Cronenberg's Disappointing Adaptation

            For all its cinematographic appeal, ranging from the eerily beautiful motorway landscape to the unique choice of cars for each character, David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash failed to emulate my favorite part of J.G. Ballard’s novel, the inner conflict and mental processes that the main character, and narrator, James Ballard has. At many points while watching the film, I felt as if there was a vital element keeping all the aspects of the story together. For example, during the scene when James meets Helen Remington at the police junkyard, the movie failed to evoke the thoughts that James projects on Helen and assumes are her actual motives. The thought that she had undergone a rebirth through her accident with Vaughan and her husband, revealing a new sexuality, born from the fusion of her and James’ automobiles colliding with her husband dead on James’ bonnet, is one that cannot be perceived by the audience members who had not read the novel. I believe that the movie cannot be truly understand without having read the novel first, which is, in the end, a major shortcoming of the film. Although the film does evoke the sentiment that the characters live in a small, yet large, world dominated by technology and that a new form of sexuality, the union of machine and man, is arising, the film fails to portray the most vital element of the novel, the thought processes and analysis that only the novel’s narrator, James Ballard, has. In the end, I’d say that the film was a superficial adaptation of the novel, translating the aura of this strange world very nicely. However, the vital interpretations of this world seen through the eyes of James, in detail description of events with lesser importance and the excruciatingly descriptive crash fantasies, are completely missing.