Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (review)

Building on and reassessing a lineage of works that explore the relationship between new technologies and the demands of modernity on its subjects, Crash engages in intriguing discussions on various links between material artifacts, the moment of collision, and the social politics of movement. Seminal theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Gilles Deleuze, and Paul Virilio, together with a host of important film scholars, are all evoked critically throughout the book, providing the author a platform for creatively decoding various historical, political, and fictional sites of the car crash. Karen Beckman’s commendable willingness to place in the center of her investigation the destruction, rather than the smooth operation, of a particular device represents a bold and unique approach to the study of technological cultures. Construing the wreck as both metaphor and lens, she investigates how such collisions shape the limits and possibilities of different visual and literary mediums, as well as the significance of auto-destructive representations to the changing understandings of mobility and stasis throughout the twentieth century.

In correctly moving away from a theoretically constraining “traumato-centric” conception of technological mishaps, the book offers an important contribution to a scholarly shift, recently advocated by J. Arthurs and I. Grant, Crash Cultures (2002), from seeing modern societies as “risk societies” toward seeing them as “crash cultures.” This still inchoate perspective suspends moralistic judgments of crashes as negative occurrences that must be overcome by “safety measures”—at least until one is willing to consider the collision as an important material and symbolic event in its own right. The crash can be appreciated under this new light for its oft-denied thrilling, positive, creative, even life-giving value. Thus, from such realist early shorts as How It Feels to Be Run Over (1900), through slapstick comedies like Laurel and Hardy’s Two Tars (1928), to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 disjointed carpocalypse Weekend—all sandwiching, of course, a discussion of J. G. Ballard’s 1971 Crash—Beckman’s analyses press cutting-edge film theory to address problems of literal and semiotic points of impact on dominant constructs of gender, (im)mobility, and boundaries. Importantly, they add to the conceptualization of the cinematic crash as a second-order hybrid within the already-existing hybridity of the car/driver, an “ideological and aesthetic impurity” (p. 232) that throws into question the dividing lines between subject and object, inside and outside, spectator and participant.

Historians of technology expecting more orthodox explorations into the past of artifacts will not find them here (and given Beckman’s expertise as film theorist this perhaps should not come as a surprise). And while the book declares from the outset that it is “not a sociological study of how car accidents affect people” (p. 8), I was still surprised to discover how little it considers the profuse historiography on the motorcar in the United States and Europe: the author seems unaware of John Urry’s 2005 call for framing the automobile within the sprawling sociotechnical system of automobility, for example. Similarly, the author’s interpretation of car crashes in slapstick cinema might have benefited from a discussion of the intensifying dialectical relationship in America, starting in the early 1920s, between auto production and destruction, primarily embodied in the car industry’s strategy of “annual model renewal.” This practice, later known as “planned obsolescence,” pulled the motor vehicle into a cycle of continual symbolic and physical destruction and regeneration that aimed at making room for ever-new automotive desires and needs. Additionally, the book’s fascinating and first-of-its-kind discussion of the collision in industrial safety films between 1930 and 1960 could have been enriched even further by a consideration of the rise to mainstream popularity of the auto thrill show and demolition derby crash-extravaganza during this era, both supported primarily by the auto industry. Beckman would have also profited from Julian Smith’s 1983 systematic analysis of early film’s uses...