|
Automatic Lover
Fred Botting and Scott Wilson
Some dickless piece of shit fucked with my car
Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction
One of the most boring things one can say about a film is that it is
boring. When a film´s main preoccupation is sex, moeover, this sort
of judgement is often simply an expression of moral distaste dressed up
as sophistication. Yet Crash starts from the premiss, attributed to Michel
Foucault, that 'sex is boring'. Boredom is the film´s milieu: generically,
Crash combines the stylized ennui of a seventies German urban alienation
film with the grainy, low-tech, humourless repetition of a seventies German
porn film.
Set in a Canada that seems to comprise totally of motorways and tower
blocks, the film´s opening sexual encounters present sex as a matter-of-fact,
workaday activity: an automatic emptying of the liberation of sex into
the free-floating realms of consumer capitalism, a 'pornographic culture'
of materialized appearances, mechanical labour and copulation. [1] On
a balcony overlooking jammed motorway, James and Catherine Ballard compare
notes on the day´s sexual encounters: 'how was work today darling?'
is replaced by the equally perfunctory 'who did you fuck at work today
darling?', and shortly followed by the question, 'Did you come?' Sex becomes
the same dull daily grind as work: a banal, repetitive, mundane event
absorbed in the pleasure principle of the productive and cosnumptive economy.
Sex, work and pleasure, but no jouissance, at least not that day, according
to the Ballards´ negative response to their own inquiries. An everyday
routine, sex has become divested of desire, freed from any morality other
than the imperative to enjoy, a joyless, superegoic command to keep on
fucking.
Cronenberg´s film addresses the injunction to and extinction of
sexual desire, in line with J.G. Ballard´s project in his novel
Crash and other works. In The Atrocity Exhibition, for example, Ballard
has one character speak of the need 'to invent a series of imaginary sexual
perversions just to keep the activity alive'. [2]. For Vaughan in Crash,
the automobile serves as a sex aid. As the film´s sex-guru, Vaughan
recruits his disciples, the Ballards and Helen Remington, by setting their
car accidents in a photo-narrative, thereby giving their physical trauma
a new, erotic meaning. In a short time, the characters begin to share
Vaughan´s interest in car crashes, an interested manifested in precipitating,
photographing, recording and re-enacting automobile collisions. In his
workshop, he speaks of a 'benevolent psychopathology', of the car crash
as a 'fertilizing event' and a 'liberation of sexual energy'. Vaughan
is credited as the film´s dominant character by the others around
him, the master of ceremonies who connects crash victims, explains events
and stages their ritual observances. As a paternal or phallic figure,
however, he remains suspect. Elias Koteas´ performance as Vaughan
as the dangerously charismatic, virile American is so excessive (often
recalling Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro at their most deranged) as
to successfully hint at the deficiency that determines his obsession.
Far from being the intoxicating, sinister figure he appears to be for
Helen Remington and the Ballards, he merely evokes incredulity, and fails
to provide the point of identification that could enliven his project
for a cinema audience. Looked at another way, he´s simply 'a dickless
piece of shit who fucks with cars', to quote Vincent Vega from Tarantino´s
Pulp Fiction.
Absent or not, Vaughan´s dick is an object of curiousity in the
film. Ironically, in the one scene of normal, 'bedroom' sex between the
Ballards, pleasure comes as an effect of persistent, probing inquiries
into another fantasized sexual scene. Catherine Ballard interrogates her
husband about Vaughan´s penis: what does it look like; is it circumcised;
is it badly scarred; would her husband like to suck it? Moving from his
scars to his penis, from his sexual habits to the semen smell of his car,
from his arsehole to the idea of sodomizing him, the escalating series
of questions and speculations spices sex with a quite literal instance
of perversion - in the Lacanian sense of a turning towards the father
(père version) that foregrounds the symptom or object a
supporting the paternal function. [3] However, as Catherin Ballard later
discovers, Vaughan´s penis, if nor already severed after 'the motorcycle
accident' that was supposed to have damaged it, is not an organ he employs
in the film. [4] When he´s not ramming someone with his car, he
fucks with his fists, leaving behind a trail of cuts and bruises; as Catherine
Ballard discovers, sex with Vaughan is just another kind of car crash.
Vaughan occupies a central place in the libidinal economies of the film´s
characters, then, as their point of père version, in the
form of a quasi-phallic, yet penisless, figure who sits in his car as
the scarred metaphor of a 'real' castration that precisely discloses the
excessive failure of traditional symbolic castration. Liberated
from any taboo that might once have given it meaning, all 'normal' sexual
activity disappears and the phallus (the taboo) is desired precisely as
a body that has been beaten black and blue, scarred with twisted metal.
Imagined and fetishized as the signifier of the desire of an Other now
seen as machine, the battered and broken body is the last remnant of a
human erotic imaginary in the face of a fully automated form of desire.
As the bedroom is displaced by the car, sexual organs and erogenous zones
are replaces by scars in a technological supplementation of quasi-erotic
energy and intensity; ultimately, cars, scars and signifiers conjoin to
sever sex from bodies and organs.
Signifiers of the collision, the wounds and scars, are photographed,
collected, simulated and fetishized first by Vaughan, then his disciples:
Catherine´s interest in Vaughan´s scarred body; Ballard´s
impatience to touch the healed gash along the back of Gabrielle´s
thigh; Ballards ardent sensivity towards his wife´s battered and
bruised body; Ballard´s and Vaughan´s passionate kissing of
each other´s bruised tatoos. Eventually the entire film is dominated
by a generalized medico-pornographic gaze that is turned in on itself
as a symptom of its own psychopathology. Scars endow bodies with a value
they would not otherwise possess. As scar-screens, the empty units of
visual identification ('characters' is too strong a word) are marked by
the traces of an unspeakable automotiv jouissance unavailable to a human
culture determined by the restricted economy of the pleasure principle.
At the point linking and separating horror and eroticism, crash scars
announce a splitting of subjectivity that comes of the transformation
of bodies and their reinscription in a new order of desiring. Crash, however,
seems to do no more than fetishize a generalized lack. Without any privileged
place of identification, the film is plotted along a chain of scars signifying
the displacement of the fetish from its 'original' location as the substitute
for maternal lack, to a fetishistic repetition and universalization of
lack; all figures are all-too-obviously castrated: scarred, clumsy, limping
bodies, mobile only with the aid of vehicles, sticks and calipers. The
effect is similar to that noted by Laura Mulvey when she suggests that
the fetishistic and close representation of the female image breaks the
cinematic spell, freezing the male look, rather than allowing it to assume
a masterful and superior distance. [5] Similarly, in Slavoy Zizek´s
version of the pornographic gaze, the discomforting of the position of
a viewer as voyeur evacuates the attenuation of any secure authority.
The wounds, bruises and scars repeatedly thrust by the camera into watching
faces serve to abject, rather than incorporate or elevate, the look. Visual
pleasure is not restored by the jubilant identification of meaning; the
specator is not returned by the comforts of a recognisable resulotion
which fills cinematic lack. Instead, all that is seen is a pornography
of scars that either leaves one cold or becomes a horrible limit beyond
which one cannot bear to look. It is from the overt presentation of generalized
castration, perhaps, that the censurious morality which surrounded the
release of the film in Britain takes its bearings since any moral concern
expressed in regard to the likelihood of cinematic seduction or childish
emulation (this is not a film advocating sex in cars) is quite untenable.
If sex, in Crash, disappears in the back of a car, it does so as an effect
of its generalized automation. Significantly, the car crashes do not take
place as part of a compelling narrative. Stylistically and technically,
Crash refuses to evoke or simulate the sensational and spectacular effects
that one would expect of a film that draws an equivalence between sex
and car crashes. There are no big bangs, no sensuos slow-motion smashes,
no romantic chases or erotic duels on the open highway. The crashes take
place as a series of bumps that occur as an effect of sudden accelerations
of minor deviations amidst the packed lanes of commuter traffic. Since
sex has become work, it has become just one functioning part of the regulative
synchronous machine that articulates the circulations, exchanges and communication
of so many bio-mechanical vehicles that are visualized in the film´s
recurrent shots of traffic flowing, a movement, relentless and aimless,
that seems to be simply there, underscored by the omnipresent background
noise of internal combustion engines. 'I somehow find myself driving again',
Ballard remarks to Helen Remington. No sense or reason informs his decision,
only a kind of automatism that is reinforced by the mutual, stupefied
sense of the monotonous increase in heavy traffic. Cars replace human
subjects, equivalent units of mechanical and automatic motion. In Crash,
driving, work, sex and pleasure have become hyperhomogenized into the
same productive-consumptive economy determining the flows of communicational
vehicles. Sex, work and pleasure are bound up with driving and are absorbed
by the repetitive, automatic insistence of a signifying chain. Everything
accedes to a new order of automation, a social symbolic machine working
with and absorbing the intensities and erotic energy previously associated
with enjoyment and jouissance. [7]
In the hypersexualized and desexualized setting of Crash, sex is associated
with the circulation of communicational vehicles and invested with the
erotic charge of the crash. That sex is still synonymous with some sort
of 'crash', therefore, does denote its survival of reinvention as a mode
of nonproductive expenditure opposed to the world of work and traffic
flows even as it is dependent upon them. Indeed, as Joan Copjec argues,
sex appears where words and categories fail, in the gaps of signification
where desire articulates and separates beings. [8] But of course it is
not the human characters who are the vehicles of sexual identity, nor
are they the conduits of desire; they do not have the sex. Rather, they
suffer the effects of autosex, they become its 'victims' and they eroticize
themselves precisely as such in the form of their wounds and scars. Strangely,
this is where Crash connects up with a so-called 'political correctness'
problematic. This is not so much to do with the suggestion that in its
sexy depiction of paraplegic Crash shows a commendable willingness to
affirm that the differently abled can also enjoy healthy relations on
screen. Rather, the increasing juridical, governmental and corporate concern,
in North America, with unauthorized incursions into the 'personal space'
of employees (particularly the various degrees of sexual harrassment)
has, in common with Crash, the close identification of work and jouissance,
and an interest in intensifying sex, and the social activities around
it, as something that may seriously damage your health - or psyche. It
is no longer taboo, or transgression, then, that returns some interest
to sex, but the location of sex as the scene of potential disaster: sex
as a kind of car crash, computer crash, financial crash or lifestyle crash,
physical, psychic or system violation, malfunction, illness, break down
or burn out, the catastrophic point where one´s life, identity or
career crashes.
Hollywood, of course, has a tradition of disaster films and of film careers
arrested, destroyed or immortalized in one kind of crash or another, and
they provide the conventional means by which the crash and its victims
may be romanticized by the image: with its photographs and photographed
reenactements of the celebrated deaths of James Dean and Jane Mansfield,
Crash makes explicit reference to this tradition. The photographic image
becomes the only means by which the hypermodern subject can verify its
existence imaginarily and symbolically in an umbilical connection to a
reality 'that has been'. [9] Absolutely bound up with a hyperhomogenizing
system whose only point of fissure is the 'crash' itself, crashes become,
for the hypermodern subject, simulations of the traumatic (missed) encounter
with the real. [10] Which is why they must be photographed. The photograph
functions as a scar in time, freezing the moment when the mortal being
becomes Other, fully transformed into pure images: Vaughan´s photographs
not only capture the instant when bodily parts are indelibly imprinted
by mechanical components, they inscribe the image on another technological
surface. As Hollywood has known for years, one´s life and destiny
are realized on film, and Vaughan is another prophet of this destiny,
aspiring to die in a celebrated, and much photographed, crash. (In the
novel he plans to die in a car crash which also kills Elizabeth Taylor.)
In Cronenberg´s film, however, Vaughan fails, in his own fatal
crash, to guarantee his own photographic immortality by impacting with
a film star. Nevertheless, after his death, the Ballards carry the torch
with their own brand of car sex, presided over by the spectre of Vaughan,
in a repetition and replacement of ealier patterns. Having bought and
rendered roadworthy Vaughan´s 1963 black Lincoln, the final sequence
of the film documents their own romantically-paired car chase. With their
scars and cars, sex between the two has become fully automated. Ballard
is seen furiously driving Vaughan´s car-phallus-scar machine, the
object of pursuit being his wife´s grey sportscar. He catches up
to ram the smaller car repeatedly from behind, until it careers off the
road. The Lincoln halt hurriedly. Ballard, apparently shaken, gets out
and stumbles down the grassy roadside to the overturned car to peer down
into the camera. As he kneels, his prostate wife comes into shot. She
is not dead. He inspects her injuries and strokes her head, breathes her
name and asks if she is OK. With a consolatory air, he tenderly kisses
her and whisper 'maybe next time, darling.. maybe next time'. They have
sex where they are lying. The camera rises, with a warm crescendo of orchestral
strings, above the lovers´ ardent embrace on the grassy bank. A
romantic climax and the end of the film.
The ending rewrites the story as the rediscovery of the illusion of a
sexual relation. Vaughan´s death governs the reborn sex life of
the Ballards, renewing desire with the promise of an unimaginable jouissance.
'Maybe next time'. Maybe next time Catherine will attain fatal bliss in
the orgasmic instant of the crash. Maybe next time: jouissance remains
postponed, but the recovery of its possibility, its fantasy, constitutes
the occasion for the reappearance of desire. From being a mechanical failure
of diminishing returns, sex is transformed by the crash and becomes, again,
a liberating experience. Maybe.
Where fantasy restores the illusion, deferral and the coming promise
of a sexual relation in the film, there is no fantasy or place for it
made available on the screen: the audience watch a relentless series of
similar acts with steadily diminishing interest, divested of curiousity,
desire or identification. The screen discloses itself to be an empty space
of repetition: sex, sex, sex, sex, car, crash, car, sex, sex in car, sex,
sex, crash, cars, sex in car, crash ... and so on. Just as there is no
sexual relation, so, in Crash, there is no cinematic relation, no fantastic
unification between audience and moving images, scars having become too
visible as vicious visual slashes severing voyeur and screen. Indeed,
instead of the pleasurable cinematic spectacle of a narcississtic, urban
alienation, Crash offers only the relation of non-relation, an experience
of redundancy in the face of endless work-sex-pleasure that unfolds on
film in the absence of a jouissance that is always missed, that occurs
elsewhere, in another scene, at another time, beyond human comprehension
in the missed instantaneousness of the crash.
Notes
1 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (Basingstoke and London:
Macmillan 1990). p. 34
2 Cited in Sylvère Lotringer, Overexposed (London: Paladin, 1988),
p. 5
3 Jacques Lacan, 'Seminar of 21 January 1975', in Juliet Mitchell and
Jacqueline Rose (eds.) Feminine Sexuality (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan,
1982), pp. 162-171, 167
4 David Cronenberg, Crash (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 37
5 Laura Mulvey, 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema', Screen vol.16,
no. 13 (1975), p. 18
6 Slavoy Zizek, Looking Awry (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 1991),
p. 108
7 Jouissance includes Lacan´s sense of the 'getting ' of meaning
('enjoy-meant') and 'erotic bliss'. See Jacques Lacan, Television, trans.
Dennis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson (New York and London:
W.W. Norton, 1990), pp. 16, 89; and his account of the discharges of sexual
and bodily energies exceeding symbolic law, that is 'beyond the phallus'.
'God and the jouissance of the [under erasure] woman', in Mitchell and
Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality, pp. 137-48,; Bataille´s general
economic notion of excessive expenditure, sacrificial consumption and
inner experience, see Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (eds), The Bataille
Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), and Lyotards 'acinema' of the libidinal
intensities of the drives and wasteful and pyrotechnical disspation of
energy and images, see 'Acinema', in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard
Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 169-80
8 Joan Copjec, Read My Desire (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 1994),
p. 204
9 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Fontana,
1984), p. 96
10 For a discussion of the distinction between 'hypermodern' and 'postmodern',
see the issue on 'Hypervalue', Cultural Values, vol.1, no. 2 (1997)
|