Crash.

The recent successful revival of the Star Wars trilogy reminds us that the current split in American movie-making began in 1977 when the first Luke Skywalker film appeared. In it the big studio bosses thought they had found the formula for a hit: special effects, lots of noise on the sound track, dialogue of comic-book simplicity. What they ignored was George Lucas's attempt at mythological resonance (Luke, trained by his Jedi gurus, might be Perceval instructed by Sir Gawain or the Indian hero Rama learning from Viswamithra), truly inventive comedy (the justly famous extraterrestrial bar scene), and a certain generosity of spirit (Luke's refusal to let Darth Vader surrender himself to the "dark side"). Result: the last decade-and-a-half of soulless high-tech splatter movies with Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger and the current crop of disaster projects (Independence Day, Volcano, et al.).

The so-called serious movies now get made on smaller budgets by the independent companies such as Miramax, Fine Line, and Gramercy, which are usually owned, or at least empowered, by the big studios. It's as if a billionaire capitalist allowed one of his ten children to become an avant-garde painter while his nine other offspring were expected to toe the line within the family business.

Now and then, the artist-son turns out to be a real piece of work, a combination of psychosis and meanness who produces something that may alarm papa and make him wish that junior and he did not share the same name. Case in point: Crash, winner of a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and now being touted by many critics as the latest triumph of "cutting edge" art.

Any review of Crash has to turn into a pathology report since the movie is morally and intellectually diseased. Dramatically, it's beyond disease; it's dead. Of course, the attraction of thanatos is the very theme of the movie, and a legitimate theme it is; only it isn't just the characters who have succumbed, but the man who made the movie, David Cronenberg.

The plot: A director of commercials (James Spader) causes a car accident that results in the other driver's death and the injury of the latter's wife (Holly Hunter). Spader seeks out the widow, not to ask forgiveness (at no point in the film is any emotion as human as guilt ever expressed), but because he became erotically fixated on the sight of her he glimpsed a moment after the collision. This vision of Holly Hunter through a shattered windshield, bleeding, one breast bared like an Amazon about to do battle, furious yet somehow alluring in her fury, is the best shot in the movie and suggests that we are about to see an erotic, Strindbergian duel-to-the-death. But no, it's just the sight of wounded flesh that arouses Spader, not Hunter herself. Though the couple do shortly copulate (after nearly having another traffic accident), she introduces him and his zombiesque wife to a collection of sickos led by Vaughan (rather wittily played by Elias Koteas, the film's only notable performance) who stages famous car crashes, such as James Dean's. From then on, these obsessives simply pair off - in hetero and homo combos - to have it off in the front and back seats of cars. Most of the movie is just that - soft core tableau. But don't think that Cronenberg is going to let us miss the significance of it all. "Do you always have sex in cars?," someone asks Hunter. "Yes," she replies, "but I didn't plan it that way. It's just that they all felt like traffic accidents." Yes, life is just one big bang in Crash.

Vaughan finally takes to smashing his car into the vehicles of his fellow enthusiasts as an automotive complement (substitute?) for sex, finally hurtling to his own death. Spader, emulating Vaughan, drives his wife off the road, then sodomizes her half-dead body, murmuring into her ear, "Next time, darling."

Satire? That's the great cop-out word of movie reviewers when they feel they have to praise something idiotic just because it's different or "cutting-edge." In Crash, only one scene, the recreation of James Dean's death, succeeds as satire, but it's about our obsession with celebrity, not cars, or sex, or death, and therefore unrelated to the rest of the movie. But it isn't even cars or sex that is David Cronenberg's primary interest. This writer-director is obsessed with the human body itself, but only smashed, spavined, and bloody. His one good movie, a remake of The Fly, drew its power from his fascination with how Jeff Goldblum's body mutated into a monster's. But The Fly was truly dramatic, for Goldblum's nature changed as much as his flesh did.

But there is absolutely no drama in Crash. The sick, emotionless man Spader plays at the film's beginning, encouraging his wife to have sex with other men so that she can describe her encounters to him, is just as sick at the conclusion, only now he has found a new outlet for his perversity. The story never moves off square one, but it gives Cronenberg the opportunity to train his camera on scarred faces, arms, and chests, and to juxtapose sex with gory injuries and the imminence of death. There is no searching for meaning, no compassion, not even horror. It is the transfixed gaze of the obsessive who has found his object and has mentally torn it out of the context of humanity.

Literally and figuratively, Crash is roadkill. How then does it earn film-festival prizes (to his everlasting credit, the Cannes jury head, Francis Ford Coppola, tried to block the award) and the genuflection of critics? The perfect answer to that is in a passage from Grover Sales's book, Jazz: America's Classical Music, where the author defines the French phrase, l'avantgarde pompier, as "phony avant-garde, spurious work passing itself off as genuine avant-garde, preying upon the vulnerability of upwardly mobile enthusiasts unsure of their own taste and desperately afraid of being caught culturally short like the detested bourgeoisie of yesteryear that denounced Stravinsky, Picasso, and Charlie Parker as anarchists and fakes."

Today, the heads of Independent film companies, festival chairpersons, and most critics are precisely those "upwardly mobile enthusiasts." This is not the last time we will be crashed.