Crash (1996)

I have this weird thing where every time I see a Cronenberg movie it is neither as hot nor as fucked up as I would have hoped. There are exceptions to this (his 80s stuff! Cosmopolis, weirdly!), but I think going into his films with other people’s expectations of what makes a movie lurid in mind tends to make me think I’m in for something more than what’s actually on offer. That’s definitely more on me than on Cronenberg, but as the survivor of a horrific and near-fatal car accident I suppose I was hoping to be squicked out a little more by the carnage of Crash, and, I guess, as a member of a fetishized class of person, that the sex would feel more dangerous?

Maybe that’s an odd thing to say about the sex-in-car-crashes movie, maybe there’s something for me to work through, but again: 30 years of hype — Coppola hated it! Ted Turner tried to sabotage it! It tanked the NC-17 rating! — and what I got out of it was basically true to Roger Ebert’s assessment of the film, “a dissection of the mechanics of pornography,” cold and mechanical and procedural and, unfortunately, repetitive to the point of feeling kind of dull. I don’t like feeling this way about a movie too many of my friends/people I respect have found incredible, so I’ll give it another try some day, without the pretense of following Drive as a late night double feature.