Crash is the Baudrillardian novel. ‘Anticipating Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard, Ballard demonstrated how encroaching advertising and mass consumer culture played on submerged desire, implanting new, artificial subjectivities to create a schizophrenic underclass’ (Sellars and O'Hara 2012: xii). The primary focus in J. G. Ballard's Crash (1973) is ‘a cult of bored, middle-class professionals who feel alive only after modifying their bodies via staged car crashes’ (ibid 2012: xii). Their leader, Vaughan, feeds on the neuroses of his followers, encouraging them with questionnaires to fantasise about dying in crashes with celebrities, developing comprehensive psychosexual profiles, while he himself obsesses over Elizabeth Taylor. In both Ballard and Cronenberg's 1996 film adaptation, the unexpected crash breaks people out of their neurasthenic yet promiscuous existences. Under Vaughan's leadership, they are introduced to a ‘benevolent psychopathology’ that enjoins them to the technological transformation of their bodies, and facilitates new, perverse sexual practices. Characters are no longer alienated from their surroundings or from each other, but physically and psychologically interconnected, their remodelled psychic apparatuses corresponding with their external world. James, the narrator, explains: ‘I realised that the entire zone which defined the landscape of my life was now bounded by a continuous artificial horizon, formed by the raised parapets and embankments of the motorways and their access roads and interchanges’ (53). This artificial horizon is formed at the junction of the flows of the industrial landscape and communications technologies: a riot of celebrity mythologies, accumulated fictions, images and technoscientific planning and research bear down upon subjects in an oppressive, yet seductive, simulation. In Cronenberg, Vaughan travels from the city's high-rise apartments, hospitals and film studios to squalid outer suburbs and derelict racetracks, recruiting new test subjects.