"Car Crash Crucifixion Culture"
an essay published in Car Crash Culture (edited by Mikita Brottman)

published January 2002

"A thoughtful and persuasive comment on the cult of the celebrity,
citing the deified celebrity death as 'an attempt to replace the absent crucifixion' ...
excellent ... excellent."
-- WENDY O’BRIEN (of Central Queensland University), Cercles

"Julian Darius's essay, 'Car Crash Crucifixion Culture,' [has]
far-reaching interpretive panache
... [and is] never dull."
-- RANDY MALAMUD (of Georgia State University), South Atlantic Review

"For Julian Darius ..., the wrecked car becomes a central conceit in a ludic piece that
expertly judges the two disparate events of celebrity accidents and crucifixion."
-- MIKITA BROTTMAN (of Maryland Institute College of Art), from her introduction

"Car Crash Crucifixion Culture"
was published in Car Crash Culture, a splendid, provocative collection of essays relating to car crashes, particularly celebrity car crashes, and edited by Mikita Brottman and published by Palgrave, a division of St. Martin's Griffin. Published in both paperback and hardcover in January 2002, the softcover runs a powerful 356 pages plus an introduction by the editor.

Car Crash Culture explores the underside of America's cult of the automobile and the frequently conspiratorial speculations that arise whenever people die in cars. Looking at fatal celebrity car accidents and other examples of death by automobile through original essays, personal memoirs, and forensic reports, cultural critics ponder people's fascination with car crashes. They explore car crash conspiracy theories, the automobile as the site of murder, car crash films, and the notion of the "accident." The book features original essays by such underground icons as Kenneth Anger and Adam Parfrey. Essays cover the deaths of Albert Camus, Jackson Pollock, James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, Princess Diana, Princess Grace, Mary Jo Kopechne, and others.

Mikita Brottman, the book's editor, is Assistant Professor of Literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art and has published books on horror films, cult cinema, and the history of cannibalism. She writes for a number of alternative and underground publications.

My own essay has a cruciform shape and attempts to show how our response to car crashes is determined by the nature of, the cults surrounding, and the iconography of crucifixion. Along the way, I get to play with both Christian mythology and pop culture, Princess Diana and JFK. The general consensus seems to be that the essay is a brilliant autopsy on Western culture and its response to car crashes -- and that the essay feels somewhat insane. Reading it does something to your brain. It's intended to be a work of high intellectualism that's both playful and accessible. It takes in high and popular culture with great voraciousness, and it's a good deal of fun, with each sentence containing linguistic and intellectual twists of some sort. I heartily recommend it.

"Cultures have long memories, even if these memories are constantly in the process of revision. As a person's psychology often transfers impressions from one figure onto another, so a culture's mythology often transfers older configurations onto new events.
God may be dead, but the geography of his corpse continues to define us."
-- JULIAN DARIUS, from "Car Crash Crucifixion Culture"