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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE APRIL 4, 1997
EVENINGS OUT
Sold as high art, this is just gruesome misogyny
Crash
Directed by David Cronenberg Fine Line Features
Reviewed by Kaizaad Kotwal
"The Emperor's New Clothes" is a timeless fable about a king who parades around naked while his citizenry claim to see the beauty and richness of his new fashions. Ironically, the tragic figures in this little morality tale are those who see the truth and call a spade a spade, or a nude a nude as the case may be.
Fast forward to the present and there's a new beast parading around sans apparel, yet very few critics have dared to call David Cronenberg's latest film Crash what it really is: trash!
Here's the skinny on this piece of celluloid. In this film, we are presented with a group of fetishists who get off on car crashes and disfigured bodies. What's really tragic is that this film has been paraded, by the Hollywood press and the citizenry of current chic, as a ground-breaking (pun intended) and revolutionary film.
Cronenberg's film (based on a 1973 book by J.G. Ballard) is a vacuum in which the characters flash a lot of flesh and little else in the way of acting, motivation or character complexity.
The media has so hyped the raw sexuality of this film and its new look at sex that people don't need more motivation to drive to the cineplex (where no other Cronenberg film has ever played; they only play in art houses) and plop down six or more bucks to become voyeurs into this world of auto-erotica. In fact, the Cannes film festival created a special category to award Crash-a prize for "Daring, Audacity, and Originality.”
Well, to stand up to the claims of the
granddaddy of all film festivals would be to stake one's claim with the un-hip, the noncool and the culturally challenged. To call the bluff on this film would be about as popular as being known as a Bob Dole groupie.
The film has an abundance of sex scenes; in fact outside of getting into car crashes and having sex, the characters do little else. But here's where Cronenberg's claim to making an original film about sex falls apart.
JONATHAN WENK
Rosanna Arquette is one of the car-crash aficionados in Crash.
There's a plethora of female flesh on display. In fact, it's all laid out in full view in what Cronenberg probably thinks is imitative of European film nudity chic. There are plenty of shots where the camera focuses in on an erect female nipple in the foreground and then pans down to a gruff, greasy male hand brutally squeezing female genitalia.
There's another scene where the character played by Deborah Kara Unger (constantly pantyless à la Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct) has sex with her husband. She is shown in full light to display her bruises from a previous car-crash sex encounter. Meanwhile, the husband lies in shadows, and there are no glimpses of his genitalia or even his bare behind.
Really, how original is it to display a female body in total nudity while the men are
strategically draped in sheets and covered with conveniently placed pillows? If a major studio had made this film, we would have called it exploitation, and Gloria Steinem would be beating down the door of the studio execs, saying that they are involved in a major conspiracy to further the objectification of the female body. But because this is packaged as an art flick, it becomes a mediation on "existential angst" in which the female body is the vehicle through which such a discourse is made possible.
The bottom line is that this film is more misogynistic than any film in a long while. Where is Gloria Steinem when you really need her?
After the first ten minutes, watching the
audience watching the film became infinitely more telling and interesting than the film itself. The audience sat spell-bound through the first hour-plus of heterosexual sex despite all its violence, misogyny and brutal fetishization. Then Cronenberg throws in a quickie with the two lead men kissing-fully clothed, mind you, no bruises and several rows of the packed theatre cleared out.
I don't mean to overstate the obvious, but here's a segment of society that has no problem with women being battered and mauled during sex, but one gay kiss and their morality barometer plunges lower than all the cleavage in the film. The irony is, the group of guys who bailed out, dragging their girlfriends by the hand, missed the lesbian scene that followed.
While certain audience members were blatantly homophobic, the film itself is not much better even though it pretends to give us a gay kiss. I know that Cronenberg and his cronies would argue that the women are battered because they want that kind of rough sex and they enjoy it. It's a choice, right? Well, I wonder if that has anything to do with this being a film from the straight male perspective of things.
So, Emperor Cronenberg's new film is parading in cineplexes these days, and the characters aren't the only things naked. And while the whole movie is so dour, so trashy and so joyless, there is a silver lining to this burnt carcass of a film. The next time we hear about teens having sex in the back seat of Dad's car after watching some B-movie at the cineplex, we can all breathe easy. After all, at least they parked the car while having sex, came home in one piece, and hopefully the Bmovie they saw wasn't trash-I mean, Crash.
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