cronenberg's crash

I think that Cronenberg's movie adaptation of Crash would have been much better if I had watched it without already having read the novel. I will admit that I think it did a really good job of bringing to life the small world that centered around the highway that Ballard created for his characters, although it ended up not being set in England as it was in the novel. It is easy to create such a limited setting for a novel, because all Ballard had to do was think of it, but for a movie it seems like it would be rather difficult to confine the action of the film to such a small number of places: the road, James' house, the hospital, etc. However, I think that this aspect of the film is what stayed the most true to the novel. One thing that I did have a problem with however was the absence of James Ballard's narration. What makes the book so interesting is the fact that he is constantly describing in the smallest detail all of his sexual fantasies, analyzing everything that happens to him, and projecting his thoughts onto others. In the film, none of this was done so it made the character of James much less arresting than he was in the novel. We never really know what his motivations are in the movie because we cannot experience his thoughts like we can while reading the book and this makes him and really all of the characters much flatter and two dimensional. Also, the ending of the movie clearly differentiated from that of the novel, which made it so I came away from each experience with a completely different idea of what it was really about. At the end of the novel, James and Catherine are walking away from Vaughan's crash and James begins to plan out his own crash, presumably to end his life as well. But the last scene of the movie is James following Catherine in Vaughan's car, driving her off the road and making her crash, then having sex with her. To me, the conclusion of the movie has a much different meaning than the ending of the novel was meant to and it changed the whole experience of the movie for me in a negative way.