Crash

"Prophecy is ragged and dirty... so make it ragged and dirty." Another film obsessed with death as the ultimate human limit, and humanity's natural perverse pursuit of it as a result. Toeing the line between life and death, pain and pleasure, and the unknowable, addicting, and ultimately destructive urge to get as close as possible to whatever our limit may be, in whatever endeavour we might find ourselves in. Cronenberg explores this sexually much as Żuławski does in Possession because this is the most instinctive, universal, and insatiable form of desire - perhaps its basest form, too. Where Possession parallels desire and death, exploring limits through the destruction of societal norms, Crash frames the brush with death as foundational instead of analogical. These characters are obsessed with each others pains, their imperfections, and their pasts. They act as voyeurs even as become agents of the harm themselves - voyeurism taken to its extreme, to the realm of dangerous acts in themselves. They capture this fascination with death in danger at its most mundane, accepted form in modern society: the traffic accident. Naturally this fascination with the limit of death can go only one place - death itself, or else so near to it that there is no going back, although one could argue that everyone in this film is already long past that point. There is a pervasive since of doom that practically radiates from the entire film, one that I think is particularly expressive of Cronenberg's point here - that this is, in a manner of speaking, humanity's future. We may not be able to help these feelings, and if we do let this fascination with our limits dominate us, then we are perhaps all fated to live as dangerously as the characters of Crash do - if we don't already without knowing it. It's a hard thing to balance, however, because the pursuit of those limits is, of course, what makes us human. We can never stop that, and we never should. But maybe being a little more aware can help. Another thing that stood out to me is how much technically stronger of a work this is compared to Videodrome. Truly, the lighting, camerawork, and set pieces here are very clearly on a level above Cronenberg's earlier work. The characters of this film, in fact, seem to believe that he's transcended it thematically, too ("You said it's about the reshaping of the human body by modern technology."/"That's just a crude sci-fi concept that floats on the surface and doesn’t threaten anybody.") - although I think there are a fair number of parallels here that they don't quite give him credit for. The soft curvature of the human body is constantly contrasted against the harsh planes of the analog machinery they surround themselves with, and as much as the characters are inspired by the human harm that results from the crashes they admire, it would be remiss to dismiss the effect the machinery itself seems to have. The cause and frequency of the danger is undoubtably a factor, as is the daily nature of traffic itself. The characters have sex in the cars, they have sex watching cars, and they have sex to the rhythm of the car wash. They may claim to be moved solely by the transcendence of the traffic accident as a human experience, but they have nonetheless allowed themselves to be shaped by this machinery and the world that humanity has built for itself. By the end, especially in the particularly urban highway environment of Toronto (in case you didn't know, famously awful traffic), this feels as apocalyptically prophetic about industrialization's effect on human nature as it does about our apparently inherent human tendencies. And that is certainly a greater fear, because it is a doom of our own creation. Criterion Challenge 2026