The first three scenes in David Cronenberg’s Crash are sex scenes. The fourth is a car crash. That, too, turns out to be a form of sex, but it takes a minute for the audience to catch up. We’re introduced to our central couple in peril as they’re having polyamorous sex with other partners, then meet to discuss their extramarital adventures while having sex with each other. In each case, they are in direct contact with heavy machinery, which adds to their excitement. In the first scene, a woman (Deborah Unger) has sex with her flight instructor while her cheek is pressed against the wing of the small airplane she’s learning to pilot. Next, we see her film-producer husband (James Spader) having sex with an assistant camera operator while using the tools of their trade as a makeshift mattress. Then, the married couple convenes on their high-rise balcony, overlooking a dozen lanes of endless traffic as they have semi-public sex in shameless view of the passing cars below, getting off on the exposure of their bodies and their recounted affairs. In the fourth scene and first car crash (of many), the machinery becomes more actively involved in the physical contact. The film producer drives head-on into another car, instantly killing its driver. That victim’s widow (Holly Hunter) then sensually reveals her naked breast to our battered & concussed protagonist, revealing that his highway accident was, indeed, another form of sex. He just doesn’t know it yet.

While its small cult of automotive fetishists has fixated on a highly specific turn on, Crash is the ultimate “Anything can be sex!” movie. Car crashes? That’s public sex. Kissing a freshly inked tattoo? Oral sex. Lighting a friend’s cigarette? That’s making love. Photographing a concussed hospital patient? Okay, that’s more akin to pornography & masturbation, but you get the point. James Spader’s car-horny protagonist awakes from his first crash half-alive in a hospital bed, where he’s already been scouted & recruited by the sex cult’s egomaniacal leader (Elias Koteas). The cult’s biggest outreach program appears to be a regular outdoor meeting where they recreate famous car crashes—like the one that killed James Dean—for bleachers packed with horny voyeurs. Their leader doesn’t restrict his sexual releases to those grand displays, however. His gigantic, beat-up car is both a battering ram and “a bed on wheels,” which he swerves up and down the streets of Toronto in search of the ultimate car-crash turn-on: death. His loyal followers all fuck & mutually masturbate each other in various pansexual pairings one car crash after another, until the movie arbitrarily ends during one such indulgence, no actual end to their nihilistic highway hedonism in sight. Functionally, every scene is a sex scene, and yet it seems as if the only players who achieve orgasm are the ones who die in their respective crashes, crushed under heavy metal.

It’s typical for David Cronenberg movies to be about sex, but Crash differs from his usual mode by actually depicting it. Usually, Cronenberg depicts the penetration and joining of the human body’s various orifices a kind of monstrous real-time mutation, something to fear rather than enjoy. Although a lot of Crash‘s sexual touch is mediated through heavy machinery, Cronenberg also includes plenty of direct skin-on-skin contact, embracing the erotic instead of recoiling from it. While he preserves the protagonist’s name as James Ballard—in reference to the sci-fi novelist who wrote the source material—he shifts the character’s occupation to Torontonian film producer, even depicting him slumped in a director’s chair on set. In this way, Spader plays both the author and the auteur, intertwining Cronenberg’s personal sexual hang-ups with Ballard’s cerebral perversion of daily highway driving. In the film’s best moments, he gets totally lost in the abstract hedonism of cars’ physical presence, such as the wet thudding sounds of an automated car wash or the philosophical meaning behind traffic’s ebb & flow currents. It’s all slyly funny, chillingly violent, incredibly sexy, and seemingly personal to how both of its respective authors think about sex & modernity. So, yes, anything can be sex, including a deadly car crash. How terribly exciting is that?

-Brandon Ledet