@sithwax
sithwax replied to your photoset:Favorite fictional characters: 01. Vaughan, Crash.
Watched this last night. So this time around I viewed the bunch as cowards. They were fucking not so much to get off but as a form of distraction from how boring life was. “Maybe next time.” Maybe just kill yourself and get it over with. Almost dying is sexier than death…
I wholly agree that there's a lot of boredom in there - the descent into an ultimately shared existential anti-crisis, disinterest/detachment, etc., which makes perfect sense in a Ballardian film. Both emotionally and sexually speaking, the feeling of "being truly alive" one experiences throughout all the stages of a near-death experience, the ways in which the brain and body react both bracing for and during a potentially fatal impact, is a big part of what drives crash fetishists (pun intended?) and edgeplayers to do what they do. In my opinion, that's the most interesting question the film is asking: To what extent will someone go to alleviate their boredom with life?
I don't think I'd personally call anyone in the film cowardly, so much as tired, turned off and starving for some - any kind of - sensation. I think of Vaughan as a kind of poster child for that frame of mind. He's a caricature of it. I think that's what I love most about him.