Cronenberg's 'Crash' course in effect

Crash (1996) envelopes its audience with a dangerous sensuality that brilliantly and disturbingly transcends the line between watching and experiencing a film. It is this involvement that you feel while watching the film that makes it so important, powerful and bewildering. The audience, like the protagonist James, becomes seduced by the forbidden pleasures that lie between beauty and destruction embodied by Elias Koteas' character Vaughan. Vaughan even directly refers the experience of a car crash to that of sex, "the car crash is a fertilising rather than a destructive event". This pursuit of masochistic expression is what drives the narrative, though Cronenberg manages to keep it from the perverse and instead it comes across as an honest reflection of the characters. Before James' initial crash he shares a hollow and unfulfilled sex life with his wife. As they both become entwined in the violent, sensual thrill of the crash, it becomes deeper and darker. This dynamic creates some of the most complex physiological profiles ever committed to celluloid. In this way it is comparable in depth and humanity to Bergman's Persona and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom. Forget any notion of this film being 'controversial', 'fetishist' or 'erotic'. It defies a label. It is instead a film that cements David Cronenberg's position as one of the finest directors working today, or indeed, ever.