XVII. JOUR MAL II: CRASH AESTHETICS

For your curiosity, quote-fetish, and general interest, here is the transcript for JOUR MAL Season I, Episode II

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

In Association with PHASMID PRESS

THE EMPTY SET PRESENTS: 

JOUR MAL: SERIES I-TRASH

Written, Produced, and Narrated: D.K. V-B

Additional vocals: Clementine Robertson

Graphic design: Scott McCLure

Special thanks to Rob Scher
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EPISODE TWO (IN SIX PARTS): CRASH AESTHETICS

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I. “A Most Perfect Act of My Whole Heart”; or, “Have You Ever Seen a Portal?”

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus declares that “from the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one’s passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt—that is the whole question” (Camus 22). And yet often, I think the answer is surely us all to the question: who amongst you has gone all the way? In, through, out, over? Uber, unter? Who's been there-Elsewherenevermore? 

Or is it more a statement? Like the one that issued short bright sparks that came out the mouth of the now obscure Atlanta rapper Tree on the track “All” when he said, in his croaking, pleading timbre: “for a second it was ours, it was ours, it was ours.” 

Surely the answer is us all to the question Frank asked Donnie in the empty theatre while Gretchen slept. 

Are mesmerism and fascination, separately and together, something like a portal? A beautiful thing Karen Pomeroy described to Donnie as a “cellar door”? Maybe Camus would agree, saying that “there is thus a lower key of feelings, inaccessible in the heart but partially disclosed by the acts they imply and the attitudes of mind they assume” (Camus 9). You ever ask yourself why it was what it was that first brought colour to Pleasantville? Too trite, maybe. Too obvious. Yeah, that's it. 

If I'm thinking of mesmerism and fascination, then I'm always-already thinking of Lugosi. Mina rendered dumb by the Countish coordination of hand and eye, both outstretched, the angles twixt the claw steep, the beam of light across the gaze - “come...here”, imperious-smooth as an inquisitor's velvet. Under the aegis of 30s standards and practices, it would seem that the vampire's hands are more mesmeric than his bite. Clara Bow, Helen Chandler, and Dwight Frye alike, all caught up in the timbre of night music. Mesmerized. Ask yourself: is your Will stronger than wolfsbane? Where does the magnetism sleep? What reverse cannon sucks you in? Palm to putrid palm, heart to ugly heart? Maybe it's not in the eye or the mouth, but all of it in hand. 

I'm curious as to whether hypnagogic states can reveal something of It, a shadow of a shadow? Can this mesmeric magnetism pull on those dark tides, both in the sense of ignorant impenetrability and/or mood-hue, right up to the toes of our heart, stood on the beach of our mind, to feel the temperature of soul-surf and perhaps fathom something of that See of inner sea? Hmmm. Let's ask Cronenberg.

I. Introduction: Crash and Fascination

There's all types of slime, oleaginousness, gum-thick gunk that can make you slick or make you sick. Sick to think that you've been caught in the amber of her eyes, like a musca trapped in sap. A sap of the Chandlerian order, an organ in a tub, kidney on ice, brain in a vat. Is mesmerism and the fascination that oozes out of its eyes, that gathers ankle-high then up to thighs, nothing but a trap? Existenz, Truman Show, 13th Floor, The Matrix, Possessor, Wandavision – how would you know? Hmmm. Well, but, maybe the Merovingian was right. Maybe as soon as It takes and takes you,  why “does not matter. All that matters is the feeling” 

Funny how the Merovingian is French. He sounds, in many ways, especially in the infamous chocolate cake scene in The Matrix Reloaded, a lot like La Mettrie's Le bonheur (1748), which says: In regard to felicity, right and wrong are quite indifferent . . . a person who gets greater satisfaction from doing wrong will be happier than anyone who gets less from doing good . . . there is a special kind of happiness which can be found in vice, and in crime itself.

The fascination of sewer-gleam, dark light paradoxes, bracts and axles bobbing askance in the shallow, the illusion of deep water, bilgewater, the illusion that we'll all float down here. You swallow and think dimly about how and maybe even dimmer why its Call has claws, its look's got hooks, why it knows you so well despite going to sleep inside you with, if at all, a rough and rabid word passing between you like the dregs of barsoap, hard, quick, and intense, twixt the twitching palms of Howard Hughes. 

It's fascinating how you feel strange, heady, woozy, swayed and sickly sweet, like molasses when you watch all these. Watch. Fascinated by the fact that even in those strange undulations of Cronen-Coleridge green witch-oil sea-skin, you find that there is also laughter booming  through you, in you. 

The work of David Cronenberg, and his son if Possessor is anything to go by, stays with me like that. The heavy swallow of a faceless fascination. It's in the shiny curve and wincing point of Beverley Mantle's instruments in Dead Ringers, the glistening membranousness of Max Renn's new flesh in Videodrome. Eric Packer's panting let's-find-out in Cosmopolis, Seth Brundle's revolting reversibility in The Fly, the gurgle-coo of Allegra Geller's squelching game pods in Existenz. Yes. Yes, it's in the pout of the scars in Crash.

Wait, wait. Last time I wouldn’t because I couldn't define sewerism. Why? Well because, as I hope to show here, the mesmeric, like the abject, trash, and the absurd “has meaning only insofar as it is not agreed to” (Camus 22). Why. Why always is there an onus of comprehensibility, of legibility, when it comes to these deep draw magnetisms? Perhaps scary, for many-most, not being able to define what it is that tugs on you from behind your naval. Makes it easier to accept those otherwise repressive and odious categories your un-tugged mind scoffs at readily. But I can't help but think of the illegibility of my blackness and the illegibility of the blackness in me, I think of Camus and Beckford, the former who asserts of Chestov's absurd god: “His greatness is his incoherence”, the latter who in Vathek states “there is nothing so pleasing as retiring to caverns” (Camus 22). 

This time, I won't because I can't describe the yen, the pull, the call of the mesmeric Thing. Albert, it feels, chides me for thinking I could, on any given day, good or bad: “I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art” (Camus 22). 

Lots of things are mesmeric. Questions. Like this one. Maybe questions are inherently mesmeric because they bind one to an answer, given, expected, or unexpected. So to the asker bound to a revelation, however large or small, of something of their imagination, their personhood, their point of view.

Latent within the term 'fascination' and its common connotations, which include immobilizing by the power of the gaze, charm, enchant, attract, enrapture, seize, capture, and/or dazzle is a power dynamic. From a psychoanalytical perspective, Sigmund Freud used the term first in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c) to refer to what can be described as the binding properties of love, the bondage of love. Bataille would agree, claiming: “This fascination is the dominant element in eroticism. (Bataille 13)

Well, it warrants the saying of it. I acknowledge that referring to Freud and Lacan in 2021 would put me in line to at least be painted as an unfashionable atavist, at most see me dragged outside behind the chemical sheds and shot. 

So perhaps at risk, or something far less melodramatic, a splinter as opposed to a dismemberment, I'll venture a supposition, that Inherent in this description is the suggestion that love is predicated on a fascination that engenders a paralysis of critical faculties, dependence, docile submission, and jejune credulity, much in the same way fascination forms both bridge and catalyst that creates and sustains similar affects between a hypnotist and the hypnotized. 

A little bit too strong, maybe? Not stronger than Bataille's introduction to Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, where George claims that: “Men are swayed by two simultaneous emotions: they are driven away by terror and drawn by an awed fascination. Taboo and transgression reflect these two contradictory urges. The taboo would forbid the transgression but the fascination compels it. Taboos and the divine are opposed to each other in one sense only, for the sacred aspect of the taboo is what draws men towards it and transfigures the original interdiction. The often inter-twined themes of mythology spring from these factors.” (Bataille 66)

Ethics and technique notwithstanding, many factions, forces, forums, fielties, and frameworks are interested in the intimated power of such states. A good example from a bad text, Sex Secrets of the Black Magicians Exposed, Ramsey Dukes states: “The technique used is called ‘post-hypnotic suggestion’. It is possible to hypnotize a person,and tell him that he will obey certain commands or perform some action spontaneously,after he has come round from the hypnotic trance. In this way it is possible to confront someone with a miracle and watch his reaction” (Dukes 81). 

Maybe he'd call this befoulment, this elevated loss, this addled clarity nothing but a dirty miracle. But miracles to some are not so banal. The drama critic of The New Yorker, John Lahr, for instance, puts it short and sharp as a bodkin through  a doublet: "Perversion became an act not of debasement but of discovery ... Evil itself becomes a miracle."

Beyond the parallel drawn between subjects in a relationship of extreme devotion, being in love, and hypnagogic states, Freud explicitly links these phenomena with sexual relationships in his 1918 article "The Taboo of Virginity" in which he discussed the notion of "sexual bondage," a state of subjugation, dependence, and willlessness experienced in a sexual relationship. Jacques Lacan would later use the term to explore the problem of the imaginary relationship between the self and the loved Other or the authority figure, whereby fascination is inextricable from the process of ego formation. 

Well, while it could be argued that an auteur can portray the physical dynamics, flows, and negotiations of power within both sexual and non sexual contexts using either acts or symbols of power, be it sociopolitical/economic affluence as it is in Sam Taylor-Johnson's 50 Shades of Grey (2015), or more directly through extreme impact violence as it is in Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me (2010), I feel that it is vastly more difficult to portray the more 'ephemeral' phenomena associated with and result from such acts, as well as their psycho-physical consequences and, particularly, the role of fascination in these encounters. It can be done, though. And done well, you ask me though you didn't. David Cronenberg's Crash (1996) is, to me, and example of how Western cinema has attempted to engage with and authentically express the myriad affective subtleties involved in the relationship between fascination, and the confluence of sex and power with varying degrees of success.

Let's cast broadly and ask well, what does paraphilia mean to folk? Where does it sit in the register and roll of days? Lurid, mysterious, enervating, abject, off-putting? Well, there's the Romance of it, of course. Only think of Walter Pater's "Conclusion" in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which Oscar Wilde knew rote and called his “golden book”: “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How can we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits.” 

Not dissimilarity in tone, the French Ultra-Humanite writes in The Order of Things: “After Sade, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of darkness, which we are now attempting to recover . . . in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought” (Foucault, 211). 

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's set it up properly. Let's describe the text. "Crash" is about the strange lure of the auto collision, provoking as it does the human fascination with death and the tendency to eroticize danger. Most motorists will slow down to stare at the scene of a collision; they may feel their pulses quickening and become aware of the fragility of their own bodies. The characters of "Crash" carry this awareness a step further, cherishing and nurturing it. For them, a car collision is a sexual turn-on, and a jolting life force they come to crave. After getting into a serious car accident, a TV director discovers an underground sub-culture of scarred, omnisexual car-crash victims who use car accidents and the raw sexual energy they produce to try to rejuvenate his sex life with his wife. Since a road accident left him with serious facial and bodily scarring, a former TV scientist has become obsessed by the marriage of motor-car technology with what he sees as the raw sexuality of car-crash victims. The scientist, along with a crash victim he has recently befriended, sets about performing a series of sexual acts in a variety of motor vehicles, either with other crash victims or with prostitutes whom they contort into the shape of trapped corpses. Ultimately, the scientist craves a suicidal union of blood, semen, and engine coolant, a union with which he becomes dangerously obsessed. 

In many ways, Crash can inadvertently be summarized by a single Bataille quote: Beings which reproduce themselves are distinct from one another, and those reproduced are likewise distinct from each other, just as they are distinct from their parents. Each being is distinct from all others. His birth, his death, the events of his life may have an interest for others, but he alone is directly concerned in them. He is born alone. He dies alone. Between one being and another, there is a gulf, a discontinuity. This gulf exists, for instance, between you, listening to me, and me, speaking to you. We are attempting to communicate, but no communication between us can abolish our fundamental difference. If you die, it is not my death. You and I are discontinuous beings. But I cannot refer to this gulf which separates us without feeling that this is not the whole truth of the matter. It is a deep gulf, and I do not see how it can be done away with. Nonetheless, we can experience its dizziness together. It can hypnotise us. This gulf is death in one sense, and death is vertiginous, death is hypnotising. (Bataille 12-13)

II. The Power and the State: A Sketch of Common Interpretations of Fascination

Non-psychoanalytical definitions of fascination typically refer to the same melange of concepts. Steven Connor (1998) describes the phenomena as a derivation of the Latin fascinare, “meaning to bewitch or enchant and, until the nineteenth century and even beyond, the word retained this strong association with the idea of the maleficent exercise of occult or supernatural force” (Connor 9). Similarly, Brigette Weingart states that the Greco-Roman etymology of fascination both explicitly and implicitly “locates the notion within the history of magic (or, depending upon your perspective, superstition)” (Weingart 74). 

Historically, the power of fascination, its transmission and suffering, has characteristically been assumed to be the province of sight/looking, predicated on the Medusa-cum-Persues archetype in Greco-Roman mythology. According to Tobin Siebers (1983), the head of Medusa fascinates because “its horrifying countenance spontaneously transforms its beholder to stone [and] yet the mask of Medusa also serves an apotropaic function, as do all masks, by protecting its wearer against fascination. The mask of Medusa once more presents a familiar paradox: the Gorgoneion both causes and cures the evil eye. Yet Perseus also carries and cures the disease of fascination” (Siebers 58). 

Louis Marin (1977) also notes this central paradox, between elevation and degeneration at the heart of fascination, at the heart of the symbol of Medusa's head: “we [always-already] have, then, two Medusas in one: a horrible monster as well as a striking beauty: the fascination of contraries mixed together” (Marin 140). Jean-Pierre Vernant (1985) further explicates the notion of fascination as a type of infection and/or psychologically viral power that entraps and ensnares, whose functioning also latently involves reciprocity, mutuality, and transference: “fascination means that man can no longer detach his gaze and turn his face away from this Power; it means that his eye is lost in the eye of this Power, which looks at him as he looks at it [as Nietzsche said of his abyss], and that he himself is thrust into the world over which this Power presides” (Vernant 221). 

Hmmm. Well, perhaps, it is in the eyes of Medusa, as it is in the panting of a paraphiliac, or in the sewer, is an entire universe, into which to elevate and expand, into which to dissolve and be consumed, a Sisyphysian task from which to escape. Maybe what Cronenberg shines a blacklight on is all really simple. As Camus states, “great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate. There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness, or of generosity. A universe in other words, a metaphysic and an attitude of mind. What is true of already specialized feelings will be even more so of emotions basically as indeterminate, simultaneously as vague and as “definite,” as remote and as “present” as those furnished us by beauty or aroused by absurdity” (Camus 8). What does it really matter, then, how absurd a paraphilia may sound to you if  “living is keeping the absurd alive”? (Camus 8).

Maybe to most it's not absurdity at all, but rather horror, as Bataille asserts: “In order to reach the limits of the ecstasy in which we lose ourselves in bliss we must always set an immediate boundary to it: horror. Not only can pain, my own or that of other people, carry me nearer to the moment when horror will seize hold of me and bring me to a state of bliss bordering on delirium, but there is no kind of repugnance whose affinity with desire I do not discern. Horror is sometimes confused with fascination, but if it cannot suppress and destroy the element of fascination it will reinforce it. Danger has a paralysing effect, but if it is a mild danger it can excite desire. We can only reach a state of ecstasy when conscious of death or annihilation, even if remotely.” (Bataille 267) Well, maybe it's all better unthought of, then, “just as though our whole humanity did not spring from the reaction of horror followed by fascination linked with sensitiveness and intelligence” (Bataille 266). And yet sill – “if I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living. It is not up to me to wonder if this is vulgar or revolting, elegant or deplorable” (Camus 40).

Either way, it seems to me that the understanding of fascination, as a force of extramission and intramission through an invisible albeit omnipresent substance or effluvium, saw a revival in the nineteenth century's preoccupation with the occult, spiritualism, hypnosis and mesmerism. Retrospectively, it may seem somewhat silly, certainly crude, this animal magnetism that Mesmer spoke of. Mesmer's treatise on Animal Magnetism printed in Geneva in 1779, contains the entirety of, well perhaps the unsurprisingly, and indeed fittingly fascinating history of the entire concept. By and large, the adjective “mesmeric” the substantive “mesmerism”, as well as the verb to “mesmerize” have scarce altered their meanings since they first became current. Some see all of this as “posterity's unique tribute to a unique man”. And who was this man, indeed? One Franz Anton Mesmer, born in the modest Austrian village of Iznang, Lake Constance, on May 23rd, 1734. Maybe fair to refer to him as a sort of economy Freud, a Jung with a penchant for garden soirees and the ear and pursestrings of the gentry, Mesmer's significance in Western medical history is debatable. His supporters, scant and recessed as they may be, would hold fast to the assertion that his was a dangerous path, dabbling about with brains, their control, their elevation or submission. These same arcane acolytes would most likely point you to the fact that the last European – and they'll most likely use this term, which sounds stolidly scientific, terrifically taxonomic – neuropath to be killed for witchcraft was burned at the stake in Leith, Scotland (I used to live there, incidentally, right at the heel of the Walk), only an even dozen years preceding his birth. Others, like the Abbe Fiard a century later, made the connection between Mesmer and the Mephistophalean abundantly clear, putting Mesmer and Cagliostro in the same Satanist breakout room. 

Having just turned my age, thirty-two, on May 27th 1766, Franz reached into his cosmology, but more like astronomy bag, withdrew his paper Disputatio de Planetarum Influxu (“Concerning the influence of the planets”), and read it aloud for the citizenry. He was awarded a faculty diploma for his efforts, and later refers to the document in question as the Mimoire or “The Dissertation”. I don't know if the me I was, wine-soaked and avoidant, which is a dishonest way of me saying depressed, when in the throws of final drafts and later corrections, is jealous and dreams of standing on a crate used to cart oranges set up in front of the David Hume Tower, yelling in mid-winter about Sunstones, Jewel Mountains, and Fire Falls. Anyway, he returned to “The Dissertation” only to tweak the title, as far as I know, adding “in corpus humanum” (“on the human body”). The rest, unchanged in the mein, formed the basis of his famous Twenty-Seven Propositions concerning the beautiful, mysterious, and powerful-sounding phenomena he referred to as “animal magnetism” 

I don't have the time and wealth of your indulgence to enumerate these postulates in their entirety. To say something,  however, of tenor, tone, and reception, well, we need only look to the introduction of Mesmerism by Mesmer, written by Gilbert Frankau for the 1779 edition. Concerning the good doctor's Propositions, Frankau would have us believe that “these Propositions, however fallacious, foreshadowed some of our present-day knowledge about the afferent and efferent elements in the nervous system seems to [him] a possibility. Indubitable, however, is the fact that they led up, through " somnambulism ", as it was originally called, to hypnotism, a word coined by the Scottish doctor James Braid in the eighteen-forties” (Frankau 9). Frankau goes on:: “This fact, I claim, entitles Mesmer to be regarded as the father of modern psychotherapy” (Frankau 9). 

This is to say nothing of the modern augurers, skaldars, vulva, baloyi, casters, crafters, cursers, and curers who Frankau believes owe Franz a debt of influence, specifically with regard to the methods and maneuvers of mediums. Pursuing this line, I'd add psycho-sexually inclined thinkers and practitioners, whatever stripe, form, credo, or character, to this admixture. 

Now, whether you sacrifice yourself to the experience limite like Foucault, or like Mrs Eddy, enrol a guard of virgins to protect you from the malign influence of animal magnetism, or be like Quinby, a dedicated student to it, I reckon it's more interesting to consider the people Franz knew. Casually, and with a detectable dose of nascent pride, Frankau notes that “admittedly the young Mozart was under an obligation to Mesmer—a staunch friend of his father Leopold, an acquaintance of Gliick and Hadyn, even personal correspondent of Benjamin Franklin'' (Frankau 18). 

With these connections, what did ol' Franz get up to? Well, there was the lavishly decorated clinic, to begin with. Perhaps it was the furniture, the gorgeous curtains, or fine carpets that made for the absolutely perfect backdrop from those early experimental treatments that saw him put forward models of group therapy and mass hypnotism. Frakau says he was “armed with a wand” which he used to oversee and officiate, wearing “anti-magnetic” clothing, while refrains of music played, the minor mass thronged around a baquet – “a large vat filled with water and magnetic material such as iron filings'' (Frankau 15). It gets weirder, for from this magna-vat, “projected metal bars, which the patients, who also held one another's hands as at table-turning seances, grasped during treatment” (Frankau 15). Based on accounts of patients like Margaret Goldsmith, it sounds like something between the respective practices of Dr. Moreau and Dr. Parnassus: “the baquet [...] had been used by Mesmer, along with 'magnetized' trees, ponds, etc since 1775” with most people not in the mesmeric field of mystery chalking up the bulky apparatuses and the strange attire and activities within them as some kind of battery, a source of electrical energy. The following year in 1776, Mesmer abandons the use of magnets and electricity in his burgeoning psycho-therapeutic praxis, hereby effecting an auto-anotonymic apostasy against Proposition Seventeen of his own Dissertation's dicta which, describing this baquet as a type of storage tank, decreed: “This magnetic property may be stored up, concentrated and transported” (Frankau 15). Ask yourself as we go along: What is the magnetism Mesmer describes, really? The draw and pull of closer tides? Its province, puissance, provenance, principality, power, pallid or pouting that pushes on the pressure of the pump, upward into a gummy smile, that pulls on the pulp in your teeth, the mouth in your mind to gasp, like waking up to the dim azure wash, winter air, through decanter-cut facets of a blue sun. 

We could add Caligari to the mix, in view of Franz's extensive use of mirrors, to accompany his music, which, in Proposition Fifteen, he described as “intensifying and reflecting” animal magnetism “just like light” (Frankau 16), and later in Proposition Sixteen how animal magnetism “is communicated, propagated and intensified by sound” (Frankau 16). 

The strangeness followed him to his near homophonic end. Mesmer died at Meersburg, on the north shore of that lake he'd swam in as a youth. We know from his youthful friend Justinus Kerner, who wrote in a book published in Maine in 1856, that Mesmer died smiling. Frankau calls this “a strange thing” but stranger still “is the tale of the magnetisable canary which would fly from its cage, always open, and perch on his head to sing him awake every morning; perch on the sugar basin while he ate his breakfast and anticipate his need by pecking extra lumps into his coffee cup. For the end of that tale, as Kerner relates it: '' Next morning Mesmer lay as though he were still alive, but never again did the canary bird fly on to his head to wake him. It ate no more and sang no more and soon it was found dead in its cage” (Frankau 21). The man, the magnetism, the mesmeric crisis and the therapeutic value of them all scarce countenanced, in their time and in times that came after, the value of the mesmeric 'trance'. Well, maybe not to nobody. Perhaps even only to a character named Lavater, whose “conversion to animal magnetism was largely due to experiments of a hypnotic nature carried out on his own wife” (Frankau 22).

By the 1800s this mesmeric crisis was a strange, perhaps even fascinating footnote in the annals of the century, overshadowed by the light of unnumbered luminaries, polymaths many of whom he himself knew and struck up with. What was left of the magnetism and the mesmerism was something described, perhaps, as “a form of sleep-walking”, whereas “the trance retained its name Somnambulism until the publication of Braid's Neurhypnology or the "Rationale of Nervous Sleep considered in relation with Animal Magnetism re-christened it Hypnotism shortly after 1843” (Gregory 2). Another character, this Baird, who Gregory, writing in his 1877 Mesmerism and its Phenomena, said “suffered from various delusions, notably that he could bring about both psychological and physiological changes in a tranced patient by stroking certain parts of the skull. (This process was called phreno-magnetism.) But with his discovery that " hypnosis " could be induced by the simplest means of fixing the patient's attention it became obvious, even to the most academically minded medico, that, whatever its cause, the mesmeric trance could not be humbug. The hypnotic condition was too well established a fact” (Gregory 3). 

This is why, comparative eons later, characters like Connor note that “the power of the mesmerist to fascinate or entrance his subjects was most commonly explained as the effect of magnetic or electrical forces originating in the body of the mesmeriser and passing across to his subjects'' (Connor 11). Here already is the latent suggestion that the action(s) of the power of fascination, while seeming mono-directional, are in fact governed by an exchange between reciprocally fascinated subject entities. A giving over and a taking up, not unlike Goethe's Faust in the “Martha's Garden” scene who declares: ... to give oneself completely and to feel an ecstasy which must be everlasting! Everlasting—for the end would be despair. No—no end! no end! 

Alongside this nineteenth century understanding of fascination as a force that produces pseudo-supernatural alterations in the psyche that simultaneously liberate and enslave, is a decidedly aesthetic understanding of fascination. According to Hans Ulrich Seeber (1891), the value of fascination, its “raison d' etre, [is to] be justified by the degree of intense admiration it can, by means of its beauty, provoke, both in the artist and the recipient. But intense admiration means simply that the work of art must be an object that fascinates, that lives from the radiant power of its suggestion, its ambiguous surface” (Seeber 322: emphasis mine). 

Similarly, specifically psycho-sexual fascination can have numerous modalities and flows, even if taken from a purely aesthetic standpoint; the body, its curves, sensuous movements and liniments, but also its scars, wounds, scents, and maladies. However, the psycho-sexual fascination of certain parahpilias takes the purely aesthetic dimension of fascination further into (oftentimes radical) haptic zones whereby fascination becomes sensationalized not merely aestheticiszed. Broadly speaking, in sadomasochistic interactions, for example, fascination is both seen and felt. It is brought into the body, its climactic capacities, and interior into the ephemeral zones of the subconscious, the innenwelt, in which the complexes of desire, passion, fantasy, and ethical negotiations of trust and consent in dominance and submissiveness are engaged. Here, there is a distinct difference between interest/liking and fascination. The former carries undertones of fleetingness, alterability, even its antonym boredom. The latter carries with it connotations of witchcraft and, at its most radical, obsession, fanaticism, and madness: “[w]hereas 'liking' designates a relatively mild feeling in the aesthetic sphere, 'fascination', like hypnosis, affects the whole personality perhaps to the point of unbalance” (Seebers 332). Due to this power to destabilize, inherent to fascination is always-already the suggestion that it also “contains an admixture of something potentially disturbing and powerful which makes it impossible for the beholder to retain an aloof, aesthetic stance” (Seebers 329). I'm thinking of Blanchet in Crystal Skull, at the end, in the Mayan ruins, yelling to the refleshed form of an intergalactic mummy: “I WANT TO KNOW, I'M READY!”... well. In my experience, often when people say they want to know, they mean they want to be told. 

The feeling of being drawn forth in an irresistible manner as well as the intimated dangers of fascination may suggest a 'negativity' in/of fascination. However, it is also this very 'negativity' that is an essential part of the power and appeal of fascination itself. Importantly for sadomasochism is the fact that the state of being fascinated “does not necessarily have to be experienced as an oppressive loss of self-determination, but can take the form of a readiness to be invaded and/or borne away by exterior forces'' (Weingart 97). The fascinating experience does not, however, occur in isolation. Implied in this definition is the notion of a transmission of emotions, a connective process between a subject and an exterior agency who, by being fascinating, cannot be fully appropriated (Weingart 74).

III. Verliebte Hörigkeit: Freud and Fascination 

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freudian fascination takes as a part of its basic definition the etymological intimations of immobility, charm, dazzle, and enchantment. Freud uses the term in relation to lovers' paralysis of critical faculties, as well as the phenomena of (co)dependence, docility, submission, and psycho-emotional impressionability that occur when in love. Freud's earliest considerations of the relationship between fascination, love, and hypnagogic states appear as early as 1890 in his essay “Psychical, or Mental, Treatment”. Referring to the docility, obedience, and credulity of the hypnotized individual, Freud argued that a situation producing this type of “subjection on the part of one person towards another has only one parallel, though a complete one – namely in certain love-relationships where there is extreme devotion. A combination of exclusive attachment and credulous obedience is in general among the characteristics of love” (Freud 296). Freud returns to this reading in 1918 in his essay “The Taboo of Virginity” in which he discusses the the psychoanalytical aspects of love and sexual bondage. Here, “sexual bondage” refers to “the phenomenon of a person's acquiring an unusually high degree of dependence and lack of self-reliance in relation to another person with whom he [she] has a sexual relationship”, going on to posit that “this bondage can on occasion extend very far, as far as the loss of all independent will and as far as causing a person to suffer the greatest sacrifices of his [her[ own interests” (Freud 1905, 193). 

What is most interesting to note here is how the principal functioning of fascination as an exchange is seemingly absent from Freud's thinking on the subject. It is an odd omission considering that inherent to the idea of binding one thing to another is the concept of co-operation which in turn is inherent to Freud's conceptualization of fascination as a state of amorous "bondage" (verliebte Hörigkeit). In spite of this shortcoming, Freud's psychoanalytic understanding of fascination as a specifically psycho-sexual force is of greatest use here and will be combined with other psychoanalytic concepts – fascination as a type of transference, jouissance, and death-drive toward and beyond limit-experiences as demarcated by the pleasure principle – and will subsequently be brought to bear in my reading of Crash. 

IV. Fascination, Pleasure, Excess, and Death: Lacan and Fascination 

The most interesting and pertinent aspect of Freud and Lacan's respective discussions of fascination is fascination's relation to sadomasochism, the death-drive, and jouissance. While Freud identifies fascination, or fascinated states, with the death-drive and indeed amorousness and its devotions– that is as always-already tending toward termination and repetition – he does not explicitly associate the death-drive with sexual drives. In 1964, Freud and Lacan diverge on the status of the death-drive, the latter viewing the phenomena as an irreducible aspect of every drive. In Seminar 11 (1964), Lacan states that “the distinction between the life drive and the death drive is true in as much as it manifests two aspects of the Drive '' (Lacan 257). He underscores this position in the Ecrits (1977), stating that “every drive is virtually a death drive” for three reasons, two of which are relevant to my discussion of psycho-sexual fascination (Lacan 848). First, every drive is a death-drive because every drive pursues its own extinction. Second, every drive is an attempt to go beyond the ideological prohibitions against the subject's pursuit of pleasure – known in psychoanalysis as the pleasure principle. In so doing, the subject seeks to transgress the stricture of the pleasure principle to a psycho-sexual zone of excess known as jouissance, where pleasure/enjoyment is experienced as pain/suffering. 

What is most interesting to note here is that psycho-sexual fascination and the death-drive both operate through the action of a paradoxical undifferentiating ambivalence. While the essential exchange that occurs between fascinator and fascinated – for example between a Dominant and a submissive in the context of a BDSM relationship – may suggest a mono-directional flow of power from F to f (D to s), both are ultimately fascinated by each other. In this sense, the distinction between dominated and Dominator, as with the distinction between life and death drives, is ultimately symbolic, in the last instance. Denuded of their 'symbols of office', both the fascination and desire of the Dominant and submissive tend toward the same terminus. While one might assume from observing the symbolic behaviour of Master and slave practised in BDSM that it is only the submissive who somehow seeks transcendence from her/himself jointly through the radical acquiescence of submission and the violence and degradation of domination which when brought together in play results in a symbolic death, the Dominant is equally engaged in seeking symbolic death and transcendence in, through, and because of the submissive. Therefore, the submissive “makes himself the instrument of the Other's jouissance” just as much, albeit through different procedures, as the Dominant (Lacan 320). Here, both Dominant and submissive, Sadist and masochist, are fascinated by the same thing in their attempt to transgress the pleasure principle to its limit; both are ultimately trying to go “as far as [they] can along the path of jouissance” through, against, and because of one another (Lacan E, 323). As Pansy Duncan rightly notes, fascination's supra-subjective status ultimately suggests that “what fascinates [...] is always fascination itself” (Duncan 89). 

From a psychoanalytical standpoint, Sadism and masochism are both modalities of the same fascinating Drive underpinning all human sexuality, albeit crystallized in psycho-sexual relationships involving power play up to and including death. BDSM practices that are considered ‘extreme’ or ‘dangerous’ are thus said to provoke the greatest risks of psychic and physical harm. As Downing (2007) suggests, the very notion of ‘edgeplay’ suggests that such practices function as being close to a ‘limit’, which simultaneously necessitates both their judicial and clinical prohibition and transgressive pursuit. In the case of extreme psycho-sexual fascinations which involve power play that potentiates death as an essential part of their eroticism, Downing suggests that the reason why psycho-sexual extremes of this and lesser natures still hold fascination – as well as controversy – over death-driven sexuality in this our contemporary milieu of so-called sexual liberalism is because “it is more specifically that we have a problem with the idea of validating the right to consent to a sexually pleasurable death” (Downing 10).

The relationship between psycho-sexual fascination and sadomasochism starts with Freud's interpolation of Kraftt Ebing's's 1893 coinage. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud's usage of the term similarly posited an inherent link between Sadism and masochism. Unlike Freud, however, who posited that sadism is primary, Lacan argued masochism is and that sadism is derived therefrom. In Seminar 11, Lacan states that “sadism is merely the disavowal of masochism” (Lacan 186). Lacan gives special privilege to masochism among the drives, regarding it as the 'limit-experience' in the subject's attempt to transgress the pleasure principle through a preferred experience of eroticized, and therefore psycho-sexually fascinating, pain. (Lacan 778).  Therefore, the limit-experience being sought by the psycho-sexually fascinated in Crash expresses a specific degree of relative distance to this limit. In a movie like, say Secretary, the limit being sought to be overcome is the experience of eroticized pain as purely pathological. In Crash, the limit being sought is far more extreme, namely an orgasmic death-by-automobile, where the limit between life and death is not merely grazed but absolutely obliterated. 

Lacan's views on the nature of sexual relationships also helps elucidate an interesting aspect of psycho-sexual fascination; namely, successful, that is sustained,  psycho-sexual fascination is predicated on ignorance. According to Lacan, the sexual drives are essentially partial in that they are not directed toward a complete or whole person but towards what he refers to as part objects. In this sense, the psycho-sexual relationship is not between two subjects but rather two partial objects, whose partiality is not only reciprocal but also reciprocally fascinating (Lacan S20, 58). In order for fascination to maintain itself as long as possible for both Fascinator and fascinated, each cannot fully know the other. The intimations of the mutual unknown precisely are, imprecisely, what compel the shared fascination produced and experienced between the two. Similarly in a sadomasochistic arrangement, the fascination of the sub in the Dom is partially based on the sub's ignorance of the depth of what we could call the Dom's Will or drive to death. It is this undisclosed potential, with all its connotations of danger, that excites the sub's fascination. Equally, the depths of the sub's submissiveness, that is, the sub's potential will to submit to death must also remain mysterious to the Dom in order to excite Her/His fascination in attempting to test this limit of death, both in Her/Himself and in/through the sub. While this position may seem extreme, Katherine Franke (2001) points out that psycho-sexual fascination is, in many ways and to many different degrees, a necessarily dangerous idea for what can oftentimes be a necessarily dangerous feeling: 

Desire is not subject to cleaning up, to being purged of its nasty, messy, perilous dimensions, full of contradictions and the complexities of simultaneous longing and denial. It is precisely the proximity to danger, the lure of prohibition, the seamy side of shame that creates the heat that draws us toward our desires, and that makes desire and pleasure, not a contradiction of or haven from danger, but rather a close relation. These aspects of desire have been marginalized, if not vanquished, from feminist legal theorizing about women's sexuality. (Franke 207). 

The truly extreme (and I argue beautiful) aspect of the above proposition is, in fact, located in the idea of the trust required to accept the ignorance and inherent potential danger of psycho-sexual fascination– up to and including death – as an essential part of the rapprochement of sadomasochistic relationships/power-play that should not be limned by either Dom or sub. In essence, therefore, while the Dom and sub are mutually undifferentiated by the supra-subjective force of fascination, they are also mutually undifferentiated by the necessity of ignorance in its exploration and pursuit.    

V. “An Intensity Impossible In Any Other Form”: On the Psycho-Sexual Fascination of Symphorophilia in Crash 

How do you mesmerize someone? Well, sort of how Bataille talks about this gulf, this affective in-between, this brimful liminality, fascination, horror, a l'ecart one might call sublime. But I don't have to speculate because the man whose name gives us the word gives a pretty clear account of just how to do it. One of his disciples, William Gregory, gives us a replete account, or methods of operating,  in his 1877 “Animal Magnetism or Mesmerism and its Phenomena”:

You may now, having found a person susceptible to a certain extent, proceed to try the effect of passes, made slowly with both your hands, downwards from, the crown of the patient's head, over the face, to the pit of the stomach, or even down to the feet, always avoiding contact, but keeping as near as possible without contact. Or you may make the passes laterally, and so downwards over the arms. It is necessary to act with a cool, collected mind, and a firm will, while the patient is perfectly passive and undisturbed by noise or otherwise. He ought to look steadily at the eyes of the operator, who, in his turn, ought to gaze firmly on his subject. The passes should be continued, patiently, for some time, and will generally excite the sensations above mentioned, warmth, coolness, pricking, tingling, creeping of the skin, or numbness, according to the individual operated on. When these sensations are very marked, the subject will, in all probability, turn out a good one. It is probable that, with patience and perseverance, a vigorous, healthy operator, would finally succeed in affecting all persons; but in some cases, which have afterwards become very susceptible, the subjects have been only affected with great difficulty, and only after much perseverance, or even have not been at all affected on the first trial, nay, even for many successive trials. The operator must not be discouraged. If he perseveres, the chances of success are much increased, while he will often meet with cases in which a few minutes suffice to produce strong effects. Another, and in some cases a more successful method, is to sit down, close before the patient, to take hold of his thumbs in your thumbs and fingers, and, gently pressing them, to gaze fixedly in his eyes, concentrating your mind upon him, while he does the same. This is, at least in the beginning, less fatiguing than making the unaccustomed motions of passes, although, with a little practice, it is easy to make several hundreds of passes uninterruptedly. I cannot give decided preference to either method. Both will occasionally fail, and both are often successful. They may be combined, that is, alternated, and often with avantage. (Bataille 1-2)

In Crash, Croneneberg, through Vaughan and symphorophilia, takes these principles, ideas, interactions, and contacts to their extreme limits. Collision, collapse, admixture-the chaos and brightness and terror and speed inherent to the notion of crashing. 

Clinical literature has, for large swathes of its own history, parsed paraphilia as abjectly pathological. The madnesses of civilization, the undisciplined and unpunished. Perhaps you, yes you, like those alongside which like you, fatigued, tired with all these, cry out for restful death like Shakespeare's speaker in Sonnet 66, think that being mesmerized by this or that, let alone getting off to this or that is absurd, revolting, terrifying, illogical. But as Camus says: “All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street-corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door. So it is with absurdity. The absurd world more than others derives its nobility from that abject birth” (Camus). Perhaps the absurd things in you are your greatest achievements. Perhaps the greatest truths you've ever known lay damp and corroding in the bilge in you. Absurd and and use-less, as Eco says in the Island of the Day Before: “if there was beauty somewhere, its purpose was to remain purposeless” (Eco, 105). Uh oh. Dick's trash stratum has re-entered the chat* And perhaps with it, the resigned dream of Camus, that “The body, affection, creation, action, human nobility will then resume their places in this mad world. At last man will again find there the wine of the absurd and the bread of indifference on which he feeds his greatness” (Camus n.p). 

Well, the connection between Crash and fascination immediately registers in critical responses to the film; from Mark Browning's (2007) quote “mesermiz[ed] fascination,” to Janet Maslin's (1997) quote “grim fascination,” to Robin Dougherty's (1997) account of the film as [quote] “pleasantly hypnotic” (Browning 145; Maslin 1997; Dougherty 1997; Duncan 81). Diegetically, however, specifically psycho-sexual fascination has an overachingly binding modality. The principal characters of Crash could be all described as symphorophiliacs. Symphorophilia, as a model of excess and irrationality that privileges death drives over life drives, is an essential aspect of the manner in which its fascination functions. In Crash, “when such a deliberate breach of taboos compels, in the reader or observer, fascination rather than moral indignation — captivating and forcing him into the role of a voyeur— the reason for this must lie in the inevitability of the two basic drives appealed to and activated in this process. These are Eros and Thanatos, the sex-drive and aggression” (Seeber 333). While James (James Spader) can be seen as submissive to Vaughan's (Elias Koteas) intense psycho-sexually symphorophiliac fascination, James' “masochism in this context is not an expression of passivity, but an active desire for the dissolution of the subject. in order to fulfil [his] desire [he] must accept the presence of death” (Pitagora 64). It is clear, to me, at least, that Crash is less about the idiosyncratically titillating exploration of severe paraphilia, symphorophilia in this case, but more so a deft presentation of the mesmeric power of fascination that yes, can orbit such pits, graves, hollows and holes. 

I contend that any discussion of the relationship between psycho-sexual fascination and death in the film need first/also address the relationship between psycho-sexual fascination and power. The film's depiction of an initial distribution of what we can call fascinating power or the power to/of fascination is, well, fascinating. Catherine Ballard (Deborah Kara Unger) is initially presented as the more sexually explorative, sexually interesting, and indeed more sexually fascinating than her husband James. While sex and a seemingly radical openness about promiscuity and fantasy are initially portrayed as being essential aspects of their marriage, initially, the flow of fascinating power is largely mono-directional: C>J. 

The imp of the perverse that lurks in her ostensibly sedate albeit restless mind seems to lead her, step by step, toward self-injury and self-destruction. It is as if the concatenation of steps were as inexorable as their playful psychological challenge: “Do not think of a pink elephant in a blue desert. The prohibition creates a vacuum into which our freedom of will seems to be sucked by a strong natural law. Only an equal counterattraction can save us from what Milton called "the instinct of waywardness." (Shattuck 71).

She has pseudo-surreal encounters in airplane hangers while he has rather cliched on-set trysts. However, despite Cronenberg framing their relationship as deeply sexual, it is not depicted initially as sexually exciting. Passion between the two has seemed to ossify to repetition, routine, and disappointment as noted when Catherine asks if the P.A James has sex with in the beginning of the film reached climax. James answers no to which she responds, “maybe the next one” (Cronenberg 1996). Her attitude is laconic, supine, and only mildly enthused at the idea of the affair itself as opposed to its outcome (or lack thereof). In many ways, both James and Catherine are perfect subjects for Vaughan's mesmerizing fascination because as Gregory notes, “Two things are desirable. First, a passive and willing state of mind in the patient, although faith in mesmerism is not at all indispensable; but a bona fide passivity, or willingness to be acted on. This, however, signifies little in susceptible cases. Secondly, intense concentration on the part of the operator. (Gregory) Vaughan succeeds in fascinating, mesmerizing not just one but both of them because, in many ways, both are desirous of being acted upon by a passion as bright and scarred and searching as Vaughan's.  

It would seem that they would be adherents of Beckford who declared “I am not over-fond of resisting temptation”; where, despite the seeming coolness, there is none of that most arduous fear that whispers: “if she knew me as I really am she would despise me, and certainly not aid or abet my evil designs. To veil their vices from the sight of the good is the only resource of those who are not blind and know themselves to be vicious”, that fear that that deceptively simple line by Hopkins describes: “my heart in hiding stirred for a bird” (Camus 22, Hopkins). 

This milieu of purgatorial psycho-sexual fascination is literally and figuratively exploded in the following scene in which James is involved in a car accident with Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter). The crash itself is extremely violent, sending Remington's husband through the windshields of both vehicles, resulting in head and spine trauma and, ultimately, death. In the aftermath of shattered glass, crumbled steel, and engine smoke, Helen exposes her left breast to James who gazes at her in shock, absolutely spellbound, fascinated. Here, Cronenberg immediately signposts the film's central focus: the motor vehicle as a conduit/crucible that admixes fascination, sex, and death when damaged and/or destroyed. The fascination over this extreme point's ability to fuse ostensibly antithetical ideas/states/desires represents the same type of soma-aesthetic edgework Foucault described as the limit-experience: a state of being as close to death as possible while still alive. 

This concatenation of sex, injury, death, and, more importantly, a fascination with their admixture is expressed by Remington when speaking to James in the recovery ward of the hospital: “[a]fter being bombarded with road safety propaganda, it's a relief to have found myself in an actual accident” (Cronenberg 1996). The implications of this view are seemingly obvious. Remington's statement latently suggests that the crash is a type of physical valve for her ever incessant, ever pressing, ever present psycho-sexual fascinations orbiting the crash and its resultant psycho-sexual affects. The exothermic and highly volatile nature of automobile crashes can therefore be construed as simultaneously pro- and anti-fascination. It is the fascination into the nature of motor vehicle crashes that compels the symphorophile to eventually seek to reify this fascination in and through the body. In so doing, the symphorophile risks death and, therefore, the end of any and all fascination in toto. In this way, the edgework of fascination is constantly driving at the inevitability that will send the fascinated over the edge, from seeing the limit, to grazing the limit through its symbols, to transgressing the limit entirely. It is this danger of being driven-to-death that precisely fascinates the symphorophile. I propose that the underlying circuitousness here reveals an essentially tautological substructure to psycho-sexual fascination and the reification of its contents in experience. The fascinated individual seeks to experience the full implications of her fascination in spite of and, indeed because of all the extremes – up to and including death – it intimates. Experiencing one's fascination in this instance simultaneously means not only to also forfeit it, but all experience. 

It is not only the crash itself that is construed as a fascinating psycho-sexual phenomena in the film. The embodied effects of, what we can call in this context, successful crashes is also depicted as extremely psycho-sexually fascinating for its characters. For example, after speaking with Helen, James encounters what appears to be a hospital photographer (later revealed to be Vaughan). He is carrying photographs of what appear to be portraits of parts of Helen's body that show her freshly stitched and severe injuries. What is interesting to note in Koteas' performance as Vaughan is how he assiduously handles this material, how he treats the portraits like erotica, as if to him, the scarred body, by its very scarring and status as scarred, damaged, forcibly opened or torn, is transmuted into one of fascination. Vaughan (and later his other comrades of the Project) is shown to be completely psycho-sexually fascinated both by the crash as an experience and the post-crash body as an object of fascination that can only be produced by the crash. This overt eroticization of the crash occurs throughout the film. For example, when Vaughan, Catherine, and James come upon a pile up on a busy highway in the film's third act, Vaughan positions Catherine in and amongst the carnage and damage and video records her as if he is directing a masterpiece of erotic art. The latently deeply sexual nature of this scene of death is underscored by Vaughan's directions to Catherine, erotically whispering, “slow down, not so fast” (Cronenberg 1996). James watches on from afar, through the sparks of the firemen's tools, the flashing lights of on-scene emergency personnel, and the smoke of cracked engines. His expression is one of simultaneous fascination and erotic arousal. In this scene, fascination explodes in a multitude of eroticized directions that subtend voyeurism, cuckoldry, and symphorophilia. The implication here is that psycho-sexual fascination is not limited to a single effect for a single individual or group. It can have both collective and polyvalent manifestations and power regardless of age, socioeconomic status, or sex. 

Ostensibly, the nature of symphorophilia makes it a rather straight forward psycho-sexual fascination in that the component elements thereof are rather obvious – a car, a driver (and passengers), a crash, and lastly a dead and/or injured body. However, the numerous fascinating explorations of psycho-sexual fascination in the film are far more subtle. For example, while Ballard is recuperating with steel pins in his broken shin, Catherine proceeds to manually stimulate him, electing to use a fascinating lubricant, what appears to be warm soapy water – a symbol that suggests purity and cleanliness, healing and conscientious good health. More fascinating, however, is the fact that while stimulating James, she describes, in vivid detail as well as a sexually suggestive tone and timbre, the aftermath of his crash with the Remingtons. Like Vaughan, Catherine treats the data of the crash as hyper-erotic, as inescapably psycho-sexually fascinating, punctiliously treating the details of death, injury, pain, and loss with the same vicerality inherent in De Sade's descriptions of the initiation of Justine: “Minute flecks were spattered across the seat and steering wheel. The instrument panel was buckled inwards, cracking the clock and the speedometer dials. The cabin was deformed, and there was dust and glass and plastic flakes everywhere inside. The carpeting was damp and stank of blood and other body and machine fluids'' (Cronenberg 1996). It is clear that Catherine is psycho-sexually fascinated by that which psycho-sexual fascination ultimately tends toward: death. 

While Cronenberg does not necessarily offer viewers a hierarchy of psycho-sexually fascinating objects, he does focus on specific objects that act as loci of psycho-sexual fascination. Two of three such objects Cronenberg's aesthetic and narrative recursively orbit are scars and cars. In a way, Bataille might say that Cronenbergian eroticism “springs from an alternation of fascination and horror, of affirmation and denial” (Bataille 211). Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (2013) posit that Crash concretizes its exploration of psycho-sexual fascination in the “the battered and broken body...the last remnant of a human erotic imaginary in the face of a fully automated form of desire” (Botting and Wilson 84). The psycho-sexual power of the battered and broken body and specifically its erotico-imaginative fascination is nowhere more apparent than during an intimate scene between Catherine and James. Catherine asks James about Vaughan after having met and been fascinated by him in the previous scene in which Vaughan, bloodied and scratched, is being interrogated by a policeman concerning his possible involvement in a fatal crash. His scarred body, a patchwork of prohibitions and yet, those very same scars “point[] with a smile to the perverse human tendency to transform prohibition into temptation.” The air of the following scene is saturated by this melange. The following exchange occurs mid-coitus: 

CATHERINE: He must have fucked a lot of women in that huge car of his. It's like a bed on wheels. It must smell of semen...   

JAMES:           It does.

CATHERINE: Do you find him attractive?

JAMES:           He's very pale. Covered with scars.

CATHERINE: Would you like to fuck him, though? In that car?

JAMES:           No. But when he's in that car...

CATHERINE: Have you seen his penis?

JAMES:           I think it's badly scarred too. From a motorcycle accident.

CATHERINE: Is he circumcised? Can you imagine what his anus is like? Describe it to me. Would you like to sodomize him? Would you like to put your penis right into his anus, thrust it up his anus? Tell me, describe it to me. Tell me what you would do. How would you kiss  him in that car? Describe how you'd reach over and unzip his greasy jeans, then take out his penis. Would you kiss it or suck it right away? Which hand would you hold it in? Have you  ever sucked a penis? Do you know what semen tastes like? Have you ever tasted semen? Some semen is saltier than others. Vaughan's semen must be very salty...(Cronenberg 1996). 

Well, I suppose it is no surprise then that the symphorophile's scarred penis should take on the status of an ironic double symbol: an individual who derives sexual pleasure from the crash-scarred body whose own sex organ is a crash-scarred object. But more. That the sticky, always-under-the-skin-of-the-celluloid-despite-the-minimalist-monochrome-chic-of-its-aeasthetic oleaginousness in this scene makes me think of Roger Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography when he refers to La Mettrie's Le bonheur (1748): Let pollution and orgasm make your soul, if it is possible, as sticky and lascivious as your body... Oh, lice of the beautiful, pollution of jouissance. It would seem that trash has, once again, re-entered the chat. 

Perhaps an element of the disturbance/trauma of being fascinated, acquiescing to its power, is the inescapable (and in this case non-normative) desire it incites in the fascinated. This paradox of psycho-sexual fascination and its power is perhaps most clearly distilled in a scene where James and Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette) have sex in Gabrielle's car. During the encounter, James combines the idea of the object of fascination, violence, pain, injury, and potential or near-death experiences, despite their combined perturbations, as inescapably sexual when he penetrates one of the scars on the rear of one of Gabrielle's thighs. Like the veiled psycho-sexual, erotico-imaginativly fascinating power attributed to Vaughan's crash-scarred penis, the unveiled image of Gabrielle's scarred, fishnetted, and braced legs protruding from her black leather miniskirt also symbolically, and indeed powerfully, draw together the normatively antipodal extremes of pain and pleasure. The concept of embodied objects of psycho-sexual fascination takes a different route with Vaughan and James towards the end of the film. In one of the film's penultimate scenes, Vaughan and James get medical tattoos, the former a large steering wheel over his sternum, the latter a small Lincoln Continental star logo on his thigh which the former licks before it has begun healed. The latent symbolism of this scene suggests that both Vaughan and James are not simply trying to become cars or totemic of them, but to internalize (as well as penetrate) their fascination(s) and embody them. 

It is not only the crash-scarred body of the driver or passenger that Cronenberg shows to be an object of psycho-sexual fascination as a result, but also the very object of conveyance that facilitates the creation of such objects, namely the crash-scarred car itself. James is compelled toward it, called by it.  Most noteworthily, after his initial crash, James replaces his totalled car with the exact same model and colour as if to suggest an unconscious desire for synchronicity: recreate the conditions of the original crash, complete with the same or similar participants, environment, and objects, and it shall occur again. However, the car is also directly eroticiszed – this said taking into account the intimate link between female sexuality and motorveichles in 20th and 21st century Occidental culture – when James and Remington have sex in his new car, their encounter is doubly charged with both the recollection of the wreck of his old car, and the potential wreck of his new car in the same way, but for a new reason. A reason now enriched by psycho-sexual fascination of both manufacturing the crash itself, but also the sexualized experience of the crash itself. 

If, as Bataille claims, that “the object is less an object than the aura surrounding the state of the soul and it is impossible to say whether it is horror or fascination”, the car, therefore, is perhaps the most central object of psycho-sexual fascination around which all fascinated individuals in the film directly or indirectly orbit (Bataille 237). For example, later, in the film Vaughan and James take a sex worker for a drive in Vaughan’s car. While Vaughan and the sex worker have sex in the rear, James excitedly watches the pair in his rear-view mirror, frequently and lengthily making and maintaining eye-contact with Vaughan. Here, the car is not only directly eroticized by the fact of a sexual act taking place within it, but that the sexualized interior of the vehicle itself indirectly acts as a surrogate vagina/anus for James and Vaughan. 

Indeed, the eroticization of the car represents only half of the symphorophile's psycho-sexual fascination. In order to illicit true symphorophiliac psycho-sexual fascination, the car must crash. The sexualization of the crash emerges in a scene where Ballard listens to Vaughan and Seagrave (Peter MacNeill), the former's stunt driver, plan their recreation of Jane Mansfield's fatal crash. They discuss the crash in detail, highlighting her decapitation and the death of her chihuahua. However, Seagrave is only concerned with “having really big tits” in terms of his cross-dressing accoutrement. He reinforces the importance of this detail stating that it is important for him to have large fake breasts so that the audience can “see them get all cut up” (Cronenberg 1996). Here again is yet another one of multiple instances where the violence, injury, and death of the crash is overtly sexualized precisely through the fascinating and grizzly details of not just famous automotive crashes, but famous crashes named in the film, involving sex symbols like James Dean and Jane Mansfield. 

In view of the elevated fetishistic status of the vehicle, the psycho-sexual fascination of symphorophilia can be accurately described as fundamentally object oriented. Inherent to the appeal and inter-mediation of both the vehicular sex-object and the vehicularly created sex-object of the crash-scarred body is what Martha Nussbaum (1997) refers to as violability in psycho-sexual relationships in which objectification is central. According to Nussbaum, “the objectifier treats the object as lacking in boundary-integrity, as something that it is permissible to break up, smash, break into” (Nussbaum 289). In a scene in which Remington and Ballard speak as they inspect their damaged vehicles at an underpass scrapyard after their respective recoveries, Remington treats the body of the crash-scarred car as reverentially and latently sexually as Vaughan does the body of a crash-scarred individual. In this way, the crash and the scar undifferentiate the inanimate and the animate as objects of psycho-sexual fascination. 

In Crash, the crash-scarred car acts as a conduit-crucible of psycho-sexual fascination. There are several fascinating examples of this toward the end of the film. Following Vaughan's death, Gabrielle and Helen console each other by having sex in the wreck of Vaughan's car. Moreover, James starts driving Vaughan's moderately repaired wreck. Here, the car and its change/transference of ownership represents a transfer of the object of fascination, not the fascination itself. Vaughan merely assisted James and Catherine (and one assumes other members of the Project) find a new outlet for their fascination that was once threatening to ossify to routine. Nothing exemplifies this more than the film's final scene in which the Ballards stage a crash in which Catherine is flung from the vehicle after being rammed from behind by James driving Vaughan's old car. She survives and is only slightly injured.

James consoles her and kisses her while both lay partially under the wreckage of Catherine's car. Fascinatingly, Catherine's survival disturbs her in a way that suggests that while the crash was a success, her death in it was not. Here, the couple's declaration of “maybe the next one” takes on a far more severe – for some sinister, for others erotic – meaning. While the phrase when used at the beginning of the film referred exclusively to the achievement of climax, at the end of the film, it is enriched (or perverted, depending on one's view) to refer to the achievement of climax in death that cannot be achieved in any other form, mode, or way save the fatal crash. 

Interestingly, the subtleties of fascination as a type of transference noted in Section II are also consistent with Girardian mimesis, a theory developed by the French thinker Rene Girard that holds that desire is fundamentally mimetic. For example, while Catherine and James are shown to indeed be ironically hyper-sexual to the point of sexual ennui, they have not, in fact exhausted all sexual fascinations available to them. This is made clear by the fact that they learn and mimic Vaughan and Helen's symphorophiliac fascination. For James, this takes place when Helen takes him to one of Vaughan's nocturnal illegal car crash recreations, exposing the former to the fascinating intensity and complex peculiarity of the latter's desire, its extremity, lack of safety, and the secrets of the literal and figurative death-drive of the crash. In so doing, not only does she revivify or relearn her own symphorophiliac fascinations the viewer assumes she mimetically learned from Vaughan, she imparts the same desire to/in James. James, in turn, imparts this same fascination to/in his wife. As such, psycho-sexual fascination with non-normative sexualities may, on the one hand result in rigid sequestration and abjection for the fascinated. On the other hand, however, the fascinated may find community, understanding, and experience within sequestered and abject populations of the non-normatively fascinated. For example, one of the first group activities James engages in with Vaughan's group involves watching German crash test footage, replete with ragdolled safety test dummies, shattered glass and violently crumbled steel. The group watches the footage in rapt silence, charging the mise en scene with deep sexual arousal and restraint, as if they were watching some illegally acquired pornography. In this scene, the fascination spreads first from Gabrielle who begins masturbating after a short while of viewing, then subsequently contaminates, ensnares, dazzles, and/or mystifies Helen and James. All three then manually stimulate one another while watching the screen, doubly transfixed by their own fascination and the shared fascination of others in a scene I would risk describing as oddly comforting, sweet, and/or even romantic. The transference and mutual reciprocity of fascination inherent in James's initiation into what could be described as group fascination culminates in James and Catherine not only joining Vaughan's ragtag band of non-normative psycho-sexually crash-fascinated outcasts, but sleeping with many of its members

While James, Catherine, Gabrielle, and Helen are all respectively interesting examples of extreme psycho-sexual fascination in practice, the most fascinatingly fascinated character in the film is clearly Vaughan. I argue that this comes down to the fact that he is the most honest with himself about his ambivalent status as both fascinating and fascinated. The recursive nature of psycho-sexual fascination, and the hypothesis that it paradoxically prolongs itself while trying to reify itself in experience and therefore withholds or ossifies into knowledge, is exemplified by Vaughan. His symphorophilia is not simply a fascination with the crash, but being that his fascination is to reenact old (in)famous crashes, the specific modality of his psycho-sexual crash-fascination is recreative. His fascination is to return to his fascination until he should eventually succeed in following it to its terminus. In the case of a symphorophiliac, this can described as being driven to death by a fascination with being driven or driving to death; both a figurative and literal death-drive: an auto-erotic car crash-suicide. In this sense, the psycho-sexual fascination of car crash is always-already driving beyond both the pleasure principle and the limit experience in that it leads not near death but to death. 

While Vaughan's fascinated status and pursuits may indeed be extreme to the point of illness for some, he is certainly not opaque or mysterious about his fascination. He is, I argue, admiringly clear, concerted, and focussed about why, how, and who is involved in his fascination. This is made clear when James is inducted into Vaughan's Project during an exchange in which the latter articulates his telos to the former. James asks, “What exactly is your project, Vaughan? A book of crashes? A medical study? A sensational documentary? Global traffic?” to which Vaughan responds, “ It's something we're all intimately involved in: the reshaping of the human body by modern technology.” (Cronenberg 1996). However, later in the film, Vaughan seemingly contradicts himself and reveals his true fascination with crashes: He states when speaking to Ballard: 

VAUGHAN: It's the future, Ballard, and you're already part of it. For the first time, a benevolent Psychopathology beckons towards us. For example, the car crash is a fertilizing rather  than a destructive event – a liberation of sexual energy that mediates the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form. To fully understand that, and to live that... that is my project. 

JAMES:       What about the reshaping of the human  body by modern technology? I thought  that was your project.

VAUGHAN: A crude sci-fi concept that floats on the surface and doesn't threaten anybody. I use it to test the resilience of my potential partners in psychopathology. (Cronenberg 1996). 

What are we to make of him, then, Vaughan? What is he doing? Is he revolting or revolting? How so? Against what? It would seem, through the movie, and this inextricable cloud of melancholy pervading Koteas's sad eyes that Vaughan’s “revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.” (Camus)

While Cronenberg presents Vaughan perhaps as a type of neo-mesmerist in a traditional sense, with assistants, and apparatuses, specifically the car, he is as much Sadean as he is anything else. I'm thinking of Bataille's description of  Sade's “moral situation”: 

Very different from his heroes in that he showed human feelings, Sade experienced states of frenzy and ecstasy which seemed to him in many ways possible for all. He judged that he could not or should not eliminate from life these dangerous states, to which insurmountable desire led him. Instead of forgetting them in his normal state, as is the custom, he dared to look them right in the eye and faced the enormous challenge they pose to all men.

Bataille would have us conclude that Sade's most depraved scenes of systematic perversion, torture, and murder constitute a new sublime—like the wild beauty of violent storms and terrifying precipices in nature: elevating spectacles. The editors of Bataille's writings in English translation refer to them as “liberating.” In Crash, through the Project, Croneneberg suggests that Vaughan, like Paulhan sees “the sublime in the infamous, and greatness in the subversive.” 

For Cronenberg, Vaughan is  the high-priest, the scapegoat, sacrifice, and conduit of libido sciendi, “the lust to know'', the upholder of “an instinct of waywardness”, an armarius of “the lust of forbidden knowledge”—a drive carrying a strong element of perverseness and a penchant for transgression. Similarly, Botting and Wilson (2013) note, Vaughan's belief in the fascinating power of the crash is not only re-creatively death-driven, but also seen as transformative in its effects: “from being a mechanical failure of diminishing returns, sex is transformed by the crash and becomes, again, a liberating experience” (Botting and Wilson 87). In this sense, the exothermic and violent destructiveness of the crash contains within it a type of psycho-sexual fecundity. Vaughan's wry allusion to his and his group's fascination as a psychopathological partnership suggests that it is a clinical label that ultimately amounts to an un-fascinating prescription which precisely he and his group resist by putting their bodies and the lives and health of those bodies to the hazard for their shared fascination in their mutual ecstatic destruction. The suggestion here is that he and his group's fascination is beyond prescriptive pathologization. Its fascinating nature speaks to both onto-existential mystery and psycho-sexual satisfaction, summed up neatly by James who describes his burgeoning symphorophilia, saying “it's all very satisfying and I don't know why” (Cronenberg 1996). 

In the yen-full nadirs of this not knowing, I'm impelled to think of the hypnotized, whose reason is overridden by the feeling: “No matter how bizarre you make the subject’s action under posthypnotic suggestion, you will find that his mind can devise a rational explanation. A shy young man will stand up in the middle of a lecture and shout ‘hot stew!’ without any justification. But if you ask him why, he will be unlikely to say that ‘dark forces compelled him’. If he is rational, he will believe that he did it to prove to himself that he was not in a hypnotic trance, or some such reason” (Shattuck). 

But mesmerism and fascination are latently inalienable from black sex magic to the sons of the alienists and others besides. Therefore, whether a fair rebuke is Vaughan such a Black Magician, his totem the hircocervus, the traglaph, One who Samael cautions against, proclaiming: 

52. These Black Magicians have a sublime appearance and an exquisite spiritual culture. 

53. When these Magicians speak, they speak only of love, light, truth, and justice.  

54. They appear as ineffable beings and we discover that they are Black Magicians only when they advise us, in a very fine and delicate tone, to ejaculate the semen”. (Weor, 2012)

Is a mesmerizer a Black Magician, in this way?” Or maybe a Man Medusa, both diaphane and heresiarch. Or something else entirely? Perhaps a Camusean hero? An Absurd hero? But why? What has he done to earn the appellation? Why should such passions be seen as absurd when “As for that thorn he feels in his heart, he is careful not to quiet its pain. On the contrary, he awakens it and, in the desperate joy of a man crucified and happy to be so, he builds up piece by piece—lucidity, refusal, make believe—a category of the man possessed. That face both tender and sneering, those pirouettes followed by a cry from the heart are the absurd spirit itself grappling with a reality beyond its comprehension” (Camus 22). 

The conclusion of Croneberg's film is as ambivalent about symphorophiliac psycho-sexual fascination as psycho-sexual fascination itself is of morality, law, and/or good taste. It suggests that in the last instance, the only way to escape psycho-sexual fascinations as intense an exacting as symphorophilia is to fully submit to their power, follow their intimations of death to death itself. In the end, husband and wife lay strewn on the roadside, their faces sombre with despair. Not because they crashed, but because they didn't crash hard enough. As if their love, passion, and lives themselves have not been fully spent. Properly spent. As if they knew that Camusean maxim by rote: “Obeying the flame is both the easiest and the hardest thing to do '' (Camus 42). Alone or together. To soar, sore, you poor thing, a gull with a wing gummed with oil. And panting, hacking up bellyblack in thin air, cold enough to smudge with hard breath, through gyres, schizoid spin, the long night, the short sun, and the lightning lash, somehow reach “the Temples of Lemuria, in the Room of Maat, lady of the Great House, destroyer of fiends at eventide, hot with flame-love, where we found hypostasis and hypostasy” like Samael said in the Treatise of Sexual Alchemy. 

And then maybe, just maybe, “shall be recited before them these words: “Ah! Your death will be sweet, and whosoever witnesses it will feel truly happy”...“Thy death will have to be the seal of the oath of our eternal love” (Weor, 2012).

Fascinating.