David Cronenberg's Adaptation Of Crash

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To put Crash in context with the horrified reception of the work, twenty-three years after the novel was published David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of Crash came out and was deemed so pornographic in its visualization of vehicular accidents that it was banned in Westminster (Potts). And even Cronenberg’s adaptation could never in the average time constraints of a film have included every violent crash detailed in the imagination of characters James Ballard and Dr. Robert Vaughan. The novel floods the reader from the beginning with the shockingly detailed imaginations of a sexual obsession with car crashes as well as the death of the almost-mythical being, Dr. Vaughan – who made this obsessive lifestyle accessible to James. Ballard’s literary …show more content…

The space where fluid abjection is predominantly exposed lies within the vehicle in the act of its cooperative destruction of human and machine, carrying with it automotive fluids mixed with all forms of human abjection from “rainbow [oil]” and “blood” to “vomit,” “globes of semen” and “the last drops of fluid from his seminal vesicles,” (Ballard 9). The intermingling of these fluids functioning as a union of technology and man in death, where man is less capable of recovering, unable to be started back up. Ballard’s use of this automotive space as the core locality for perceiving the fragility of human identity is quite blatant, as he lucidly specifies, “I realized that the human inhabitants of this technological landscape no longer provided its sharpest pointers, its keys to the borderzones of identity,” (Ballard 48-49). This is to say, that society itself is so desensitized to technology and post-modern utilitarian culture that the technological space that when whole would have provided a new margin to human identity has been made so commonplace that only its merged destruction with man that physically reestablishes the border of

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