Freud reasons that the fetish, any of them, is a substitute for the penis.
But, he adds, to the amazement of unbelievers, not just anyone, but the mother's phallus.
They have read well.
We are as terrified of ending up as she is because of the castration that we cling to whatever it is.
'
Crash
' is more than a simple movie, a fetish, a weightless, waxed, disturbing and hygienically perfect substitute for all deficiencies.
This is how
JG Ballard put it
when in the 70s he short-circuited the manners of the air novel '
beat
'with an acid vomit that spoke of the male crisis, technological paranoia and humanity's drift towards a toxic abyss of asphalt and chrome sheet.
And he did it hand in hand with a perverse text that staged in the first person the most intimate perversity of sex with a gravity as explicit as it was unbearable.
Twenty years later
David Cronenberg
took the witness
and surprised with an adaptation that is really a fetishist rewriting of the fetish itself: just as transgressive, exactly as radical, but aware, from the stylization, cleanliness and clarity, of all defeats accumulated in two decades.
Now,
25 years later,
the film returns to the billboard and on the polished surface of the
Lincoln Continental Convertible
in which Kennedy was assassinated reflects the same anguish, identical to sorrowing for a lack impossible to replace.
Pure fetish we said.
They say that when the publisher returned the manuscript of his novel to Ballard, he forgot to remove the annotation of one of the paid readers of the house.
"Beyond all psychiatric help," read on post-it.
The film also received its cut outs.
It was banned in the London borough of Westminster and, despite being awarded the
Special Jury Prize
at Cannes
,
the president of the court noted his vote against.
It was Francis Ford Coppola.
"Nobody has a life story, a past or a single recognizable emotional response. Nobody has much of anything in reality, except an insatiable mechanical libido ... and a car," says
Elias Koteas'
character
in an effort perhaps to stage it. the margins in which the film moves.
This (Vaughan's name is) is a strange guy too obsessed with each of the scars that run through his face.
His project, he says, is to remake the human body thanks to technology.
Music to the ears of the apostle of the new flesh who was then still Cronenberg.
In the novel, Vaughan's universe is a society thrown into the construction of highways heading for virgin lands in which to build with more cement;
a society, more British than American, living in the golden age of pornography and in which the figure of the automobile still retains the phallic spoilers and pointed edges that herald the imminence of a future that is necessarily completely sterile.
Pure fetish.
In the film, already located within the geometric splendor of the 90s, it is something else;
how different the cars he drives and stains with his semen Vaughan.
The new sap of the old myth still runs through them, but the environment is much more sophisticated, bright and comfortable.
Vaughan aspires to live as
James Dean
died.
You want to join and be confused with the charred and twisted remains of an eternal accident where the flesh is mistaken for the guardrails.
Pure show.
Deborah Kara Hunger and Elias Koteas in David Cronenberg's 'Crash'.
There is some prophecy (dirty prophecy, you hear it said) in Cronenberg's work.
The characters in the film move across the screen like ghosts with no past or future.
They wait for nothing because they seek nothing.
Their only concern is to tend to that mechanical libido that makes them flail gently and obscenely between the folds of the upholstery of a junkyard car.
There, perhaps the last vestige of humanity resides.
When years later, in 2012, the director returned to enclose an entire film inside a vehicle, those characters tortured and rocked by the smooth idle of a four-stroke engine, would finally acquire the consciousness of all the vertigo of a time beset by all crises (in addition to economic, environmental and immigration).
There is only one possible refuge and that refuge is an illusion, only in the open.
That's what '
Cosmopolis
' was
talking about
, she too is a novel where
Don DeLillo
tells the story of a man determined to cross New York for the sole purpose of cutting his hair.
In 24 hours, the young millionaire protagonist travels the exact path that goes from despair to emptiness.
And he does it inside a limousine, those long vehicles for wildly happy weddings in which the world fits or, better, the end of the world.
The '
limo
' as the perfect metaphor-fetish: cars designed for gigantic egos stopped in their own contradiction because of cities that simply do not enter.
Egos that do not fit.
We are them.
The finance shark played by Robert Pattinson plunges through a strange maze as his business goes bankrupt, his marriage fails and the universe collapses.
"A ghost haunts the world. The ghost of capitalism"
, reads a luminous.
And so.
All that egocentric network disaster is already foreshadowed in '
Crash
' which is more perfect surgery.
Peter Suschitzky's
photography
makes each fluid in Ballard's prose glisten like a freshly polished car body.
Meanwhile,
Howard Shore's
music
deconstructs and breaks each harmonic line until it recreates with rare perfection the atmosphere of orderly chaos of a futuristic painting by Bosco.
Or Dalí.
And through that landscape they move, like insects stopped in the windows of a lascivious entomologist, a
James Spader
(who
plays
a producer of what appear to be advertisements for the DGT to prevent accidents named Ballard, like the author) whose chameleon eyes defiant and surprised they warn of the precipices that open at their feet;
a
voracious and hieratic
Holly Hunter
;
a
Rosanna Arquette
with her flesh open in a wound that is both an indelible reminder of a permanent accident and a dark omen by force.
And then, in the background,
Deborah Kara Unger
, who plays the protagonist's wife dressed as a praying mantis.
She acts as the only true priestess of the pagan and salacious liturgy of Cronenberg where the image and the word fade to acquire a new carnal and geometric sense at the same time.
Everything he touches, everything he says, is nothing more than pure fetish.
'
Crash
', the film, imagines an immediate future in which technology takes over bodies until they are subdued.
It does so from the analog and '
vintage
'
distance
of a machine that essentially shines.
The car, remember, was born on the same assembly line as the cinema itself.
The two,
Ford and Lumière
, respond to the same wear of the aura in the age of technical reproducibility, as the philosopher would say.
At times, the cynical and funny naivete of the innocent tin and paint liturgy captivates with those characters bent on reproducing deaths of celebrities before the cross of the camshaft.
At times, he subjugates the power of suggestion of the game proposed by Cronenberg in which desire is materialized in a mechanical offering of progress that is condemnation.
And so, frame by frame, pandemic by pandemic, the prophecy that '
Crash
' imagines is perfectly fulfilled from the organic screen of a simple mobile phone, which, although digital and without grace, also shines as the most powerful of substitute fetishes. for beings, we, definitely castrated.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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