Crash (1996)

David Cronenberg’s 1996 movie Crash, shot in Toronto, is based on J.G. Ballard’s 1973 book.

The movie starts with a car crash. James Ballard (James Spader) is involved in a crash in which a man is killed. The man’s wife Dr Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) survives.

Ballard and Helen are soon involved in a sexual relationship, the sexual electricity coming from their shared car crash experience.

They both notice something odd. After their crash there seems to be a lot more traffic on the roads.

Ballard meets Vaughan (Elias Koteas), a man obsessed by car crashes, and gets drawn into a strange circle of car crash enthusiasts. It’s not a cult but it is an obsession and it’s a sexual fetish. If driving a car is a sexual act then a car crash is the ultimate orgasm.

Ballard’s wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) is drawn in as well.

Vaughan recreates famous car crashes such as the James Dean crash. Despite the use of stunt drivers it’s very very dangerous, which is why it’s exciting.

Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), one of Vaughan’s little circle, suffered such severe injuries in a car crash and has so many metal prosthetics that she seems almost cyborg-like. Ballard enjoys having sex with her because it’s almost like having sex with a machine-woman.

Ballard is being more deeply drawn in and Vaughan is becoming increasingly obsessed. It’s as if his 1963 Lincoln Continental convertible is now an extension of his body, or perhaps his body is now part of the machine.

These people are all discovering that they cannot get real sexual pleasure unless the sex act is linked with cars and car crashes.

All these people are strange to start with. There’s something oddly disconnected about them. It’s not like being involved in a car crash suddenly changes their lives. The car crashes just bring things into focus for them. Suddenly their sense of disconnectedness makes sense to them.

There are obvious thematic links to Cronenberg’s earlier Videodrome. That whole Long Live the New Flesh thing. In Crash as in Videodrome we see the birth of almost a new species with people radically changed by their interface with technology and machines. Their emotions are different. Their sexuality is entirely different and cannot be understood in terms of any of the traditional classifications. The body and the machine are one. When characters have sex in a car (which they frequently do in this movie) it’s not a man and a woman having sex. It’s a threesome with the car being the other partner. The car is not just a convenient place in which to have sex. The car is the essential element.

It would be a mistake to see this a psycho-sexual thriller or a psycho-sexual drama. It’s not really a psychological movie at all. It’s not exploring the psychology of the characters nor is it concerned with society in a straightforward way. It’s more of a philosophical movie. Cronenberg thought of it as an existentialist movie.

This is a science fiction movie and it could even qualify as cyberpunk. In fact I do consider it to be cyberpunk. Cyberpunk concerns itself with the interface between humans and machines and the effect that has on our humanness and Crash explores similar territory. Cyberpunk usually focuses on AIs and robots but when Ballard wrote his book in 1973 the internet, AIs and personal computers were not even thought of. Ballard focuses on cars instead.

Cronenberg maintains this focus and it’s interesting that there is not a single computer in the movie. Which I’m sure is deliberate. Ballard’s idea of cars and freeways modifying our bodies and our behaviour and our sexuality still worked in 1996 and it still works today.

The fact that it’s cars rather than robots gives the human-machine interface a more visceral edge, cars being more brutally machine-like and more obviously dangerous while at the same time being part of everyday life that we take for granted.

This is the sort of thing that suits James Spader perfectly so it’s no surprise that he’s excellent. Elias Koteas is effectively disturbing as Vaughan. Rosanna Arquette is terrific. I especially loved Deborah Kara Unger as Catherine Ballard. She’s so detached and disconnected which is exactly right for the part.

All the performances work because they’re all slightly cold and disengaged.

The visuals have a starkness which works extremely well. We really do feel that this is a world that is no longer quite the familiar world. It’s just subtly wrong.

Crash was hugely controversial. In terms of explicit content it’s very tame but the ideas upset some sensitive souls. J.G. Ballard loved the movie.

Crash is Cronenberg at his best. Very highly recommended.

The Criterion Blu-Ray includes an excellent audio commentary by Cronenberg. Cronenberg insists that he has zero interest in political messaging which increases my admiration for him considerably.

Fast Company (1979)

Fast Company is a lighthearted romantic action thriller drag-racing drive-in movie directed by David Cronenberg. This is definitely not the sort of thing one associates with Cronenberg.

This is a Canadian movie shot entirely in Canada.

Cronenberg was just finding his feet as a director at this time. This is a movie he did for a pay cheque but he is in fact a drag-racing fan.

Lonnie Johnson (William Smith) is a well-known popular drag racer. He drives the fastest dragsters, the “fuelers” which run on nitromethane and alcohol. Or he did, until his car exploded. Now he has to drive a “funny car” (front-engined dragsters with fibreglass body shells). Which means that his protégé Billy Booker (known as Billy the Kid) misses out. Lonnie feels bad about this. He likes Billy. But Lonnie had no choice. He races for the FastCo team and his boss Phil Adamson (John Saxon) insists.

We know Adamson is going to be the bad guy because he’s played by John Saxon. And Saxon is in full-on nasty slimy super-villain mode.

Lonnie’s chief rival is Gary "The Blacksmith" Black (Cedric Smith). Gary resents Lonnie’s success but while he’s hyper-competitive we should not jump to the conclusion that he’s going to be a bad guy.

Lonnie’ girlfriend is Sammy (Claudia Jennings). She’d like him to give up racing and she knows he won’t but she loves him anyway.

Billy the Kid is sleeping with Candy (Judy Foster), who is a kind of drag racing equivalent of a Formula 1 grid girl. Adamson is trying to force her to sleep with clients.

Adamson has plans to get rid of Lonnie because Lonnie won’t grovel to him but he has to have a plausible justification for firing him.

It all comes to a head with a big race for the Funny Car championship.

There’s some satire here about the corrupting effects of commercialism in sport but FastCo is not a giant corporation. Adamson has a private plane but it’s not a LearJet. It’s a little single-engined Cessna. FastCo and Adamson are just not big enough or important enough to be truly sinister, which makes the satire lighthearted and amusing. Despite his ruthlessness and unscrupulousness Adamson is ridiculous rather than truly scary.

There’s plenty of cool drag racing action. There are crashes and there are exploding dragsters. Lonnie is nicknamed Lucky Man because of his extraordinary knack for walking away unscathed from spectacular crashes. There’s some suspense. There’s an over-the-top villain. There’s a bit of humour. There’s a lighthearted feelgood vibe. There’s some romance. There are bare boobs. This is a total drive-in movie.

One thing I like about it is that it takes these people seriously. Drag racing is their life. The movie isn’t mocking them. Lonnie isn’t a ridiculous figure. Sammy isn’t made to seem ridiculous for loving him. Candy isn’t made to seem ridiculous for loving Billy. These people have a passion and they follow it. They are doing what they love. Sammy respects Lonnie for that.

With motor racing there’s always the sneaking suspicion that the attraction for the spectators is the possibility of witnessing a fiery crash. It’s a kind of primitive ritual - men courting violent death. It’s a dance of death. It’s interesting that although on the surface Fast Company doesn’t seem at all Cronenbergian 17 years later Cronenberg would deal with similar themes in a very Cronenbergian way in Crash. And while Fast Company doesn’t deal with the erotic aspect of this attraction overtly we do see some very hot babes who are obviously at least to some extent keen to have sex with men who may be marked for death.

John Saxon is delightfully fiendish. William Smith makes a good sympathetic hero. He’s not perfect but basically he’s a good guy. Claudia Jennings, a fine actress, is very good but isn’t given enough to do.

Fast Company is a fine above-average drive-in movie.

This movie looks great on Blu-Ray.

Shivers (1975)

Shivers (or to give it its original US title They Came from Within) was David Cronenberg’s first real feature film. Many of the obsessions that run through his work can be seen in this movie so it has perhaps some mild historical interest for that reason. Unfortunately it’s an unbelievably bad movie so if you’re not a Cronenberg completist avoid this one.

I happen to be a major fan of Cronenberg’s work. I consider both Crash and Dead Ringers to be masterpieces. Shivers is simply an embarrassment. In an interview on the DVD Cronenberg admits that his early films were heavily influenced by American underground movies. And Shivers has all the hallmarks of a underground movie - excruciatingly bad acting, inept editing, a flat visual style, a penchant for cheap shocks and a generally infantile tone.

The setting is an ultra-modern (by 1975 standards) apartment building on an island in the St Lawrence River in Montreal. The Starliner is more than just an apartment block though - it’s an entire town in miniature with its own shops, its own medical centre, etc. Were presumably supposed to see this as some kind of comment on the evils of modernist architecture and capitalism.

The doctors at the medical centre have been conducting experiments with parasites. On of the more deranged of these medicos has a theory that parasites can be created that will be over to take over the functions of damaged bodily organs thus making organ transplants unnecessary. Of course these parasites have escaped into the building, and they apparently have the effect of making people sex-crazed.

Cronenberg explains in his interview that he’s a firm believe in not implying anything - all the horror should be shown. Shivers is a classic example of the drawbacks of that approach. When your monsters look too silly to be scary your only option is to try to gross the audience out. The results are almost invariably, as in this case, tedious.

There are some good ideas here, but the film has no dramatic tension, no suspense, no surprises, no unexpected twists. Just a series of gross but silly images.

For a movie that concerns itself with parasites that supposedly drive their victims to sexual frenzy it’s also curiously un-erotic. Later in his career Cronenberg became very good indeed at depicting disturbing aberrant eroticism but sadly there’s no trace of that quality here. Even Lynn Lowry (who had demonstrated in Radley Metzger’s Score the previous year that she could be very disturbingly sexy indeed) fails to generate much excitement, even when she takes her clothes off in a desperate attempt to keep the audience interested.

Cronenberg even gets a dull performance out of Barbara Steele.

Cronenberg and Kim Newman, in discussing the movie, use the words transgressive and subversive a lot. They’re great words, but all too often in practice they end up being things that 19-year-old film students think will shock their parents. And Cronenberg was 32 when he made the movie, which is a bit embarrassing.

I haven’t changed my opinion on Cronenberg. I still think he’s one of the best and most interesting of modern horror directors. Everyone is entitled to one bad movie and its always good to get it over with early in your career. One does have to feel a bit sorry for the Canadian taxpayers who financed this clunker.

The Prism Region 2 DVD suffers from atrocious sound quality, but given that this was a low-budget movie that may be a problem with the source material rather than the DVD. And the dialogue is so awful that most of the time not being able to understand it is actually an advantage.

Videodrome (1983)

David Cronenberg’s 1983 opus Videodrome has lost none of its edge in the quarter of a century since its initial release.

The fact that the cutting edge technology depicted in the movie is cable TV and video cassette recorders surprisingly doesn’t date the movie at all. Cronenberg has no interest in the details of technology. What he’s interested in is what technology will do to us, how it will change us. The specifics of the technology are irrelevant. The line between reality and what the media shows us started to become blurred long before 1983. As early as the 60s soap opera stars were being approached in supermarkets and addressed by fans who were unable to make the distinction between the actors and the characters they played.

James Woods plays Max Renn, a sleazy media entrepeneur who runs a cable TV station, a station that specialises in softcore porn and violence. Max is always on the lookout for something edgier, something harder, something that the competition doesn’t offer. When his satellite dish picks up a program called Videodrome, a program that offers torture and murder that seems so hyper-realistic that it may or may not actually be real, he is convinced he’s found a winner.

Appearing on a TV talk show, Max makes the acquaintance of radio personality Nicki Brand, who hosts the Emotional Rescue radio show. She admits that, “I live in a highly-excited state of overstimulation.” Back at his place she is looking for porn videos (which she likes because they get her in the mood) when she discovers the Videodrome cassette. She decides that she was born to appear on that show. Nicki’s sexual tastes are decidedly masochistic - she enjoys things like burning herself with cigarettes, and being cut by her lovers.

But Videodrome comes with a price, and the price is that it triggers an uncontrollable series of hallucinations. Max finds himself in a world of conspiracies, of shadowy organisations intending to use Videodrome for political purposes, of mysterious media gurus who exist only on TV, and there seems no way to stop the hallucinations. And he’s developed a vagina-like opening in his stomach, into which objects such as video-cassettes can be inserted.

Science fiction is notorious for making embarrassingly mistaken predictions about what the future will be like. Videodrome is scary because its predictions have ended up being so chillingly close to the truth. We do have cable TV stations specialising in murder as entertainment - after all, what else is CI if it isn’t that? The combination of sex and technology was a particularly bold prediction in 1983, when concepts like cybersex hadn’t even been thought of (this movie came out a year before another Canadian, William Gibson, first popularised the idea of virtual reality and cyberspace in his novel Neuromancer).

The main criticism leveled at this movie has always been the incoherence of the plot. But anyone looking for a coherent plot has missed the point of the film. Everything is seen from the viewpoint of Max Renn, a man who lives his life switching back and forth between reality and hallucination, existing in a society in which the line between reality and media is fuzzy enough to begin with. And Cronenberg sticks relentlessly to Max’s point of view - there is no comforting explanation at the end where we discover what was reality and what was fantasy.

Of course if you’re going to dispense with logical plotting you’re going to have to rely overwhelmingly on the power of the images, of the mood, and of the acting. Videodrome has more than enough strength in those areas. The images are as unsettling as ever. Effects such as the breathing video-cassettes and the TV set with Nicki’s face emerging from the screen still work perfectly. James Woods (who can at times overdo the edgy thing) is perfectly cast as Max. Debbie Harry is extremely effective as Nicki, bringing a disturbingly kinky eroticism to her performance.

The 1970s had seen a series of science fiction horror movies exploring similar themes of technology merging with humanity and mimicking reality, movies such as Westworld and Demon Seed. Cronenberg takes these ideas to their logical extreme in Videodrome. A great movie. Long live the new flesh!