Crash
Karen Beckman
Jaffe Associate Professor of Cinema and Modern Media
Why do filmmakers love car crashes? First, this figure embodies the paradox of cinema, the simultaneity of stasis and motion. But that’s not all. Let’s take JFK’s assassination as a case study, which the novelist J. G. Ballard considered to be the most important automobile accident of the 20th century. Jackie K.’s pink crawl across the back of the Lincoln convertible demonstrates how the modern subject experiences trauma cinematically. She was not going for help, nor was she trying to retrieve her husband’s head. Rather she believed, I contend, that if she crawled quickly enough, she could move backwards through filmic frames of time against the forward drive of both the automobile and Abraham Zapruder’s newly invented portable camera. Like a media oracle, this car crash prefigures how we would come to experience every minute, perhaps even this one, as a prerecorded event, as if there were no outside of cinema. Thanks.