Crash
Crash is a novel by J.G. Ballard first published in 1973, and later made into a 1996 film directed by David Cronenberg, about a subculture of people who are sexually aroused by car crashes.
They re-enact famous car crashes (such as those that killed James Dean and Jayne Mansfield), cause accidents themselves and document other crashes. Both NC-17 and R versions have been produced. It won a special prize at Cannes for daring, audacity, and originality.
The film's subject matter caused the tabloid press to condemn it as sick and evil. Few of the papers pointed out that it was based on a novel by the author of Empire of the Sun. To be fair, the film does feature very graphic depictions of sexual acts mixed with violence. For example, some characters use gash wounds (healed or otherwise) as alternate orafices for intercourse.
The novel
Crash is a story about car-crash fetishists, who gets their sexual kicks by staging and participating in very real car-crashes, often with very real consequences. Ballard writes the book in a cold and detached language, giving the impression of an engineering report or a medical journal.
The story is told through the eyes of a narrator named after the writer himself, but it centres on the sinister figure Vaughan, a “former TV-scientist, turned nightmare angel of the expressways”. Gathering around Vaughan, is a group of alienated people, all of them former crash-victims, who follows him in his pursuit to re-enact the crashes of celebrities, and experience what the narrator calls “a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology.” Vaughan’s ultimate fantasy is to die in a head-on collision with movie star Elizabeth Taylor, popular at the time the novel was written (in 1971).
The book explores themes such as the transformation of human psychology by modern technology, and consumer culture´s fascination with celebrities, Internet Movie Database
Crash is the name of a 1996 album by the Dave Matthews Band.
Crash is the title of a 1988 song by the Coventry band, The Primitives.
CRASH was an Los Angeles Police Department special task force in the 1980s and 1990s.
A crash is also a common term for a computer fault that brings down a program or operating system.
A car or other vehicular crash is the act of colliding with something, including another vehicle. See Road Safety.
