Body work - interview with author J.G. Ballard and director David Cronenberg - Interview

ArtForum, March, 1997 by Andrew Hultkrans

AH: You had a major auto accident soon after completing the novel. Did that force you to reassess some of the flights of imagination you had just taken?

JB: No, it didn't. By a miracle I wasn't hurt. At least I hope I wasn't hurt - you never know about long-term brain damage.

AH: But you'd already finished Crash, so I think the screws were already loose.

JB: I'd finished it two weeks earlier, and I know if I'd died in the crash people would have said, "Ah, he got what he deserved." I mean, I never said that I think car crashes are sexually exciting. What I'd said is that the idea of a car crash is sexually exciting. We know they're almost the worst thing that can happen to us on the average day, and yet, at the same time, we find the idea of crashing cars very, very exciting.

Now, this is what I was exploring - the fact that there's something about the car crash that trippers a powerful imaginative response. I mean, I've written endlessly about the peculiar resonance that the deaths of famous people in car crashes - Mansfield, Camus, James Dean, and so on - have, which the deaths of the famous in hotel fires and plane crashes do not have. That Kennedy's assassination took place in the course of a motorcade had a special bearing on the curious, electrifying magic his death had on the public imagination. Had Kennedy been shot as he stepped out of the aircraft in Dallas, I don't think it would have had quite the same resonance. I don't think you have to look very far, because we all know when we drive our own cars that we have our death, literally, at our fingertips. We all know that the experience of driving a car taps various feelings of aggression and competitiveness. Young men, in particular, have to grapple not just with the car as they drive, but with their own hot emotions. The car, the experience of driving, also plays into the hands of all kinds of unconscious fantasies - of transcendence, of death. I think the car plays a special role in the twentieth-century psyche for that reason. But this is something that takes place in the imagination. It's the idea of the car crash that is sexually exciting - not the crash itself.

AH: I understand the film has caused quite a bit of tub-thumping in England.

JB: The film opened here at the London Film Festival a couple of months ago, and created an incredible storm. And I thought, "Poor David." He must have felt how Gulliver felt among the Lilliputians. He was just amazed by the reaction of the British press, those custodians of public morality.

AH: Did he receive the old "Throw this sick bastard out!" tabloid treatment when he arrived?

JB: When Crash received its first screening in Cannes, I noticed that a lot of the press people who were interviewing us, even though they'd seen the film the previous evening, were really talking about an imaginary film that they'd screened inside their heads. And this is a problem with Crash - people think they've seen a violently pornographic film. In fact, the car crashes are played down, there's a low degree of violence, and there's very little sex. It's only, you know, simulated sex. There are far more graphic sexual scenes in countless Hollywood films - Basic Instinct, etc. - and infinitely more lurid violence. But once the dog has got the bone clamped between its jaws, it won't let go. These new moral crusaders don't want to let go of Crash, because it's such a juicy bone. God knows what will happen if it is finally shown here.