Crash!: Aviation Disasters and the Cultural Debris Fields

Crash! explores the fascinating, revealing, and surprising cultural impact of plane crashes across art, literature, music, media, and creative nonfiction.

Plane crashes are covered extensively but they are not analyzed very deeply, apart from the focused operations of media, government, and aviation-industry crash investigations. This is despite the voluminous, diverse, and fascinating cultural material-poems and novels, songs, films, art, tv series, and on and on-that emerge in the wake of aviation disasters. Randy Malamud reanimates these tragic events and identifies how they persist and resonate through our culture-more than we might have imagined, and in intricately far-reaching ways.

A unique and extraordinarily wide-ranging cultural examination, CRASH! takes the reader on a journey that includes reflections on William Faulkner - who was devastated by the death of his brother in a plane William had lent him - to flight phobia and Rain Main, to themes of crash survival, with asides on Lord of the Flies, Lost, Yellowjackets, and Castaway, to deep dives into modernist paintings and representations of plane crashes, to the cultural aftermath of 9/11.

Ultimately, Malamud shows that the crash does not bring about complete and total destruction: we can accomplish some degree of restoration by shoring fragments against the ruins. The plane is dead; long live the plane.