Ballard successfully illustrates a new sexuality – one oriented
around car collisions and technologies.
Whether or not one finds these
sexualities to be perverse or extreme, it is hard to deny that Ballard
describes them compellingly. There
are moments in the beginning of the novel when I doubted the characters’
capacities to be stimulated by the material components of a car. Furthermore, that one could literally
engage the car sexually. But
Ballard does just that, and he does so successfully. His descriptions are at times vague, but as a reader I got a
real sense of the sexuality and longing of the characters and the way they
expressed these desires both in cars with each other, and to the cars themselves.
This is where the adaptation falls short. I feel that Cronenberg’s Crash is unable to illustrate the
intimacy the characters feel with the
cars themselves. We talked in
class about how the sexual encounters in the book were void of any real
intimacy and, at times, sexuality.
The movie, however, felt to me like a series of strange and awkward
porno scenes that happen to take place in and around cars. There was something lacking there. The scenes in the movie were entirely
about sexuality and a desire for other breathing, living people.
I did, however, appreciated moments when Vaughan got his
sexual partners into the positions of crash victims. These instances were true to the book.
I suppose this can be explained pretty simply: you lose a
lot when converting something written to a visual medium. Writing allows for a more omniscient and
deeper exploration of the characters.
We understand their motives; their hopes and fears; and their
unreliability. For example, at no
point in the film did I get a real sense that Cronenberg was questioning Ballard’s
sanity. In the book, however, we
are constantly asking ourselves the question: is Vaughan even real or is he
just a creation of Ballard’s imagination?
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