Car Crashes and Comas

When I was little, around the ages of 7-10, I was slightly obsessed with car crashes, injury, comas, and paralysis. As far as I can remember, this fascination started when I watched a crap TV movie in which a young girl was hit by a car and left paralysed. It must be twenty years since I saw it (blimey) but I can still remember the scene in which she was hit. She's crossing the road, carelessly, looking back at her friend, and then WHAM. I remember seeing her body flung up in the air and bouncing hard off the car bonnet.

It wasn't just the climactic impact that enthralled me. It was also the fact that afterwards she was so badly damaged, physically and mentally. She spent the rest of the film learning to walk and talk and eat again. It's hard to be sure, but I think part of the fascination was that a single moment of carelessness could have such immense consequences. What could be destroyed in an instant.

There were lots of other examples:

We were shown a public information film at school about a boy who was skateboarding and was knocked over by a car. I still remember the final image with the blood trickling out of his nose, and the solemn pronouncement that he had 'a fractured skull'. I think it was the first time I ever heard the phrase.

In real life, around the same time, I knew a girl who was in a serious car accident and was paralysed. We weren't close friends - I think our mothers vaguely knew each other. I have a vivid memory of an article about her in the local newspaper which included a photo of her with her legs in some sort of metal contraption. I was painfully interested by this picture.

The enforced passivity of the coma also intrigued me: for example, the film Reversal of Fortune, about Klaus and Sunny von Bulow, and the Sweet Valley High book Dangerous Love, in which there was a motorbike crash which left Elizabeth comatose. I had a thing about unconscious people being physically moved around. I used to play a game with my sisters where we would take it in turns to 'play dead' and be moved around by the others.

I even remember telling a babysitter, who was probably only about 16 herself, that I was really interested in people being paralysed, and her having no idea what to say back to me. Which isn't that surprising really.

Does this belong in a blog about sexuality and BDSM? Instinctively I think it does. My fascination, which coincided with the very beginnings of puberty, had an edge which I would describe as sexual. (I told some of this to a friend in the pub last night, and she suggested that it might have something to do with your body changing, beyond your control.)

The vividness of the images, how clearly I can still recall these verbal and visual scenes twenty years later, means it must have been very very intense at the time. Perhaps it could even be described as a fetish. But I had more or less completely forgotten about it until something sparked my memory recently, and it all came flooding back.

I have no idea what conclusions I can draw from any of this, except: it's amazing what you can forget; I was evidently quite strange, even at the age of 7; and it's not very surprising that I found Crash ridiculously erotic.