This is what we're watching: Crash, a film in which Cronenberg teaches how to get an orgasm from a car accident

In the new series Articles every week I talk about which films and TV series amazed me. Today we’ll talk about “Car Crash.”

By the mid-nineties, David Cronenberg had established himself as an author making scandalous films. But “Car Crash” turned out to be the director’s most provocative and crazy film - so much so that journalists and public figures suggested boycotting it.

Film producer James Ballard gets into an accident and becomes sexually aroused. He meets Helen - it was her car that he crashed into. She discovers to Ballard a group of people who derive sexual pleasure from accidents. James is drawn into this secret society, not forgetting to take with him his wife, whose relationship has long been reduced to emotionless sex.

After the premiere of Crash, Cronenberg was accused of exalting sexual deviance. It is unlikely that the fierce fighters for morality understood that for the director this was more of a compliment. He was always interested in physicality, sexuality, techno-fetishism - and “Crash” incorporates all of this. The car turns out to be an extension of the body, the mutilation is a sexual act. Even preparing for an accident looks like a prelude.

Cronenberg is scandalous, but hardly because he wants it: the director does without feigned shocking. He just asks too unpleasant questions. If simple BDSM practices are approved in society, is it possible to go further? And where is the line between harmless pleasure and a dangerous fetish? Like Roman Polanski in Bitter Moon, Cronenberg comes to the conclusion that from a favorite little practice to a deviation that defines an individual, it is only half a step. And for the hero to become himself, to understand himself, he must go through this path, simultaneously destroying his life - either social or physical.

The background against which the action unfolds looks amazing. One of the most sexualized films of the nineties, Eyes Wide Shut suggested a mysterious, even sacred, practice. Cronenberg in Crash depicts a gray and boring city in which the characters live. Their dangerous fetish does not destroy everyday life, it calmly fits into it. Because of this, the sexual practices of the heroes are not perceived as something special - it is part of city life, nothing more.

Almost 30 years have passed since the release of Crash, but there are practically no directors who have stepped into the territory trodden by David Cronenberg: only Julia Ducournau and Cronenberg Jr. immediately come to mind. That’s why his strangest and, probably, piercing film still shocks – others are afraid to go that far in discussing physicality.