David Cronenberg’s auto-erotic Crash at 30 • Journal • A Magazine • , Life in canada

The sex scenes in Crash are often slow and methodical, reiterative, never arriving individually but always as a trail of thematically interconnected sequences of stunted, searching sensuality, proceeding with the slowdread inevitability of a funeral procession.

The car collisions, though, are intense, singular, intimate. When they come, they come hard, fast, violent:

Like when James accidentally accordions his 1988 Dodge Chrysler Dynasty into the 1986 Ford Taurus of Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) on a rainy night.

Remington’s husband is ejaculated from the Taurus and into James’ Dynasty, dead on impact. Through mutually shattered windshields, James and Helen stare at one another across a gulf of twisted steel and unforgiving concrete that’s ellipsied with oil spots and blood. Helen struggles to free herself, never breaking from their stare, and accidentally undoes her blouse, freeing her breast as inadvertently as Catherine did purposefully. Something is fused in this moment for them both, something crucial, between their broken bodies and frozen minds, some freeing radiance of death joined to the exultant promise of sexual rebirth.

And then:

Weeks later, when James and Helen figuratively collide again, this time as pedestrians limping throughout the police impound that holds both their totaled cars, that fusion becomes overpowering. James offers Helen a ride in the new 1988 Dynasty he has purchased as a repeat of his unsalvageable one; after an adrenalizing almost-accident flares their shared trauma on the expressway, they pull into a parking garage for passionate, galvanic sex. Unlike the repeated scenes of impersonal rear-entry couplings throughout the film’s first act, Helen mounts James in the front seat while facing him, smiling and hungry, both of them yelling now, the first time anyone in Crash has raised their voices above muted funereal whispers, the film’s heretofore static and stationary cinematography now making a wide, swiping arc around them as something holy occurs, something transcendent, as two lost souls are found, and both come screaming within the metal confines of a lipstick-red Chrysler.

And then:

This sex scene is followed by another. Like buying again the same make and model of the car he crashed, James replicates with Catherine the face-to-face positioning he’s just shared with Helen. Their homebound sex features none of the ragged ferocity and internal combustion held between James and Helen in his car, none of the risk of lustful death nor the promise of deathful lust. There is something missing, some lost key required for ignition. James and Catherine rut into collapsed, unsatisfied exhaustion, lacking in their marital repetition what James and Helen discovered in their vehicular resurrection.