Reshaping the human body by modern technology.

I can't tell you why, but I'm drawn to David Cronenberg's Crash.

Initially, it was an ironic infatuation; in college I'd watch the tape in mixed company, snickering at Cronenberg's ability to profoundly repulse unsuspecting viewers. I didn't much care for the film (or Cronenberg for that matter), but Crash was good for a laugh.

Then a funny thing happened. I started taking Cronenberg and his work more and more seriously (during my third or so viewing of Dead Ringers I was startled to realize that it was easily one of the best films of the 1980s and an indisputable masterpiece) and Crash became something entirely different. I still think there's a lot of gallows humor in it, but I'm struck by how Cronenberg seems to be wrangling with these weighty concepts--the erotics of danger, compulsion, technological paranoia, relationships--and he doesn't seem to have (or care about) a defined thesis. He's content to wrestle with these themes in a film that basically lacks any conventional narrative and does it in the most clinically explicit, provocative, and violent way imaginable. And in the end, he ultimately leaves it all open for discussion.

A confession: when I watched the film a couple of nights ago, I spent most of the time not thinking about the moral implications or the perfect production values; I thought about Ted Turner. This was the mental image in my head: Turner, then owner of TimeWarner, is settled into his private screening room to view this controversial movie his conglomerate has recently acquired at Cannes. He brings a perfectly grilled beefalo burger to his mouth and just as he's about to take a bite, from the screen Deborah Kara Unger asks James Spader if he knows was Elias Koteas's semen tastes like. Uncle Ted chokes for a second and does a spit take. And scene.

Juvenile? Yup. But every time a Cronenbergian bit of perversity showed up on the screen, that was the mental image that ran through my head. And it made me laugh. Every time.