Cronenberg's simultaneously erotic and clinical adaptation of J. G. Ballard's infamous cult novel almost caused a riot at Cannes and wound up banned in London; Americans had to wait a full year until the nation's unappointed moral guardian Ted Turner (who owned the film's distribution company) finally decided to release it. Set in a near future suspiciously like the present, Crash follows a married couple who imagine their illicit affairs to be the height of impropriety, until they encounter a group who enjoy slightly bigger kicks: sex while watching-or in-car crashes. Organizing celebrity death reenactments (James Dean, Jayne Mansfield) for the ultimate fetish, they conflate automobiles with eros, technology with lust, with pain as the final arousal. Crash uses sex, death, and the automobile to uncover the yearning heart of a metallic world, where machines are the hardest pornography.