Crash

Director- David Cronenburg (The Fly)

This riveting tale of racial bias and the way it touches a series of lives in Los Angeles relationally viewed through the prism of a single traffic accident is the winner of Best Picture in...............oh wait no. This is another movie entirely.

Have you ever said to yourself "Most of the fetishes on display really aren't insane enough. C'mon, show me a REAL fetish!!" then this is the movie for you. Cronenburg has adapted a short novel about people who derive intense sexual pleasure from car crashes and turned it into this film. The movie is really intriguing and unique for a while, then kind of gets old as the same radical gestures in the beginning of the movie (people get off on WRECKS) are repeated ad nauseum. Car wreck leads to car sex, sure. Car wreck leads to screwing a scar in someone's leg, what the hell!?

This movie I think is attempting to make a larger point about consumption or something but the movie pretty much made it relatively quickly. The debate though can be about WHAT exactly its criticizing. Is it just an open acknowledgment about how cars function as objects of sex in society? The typical example is the Ferrari purchaser who is compensating for a tiny penis or some other shortcoming. Car wrecks into sex could enact an inversion of this typical bind- that we destroy our cars (precious status symbols) to achieve sexual satisfaction. Perhaps the point is that we can not have good sex until we stop worrying about factors that are external to sex (consumptive societal ones about status etc). But the movie does perform a group of people getting off to an external stimulus so some of this fetishism is probably inevitable. I found myself after this movie desperate for Secretary, another James Spader movie about fetishes that frankly held my interest and intrigued me a lot more.