SOURCE: “Wound Envy: Touching Cronenberg’s Crash,” in Screen, Vol. 40, No. 2, Summer, 1999, pp. 193–202.

In the following essay, Smith discusses the auto accidents that occur in the film Crash in the context of Freud’s thought on male and female hysteria, trauma, and the connection between sex and death.

The frantic use of automobiles is not … for the purpose of going somewhere in particular; here it is not a priori a question of distances to cross, which creates inevitably new travel conditions. To go nowhere, even to ride around in a deserted quarter or on a crowded freeway, now seems natural for the voyeur-voyager in his car.

Paul Virilio¹

Screen is right to have begun a debate on David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), a film which seems to have caused so much controversy and yet, up to this point, has neither received nor generated sagacious consideration in film studies.² Perhaps...