Re-imagining censorship as “reel” mutilation: Why not release a G-rated version of David cronenberg’s crash?

Abstract

David Cronenberg’s film Crash1 won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1996 while simultaneously garnering implacable rancor and a vigorous censorship campaign against it in both the United Kingdom and the United States. The maelstrom is well-documented in Martin Barker and Julian Petley’s book, The Crash Controversy: Censorship Campaigns and Film Reception (2001), which analyzes the complexities of the immediate response to the film in the UK. In addition, due to its graphic sexual content, Fine Line Cinema, a subsidiary of Ted Turner’s empire, stalled the US distribution of the film, deeming the film dangerous to the public, which reveals compelling interstices between public politics and film criticism. This chapter seeks to examine what this response can tell us about the consequences of censorship.