Crash

Product Information

It’s a 5 star from a technique perspective but it’s a 1 star from my response to it and whether I’d recommend it to another reader. The consensus reads: "Despite the surprisingly distant, clinical direction, Crash's explicit premise and sex is classic Cronenberg territory. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an intentionally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. An academic study of the controversy and audience responses to it, written by Martin Barker, Jane Arthurs and Ramaswami Harindranath, was published by Wallflower Press in 2001, entitled The Crash Controversy: Censorship Campaigns and Film Reception. But it is an important book to read, as is all of Ballard's work before and after "Crash" ends at just over two hundred pages or so.

He noted that a moment has come in the history of mankind when sex-free artificial reproduction of the species became available: "We could literally put a moratorium on sex for 100 years and we still would not extinguish the human race. It is safe to say that a good barometer of sublimity is evident in the negative reaction the work draws out of society; the greater the reaction of faux 'shock' and 'horror' the more important and relevant the work - I think here of Easton Ellis' 'American Psycho' as another fine example where the inverted shock to brilliance ratio once again proves itself accurate. I had avoided reading this book as I must have had some lingering memory of the surrounding controversy. Cronenberg's script was mostly faithful to the book, but the ending scene was created by him and he removed some scenes from the book during filming. Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights.Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook).

Yet, despite the injuries inflicted, they do not have this burning desire that helps man compose a consistently successful future.The great impact the book had upon publication must be due to the novelty of the idea and the presentation.

He drives obsessively, always on the lookout for a potential accident in the making, and makes many trips to the scene where is own accident occurred. I also get that, since I do not share this particular fetish, this book will find its most enthusiastic admirers among those who do share it. Ballard certainly added an extra kink to the perversity of this novel when he elected to give the narrator his own name.

As the couple kiss and begin to have sex near the wrecked vehicle, James whispers to her, "maybe the next one", implying that the only possible apotheosis of their extreme fetish is death. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole.