J.G. Ballard on the “gripping, blurred frontiers” of David Cronenberg
In 1996, David Cronenberg took on the task of adapting J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash for the big screen. Cronenberg cast James Spader as James Ballard, a film producer who survives a horrific car crash which results in his becoming sexually aroused by them. He falls in with a group of similar-minded fetishists whilst trying to re-spark his sexual relationship with his wife.
Crash was well received by critics after it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. In fact, Cronenberg’s film was awarded the Special Jury Prize, which is only given at the request of the festival’s jury, not merely awarded every year. Francis Ford Coppola, the jury’s president that year, called the film “daring and audacious”.
Ballard once gave the highest of praise to Cronenberg in a piece entitled ‘The killer inside’ for The Guardian written in 2005. He called Cronenberg’s A History of Violence “a film as brilliant and provocative as anything [he] has directed,” adding, “all Cronenberg’s films make us edge back into our seats, gripped by the story unfolding on the screen but aware that something unpleasant is going on in the seats around us.”
“That unpleasantness, needless to say, is ourselves, a damp bundle of passions, needs and neuroses that conceal our secret nature,” Ballard went on. “The disturbing event we witnessed in the past is the experience of being alive, a state of affairs that Cronenberg most definitely does not take at face value.”
Ballard then gave a brief description of the impact that several of Cronenberg’s films had. He called Videodrome “a parable of how tenuous reality has become in a media-dominated world” before noting the “adolescent doubt and self-loathing” that Jeff Goldblum undoubtedly experiences in The Fly.
The author’s description of Crash itself shows that Cronenberg absolutely nailed home the themes of Ballard’s novel. He writes, “[It’s] a love story that treats the car crash as a religious sacrament, enlists technology in an attempt to escape even death itself.”
Even as far back as Cronenberg’s early work, including films such as Scanners and The Dead Zone, Ballard admits that the director had been exploring “the blurred frontiers between mind and body, very much a newborn baby’s perception of reality.” Evidently, Ballard has the most profound respect for Cronenberg, so it’s clear to see that he trusted him to do Crash justice.
Perhaps Ballard’s most significant praise for Cronenberg comes in the following passage: “I know that in person he is good company, with the reassuring manner of a neurosurgeon explaining how he is going to remove the inoperable tumour buried deep in your brain. Remarkably for a filmmaker working entirely within commercial cinema, he has remained faithful to his central project, and his films constitute a sustained autopsy into the nature of existence.”
