Kids, read no farther. In fact, leave the room and play Nintendo. And put your dirty socks in the hamper.
If you think YOU'RE warped wait until you see the characters who populate this movie. You'll not only emerge from the experience reassured, you'll wind up feeling like a paragon of normality.
The story (if that's the word for it) has Spader getting into a head-on smasheroo with a car in which Hunter is a passenger. Her husband is thrown through the windshield and killed. Spader is hospitalized with various pieces of shiny steel holding his long bones in place. He finds the pain and discomfort and immobilization so arousing that when his wife (Unger) visits him it leads to masturbation. There's a lot of that sort of thing in this movie.
You'd never think Holly Hunter would suffer from such a paraphilia but she does. So does Spader's wife. Hunter and Spader run into each other, figuratively, in a garage full of wrecked cars and make furious love in one of the surrealistically twisted carcasses.
Before you know it, the Spader family and Hunter have fallen in with a group of -- well, there's no easy name for people of this quality. Koteas, the head of this underground cohort, is some sort of show-business stunt driver who, with a few associated, restages fatal car crashes of celebrities. Spader and Hunter are one of a dozen or two spectators who come to watch the staging of the 1955 crash between James Dean's Porsche and a Ford driven by somebody named Turnipseed. None of the men involved in the stunt wear helmets or seat belts and there are no roll bars or any of that wimpy stuff. Koteas' shiny Porsche Spider backs up, then speeds full blast into the front of the Ford. Kaboom. Sirens burping, the cops arrive and everyone scuttles for cover. It is never explained exactly how Koteas makes enough money to smash up beautifully restored Fords and Porsches. (His next big show will involve the decapitation of Jane Mansfield.) At Koteas' home they watch movies of test crashes with dummies instead of porn.
Spader's wife has seemed relatively reasonable up to now but she finds herself turned on by crashes, stunt men, and the rest. When she and Spader are making love (this time in bed, not in the back seat), she asks about Koteas. "Did you see his penis?" Spader: "He says it's all scarred from a motorcycle accident." Unger ecstatically: "Ewwwww." Anyway, to get on with it, one thing leads to another -- one thing being crashes and the other being flaming death amidst twisted metal. What with everyone being swept up in the craze and wanting still more of the excitement, the only sensible way to arouse and satisfy your wife is to smash into her car and kill her, right? Two Big Os for the price of one -- Orgasm through Obliteration. So Spader continually rams the convertible driven by his willing wife until it flips over on the side of the highway. But she's not dead after all. "I'm all right," she mumbles. "Maybe next time. Maybe next time," he whispers to her and then does her bloody and half conscious body in the sere grass.
So what's it all about, you ask? You might find that SOME people have no idea but I have a very firm answer. I don't know. At one point Spader asks Koteas why he's so interested in this stuff and Koteas replies portentously: "It's the reshaping of the human body by modern technology." Gosh.
It's an awesome statement but what does it mean? How is modern technology reshaping the human body? Does he mean that vehicular accidents tear it all to bits? Is he somehow thinking of the Thighmaster or simulacrum that imitate rowing or cross-country skiing or walking upstairs? Is Cronenberg really after ROCK HARD ABS? Here's what I think he's up to. It's been called self testing. It's seeing how far you can violate ordinary tastes and still get away with it, rather like a toddler who insists on wobbling along by himself until he either falls down or somebody picks him up. The real message of the movie is that there is no message. It's a highly ritualized violation of the viewer's expectations of taste. A Halloween prank.
What else could it be? It's certainly not a realistic portrayal of a bunch of perverts. Where could they possibly get insurance after the first dozen crashes? And the fear and sexual responses are antagonistic, the former mediated by the sympathetic nervous system and the latter by the parasympathetic. Somebody who jumps off a cliff might have a spontaneous ejaculation, a sympathetic reflex, but he's not going to have an erection.
I don't mean to pan the movie entirely. Unger and Hunter and Roseanna Arquette are sexy and attractive women. (There's a homosexual encounter involving Spader and Koteas, but it's not sufficiently prolonged or explicit to be anhedonic.) At any randomly chosen moment, the screen will show cars on the highway, cars crashing, people having sex in cars, or people talking about cars crashing and people having sex in cars. And it's neatly directed too. What shiny metal and what frangible flesh! Everything but the bodies seem gleaming and cold.
My only problem was that I didn't like it. Not my perversion.
If you think YOU'RE warped wait until you see the characters who populate this movie. You'll not only emerge from the experience reassured, you'll wind up feeling like a paragon of normality.
The story (if that's the word for it) has Spader getting into a head-on smasheroo with a car in which Hunter is a passenger. Her husband is thrown through the windshield and killed. Spader is hospitalized with various pieces of shiny steel holding his long bones in place. He finds the pain and discomfort and immobilization so arousing that when his wife (Unger) visits him it leads to masturbation. There's a lot of that sort of thing in this movie.
You'd never think Holly Hunter would suffer from such a paraphilia but she does. So does Spader's wife. Hunter and Spader run into each other, figuratively, in a garage full of wrecked cars and make furious love in one of the surrealistically twisted carcasses.
Before you know it, the Spader family and Hunter have fallen in with a group of -- well, there's no easy name for people of this quality. Koteas, the head of this underground cohort, is some sort of show-business stunt driver who, with a few associated, restages fatal car crashes of celebrities. Spader and Hunter are one of a dozen or two spectators who come to watch the staging of the 1955 crash between James Dean's Porsche and a Ford driven by somebody named Turnipseed. None of the men involved in the stunt wear helmets or seat belts and there are no roll bars or any of that wimpy stuff. Koteas' shiny Porsche Spider backs up, then speeds full blast into the front of the Ford. Kaboom. Sirens burping, the cops arrive and everyone scuttles for cover. It is never explained exactly how Koteas makes enough money to smash up beautifully restored Fords and Porsches. (His next big show will involve the decapitation of Jane Mansfield.) At Koteas' home they watch movies of test crashes with dummies instead of porn.
Spader's wife has seemed relatively reasonable up to now but she finds herself turned on by crashes, stunt men, and the rest. When she and Spader are making love (this time in bed, not in the back seat), she asks about Koteas. "Did you see his penis?" Spader: "He says it's all scarred from a motorcycle accident." Unger ecstatically: "Ewwwww." Anyway, to get on with it, one thing leads to another -- one thing being crashes and the other being flaming death amidst twisted metal. What with everyone being swept up in the craze and wanting still more of the excitement, the only sensible way to arouse and satisfy your wife is to smash into her car and kill her, right? Two Big Os for the price of one -- Orgasm through Obliteration. So Spader continually rams the convertible driven by his willing wife until it flips over on the side of the highway. But she's not dead after all. "I'm all right," she mumbles. "Maybe next time. Maybe next time," he whispers to her and then does her bloody and half conscious body in the sere grass.
So what's it all about, you ask? You might find that SOME people have no idea but I have a very firm answer. I don't know. At one point Spader asks Koteas why he's so interested in this stuff and Koteas replies portentously: "It's the reshaping of the human body by modern technology." Gosh.
It's an awesome statement but what does it mean? How is modern technology reshaping the human body? Does he mean that vehicular accidents tear it all to bits? Is he somehow thinking of the Thighmaster or simulacrum that imitate rowing or cross-country skiing or walking upstairs? Is Cronenberg really after ROCK HARD ABS? Here's what I think he's up to. It's been called self testing. It's seeing how far you can violate ordinary tastes and still get away with it, rather like a toddler who insists on wobbling along by himself until he either falls down or somebody picks him up. The real message of the movie is that there is no message. It's a highly ritualized violation of the viewer's expectations of taste. A Halloween prank.
What else could it be? It's certainly not a realistic portrayal of a bunch of perverts. Where could they possibly get insurance after the first dozen crashes? And the fear and sexual responses are antagonistic, the former mediated by the sympathetic nervous system and the latter by the parasympathetic. Somebody who jumps off a cliff might have a spontaneous ejaculation, a sympathetic reflex, but he's not going to have an erection.
I don't mean to pan the movie entirely. Unger and Hunter and Roseanna Arquette are sexy and attractive women. (There's a homosexual encounter involving Spader and Koteas, but it's not sufficiently prolonged or explicit to be anhedonic.) At any randomly chosen moment, the screen will show cars on the highway, cars crashing, people having sex in cars, or people talking about cars crashing and people having sex in cars. And it's neatly directed too. What shiny metal and what frangible flesh! Everything but the bodies seem gleaming and cold.
My only problem was that I didn't like it. Not my perversion.