Cronenberg's Film Crash

The David Cronenberg adaptation of Ballard’s Crash finds itself in an odd place film-wise.  Watching the movie was almost nothing like reading the book in my opinion.  The main thing about the movie that left me so disjointed was the mere fact that the audience had almost no access to the mind of the character of James Ballard whereas the book is completely set within his mind.  In a way this makes leaves the film feeling lacking and unconnected to the events taking place.  At times we just see Ballard staring at things in the film without any explanation and this hurts the viewers understanding of his inner fantasies and sexual desires.  There is something to be said that the film suffered from the fact that it was for ‘mass’ audiences and thus it is censored in certain areas.  Although Cronenberg went father than many directors would with the graphicness of the moments in the movie it is nowhere compared to the written work by JG Ballard.  While I am full aware that it was an adaptation I constantly thought throughout the movie that if I had not read the book I would most defiantly be utterly lost with the plot and motives of the characters, save for Ballard’s wife who is far more perverted than Ballard in the film while the opposite is true for the book.  There is one thing that Cronenberg nailed for me directly on the head, and that would be the world where this all takes place.  While it is Canada, only reviled by the cars license plates, it still has that blandness that JG’s ‘London’ did.  Overall the film may have a similar tone to the book to me it did not have the same grasping qualities that the book had, I did not understand the film Ballard the way I did the one in the book, not that I fully understood that character either.