James Ballard (James Spader) and his wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) enter an underground world of "symphorophiliacs" led by the enigmatic Vaughan (Elias Koteas), who re-enacts famous celebrity car crashes, such as the one that killed James Dean.
Ballard’s novel is about the eroticism of technology and the coldness of modern media. Cronenberg’s film is shot with the sterile, blue-green light of a freeway underpass. Watching it on a 480p stream, with the occasional buffering wheel, removes the Hollywood polish. The scar tissue on Elias Koteas’s back looks like melted plastic. The chrome of a Lincoln Continental glitches into digital blocks.
The year is 1996. The internet is a wild, lawless frontier of <blink> tags, dancing baby GIFs, and dial-up screeches. It was the year the digital world was supposed to mature—until .
James Ballard (James Spader) and his wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) enter an underground world of "symphorophiliacs" led by the enigmatic Vaughan (Elias Koteas), who re-enacts famous celebrity car crashes, such as the one that killed James Dean.
Ballard’s novel is about the eroticism of technology and the coldness of modern media. Cronenberg’s film is shot with the sterile, blue-green light of a freeway underpass. Watching it on a 480p stream, with the occasional buffering wheel, removes the Hollywood polish. The scar tissue on Elias Koteas’s back looks like melted plastic. The chrome of a Lincoln Continental glitches into digital blocks.
The year is 1996. The internet is a wild, lawless frontier of <blink> tags, dancing baby GIFs, and dial-up screeches. It was the year the digital world was supposed to mature—until .
