Crash

Cronenberg’s 1996 movie adaptation (not the one that won many Oscars and is bad) captures Ballard’s sensual mechanical fetishism and apocalyptic consumerism perfectly. It is a 120-minute-long sex scene in a carousel of mangled metal. It is probably the best adaptation of prose to film I can think of, which is bolstered by the sheer strength of the book itself. Crash (again, not the 2006 one, the car crash sex one) is by far Cronenberg’s horniest feature, and that’s saying something. Uh. I didn’t mean to just talk about the movie. I should probably talk about the book. The book… show more.

Pornographic and repulsive even by 2022 standards, J.G. Ballard’s mind-bendingly twisted, troubling novel centers on a writer caught up in a cult of self-obsessed "symphorophiliacs" who restage and sexually fetishize famous, especially ghoulish car crashes. Ballard offers an unsparing vision of a future in which humans and machines meld, anything and everything gets objectified, and compulsive sex becomes utterly impersonal. And who should turn up in the novel but screen goddess Elizabeth Taylor with whom the spooky character “Dr. Robert Vaughn” is so enthralled that he fantasizes dying with her in an orgasmic head-on collision? Even boundary-pushing maverick movie director… show more.