At least on the surface “Crash” is gruesome.

As you’ve probably heard, given the year-long controversy surrounding it (a hit at Cannes, banned until recently in England, its release in the U.S. initially delayed by Ted Turner), the story’s about a group of people who are turned on by car crashes.That may seem shocking, and it is. (I haven’t even mentioned the scene in which one character sexually penetrates the vulva-like scar of another.) But given its premise, the film is astoundingly free of either horror or repulsiveness, unless you count your own surprise at readily jumping on its characters’ wavelength.

It’s easy to see why Cronenberg, given his fascination with bodily functions, was attracted to this story, based on a book by J.G. Ballard. One of Ballard’s creations is a leather-jacketed, raggedy-scarred photographer named Vaughan (Elias Koteas), who drives a funereal 1963 black Lincoln convertible. Vaughan’s hobby is re-creating the fatal crashes of such stars as James Dean and Jayne Mansfield. A kind of angel of death, he walks into the lives of a couple, Catherine and James Ballard (Deborah Unger and James Spader), and Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) when James Ballard’s car crashes into Remington’s, killing her husband and putting both survivors in the hospital with devastating injuries.

We know Catherine and James, a film director, are no sexual naifs because we’ve seen each of them tryst with others and then compare notes at the end of the day. Likewise, our first sight of Helen is when she flashes a breast just seconds after the collision in which her husband’s body flies through the windshield of James’ car. These people are weird, all right, but nothing quite prepares us for the journey they embark on together. They’re like dream characters, meaningless on their own, but part of the fabric of a single, powerful, collective subconscious.

No sooner are Helen and James both out of the hospital than they show up together at a late-night show staged by Vaughan in which stunt men re-create the Dean crash with real cars. This incident is the first pulse of emotion in a story driven by moments of odd sympathy for people in seemingly repulsive situations. It somehow makes sense that Helen and James, having barely escaped one near-fatal crash, are drawn to the spectacle of another. We may be uneasy, but at the visceral level, we understand it.

We also understand why Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette) — a crash survivor and Vaughan groupie whose leg braces only improve her get-up of fish-net stockings and black lace — drives a car salesman wild when her brace tears the leather of a car seat. And just when it seems like the only thing that could improve the film would be a gay sex scene, James and Vaughan find each other in the back of the Lincoln. Then, Catherine puts her bare nipple on a cold metal surface and … well, you get my point.

With “Crash,” Cronenberg has created a mood film about eroticism, one that’s decorated in the purple and mauve shades of corpses. It’s a film noir in bruise tones, a place where a car wash is the most erotic scene on earth.

But the film doesn’t stop at making facile observations about the intersections of sex and death or automobile chrome and American movies. It draws on these things, along with voyeurism, fetishism and our Hollywood-seeded love affair with violence. Then “Crash” goes somewhere else entirely.

If anything, it takes us down the lost highway of forbidden emotion and sensuality that eluded David Lynch in his most recent film, “Lost Highway,” and that eludes most American films with their fixation on adolescent sexuality. Cronenberg’s characters exist in their own closed universe, a place where every object and every opportunity is sexual. Occasionally, this universe has quirks that aren’t entirely sexual — as when James keeps insisting there are “more cars” on the road than there were before his accident. But what it hasn’t got — and this is what’s liberating — is a judgmental point of view. The film’s sensibility is neither moral nor immoral.

It just is.

That’s no small disappointment when what’s at stake — according to the mad-scientist scenario at the heart of this tale — is nothing less than the future of the world. Instead, the movie feels like a treatment for a great cinematic film rather than a film itself — something Hitchcock might have worked with if he wanted to make a thriller at the top of the world. It’s a sequence of plodding but beautifully shot set pieces that take advantage of Denmark’s perpetual winter twilight and its monstrous ice floes, but don’t illustrate anything. The screenplay is by Ann Biderman (“Primal Fear”).

The story is about how Smilla (Julia Ormond), bitterly exiled from Greenland as a child and now living as an unemployed scientist in Copenhagen, gets involved in investigating the death of Isaiah, her 6-year-old neighbor who fell off the roof. Smilla’s Inuit upbringing is what gives her a so-called sense of snow. The idea is that she’s able to read — and care about — the cold, white crystals the way other scientists read graphs or fingerprints. Innately suspicious, Smilla notices that the tracks Isaiah left on the snowy building indicate he might have been pushed.

With help from a laconic downstairs neighbor known only as “the mechanic” (Gabriel Byrne) and from a former employee (Vanessa Redgrave, in a throwaway part) at the mine that employed Isaiah’s father, Smilla pieces together a sinister cover-up. She also attracts the government’s attention, and in no time at all, she’s on the run. She escapes from a burning boat, reluctantly falls in love with the mechanic and ultimately books a clandestine passage on a ship headed for an unknown polar destination.

Never mind that there’s not one snowflake of suspense in all this. Despite a breathtaking scene in which the meteor’s crash into Earth turns the ice fields into a carnivorous tidal wave of snow, August’s direction is mind-bogglingly dull. Without Hoeg’s exploration of Smilla’s mind — in the book, she’s one of pop-culture’s best-wrought loners — it’s nearly impossible to figure out her motivation. The emotional engine of the story revolves around Smilla’s letting go of her misanthropy and admitting her need for attachment. But without any way for us to sense this, the movie makes no sense.

Why is this woman so angry? Better yet, why is she wearing lipstick?

It doesn’t help that Julia Ormond — perhaps the most un-Smilla-like actress walking the planet — is cast in the starring role. She gives a competent performance, but she looks like Nancy Drew’s pert-nosed cousin who somehow got trapped while sleuthing inside a snow globe, not the prickly, androgynous warrior Smilla is meant to be. During the film’s many slow moments, you find yourself wondering who should have been cast. Among the possibilities: a younger Vanessa Redgrave, Sigourney Weaver, someone whose physicality would actually be threatening. (In Hollywood? What was I thinking!)

Hoeg’s psychological/sci-fi mystery begs to be turned into a high-budget B-movie — something that, like the book, stirs up our collective memory of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and such Arctic-set sci-fi classics as “The Thing.” Instead, we get Ormond, whose response to Byrne’s question about her having a rough, salty tongue (“I try to be rough all over”) sounds like a come-on. Here’s hoping the next time we need a tough girl heroine, we get someone closer to Smilla than Cinderella.

In fact, there’s only one conceivable thing more comforting than a box of puppies. That would be an entire network devoted to bringing images of cute animals into your home.

And so I tuned into the new cable channel Animal Planet with high hopes. The network’s concept — “all animals, all the time” — seemed to offer up the closest thing I’d ever get to a real-life “Box of Puppies.”

The cable giant TCI has tried to substitute the network for such cable perennials as VH1 and Comedy Central on cable systems across the country serving some 5 million viewers. Of course, TCI’s programming strategy has less to do with the emotional power of cuddly animals than it does with the persuasive power of cash. Animal Planet, a Discovery Channel spinoff, pays premiums to cable systems that pick it up, whereas the cable castoffs — VHI and Comedy Central, and in some areas, C-Span, E! and MTV — pay nothing.

Animal Planet isn’t the only one to pay. Quite a number of cable networks — Home and Garden TV, The Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon’s TV Land and the Fox News Channel actually pay cable operators hard cash for each subscriber. Others pay cash incentives, such as marketing support or product support, in the case of home shopping networks. You may want your carrier to pick up the History Channel or Turner Movie Classics, but since those popular networks don’t indulge in “cash for carriage,” as it’s called, you’re probably not going to get them if they’re not already on your system.

And never mind that a lot of communities have been able to get TCI to reinstate VH1 and Comedy Central. The TCI maneuver is merely the first time a multisystem company has pulled this trick. It’s already a common tactic at the local level. As growth of the cable audience starts to slow down, we can expect similar sleights of hand from other cable giants like Time Warner and Cablevision. As one cable insider told me, “Everybody wants to follow suit.”

All this big-money maneuvering brings me down a bit. And so, unfortunately, does the reality of Animal Planet, as I can report after an unscientific grazing period of several weeks.

For one thing, if you tune in during prime time, there’s not much adorableness to be had. Those hours are reserved for creatures that are decidedly uncute and uncuddly. Pigeons? Barnacle-encrusted whales? No, thanks. And sometimes a species with potential cuteness is exploited for violence, as when baby turtles are seen to be racing to the sea before being picked up by vultures and cracked open for lunch. If I wanted that sort of thing, I could tune into the Fox Network during sweeps.

On Animal Planet, alas, heartwarming tail-waggers are reserved for daytime hours. I’m not sure what the marketing strategy is here. Is it that people who are at home during the day obsess about their pets, while those who watch in prime time prefer to see Bambi’s cousins devoured by ravenous hyenas? In any case, the nearest equivalent to “Box of Puppies” is “Pet Connection,” a half-hour advice show starring Dr. Bernie Pukay. (Why does your puppy bite? Tune in and find out.) Then there’s “Pet Crafts,” a segment of another show, in which you can learn how to make festive litter boxes for your cat. Right.

I have yet to stumble upon “Human Nature,” an evening show hosted by Olivia Newton-John, or “Wild Guide,” which reportedly features “the late Margaux Hemingway.” But I feel confident in asserting that the highlight of Animal Planet is its daily look behind the scenes at “The New Adventures of Lassie.” Yes, the collie wags again, and if you tuned in earlier this month, you now know that “not every dog can be Lassie.”

When it comes to Animal Planet, I’m really less concerned with cable politics than with figuring out just what is it about this programming concept that the TCI powers that be think is so viewer friendly. Can furry tarantulas and wild caribou make up for the fact that some viewers now can’t get “The Tick,” “Ab Fab” reruns, or music videos? Could a show called “Crocodile Hunter” replace “The Daily Show” or “TV Nation”?

Well, not every cable program deserves to be watched. If Animal Planet wants to attract a sizable audience, it’s got to avoid those shows featuring scuba divers using themselves as shark bait. Think warm, cuddly. Think bunny slippers. To that end, I’m submitting some programming suggestions for Animal Planet.

Here are some titles. You come up with the content: “Sleeping Kittens,” “Nursing Piglets Making Barely Audible Squeaking Sounds” and “Young Chimpanzees Endlessly Doing Somersaults.”

And I’m always open to Box of Puppies Planet.

Or perhaps “The Graduate” is really a tragedy, considering that what we thought we were watching was something altogether different than what’s actually on the film. (Women, in particular, may be disappointed to rediscover that Ben’s coming of age requires them to participate from the wrong side of the bed sheet.)

Never mind that “The Sound of Silence” may be the most laughable musical backdrop for a seduction ever recorded. Or that Anne Bancroft, cast as a middle-aged parent, is a mere six years older than Dustin Hoffman, who’s supposed to be 20. Or that from the vantage point of ’90s adulthood, Ben’s “alienation” seems downright dreamy.

What’s alarming is that the film, which so perfectly captured its era, seems to have turned on us. No longer a blueprint for liberation, it’s practically an anthem to conformity.

That’s remarkable, considering that if you were picking through today’s cultural altar, you’d have to take the entire “Brady Bunch” oeuvre, and throw in Kurt Cobain, to come close to conjuring up the equivalent of “The Graduate” as a zeitgeist land mine. Released in 1967, “The Graduate” made the third highest box-office profit of any American film up to that time. The film unleashed Dustin Hoffman upon the world (it was actually his third movie) and got Mike Nichols an Oscar for directing (the best-movie Oscar went to “In the Heat of the Night”). All things considered, it’s had a pretty amazing shelf life — a good 15 years or so of near-deserved cultdom before its mustiness began to show.

Passively misogynistic and emotionally muddled, the story is about a young man who has an affair with an older woman and then, growing tired of her, becomes determined to marry her virginal daughter. Only she, it seems, can rescue him from the sordid experience of having slept with her mother.

Well, that’s a pretty odd fable to seed a fresh, radicalized youth movement with, to feed a generation needing to replace its parents’ status-conscious, material-based dogma for living. Indeed, the film’s view of marriage, sexuality and the suburbs is closer to stodgy old John Updike than Erica Jong. What gave “The Graduate” its long-standing appeal was that it proffered a chance for Ben and his real-life contemporaries to literally fuck the parent images in his life, destroy them and — having seemingly earned the moral upper hand — step into their shoes. Alas, to our naive ’60s eyes, this seemed revolutionary.

Today “The Graduate’s” most remembered phrase has lost its irony. (We’re all in plastics now, aren’t we?) Ben’s parents, rather than hypocrites and conformists, just seem like people who came a few minutes too late to the New Frontier. As for you, Mrs. Robinson, it’s clear that Bancroft outclassed not only her own hateful role but pretty much the whole film.

Even now the movie is not without its charms. For my money, the scene in which Ben appears at his parents’ barbecue, decked out from head to foot in scuba gear like a mute space explorer, is one of the best evocations of alienation — youthful or otherwise — ever captured on film.

Of course, Ben is an explorer from another planet — the planet of teenagers — let loose among the strange culture of adults. It’s because of this that he struck a chord with viewers for so long. Nichols places him underwater a lot, as though he really were a creature who literally can’t breathe the earth’s atmosphere.

Indeed, the power of Ben’s career claustrophobia, the horror he feels as people keep asking what his plans are, may last another 30 years. “Do you know what you’re going to do?” they say, as though he has to choose one thing — folding a piece of paper, bouncing a ball — and then do that one thing over and over for the rest of his life.

In “The Graduate” we remember, Ben rebels against that model of the world, racing to steal Elaine away from the altar, beating off her family and her would-be future (and his) with a crucifix he pulls off the wall of the church. One of the first ’60s movie characters to say “Fuck You” to the Establishment, Ben lives in our memory as a rebel who hijacked his own awful fate.

On actual celluloid, it’s a different story.

You don’t need Nichols’ one moment of supreme, painful insight, that awful, final glimpse of the couple “escaping” at the back of the bus, barely able to look each other in the eye, to see that nothing Ben does is particularly heroic. Rather than striking a blow for self-determination, he ends up with the exact girl his parents have picked out for him.

He barely knows her, but he pursues her because she’s everything her mother isn’t: respectable, safe, ready to forgive him for having no vision at all.

Of course, now that candidates and anchormen show up on MTV and hip, late-night talk shows with frightening regularity (and Bob Dole has made a third career out of cameos on “Saturday Night Live”), a first lady flapping her gums in an afternoon time slot shouldn’t turn heads.

But Hillary’s TV appearance, actually taped last week, is a front-page headline. For the past two and a half years, the first lady has been in virtual seclusion. Early into President Clinton’s first term  thanks to her ill-timed remarks about moms who bake cookies, not to mention health-care reform  Hillary was sentenced to the political equivalent of having to spend the rest of the day in her room.

If memory serves, Hillary’s last utterance on national television occurred sometime during the 1994 Winter Olympics, when she ran across David Letterman’s mom in Norway. Whatever she said then has already been taped over.

Indeed, Hillary has been hidden away like a social embarrassment  the maiden aunt who babbles on about the family secrets. Or, more to the point, like an intelligent woman in an era that gives lip service to the ideal of women’s potential, but when confronted by the reality of women in power, still turns pale and makes hostile jokes. God forbid such a creature should actually speak her mind.

Of course, none of this would be happening if the second Clinton term weren’t already in the bag. With no voters to offend, there’s no reason why the first lady can’t go out in public. What’s disappointing is how muted she still remains.

The truth about Monday’s 40-minute appearance is that Oscar the Grouch actually stole the show before Hillary set foot on the stage, a basket of official White House M&Ms (the peanut kind only, not the plain) in tow. As the perfect straight man, his misconception about fellow guest Michael J. Fox allowed Rosie to explain to him, “He’s not a fox, he’s an actor.” The same cannot be said for Hillary Clinton — she’s neither an actor nor a source of provocative discourse.

Along with the M&Ms and a kids’ book for Rosie’s son, Parker, the first lady also brought along a trivia quiz based on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” (One tidbit: Betty Ford was the only first lady to appear on the sitcom.) Hillary, who looked pale and ill at ease and happened to be wearing a deadly dull navy blue suit seemingly designed not to offend, also delivered a handful of earnest remarks about the importance of literacy.

Can’t argue with the importance of literacy, can you?

To be fair, the first lady actually seemed delighted to meet Oscar the Grouch and to give him some official White House trash. But the most poignant moment of the show wasn’t when Hillary offered Oscar “some golf balls sliced by the president of the United States,” but when Rosie asked her if, as a child, she had been interested in politics.

Her response: “I wanted to be part of what was going on.” That’s what you’d expect from the first baby-boom first lady. Then why is it that even now, after the election’s over and there’s nothing to lose, Hillary Clinton is still handing out candy and making pleasantries? Here’s hoping she finds bolder, more important ways to be part of what’s going on.