3. Sexy Machines
If Naked Lunch was a flawed but utterly compelling adaptation of one of literature's most controversial texts, Cronenberg's take on JG Ballard's infamous dystopian cyberpunk masterpiece Crash is simply brilliant and ranks among the director's best work. While Naked Lunch didn't really achieve much recognition beyond the independent cinema circuit, Crash courted wide controversy - effectively, it seriously pissed off a lot of censors and conservative critics. Cronenberg's film is far closer to its source material than the Burroughs adaptation. The story of a group of people that find sexual pleasure in car crashes, Cronenberg unflinchingly depicts the cyborgian sexuality of an increasingly technological society. There are many disturbing scenes. James Ballard (played by James Spader) copulates with a vulva-shaped scar on a woman's leg. Characters grope one another while watching videos of car crashes. Liaisons with prostitutes occur exclusively in vehicles. Shots of parts of cars (dents in the bodywork, smashed windscreens, restrictive seatbelts) are tainted with pornographic cinematography, as if to render the vehicles sensual to the viewer. The film's climax ends with a devastating but intentional car crash, in which Ballard and his wife are thrown from the vehicle. Ballard notes that "next time" will be better for both of them - implying that the only way that these car crashes can truly satiate their fetishistic desires is through their eventual death. Crash is a weird but intoxicating watch. It takes many of Cronenberg's themes of body horror and fuses them with a brilliant study of the role of the machine in the late twentieth-century. Naturally, it was banned in many places and, sadly, filmic references to Crash are now generally related to Paul Haggis' Academy Award winning movie of the same name.