ABSTRACT
I suddenly grasped his meaning and realized that I had never really understood the word. In class, as we studied Shakespeare’s endless parade of cross-dressing characters and their loves, I’d always heard the word eroticism as meaning that these charged relationships were, somewhere deep down, all about genitals. Yet my professor’s question alerted me to something I hadn’t seen: the characters in Crash might be employing their genitals left and right, but that didn’t necessarily mean there was anything erotic about it. Eros, then, had to be something else-intimacy, a feeling that engaged the emotions as well as the body, something that could move between two Shakespeare characters whose only physical contact might be a clap on the shoulder. In a twisted way, the encounters of the car-crashing young people in Cronenberg’s film are fumbling toward the erotic: their engineered brushes with mortality spark an intense desire for human
connection, a desire that highlights the alienation of their daily lives and their ignorance of how to relate to each other.
