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Crash is a novel by J.G. Ballard first published in 1973 about a subculture of people who are sexually aroused by car crashes. They re-enact famous car crashes (such as those that killed James Dean and Jayne Mansfield), cause accidents themselves and document other crashes. It was a highly controversial novel: famously one publisher's reader returned the verdict "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish."

It was later made into a 1996 film directed by David Cronenberg. It won a special prize at Cannes for daring, audacity, and originality. The film was as controversial as the book, featuring graphic depictions of sexual acts mixed with violence. This caused the UK tabloid press to condemn it as sick and evil, though few papers pointed out that it was based on a novel by the author of Empire of the Sun. Although passed by the British Board Of Film Classification with an 18 Certificate it was being banned by Westminster Council, meaning it could not be shown in any cinema in Central London. The film has been produced in both NC-17 and R versions. This controversy has now subsided and the film is readily available on DVD.

The novel

Crash is a story about car-crash fetishists, who gets their sexual kicks by staging and participating in very real car-crashes, often with very real consequences. Ballard writes the book in a cold and detached language, giving the impression of an engineering report or a medical journal.

The story is told through the eyes of a narrator named after the writer himself, but it centres on the sinister figure Vaughan, a “former TV-scientist, turned nightmare angel of the expressways”. Gathering around Vaughan, is a group of alienated people, all of them former crash-victims, who follows him in his pursuit to re-enact the crashes of celebrities, and experience what the narrator calls “a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology.” Vaughan’s ultimate fantasy is to die in a head-on collision with movie star Elizabeth Taylor, popular at the time the novel was written (in 1971).

The book explores themes such as the transformation of human psychology by modern technology, and consumer culture´s fascination with celebrities, disaster media and technological commodities. The human characters in the novel are cold and passionless, unable to get sexually excited unless some kind of technology is involved (typically architecture and cars). The gruesome damage inflicted on car-crash victims is not seen as shocking, but as the liberation of new sexual possibilities, that has yet to be explored.

Finally, the book asks why we, as an enlightened society, accept such a “perverse technology” – that kills a vast amount of people yearly – as such an integral part of our culture.

Writes Ballard in the foreword: “Do we see, in the car-crash, the portents of a nightmare marriage between technology, and our own sexuality? … Is there some deviant logic unfolding here, more powerful than that provided by reason?”

Quotes:

“After having … been constantly bombarded by road-safety propaganda, it was almost a relief to find myself in a real accident.”

“Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds, hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.”

External link

• Crash at IMDb

• 1973 books
• 1996 films
• Canadian films
• David Cronenberg films