Crash

David Cronenberg's Crash (1996) brought down a storm of controversy and opprobrium when it was first screened, provoking outrage for a plot that weaves together moments of extreme horror, injury and sexual pleasure . And yet it's a cool, controlled, formal film, unsensational, more analytic than titillating, a brilliant exposé of modern pathologies.


In his compelling study of the film, which includes an exclusive and revealing interview with Ballard, Iain Sinclair explores the uncanny temporal loop which connects film and novel. What, he asks, is the relationship between Cronenberg's film and Ballard's book? And, further back, what is the relationship between Ballard himself and the character 'James Ballard' in Crash? If Cronenberg's 'adapted' Crash, he also absorbed it, ingested it, made it into something new. But, on the other hand, the novel controls the film, or uses the film to disguise its truly subversive intent. And, for Sinclair, there are more startling permutations still. To what extent, for example, is Crash a premonition of some of the more remarkable media events of recent times?


In his afterword to this new edition, Iain Sinclair reflects upon his own relationship with J.G. Ballard, whom he came to know in the period after writing the original book, and considers Crash in the light of more recent films by Cronenberg.