La Interzona

“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel.

Cruising and loosed throughout the plot of Crash in his nightblack 1962 Lincoln Continental Convertible (the same model JFK was killed in), Vaughan acts as an ominously Christlike figure, delivering his version of the Sermon on the Mount(ing) via recreations of famous celebrity vehicular deaths, viewing them as modern crucifixions in which figures like James Dean are transubstantiated into cultural immortality. And by reenacting those deaths in clandestine performance art pieces featuring actual auto wrecks, the otherwise impotent Vaughan is able to achieve sexual gratification and release.