The hospital sequences in Cronenberg's work have scope beyond mere frights. They're as sorrowful as the passages of a man's recovery from a coma of several years in The Dead Zone . He has lived through catastrophe, surviving the invasion of Shanghai by the Japanese in WWII and witnessing the atomic glow from Nagasaki across the East China Sea on that August morning in 1945. Ballard's books consider the possibility of human life becoming cheap beyond our worst imaginings. Passersby are at first awed by the find, but eventually they vandalize the corpse, carrying off bits of the giant as souvenirs, pissing on it and carving their initials on its bluing body.
Humanity is reduced to the level of crabs.
The sleek novel Crash inquires into the sexual nature of collisions as lusted after by jaded swingers who find themselves wrapped up in a cult of car crashers. Crash 's influence can be traced to its canny combination of sexual explicitness and high-church European alienation. In the novel, sex is remote, conducted under circumstances of sterility, artificiality and pain. In the movie, Cronenberg makes explicit what Ballard rendered abstract. And on screen, even often impersonal sex is sexy.