James Spader and Deborah Unger (providing an eerie simulation of Theresa Russell) play a couple of sicked-out yuppies who've slid so far down the emotional scale that the word "jaded" no longer applies. James and Catherine Ballard keep their lifeless relationship afloat with a parade of extramarital sexual liaisons. Even that doesn't seem to help as the couple continually drift around in a desensitized fog.

Relief (if that's the word for it) comes one day in the form of an auto accident. Mr. Ballard is involved in a nasty head-on collision with Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter). The crash kills Remington's husband and severely injures Ballard. It also seems to awaken something in Ballard. This incident, this adrenaline surge, this perverse mingling of flesh and steel provide a new level of eroticism. Dr. Remington soon introduces Ballard to a creepy, messianic ex-scientist named Vaughn (Elias Koteas). Vaughn has also been in a serious accident and understands the sexual power of such an event. He spends his days photographing accident scenes and his nights re-creating famous car crashes (like the one that killed movie star James Dean) with his band of mangled followers. Vaughn inducts Ballard into this weird car crash subculture, and the film transmogrifies into a quickly unspooling litany of sex and cars.

Crash has received an undue amount of publicity because of its uneasy mix of sex and violence. It has been banned in a number of countries, including England, and had a devil of a time getting released here against the wishes of its American owner, Ted Turner, who denounced the whole thing as "pure pornography." There's absolutely no denying that Crash is loaded start to finish with nongarden-variety sex. Those expecting to see attractive couples rutting in the bloody viscera of accident scenes (and I hope there aren't many of you out there) are likely to be disappointed, however. Crash is more obsessed with the aftermath of the car crash, with the "ritual" that surrounds them. Marilyn Manson would love this film--with it's loving glimpses of neck braces, leg braces, body braces and acres of scarred flesh. Though I doubt, as some have voiced concern, that hoards of curious teenagers will soon take to the roads imitating the film's twisted scenarios.

Ultimately, Cronenberg's metaphor is a pretty simple one. He's preaching against the fetishization of the automobile and--by extension--of everything mechanical or technological. Cronenberg has long ruminated on the connection between man and the unnatural. Recall, if you will, the scene in Cronenberg's The Fly when scientist Seth Brundle rolls over onto a microchip, embedding it into his flesh and realizes the solution to his problem (and the eventual road to his damnation). Man, machine and their intertwining have always fascinated Cronenberg. In the case of Crash, however, the metaphor falls flat. When Ballard's novel was written in 1973, the automobile might have retained some aura of "newness." Nowadays, with technology running so unrestrained around us, it's difficult to imagine something as ingrained as the automobile as a symbol of rampant technology.

The sexual element, though heady, doesn't add much to the mix. Sane-minded folks (a category in which I must place myself) are expected to get slightly aroused by Cronenberg's admittedly well-staged sex scenes. We are then expected to feel wrong and unclean for having such thoughts when the circumstances surrounding them are so extreme and corrupted. Yeah. So? Cronenberg is saying (as was Ballard before him) that we have become so desensitized as a culture, that it takes something as extreme as a car crash to shock our senses back to life. Judging from the harsh reaction this film has received almost worldwide, I'd say that we're plenty sensitized.

Cronenberg has often dealt with strange new worlds and edgy, off-beat characters. With Crash, though, his characters are so far removed from humanity, that it's nearly impossible to sympathize with them. James and Catherine Ballard aren't as incomprehensibly weird as, say, any couple in any David Lynch film; but it's still hard to think of the things that they do as "wrong." The Ballards are so bizarre and disaffected to begin with that their actions seem almost normal. These aren't semi-regular people whose lives are spiraling wildly out of control (think of James Woods' character in Videodrome). This is a collection of wackos doing wacko stuff.

Like Naked Lunch, Crash is likely to find a cult audience who will appreciate its image, if not it's message. Me, I'm hoping that Cronenberg's next film--a remake of his student sci-fi flick Crimes of the Future--will put him back on the road to recovery.