Crash at 25: Sick and depraved or a serious piece of art cinema?

David Cronenberg’s JG Ballard adaptation about the erotic fascination with car crashes is about to be re-released, but the controversy that once accompanied it has all but vanished, says Geoffrey Macnab

James Spader and Holly Hunter in ‘Crash’ in 1996 (Rex)

In the years after its release, the Canadian director David Cronenberg used to look back with bemusement on the frenzied British reaction to his 1996 film, Crash, adapted from JG Ballard’s novel.  

The 1973 book, which Ballard proudly described as “the first pornographic novel based on technology”, explores the erotic fascination of car crashes. It is set, as its author later wrote, “at a point where sex and death intersect”.  

In spite of the provocative subject matter, Ballard claimed his novel “created little stir” when it first appeared in the UK. True, a reader at his publishing company had described him as “beyond psychiatric help” and had strongly recommended that the book shouldn’t be published. However, the novel did appear. Whatever revulsion certain critics showed towards Ballard’s writing, nobody called for it to be banned.  

Just over two decades later, Cronenberg’s film version, which is being re-released in the UK in a 4K restoration later this autumn, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996. Gilles Jacob, the then artistic director of Cannes, told Cronenberg he was programming Crash bang in the middle of the festival “so it would explode like a bomb”. It was beaten to the Palme D’Or by Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies but the competition jury, chaired by Francis Ford Coppola, gave it a special award “for originality, for daring and for audacity”.  

“Coppola was totally against it [the award for Crash],” Cronenberg recently told the Canadian press but the other jurors fervently championed the film. After Cannes, it was a box office hit in France, Canada, and in many other markets. It was treated as a serious piece of art cinema.  

However, by the time Crash reached the London Film Festival in November 1996, the din around it was already becoming deafening.   

“The sickest movie of them all,” screamed headlines in the tabloids. “Vile film portrays car crashes as the ultimate turn-on”. Crash was called ”immoral and depraved”. The then culture secretary Virginia Bottomley weighed into the debate, urging “local authorities to make their own decision and use the powers they have to refuse the film a screen” in the event that the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) didn’t ban it first.   

With typical bombast, the Evening Standard’s critic Alexander Walker had called it a film “beyond the bounds of depravity”. The Daily Mail was even more outspoken. 

At least, Walker had seen the film. Many of its other detractors hadn’t. As Cronenberg noted, they were reacting to the “phantom of the movie” conjured up in all the howling headlines rather than to the movie itself. The BBFC found the sexual content and violence in Crash to be “unremarkable in classification terms” but still called in lawyers, psychologists, and a group of 11 disabled people to view the film before they issued a certificate. The 11 didn’t much enjoy the screening but concluded, as the BBFC later wrote in a case study, the film’s “depiction of disabled people as being able to be both sexually attractive and active, (despite rather than because of their injuries), was generally a positive thing”. 

That should have been that. The film was given its 18 certificate and distributed in the normal way. It was at this point, though, that the chairman of Westminster’s licensing sub-committee, John Bull, waded into the dispute, causing the film to be banned in Westminster, thereby keeping it out of West End cinemas.  

As Ballard wrote in his autobiography, Cronenberg, “a highly intelligent and thoughtful man, was completed baffled by the English reaction. ‘Why?’ he kept asking me. ‘What is going on here?’”  

Predictably, Councillor Bull’s actions and all those articles in the tabloids telling readers about Crash’s sickness and depravity served to whet cinemagoers’ appetites. It did far better business than might have been expected given the extreme subject matter of the film.  

“Luckily, Sony [Columbia TriStar] were distributing it. You felt the power of Sony. They didn’t have to bend. They had the money to spend on the film,” Crash’s English producer Jeremy Thomas recalled about the “furore” caused by the Mail and Standard that actually helped with the marketing.  

Crash may not have screened in Leicester Square but it showed in cinemas everywhere else in the UK. A few years later, it appeared on Channel 4 without any cuts and nobody complained. Nor were there any reports of pile-ups, dogging incidents or orgies on Britain’s motorways and slip roads involving crash victims who’d watched the movie in the aftermath of its release.  

In synopsis, Crash may indeed sound shocking but it is also satirical about our morbid obsession with celebrities and the ways they die. There is a very creepy and detailed recreation of James Dean’s fatal accident in his Porsche 550 Spyder race car on “a lonely stretch of California two-lane backdrop… the moment that would create a Hollywood legend”. The film also refers in deliberately tasteless fashion to the decapitation of Jayne Mansfield, “her head embedded in the windshield”.  

Cronenberg had switched the action from the roads of west London to the freeways of Toronto but was otherwise largely faithful to the novel. This is the story of James Ballard (James Spader), his sexual encounters with strangers he crashes into, and his fascination with the charismatic Vaughan (Elias Koteas), “the nightmare angel of the expressways”.  

“Sex and cars are two of the most photographed things in the world,” Cronenberg observed. His idea was to yank them together in a way that had never been done before.  

The Canadian is a huge car enthusiast. He spent years trying to make a film about Ferrari’s Phil Hill, the first American to win the Formula 1 Championship. In Crash, he shows a child-like enthusiasm in staging the demolition derby scenes of cars smashing into each other. They always do so at full speed, never in slow motion.   

However, no one is going to mistake Crash for a more highbrow version of Smokey and the Bandit. Alongside the scenes of cars smashing into each other, there are sequences showing massive, soul-destroying traffic jams. This is a subversive and provocative film in which normal narrative rules are abandoned. In most other movies, car accidents and sex scenes are very occasional events. Here, they make up the bulk of the movie.   

“The film is funny,” the director insisted. Crash has signature scenes of Cronenberg body horror, for example when James has sex with a wound on Gabrielle’s (Rosanna Arquette) leg.  

“There are moments when audiences burst out laughing, either in disbelief or exasperation. They can’t believe that they are going to have to look at another sex scene,” the director told Sight & Sound magazine. “In Crash, very often the sex scenes are absolutely the plot and the character development.”  

There is nothing furtive or voyeuristic about these scenes. What bothered some audiences was precisely the desensitised, matter-of-fact way in which they were staged.   

Cronenberg was fascinated by the clash between technology and animal instincts. He talked about the “primitive” roots of the behaviour of his seemingly modern, middle-class protagonists. In the film, characters refer to “the reshaping of the human body by modern technology”. Lines between the humans and their beloved machines sometimes blur. We see protagonists stroking the bodywork of the cars as if they are massaging skin. After their crashes, the humans themselves end up covered in metal, wearing steel clamps, callipers, and back braces.  

Some of the ideas behind Crash have added topicality today. Ballard wrote that his novel was concerned with “a pandemic cataclysm that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures millions”. He is referring not to Covid-19 but to the toll taken on the roads. According to World Health Organisation data, there were 1.35 million world traffic deaths globally in 2016. These deaths are accepted without governments quarantining their citizens or closing borders with countries that have the highest fatalities or even putting speed bumps on the roads.  

Cronenberg defended the violence in Crash, pointing out that other films of the period, such as Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, contained far more bloodshed. The context, though, was very different. This wasn’t a story about war or gangsters. It wasn’t a revenge fable. Its violence was impersonal and abstract and didn’t even have much to do with road rage. When you have people crammed together in powerful vehicles on huge freeways, the film reminded audiences, deaths were inevitable. Some viewers who might have been prepared to accept this message in public information documentaries about the importance of safe driving were appalled to find it in a fictional feature showing at their local multiplex.  

It is striking that the fiery language used by those calling for Crash to be banned often overlapped with that of Cronenberg himself. He called his own film “difficult, disturbing and unrelenting”, a verdict that Bottomley and Cllr Bull would surely have endorsed. There was no question that he wanted to provoke audiences and to shake them up. At the same time, he is the most cerebral of filmmakers. “I came to feel that the art that was the most interesting to me was the art that provoked philosophical thought,” the director ruminated in a recent masterclass. “People have said to me, ‘In your movies, you really want to scare people.’ I don’t even think about that. For me, making a film is a philosophical voyage. I am trying to figure out what is the human condition – what it is to be a human being, what it is to exist, what it is not to exist.”  

With Crash, the context in which the film was released was the issue. If it had been presented as an experimental art-house film and shown as an installation in a gallery, no one would have become agitated. If it had been sold to audiences as a cult, late-night B movie, few eyebrows would have been raised either. What made Crash so unsettling was its status as a mainstream movie with well-known stars. Detractors weren’t prepared to join Cronenberg on his “philosophical voyage” or to accept his description of Crash as “experimental and complex but not a social danger”. For them, it was, as the tabloids called it, “a sex and wrecks” movie, a “sicko” flick including (as one reviewer put it) “some of the most perverted acts and theories of sexual deviance I have ever seen in mainline cinema”.  

You can’t help but feel a touch of nostalgia for all the old-fashioned Bull-like British outrage that Crash provoked. A quarter of a century later, in its gleaming 4K restoration, its formal daring hasn’t dimmed in the slightest but the controversy that once accompanied it has all but vanished.   

‘Crash’ is re-released on 6 November by Arrow Films. The ‘Crash’ 4K UHD Blu-ray Limited Edition will be released on 30 November