Autoerotica: The glittering wreckage of "Crash"
David Cronenberg's "Crash," winner of a jury prize for "audacity" at last year's Cannes Film Festival, is a fine translation of the singular character of J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel. In burnished, ornate, painfully specific prose, Ballard suggests a linkage between sexuality and the modern machine, between the unspeakable thrill of danger in our imaginative lives and the deadly potential of the automobile and its propulsive motion. James Ballard (James Spader) is a film producer whose dispassionate liaisons with his wife, Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger), a sculpture-boned beauty, are heightened through exchanging stories of their mutual, promiscuous adventures outside their marriage. After an accident in which the other driver is killed, Ballard meets the surviving passenger, Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter), along with Vaughn (Elias Koteas), a sexually polymorphous crash fanatic who has become obsessed with the meeting of flesh and technology in w
