The movie isn’t about sex or car crashes. (Well, sort of.) In Crash, David Cronenberg once again delivers on the grotesque and “the flesh” in a story about people who get off on car crashes. What the story ends up showing us is how we let our obsessions and addictions get out of control. This is the kind of “asking questions” I like in Cronenberg’s movies (unlike A History of Violence). He shows us some tough images to stomach, because we can’t possibly believe that sometimes instead of being in control of our addictions, they rule us. The sex scenes are graphic, but nothing in the movie is disturbing on a purely denotative level. What bothers us about the movie is the ideas conveyed in the images. It’s enough to make you not want to try out a car-crash fetish anytime soon.
