Crash is provocative, dangerous, and challenging.  The ideas it explores are alien, foreign, as though it were conceived in another place and time.  Whatever one makes of the themes explored in the film, no-one is going to mistake it mainstream thinking.

Crash started as part of something else.  JG Ballard had been exploring it’s themes and ideas for several years before Crash hit the scene.  Vaughan, a central character, first appeared in The Atrocity Exhibition – and equally challenging piece of work.  The deconstruction of the celebrity was also a prevalent theme in Ballard’s writing.  Crash had been brewing like a storm.

David Cronenberg was well known in cinema for his series of body horror movies such as Shivers, Rabid, and Videodrome.  In later films he has evolved the more overt body horror themes with those of the inner-psyche, evidenced by the likes of Spider.  Crash is a film that shows Cronenberg at his body horror best, merging the physical body horror themes with the transformation of the mind.

Perhaps the most significant movie in Cronenberg’s filmography is Naked Lunch.  Inspired by the novel of the same name by William S. Burroughs, it was long considered an unfilmable book, yet Cronenberg found an effective way of bringing it to the big screen.  There could hardly have been a better preparation for taking on JG Ballard’s writing.

Cronenberg’s Crash is surprising because of the choices the Director made.  The movie isn’t simply an adaptation for the modern age, Cronenberg decided to carry over these strange characters with few changes.  JG Ballard’s dialog is often other-worldly, oblique, yet Cronenberg resisted modernizing, it normalizing the text.  Instead he carried over huge amounts of descriptive text as dialog, and allowed the characters to live within the enclosure of their inner thoughts.  Cronenberg’s Crash isn’t simply a film inspired by JG Ballard’s novel; it is JG Ballard novel brought to life.

Which throws up challenges galore for an unsuspecting mainstream cinema audience.  Who are these people?  Why do they do these things?  What are they thinking?  These things are part of JG Ballard’s cannon, but inside ninety-minutes of a Cronenberg film, what can be made of what we see on the screen?

You often hear people suggest “the film was good, but the book was better” when dealing with adaptations of novels.  In the case of Crash, this doesn’t apply.  Perhaps uniquely, the movie complements the book.  It in no way overshadows the novel, nor vice-versa.  Cronenberg made changes to the narrative, and even to characters, but he created something that beautifully complements the original text. 

Still, to fully appreciate the power and energy of the film, it is enlightening to know how the screenplay and novel compare.  What choices did Cronenberg make?  What omissions are there?  What was added?  By viewing the movie from the perspective of the novel, we can fill out the more obvious questions, and become enlightened to the genius of Cronenberg.

So here it is, a reading of the movie through the chapters of the novel.  We examine every nuance, character trait, and action of the players.  Watching Crash through the pages of the book we can learn much, become inspired, and see Crash is all its glory.

Welcome to the world of Crash.

See you on the highway.

Vaughan - May 2008