You Love to See It: Crash

Like a cunt, a wound has lips. In many ways this statement encompasses the totality of David Cronenberg’s almost unbearably sensual Crash, a movie which literalizes the psychological conceit of sexuality taking shape around the psychic wound of trauma. In Cronenberg’s film the characters’ wounds becomes sexual in and of themselves, the trauma inflicted on their bodies by repeated car crashes leaving them more and more sexualized until, as with Eleas Koteas’s Vaughan, the libido becomes all-consuming, transforming into the mortido, or destrudo: the insatiable urge to move by violence toward destruction.

The movie is rife with the fetishization of near-death. In one scene James (James Spader) fucks a wound on the back of Gabrielle’s (Rosanna Arquette) severed leg, pushing himself into the site of a trauma which nearly destroyed her body as though desperate to experience that moment of physical crisis, to internalize it and make it a paradoxical lack-and-part of himself. In an earlier scene Gabrielle’s prosthetic leg snags on the upholstery of an expensive showroom car as she tries to climb into the driver’s seat. The fine leather tears with a clear, crisp ripping sound as she playfully lets the salesman try to free her, and his panic only adds to the frisson of desire which passes between her and James. Destruction, the opening of a figurative wound in the fabric of daily life, is flirtation.

What, once injury has deformed the body, are we to do with our remade and fragile selves? Cronenberg is uninterested in giving instruction or parsing out moral ways of being, choosing instead to follow the same human instinct which drives us to pick at our scabs, to thrust our fingers into our cunts and rub our thumbs over the almost unbearably sensitive heads of our cocks: you see a hole in a body, you probe it, feel it, fill it. You see a whole in a psyche, you do the same. A wound is both an absence and a presence, an invitation and a denial. Crash strokes its naked, glistening subject matter until, like a cunt, it softens at the touch, relaxing. Ready to engulf.