a review of 欲望号快车

HOOPTOBER NINE! NIGHT TEN! + 2022 Criterion Challenge Week 39/Category 34: Midnight Madness Although Cronenberg (and I suppose by extension Ballard, although I have not read the original book) clearly intended this movie as an exploration of illicit sexuality and kink culture through the thinnest of magical-realist lenses, I also see a lot of parallels to the way Philip K. Dick wrote about drug culture in A Scanner Darkly. There's a sense that they're not just chasing the physical rush, but more importantly the feeling of being blissfully out of control, letting the forces of physics (which precede and underlie chemistry, after all) do what they will with them in the same way as their freely-swapped sexual partners.