Rear-Ended: Crash (David Cronenberg, 1997)

The time is upon us. Clayface: Celebrity Dirt #2 is out today. Pick it up at your local comic shop and the usual digital platforms, and get your pre-orders for #3 in before the final order cut-off on Monday, August 17.

As always, I'm celebrating Clayface release day by writing about classic body horror. I think you'll find this essay contains some of my most sophisticated work.

First of all: I know what you’re thinking. Another Cronenberg movie for body horror week? you’re saying, as you read this. And: Another trans person writing about Crash (1997) by David Cronenberg? you further inquire, as you scroll further down the newsletter, a process during which you evidently talk out loud to yourself a lot. 

Well: It’s not my fault, on either count. The theme of this month — assigned by myself, to myself, but which is nonetheless inviolable — is “movies Jude Doyle wasn’t allowed to watch during the 1990s,” and I wasn’t allowed to watch this one. At least, not all the way through.

Crash was responsible for one of my all-time most embarrassing moments on a date. This happened many years prior to my transition, which is important, because the idea here is that I was on a straight date with a straight man. The straight man in question had Crash on VHS, and he put it on for me, and we got as far as the bit where James Spader fucks Roxanna Arquette’s leg-scar before he chivalrously offered to turn it off “if I was feeling uncomfortable.” 

I wasn’t uncomfortable, I assured him, and then I did it: “I think it’s pretty sexy,” I said, aloud, causing the person I was trying to have sex with to look at me with a blank, uncomprehending horror. Then he reached over and quietly shut off the tape.