Dec 22, 2020 Web Exclusive By Jason Wilson Sex and car crashes is such a reductive and meaningless way to characterize David Cronenberg’s Crash, but it’s understandable why such a description would ultimately be how such a movie is sold to the public. It’s the promise of something taboo and dangerous, and while the movie most certainly is those things it doesn’t go about it in the way that you may expect. Crash is cold and sterile. It’s erotic without being sensual. The sex is almost always presented as mechanical and joyless. Thrilling, yes, but automatic and machine-like even when certain boundaries of inhibition are eroded. James Ballard (James Spader) and his wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) have affairs and relay the details to one another during their own sexual encounters. It’s not that they’re necessarily dissatisfied with one another, it’s that sex has simply lost its luster. James breaks his leg in a car crash that sends another man fatally through his windshield. That man’s wife, Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) is left watching from the other car. This event awakens something in James and puts him on a path to further depravity or a boundary-less sexual awakening, depending on your point of view.