Do we see, in the car crash, a sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology?

All the protagonists of Crash become obsessed with the new sexual possibilities imbedded in the car after they experience the violence of a car-accident. The wounds caused by the impact with the interior of the car become strange new zones of erotic interest, thereby at times reducing ordinary genital sexuality to a limited, somewhat primitive activity. Sex becomes the perfect metaphor for the relation between our bodies and technology. Ballard struck gold when realising the potential sexual metaphors the car already had in popular imagination. The somewhat crude use of automobile parts such as bumpers, headlights, shifting-poke, exhaust-pipe and pistons have been around for years somehow signifying the mechanical side of sex. Ballard's cool prose, as if lifted from an alternative medical textbook, aesthetizes these metaphors while adding some of his own, for instance the recurrent mixing of engine coolant and gasoline with bodily fluids. It is as if the blueprint for this new sexuality was unconsciously built into the car waiting to be discovered and then used to assemble new desires.

As Ballard states in his 1974 Introduction to Crash, science, technology, television, film and advertisement have had a disastrous impact on the social relationships of this century, creating a hyperreality which effectualy meant "the death of affect". In this third phase of the industrial revolution, which Martin Bax has called the Ballardian phase, the products of industrialisation (computers, television, cars, surveillance-cameras) are invading people, impinging on their behaviour, taking over their lives (R/S 1984: 36).

Lukas Barr in an interview with Ballard tries to define the renewed focus that remains after these corroding tendencies:

"Whatever happens in terms of space, in terms of perception, in terms of the mind, you always still have to deal with the body, which isn’t subject to the same type of flexibility. So in a way, going back to Crash, you can see that the body is one answer to this problem, that you can ground yourself in your body, that you can mark your body, that there’s some permanence and weight there." (Barr 1995: 2)