You give voice to thoughts, suspicions, and feelings I have long buried or forgotten about (even in my young age) and knowing I am not alone is a tremendous comfort and blessing to me.

I actually just ordered an ebook version of your book today because I could not wait until to receive it in the mail I was so giddy about reading it. Its strange and wonderful because I am writing about these very same topics in school, have always been intensely fascinated and bewildered by what we could call broadly the “Myth of the Machine” and had just starting reading Baudrillard, Virilio, Arthur Kroker ect. when I stumbled on your reviews at amazon. The more I saw about what you wrote the more I agreed with it and was relieved there were others who felt the same pinching of the machine on the freedom of the human soul. I am very grateful I am able to talk directly with an author in this fashion and I can’t wait to give you some thoughts about your material. Hey at least its one thing the global village is good for

Btw, the increased replies on your amazon reviews and your videos on youtube (under the username of g00ch) are all me, just so ya know

I’ve written about Crash, both the film and the novel, in my book “Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons” which is available on Amazon.

Crash is one of my favorite movies, and I think it is Cronenberg’s best film. It’s also a very good novel. Ballard and Cronenberg are two first rate artists who have managed, for the most part, to stay faithful to their rather unconventional and unpopular worldviews in an age of commercialization and comodification.

I think Crash is a wonderful variation of the Gnostic myth of the fall, in which the soul is envisioned as a spark of light from the heavens that has fallen into the prison of a material body. In Crash, the human spirit is what has fallen, and instead of the soul trapped in a body, the human spirit is trapped in the Machine and can’t seem to find a way out.

Psychological studies have shown, by the way, that there is a link between suffocation and erotic arousal, so it is almost as though in Crash the confinement of the human spirit to the artificial carapace of the Machine is paradoxically sexually arousing. Modern western man is, after all, in love with his machines and is very turned on by them. But his soul is suffocating, too, and he is looking for any kind of an experience whatsoever, be it death, sex or God, that will make him feel alive again, precisely because he has been numbed by the machine. Technology has a numbing effect on any sense organ that it extends (McLuhan’s insight), and as technology as a whole is basically an extension of the human soma, so it is the soma which most feels its numbing effects and is desperate for a way to make the nerve endings tingle again.

Crash is an existential film very much depicting the state of what Heidegger called modern man’s “fallenness,” or “thrownness.” Modern man awakens today beneath the sun and the stars, where he finds himself “thrown” into the Machine, wondering how his ancestors managed to contrive to wind him up there, and he is utterly bewildered. The reasons that ignited the mind of nineteenth century humanity to build the machines are now slowly becoming forgotten. Soon, they will disappear altogether, as the machine becomes more and more of a burden. Eventually it will be something we all wish we were rid of. Accidents and catastrophes are one means by which this unconscious collective death drive manifests itself. Those will, and are, increasing, as the unconscious rebellion and rejection of the collective pysche against this mechanical Umwelt increases with the passing of time.

Check out my book for more.

Best,
John Ebert

I know this is a rather old review but I just wanted to thank you for the style and presentation of reviews that go on at this site. It is precisely the reasons you gave in defense for your reviews that will bring me back here, as I find no comfort in most (if not all) “critic” responses to films. The reviews you make attempt to ground everything in taking account of the fullest history of Man as possible, and I am very grateful you continue to do the writing you do.

I was also wondering; What do you think of Cronenberg’s Crash and the novel by J.G. Ballard that deals with this issue in a horrifying but REAL way? In allowing an alien view of what these type of traumatic events do to the human psyche, they paradoxically appear more vivid and palpable then the way in which they appear in the mediascape–where they are presented as cold and detached as possible. Indeed, nobody appears more “cyborg” like then a 21st century news reporter who spews teleprompter notes with barely any intonations on the some of the most horrific things known to man.

Well, here’s the thing: I try to avoid doing movie reviews the same way they are done in the newspapers and on other sites, otherwise this site would have nothing else to offer that one couldn’t get on those other sites. So I tend to avoid discussing things like plot, character, whether the film is good or bad, its artistic merits, etc. That’s why the reviews seem a little odd, I suppose, because I leave out the traditional details that one would expect to find in a movie review. Instead, though, I focus on the film’s philosophical or cultural significance. That is, what is going on in the culture at the time the film is produced is highly significant and is part of the general cultural phenomenology of art and film and literature that is normally missed by reviewers.

So that’s why it seems like I left 85 percent of the movie out of the review. Instead I have focussed on the fact that the film’s very thematic concern is with the phenomenon of accidents and catastrophes per se. It doesn’t so much matter that there are only three catastrophes in the film or that they only occupy a few minutes of screen time, because the entire film is devoted to bringing the phenomenon of crashes and accidents into our awareness. This is something which, to my knowledge, doesn’t happen much in film. Accidents and catastrophes are normally featured as window dressing for the plot; they almost never form the thematic concern of the film’s main raison d’etre.

No, “Knowing” is not as good a film as, say, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” or “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” but the fact that Proyas is at least trying to dialogue with those films through visual quotations and allusions from and to them is itself tantamount to a conscious effort on his part to continue in the tradition of the modern apocalyptic narrative.

“Knowing” is not a masterpiece in any way, shape or form, but it is a very good film on the level of, say, Proyas’s earlier “Dark City” or “The Truman Show” or something along those lines. It is a good film with earnest intentions and some of the aims which I impute to Proyas were undoubtedly unconscious on his part, but this doesn’t much matter, since the unconscious often has its own agenda and can produce works of art with very little conscious knowledge on the artist’s part regarding what he or she is up to. The unconscious is homeostatic and self-organizing; it is a Mindfield of its own, with its own agendas and emergent properties. Artists discover its intentions rather than just making up their own.

So “Knowing” is a good recent film in the mythological tradition, but not a masterpiece. Hope this helps.

In any case, I would have appreciated a more in-depth analysis of the film from you with more specific details. I’d love to be convinced Knowing is a great movie, but you give very few arguments on why it is in a practical way.