly this is because the dialog is pulled right out of the novel, and Cronenberg sometimes struggles to reproduce the entire ambiance of the writing.  Still, lines such as:  "Is the traffic heavier now?  There seem to be three times as many cars as there were before the accident." are surely too delicious to ignore?

Finally, there is a key sequence at the end of the chapter that did not make it into the film, which is a pity.  Ballard picks up a rental car with his secretary, Renata (since she has been excised from the final film, perhaps her presence here explains why this scene was cut, although it never appeared in the script).  Together they revisit the crash site, a visit that makes Renata somewhat nervous. 

At the crash site they are being observed.  As Ballard drives by, he realizes this onlooker as Vaughan, whom he had assumed was a doctor from the hospital.