In this month’s Low Culture podcast John and Luke are grasping their fuelling nozzles, lubing up the big end, and casting their eyes over the smooth chrome body of David Cronenberg’s 1996 film Crash, based on the JG Ballard novel of the same name. Incredibly 90s from the opening graphics to the styling of pubic hair, Crash was an at the time controversial erotic thriller about a film producer and his wife’s open marriage and their deepening involvement in a shadowy group of people who find sexual stimulation in auto-accidents. Is it just a compilation of sex scenes with some loose glue to bring them together, the sort of thing that a year later would be shown late at night on the new Channel 5, or a critique on how sex was always used to sell motorcars? Which bits are hot, and which not? Was Crash ahead of its time in its depiction of male bisexuality, and was Cronenberg trying to make amends for the homophobia of some of his past work? John and Luke advise you to watch it in companion with a 1971 film featuring JG Ballard that uses text from the chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition that eventually became Crash as they look at how Crash prefigures our own era of algorithmically-delivered porn saturation and chemsex parties. Could Crash be made now given that contemporary car design is so depressingly bulky, tech-bro and mediocre?
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