Crash

David Cronenberg's Crash (1996) brought down a storm of controversy and opprobrium when it was first screened in London. And yet it's a cool, controlled, formal film, unsensational, more analytic than titillating, a brilliant exposé of modern pathologies. It has almost none of the violence and explicit sexual content of the J.G. Ballard novel from which it is adapted. What is the relationship between Ballard himself and the character 'James Ballard' in Crash?

In this book, which includes an ...