Crash

Reviewed by D.K. Holm

ain Sinclair is the kind of writer who sends you running to your reference library. His novels, essays, poems, and short stories cannot be read with complete satisfaction without a good dictionary and a copy of A to Z London, or without access to a really big bookstore nearby, available for dashing off to at a moment's notice to look up the multitude of new authors he's prone to casually introducing. He is truly a London-based author, for much of his work, such as his novel Downriver, is a consideration, if not an autopsy, of that metropolis. When reviewing other writers in the London Review of Books and elsewhere, he favors books about walkers in that city, and he knows not only the streets and shops and criminal dives, but also the renegade practitioners of literature and other arts who have percolated just below the surface at various times since the '50s. He was one himself for a while. He seems to favor stripped-down transgressive lit, but Sinclair the essayist writes an intense, clotted prose, packed with imagery and insight.

He seems a natural for a monograph on Crash for the British Film Institute series of modern classics. And in fact, Sinclair mentions that the opportunity to write the book came at a time when he wanted to hook up with J. G. Ballard, author of the source novel for the film. But if this monograph seems a logical extension of Sinclair's interests and the BFI's project, it is also one of the more unusual books in the series. Not only is it among the longest of the 50-plus volumes in the two pronged assault on cinema that comprises the Film Classics and Modern Classics series, but it is rather unique among them for disparaging the film that is ostensibly a "classic."

Sinclair finds Crash the movie to be "a film without a sense of smell," the book that has inspired it has been "neutralized by esteem." Toronto, where Cronenberg shot the film, is where Ballard's "dream went to die." But if Sinclair honors the film version best by ignoring it for the most part in his text, he is very good on certain aspects of it, such as Deborah Kara Unger as the wife. A walking Helmut Newton photo, Unger, a philosophy student turned actress, captures for Sinclair the studious sexuality of the book's equivalent. "She acts with her hair, minor adjustments, tosses of the head that advertise the transit of small emotions." Better yet, "she can't keep the bedclothes out of her voice."

If the book is unusually disparaging about the movie it's covering, Crash is also unusual in the amount of labor and legwork Sinclair indulged in to write it. Not only does he track down Ballard (though not Cronenberg), but also a host of filmmakers who in one way or another composed ur-Crashes. Among them is Christopher Petit, now a novelist (Robinson, The Psalm Killer), but once a filmmaker, among his works the intriguing Radio On, which dwells in the same "frozen aesthetic of motorways, business parks, airports hotels: franchised Surrealism" as Crash, what Sinclair calls the "not here" at the edge of a city. Sinclair pinpoints a significant difference between the movie and book of Crash, but one that Petit links up with. In a subplot of the book, the main character has dalliances with his secretary, Renata, who is color-coded with a bright red plastic raincoat. "The clothes that people (especially women) wear place them in a hierarchy of caste and sexual availability." That Cronenberg drops Renata from the film (though he had originally included her in the screenplay version) is just one of the director's many sins against the text, one that Petit doesn't commit in his variations on Ballard's themes. Petit pops red raincoated girls significantly into his video films, because he knows, as Sinclair notes, that "video tape, unlike film, responds hungrily to scarlet PVC.

If I am making BFI Classics: Crash sound like a downer, that's unintentional. Instead, I'm trying to isolate its unique characteristics. Among them is Sinclair's exultant critical prose. Here he is on the Ballard aesthetic: "Ballard's compacted novels of the '60s and early '70s read as much like storyboards for unmakeable films as auditions for future books. He revealed himself as a master of the list, the image cluster, the questionnaire; rapidly cut high-angle drifts across previously underimagined territory and savagely implicated close-shots. Spinal canals. Conradian lagoons infested by cretaceous monsters. Hot jungles breaking through the tarmac. Sexually alluring corridors. Formulae for assessing the ridges and contours of alien pudenda. A vocabulary that lurches between Victorian circumlocution and forensic exactitude." Sinclair is one of our best critics, and it's fascinating and rather enjoyable to read him on one of our best writers, while subtly disparaging one of our best contemporary films.

This book can be ordered directly from the Indiana University Press. For a lengthy consideration of the source novel, the film, and Canadian filmmaking, consult Jonathan Rosenbaum's archived review in the Chicago Reader.

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