Fact1: arousal is heightened by discussing intimate details of extramarital sex, Fact2: driver While trapped in exposes breast wreckage, Fact3: Vaughan are aroused by car wreck, Fact4: car crash killed James Dean with authentic cars and stunt drivers, Fact5: film 's sexual couplings in cars are not restricted to heterosexual experiences
Output: Film producer James Ballard James Spader and his wife, Catherine Deborah Kara Unger, are in an open marriage. The couple engage in various infidelities but, between them, have unenthusiastic sex. Their arousal is heightened by discussing the intimate details of their extramarital sex. While driving home from work late one night, Ballards car collides headon with another, killing its male passenger. While trapped in the fused wreckage, the driver, Dr. Helen Remington Holly Hunter, wife of the dead passenger, exposes a breast to Ballard when she pulls off the shoulder harness of her seat belt. While recovering, Ballard meets Remington again, as well as a man named Vaughan Elias Koteas, who takes a keen interest in the brace holding Ballards shattered leg together and photographs it. While leaving the hospital, Remington and Ballard begin an affair, one primarily fueled by their shared experience of the car crash not only do all of their sexual assignations take place in cars, all of Remingtons offscreen sexual encounters take place in cars as well. In an attempt to make some sense of why they are so aroused by their car wreck, they go to see one of Vaughans cult meetingsperformance pieces, a recreation of the car crash that killed James Dean with authentic cars and stunt drivers. When Department of Transport officials break up the event, Ballard flees with Remington and Vaughan. Ballard becomes one of Vaughans followers who fetishize car crashes, obsessively watching car safety test videos and photographing traffic collisions. Ballard drives Vaughans Lincoln convertible around the city while Vaughan picks up and uses street prostitutes and, later, Ballards wife. In turn, Ballard has a dalliance with one of the other group members, Gabrielle Rosanna Arquette, a beautiful woman whose legs are clad in restrictive steel braces and who has a vulvalike scar on the back of one of her thighs, which is used as a substitute for a vagina by Ballard. The films sexual couplings in or involving cars are not restricted to heterosexual experiences. While watching videos of car crashes, Remington becomes extremely aroused and gropes the crotches of both Ballard and Gabrielle, suggesting an imminent menage a trois. Later, Vaughan and Ballard eventually turn towards each other and have sex while, also later, Gabrielle and Remington have sex with each other. Though Vaughan claims at first that he is interested in the reshaping of the human body by modern technology, in fact his project is to live out the philosophy that the car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event, mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity thats impossible in any other form. The films climax begins with Vaughans death and ends with Ballard being involved in another semideliberate car crash, this one involving his wife. Their fetish for car crashes has, ironically enough, had an unusual bonding effect on the Ballards marriage. As he caresses her bruised body on the grass median near the crash, Ballard and his wife display affection for each other, ending with Ballard saying, Maybe the next one, possibly implying that the logical end result of their extreme fetish is death.