Long live the new flesh, indeed. I was fascinated with this Crash, the only Crash that should exist, but I still felt like it was a bit too much of a rearrangement and sexed-up version of the same films that Cronenberg had been making up until this point. It is more polished than anything up to this point, though, and is probably the best stand-alone film other than The Fly that I have seen by him. I often hear an opinion from people who confuse David Cronenberg with David Lynch because they are both weird, North American Davids working with a lot of violence and a lot of sex. But, I think that they have both been mislabeled for the sex in their films, which I don’t think there is even that much of at all. Lynch is on most people’s radars for the lesbian scene in Mulholland Dr.; the only time I’ve seen that film on the big screen was at the Coolidge Corner Theatre as part of their ‘Films that turn us on’ series. And I think that Cronenberg has similarly been branded for excessive sexuality in his films because of Crash, though his other films only have brief moments. Crash also has a lot in common with Wild at Heart, especially in these films’ presentations of sex.
Also similar to Lynch, and even more than him, Cronenberg’s characters have a stilted, 90s way of delivering their lines that was initially offputting for me been I first saw History of Violence. It’s easy to dismiss it as bad acting, but I think that these films very much come from and are influenced by common made-for-television movies-of-the-week and soft porn styles and conventions, and they seek to descontruct and demolish what those films stand for. While Lynch dissects and obliterates American ideals and fantasies, Cronenberg uses Crash to expose naive perceptions created by ‘movie sex’. The first few sex scenes, the first one at the plane, Spader’s early sex scenes, especially the ones in cars, all play like Red Shoe Diaries episodes. Tacky dramatic lighting, slow-mo thrusting, breezy music. The movie slowly but surely evolves away from that into a disturbing sado-masochistic fetish for car crashes. Characters reveal bizarre intentions and turn-ons that seems all the more crazy because of how the film was set up. The film asks the viewer to be open-minded toward such fetishes and non-vanilla sex, but it is difficulty to see the appeal of dismemberment, scars, and disability. The film successfully stretched my liberalism toward sex until it couldn’t be stretched anymore.
The characters in this film, like so many of Cronenberg’s films, can only be truly happy when they can remove themselves from their humanity, always working and building toward a more digital or mechanical way of being. Thus, it is consistent and important to Cronenberg body of work. However, I think that with this film he started showing signs of exhausting the idea, and he has since, thankfully, been moving into different but relative territory.