The Filmcake

It happened by accident, our double feature. After hemming and hawing over whether or not to hold out for a Grindhouse box set, I went ahead and finally purchased Tarantino’s Death Proof. I saw the whole Grindhouse event when it arrived at the theaters. Afterwards, a trip to Austin with stops at Guerro’s and Texas Chili Parlor only intensified the desire to watch the movie again. At the same time, we were finally able to get a hold of Cronenberg’s Crash which happened to be airing on one of the movie channels. I hadn’t yet seen that one…and hadn’t been successful in finding it elsewhere. Without planning, we had our themed double feature–sexual arousal via car crashes.

While licking Rosario Dawson’s feet isn’t quite the same as fucking Rosanna Arquette’s scar, it’s certainly in the same ballpark. Death Proof’s Stuntman Mike gets off killing girls with his indestructible stunt car, while Crash’s Vaughan and his entourage get off by crashing in a very destructible way. One takes a car straight out of Vanishing Point, while the other recreates the deaths of James Dean and Jayne Mansfield. Where one is 70′s highway safety film, the other is repetitive crash test video. While one possesses the creepiness of an older man’s leer, the other is consensually perverse. Both have a palpable eroticism which confirms that the complicit viewer is also both creepy and perverted.