Posted on Thursday 25 April 2002
I watched Crash by David Cronenberg for the first time on T.V the other night. If you haven’t seen it, you’ve probably heard of it with all the hysteria in the press that followed its release. It follows a set of characters (principally James Spader) that develop a fetish involving car crashes and wounds resulting from them. They literally sit around wanking to world scariest police chases (I thought I was the only one).
It seemed to me as I was watching it, that this is an allegory, but an allegory for what? Then, as Spader was fucking Rosanna Arquette, running his fingers along the deep scar lines on what was left of her legs, it struck me that at some point during the early stages of a relationship people reveal emotional or psychic scars to each other, confess their damage, as a way of testing each other and deepening the relationship by admitting the initial idealized version of themselves they were previously presenting wasn’t exactly the full picture. Sure you can love the good me, but can you love the bad me?
Some people though, begin to idealize the damage, to fetish it, believing it makes them more real, genuine, dangerous, unique. Their damage defines them and justifies endless self-pity, melancholy and inaction. Half- consciously, they begin to compete; “You think you’re fucked up that’s nothing compared to me”. Richie Manic fans spring to mind. There’s a line in a song from a band called, co-incidentally, The Driven, that goes:
‘Desperately I lick your scars, not that the taste does anything for me.’
On another level it seemed to be commenting on the fetishing of violence by the media. When Elias Coteas is leaning out of a convertible taking pictures of a car crash, it reminded me of how the media are doing that every day on our behalf. When he explains that his project is exploring how our bodies are being transformed by technology, if you substitute film for project and psyche for body, the central point of the film reveals itself. Open a newspaper, turn on the newspaper and there are pictures of train crashes, war zones, crime scenes everyday, always accompanied by a self righteous sense of outrage and a pair of tits on page three, or an ad with a half naked model, or simply being introduced by a woman who could be a model. This adds a juicy level of irony to the witch hunt that followed the release of Crash. Surely there were more important stories at the time that deserved the media’s attention but they didn’t possess the vital ingredients of sex and violence.
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