“The crew of a fishing boat blocked emergency radio frequencies for hours as they watched an erotic film. The crew of the Blyth-based Oceania accidentally left their radio switched to the emergency channel on Thursday as they were off the North East coast. They then settled down to watch the film Crash on a TV which was next to the radio — not realising it was being broadcast over a 30-mile radius. A lifeboat from Berwick was dispatched to alert the crew to their mistake… Humber Coastguard said it was lucky the incident happened during a quiet period and at night. A spokesman also said it was fortunate that sea conditions were relatively calm. He said: ‘This should serve as a warning to others to be careful with their emergency radio switches.’ The skipper of the Oceania, George Mair, said he had apologised for the error. He said he had inadvertently jammed a clock radio into the switch that opened the emergency radio channel. He said although the film was on in the background, he was busy working on the boat at the time. The controversial film Crash, starring Holly Hunter and James Spader, tells the story of people who gain sexual gratification from car crashes.” —BBC (UK)

(Hat tip to the Ballardian for the story.)

If you’ve ever seen the very brilliant film Crash, you’d have to wonder to what extent it can justly be called “sexy” or “erotic.” Based on the novel of the same name by J.G. Ballard, the film is about a small group of people who develop a fixation with the erotic possibilities of car crashes. And while there is nudity and sex in the film, it’s not exactly erotic. After all, this is not Debbie Does Dallas. It’s not intended to get you hot. It’s intended, like all Cronenberg films, to make you think.

All the same, no doubt Mr. Cronenberg very much enjoyed the thought of his film being broadcast over the lonely seas. Not because Mr. Cronenberg is such an exhibitionist — the recent story about him having sex with his wife in front of the crew of his new movie sounds like his idea of a joke — but because there’s something too appropriate about his vision of sexual psychopathology serving as an emergency broadcast signal to the lonely and adrift. After all, the characters in the film are very much islands of subjectivity whose ability to communicate is confined to the shared joy they take in violent collisions and the wounds those collisions imprint on tender flesh. It makes you wonder if this solipsistic sexuality is somehow especially appealing to the men and women who spend their lives cut off from the mainland, or perhaps it even causes them to imagine their own novel forms of sexuality — stimulation at the sight not of rammed cars but of rammed boats, ghost ships, drowned bodies.

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