The Car and the Breast in the Landscape of the Real
Becky McLaughlin
Critical Essay
Each spring when I teach my “Studies in Film” course, I hand out a syllabus that includes what might be called a global trigger warning entitled “Note Concerning the Filmic Content of this Class.” In this note, I state the following:
We will—and I use the emphatic mode quite intentionally, here—be watching films that are disturbingly sexual and frequently violent in their content. If you are uncomfortable watching and discussing films that show explicit sex (not simply heterosexual but homosexual), nudity (male as well as female), and violence (men hurting women, women hurting men, and men hurting men), you will probably be very uncomfortable in this class, and thus you should learn to live with your discomfort, do as Oedipus did and gouge out your eyes, or drop the class before it gets underway.
Oddly enough, very few students choose to drop despite my explicit warning of what is in store for them as a viewing audience.
I begin their sojourn through this brutal terrain as gently as possible with a film in which a woman is psychologically tortured by her husband, who wishes to drive her mad so that he can retrieve the jewels that belonged to his wife’s aunt, whom he had murdered years before. This is George Cukor’s Gaslight, and the worst that has been said of it by my students is that it is boring. Next in the line-up is a film in which a woman is blackmailed into marrying a man she does not love and then forced, very much against her wishes, into consummating their marriage with sex, an act that amounts to little other than rape. She attempts suicide the morning after. This film, Hitchcock’s Marnie, frequently elicits laughter from the viewing audience of students. Somewhat later in the semester, these same students are treated to a film in which a woman seeks out a man who is willing to murder her by stabbing her repeatedly with a knife, a film in which this woman very coolly gives directives about how the murder is to be enacted, saying, “After you’ve stabbed, be sure to twist it upwards or it may not penetrate far enough” (Spark 106). She then adds, almost as an afterthought, “I don’t want sex. You can have it [later]. Tie my feet and kill, that’s all” (106). My students are generally nonplussed by this film, but that is only because of the director’s attempt to represent in filmic terms the future anterior tense of Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat. In yet another film, a naïve, young woman is asked by her paralyzed husband to engage in sex with other men so that her sex life will not wither and die. For all intents and purposes, his is a selfless request, one to which his wife very reluctantly consents. Her subsequent sexual encounters lead to her banishment from the church and eventually to her death at the hands of a group of vicious sailors. This is Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, which often elicits discussion on the part of my students, not about the morality of the repressive church or the vicious sailors but of the husband and wife. As a companion piece to von Trier’s heartbreaking film, I show the equally heartbreaking Leaving Las Vegas, in which a prostitute, who is brutally anally raped by a group of fraternity boys during one of her tricks, befriends a man who is intentionally, and successfully as it turns out, drinking himself to death. Despite the fact that much of what happens in each of these films is morally and ethically reprehensible, none of my students cries out against them.
The film that elicits the cry of outrage, as you may have already guessed, is David Cronenberg’s Crash, a film in which beautiful people have consensual sex in cars, engage in fast and reckless driving on crowded city streets and thruways, and enjoy looking at car crashes. No doubt these are all things that at least half of my students and plenty of others besides have done quite happily, and so my question is why this film—and this one alone—elicits such disgust, revulsion, and contempt. And it is not just my students who get up in arms over Cronenberg’s Crash. As the great body of criticism that has accrued since the film’s release will attest, lots of viewers—and not just my students—have had similar reactions to the film. As Jill Craven comments in an article entitled “Ironic Empathy in Cronenberg’s Crash”:
The book aroused concern for some of the same reasons the film did. For example, one reader warned [that] “The author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish!” The New York Times review started with “Crash is, hands down, the most repulsive book I’ve yet to come across.” The film incited extreme reactions as well. It garnered both critical acclaim and disgust at Cannes, where it won a Special Jury Prize for “audacity, originality, and daring.” (189)
Craven goes on to say that while the film did well in Europe, on the Anglo-American front it ran into trouble. In Britain, the film was very nearly banned, the Daily Mail leading “the crusade to ban the film and to boycott products made by its distributor’s parent company, Sony” (189). Likewise, in the U.S., “media mogul Ted Turner tried his best to block release of the film. Although he was ultimately unsuccessful, the film’s release was delayed substantially by Turner’s efforts” (189). According to Craven, even Cronenberg’s agent was worried enough by the controversy the film had stirred up to tell Cronenberg that this film would “end [. . . his] career” (189). And in an article entitled “Death Drive’s Joy Ride,” Manuel Combler makes reference to Anthony Lane’s “extremely hostile review of Crash for The New Yorker,” in which Lane argues, “People are right to be shocked by Crash, but for the wrong reasons. What it shows you even in scarred closeup, is only mildly nauseating compared to what it insists [on] telling you” (7).
Obviously, few people are disgusted or nauseated by the reality television shows in which we see surgeons carve great wads of fat off people’s heavily-burdened bodies or in which we see women and men undergoing extreme makeovers in which their bones are crushed, their faces and bodies hacked up with surgical tools and reconstructed on the operating table to render them more beautiful—at least not disgusted or nauseated enough to ask that these types of shows be removed from the air waves. Obviously, few people are disgusted or nauseated by films in which car chases and fatal crashes occur or in which people have sex—at least not disgusted or nauseated enough to ask that these types of films not be released. So why the great hue and a cry over the scarred bodies, wrecked cars, and copulating couples of Crash?
There have been many attempts to answer this question, and while those attempts have resulted in smart, thoughtful essays about the film, I do not think any of them has quite successfully answered the question of why Crash creates in its viewers the particular affective response of disgust, revulsion, contempt, and/or nausea. According to one scholar, the reason viewers are so put off by the film is that they cannot relate to or identify with the detached, unemotional, affectless characters of James, Catherine, and Vaughan. I could not relate to or identify with Mad Max, Robocop, or the Terminator, but that did not prevent me, and countless others, from watching and thoroughly enjoying the films in which these detached, emotionless, affectless characters appeared. According to another scholar, viewers are put off by or put out with Crash because it is a pornographic film that fails to titillate. It would seem that in moralistic circles, this would be the best kind of porno flick imaginable. Yet another argument mounted to explain viewers’ aversion to the film is the alienated relationships of the film’s central characters, their isolation from and sense of boredom with one another. But alienation and isolation would be cause for sadness, regret, or concern, not the visceral affect of disgust or nausea. And thus none of these explanations satisfactorily explains the presence of this affective response.
Most of the essays that have been written about Crash, at least the ones written in its defense, are all quite insightful and smart, but they miss the point, as I see it. It is not a lack but a surplus of identification that creates disgust in many viewers: in other words, the “problem” with the film, the thing that causes the reaction of disgust, is that we identify far too heavily with the characters. For what Cronenberg’s uncanny film offers up is not an apocalyptic future, as many critics have argued, but a return to the past, a return of the repressed landscape that we enjoyed before we were “properly” or thoroughly socialized. As Freud defines the term in his essay, “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (220). In this case, what was known of old and long familiar but what has now been forgotten or repressed is the pre-symbolic register of the real. As New Lacanian Bruce Fink articulates it,
The real is, for example, an infant’s body “before” it comes under the sway of the symbolic order, before it is subjected to toilet training and instructed in the ways of the world. In the course of socialization, the body is progressively written or overwritten with signifiers; pleasure is localized in certain zones, while other zones are neutralized by the word and coaxed into compliance with social, behavioral norms. Taking Freud’s notion of polymorphous perversity to the extreme, we can view the infant’s body as but one unbroken erogenous zone, there being no privileged zones, no areas in which pleasure is circumscribed at the outset. (24)
Cronenberg’s film—with its voyeurism and fetishism, its fascination with wounds and scars, blood and body fluids—takes us back to those perverse by-gone days in which we enjoyed looking at, and perhaps even tasting, our own turds; sucking the maternal breast, our thumb, our foot, or anything phallic-like that we might lay our tiny hands on; peeling scabs off recent wounds and eating them; playing “doctor” with the kid next door, not out of desire but curiosity; crashing one Matchbox car into another in the hope of destroying one or both; peering through keyholes to see the primal scene enacted; picking our noses and eating the salty mucus-smeared “boogers” with casual relish. Am I disgusting you yet? Yes? Well, that is precisely the point. None of these things seemed disgusting to us while we remained polymorphously perverse bodies bent only on seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. The pre-symbolic landscape was one in which we had not yet been socialized, in which the body had not yet been carved up into “appropriate” erotic zones—our sense of “right and wrong,” “masculine and feminine,” “heterosexual and homosexual,” “destructive and constructive,” “good and bad,” not yet in place. And that is the landscape Cronenberg offers us in Crash. It hits a little too close to home, given that the civilizing forces of primary repression are shaky constructions at best. As Jonathan Dollimore comments in “The Cultural Politics of Perversion,”
[S]exual normality is precariously achieved and precariously maintained: the process whereby the perversions are sublimated can never be guaranteed to work; it has to be reenacted in the case of each individual subject and is an arduous and conflictual process, a psychosexual development from the polymorphous perverse to normality which is less a process of growth than one of restriction. (1)
At some level, everyone who watches Crash must recognize how fragile “sexual normality” is—hence the operation of disgust as a defensive measure, a shoring up of the socializing forces.
But how do we know that we are in the register of the real when we are watching Crash? The telling feature, I would argue, is Cronenberg’s representation of the breast. Unlike most filmmakers, who wheel and deal in heaving bosoms and the display of cleavage, Cronenberg’s breast is the Lacanian breast of the (m)Other, the breast that a nursing child would encounter. Although we are accustomed to widespread mazophilia (i.e., fetishization of the female breasts), we are not accustomed to or comfortable with a female breast that appears in the singular. Recall, for a moment, the literary image of the giant breast Gulliver encounters during his stay among the Brobdingnagians:
I must confess no object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with so as to give the curious reader an idea of its bulk, shape, and color. It stood prominent six foot, and could not be less than sixteen in circumference. The nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and the hue both of that and the dug so verified with spots, pimples, and freckles that nothing could appear more nauseous; for I had a near sight of her, she sitting down the more conveniently to give suck, and I standing on the table. (2087-88)
Or the visual image of the giant breast in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask, which chases Woody Allen across a field, squirting streams of milk that drench him as he unsuccessfully tries to ward off the “evil” breast with a small silver cross. Both breasts dwarf the men who are forced to confront them, a size imbalance reminiscent of childhood when adults towered above children; and both men appear horrified or nauseated by the uncanny nature of the lone breast, which is precisely the maternal breast. While Cronenberg’s breast does not leak or squirt milk, we know that it is the equivalent of the maternal breast because it appears in singular form.
The first breast the viewer sees exposed is that of Catherine Ballard when she removes it from her brassiere and presses it against the cold, hard metal of an airplane wing. The second breast is that of Helen Remington, which falls out of her jacket when she tries to remove her seatbelt after the car crash in which she and James Ballard are injured and her husband killed; the third breast is that of Gabrielle, who wears a leather body suit with a hole cut out of the fabric where her left breast rests. One of the few times both breasts appear is when a male character masquerades as Jayne Mansfield, but his mammary mimics are obviously not attached to his body. They are representations of breasts, not breasts themselves.
What I would like to argue is that the singular breast is the pre-symbolic or real breast, while the double breast, or the bosom, is the symbolic. According to Freud, the primary nature of sexuality is aberrant; what is secondary, i.e., learned or (super)imposed, is what we call “normal.” So, in a very significant way, what we call normal is the deviation, not what we call the perverse. The label of perversion must always be applied retroactively, however. That is, primary sexuality can only be called “aberrant” once we have secondary sexuality in place. Like the polymorphously perverse body, which is primary, the fragmented body is primary in some sense as well. The Cronenbergian body is precisely the polymorphously perverse, primary, fragmented body—hence its ability to horrify rather than titillate.
However much we rail against the constraints society places upon us, a world such as Cronenberg’s (devoid of the big Other, in which the “children” have been left alone to guard the “candy store”) would be a world in which desire does not operate and the death drive knows no bounds. There is a strange sense of unreality to the landscape of Crash, because despite all of the crazed driving, no one ever gets pulled over by the police; and despite all of the crazed fucking, no one ever gets caught in the act or punished. In short, there is no authority figure on hand to say “No,” to impose interdictions, to pass ethical or moral judgment. Even at the scene of a massive multiple-car wreck, the characters of Catherine, James, and Vaughan are allowed to roam quite freely through it, no figures of authority making it their mission to say, “Stay back! Move along! Get out of here!”
What is frightening is that the only thing that binds these characters together is the car, an object made of metal, by humankind. Tear it apart, reconstruct it, and you have objects of war, through which men and women tear each other apart. If that is all there is, what hope do we have? It is indeed a bleak landscape that Cronenberg offers, but one that must be looked at, taken frontally, in order to defend against it—but not in the ways that so many of the critics have tried to do. There must be an acknowledgment of what one is seeing before one can mount a defense against it, and, so far, there seems to have been no acknowledgment of that. The “perverse” and the “normal” ought to be understood as terms involved in an important dialectical relationship, the perverse as both the foundation of so-called sexual normality and as a resisting force when the “normative” becomes too oppressive.
Works Cited
-Combler, Manuel. “Death Drive’s Joy Ride: David Cronenberg’s Crash.” Other Voices: A Journal of Critical Thought 1.3 (January 1999).
-Craven, Jill. “Ironic Empathy in Cronenberg’s Crash: The psychodynamics of Postmodern Displacement from a Tenuous Reality.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 17.1 (2000): 187-209.
-Dollimore, Jonathan. “The Cultural Politics of Perversion: Augustine, Shakespeare, Freud, Foucault.” Genders 8 (1990): 1-16.
-Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.
-Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17. London: Hogarth, 1955.
-Spark, Muriel. The Driver’s Seat. New York: New Directions, 1970.
-Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. 1726. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1. Ed. M. H. Abrams. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. 2041-181.
Becky McLaughlin is a professor of English at the University of South Alabama, where she teaches courses in early American literature, critical theory, film, and gender studies. She has published essays on topics such as fetishism, feminine jouissance, sexual fantasy, epistemological trauma, auto-ethnography, the voice, and rock music. She is currently editing (with Eric Daffron, Maria Gil Ulldemolins, and Kris Pint) a collection of essays entitled Autotheory and Its Others, under contract with Punctum Books.
Photo Credit: Gary Bloom grew up in Minneapolis and attended what is now Minnesota State University-Mankato, where he studied sociology. He has been a teaching assistant in a psychiatric hospital, a driving instructor for spinal cord injury patients, and a computer programmer. His articles, photography, and poetry have been published in newspapers, magazines and websites including Literary Hatchet, Liquid Imagination, Milwaukee Magazine, The Buffalo News, The Grand Rapids Press, Art Times Journal, and Black Diaspora. He lives in Mississippi.
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