Sicilian horse flies, from Corsica
A friend recommended Accident to me because it's "like pus" and "evil," and truly that's all there is to it. It's difficult to know what to do with something so pus-like and evil. So committed is the film to its evil, it betrays even an indifference to making its evil more manifest than it thinks it thinks it has to. What I mean is, Accident could push things into melodramatic cruelty, ritual debasement, something, anything, recognisably and materially sadistic, so that we could point to it and say This is cruel and it is about power, but that it doesn't want us to be able to do this, it wants only to seep from the screen and into the room as it is, diseased and evil. It doesn't want to be about Stephen's impotence, or his desire, although he is impotent, and he does desire, and it doesn't want to be about Charley's impudence, or William's aristocratic death drive, or Rosalind's silent suffering either, although all of these things contribute in one way or another to its sense of disease. It does not want to be about these things because it is too diseased to be about anything. Being about something requires a thing to step outside of itself and either indicate its awareness of another thing, or demonstrate an awareness of itself as if from the position of another thing, and Accident cannot leave itself.
Accident's inability to leave itself is impressed on us by the circularity of its opening and closing. The sound of the accident opens the film, and the same sound closes it. The opening accident sends the film into a flashback that occupies the majority of the runtime, and then when it finally passes it, we hear the sound again. Accident cannot leave the accident that both precedes and awaits whatever happens within it. A less diseased film would accept this constitutive accident as its traumatic centre. We could then say the film is circular because the traumatic event upends causality. Because not only does the repeated arrival of the traumatic event in the future invalidate futurity as such, it inscribes itself in the past such that there seems no longer to have been any time without it. Forget time and possibility; there is not even memory free from it. It's for this reason people may come to idealise and seek to recover the event as an event, however unbearable. An event is evidence that causality is still operational: there was a time before it possessed everything, there will be a time after it. The accident of Accident would then stand as a kind of recursive working-through for Stephen, expressed in filmic eternal recurrence. But Accident's inability to leave itself does not come down to any kind of psychical wound, much less a belief in working-through. Rather it seems metaphysically cruel because it has always been cruel, with or without the defining accident.
Because it's Losey, careful blocking communicates things about power and relationships, but the effect is still disease, and the disease invalidates the need for us to interpret subject matter. For every sequence where it's clear what's being pantomimed, there are an abundance of actions and images where it's not clear what we're supposed to be looking at or why. This meaningless abundance comes to encroach on the pantomime until all communication is rendered meaningless. In the beginning we might say that Stephen conceals his desires through words and that Charley uses words to obtain his. (Losey is, after all, smitten with all the kinds of conflicts that become available through the use of English passive-aggression). But then it becomes clear that Stephen's desires are readable on his face and body and that he's not really trying to conceal anything, and that Charley's words distance him from perceiving reality the more he describes and addresses it. In openly expressing want, the driving force of desire works doubly hard to render the object obscure. These people are not victims of expression. They are people who have words, who have power, but who can never enjoy anything. Where this could lend itself to enjoyable rallies of empty statements, Reginald Beck's arrhythmic edits opt for excruciating pause and irregular truncation. Some shots remain long after characters have walked off, where others cut in before the line reading has finished. There is no playing with words around the object of desire because words have been debased. And there is no sense that some divine object would free them from all of this, because even the idea of the object has been debased. Because nobody in this can leave Accident and Accident cannot leave itself.
6 Jan 2026