Based upon J.G. Ballard’s novel of the same name David Cronenberg’s film explores extreme human behaviour – the fascination with death and eroticisation of danger. After being involved in a head-on collision the homonymous lead character James Ballard (James Spader) and his wife Catherine Ballard (Deborah Karak Unger) find themselves increasingly involved with a cult of car crash fetishists, an underground sub-culture of omnisexual car-crash victims who use car crashes to fuel their sex lives. The movie essentially consists of a series of car crashes juxtaposed with sex scenes, providing a cautionary tale of a mechanised industrial society’s tendency to dull the human senses.

Some of J.G. Ballard’s (the author) favourite films were created by directors who work in tandem with great composers. For example, David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock, who Ballard has written about in a variety of contexts, had long standing relationships with composers Angelo Badalamenti and Bernard Herrmann respectively. Appropriately, the film adaptation of Crash was created by one of the most important director / composer teams of contemporary cinema: the Canadian duo of David Cronenberg and Howard Shore. J.G. Ballard has hailed Cronenberg’s Crash (made in 1996) as “the first film of the 21st century,” and in a review of one of the director’s more recent works, A History of Violence (2005) he wrote “all Cronenberg’s films make us edge back into our seats, gripped by the story unfolding on screen but aware that something unpleasant is going on in the seats around us.” The effect is compounded by the relationship between Cronenberg’s film in the context of a Howard Shore score.

Shore has taken the opportunity to experiment with the music. In the liner notes for the soundtrack he explains that “… 75% of the score was composed while 25% was mutated after the music was recorded.” His approach is to focus on the emotions (or lack thereof) being played out on screen. Using six electric guitars, three harps, three woodwinds and two percussionists to make up most of the score, the ensemble provides a metallic touching on industrial sound, presenting little in the way of recurring themes. It is clear Shore understands that space and silence are important in manipulating the viewer’s perception in a film such as this. He has generated soundscapes under which the on-screen characters play out their increasingly hazardous and destructive lives. Listened to on it’s own, without Cronenberg’s scenarios to guide the audience, Crash is a difficult listen, with electric guitars monotonously moving forward, repetitive yet arousing. The woodwinds are used sparingly and tend to appear in the more intimate moments. When the small string orchestra makes an appearance it appears the characters may actually care for on another.

There is a subtle use of electronic effects which is mirrored by lead character Ballard’s comments about technology in the film; the car is the technology we are most involved in, providing a marriage between human imagination and technology. These words could be used to describe Shore’s own take on his score for this film. The mixture of the electronic manipulation and acoustic instruments is carefully considered by the composer. Antique harps plucked over images of slow-moving heavy traffic provide a connection between old and new technology. The score mirrors the film in it’s linking of technology with the carnal. What is often referred to as a “love affair” with the automobile as resulted in a world-wide and growing addiction to a means of transportation which is unhealthy and destructive. Aside from the pollution and accident rate the addiction has also increased human isolation. Hidden in private shells people only interact when necessary, the interaction rarely becoming intimate until it is violent. Cronenberg, J.G. Ballard and Howard Shore put forward the idea that machines have changed our humanity and Crash says that our sexuality can mingle with the technology we hold so dear. Film director Bernardo Bertolucci apparently told Cronenberg that Crash is a religious masterpiece.

It is easy to tell as the film progresses and protagonist James Ballard unravels psychologically the music become stranger to represent this. In one scene where Ballard, his wife and fetishist Vaughan are entering a car-wash, Shore creates a sort of music concrete (best described as electronic music created from editing fragments of natural and industrial sounds). The car-wash scene begins with detailed recordings of the convertible car as it reconfigures it’s roof; a window closing electrically to hermetically seal the occupants in the watertight car, giving way to the mixture of thick wads of cloth and leather against metal and streaming water sounds. The pulsing machine noise builds to an intensity measured by the sexual activity inside the car. However, mostly throughout the film, music is rarely louder than the dialogue, engines, and traffic noise dominating the sonic landscape of Crash.

Shore says that Cronenberg has always given him considerable freedom in their collaborations. Having scored over a hundred films Shore claims that for him film and music are intertwined, that the film performs his music for him, in a way. The score successfully creates an atmosphere that allows the violence and sexuality to seep out, rather than represent it explicitly as would be the temptation for many composers. The various performers and soloists show discipline in how their respective parts are played, never conveying too much emotion into the score. It is unlike anything Shore has produced before or since. He has gone on to compose full-blown orchestral scores for the likes of Peter Jackson and his Lord of The Rings trilogy, but the budget would not allow for such extravagance in this film, leading to a much more interesting product. The understanding of dynamics and layering are clear here, the limited tonal and thematic range and a reluctance to key changes creates hypnotically repetitive melodic patterns – hypnotising the audience to the ritual significance of automobile trauma. This intelligent balance creates the perfect environment for action, magnifying the images and their meanings. The score juxtaposes the most ancient instruments (such as harp and flute) with the most contemporary (sampling and computer manipulation), reflecting J.G. Ballard’s comparison of basic human needs (sex) with contemporary culture (cars).

Download the soundtrack here.

As a bit of a diversion, here is a classic Squarepusher track Red-Hot Car cut together with a re-edit of some scenes from the film. Nothing like the soundtrack for the actual film, but fun all the same.

You can read and listen to another soundtrack review in the form of Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, with Brian Eno and David Bowie.

Crash – IMDB

Ballardian

Crash Soundtrack – Discogs