Crash

Product Information

In a 1996 interview with the Vancouver Sun, Cronenberg said Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci told him "the film was a religious masterpiece. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received the Special Jury Prize, a unique award that is distinct from the Jury Prize as it is not given annually, but only at the request of the official jury (for example, the previous year, both a Jury Prize and a Special Jury Prize were awarded). Vaughan and Ballard bond over their shared fascination with car crashes, and they start to spend more time together. While leaving the hospital, Helen and James begin an affair, one primarily fueled by their shared experience of the car crash. Alongside Ballard�s cult postmodern novel, this special edition, edited by Chris Beckett, includes never-before-seen reproductions of Ballard�s annotated manuscript pages, essays, stories and material that shine a new light on this modern masterpiece.

I never read reviews of a book I’m about to gobble or have just finished, lest they unduly influence my perception. His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

The film was an international co-production between the British company Recorded Picture Company, and Canadian companies Alliance Communications Corporation, The Movie Network, and Telefilm Canada. In Crash, men become machine and machines become sexualized, like I said in my review of the movie adaptation. He has a police scanner in his car and every time there is an accident he appears on the scene with his cameras whirring and his penis stirring. Robert Vaughan, an acquaintance of Ballard’s who had planned to die that day, taking famed actor Elizabeth Taylor with him.

As it is, I think this is a great short story pumped up like an airbag into one big nasty ready-to-explode testicle. Uncorrected proof copy; vg in wraps; imprint of rusty paper clip on front wrapper, indentation from paper clip on firs t 48 pages. The consensus reads: "Despite the surprisingly distant, clinical direction, Crash's explicit premise and sex is classic Cronenberg territory. In an author's note readers were advised to `simply turn the pages until a paragraph catches your eye'. 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.In 2000, a poll done by The Village Voice of film critics listed Crash as the 35th Best Film of the 1990s. So much semen is spurted and wiped on the dashboard instrument panels that I ceased after awhile to wonder or care how our motorists could even read the dials. However in that same year of 2011 a total of 32,479 people died on US roads in accidents, a death toll that had no political consequences what so ever.

Helen Remington, the driver and the dead passenger's wife, exposes a breast to James when she pulls off the shoulder harness of her seat belt.In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way. A head on crash that kills the driver of the other car putting both Ballard and the wife of the dead man in the hospital for a lengthy recovery. It describes the tendency of the story's main car-cash fetishist weirdo, Vaughan, to repeat, obsess and raise the (roll)bar of kink on his over-the-top fantasies: "Always he deliberately sidestepped into self-parody. Ballard's style may appeal to some; the style (or rather the consistent absence thereof) certainly did nothing for us.

This mass slaughter on the roads was, is, in fact a phenomenon that is tacitly accepted as a completely normal part of everyday life in all countries. Cannes jury president Francis Ford Coppola noted that "certain (jury) members did abstain very passionately" from endorsing Cronenberg's film, but added that it was important to give Crash an award, "even though in mining some truth of the human condition it offended (certain viewers)".

I had written tons more, including a couple of parodies of the book, but as I don't know how to fit them in here, let's just keep things short. O isolamento daqueles pedaços da nossa vida, como se as lembranças e intimidades intactas tivessem sido tiradas de casa e esparramadas ao ar livre por uma turma de demolição, fazia parte da mesma recriação do lugar-comum que de maneira trágica eu empreendera com a morte de Remington. If anyone asks me in real life what this book is about, I tell them it's car crash porn, and that's not an exaggeration or understatement. J.G Ballard must've been dodging torch-wielding priests back in the days, because this is a dirty, dirty book.