The House Next Door

The House Next Door has moved to http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/

The current address, http://www.thehousenextdooronline.com, will also redirect you. See you there!

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By Ali Arikan

When Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the Best Director Award for Three Monkeys at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2008, he ended his speech with a simple sentence: “I dedicate this film to my lonely and beautiful country, which I passionately love.” The speech itself had been more elegiac than jubilant, delivered with the director’s dulcet tone, a short melody of gratitude to a festival that had done more than any other for this Young Turk’s career. But it was that final dedication that will echo in the hearts of his fellow countrymen and women for a long time. With one brief line, he captured the very gist of modern Turkey: a solitary land of infectious passions, tragic beauty, and deep melancholy.

Naturally, what’s true of Turkey is even more true of Istanbul. The city’s allure is magical; its sense of isolation at the crossroads of the East and the West palpable; its passions explosive. It’s not at all surprising that this city of contrasts, which seems to defy the fabric of convention itself, has given rise to a particularly unique musical scene.

More on that in just a short while: first, a detour. It’s a shame that the cinema of Turkey is generally synonymous, in the dorm rooms of vexatious frat boys at least, with cheapo knock-offs of Hollywood blockbusters. It's certainly true that those films are funny (even though the real point of the most infamous one of them all, Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam aka The Turkish Star Wars, has been lost in all the fanboy hype—it’s not just a spoof of Hollywood, it’s a spoof of spoofs and of knock-offs, too); but they represent the nadir of an industry that found itself unable to adapt to the parallel rise in both the popularity of television and the physical costs of film in the 1970s.

The twenty or so years from the mid-'50s to the mid-'70s are infinitely more interesting, not just to cineastes, but also to more general lovers of film. Turkish cinema—or its metonym Yeşilçam, after the street in the sleazy Beyoğlu district of Istanbul where many of the local film companies had their studios (as in apartments, not back-lots)—lived through its halcyon years in that period, when Turkish output was about 300 films per year on average, the sixth biggest in the world. Remarkable for a country ravaged by wildly fluctuating economic and political instability.

Looking back at many of the films from the era, one’s overall appreciation is divided between a nostalgic longing for the old days, or—and this would be more true to non-Turkish viewers—a purely academic interest. Ironic detachment, that most annoying of qualities when appreciating a work of art, is almost impossible to forfeit for even the least cynical of viewers. The more popular fare of Yeşilçam’s heyday is at times naive to the point of nausea—the comedies, musicals and the tragedies, the three most popular genres of the time are virtually interchangeable—based on one simple storyline with three different endings.

Aside: One could argue the same goes for the more arthouse output of the late '70s with one obvious exception: Şerif Gören and Yılmaz Güney’s Cannes triumph Yol (The Way). You could say the same of the latter director's many other films, which, even though they have more in common with turn-of-the-century Marxist village stories of Russia (understandable, given that particular auteur’s personal politics), are, nonetheless, universal triumphs (Here’s a link to an excellent piece on Güney by Bilge Ebiri).

But what all these films, from the naive to the highbrow, had in common was an impeccable sense of time and place. Snapshots of the tangible as well as the intangible, they were ornate sets of looking glasses into the life of a country.

And it was the obliteration of that sense that was the most terrible result of the decline of homegrown Turkish cinema in the late '70s. As the country got richer, and interest in cinema started to rise again from its ashes (thanks, ironically, to television, and constant repeats of old Turkish films on various networks), a second golden age was heralded in the early nineties. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but the current output has been increasingly more interesting. After almost three decades running from itself, Turkish cinema has started to embrace that lonely, passionate, beautiful country.

Unlike its Romanian or Iranian counterparts, Turkish cinema has yet to make the leap from “curious esoterica” to “universal art.” It’s also still too early to speak of a Turkish New Wave. I would be the happiest little Turk alive (Turkling? Turklet?) if Yeşilçam were able to make that leap into genuine greatness, but it’s simply impossible to substantiate that claim as we near the end of the decade. Ceylan is this country’s only true bona-fide auteur. There are other exciting filmmakers like Zeki Demirkubuz or Yeşim Ustaoğlu (whose recent film Pandora’s Box is delightful), and I feel they have their best work still ahead of them.

But the one figure in Turkish cinema who speaks to me much more personally than any other is Fatih Akin (even though he’s actually German). Born in Hamburg to Turkish immigrant parents, Akın had a fairly successful career with “mid-brow” fare until his break-out neo-Yeşilçam saga Head-On won The Golden Bear in Berlin in 2004. His perspective as an outsider looking in to Turkish life and Turkish cinema, in the aforementioned festival darling or the far-more accomplished—and misunderstood—The Edge of Heaven (tell me that my soul’s forgiven), are closer to my own than any other Turkish filmmaker. Having lived more than half my life outside Turkey, my—fairly recent—return to Turkey was somewhat traumatic, and I find tiny glimpses of that in Akın’s vision. Identity is of key interest to him, and in Crossing The Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005), Akın explores how crucial music is to identity formation, and vice versa.

Unlike Head-On, which is a bona fide classic, and the best homage to Turkish cinematic melodrama, Crossing the Bridge is much less coherent, even wobbly at times, and unsure of itself. Though it crackles with wit and joy and zeal, it also struggles to live up to the director’s previous magnum opus (it’s also far less confident than The Edge of Heaven). The present that is Crossing The Bridge is unable to burst through the past that is Head-On, which is an unintentional meta commentary on Istanbul itself.

A documentary on the Istanbul music scene, the film begins with what sounds like an apocryphal quote from Confucius—that to understand a people, one need only listen to their music. A few seconds later, it is revealed that it comes from the lead singer of the popular (among the kids, at least) street-band Siyasiyabend, with eyes glazed so vividly from Turkish homegrown that they could be mistaken for a pair of Christmas hams. Later in the film, he will make the egregiously inaccurate statement that hard drugs only started to appear in Istanbul in the last few years. So those infamously subfusc Ottoman opium dens used to sell figs, I take it.

The film is chock full of these semi-profound soundbites, but the quote that opens the film is accurate in describing Istanbul: certainly the current music scene is much less a harmonious amalgamation of Eastern and Western forms, and more an amorphous, cacophonic chimera, and if one were inclined to stretch the metaphor, one could easily do so, and use it to describe the city itself, its architecture, its politics, its economy, but, most importantly, its people. The film captures that sense perfectly—what Yesilcam was most adept at doing. Most of the subjects might not be much to listen to (talking, singing, or playing), but the way they are presented is nothing short of beautiful.

Crossing The Bridge documents a musical journey, undertaken, ostensibly, by Alexander Hacke, the bassist for the German avant-garde powerhouse, Einstuerzende Neubauten (which, incidentally, is what I shall call my firstborn), as he tries to get a sense of the city’s musical panorama, having been fascinated by what he had seen of it when he came to the busy metropolis during the making of Head-On (he had worked on the score). Hacke, replete with his Euro-hipster swagger, and facial hair that borrows from, nay plagiarises, Fassbinder, saunters his sweaty stuff, somewhat annoyingly at first, through the hot and humid streets of Istanbul, all the while meeting a wide range of musicians—some of them great, others good, and not a fair few fucking terrible.

Siyasiyabend I’ve already mentioned. A few friends have heard of them, and they come recommended. “Why,” is the only word that comes to mind as the lead singer rolls a fatty and goes off on an acoustic meander overlooking the Golden Horn, the offshoot waterway into the heart of the European part of the city, renowned for its beauty. Gingerly, he croons to a pedestrian three-chord progression emanating from two acoustic guitars—one of which is most definitely out of tune. The scene is shot with such precision and such respect for the band, that one almost, ALMOST, overlooks the fact that the irony of bitching about shallowness while smoking a blunt is lost on this most over-earnest modern-day troubadour.

Sitting here in the middle class confines of an office cubicle, their world is as foreign to me as it must be for those living in NYC. This, though, is the reality of the city: hubs like Beyoğlu, the Mos Eisley of Istanbul, bring people together, and, most of the time, there is nothing in common but the music. A Canadian accompanies a Gypsy band during a traditional Thracian ballad; a Kurdish soprano makes use of the perfect acoustics of an archaic Ottoman bath; a Turkish pop star covers Madonna’s “Music.” Identities mesh, music prevails.

The cardinal sin of reviewing a film must be criticizing it for omissions it never cared about including in the first place. With a documentary such as this, I shall allow myself some leeway. The film does not document the city’s Greek, Armenian or Jewish music, which is a shame since all have had an indelible impression on what is now called the Turkish sound. And it’s also not because some of the inclusions are questionable not just for their musical talents, but also how representative they are of the scene itself. Take, for example, Ceza, the most famous of the recent Hip Hop singers from Istanbul. That his name means punishment in Turkish is apt since his music lacks both the subtle sophistication of latter-day American hip hop, and the poetry of mid-'90s rap, and as such sounds like someone having an episode, or speaking in tongues, or both. His entourage only make Ceza’s scenes all the more risible, as they bounce around Moda, a very affluent neighborhood on the Asian side, looking like the Hobbiton chapter of the Kris Kross Fan Club (Jump, yo!).

The Beyoğlu rock scene is not much to write home about, either. Try as they might, most of them can’t help but sound like 1983. Maybe I am being overly mean about this, but spend at least an hour in a Beyoğlu rock bar with a live band, and you’ll agree with me. Call me traditionalist, but I like my rock like I like my bed: Rocking! (You can also call me Al, but you’ve got to be my bodyguard first.)

Just like Turkish music itself, though, the film finds its niche as Akin and Hacke start to go ethnic. As they stray away from the confines of the city’s petit bourgeois youth toward more authentic sounds, the promise of the earlier scenes draws one back in, and never lets go. Their trip into the gypsy hinterland of Eastern Thrace is so full of joy, one can’t help but dance to the mesmerizing beats (especially if one has had a few bevvies, which, as the film also attests, is the best way to enjoy the music of the Turkish gypsies). It is from that moment on that the film transcends its raison d’etre; the musicians that follow—the sombre Orhan Gencebay, the vivacious Müzeyyen Senar (alas, not anymore since the 90-odd-year-old diva has recently had a stroke), and the legendary Sezen Aksu—form such an amazing trifecta that one forgets about the likes of Ceza, or Siyasiyabend, or any of the other rather bland, yet perfectly representative, acts. Crossing the Bridge is a bizarre film with parts that collapse like a house of cards. Yet when put together, one has a taste not just of the music of Istanbul, but of the city itself.

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Ali Arikan is the author of Cerebral Mastication. Follow his updates on Twitter.

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There's been a good many tempests directed at Ben Shapiro's Big Hollywood post "Top 10 Most Overrated Directors of All Time." Personal favorite response is from Victor Morton of Rightwing Film Geek—a rebuttal entitled "I blame Sonny."

Amy Taubin's Times article, "One Singular Auteur, Through Another," is all about Steven Soderbergh's upcoming documentary on Spalding Gray, a must-see for those fans (myself included) of the duo's 1996 collaboration, Gray's Anatomy.

And whose is that German cadence (but not really) reading a childhood favorite? (Hattip: Jason Bellamy)

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"Links for the Day": A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.

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I understand exactly how this bird feels. (Thanks Michael Grammar.)

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by Clara Loginov



After watching the beginning of season four of Big Love, I think we can safely give up on ever having a premiere of this show that isn’t a busy and exhausting whirlwind. The show will always set an overwhelming number of balls rolling at the beginning of each season, leaving us only to hope that the threads will be weaved together in a fulfilling manner throughout the season. That said, the season four premiere is somewhat deceptively messy — though it packs in a lot, it also seems to indicate the paths it intends to follow throughout the season.

Bill Henrickson’s (Bill Paxton) business endeavors and his roles as a husband, a religious leader to his family, and now a church that extends only slightly outside his family, have always been inextricably linked. As someone who was never really exposed to religion personally, it was one of the first things that intrigued me about the show even back in season one, when, during the first Henrickson family dinner, Bill said grace and prayed for a successful store opening, establishing a relationship with God that is often best described as self-serving.

In the somewhat ironically titled “Free At Last”, written by Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer and directed by Daniel Attias, so much of the plot revolves around various moneymaking endeavors that it’s clear that this season, the show means business, literally.

But before getting into the business side of things, let’s note that the first scene of the episode picked up on a different kind of endeavor for the Henrickson family: the establishment of their own church, which has been a long time coming. After the events of last season, namely the revelation that the Woodruff letter (proving that the Mormon Church never intended to truly ban polygamy) was a fake, as well as Barb’s (Jeanne Tripplehorn) excommunication from the Mormon church, it is perhaps the moment the family needs this most. The congregation of this unnamed church consists of the Henrickson clan and the remainder of Don Embry’s (Joel McKinnon Miller) sundered family. Though we never learned much about Don’s wives, he’s clearly a broken and humbled man in comparison to the, well, kind of prickish guy we met at the beginning, and the testimony he offers in the newly established church, that he feels it will be “manna to a starving people” is kind of heartbreaking, though, like with the other testimonies, it is clear that he is talking primarily about his own needs.

The testimonies offered by the Henrickson women seem to be the show’s way of picking up from last year, and are perhaps an indication of what we can expect from each of them this season. Though the episode doesn’t revisit the setting beyond this scene, or even reference the church after it, it’s crucial in setting up the episode’s, and presumably the season’s, key arcs and ideas. Barb’s and Nicki’s (Chloe Sevigny) testimonies both indicate a desire to pick up the pieces after shattering events, namely Barb’s aforementioned excommunication and Nicki’s near-extrication from the marriage after exploring her feelings for Ray the DA (Chip Esten, who appears briefly in this episode, and is totally not amused about anything) in the case against her father.

And if Barb and Nicki are lumped together in a way, in this same scene, third wife Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin) is clearly distinguished in a way she hasn’t been before, which is to say that here the distinguishing factor is not just her youth and sexuality. Barb’s later statement that Margie is blossoming is demonstrated pretty much right away, being established visually, at first, in the long shot of the congregation singing, with Margie dressed in colors that are much brighter than the whites and pastels and grays of everyone else in the room. This is evidence to hopefully prove what Todd has predicted in the past, that season four will be Margie’s turn in the spotlight. If this episode doesn’t necessarily embark on some big plot for Margie, it does connect her closely to the themes that the show seems to be setting itself up to explore this season.

Because of the way Big Love’s world tangles religion, romance and business, it is often almost as important to find a business partner as it is a romantic partner, and relationships seem to work the best when those involved are on the same page and have a mutually beneficial business arrangement, no matter who they are or where they live. It’s why Barb was happier when she could be the face of HomePlus, Bill’s only enterprise at that time; it’s why Laura is the wife Alby has given the most power to; it’s why, we can perhaps speculate, Don lost his second and third wives. In this episode we see Lois seemingly try to fix her relationship with Frank with, oh, let’s call it love (in a bizarre scene where she forces him, at gunpoint, to take her out for ice cream) and when that fails, she attempts to repair things (granted, which in this case means that her husband doesn’t attempt to kill her, but let’s go with it) with a financial arrangement.

To get back to Margie, what season three established, and what this season looks to expound upon, is her entrepreneurial ambitions and skills, as well as the compatibility of her business relationship with Bill. When it’s her turn to give testimony in the opening scene, she hopes that the casino that Weber Gaming is opening, in partnership with the Blackfoot Indians, will be successful. Her home shopping channel-type jewelry business seems to be thriving, and the naïveté that’s been thus far associated with her character seems to be turning into an odd sort of integrity, as she passes off tasks at home so as to keep her promise to her boss at the television station that the jewelry business will be her sole focus.

Unlike with Barb and Nicki, it seems that if we get a season that offers a deeper exploration of Margie, it may not include as much probing of her past as the other two, and may rather focus on who she is becoming, as this is clearly a formative time in her adult life. Much of the character’s struggles with her past seemed to be put to rest in “Come, Ye Saints,” where she finally dealt with the death of her mother. She has no other family that we know of, unlike her sister wives, who bring a lot of baggage in this regard. Though her ties to the Principle are arguably the most tenuous, for this reason, they have also wavered less than those of Barb and Nicki, especially as their troubled pasts were explored in seasons two and three, respectively. And Margie’s relationship with Bill has remained the most stable over the last three seasons, though it’s mostly her sunny disposition and eagerness-to-please that have kept her obedient, for lack of a better word. It will be interesting to see if Margie’s growing role as a moneymaker will bring her closer to Bill as it largely did in season three, or if she’ll struggle with staying in a patriarchal relationship as she comes to understand her potential in a way she never had before. The fact that she has to keep her business secret from Bill for the time being is already an indication that it may be Margie’s turn to question her marriage, something we’ve yet to see her do.

As it is the most divisive aspect of Big Love, I should probably state my personal opinion and admit that I like the Juniper Creek element of the show more than most, and I do think that the compound continues to play an important role in the show’s universe. I still find many of the Juniper Creek scenes engaging and revealing, and while these scenes sometimes have tonal problems, their sheer bizarreness is itself essential to the show.

The original function of the compound was largely to make the Henricksons appear as a normative version of polygamy in contrast, and while three seasons have been more than enough to establish the central family within this context and Juniper Creek isn’t really needed for that purpose, it still can be seen as representing an aspect of American life, which in my take is that of unassimilated immigrants, or any unassimilated fringe group, really. I have a pretty strange family, immigrants from the USSR, many of whom never made it a goal to fit in cleanly in American society. It may sound crazy, but sometimes the Juniper Creek-ers just make more sense to me, the strange squalor of their homes being more reminiscent of my childhood home than any of the Henricksons' three little boxes. I’ve got to imagine (read: hope) that there are some other people out there who feel this way.

But to get back to the episode at hand, “Free At Last” demonstrated some of more effective ways that the show uses compound characters, in terms of intersections between those characters and the Henricksons. In terms of tone, the scene in which Adaleen (Mary Kay Place) informs Nicki of Roman Grant’s, Nicki’s father, death is a great showcase of what Big Love is so uniquely good at, with much of this owing to Place’s understanding of the show’s dark humor. Adaleen doesn’t know how to break the news to Nicki, so she despairingly sends her to the freezer where she’s stored Roman’s body (“Just get the bacon! Get me bacon please!”), so as to have Nicki discover the body herself. It’s so absurdly abnormal, but with Place’s slyly dark take on the scene, and Sevigny’s dead serious one, the scene is a tiny yet perfect example of Nicky’s disturbed upbringing, and I found it extremely moving and sad.

As a whole, this very hectic and exhausting episode brought everything together using an idea that Big Love established from the beginning, one that has remained a constant theme, which is that greed and the desire for wealth know no barriers across the various groups that we encounter–this is one of the biggest uniting factors for all characters on the show, and the contrast is primarily in the way the characters go about obtaining these things. In the final scene, set at the casino after its successful opening night, the Henrickson’s are brought together when the case of cash they earned is opened for them to look at. Bill started the episode by establishing a new church, and ended it with the opening of a successful business, and as far as Bill is concerned, his riches are bestowed upon him by God, for being righteous and following the Principle.

Take Lois, on the other hand, who has gotten herself involved in any number of dodgy schemes, the latest of which is bird smuggling, and doesn’t care that she’s completely outside of the boundaries of what is legal and, further to the point, normal. I love the idea of Lois living in an apartment in the middle of town, away from the compound, completely unwilling to change her behavior or demeanor despite the change of setting. I don’t know if the show intends to just use this as a darkly comic diversion, or if they plan to go somewhere with it, but I’m actually quite hoping it’s the latter. In any case, I think there is always a place on this show for a group of people who live even more deeply in the outliers of society than the Henricksons.

Little thoughts:

• Sorry for the delay with this piece. I’m in the midst of a grand move to a different country (okay, so it’s from Canada to the United States) and don’t currently have HBO. Or a TV. Or a home, for that matter. By the end of the month, these should be up in a timelier manner (though next week’s may be super late since it’s moving week.) I also want to thank Todd for letting me write up Big Love, and while I don’t expect to fill his shoes, I’ll do…something.



• This episode had some pretty wonderful humorous moments, and Barb’s terrifically bizarre declaration that “Mormons don’t like salmon, we like crab legs” was way up there for me. I did some, admittedly hasty, googling on the topic and didn’t really come up with any interesting sources that reference Mormons and crab legs. Does anyone know if there’s any truth to Barb’s assertion, or are we
  just to take that moment as a sort of desperate grasp for control on her part?



• I hope they give Ben some sort of actual plotline this season, because suddenly being lead singer for a teen Christian rock band doesn’t quite count. I was pleased, though, to see his band validate a theory that a friend of mine has, that all musicians who are fat are bass players. Ok, while this isn’t always true, think about it, it’s true most of the time.



• That phone call from Teenie was kind of ridiculous, I’m just sayin’. And the poor girl has been away at camp for way too long. All she did was show some neighborhood boys dirty pictures. One would expect at least Bill to be proud of her business prowess and keen understanding of supply and demand at a young age.



• How did people feel about the image of Bill taking Roman’s white cowboy hat? I personally found the symbolism to be a bit heavy-handed. It also let us know that Jerry and Tommy (really—Tommy and Jerry, Big Love?) are not letting up on Bill yet, but I honestly hope this isn’t a plotline that is dragged out even further.



• I did mean to include a discussion of the new credits sequence in the main discussion, but it didn’t really fit in. The consensus seems to be that most people are okay with the new sequence, but I haven’t heard anyone who prefers it to the original. If you do, I’d love to hear your take. Personally, I don’t see why this had to be changed: It clearly indicates something of a change in direction, and lets us know that the show, and the paths of these characters, may be getting darker, but these things are well enough explored in the show itself. I liked having that sequence there at the beginning, because it’s a constant reminder of the purpose of the Principle and the characters’ original goal, no matter how far they may stray from it.

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Clara Loginov is a freelance writer currently without home, nation or possessions. (No religion either — imagine!) This bio will be updated when any one of the above is obtained. But she does have a Twitter: http://twitter.com/ClaraLogs.

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By Dan Callahan

When Eric Rohmer entered a space with his camera, whether it was a Parisian apartment or a beach or a forest, he somehow managed to enlarge that space into an environment that shimmered and tingled with a kind of spiritual, almost supernatural presence (his only antecedent in this spooky regard was Murnau). He must have had his technical tricks and preferences, but I don't think it comes down to what lenses he used, or whatever stratagems he devised to capture natural light, or even the people he picked to be in his films, almost all of whom had a natural grace. Rohmer had an ineffable way of looking at his educated men and women as they talked and talked themselves in circles, making plans and describing their own feelings and sensations after the fact until we forget what action they were planning to take and lose ourselves in a kind of heightened inertia. All the while, Rohmer watched over them like a forgiving but sometimes judgmental God.

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To read the rest of the article at The L Magazine, click here.

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By Odienator

So, Eric Rohmer is dead, which is not at all surprising given that he was 89. What is surprising, at least for me, is my immediate thought upon hearing of his death. I thought of Father Brogan, the Jesuit who taught my undergraduate political science class at my college. Like Mssr. Rohmer, Father Brogan is also dead, and I took his class in the Spring of '89—coincidentally Rohmer's age—but neither of those is the reason I thought of him.

Father Brogan was an old man, a servant of God with a scholarly grey beard, a penchant for blue dress shirts (he never wore a collar), and a tendency to drone on for the entire class about "The Common Good." I had him in the C pattern of my schedule, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 11-11:50 AM. Despite being fascinated by politics, especially the dirty kind that ran through my home state like shit through a goose, I found Political Science 101 an incredible bore. Occasionally, Father Brogan would shake us from our glazed stupor over the Common Good by saying something filthy and/or off the wall, but he rarely strayed from the topic. Once he said "shit" with the fury of someone who had just fallen ass-first into the fires of Hell, and another time he talked about sucking the Government's Tits, which were at the time represented by Barbara Bush's knockers. But the other 97% of the time, it was All Common Good, All The Time. There was so much ado about The Common Good that my final exam was me repeating the definition of the Common Good thirteen different ways. It was a masterpiece of term-paper bullshit, and the man, bless his heart, gave me an A-minus as my final grade for the class.

Outside of the subject matter, Poli Sci 101 was consistent in one other way: At the beginning of every class, Father Brogan would open his blue notebook and recite a prayer. Not a prayer to praise His Holy Name or to give big-ups to the Virgin Mary. No, Father Brogan was a Republican, and his prayers were always more political than theological. "Heavenly Father," began Father Brogan on the particular day that linked him and Rohmer forever in my memory, "please guide George Bush's hand to continue the work of the great Ronald Reagan." Head bowed, I offered up a canceling-out prayer: "No, sweet Jesus, please strike George Bush and that son of a bitch Reagan with thy lightning! We ask these things in your name…"

After the partisan prayer, Father Brogan called on us to discuss our homework. I sat in front of the the class, as I was wont to do in school because I was a humongous grade whore whose hand was always up. "Mr. Hernandez," he said to the grade whore with the permanently raised hand, "do you know the answer?" "It's Henderson," I said for the 100th time before showing the class I had actually read the boring ass material we'd been assigned. I still think Willie Hernandez got the A I deserved in this class. I honestly don't remember what the question was, but I am sure it had something to do with The Common-You-Know-What. But I do remember what happened next.

Whether inspired by my answer or some random memory popping into his aging brain, Father Brogan started telling us about some French movie. "Blah blah blah blah blah," he said, for it certainly wasn't interesting to me, at least not until he said "and then Claire climbed a ladder and Jérôme came face to face (pause) with Claire's knee."

He paused, and looked heavenward before continuing to speak. "And at once, Jérôme became obsessed with that heavenly, heavenly knee."

As he continued to describe the film, or more specifically, the titular object of Le genou de Claire, horror washed over me in waves. Father Brogan was getting HOT over this. And not just a little hot, either. He was sighing, smacking his lips and practically panting. His face and neck were turning red and he became more animated. "All this over a KNEE?!!" my confused 18-year-old brain asked. "What's so fucking compelling about a knee? Now, Claire's Kootykat—that I can understand!" I figured I'd better pay attention, because there had to be more to it than this. It's a French movie, I reasoned, and PBS had shown me over the years that French movies were perverted as shit. "Maybe her knee has a hidden vagina in it!" I considered. Suddenly I became hooked on the story.

"Jérôme wants to touch (long pause) Claire's knee so much," panted Father Brogan. "And one day, he gets his chance. He…"

Suddenly, Father Brogan stopped talking about the movie. "But back to the Common Good," he said. "WHAT?!!" my inner voice shrieked. "Where's the rest of the story? What the hell happened next? Did he touch her knee and blow up? Did she slap him? Was there or was there not a hidden knee vagina?!" My face must have registered shock, because the professor addressed me directly. "Is there a problem, Mr. Hernandez?"

"Um, no," I said.

Later that day, I called the Great Love of my Life, who was also in college, albeit in Tennessee. An arts history major who spoke fluent French, I was sure she'd know of this French movie. When I described the plot, she said "yeah, I've seen that. Claire's Knee. Eric Rohmer directed it."

"So what happens?" I asked. "Does he touch her knee or not?!"

"Silly boy," she said to me, "that isn't even the point of the movie."

"How can't it be?" I protested. "It's the name of the damn movie!"

"Still," she said in that "you're so unrefined" tone of hers I hated. "It's much deeper than that."

"Well, does he fuck her?" I asked.

"Must you be so crude about art?" she asked, shaming me. After that, I certainly wasn't going to ask about hidden genitalia in knees. I sighed in surrender.

"PBS is going to run some Rohmer during their beg-a-thon this year," she told me. "Why don't you find out for yourself what happens to Claire and her knee?"

Eventually I found out about Claire's knee and Pauline's beach and Chloe's afternoon, a night at Maud's and many other Rohmer stories. More than once, I was bored out of my fucking mind. But also, more than once, I was intrigued, surprised and riveted by what I saw unfolding onscreen. And I have Father Brogan's R-rated reaction to a PG-rated joint to thank for that.

R.I.P. Eric Rohmer. And Father Brogan too.

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Odienator has officially retired from blogging, but occasionally pulls a Brett Favre.

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Thank you for your films, Monsieur Scherer. Perceval will shepherd you. Say hello to Pascale as you pass the full moon.

UPDATE: Dave Kehr says it best.

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A Rumination by Dan Jardine

There are many reasons that Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset demand, like Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece, The Godfather Parts I and II, to be addressed as a single unit, but two are predominant. Firstly, doing so allows us to enjoy the invigorating spectacle of the two films' bold balancing act, as on the one hand there stands the optimism and hopefulness of the (more) conventionally romantic Before Sunrise, while on the other hand we witness the often savage skewering of same in the much bleaker and despairing sequel. Secondly, the two films are more rewarding when consumed as one because we observe the counter-development of these films’ protagonists, as they effectively switch positions and outlooks over the course of the two stories, all the while maintaining the opposites attract magnetism that drives the romantic genre.

Further, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset are two films that have a deceptively simple concept masking their depth and grandness of design. What could be more straightforward than placing two attractive, intelligent people together in two gorgeous cultural landmarks, and letting them, to borrow from Hamlet, use their words, words, words to seduce both the audience and each other? And yet, behind this thin façade are two edgy and wise films that I continue to find, a dozen or more viewings down the road, profound in purpose and effect. These two films, which mark director Richard Linklater's crowning achievement as a filmmaker, prove craftily subversive, as the director seduces us with the conventions of a traditional love story, teasing out our expectations, only to undermine them time and again with cynicism and even despair.

Sunrise and Sunset coyly employ, then cleverly attack the romantic delusions that have been passed down through the ages via various popular culture media. Moreover, these films ask us to consider the very nature and purpose of our existence in a fragmentary, superficial and transient universe. Amid some of the most beautiful art and architecture that Europe has to offer, and often accompanied by a soundtrack of history's most enduring composers (Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Strauss), the two leads, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), search for meaning and permanence in a world that emphasizes disposability. The contrast of the past and its constant glories with the confusion and transience of the modern is surely not accidental. In the context of a world where we are only expected to be as happy as our latest acquisition, we share the experiences of the protagonists, who soak up the atmosphere of cultures that have been built over centuries.

Finally, to wrap up this prolonged introduction, I must come clean with a bit of a confessional aside in order to reveal a deeply personal reason that Linklater’s films have, beyond what I hope to show are some impressive aesthetic appeal, held me in their sway. Before Sunrise and Before Sunset have acted as a strange sort of Greek chorus as I have faced down the challenge of enduring the dissolution of my marriage. Having the two leads in these movies echo my thoughts and reveal my feelings in some of the movies' most powerful scenes has been both unsettling in a “how did they know that’s how I felt?” way, and comforting in a “so, I’m not the only one who feels this way!” sort of way.

In Before Sunrise, the young twenty-something couple's conversation is preoccupied with death, transience and the fragility of life. It is both moving and telling that the story that wins Celine over and convinces her to disembark the train and spend the night in Vienna with Jesse revolves around the tale he tells of himself as a child seeing his grandmother's ghost in the spray of a water hose, a fact that we learn in a conversation that also focuses on reincarnation, the fracturing of the individual spirit in the modern world, and Celine's 24/7 obsession with her own mortality. In fact, when the couple first meet, she is reading a George Bataille anthology titled Madame Edwarda, Le Mort (The Dead Man.) Further, the young couple visit the Friedhof der Namenlosen, a graveyard filled with Viennese suicide and plague victims, many of them resting for eternity in the sort of anonymity that had Thomas Gray opining that "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/ And waste its sweetness on the desert air." And near the film's end, when Jesse quotes from Auden's "As I Walked Out One Evening," he focuses upon the passages that emphasize the inevitability of decline and death ("Time will have its Fancy/To-morrow or To-day").

All the while, the couple search for evidence of things that can persist. Staying awake in defiance of that harbinger of mortality—the night—hoping to cheat the death of each day by stealing the time that they shouldn't even be having together, their conversations inevitably swing back to all the proofs that they see around them of the ephemeral, particularly in the realm of human relationships, where nothing sticks, where disintegration and collapse seem to be the norm. It is not merely in conversation, of course, that they hope to cheat death, but also in their burgeoning relationship. It is standard operating procedure in the romance genre to escape mortality through timeless love. In a daring bit of teasery, Linklater takes this expectation and dangles the hope for a happily ever after ending for the duration of both films.

Immersed in centuries-old art and architecture, the young couple in Before Sunrise search for meaning and clarity in their conversations, hoping that the connection they are forging will give them something to cling to in this potential shipwreck of life. Yet it is only when we revisit the couple nine years later in Before Sunset that it is clear these lessons have been internalized. The Celine and Jesse of this film are so young and unseasoned that they don't realize just how special this connection and their time together is, and it is only after nine years of struggle that they are able to put what they had together in Vienna into its proper perspective. The magnitude and rarity of their Viennese Brief Encounter is only evident through the perspective that the years provide. Also, on the most practical level, Sunset must be seen as a completion of the previous film insofar as the latter film picks up where Sunrise left off. Furthermore, the second film provides high relief for the first, as Sunset re-imagines the themes, moods and conversations of Sunrise from a new vantage point nine years hence. Indeed, Sunrise acts much like Sir Walter Raleigh's Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd, a determinedly sceptical poetic response to The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, Christopher Marlowe's self-consciously ironic romantic paean to pastoral idylls. The dialectical tension between the styles and outlooks of these two films serves to enhance our appreciation of their depth and significance. Like The Godfather Parts I and II, these two films are fulfilling when taken as parts of a whole, rather than as separate entities, and viewing the films in a single sitting is a much more rewarding and complete experience of the films.

Before Sunrise appeared on the scene relatively early in the career of director Richard Linklater, and in it he seems content to let his protagonists' words and the beauty of the Viennese cityscape do most of the talking for him. While Robin Wood's seminal essay "Rethinking Romantic Love: Before Sunrise" offers a spirited defense of a deeper reading of the film's cinematic qualities, using one scene in particular (the imaginary phone calls), to point out how sophisticated Linklater's visual instincts are, the reality is that Before Sunrise consists of a largely static camera, with characters delivering the dialogue in a series of standard two shots, while occasionally breaking the camera away long enough to linger lovingly on the gorgeousness that is Vienna.

However, by the time he filmed Before Sunset, Linklater seems to have developed a little more cinematic ambition. The fluid camerawork in Sunset distinguishes the film from its more static predecessor, as Linklater glides through the streets of Paris, rarely resting his shots for more than a second or two on the beauty that surrounds his protagonists, delivering the city sidelong glances instead, as the couple, reflecting the increased speed with which time is passing them by, roam the Parisian streets and waterways. The camera seems to recognize that this couple does not have the same luxury of time that they did nine years previous, as even the film's length (80 minutes vs. the 105 minutes of Sunrise) places the characters in the context of even further temporal urgency. Furthermore, the anxiety and restlessness that informs their attitudes and dominates their conversation is well-matched by the film's incessant movement. It is a classic case of the film's style informing and strengthening its content.

And speaking of time, the years that have passed between the two films have not been kind to our heroes. In Before Sunrise, Celine believes in magic, embraces reincarnation, accepts fortune-telling and is enchanted by the words of the street corner poet. In the second film, the bloom is off the rose, as one life appears to be plenty enough for her now. The intervening years seem to have been particularly hard on her, as Celine has developed a hardened, cynical shell that Jesse finds difficult to crack. What was flippancy in Sunrise—her repeated references to how men are lucky that women don't devour them after sex, the way some insects do—has become bleak pessimism in Sunset. She has seen how the world functions, and even though she appears to be committed through her work to make the world a better place, she is not hopeful of its future. For every optimistic note that Jesse tries to strike, Celine finds a discordant one. Her work for environmental causes appears to have developed not out of humanitarian optimism, but rather a finger-in-the-dike pessimism, the blame for which, it eventually emerges, is a series of failed relationships, the fault for which she finally lays at Jesse's feet. These failures pointedly remind Celine of what a profound and unique experience their night in Vienna was, in much the same way that Before Sunrise reminds us of the creative failure that is the vast majority of mainstream Hollywood romantic comedies. Just as traditional rom-coms encourage an almost delusional level of romantic optimism in their devotees, so too has Celine's Viennese encounter raised her expectations so high, that her feelings of betrayal by her experiences in the years since have been all the greater.

When we first see Jesse in Before Sunrise, he is brash and open, but also freshly wounded by love. Despite winning Celine over with the story of his grandmother's ghost, the younger Jesse is sceptical to the point of cynicism at times, blithely dismissing the inexplicable or the uncertain. However, in Before Sunset Jesse appears, in contrast to Celine, happy enough, married with a child and a modestly successful novel under his belt. There is something more upward-looking in the Jesse of Before Sunset. For example, while he has an irritating habit in Sunrise of contesting nearly all of Celine's thoughts and feelings, in Before Sunset he proves himself far less irritatingly self-involved, and while clearly pessimistic on a personal level, he is much more hopeful in a global sense. It is, one should note, an optimism that grates on Celine. All in all, at first blush, it appears that Jesse has aged well, while Celine has not. But we gradually sense Jesse's deep-seated sorrow as, when Sunset reaches its climax, we learn that he, for all his apparent hopefulness and optimism in the film's first hour, is the victim of a profound dissatisfaction. Perhaps it is his earlier heartbreak that has led him to seek the safety of a comfortable relationship, but the consequences to his happiness appear to be devastating, as the Jesse of Before Sunset appears to be on the verge of a fundamental psychic disintegration.

Just as Celine's romantic bitterness has been provoked by memories of Vienna, Jesse's impending emotional collapse can be found in the stirring up of old ghosts as well. His lament, as the film nears its close, of the complete lack of passion in his current relationship could be dismissed as the sound of yet another generation settling for a little bit less, but there is something a bit deeper and more fundamentally disturbing happening here. Both Jesse and Celine appear to be on the verge of becoming that German couple squabbling in the train at the beginning of Before Sunrise, and all those middle-aged couples they speak of in Sunrise whose untenable relationships have become a seemingly inevitable tedium of soul-sucking routine (their anecdotes are rife with stories of parents, grandparents, and friends who have betrayed their commitment to one another). And Celine is forced to face up to the poverty of her love life, and admit to feeling that the magic, romanticism and optimism that guided her thoughts nine years previous had misguided and even betrayed her, feeding into lofty expectations that could not possibly be met by a disaffected and disinterested world. The years of pain and disappointment have led the two lovers to swap philosophical outlooks.

The struggle in these films is no less epic than that of a Greek tragedy between forces of free will and fate. Are our young lovers doomed to fall into the same patterns of disappointment and dissatisfaction that have befallen every generation as it nears middle age? Or are they going to find a way to overcome the great weight that the natural, historical and cultural forces—Time as the oppressor in Auden's poetry; the dissolution of the individual in Seurat's painting; the resurrection of Notre Dame Cathedral; the endurance of the river Seine; the Prater's Wheel of Fortune-esque ferris wheel—that surround these characters and constantly remind them of the crushing inevitability of the passage of time, and which seem to conspire to keep us all in their sway?

The final 25 minutes of conversation that winds up Before Sunset are the most deeply affecting moments of the two films. Here, both characters face up to their life's failures, and seem on the brink of falling into a desperate cynicism. Life has come up so far short of the vaulted expectations that the night in Vienna bred in them. However, rather than the disappointment dissolving into a series of recriminations or a spiral of mutual regret, the film takes a miraculous healing turn at the end, and the characters rise above their ruefulness, and use it as a springboard into hope, guarded as it must remain given all that continues to separate them, including geography and pre-existing relationships. As a result, the final moments in Celine's apartment are poignant in a way rarely found in more conventional romances.

After spending over three hours watching them connect, and after waiting 9 years to have answered the question on everyone's lips—"will they or won't they?"—we have become so attached to this couple that it is quite impressive that Before Sunset is able to deliver a conclusion that is not only wholly befitting to the couple, who have got so much invested in the lives that they've built apart from one another, yet who clearly need each other to find that faith in life that appears to have left them, but that is among the most eloquent and evocative in filmdom. The carnal union that caps these films is entirely appropriate given the strictures of the romantic genre, but these moments do not come without raising audience concerns. They may be putting off death, both physical and emotional, just a little bit through sex, but is it a temporary reprieve? Ambiguity remains, as we must wonder what reservations and uncertainties lay in store for them the morning after. Indeed, you would have to be entirely bereft of the proverbial feline curiosity not to wonder where they go from here. Jesse has a son for whom he has sacrificed nearly everything, while Celine's work gives her life a center and meaning. Are these impediments too great to be scaled? Or will they navigate these global concerns to fine the happiness we all feel they deserve. Linklater leaves this up to the audience, but perhaps we will revisit these characters in the next decade, and learn if the cynics or the romantics have ruled the day.

Linklater's two films move us towards a new understanding of the genre of romantic films. While conventional romances spend almost all of their energy convincing the audience that, consequences be damned, this particular couple is going to hook up, and it is going to be worth all of our emotional commitment because if they don't hook up, we'll, like, die or something. These films get you thinking about the real nuts and bolts of relationship-building, and more importantly ask us to confront the consequences of attempting to build relationships in the real world of those illusory and harmful myths that we perpetuate in our romantic fictions. In Before Sunset, Celine's bitterness is rooted in the long shadow that the idealistic romantic fantasy of her one night with Jesse cast on the rest of her life. Her failures with men all come back to their inability to hold a candle to the fantasy that she built around this single Viennese night.

Hopefully Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke will give us all a chance to revisit these films in the near future through the kaleidoscopic viewfinder of a third entry in the series. I would love another chance to check in with these characters, to see how their futures have telescoped together (or apart), and more importantly, to weigh whether the films still have as profound a personal effect upon me as they currently do. To wrap things up, I will take one final glimpse of the two films' cinematic suggestiveness. There are many memorable conversations in both features, but as images go, few can top the shot in Before Sunrise of two trains forging their way through the Viennese night. Both move swiftly and in the same direction, but they do not share the same track. They run along on parallel tracks until, just as the camera parts ways with the trains, their trajectories diverge, one moving up, the other down. As symbols go, this representation of the future of our two leads, and the future of most relationships, is fitting. I will take advantage of the train's metaphorical aptness as a keen indicator that it is time to step off of the tracks and take my leave.

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Dan Jardine is a contributor to The House Next Door and the publisher of Cinemania.

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By Matt Zoller Seitz

[Editor's Note: This is Matt's latest video essay for the L Magazine. The introduction is reprinted below, with the video embedded.]

"The old formula of committed madness feels apropos here," says Nicolas Rapold in the current issue of the L, reviewing Flooding with Love for the Kid, Zachary Oberzan's solo restaging of David Morrell's novel First Blood, the basis for the Rambo films; Flooding with Love plays for a week at Anthology Film Archives beginning Friday, January 8th. In this video essay, Matt Zoller Seitz dissects this D.I.Y. psychodrama. (A transcript of the narration can be found here.)

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Matt Zoller Seitz is a filmmaker/writer, and the creator of The House Next Door.

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By Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard

[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]

JASON BELLAMY: In David Cronenberg's Crash we are given a collection of characters with often overlapping but not always similar sexual fetishes. There are characters turned on by automobile crashes—either as foreplay or as self-contained experiences. There are characters turned on by pain. There are characters turned on by scars and disfigurement. There are characters turned on by the turn-ons of others. There are characters turned on by the prospect of being caught having sex in public and there are others turned on just by having sex in cars in public places, seemingly oblivious to whether anyone will notice. The film has sex. The film has nudity. The film has oddity. This is what Crash is. But what is Crash about?

Seeing the film for the first time since its 1997 release, that's the question I asked myself over and over. What is this about? What is the meaning of this? Are these demonstrations of peculiar eroticism an ingenious metaphor or are they self-evident? Is Crash an examination of something or simply an exhibition? I suspect that our discussion of this film will repeatedly come back to these questions, but it seems this is where we must begin. And so I repeat: What is Crash about?

ED HOWARD: That's a good question to start with, though I'm not sure it has a single right answer, or even a right answer at all. The most challenging aspect of Crash, for me, is its utter refusal to express its ideology in unambiguous terms. Sure, there are expressions of ideology, mostly from Elias Koteas' Vaughan, but it's by no means clear what the film's perspective on him is, either. He even contradicts himself, first maintaining that he's interested in remolding the human body through technology and then later saying that mantra was just a ruse, and what he's really after is unleashing the sexuality of the car crash. In a way, the two purposes of Vaughan reveal the film's true roots, in the dialectic between the worldviews of author J.G. Ballard, whose novel is being adapted here, and David Cronenberg, who's adapting it. Reshaping the human body through science and technology is of course a central theme of Cronenberg's oeuvre, from the head-exploding telepathy of Scanners to the televisual mutations of Videodrome to the species shift of The Fly. Cronenberg continually returns to this idea: the ways in which our very minds and physiology have been drastically altered by the tireless advance of modernity. On the other hand, Ballard, though also concerned with the changes wrought by modernity, is more interested in the sexual component of this material: the extremes that people are willing to go to in search of eroticism in a media-saturated, spectacle-numbed age. These two tendencies, not unrelated but not entirely overlapping either, create the film's central tension.

That tension, I submit, is one reason why the film is so hard to figure out. That's not to say that the film isn't also anchored by an elegant metaphor—I'll leave it to you to decide if it's "ingenious"—that makes its sexual excesses more than mere exhibition. That metaphor is the film's most common occurrence (besides sex, maybe): the car crash. For Cronenberg, as for Ballard, the car crash is an emotionally and thematically rich event, a moment fraught with multiple possibilities and meanings. It's the moment, most notably, when the modern technology we rely on the most betrays us in a profound and disturbing way, not only in the most obvious sense, but because it shatters the barriers of isolation that technology places between us. As you point out, the film's characters have different fetishes and obsessions, but one thing they share is the sense that they're alienated from normal sexual, romantic and interpersonal relationships. Even before they become involved in Vaughan's car crash manias, James Ballard (James Spader, playing the novelist's stand-in) and his wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) have an abstracted, stylized sexual relationship based on telling each other stories about their adulterous trysts. These people are at a remove from their sexuality; in the opening scene, Catherine seems as aroused by the cold, sleek surface of a phallic airplane nose as by her lover's caresses.

The car, and the highway, is a perfect metaphor for this disconnection: all those people encased in metal, speeding across the pavement, surrounded by others like them but with no possibility of ever making a connection with any of them. No possibility, that is, but a car crash. That's why the crash between Ballard and Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) is staged as a moment of startling, uncomfortable intimacy, their eyes locked, Remington inadvertently flashing her breast as she struggles to remove her seatbelt. The car crash is so important to these people because it's an escape from their isolation and lack of affect, a way to feel something, even if it's pain and perverse arousal.

JB: Yeah, I've considered that reading, but it doesn't quite work for me. The problem I have with it is that we don't really have any on-screen evidence that these characters are lost or isolated, at least not in any painful or unwilling way. Yes, the characters of this film seem removed from the world around them, to the point that we almost have to remind ourselves that a larger world exists, but that's true of most films. Crash is about its characters; there's nothing unusual there. And so I'm left searching for a moment that shows these characters looking at the world around them and feeling like they don't belong or can't connect, and I can't find it.

Of course, your reading is tempting because it's the best way to rationalize—to whatever degree it's possible—the peculiarity of the characters' fetishes, obsessions and behaviors. "Why would these people go to these extremes?" "It must be because they can't connect otherwise." But as convenient as that answer is, and as logical as it feels, I don't think it's earned. I don't think it's in the "text" of the film. Instead I think it's an understandable knee-jerk attempt to try to place Crash into a somewhat familiar dramatic arc or genre type. Because, again, I don't think Cronenberg actually establishes that these people can't connect. In fact, I'd argue he does the opposite. All we see are these characters connecting, again and again and again. They just happen to connect with each other in what happens to be a niche group. As a result, since Cronenberg doesn't develop this loneliness, longing or isolation, when we suggest that these characters resort to this behavior because they can't connect we are dismissing their urges as the product of some kind of deficiency. And the problem I have with that is that it puts us in the same position as the bigot who assumes that homosexuals couldn't possibly be born with homosexual urges and so must have suffered a childhood trauma or lacked proper parenting. (Ditto bisexuality or sadomasochism or any other sexual orientation or behavior that's outside of the heterosexual-missionary-position "norm.")

A somewhat similar but different way to look at the film is provided in a particularly good review by Roger Ebert, who suggests that Crash is, in effect, "a dissection of the mechanics of pornography." He argues that by presenting characters who are "entranced by a sexual fetish that, in fact, no one has," and "by deliberately removing anything that an audience member is likely to find even remotely erotic, Cronenberg has brought a kind of icy, abstract purity to his subject." In other words, rather than getting consumed by our own arousal, we are able to analyze arousal itself.

Now, I have some problems with this, too, because Crash of course does include things that many audience members will find incredibly erotic. For starters, there's nudity—and if we're not supposed to be in any way turned on by what we see, Cronenberg wouldn't cast someone with the body of Deborah Kara Unger. Secondly, there's arousal; seeing people sexually stimulated is often sexually stimulating in itself. Furthermore, deviance, or any behavior outside of the politically correct "norm" (whatever that is), is for many people a significant source of arousal (which is partly what's on display in this film). Sure, the car crash stimulus might be impossible for almost anyone to relate to, but some of the other fetishistic arousals portrayed here aren't that far outside of fairly standard sexual urges. Just as I suspect there are more men who consume pornography showing women being simultaneously penetrated by multiple men than there are men would actually feel comfortable engaging in that kind of activity, I suspect that many people would feel aroused by James Ballard's ogling of the vagina-esque scars of Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), even if they don't share his specific arousal. Nevertheless, Ebert's analogy at least explains the, um, auto(mobile) eroticism in a somewhat more satisfying way. What do you think?

EH: I think that's all very interesting and relevant, all part of a film that can be read and understood in multiple ways that aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. It's possible that in talking about the film in terms of isolation, I'm carrying over my impressions of Ballard's Crash rather than looking solely at the text of Cronenberg's film. Cronenberg adapts a lot of his dialogue from Ballard but of course elides the narrator's interior monologues, which communicate much of the novel's thematic core.

Nevertheless, there is evidence that these characters feel disconnected even in Cronenberg's film. Before James' crash, he and Catherine have a chilly and abstracted relationship where most of the sex occurs outside the marriage. They talk to each other in flat, affectless tones about their indiscretions, and seem more turned on by ideas, by words, than by anything concrete. I'd say that's the definition of disconnection from the world: a preference for the abstract over the tangible. The crash seems to awaken them both to other erotic possibilities, as a continuation of the games they were previously playing to keep themselves at a distance from one another. It's a step towards the world, though not all the way. Instead of getting aroused by abstractions, they're aroused by inanimate objects, but they're still not exactly connecting with other people except in ways mediated by technology, by cold metal and pavement. In saying this, I don't want to judge the characters, and I don't think Cronenberg or Ballard want to either. If there are "deficiencies" in these characters, they're shared by the whole of our media-saturated, stimulation-numbed modern society.

Anyway, I hadn't read Ebert's review previously, but I've also always thought of this film as being closely modeled on pornography. It even follows the structure of porn: a scene, often brief, establishing some hint of character motivation or narrative advancement, followed by a sex scene. Orgasm, then repeat. The film cycles through most of the possible pairings by the time it's through, and there's a degree of mechanism in this exchange of partners: Catherine with a lover, then James with a lover, then James and Catherine, then James and Helen, James and Catherine again, then Vaughan and Gabrielle are added to the mix as well. There are even gay encounters between Vaughan and James, and between Helen and Gabrielle, though these are curiously chaste in comparison to the heterosexual matches. At one point there's a ménage a trois of fondling between Gabrielle, Helen and James. In other scenes, James takes on a voyeuristic role watching Vaughan with a prostitute or Vaughan with Catherine. It's as though Cronenberg is systematically examining the possibilities of the porn form and the sex act, parodying the rote set-up/sex scene structure of the average porn feature.

Porn was of course very much on Ballard's mind in writing the novel, as well. In his 1990 annotations to his pre-Crash collage novel The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard writes,

"[S]exual imagination is unlimited in scope and metaphoric power, and can never be successfully repressed. In many ways pornography is the most literary form of fiction—a verbal text with the smallest attachment to external reality, and with only its own resources to create a complex and exhilarating narrative… Pornography is a powerful catalyst for social change, and its periods of greatest availability have frequently coincided with times of greatest economic and scientific advance."

In some ways, that sounds like a good description of Cronenberg's Crash, especially the part about the disconnect from "external reality." I'm more doubtful about whether Cronenberg would agree with the last sentence: his Crash is many things, but a "catalyst for social change"? So if Cronenberg's film mimics the form of pornography, as I agree it does, what's the purpose of this mimicry?

JB: That's a good question. But before we get into that, I'd like to talk more about the characters and how they connect with one another, or don't. Because while I wholeheartedly agree with you that the relationship between James and Catherine is "chilly and abstracted" at the start of the film, I would disagree with any implication that their relationship ever evolves from that point (or even that they evolve individually). Sure, James and Catherine have a passionate looking sex scene near the middle of the film, but even in that scene they are essentially fucking someone else. Their arousal is just as individual as it was before and is just as tied to one another's other sexual pursuits as it was before. (Catherine spends the whole time getting turned on, and turning on James, by describing him having sex with Vaughan.) One could say that they are having intercourse with one another but having sex with someone else, if you know what I mean. And this isn't unique to James and Catherine. Over the course of the film we see these characters continue to explore their sexual desires, but do we ever see them connecting? In the backseat of a car, James and Helen have sex in which he's little more than an apparatus—both in emotion and in use. James has sex in a car with Gabrielle, but he's attracted to her scars, not to her, and she's turned on by his attraction to her deformities, not by him. The most engaged sex in the film, "curiously chaste" though it is, might be between James and Vaughan, in that they both of them seem to desire one another—rather than using one another as stand-ins for someone or something else. But maybe I only think that because Cronenberg stays at a distance, not allowing me to observe their vacant expressions during intercourse.

All of this indeed means Crash is very much like porn, because there's little evidence that there's any engagement between partners beyond the explicit pursuit of sexual gratification. That is, these individuals aren't looking to connect with one another; they're looking to be aroused by whatever means necessary. This is significant because the scenes that would be used to suggest connection are hard to distinguish from the ones that would suggest disconnection, which leads me to one of my problems with this film: I fail to detect any interesting evolution. The characters don't change. Only the specific focus of their arousal changes, from having sex in public places in the beginning to car crashes by the end, plus some other harder to define stuff in between. There's no real metamorphosis here. Instead it's like watching a drug user switch from heroin to crack. At the root, there's no difference in impulse, desire or behavior.

I don't mean to imply that films need to be about characters growing, learning or evolving. But when I find no deeper significance in Crash's fifth sexual encounter than in its second, it feels all too close to porn to me, but in all the wrong ways—repetitive, empty, untitillating.

EH: Well, I never said any of the film's characters actually succeed in overcoming their disconnection, just that all these car crashes and fetishes are ways of trying to find something more authentic, more satisfying. James' car crash is a triggering event that unleashes some new sexual possibilities, but nothing that happens here necessarily constitutes a deep human bond. I think you're right that throughout the film, none of these people experience a true emotional connection to another person, though the mutual fascination between Vaughan and James comes close. So does the enigmatic last scene, which has more than a hint of nihilistic, apocalyptic finality, but also contains, in James' urgently repeated "maybe the next one," a faintly optimistic suggestion that they'll keep trying: to feel something, to connect to each other, to kill each other? Who knows? The point is they're trying; they haven't given in to the general deadening of sensation and instead keep looking for increasingly outlandish ways to reawaken their numbed sensibilities.

In The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard writes a great deal about this distanced modern condition. After listing a number of body parts and isolated descriptive details about a woman, one of that book's characters says,

"There are one or two other bits and pieces, but together the inventory is an adequate picture of a woman, who could easily be reconstituted from it. In fact, such a list may well be more stimulating than the real thing. Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions… [C]heap photo-pornography is in fact a vital literature, a kindling of the few taste buds left in the jaded palates of our so-called sexuality."

I think this is the spirit of Cronenberg's film and his sex scenes, portraying people who have become numb to conventional emotional and sexual pleasures, and thus turn to inventive extremes for some satisfaction. The film, like Ballard's fiction, documents a world where sex, like every other aspect of human experience, has been obsessively catalogued into lists, charts, data and words rather than feelings and sensations. Ballard compares this situation to the pop art of Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann, the latter of whom is especially relevant, with his paintings of plastic-looking nudes, like desexualized naked Barbie dolls. It sounds, though, like you believe Cronenberg's film is simply a surface presentation of this phenomenon, a reflection of the flat colors and slick surfaces in Wesselmann's work rather than any kind of commentary on or response to the situation.

JB: Yeah, I suppose that's what I'm saying. See, we still disagree about what we're actually looking at here. You say that the characters are "trying to find something more." And that's true, to a point. But I see characters who just want more, and I think there's a difference. The way you describe the movie implies that these characters are reaching for something, as if they're on a quest, as if their search might actually have a destination that will leave them satisfied. The way I see the film, these characters just want roughly the same sensation over and over again, and the only reason their interests or desires might seem to evolve is because their satisfaction requires them to push their limits just to stay in the same place. They're like the drinker who used to be able to get drunk on two beers who now needs five shots just to feel buzzed. That drinker isn't trying to connect. There's no deep significance to the drinking. There's no attempt at growth. The significance is only that they want to get drunk. They want to satisfy an itch.

Now, it's here that I find Ebert's analysis applies well. He writes, "There are no moments of healing sanity because the characters are comatose with lust and fascination. They follow their self-destructive courses because they do not want to stop. If you seek to understand them, ignore their turn-ons and substitute your own." Using this logic, Crash could be seen as metaphor for any destructive activity, particularly drug abuse. "Why would someone risk injury to their family, their job, their reputation, their body, etc, to abuse a drug?" "Because when the compulsion to scratch that itch is so overpowering, everything else is irrelevant." The trouble is, I find Ebert's description of the film more fascinating than the film itself. And just because depth can be implanted into this film, I'm not sure that means the film has much if anything to say on these themes. I think it might be telling that in order to find rewarding complexity in Cronenberg's film we've had to draw upon the written work of Ballard (not to mention Ebert). On screen I don't find much there. So what I am I missing?

EH: Fair enough. I keep returning to the Ballard novel because, frankly, the film is most interesting to me in relation to its source (and to other texts and films), and even Cronenberg seems to know it: it only takes until the film's second scene before somebody asks, "has anybody seen James Ballard?" So, yeah, maybe that's damning. Regardless, I certainly think there's a lot of interest right up there on the screen. Cronenberg removes the novel's intensely internal focus, taking away our ability to see within the mind of James Ballard, who narrates the book. The result is that the film is resolutely concerned with exteriors. How you feel about the film probably depends on how you feel about this refusal to get inside these chilly, distant characters. For me, this decision makes the film more abstract than conventionally narrative. Because in normal terms, you're right, there's not much character development here, there's not much of a dramatic arc.

Instead, Cronenberg presents these bizarre porn scenarios with a deadpan lack of commentary, watching with the same mechanical fascination that we see in James Spader's eyes as he arranges Gabrielle's stiff, metal-encased limbs in the confined space of her car. In that scene especially, Cronenberg's perspective on this material is clear. He's subtly warping it to his own interests, examining the ways in which the technology of the car, and of advanced reconstructive surgeries, have created new hybrid forms for the human body. In the midst of Gabrielle and James' grappling, Cronenberg inserts a shot of the complicated system of metal rods and levers under the steering column, the special tools Gabrielle needs to be able to drive. It visually rhymes, not only with phallic imagery (another current running through the film) and with the metal surrounding the woman's legs, but with the similar system of metal rods that had earlier been digging into and supporting James' own post-crash leg wounds. By highlighting these images, Cronenberg makes these characters look like cyborgs, merging with the metal that's holding their bodies together and which allows them to get around. As a result, they come to identify as much with steel and electronics as with other people.

Later, James caresses a vagina-like wound in the surface of his wife's car in exactly the same way as he had with the scars on Gabrielle's legs: this sign of Vaughan's presence is as sexual for him as anything organic. The film is packed with subtle parallels like this, linkages between the organic and the artificial, like the way, during the car wash scene, Cronenberg draws a connection between the white foamy liquid streaming across the windshield, and Catherine's cum-sticky hand after her violent sexual encounter with Vaughan. Cronenberg's images consistently bring together messy human exigency with mechanical and artificial cleanliness: Rosanna Arquette, delivering the film's best and most playful performance, seeming to have sex with a showroom car, rubbing her ass against its sleek surface and suggestively spreading her stiff legs as she leans against it. Visually, the film is all about these kinds of junction points between human softness and the hard lines of the objects and technology surrounding us.

So what are you missing? In focusing on the film's undeniable lack of affect and pornographic structure, you're maybe missing out on the ways in which Cronenberg's imagery cleverly plays with the themes and ideas at the film's core. There's a streak of perverse playfulness running beneath its icy exterior, like the way James' time spent as an invalid on his balcony, watching cars go by through binoculars with an elegant blonde by his side, mirrors the basic set-up of Rear Window—with the obvious and thematically important difference that Hitchcock's voyeur was watching his fellow humans, while James' voyeurism is directed at cars.

There's also the great scene where Catherine, James and Vaughan are wandering through the dreamlike, fog-shrouded scene of a car crash, curiously unhindered amidst all the chaos. At one point, Catherine sits down next to a female accident victim, smoking, and Cronenberg shoots both women in profile, the accident victim slightly blurry in the foreground, turning to the camera to reveal her scarred visage, offsetting Catherine's blank, perfect features in the background. By framing the two women like this, Cronenberg makes it look like a before-and-after photo, foreshadowing Catherine's future and suggesting the fragility of her flawless, plastic beauty.

Basically, I think the film opens up and becomes far richer when considered on a shot-by-shot basis like this rather than looking at the big picture. Cronenberg's film is precise and very formalist: he carefully frames his images, carrying certain visual motifs through the film in order to express the thematic undercurrents of this material. As much as I love thinking about the film in relation to Ballard and American car culture and other outside reference points, this shouldn't obscure the extent to which Cronenberg explores his ideas, subtly and without exposition, in the visual choices he makes.

JB: What's interesting about your latest comments is that they contrast with what was going to be my next complaint: I don't think the film is visually interesting. If it were, the lack of character (never mind character development, because there's hardly character establishment) and the lack of interesting commentary within the film (in my opinion) wouldn't be such a problem. As before, I found your latest descriptions of what Crash does to be more interesting than Crash itself. That said, I don't want this to come off like a slam of your analysis, but in large part couldn't we narrow down many of your observations to a single sentence? Couldn't we simply say that Cronenberg eroticizes car parts (or the scars of car crashes) in all the places where we'd usually see body parts? So instead of caressing a breast, someone caresses the hood of a car. Instead of semen, we get car-wash foam. Instead of jerking off to porn movies, people get off to car crash videos. Instead of role-playing human sexual encounters, we get reenactments of car crashes. And so on.

Is this clever? Sure. More on that in a bit. But it's also the same technique/gimmick/joke over and over again, which makes Crash like a stationary bicycle. We go round and round but we don't get anywhere. You would disagree, obviously, because you're fascinated by how Crash falls in line with "Cronenberg's own interests," as established by looking at his career as a whole. I get that, and I wouldn't want to suggest that's invalid. Context is significant. Awareness should be rewarded. But there's a difference between saying that the best way to appreciate Crash is to see how it fits within Cronenberg's oeuvre and saying that an understanding of Cronenberg's oeuvre is essential to one's appreciation of this film. Because within Crash itself I don't see much exploration of, or comment on, Cronenberg's interest with "new hybrid forms for the human body." I see where you see it. I realize how Crash overlaps with, say, The Fly, and I assume that's what drew Cronenberg to the project. And so if we were examining Cronenberg's career, I'd say that's an important thread weaving through his filmography. But, within Crash itself, do I think that subject is confronted in any compelling way? No. Within Crash itself it's an irrelevant byproduct of the technology-for-flesh eroticization swap.

In terms of that swap, Crash is indeed quite successful. As I said earlier, there is cleverness in the number of ways that traditional human eroticism can be translated into automobile form, which is why I'd like to propose that Crash is best enjoyed as a comedy. Except I'm hesitant to do so. Though I have no doubt that there is some very intentional humor here, I'm a little unclear about how much. There are times when I wanted to be laughing with Crash but had a guilty feeling that I was laughing at it instead.

EH: Well, if you don't find the film visually interesting, we'll have to agree to disagree on that front. I think of the most prolonged sex scene between James and Catherine—the one where she dispassionately monologues about her husband having anal sex with Vaughan—and I can only marvel at Cronenberg's formal precision. The scene opens with a tracking shot where the copulating couple is first seen through a segmented window that chops up their naked bodies into Cubist fragments and overlays the sex with a lit-up urban skyline, phallic skyscrapers layered over the jumble of limbs, which blend together with the tangled sheets and pillows. We hardly know what we're seeing at first. Then throughout most of the sex the camera remains in closeup on one partner or the other, capturing their unreadable facial expressions, before Cronenberg brings them together into the same shot for the, ahem, climax. The shot sequence implies a coming-together, a connection, but of course the running dialogue throughout the scene only reinforces the couple's isolation from one another, the extent to which their marital sexuality is still defined through stories and fantasies about other people and objects. There's a push-and-pull tension here between connection and disconnection, just as there is in the film as a whole. Scenes like this, with these meaning-charged compositions and the interplay between dialogue and image, belie the idea that Crash is lacking in visual or thematic complexity.

Maybe Cronenberg does return to the same well again and again throughout this film, consistently substituting technological eroticization for more conventional erotic images. Must we fault the film for this single-mindedness? It's a film about sex in the modern, technological era becoming increasingly disconnected from human feeling, so of course it keeps returning to these images where people feel more of a connection with metal constructs than with other people. It's almost like you're dismissing the film's whole central concept—that sex in the age of technology is wound up as much with our surroundings as with the people involved—and then asking what's left. Any film or idea can be reduced to a single reductive sentence, like your accurate summary that "Cronenberg eroticizes car parts… in all the places where we'd usually see body parts." The film is concerned with the examination of this one idea in detail, and personally I find a great deal of interest in Cronenberg's relentless exploration of this theme.

As for Crash's place in Cronenberg's career, as I've suggested, I think this film is best understood as a junction point between Cronenberg and Ballard, which perhaps accounts for some of its more schizophrenic tendencies. There isn't the purity of The Fly and Videodrome, both films where the hero literally transforms under the influence of modern technology, at first unwillingly but eventually with the eagerness and passion of a convert. The ending of Videodrome, in particular, is inflected with a strain of apocalyptic optimism, a cathartic celebration of the way the hero takes what's violent and ugly in our televisual culture and appropriates it into a new sense of identity. In Crash, Cronenberg's enthusiasm for this kind of spectacle is tempered by Ballard's influence, which encourages more of an observational, coldly voyeuristic perspective. Both Ballard's Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition are full of lists, clinical recitations of various possibilities for car crash injuries and sexual experiences. It's this emphasis on pseudo-scientific jargon and structural repetition that gives the film its form, shaping Cronenberg's examinations of sexual perversion and relational disconnect.

All of which would probably be rather dry and formalist if not for, yes, the film's darkly humorous streak. I'm with you there, though for me it's unquestionable that Cronenberg (and Ballard, for that matter) recognizes the humor in this material and intentionally plays to it. The scene where Gabrielle toys with a nerdy car salesman is a perfect case in point: she intentionally flaunts her unconventional sexuality, getting into the car in an awkward way that hikes her skirt up to reveal the black panties beneath, then penetrating the vinyl seat with one of her leg brace's metal hooks. It's played as sexual comedy, no question about it, and Arquette's broad, smirking performance only drives home the humor. The same goes for the sudden insert of the stunt man Seagrave (Peter MacNeill) feeling up his fake, bra-clad breasts, or the sardonic look on the face of a tattoo artist after James asks her where he should put his tattoo ("where the sun don't shine," is the answer implied in her deadpan expression). By the same token, I don't think Cronenberg takes Vaughan's ranting, apocalyptic speeches nearly as seriously as Ballard does; by chopping up Ballard's prose into bite-size fragments and having Vaughan spit out pretentious monologues at every opportunity, Cronenberg makes him a vaguely silly and ludicrous figure, less menacing than absurd. There are signs here that Cronenberg recognizes the absurdity of his premise, that while these people's obsessions might be deadly-serious for them, they are, after all, getting hard from watching car crashes.

JB: Oh, I have no doubt that Cronenberg is having fun with the material. My favorite moment of obvious humor comes just after that sex scene between James and Catherine, when Cronenberg leaps from one of the film's longest and most passionate sexual encounters to one of its shortest and blandest. We see Hunter's Helen, centered in the frame and staring straight at us, writhing up and down as if we're the person she's straddling. "Have you cum?" she asks a then-anonymous partner behind her, clearly lost to her own interests. "I'm alright," an obscured and utterly disinterested James responds from the shadows, as if he's turning down the offer of a sandwich. That's great stuff, and clearly it's comedy by design. But other times I'm not so sure. For example, that sex scene between Catherine and James, when she informs him that "some semen is saltier than others." Is that eroticism or humor or just casual conversation? I can't decide.

While we're here, I want to stick with that Catherine-and-James sex scene for a bit to get back to your praise for Cronenberg's "formal precision." I will agree with you that the initial through-the-window shot of the couple that bathes them in light from the cityscape behind them is absolutely gorgeous. Beyond that, however, the scene you describe isn't the scene I see. According to your description, the couple is apart and then comes together at the moment of climax. But that's only half true. Yes, at the start of the scene both James and Catherine get their own closeups. Yes, at the end they share the same shot. But in between Cronenberg uses several wide shots of the couple fucking that suggest they are connecting, and he goes to the two-shot closeup of them rather quickly. So where you see "visual and thematic complexity," I see a director who goes wide-shot, closeup, wide-shot, closeup, wide-shot, closeup, etc. Pretty standard. The best compliment I can give to that scene's design is that by using only about four shots—Catherine closeup, James closeup, Catherine-and-James wide shot and Catherine-and-James closeup—within a four-minute scene, Cronenberg keeps us at a scientific distance from which we are more likely to study these actions rather than get swept up in their passion. Other scenes have even fewer camera movements, like the one in which James inspects the body of a bruised Catherine after her tumble with Vaughan, which is little more than a zoom.

In your last response you suggested that I am unfairly dismissing the film for single-mindedly focusing on exactly what it's about—dismissing its central concept and asking what's left. Looking back, I admit I'm guilty as charged. I agree that most movies are as single-minded as Crash, but it seems to me that few movies are so flat and vacant, and that's where the problem lies. We agree there is little character development. In fact, as I said, there's hardly any character establishment. Spader and Unger strip out as much emotion as possible, even in the throes of passion. Hunter is almost equally robotic. Koteas provides a demonstration of postures more than a performance. And that leaves Arquette, whose smirk constitutes the majority of her portrayal. This is all by design, I realize. Fair enough. But studying the faces of these characters is like getting lost in the expressions of mannequins, and to this we add Cronenberg's minimalist camera movements. The result is that just about the only thing worth sinking our teeth into is the film's theme. But I didn't find my bites very savory, and by the midpoint I was full.

EH: That's admittedly an understandable reaction. Though I've been defending the film thus far, I realize that it's not without its problems and limitations. As much as I enjoy its rigidly framed imagery, and as stimulated as I am by its thematic depths, I recognize that it's intentionally working within a very narrow range. Cronenberg, there's no doubt, has made richer and better films, films where his own sensibility is undiluted and raw. As in his adaptation of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, seeing Cronenberg confront another equally strong artist head-on is fascinating, but doesn't necessarily lead to a fully satisfying film that can stand up with the director's masterpieces like Videodrome, Dead Ringers or Scanners.

This brings me to one of my problems with the film, essentially the same problem that Iain Sinclair highlights in his deeply ambivalent BFI book. Sinclair shifts, throughout his book, back and forth between the Ballard original and the Cronenberg film, and ultimately concludes that Cronenberg's Crash "depoliticizes Ballard's frenzied satire," making its "pornography safe and elegant." As much as I admire Cronenberg's chilly, abstract take on this material, I think that's a fair criticism. Earlier I brought up Ballard's quote about pornography being "a catalyst for social change," but we kind of got detoured into other subjects. I want to bring it back up because this political context, this sense of revolutionary provocation, is arguably what's missing from Cronenberg's Crash.

For Sinclair, Cronenberg's Crash is a more conservative work than its source novel, and not only because it sanitizes and downplays much of the homoerotic content, shifting the central relationship of the work from James/Vaughan to James/Catherine. (Cronenberg would also remove the homosexual content, with much more questionable results, from Burroughs' Naked Lunch.) More than this process of sanitization, though, the film is somewhat lessened by its lack of context. Some sense of Ballard's radical political screeds would likely go a long way towards making the work's "point" clearer to those, like you, who find it mostly pointless as is. In his annotations for The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard writes,

"A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash?"

These ideas, so vital to Ballard, are at best an undercurrent in Cronenberg's Crash. The interest in celebrities and media still percolates in the background, especially in the hauntingly staged scene where Vaughan re-enacts James Dean's death, or in Seagrave's cross-dressing Jayne Mansfield fantasies, but it's not the driving force of the film the way it is for Ballard in his novel. That's OK, of course, since Cronenberg's interests lie elsewhere. But it still creates a sense of absence at the film's core, which Cronenberg's more formalist engagement with this story can't quite fill.

JB: I think all of that folds into my previous complaints that the film, in and of itself, doesn't have much of anything to say. That passage you cite from The Atrocity Exhibition ponders how the "ceaseless flow" of stimuli might cause the barriers between non-homogenized elements to disintegrate, to alarming results. And that's interesting. But that's not Cronenberg's Crash. Instead of focusing on the "problem," Cronenberg only shows one result. The damage, if you will, has already been done. James and Catherine wander through this netherworld of automobile erotica, but there's no glimpse of what their life might have been otherwise, no sense that a world exists beyond this one. To go back to something I said earlier, James and Catherine are users searching for an erotic high from the very start, and all that changes is their drug of choice. My complaint isn't that Cronenberg eschews a conventional conflict-and-resolution arc—though that might give the film some needed lift. My complaint is that, as you said, this film is without context. It's like watching Planet of the Apes without Charlton Heston. If all we see are apes, the unusual is usual, and so what's the point?

This lack of context or sensationalism, this suggestion that these characters are essentially as normal or abnormal as the rest of us, works quite well along the lines of Ebert's analysis, because by failing to relate to these characters we can better study their behaviors. But it hurts Cronenberg's film at the same time because we have nothing to compare these actions against. Are we supposed to be horrified by what we see here? Why? These characters partake in activities that seem to improve their happiness and that endanger only them. Their actions are so extreme that we can take them seriously but not personally.

If this is a cautionary tale, it's one I don't need. There's very little in Crash that suggests this could be my destiny. (You might as well tell me to beware becoming the best golfer in the world and having multiple affairs with waitresses because my Swedish model wife might someday chase me out of our house with a golf club. It's all so alien to me.) I do find Crash interesting on some level, but it's a lot like watching expressionless fish swim by at an aquarium. I sometimes enjoy the view, but I never worry I'm going to end up in the tank or think that their experiences on the other side of the glass say much about the world I live in.

EH: I don't know. Is Cronenberg's film as thematically rich as Ballard's novel? No, definitely not. And I can understand if you don't see yourself in these characters; if I remember correctly, you had the same reservations about Trouble Every Day, albeit not as strongly in that case. I don't think Cronenberg is presenting a "cautionary tale" here—that's not his style. The more important question is whether it's really so important that we see ourselves in these characters. The film presents the characters' sexual perversions and their icy disconnection without telling us how to feel about them, without providing a definitive interpretation. Maybe that's OK; maybe we don't need to settle on one interpretation or feel like we're seeing our possible future selves on the screen.

Throughout this conversation, we've wrestled with a few possible readings for Cronenberg's film, none of them entirely satisfying and none of them necessarily exclusive. There is another possibility, of course, which is the one you've been advancing. Sometimes a film, or a work of art, doesn't need to engage so directly with the world, or tell us anything about ourselves. Sometimes a work of art is, like Cronenberg's Crash, just its own weird, self-contained object, creating its own rules and its own skewed way of looking at things. Where Ballard's Crash engages with the world, commenting on the omnipresence of media and the warping of sexuality by modern conditions, Cronenberg's Crash seems to exist in its own strange world, cut off from ordinary reality. It seems we agree on that much. We just disagree about whether that's a worthwhile approach.

My question for you, then, is whether you see any value in a piece of art that simply is, that doesn't necessarily relate directly back to reality or tell you anything about yourself. Way back in our conversation about Solaris, we talked about Stanislaw Lem's idea that "we don't want other worlds… we want mirrors." So is that it? Does our art always have to give us mirrors? Or can it—should it—sometimes provide us with a puzzling, enigmatic glimpse of something else altogether, some strange alternate world that exists at right angles to our own?

JB: It's a good topic, and it's neat that we've done enough of these conversations to see them beginning to overlap. (If it hasn't happened already, I feel like we're only a conversation or two away from me totally contradicting myself. But I digress.) Obviously when art acts as a mirror, at least to some degree, it's easier to identify with the material and thus be "moved" by it—cerebrally, emotionally, erotically, whatever. In my case that's what I'm looking for: to be moved. But I don't think I need a mirror to do that. Not at all.

I think Crash is in rare territory, because it offers an unusually low number of opportunities for connectivity or empathy or any other kind of vicarious emotion. I'm not just talking about something as specific as the characters and their interests. I'm talking about the general structure of the film. Crash is ambiguous, but it isn't a mystery. Crash has some confrontational scenes, but it isn't combative. Crash has scenes with life-or-death implications, and yet the film isn't suspenseful. (Perhaps the only suspenseful moment comes in the reenactment of the James Dean car crash when we wait to see if Vaughan and his driver survived the stunt.) And so when I say that the film doesn't move me, affect me, provoke me, my lack of identification with these characters and with the film's themes is only part of the reason.

That said, I believe that Cronenberg intends for Crash to be chilly, distant and even boring. He's certainly trying to avoid giving us mirrors. He doesn't want us to identify with these characters, I don't believe. He wants us to observe them and focus on their behavior. And so it is that Crash feels to me like some kind of cinematic experiment more than it feels like art. I am impressed that Cronenberg manages to make an explicit NC-17-rated film about sex and car crashes that is less stimulating than your average television commercial, but I'm not moved, affected or provoked. Not on the whole, at least. Crash might be inscrutable on some level, but I don't find it puzzling. It doesn't convince me that it contains hidden depths worth discovering.

EH: For me, on the other hand, Crash is an interesting artifact, not so much for what it has to say but for its own sake, and for its interesting resonances with other reference points, among them its own source material. The film, like the novel before it, comments on the romance of the car crash: the modern-day obsession with this most modern of deaths and the celebrity lives it has claimed. More than the novel, however, Cronenberg's Crash also exists as a part of this continuum, as another entry in the media and artistic fascination with the car crash and its implications. Cronenberg thus draws, like Ballard, not only on real-life stories—James Dean, Grace Kelly, Jayne Mansfield, JFK ("a special kind of car accident"), Albert Camus—but on the cinematic and cultural heritage of the car crash's representation.

In particular, Cronenberg and Ballard are heirs to Jean-Luc's Godard's late 60s fascination with the car crash. Brigette Bardot is referenced in both Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, inevitably recalling her appearance in Godard's Contempt, particularly the famed scene when the actress lounges in bed while her lover expresses his affection for her as tributes to her individual body parts, enumerating one by one the individual elements that together add up to his desire and love for her. It's sex as an equation, a concept that reverberates throughout Ballard's work. Cronenberg echoes this scene in the one where James and Catherine have slow, mechanical sex while Catherine enumerates her fantasies about James and Vaughan. Of course, Contempt ends with an ostentatiously phony car crash, a crash where the artifice is so obvious that it's a stylized symbol of a crash rather than the real thing. Similar scenes proliferate in Weekend as well, scenes where the audience's only possible reaction is a distanced, clinical observation of body postures and crushed metal sculptures.

Cronenberg is crafting his own modern take on Godard's 60s studies in alienation and disconnection, and also drawing on other New Wave-era studies in ennui—all those films, like Godard's A Married Woman or Alain Resnais' Last Year in Marienbad or Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura, where blank, disinterested middle class people struggle to find a way of jolting some life into their emotionally flat-lined existence. If Cronenberg's film sometimes seems to be something of a blank slate, a mystery with no solution, maybe that's exactly the troubling feeling the film seeks to engender.
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Jason Bellamy ruminates on cinema at The Cooler. Follow his updates on Twitter.

Ed Howard chronicles his film viewing at Only the Cinema.

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