Crash

Originally published 02/07/23 on Letterboxd

Watching this while exhausted at 3:30 am merely heightens its already potent somnambulant qualities. As with every Cronenberg this only reveals itself more with time, but what I was struck by this time around was less to do with the steeliness of its form and more to do with how quietly moving this is, in spite of the performances’ evocation of Ballard’s prose- that is, where they seem to be perpetually in the process of rehearsing the basics of human communication.
There have been endless deliberations about the film’s advancement of the post-Anthropocene dissolution between unbound human sexuality and the machines that enable its liberation, but the extremity of the methods that Crash’s fetishists use to reach literal and figurative climax is, in typically deceptive Cronenberg fashion, an alien sheen that conceals the fundamental loneliness and total extrication from modernity that guides their movements, whereby the only cure to a kind of innate sickness stemming from the ontological hollowness of the Anthropocene is to either fuck the pain away or to destroy oneself so as not to feel anything at all.

Through that particular lens, it remains one of the only pieces of art whose psychological and emotional continuum aligns most closely with mine