I love the scene where we roam the site of a massive multi-car pile-up with the film's main characters. It's so apt a depiction of the way we live now: groping for stimulation in the wreckage of modernity, hoping to feel something in a sea of senseless destruction, sublimating our fear and horror and despair into eroticism, wanting primal urges for sex and death to overtake our better judgement because the alternative is dying slowly of boredom and atrophy. I mean, the idea of escaping into a glamorous, disgusting and absurdly funny world of car crash sex at the cinema is one I find irresistible when the alternative is sitting in front of my company-issued laptop writing yet another pointless email.

It's been six years since I last saw this and I'd forgotten that it's basically one sex scene after another, with very little in the way of plot unlike Cronenberg's more recent films. I'd also forgotten how funny it is, all those goofy lines delivered so straight-faced, the car crash re-enactments, the discovery of the dead guy in the Jayne Mansfield costume in the wreck because he "just couldn't wait" for the next re-enactment to happen and had to go and do it for real, chihuahua included. The audience I saw the film with today seemed too shocked to find much humour in it, which made the experience all the more precious somehow.