Seeing the Script, Crash.

So I've read the script for David Cronenberg's Crash. As part of my Seeing the Script project I've had to write about the outline of the film and the premise of how it's shown to the audience. Remember, the idea was to pick a film I haven't seen before. To avoid prejudice I guess. Anyway, my work follows. For anyone wondering, I got the script from www.script-o-rama.com (thanks again to Wikipedia for the image. Kisses.)



Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)

Outline

James Ballard, a TV producer, and his relationship with his wife, Catherine, has fallen out of grace sexual. Reduced to swinging to get things turned on, their sex life is begging to be revitalised. This happens in the strangest of all places. One night, James Ballard travels in his car in bad weather conditions and he soon loses control. Veering into the oncoming traffic, he hits a car that will change his life. Surviving the car crash, he sees Dr Helen Remington for the first time. Remington’s husband dies in the crash yet in one moment both Ballard and Remington have a moment of sexual connection. Through her, James and Catherine meet with Vaughan, a stunt man who illegally recreates famous celebrity car crashes.

These recreations go deeper than morbid voyeurisms. James and Catherine soon become part of a cult of car crash fetishist. The followers use the raw shock and disorientation of severe car crashes to become aroused. In the wake of this dangerous foreplay, the scars that cover the willing victims become new sexual characteristics. James and Catherine find a new lease of life for their sexual relationship but how far can they take their dangerous sex game?

Premise

Crash asks how far would a person go to find sexual gratification? The unthinkable act of arousal through car crashes is the centre of the plot. It plays on the danger by making the act part of a snuff-like underground movement. The recreation of famous celebrity crashes further the idea of voyeurism by partaking fetishists. The film uses sexual imagery almost to the point of pornography. The same can be said of its visualisation of the car wrecks that get just as much attention as characters. Often, the vehicle is as much as a character as the cast sitting in it or about to crash it.

The main character James Ballard and his wife Catherine have succumb to swinging to get sexual gratification as their love life has gone stale. It is this frustration that leads them into this hidden world of dangerous sexual pleasure.

As the main character and almost narrator, it is James Ballard that the audience follows most. We see how the cult develops around his character also. The emotion connect between all of the cast and the audience seems fleeting. The deaths of the cults main characters, notably Vaughan and Seagrave, are less tragic than they are examples of martyrdom for their cause.

The story is suited to Cronenberg’s common themes of shock gore and uneasy horror. The way the characters are shown are often through space invading close ups and sexual represented scars. The mood of the film is set almost instantly with a strong sex scene. However, it doesn’t let the audience know what questions the film will ask of them by the end of the film.