Crash (Bfi Modern Classics)

BFI Modern Classics Rob White Series Editor Advancing into its second century, the cinema is now a mature art form with an established list of classics. But contemporary cinema is so subject to every shift in fashion regarding aesthetics, morals and ideas that judgments on the true worth of recent films are liable to be risky and controversial; yet they are essential if we want to know where the cinema is going and what it can achieve. As part of the British Film Institute's commitment to the promotion and evaluation of contemporary cinema, and in conjunction with the influential BFI Film Classics series, BFI Modern Classics is a series of books devoted to individual films of recent years. Distinguished film critics, scholars and novelists explore the production and reception of their chosen films in the context of an argument about the film's importance. Insightful, considered, often impassioned, these elegant, beautifully illustrated books will set the agenda for debates about what matters in modern cinema.

Crash I )~lVid (:rOl1l'l1berg's Post-mortem on

J. C. Ibllani's 'TLljectory of E1te' lain Sinclair

"

Publishing

First published in 1999 by the

British Film Institute 21 Stephen Sireet, London W1 P 2LN Copyright © lain Sinclair 1999 The Brilish Film Institule is the UK national agency with responsibility for encouraging the arts of film and lelevision and conserving them in the national interest. Series design by Andrew Barron & Collis Clements Associales Typeset in Italian Garamond and Swiss 721 BT by D R Bungay Associates, Burghfield, Berks Printed in Great Britain by Norwich Colour Print, Dray1on, Norfolk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-85170-719-X

Contents Acknowledgments 7 1 Novel as Audition Piece 8 2 Liquid Mirror: Ballard Dissolves to Cronenberg 21 3 The Other Crash Films 25 4 Cronenberg's Crash 43 5 White Nights on the Bauhaus Balcony 62 6 J.G. Ballard and James Ballard 74

7 Atrocity Exhibitions 95 8 The Trajectory of Fate 104 Credits 124 Bibliography 128

CRASH I 7

Acknowledgments My thanks to Rob White and Nick James who proposed a book on Cronenberg's Crash at the strategic moment when I wanted an excuse to make contact with J.G. Ballard. Rob White's effectiveness in digging out lost films was complemented by some very astute suggestions about the (dis)organisation of my argument. I am grateful to J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Chris Petit and Sandy Lieberson, for sparing the time to give me interviews. Claire Walsh and Gerry Goldstein were helpful in setting these up. Paul Buck filled out details of an early visit to London by Cronenberg. Moorcock made a number of scarce items from his archive available and guided me towards a proper sense of the New Worlds era, when he and Ballard were co-conspirators (and inspirations to the rest of us).

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1 Novel as Audition Piece VAUGHAN: JAMES:

VAUGHAN: JAMES:

James Ballard?

Yes? Crash victim?

Yes.

David Cronenberg, Crash script

Crash, the novel by J.G. Ballard, appeared in 1973, one of the cultural markers that signalled the end of the 60s. All the elements in the book characters, landscape and psychopathology - had been drilled and rehearsed through a series of earlier texts, notably The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), where the feral Vaughan first appears. The former day-patient, Vaughan, he had often seen in the back row of his classes, or moving through the other students in the library forecourt at some private diagonal. .. The dented plates of his forehead and the sallow jaws were features as anonymous as any police suspect's. The musculature of his mouth was clamped together in a rictus of aggression, as if he were about to commit a crude and unsavoury crime.

Ballard's compacted novels of the 60s and early 70s read as much like storyboards for unmakeable films as auditions for future books. He revealed himself as a master of the list, the image cluster, the questionnaire; rapidly cut high-angle drifts across previously underimagined territory and savagely implicated close-shots. Spinal canals. Conradian lagoons infested by cretaceous monsters. Hot jungles breaking through the tarmac. Sexually alluring corridors. Formulae for assessing the ridges and contours of alien pudenda. A vocabulary that lurches between Victorian circumlocution and forensic exactitude. Ballard was in exile at Shepperton, a returned colonial; a time-traveller trying to recreate, through cabbalistic rhythms and repetitions, the Proustian excitement of scenes witnessed in childhood. Ballard's lists would operate like unoptioned shooting scripts.

CRASH I 9

Nobody could be expected to act on these instructions, they were magical and potentially threatening to the fabric of the received world. Image and text: Ballard worked in parallel with William Burroughs. Word as a virus of control. The project was one of decontamination: to turn hurt back on itself. To anticipate and expose harm through a series of hermetic exercises, uncensored fugues, improvisations on a narrow menu of effects. The script was a form of spoiled prophecy: cars of the abandoned motorcade Cine-films as group therapy. Patients were encouraged to form a film production unit, and were given full freedom as to choice of subject matter, cast and technique. In all cases explicitly pornographic films were made. Two films in particular were examined: (1) A montage sequence using portions of the faces of (a) Madame Ky, (b) Jacqueline Kennedy (Johnson oath-taking) .... (2) A film of automobile accidents devised as a cinematic version of Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed.

For Ballard the shooting of home movies, amateur pornography in suburban bedrooms (parodic replays of ex-pat theatricals, antidotes to tropical ennui), has been consistently advocated as an energising device. The narcoleptic rentiers of Cocaine Nights are encouraged to break out of their sun-dazed sleep by indulging in tennis, heroin and afternoon skinflicks behind the shaded windows of modernist apartment blocks. Films are like false memories, implanted fantasies. 'Last Year in Marienbad for the 1990s ... with a hint of Pasolini's Theorem.' These chamber performances are unusual: it does matter if there is film in the camera, tape in the camcorder. It's the actors that are of no account, the storyline that is redundant. What's needed is an image strip, raw material that can be processed, reshot, textured until it achieves essence: a new colour. Ballard reworks the familiar tropes: the flyer crossing the private airfield towards an open car, the woman leaning over a balcony, t!le rape witnessed by a complicit chauffeur. But in repetition the meaning changes. The same motifs must be tested, time and again, until they lose their potency and achieve an independent identity. Perhaps that is the

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true project: to kill the messenger, the fool who feels obliged, there's no choice, to keep on writing. oyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our dreams and longings - these diseases of the psyche had now culminated in the most terrifying casualty of the twentieth century: the death of affect.' So Ballard asserts in his introduction to the French edition of Crash. 'The death of affect.' It's not easy to know if the purpose of Ballard's art is to counter a general paralysis of the emotions with metaphors of heat, or whether the author uses his skills to bring about the condition that he fears the most. Does he write his way back towards a tenderness for the world in which he has been abandoned? Or does he save himself by brutalising all human sympathy? There was another solution. It was one that Ballard wasn't always eager to employ. Pass the buck. Write a book whose elements were so seductive, visually and thematically, that some stooge would be persuaded to take over the material and option a film. Of course this film would be tautologous. The more faithful, the more unnecessary. But that has never been an obstacle. There is no-one more dangerous, as Sandy Lieberson (the producer of Per/onnance) told me, with a hint of self-mockery, than an illiterate who loves literature. Hideous abortions have been performed by civilised commissioners who collected cult classics in the same way that they stockpiled unopened first editions. 1fophy make-overs. Novels neutralised by respect. Far better to treat the originals as Burroughs treated Time and Ltfe; hack them into ribbons, overprint the photographs, paste them together in a random order. Deactivate their malign potency. Their fetish for manipulating the future by printing the news before it happens. Tp1~ad, really, that Crash has not been filmed,' Ballard told the [." interviewers from Re/Search in 1982. 'Because I can see myself beginning , to believe the movie version - my own imagination de/onned by the \ damned thing, squeezed into somebody else's mold.' That was always the twist, the Faustian bargain. The movie would promote the author, bring him some financial return on work already done, but his private text (undiluted by publication) would no longer belong to him. If it could be

-----

CRASH 111

effectively translated into this other medium, then it was a failure; because the defi . . 'd novel is that it can exist only on its own jgm.s. Anything that succeeds as a film should have been a film in e first place. Ballard understood that a new reading of Crash would not only affect the general perception of the book, but would actually alter the ordering 0/ the typed words. The book would no longer be ].G. Ballard's Crash. It would be some curious unresolved hybrid. Elizabeth Taylor, the key motivating element, would vanish, and the sexual polarities of his urgent, almost confessional tale would be bent. The fecund dirt around the scars would achieve an unlooked for elegance. Faecal matter would be edited out. And the strange particulars of London that Ballard pressed into a Blakean mapping of his own would dissolve into the netherworld of David Cronenberg's Toronto. And he would love it. He would proclaim this new Crash, which he meticulously referred to in promotional interviews as 'Cronenberg's Crash', as 'a masterpiece'. 'No question about it. I think it's his best film ever, actually.' (As he, with justifiable prejudice, considers Empire 0/ the Sun to be Spielberg's finest hour. 'A remarkable piece of work,' he told me.) Film and book are undeclared rivals, quarrelsome siblings. Here, on the one hand, is a customised version of a superfluous (but affectionately remembered) dream. Here is another artist, a man who has enjoyed, in some senses, a parallel career, sharing responsibility for a work perpetrated by a writer who was, in the opinion of the publisher's reader at Cape, 'beyond psychiatric help'. But, from an equally valid perspective, Ballard, in another mood, declared that 'all great novels are unfilmable, because they're so interiorised'. Interesting dislocations arise as the writer moves between alternate worlds. Ballard remembers Deborah Unger's confusion at Cannes when he introduced her to Claire Walsh, the inspiration for 'Catherine', the female lead in Crash. When I interviewed Ballard in Claire's flat, above a mini-mart in Goldhawk Road, he narrated this episode. 'Claire won't mind me saying this, because I've said it in public: Claire is the basis of the character Catherine. Catherine Ballard. I remember, when I was writing the book, I said, "Shall I call the character

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based on you 'Claire'?" She said, "Urrun, perhaps not." So I called her "Catherine". 'When we met Deborah Unger, when we arrived at Cannes, I said, "Deborah, by the way, this is Claire. Claire is the basis of your character." Poor Deborah Unger, who is a former philosopher, a student of philosophy from Vancouver University, more or less collapsed in panic.' And she was right. How else should she respond to being unexpectedly confronted by an avatar of herself - as a middle-aged Englishwoman, a real presence, without the filtering subterfuges of cinema, make-up, wardrobe, flattering lighting? Both these women, the young Canadian actress, lean and blonde, and the mature Londoner, who had been the inspiration, twenty years earlier, for the heroine in a notorious novel, stood back, at an equal distance, from the role in the film. Claire, as the person who triggered the creation of the fictional character, had become an involuntary co-author. Deborah Unger, through her reading of the role, her mediated performance, reinvented that literary projection. 'Catherine Ballard' didn't belong to either of them. But without them, she had no existence. David Cronenberg, as the franchised film-maker, the asset-stripper of the modernist cult canon, was positioned on the far side of Ballard's novel, facing the author, as Unger faced the woman who was the inspiration for Catherine. He was prepared for it, this time. He'd been here before. First with Stephen King. And then Wtlliam Burroughs. The ultimate challenge. Everybody wanted to pay their respects to The Naked Lunch, the Olympia Press pocketbook of 1959. To honour the man by squirrelling away a first edition (in uncommon dustwrapper); by boasting of how soon after publication they had read it; by dropping in on Bill in Paris, Tangiers, the Bunker on the Lower East Side, or the red frontier cabin in Lawrence, Kansas. To be photographed with the great skull of the century was pretty good. There are albums of these things, Burroughs stiff as a cigar store Indian. But the ultimate trip was collaboration, coauthorship, to do the film of the book. What this means, if you pull it off, is a licence to rewrite The Naked Lunch. All the heads were up for it: Anthony Balch and the rest,

CRASH

the latL'Comers straining Balch hrought

Fin'. HI'

to

to

pastiche the repetitive, hypnotic style that

his Burroughs fllms (\Fi!/iam BIIYI {/ Parrol, '[r)wcI:I OpCIl

('111- UpI. ChoI/I al

No ') (Pari\), Bil! am! 7rJllY). All the Hoppers

and Fondas (with their pitch-it-to-Corman parasites) saw Burroughs as the ult in1
C/()d.:ll'or/.::

Ora".~e.

The NaJ:ed LlIJlch. Michael McClure's Thc Bcard

(seen ,ll the Roval Court in a Iwper-kinetic production, directed hy Rip

'Illl'll l. Michael Moorcock's 'fhc Filla! Programme - and, in due course, Cri{Ib. Tm a believer in asset-stripping for film's sake,' Lieberson told me. 'But lthink vou have to know what it is you are making. There's no way you can make an honest lilm .•m honest adaptation of CraIh, and place it in thL' mainstrL'am. OncL' crossing O\'L'r. Spooks

III

spox

\'OU

YOU

fall into thL' trap of trying to do that, the

arL' nL'ithL'r satisfying the purists who are dL'voted

Cronenber~J

BurrourJI1S

~nd

to

Peler Weller on lhe sel 01 The Naked Lunch

13

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the novel, the literary work, nor are you going to satisfy a general audience who want to see something more accessible. Something where they can identify with the characters and situations. So it's either one or the other. To fall into that netherland is to court disaster. The adaptation is such an attraction for film-makers, because we always have the pretensions of wanting to do something of a cult or classic nature. So what's the easiest way to do it? You take a cult or classic novel.' Lieberson's attitude was retrospective. He'd been one of the first to try to bring Crash into the mainstream. He'd talked to Nic Roeg about it, as a linear successor to Per/onnance; another attempt (doomed) to surf the zeitgeist. 'I can't remember who actually gave me the book to read. It was one of the things I got and I put aside. I finally got around to it six months later and read it. And I was absolutely captivated by it, it was brilliant. That was the first one of Ballard's books that I'd read. It was unconnected to anything else, it terms of literature. I never did get it, the option. But I wanted it.' Lieberson also wanted A Clockwork Orange and commissioned a screenplay from the photographer Michael Cooper (who Marianne Faithfull recalls 'hovering over the entire scene with single-lens-reflexeye' at the Courtfield Road flat that Brian Jones shared with Anita Pallenberg - as a kind of unsponsored rehearsal for Per/onnance). The idea, according to Lieberson, 'was to make A Clockwork Orange for, like, £400,000. Mick Jagger was going to be in it. It was one of those .... Too much cocaine and cannabis, probably, but it carne to naught.' As did The Beard, another potential Jagger vehicle. This time the money was in place, the script written, when Jagger pulled out. 'That may have been a good thing,' Lieberson admits. 'It may have been one of my disasters.' Up there alongside those other mistranslated cult classics, The Final Programme and Julien Temple's inflationary account of Colin MacInnes' Absolute Beginners. Essentially, this counter-cultural traffic, cult to mainstream, depended on one man. The @ms that got made were the ones that Jagger approved: Per/onnance, Ned Kelly, One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil).

CRASH I 15

Presumably the part of Vaughan came too late in the cycle to have much appeal, and the James Ballard character in Crash was too passive: he didn't have any songs. Cronenberg, at the time of all this hustling of subterranean masterpieces, visited London with prints of his early films. In 1969 THE Paul Buck, poet and performance ASSASSINATION artist, noveliser of The Honeymoon OF KENNEDY CONSIDEREDAS Killers and putative noveliser of A DOWNHILL Performance, was living in Stanley MOTOR RACE I ";"~~;:1 Gardens, Notting Hill. He recalls G BALLARD BiI Cronen berg crashing upstairs with Norman Snider (with whom he would write Dead Ringers). Buck, who then worked as a reader for Anthony Cheetham, touting such properties as William Burroughs J nr' s Speed and the novels of Chandler Brossard, found himself guiding Cronenberg down to the South Bank, where it was hoped someone at the BFI/NFT would screen these unsettling novice efforts. Buck remembers the show-reels as Stereo and Crimes a/the Future (which included Snider in the cast). Both these films, incidentally, were made on 35mm. So, in terms of hefting cans around town, Buck might have confused later viewings with a privileged glimpse of Trans/er and From the Drain. Cronenberg, it was already clear, had ambitions to write (as something more than author, or adapter, of his own productions). He was deeply influenced by Burroughs and Nabokov. (Strange how Lolita, a novel of the road, travel, motels, movement across America, would be shot by Stanley Kubrick in England, as a sequence of pearly-grey interiors, while Crash, whose psychogeographical field was posited entirely on the London perimeter, the Heathrow pentagram that Ballard knew so well, would be shot in Toronto.) Ballard's slory in the March 1967 issue of New Worlds

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So when it happened, and Cronenberg secured (through Jeremy Thomas) the opportunity to come up with his own interpretation of The Naked Lunch, it was like one of those moments of fusion that he had exploited in so many of his films: man into fly, twin into twin, or, most spectacularly, the distant viewing brothers at the climax of Scannen, as they pop and fizzle and boil into a single molten entity. 'I had to fuse myself with Burroughs in order to bring something of The Naked Lunch to the screen,' Cronenberg told Chris Rodley. 'If Burroughs dies I'll write his next book.' That is the conceit: the disciple, intimately absorbed by a text, becomes its author. His script, Cronenberg boasted, was 'a lovely fusion of Burroughs and me'. (Had he understood what 'fusion' with Burroughs might involve? A lemur-head peeking out of a talking asshole? A helmeted skull that represented the evil spirit of American capitalism? The status of a ventriloquised ghost? A pariah dog gifted with language?) 'We're so amazingly in sync.' The film-maker, in his privileged state, years after the event, gets to rewrite and revise the book. Authorship without responsibility. There's no question of appreciating whatever went into the original composition, the complex process of sifting autobiographical episodes, grudges and obsessions, into fictional form. Working and reworking. None of those primitive anxieties affects the adapter. Cronenberg breaks the novel down - and decides that, as everyone else who attempted the task has discovered, The Naked Lunch is not, and never can be, a film. ('There are unfilmable novels,' Ballard said, 'and 1 think The Naked Lunch is one of them. There's no narrative structure. It's a series of skits. Burroughs told me he'd had many, many offers to film The Naked Lunch, but he didn't feel they did justice to the novel. He was getting older and he probably felt it was time to get the film made.') The questionable solution Cronenberg arrived at was to take the process a stage further back, and to raid the author's raw material, his life: as Burroughs had exploited it in other works and as it was reflected, with dubious accuracy, in a number of biographies. Journalism, recollections of times past, and fictions forged by Burroughs to escape the potency of those events, were conflated into a seamless construct.

CRASH I 17

What Jeremy Thomas and Cronenberg had, in truth, purchased was the Naked Lunch franchise. The name, the marketing opportunities. The right to align themselves alongside one of the century's misogynist classics. Such a ploy was not necessary with Crash. The structure of the book was much more straightforward. It was an extended short story, or novella, charg~n intensity of vision that threatened to unbalance our comfortable sense of the known world. A work of heat and prophecy ihat~~~m~d,Tike the best prose, to write itSeIf, to come into eXistenceexactly as, or just before, its author transcribed it. (Michael Moorcock, an important associate of Ballard in the days of the magazine New Worlds, reckons that Ballard is primarily a writer of terse or compacted fictions. 'He's a short-story writer in the way that Stevenson was a shortstory writer. And, in a way, he's a painter. Images. Layering. That style is clunky, but it works: ''At d~;n when the flamingoes wheel, the funny little guy would walk down to the lagoon and study the geometry, an alphabet of this and that." He's playing the old standards. To me, Crash was an extension of that.') The narrative skeleton is as plain, bones through papery flesh, as a storyboard: that was part of the attraction for film-makers. Crash was flush with retinal assaults: 'Her uterus pierced by the heraldic beak of the manufacturer's medallion, his semen emptying across the luminescent dials.' Ballard watches rainbow spectra in oil slicks, foregrounds sharplyfocused details that bring the set, rather than the characters (who remain austerely robotic), to life. 'A seam of her gingham frock had been repaired with a few loops of black cotton.' As the stOlY progresses through a sequence of Sadean couplings, our senses are seduced by sights, sounds, smells ~veyed with the hyper-real clarity of a dream that ~ IS recalled but not experIenced. A borrowed dream that belongs to Ernst ~r Delvaux: 'geranimum-flavoured smoke'. Cronenberg, at first reading, looking for a project with which to follow The Naked Lunch, did not respond to Ballard's novel. He found the language 'cold, clinical'. There were no 'passion words'. Going back to it he discovered, as with Burroughs, affinities with his own work and

1B I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

obsessions. 'Vaughan in Crash does seem very much like my own creatures, who were emerging at the same time Ballard was writing his creatures.' Cronenberg and Ballard were co-conspirators. Burroughs was a death's-head elder who threatened to swallow up Cronenberg's creativity, dejuice his spine. Dealing with Ballard there was no need to investigate the author's life. It was already, all too clearly, visible. Teasingly, in the Guardian conversation with Ballard at the National Film Theatre, Cronenberg suggested that he 'might have to come to Shepperton and talk about your childhood and your past'. But Ballard had already anticipated this impertinence, the whinging of literary snoops and media studies quislings, by recomposing his life in Empire 0/ the Sun and The Kindness 0/ Women. Underwritten by Spielberg and the cultural brokers of the establishment, Ballard's 'secret' history as the subversive hermit pornographer of the suburbs, the poet of Autogeddon, was subtly recomposed. To be unknown and undescribed is dangerous. So Ballard got his retaliation in first by crafting, with all his long-practised skills, the fiction of an autobiography. The elements were exquisitely calculated: exoticism (catching the vogue for travel writing), nostalgia (lost colonies), war, the child. Unwary readers persuaded themselves that now they understood; the traumas of the Japanese camp, the surrealism of empty swimming pools, the fat American cars cushioning a detached viewer on his journey back into a past that never happened. In the afterglow of this achievement, the humanising of a profoundly misanthropic oeuvre that had never been contained in genre reservations, Ballard was increasingly visible. The dystopian trilogy of novels put out by Cape in the 70s (Crash, Concrete Island, High-Rise) could be safely optioned as potential film projects. They would, of course, be in danger of being castrated by respect; the venom which Ballard used as a 'fertilising' device would be interpreted as satire. The love of madness, rage, the charge towards millennial meltdown that Ballard had espoused and incubated, could be heritaged as a 'warning'. The frantic, loveless coupling of damned souls would be glossed as an 'existential romance'. Something out of David Lynch on an off day. 'It has to be a cautionary tale,' Cronenberg remarked. 'If not, it's a psychopathic statement.'

CRASH I 19

Cronenberg, by word-processing the script (often with the very sentences that Ballard used when he typed the novel), with transposed descriptions of character and setting, finds himself becoming the sole author of 'Cronenberg's Crash'. It's a solution worthy of Borges. The S,lme text, copied out afresh, acquires a new author. The film is the posthumous dream of a book that no longer exists - because future reprints will carry a cover image of James Spader straddled by Holly IIunter. The credits on the back will be film credits: executive producers, co-producers, costume designer (Denise Cronenberg), and all. The actors in this production seem, in their precisely articulated lethargy, like retrochic zombies. They aren't wearing their own clothes - clothes have no importance in Ballard's world of fetishised uniforms - but they flaunt colour-coded disguises, chosen to react sympathetically with the backdrops against which they pose and move. When these ghosts speak, they do not appear to be reciting lines learnt from a script, but struggling to recall the dialogue of the rapidly-sketched characters who resemble them; characters in a novel they mayor may not have read years before.

Scanners

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'Why invent character, when I can simply use my own name and give the novel a degree of honesty which would be absent otherwise?' Ballard asks. Cronenberg, with a wink, suggested that Ballard should rechristen Vaughan as 'Cronenberg'. The fusion has occurred in myth and memory. The struggle to evade the consequences of unbridled imagination. Cronenberg, an intelligent and articulate man, is well aware of the risk. 'Burroughs says that you must allow yourself to create characters and situations that could be a danger to you in every way. Even physically. He in fact insists that writing be recognised and accepted as a dangerous act. A writer must not be tempted to avoid writing the truth just because he knows that what he creates might come back to haunt him. That's the nature of the bargain you make with your writing machine.' So Crash, like The Naked Lunch, becomes a film of rewriting; a film that shows everything except the man at the typewriter. It's a loop: sex acts arrive, like London buses, in threes; balconies, six-lane expressways; solitary aircraft like detached quotations from a Surrealist poem. J.G. Ballard fades, williJ:lEly taking on the ro~()!"spectator, voyeur at ~ . spectacle of his own making. And Cronenbe;gi~;e~eale~t last, -;;'-S the par~digm-;;rilie auth;;r:- the man who produces books without having to write them. 'How do you stop the voices in my head?' asks Cameron Vale in Scanners. Easy. You let them out on to film.

CRASH I 21

2 Liquid Mirror: Ballard Dissolves to Cronenberg The next step was carried out in a film studio -

I learned to talk and

think backwar:d.

WS. Burroughs, The 50ft Machine This other Crash, the future film, haunts the composition of Ballard's novel. It was a necessary event that would, in carrying the story away from its original landscape, release it into a loop, a vortex of time., The . nov~ would begin at the precise point where the film ends. When Ballard transcribed his urgent account, the formula having been perfected (first by a gallery filled with crashed cars, then by the taught sequences of The Atrocity Exhibition), he was straining to envision Cronenberg's distant analogue. Or so it seems. Cronenberg's customised artefact was always ahead of him. It was a given, an inevitability. Ballard was describing, through an act of mediumship, fuelled by all the standard writerly demons (panic, rage, alcohol, bad TV), the high-budget shadowplay that his obsessions deserved. His characters who were always underdescribed, spare as line drawings in a graphic novel, would be fleshed. Catherine Ballard, who exists in her physical gestures, captured as if by a behaviourist scientist, is revealed - to the author - as Deborah Unger. Ballard's gratitude to Cronenberg is overwhelming. The Crash film is 'a masterpiece'. It 'gQ§ mJ!Cb bll:tber' tl:J,an the book. B'ut how can this b_~m is a digest, certain elements at:lQ SHe plots.m the , !0verba.~Qe,t:nEmOy_ed.~.tk chron91g~, altered nu~ Elizabeth _Tay!Qcdntbcra.sh plot Ms-g9ne. Nothing is ad.Qci. But, for Ballard, less becomes more. The tighter version carries the (re)viewer 'further'.

r- ----:-\

Further out. Eros and Thanatos:. sex-deat~. 'Vaughan died yesterday in his last car crash.' Vaughan is at th'eheartO£ Ballard's story The 'existential '--"

--

romance' is between James Ballard and Robert Vaughan, that is the thrust of the narrative: a psychosexual alliance between the passive, voyeuristic Ballard and the deranged and driven Vaughan, with his prophetic tattoos and his programme of assassination/suicide.

--------

22 I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

Vaughan and the airport hooker

Catherine and James Ballard

Cronenberg's film, ostensibly more conservative, realigns this relationship to foreground a growing sympathy, through Sadean gamesmanship, between Ballard and his wife. The novel holds Vaughan back, in order to build him up. He is glimpsed, spoken of by the narrator, seen at a distance. The old Harry Lime trick. Our imaginations are tricked into filling the vacuum. But Cronenberg isn't interested in such well-established devices. His film, more than any other of recent times, scrupulously avoids drama. Everything is at the same temperature, the cool, carefully moderated

CRASH I 23

language that he found so unappealing when he read Ballard's novel for the first time. Crash, as it is staged by Cronenberg, becomes the mirror image of Ballard's novel (which is already a revision or justification of an earlier, more fragmented original). Suddenly the project has a disputed authorship, two systems of time working together. Ballard heritaged his urgent poetic to procure an account that would be seductive enough to win a new mainstream readership, and, more importantly, a new translator: the person who would make the film. That was always the hidden agenda. Immortality. Immortality through anonymity. 'Immortality,' Burroughs asserted, 'is the only goal worth striving for.' 'To become immortal. And then to die,' proclaimed Jean-Pierre Melville (in the role of the writer Parvulesco) in Breathless, when he was interviewed at Orly airport by Jean Seberg. (The airport is the perfect Ballardian locus for such pretentious dialogue. Neutral ground. The 'not here' at the edge of the city. The launch pad for time travel- where, in one of Ballard's favourite films, Chris Marker's La Jetee, a small boy is granted a vision of his death. 'This succession of disconnected images is a perfect means of projecting the quantified memories and movements through time,' Ballard wrote in a review for New Worlds. The rest of his piece avoids comment and exposition and is itself a recreation of the film's narrative as a procession of frozen instants.) , When Vaughan, the gum -chewing crash buff, restages James Dean's fatal accident as performance art, Cronenberg has him echo Melville. (In the novel this event has a very different feel. It's a stock car derby of the London fringes; a lowlife, furtive night out that belongs in the proletarian fiction of James Curtis or Robert Westerby.) But Cronenberg'.LVilJJghJln is a charismatic prophet, the forerunner of a millennial suicide cult. He works his audience, clutching the black handmike in masturbatory excitement. He is that most dangerous of creatures, the real fake. His spiel is double edge, laced with teasing nudges at other films, earlier cultural projects. 'A lonely stretch of California two-lane blacktop, Route 466.' He is summoning the ghosts, making covert allusion to his elective antecedents: Monte Hellman's ---

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24 I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

amphetamine-gobbling odyssey with Warren Oates at the wheel, all those existential punks gunning down lost highways. Vaughan is rhapsodising a death cult, a paranoid freemasonry of self-destroying speed freaks. Salinas is namechecked as 'a dusty town in northern California', its relevance to the mythology of John Steinbeck ignored. Vaughan knows just what he's doing. 'That was glib, wasn't it? "James Dean died of a broken neck and became immortal." But I couldn't resist.' He has fulfilled Melville's prescription. Vaughan is James Ballard's guide, leading him back into the complex mysteries of the city. He belongs to an earlier, more troubled period in the writer's life. He's anti-suburb. He doesn't dream, he acts. 'Increasingly I was convinced that Vaughan ~ai proJ~tio-nof my own fantasies and obsessions, and that in some way I had let him down.' The film will redress the balance. Elias Koteas acts with his mouth agape, a fly-catcher (like Renfield, the poor lunatic in Dr Seward's asylum, in Bram Stoker's Dracula). He's oral. He chews, chomps, gnaws on Cronenberg's dialogue as if it were a fatty knuckle. Picking up a prostitute in the airport car-park, he fishes inside her mouth, hooks out the gum. 'I don't want you blowing it up my urethra.' He talks all the time (often as spokesman for the author, summarising extracts from Ballard's novel). And as he talks, he becomes Ballard, doing the thing that the Shepperton author is never happy to do: he gives a public reading. He's jabbering to himself in a weird echo chamber. 'It's the future, Ballard, and you're already part of it. For the first time, a benevolent psychopathology beckons towards us. For example, the car crash is a fertilising event rather than a destructive event - a liberation of sexual energy that mediates the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form. To fully understand that, and to live that ... that is my project.' In other words, Vaughan paraphrases Jean-Pierre Melville. And Ballard achieves his ultimate goal: 'I was visiting, incognito, the place of my own death.'

a

------

CRASH I 25

3 The Other Crash Films

1 Don't worry, Mr Cornelius, you're fixed up destinywise. Drift, drift ....

Michael Moorcock, The Final Programme While Ballard was composing the earliest Crash routines, the sequences that would feature in The Atrocity Exhibition, he was also - always the working stiff and family provider - drafting the script that would allow him his only independent screen credit. When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, written and directed by Val Guest for Hammer Films. From 'a story by ].B. Ballard'. One grudging acknowledgment and they get his name wrong. No wonder he was happy, in better times, to wash his hands of the whole business. Sell the property and let the potential exploiters go to the devil in their own time. Ballard would make himself available for the PR, before scuttling rapidly back to his desk in Shepperton. Hack work on somebody else's property is almost as unfulfilling as turning over one of your novels to have it butchered, and idiot-proofed, to the point where it contradicts all the elements you took so much trouble assembling. (See Michael Moorcock's correspondence with Ballard, Letters/rom Hollywood. Having The Final Programme, for which he had provided a perfectly effective script, inflated into a camp monstrosity by Robert Fuest, a set-designer unhinged by Wellesian pretensions, was bad enough. 'Fuest was a strange character,' the film's producer, Sandy Lieberson, told me. 'From the first week on, what he would do would be to lock himself in his office at lunchtime. Actually lock the door and not take any calls. He couldn't be disturbed. And he would sit in there, playing around with the script. And drinking. And he would come back in the afternoon with a new idea. It was a very unhappy experience making that film.' But worse was to follow when Moorcock found himself exiled to Hollywood, drudging - too fast for his own good - through some Arthurian flimflam for Irving Kershner, a director who started out with the modest Stakeout on Dope Street but was

26 I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

subsequently destroyed by numbers, the production-line multiples of Bonds and Star \%rs and Robocops.) The problem comes when film-makers insist on conflating a work of fiction with the author's biography: the kind of thing that happened to Malcolm Lowry. A flyblown impersonation by Albert Finney in Under the Volcano. Or the square-jawed Maurice Roeves as a prototype for James Joyce in Joseph Strick's Ulysses. So many great books have drowned in respect. Inevitably, as Sandy Lieberson made clear, the production companies closed in on Ballard. On the bushy-tailed subversives of New Worlds. Moorcock's gender-jumping, rock hero assassin, Jerry Cornelius, should have been typecasting for Jagger: the logical successor to Performance. But logic has no truck with cinema. The moment has always passed before the bounty hunters recognise what's happening out there; novels appear between three and seven years too soon for their own good. Film is a posthumous art. A question of cruising the obituaries. All the hotshots wanted to nick Crash, to exploit the paranoid/visionary poetic: to twin their names with Ballard on the rolling credits. The film-maker and novelist Chris Petit recognised this, when he was wondering how Ballard's work might translate. 'The thing about most of Ballard's books is that they do float. They obviously have an options currency. Bruce Robinson did a script of High-Rife. It's obviously a way of smart agents incorporating slightly maverick talents like Heathcote Williams and Robinson into the mainstream. Robinson's script for High-Rise went the rounds and everyone said it was terribly good. "Very talented writer, but we're not going to make it." End of story.' Screenwriters prove themselves to be intelligent readers, they have a documented relationship with a title that is always going to be impossible to commission. Everybody can safely talk up their astonishing versions of The Naked Lunch or Crash in the certain knowledge that nobody is ever going to be stupid enough to make them. These were always antiprojects, alternative credits, sources of rumour - until Jeremy Thomas and Cronenberg came along and blew it. Heathcote Williams was a good name to start the roll-call of those who didn't make Crash. From his first book, The Speakers (1964), a

CRASH I 27

sympathetic hearkening to the voices of Hyde Park, through plays that were whispered of as future AI Pacino projects, to glimpses here and there as actor or presence, Williams seemed to be a person who existed to be mythologised. His shtick was the unexpected, the reappearance in a new guise: Jean Shrimpton's lover, line-drawings for the Transatlantic Review, the man who talked to dolphins. Williams and Nic Roeg: that would be the package. The Crash of the Don 'f Look Now era (because the perception of any literary property changes with each decade) was an attractive prospect. But it was never going to happen. London as a fragmented, time-shifting psychogeography: Bad Timing on the Westway. (That's the first Crash film, the pipe-dream.) Ballard remembers being 'informally approached' by a theatre director, who had been a friend of his agent. Heathcote Williams was invited to write a script. 'I don't think anything ever happened to it.' There were, as always, rumours. The option lapsed, the title page was torn from the script and a new one, with some sensational catchphrase, was substituted. Perhaps it's still out there. Perhaps it surfaced on television in Mexico City. Because television is where Ballard was doomed to drift. Crash on 1V? It sounds impossible, but so many Ballard fans, Royal College of Art and National Film School students (kids like Sam Scoggins who persuaded Ballard to appear in a 24-minute account of The Unlimited Dream Company), were infiltrating the system. (Scoggins' film addressed two questions. First: 'How can you make an adequate picture of someone?' Second: 'The way in which the imagination/film transforms "reality".' Ballard replied: 'I'll give you every help I can, as long as I don't have to do anything. I don't want to stand on the roofs of multi-storey car-parks or drive cars ... you've got to film it here.') Francophile Situationists from Cambridge were on the move. Lacan spouting expoets, card-carrying media buffs, indoctrinated by the Frankfurt school, stormed the institutes (BBC, BFI, ICA). Ballard's novels couldn't be directly translated - but they could appear as free-floating essays, talking heads and dim landscapes raked by (hired for the day) Steadicam.

28 I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

I found myself appearing alongside Ballard in one of these efforts, directed by Mary Harron (of I Shot Andy Warhol fame) for BBC2's culture-bite Late Show. The short film purported to be an essay on Canary Wharf, then still in its early stages. Harron, given more time than arts 1V usually required, came up with an alternate account of Ballard's High-Rise; in which the author, whose novel was rightly seen as prophetic, was able to file his own retrospective programme notes. It was like watching a man read out the jacket blurb for something published around fifteen years earlier. (I was the low relief, mumbling apocalyptic nonsense in a riverside dive.) But you see how it works. Cult literature is hyped - by the readers, the enthusiasts, the upwardly mobile directors - to the point where they slip it, by indirect means, into the late night schedules. The talk of how impossible it is to sell Ballard to cinema is redundant; because, in effect, swathes of Ballardian material were being grafted on to television in disguised forms. On 12 February 1971, two years before the novel was published, the Radio Times announced, for 8.30pm on BBC2, Crash'. To be introduced by James Mossman. 'For science fiction writer ].G. Ballard, the key image of the present day is the man in the motor car. It is the image that represents the dreams and fantasies that all too easily can turn into nightmares. In a film for Review BALLARD explains the beauty and fascination of this potentially deadly technology.' Friday night, prime time, and here is Ballard at the wheel, cruising the Westway with soap queen Gabrielle Drake, in a trailer for an unwritten book. The film preceded the novel, as the photograph preceded the film. (Ballard had placed collaged images in the magazine Ambit, like advertisements without a product, promos for films which did not exist. 'In her face the diagram of bones / forms a geometry of murder. After / Freud's exploration within the psyche / it is now the outer world of reality / which must be quantified and eroticised.' The bondage shot that runs with this text is titled: A Neural Interval. A I G. Ballard Production. Ballard as his own producer, his own studio.) The interestingly named Harley Cokliss was the director. Cokliss made the first Crash!. He was twenty-five years, five prime ministers and

CRASH

;1Il

l':\CLlIl1;ltion mark. ahead of Cronenbcrg. (There was another Crash.'

hdlll'e the 70s \\'LTe out. Charles Band directed a horror programmer in which .Jose Ferrer tried to kill his wife. played hy Sue Lyon, in a car accidcnt. Or, re;ld it another way, 'I{lldouse-Lautrec snuffs Lolita.) [ wondLTed how the Cokliss film had come about. 'It was loc/im' the hook was written,' Ballard told mc, The film was h;lscd on of

1m'

intcrest in the car crash - as it emerged through the pagcs

II,,. ,llmeil)' /:'xhi/Jilio/l, It was made in the early 70s, With Gabrielle

Drakl', Shc was quite a serious actress in hlT earl\- days, hut then she mO\'l'lloll into Cm,I,lm"ds or something, Shc was vel'\' swcct. I met her a fcw timl's on thc set, as it were, chasing around multi-storey car-parks in

\'\'a t fo I'd, 'Therl' arc an enormous numher of multi-storey car-parks in \'\f;lliord, I disC(l\'ered, It's the Mecca of the multi-storey car-park, And thcI,'rc quitc ornate, some of them, They played a special roll' in The

,llmo/r l:\hi/J/lio/l. They were iconic structures, I was interested in the

J G B"II;,,(I

III d

PUllllCily photo (or Ihe BBC Crash'

29

30 I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

gauge of psychoarchitectonics. The multi-storey car-park and its canted floors, as a depository for cars, seemed to let one into a new dimension. They obviously decided they had to beautify these structures. They covered them in strange trellises. It was a biza"e time.' And a bizarre film. Ballard and Gabrielle Drake, sister of the mythologised singer/songwriter Nick Drake. Colonials all. Ex-pats, with memories of tropical splendour, marooned among the concrete atolls of Watford. The Drakes had grown up in Burma. Gabrielle's parents had been evacuated from Rangoon to India when the Japanese invaded. She recalls her father composing 'an entire comic operetta about an Englishman who was based out East'. (Ballard, paying his respects to the earlier film, used the name Gabrielle for the character in Crash who would be played by Rosanna Arquette.) It is especially strange to experience Cokliss' Crash! for the first time (in one of the viewing theatres at the BF!) after seeing Cronenberg's @m. The parallels are disquieting. The television film subverts its more impressive successor. It stands in relation to Cronenberg's Crash as the Goldhawk Road does to the suburbs of Toronto. It looks older than the 70s. It looks as if Ballard did these drives with Gabrielle Drake as a rehearsal for the book. The unwieldy close-ups of Detroit bumpers, the dull sheen of the bonnets, remind us that this is television. A world reconstructed in a handmirror. Slow, exploratory tracks across curved wings; the number plate, EMK 51]. Ballard's in an off-white (morningafter-being-released-from-the-drunk-tank-in-Haiti) suit, with a shifty polo shirt. He displays, without shame, the chubby, anachronistic sideburns of a time-traveller who has escaped from an episode of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). A man warped by daylight. Gabrielle Drake sports a foulard at her throat. They ought to be driving out to the club for a hand of bridge, but they have an unexplained assignation at a multi-storey carpark in Watford. Ballard's voice, the sound levels rising and falling like a flight of starlings, delivers selections from his novel: a schizophrenic buzz in the head. And the grey road unfurls. There's some crash footage but no crashes. 'Where did Harley Cokliss come from?' I asked Ballard.

CRASH I 31

'Oh, he was an American who was over here. He made a number of documentaries for the BBe. Then he went to the States. He made a thriller with Burt Reynolds and one or two other films. I don't know what he's doing now.'

2 The decline of this country, I think, is largely attributable to the fact that we have the best television in the world.

J.G. Ballard Chris Petit, who made the next alternate Crash, a short film for The Moving Picture Show in 1990, does know what happened to Cokliss. He saw the exiled American the day before I interviewed him. They passed each other, without pausing to initiate a conversation, on the corner of Frith Street and Soho Square. Petit spoke of this non-meeting in terms of body language: how we manage a repertoire of shrugs, nods and halfwaves, to signal the fact that the moment has passed for conversation. Old acquaintances are now, definitively, in different scripts. Petit's London novel, Robinson, opens with a Ballard quote: 'Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.' Fiction has always had a problem with coincidences, over-contrived dramas, lost letters; but life is not so fastidious. Start your investigation anywhere; novel in one hand, phone in the other, and within three calls you'll meet the person who has been there, done it all, before you turned the first page. As soon as I began my interview with Petit the connection with Cokliss came out. 'Harley,' Petit told me, 'was one of those figures hanging around in the 70s. He was always on the verge of making it as a director of exploitation films, and subsequently had a very erratic career. He's American, but he's lived in Queen's Park for twenty years. He did a kind of Roger Corman film in New Zealand which Chris Menges shot. Then, round about '79/'80, I did a treatment for him, a story which eventually became Chinese Boxes. I bought it back off him when he failed to do anything with it. That was in 1984.'

32 I SFI MODERN CLASSICS

'Did Cokliss have any status as a director?' 'Not really, no. He had connections with Corman. And he'd done this @m called Battletruck. I don't know where his Crash thing comes from. It was very early in his career. 'I discovered it when I was doing the Ballard piece for Moving Picture Show. I came across it in the BBC library and looked at it, not realising that it was by Harley. And I thought this a rather bizarre piece. I don't know where it came from or who set it up. I was amazed that Harley had read Crash, because he's not a big reader. Although he never particularly had a career, he was a major hustler. He always had things on the go and always had stuff that was supposedly in development. I think the last @m he directed was Dream Demon.' Petit, by now, was into what he calls 'the library years', sitting it out in Willesden, putting together a Soho bibliography for his novel Robinson. He'd given up on films and drifted into television. Ballard was the crucial influence. Invited to make a short essay for The Moving Picture Show, he picked on Crash. His film can be seen as a more sophisticated reading of the earlier Cokliss attempt. The same driving around the perimeter, sky-reflecting modernist hulks, dummy accidents; Cokliss revamped by Chris Marker. Petit's own voice, echoing Ballard. The quintessentially English pitch of the ministry man breaking bad news from Belfast. 'The voice on the other end of the phone in a spy film,' the critic Chris Darke has called it. But how far back did Petit's interest in Ballard go? 'I'd read Crash quite late. I'd read Concrete Island in the 70s. And High-Rise. But I'd not read Crash. I read it not long before I started my novel, Robinson. I got a rather cryptic message from Ballard saying: "Beg, steal or borrow some money and make Crash into a movie.'" 'Was this after you'd done the Moving Picture Show?' I asked. 'Did you know him before you worked on that film?' 'No, I didn't. I think it must have been after that. It struck me when I read Crash that the only way you could do it was as an 8mm film. You could have lots of different forms and textures. Once you translate it into the conventional production schedule, it becomes unworkable.'

CRASH I 33

'Was the Moving Picture Show film your idea, or did they approach you?' 'They approached me. They said: "Oh, we want something." I went back to them and said, ''I'd like to do a piece on the cinema of J.G. Ballard." And they said, "Oh, but nothing's been made of his." I said, "Well, that's exactly the point." 'I hadn't really done any documentaries and was quite naive in that I was assigned a producer and thought the obvious point to start was to sit down in a viewing room and view as much crash material as possible. 'And then I got a message: "Michael Jackson wants to know who is being interviewed." And I realised that the whole thing was built around the pillar of the interview. 'They said, "Well, who are you going to talk to?" And I said, "I don't really want to talk to anyone." In the end I kind of agreed to it. I said, "What I really want to do is some stuff with the car and the camera and the Westway, and to go and look at Ballard's locations." But I got cajoled into talking to someone. So I said, ''I'll talk to Bruce Robinson." I just never used it. We had to talk to Cronenberg.' It was in Petit's short film that Ballard and Cronenberg began their double act, their voices interwoven as they took it in turn to read an extract from Crash. 'One was sharing a landscape that I instinctively understood,' Petit said. 'When I read Crash I thought, "Oh, I could do this." There is that section which is read out by Ballard and Cronenberg, a very architectural sentence. The amiable saunter of Frances Waring, bored wife of my partner, through the tumstiles of the local supermarket, the domestic wrangles of our well-todo neighbours in our apartment house, all the hopes and fancies of this placid suburban enclave, drenched in a thousand infidelities, faltered before the solid reality of the motorway embankments, with their constant and unswerving geometry, and before the finite areas of the car-park aprons.

It was just that one very good sentence. I thought: "this encapsulates all my interests." It just took off from there as far as I was concerned.'

34 I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

Ballard, as responsive as ever to films derived from his work, recognised that Petit might be the man for the Crash adaptation. 'We toyed with the idea,' Petit said. 'And I think we could do it now, but it wasn't possible then. I think you could do it with a Sharp. A mixture of Hi-8 and 8mm.' The way that, in the end, Petit made his Ballard film was by writing it. As a novel. Robinson. (Martin Amis, Will Self and Alex Garland have all acknowledged their debt to Ballard. Self's South Bank Show presented itself, quite nakedly, as a Ballardian road movie. But Petit has the surest grasp on the poisonous otherness of the suburbs.) Robinson is a direct descendant of Crash, an intelligent critique of Ballard's fiction; at times it is virtually a pastiche. 'Dreaming of experiments in clinical sex with her spreadeagled in a surreal landscape of fractured mirrors that reproduced her carefully displayed genitalia to infinity.' That's Petit. Making a 'montage landscape' out of Ballard, Fassbinder and Orson Welles (as Harry Lime). The Welles who claimed, retrospectively, that he had revised Graham Greene's dialogue. But Ballard could also sound like Petit: 'Enlarged by the lens, the movements of their bodies resemble the matings of clouds .... When they come, our orgasms seem to take place in the air above the bed.' As we metamorphose into the writers we admire most, adopting their favourite tropes, so are they, in their turn, infected by our admiration. They pleasure us with the design of some small sentence, long before they are aware of our existence. Robinson, with its night drives, its willed derangement, its characters who constantly slip across the border from fiction to documentary, is the metropolitan version of Crash; Crash turned inside out, so that the trajectory arches from city heat towards the suburbs (as a no longer viable reservation), Ballard remains out on the fringe, on the balcony overlooking the expressway, watching the westward drift of traffic. Mirrors, wheels, the road. Kathy Acker, writing on Cronenberg's Crash, could just as well have been summarising every film that Petit has made. 'Poetry weighs on the narrative until its story is almost nonexistent. '

CRASH

I lad Petit, I wondl'rl'd, Wrilll'n Ro/?iwml as an hOllllllage to IhlLtrll; 'No. I thought th,ll through my lilml\"dio UII, I had ,lCCl'SS to that tl'l"rito!"\'. I Clll1cl'i\'l'd of thl' novd as much morl' static than Crtl.lh, If I'd hL'L'n cOl1sciousil' awarl' of it, it wouldn't havL' workL'd as wdl. But looking hack it Sl'l'ms c1l'ar that it is a kind of translation of Crash. '\,\'hL'11 I read Crash I was not actually looking to wrill' a novl'l. I'd '1IW'1IS foul1d thL' prohlL'm with reading a lot of English proSl' , like rL"lding i'vLlrtin Amis, is that you think "I can't do that and it doesn't pan icuLu'l\' intl'l"L'st me." But Crash sl'l'ml'd transparently N eo-Realist. "Oh. I C
'It was thL' fact that Ballard didn't write particularly well that il1ll'l"L'stL'd 1llL'. Ilis style had a /latness and none of thL' literary 4ualilies I 'Issociatl' with Eng Lit. So it was like finding soml'one with a movil' sl'nsihilil\·. I \\',IS i'ascinatl'd hy thl' fact that the guy was an editor. Thl'rl' \\',IS ,I lot of stull culll'd from movil's. And I thought onl' could actually

35

36 I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

borrow this back and try to do a novel which is as cinematic as Crash, but actually as unfilmable as Crash. That was my idea.' 'You say Crash is unfilmable. What do you think of the CronenbergtJeremy Thomas assault on the cult classics?' 'I don't know what Jeremy Thomas offers. He's done a ClaJJics Illustrated take on these books, The Naked Lunch and Crash, which I regard as unfilrnable. Or - if you are going to film them, you have to do it in a radical way. 'I think David Cronen berg was a good middlebrow director with lowbrow pretensions. All that early Cronenberg stuff, I had no problem with. I thought the very early films were rather good and that the Stephen King adaptation, The Dead Zone, was prime Christopher Walken. Not bad, but silly in the end. Then suddenly, through being picked up by Jeremy Thomas, Cronenberg.becomes this vaguely middlebrow to highbrow director - and, as fond as I am of Crash as a novel, and as fond as I was of Cronenberg, I feel that this is a marriage that is never going to work. And when I saw the film I thought, "Well, the only person who could possibly have pulled it off, in that art movie format, was Godard." 'When you read books like Crash, it's an extraordinary kind of fusion. And when you meet the man, Ballard, he's totally not what you expect from having read the book. I thought his genius was the application of Max Ernst to suburbia.' Petit was probably right. In the parallel world versions we are all free to impose on our favourite novels, Crash as a fusion of Week-end and Made in USA, would wow the last embattled remnant of ICNNew Cinema Club sentimentalists. Godard mixing video and film. The pornographic conversation pieces from Week-end, newsreel footage from the Paris underpass, the crumpled Mercedes, the collapse of Detroit's one-crop economy, statistics, signs, numbers, a proper score: a savage deconstruction in which Ballard's novel would vanish like a footprint in the snow. Crash would be liberated, as much of a ghost as all those pulps by Dolores Hitchens, David Goodis, Richard Stark and Lionel White, bought by New Wave directors and then ignored.

CRASH I 37

But Petit remains the most Ballardian of British film essayists. There's an element of shared background - colonial childhood, public school, suburbs - but it goes deeper than that. The fascination with a frozen aesthetic of motorways, business parks, airport hotels: franchised Surrealism. A present tense world of swift, spare sentences; a controlled surface disguising a sense of loss, a damaged past that can only be annealed through the rearrangement of images. Ballard's favourite moment from Cronenberg's film of Crash was the scene in the car wash. Petit ran his car wash sequence in Radio On, about fifteen years earlier, and repeated it, with all the swoooooshing rhapsodised by Ballard, in The Falconer. Radio On is what happens.when a Ballardian sleepwalker leaves town, a leisurely demonstration of the folly of not turning back at Heathrow. ('Driving along the motorway to pointless destinations, setting up private experiments whose purpose was totally abstract.' The Atrocity Exhibition.) In a television film, Suburbs in the Sky, Petit paid tribute to one of the regular categories of enticement in Ballard's fiction: the air hostess. (The Evening Standard, publishing a glamour portfolio of stewardesses in uniform, gave pride of place to a Lufthansa advertisement from the 60s that paraphrased the opening sequence of Cronenberg's Crash: a young woman with shoulder-length hair, wearing high heels and mini-skirt, 'nudged' from behind by the priapic nose of an airliner.) Petit and Ballard employ a fetishisation of occupation and uniform, the clothes that define the role, the sexual archetypes. And Cronenberg (in Crash) has adopted Ballard's system of signs and colour codes: he uses a silver/greylblue background to give the force of emphasis, narrative punch, to the appearance of red. Dr Remington's dressing gown in the hospital corridor, Seagrave's shirt. Red announces future arousal, the wound patterns of an expressway fatality. Red rushes the eye while the blue road, seen from the balcony, effaces itself in a heat haze, dissolves into the sky; sun shocks flashing from anonymous windshields. In Crash Ballard runs a sub-plot featuring a compliant secretary called Renata who is rapidly coded by what she wears, 'a red plastic raincoat'. The implication is: secretary as whore. Renata's principal

38 I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

function is to service the James Ballard character at some convenient location that provides a good view of the gravel pits, reservoirs and airport perimeter fence. The shine from her vinyl coat doubles with the headlights reflected from the car's wings and bumpers. Cronenberg includes Renata (and her raincoat) in the published version of his Crash script. But he eliminalcs-herfromthe ~Im; not wishing to detract from HotlyHunter as Dr Remington - whose red hospital wrap contrasts with the clinical white of her raincoat as she reclaims the wrecked car. Her appearance, starkly reversing the usual The red and lhe while

CRASH

expectation for a mourning outfit, provokes a telling exchange with Ballard, when he drives her to the hospital. HELEN:

A death in the family makes the patients doubly uneasy.

JAMES: I take it you're nol wearing white to reassure them. HELEN:

I'll wear a bloody kimono if I want to.

So Cronenberg, using dialogue taken directly from Ballard's novel, stagemanages a critique of that novel's procedures. The clothes that people Pelit's Thriller and Tile Falconer

I

39

40 I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

(especially women) wear place them in a hierarchy of caste and sexual availability. But Dr Remington is declaring, emphatically, that she is well aware of this. She knows the rules and dresses to please herself, not the fantasies of James Ballard - either as actor or author. The 'bloody' kimono signifies her annoyance at Spader's intrusive allusion and also previews a suicide robe. The character kicks free from the bondage of the text. By wearing what she likes she becomes what she likes; she can change her role or abandon it entirely. Video tape, unlike film, responds hungrily to scarlet PVc. It flares out: just the sort of momentary, uncontrolled distortion that Petit espouses. In his role as the unacknowledged articulator of the Ballardian poetic, he has twice exploited, almost like secret quotations from an unpublished script, the effect that Ballard described in Crash, and that Cronenberg left out of his film. In the films, Thriller and The Falconer, Petit (photographing the second scene himself) has a young woman in scarlet PVC cross a road, walk through a park: the hot colour, on both occasions, throwing the tape's supposed neutrality into turmoil. Red is like a future headline, a warning, breaking through the surface of mild English rationalism. The demons of pulp fiction at the gates of proper literature.

3 The multi-storey car-parks - the top decks are empty in the evening.

J.G. Ballard Mter television came CCT\!, unauthored surveillance cinema; the art form of the millennium. This was where a conceptualist response to Crash would be attempted ... at Heathrow. A collaboration between drifting long shots on the monitor in the security guard's cubby hole and awkward close-ups, amateur gynaecologicals, accessed by a rented camcorder. Small-time provincial pornographers reprising Crash as an '8-minute' example of guerrilla performance art. 'Tests on a wide range of subjects indicate that the automobile ... provides a focus for the conceptualising of a wide range of impulses

CRASH I 41

involving the elements of psychopathology, sexuality and self-sacrifice,' Ballard wrote in The Atrocity Exhibition. But this was taking literalism too far, the moment had passed when Crash could be shot at the 'correct' locations. So it's hard to say whether the crew who arrived at the Terminal 4 car-park in November 1997 were inspired by the republication of Ballard's novel, by a pirate video of Cronenberg's film, or by, as Ballard believes, something 'in the air'. The provocation of architectural abstractions, canted ranks of parked cars, and the roar of aircraft offering fantasies of escape. Heathrow is Ballard's 'no zone', a sexual hiatus; a concrete reef, outside time, where all the usual duties and responsibilities are suspended. Ballard had read the reports in the newspapers. This is how Luke Harding covered it for the Guardian (11 December 1997). Vincent Curran (Kingsheath, Northampton). Georgette Neale. When the erotic history of the 20th century is written, the names of Georgette Neale and Vincent Curran will surely deserve a mention. On a chilly Thursday aftemoon in November 1996, the couple arrived at the short stay car park of Heathrow's Terminal 4 for arguably the most audacious pom shoot of modern times . In front of a group of builders, Neale stripped off and spreadeagled herself over the bonnet of their silver Vauxhall car. Mr Curran, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, then engaged in what the prosecution yesterday described as 'lewd and disgusting acts.' Their performance in broad daylight was videoed by a third man, Duncan Wright, while a fourth person, James Wright, stood lookout. The alleged shoot. in the car parK'S dreary level three, was interrupted when a cleaner stumbled upon them and informed his manager.

Ballard was unsurprised by this singular tribute. 'It's in the air. I know, I know, I know. That was a very, very mysterious and quite significant event. It would be interesting to use that footage. If you get a man and a woman in a room - nothing may be happening - but all they have to do is take off their clothes and you'll have the material for a powerful and

42 I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

riveting drama. We witnesses can't escape ourselves. The evidence is always out there. Rather than fearing alienation, people should embrace it. It may be the doorway to something more interesting. That's always been the message of my fiction. We need to explore total alienation and find what lies beyond. The secret module that underpins who we are and our imaginative remaking of ourselves that we all embrace. This may be true of the world we're going to be living in for the next millennium.'

CRASH I 43

4 Cronenberg's Crash His scarred hands explored the worn fabric of the seat, marking in semen a cryptic diagram: some astrological sign or road intersection.

].G. Ballard

Crash the novel, by means of a first person narrative, as delivered by James Ballard, a materialist and man of the suburbs, a producer of advertising films, describes the spiral pursuit of Vaughan, a psychopathic visionary who lives in his car, while he plots the ultimate spectacle: when he will crash into Elizabeth Taylor's limousine, destroying them both in a fireball apotheosis. By their deaths they will be integrated with the geography of London, elevated into 'the pantheon of auto·disaster victims'. _The fictional Ballard, a detached observer, is an exile from his own history. He indulges in episodes of unenthusiastic adultery with his secretary, Renata, as a way of responding to the transitional landscape of gravel pits, reservoirs and slip· roads that surround Heathrow. The set is more important than those who occupy it. Ballard's ideal position, the one he achieves through a car crash (relatively minor for himself, fatal for the other driver), is the easy chair on the balcony (the 'veranda' as he calls it, remembering a colonial childhood). Now, in dressing gown, binoculars resting on lap, he can drift into reverie; fantasise his wife's affairs (with her lesbian assistant or her flight instructor), and watch the lanes of traffic, glinting like a swift· moving river. He is the novelist who doesn't have to write, the film· maker who refuses to pick up a camera. He remembers the story of Vaughan's death.j:J.e begiRS thete aRG lets it play backwards. The crash had been a moment 'like a haemorrhage of the sun'. Thelanguage with which he describes the event is clotted with image clusters, a glutted autopsy of semen globes, bleeding brake· lights, corneal scratches. Ballard's palette is lurid and excited. (I think of Minnelli's Some Came Running or George Sidney's Pal Joey.) The prose is urgent, swarming with a maggoty life that runs counter to the cryogenic elegance of Cronenberg's translation.

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Ballard, unlike Cronenberg, works himself into an incantatory frenzy through the Old Testament poetry of the list. Rhythms strain towards climax as they repeat the 'I think' riff, mimicking Allen Ginsberg's use of 'who' in How!. I think of the crashes of psychopaths, implausible accidents contrived in stolen cars on evening freeways among tired office-workers. I think of the absurd crashes of neurasthenic housewives returning from their VD clinics, hitting parked cars in suburban high streets. I think of the crashes of excited schizophrenics colliding head-on into stalled laundry vans in one-way streets; of manic-depressives crushed while making pointless U-turns on motorway access roads; of luckless paranoids driving at full speed into the brick walls at the ends of known culs-de-sac; of sadistic charge nurses decapitated in inverted crashes on complex interchanges; of lesbian supermarket manageresses burning to death in the collapsed frames of their midget cars before the stoical eyes of middle-aged firemen; of autistic children crushed in rear-end collisions, their eyes less wounded in death; of buses filled with mental defectives drowning together stoically in roadside industrial canals.

This delirious rapture of language, attracted to (and repelled by) the heat of thecOn);-;;:~dt~bl~au-x,-reprises the long breath, free-associating aggregations of Ginsberg's poem: the will towards madness. Read them in parallel. Ballard's 'implausible accidents contrived in stolen cars on evening freeways' or Ginsberg hymning those 'who barreled down highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod Golgotha'. Ginsberg prefigures Ballard's sense of skewed geometry: 'a sudden / flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the / meter & the vibrating plane.' Uncoiling the wild energies of a compacted novel, Ballard finds himself implicated in a poetic of derangement and selfdestruction. Image begets image, instantaneously, without moral intervention, spurning the conventions of the novel of society. Cronenberg's script is an X-ray of the elements he considers vital to the ~ry of Ballard's story. He breaks the novel down, as he has

CRASH I 45

to, into sequences of linked scenes. The sexual couplings come i tria ay or episo e, the ey to Ballard's scheme, is dropped. So that the film is left with a lacuna at its centre. This could be seen as working in Cronenberg's favour: Crash, in his reading, has no beginning, no end. It goes on foreVerJlllreSohred, "nemphatic; a quiet pO~8raphy enacted in no specific location. In sets that are epitaphs to a novel written a quarter of a century before in another world. Cronenberg's Crash is a low-key fashion shoot, using faces that are almost familiar in groupings that have been drained of all energy. Its achievement is the relinquishing of the director's supposed moral authority, in favour of a treatise on Zen and the art of motorway maintenance. At the stage of the shooting script, as it appears in published form, the sub-plots involving Ballard's relationship with Renata, and Catherine Ballard's sapphic flirtation with Karen, are still present. 'How can I arrange to have her seduce me?' Catherine asks. 'I've been thinking about that, about you and Karen,' Ballard replies. And there follows a Playboy scene (without dialogue), as Karen and Catherine try out underwear together, and Ballard watches. Then Cronenberg (again faithful to the novel) has Ballard and Renata ('her legs stowed out of sight beneath her red plastic raincoat') park on the concrete verge close to the site of the convalescent's recent crash. But these episodes, present in the novel, are rightly junked from the finished film. Their only importance was their position in a chain of erotic encounters. Everything in the novel is experienced through the psychopathic/visionary consciousness of James Ballard (writer and actor in his own scenario), as he steals his energy from the madman Vaughan. ~ard's ambition is to become what he describes. Cronenberg's Crash, while remaining absolutely faithful to Ballard's text, makes it clear from the start that it will not be trapped within the tramlines of a first person narrative. ~nny pGm, names Winging out of the screen in the style of a low-rent Star Wcm, with Ho~r9 Shor~ lay~~_down edgy (but minimalist) aural motifs, in the way that Bernard Herrmann used to doctor mood for Hitchcock. Then the camera drifts on the diagonal into a hangar of

46 I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

extravagantly coloured private aircraft; high gloss sheens in orange, yellow, white. This privileged space is overlit, buffed surfaces reflecting hot lamps, dazzling towards burn-out. The phallic shapes of the cigarnosed machines with their bulbous floats, their stabilisers, are emphasised in a predatory glide towards Deborah Unger. The trajectory of the camera, unrepresentative of the consciousness of any of the characters, already hints at a diversion from the novel. Whose point of view does this tracking shot, the first of the film, represent? OnlyUnger rand her flying instructor lover are present. The shot, stately and voyeuristic in intent, announces the presence of the crew, and emphasises -"the fact that this encounter, the sexual performance, is being staged for the benefit of an audience. Austere, airbrushed pornography: the sequence could well have been shot as one of James Ballard's advertising films, a lifestyle promo. The immaculate skins of the riveted, silver wings liaise with Unger's shaved armpits, smooth legs, sharp bones and blank pre-coital mask. Her behaviour is adolescent or infantile. She caresses her own image as it is reflected in the brilliantly polished metal (just as Vaughan strokes the Porsche that will be used to restage James Dean's fatal collision). The artist Richard Hamilton, writing of the series of studies and drawings that culminated in his painting Homage aChrysler Corp, noticed a woman 'engaged in a display of affection for the vehicle'. The showroom 'model' has a double identity, as pin-up and as car. She fakes arousal, languorously dragging a bare arm across an immaculate bonnet - while ogling her curved reflection in the windshield. Unger is still locked at that stage of sexual development where nothing is as fascinating as her own face and figure, her hair, her clothes, her smell. (It comes as no surprise that J.G. Ballard, in an Apple Computer Inc. promotion, stated: 'It may be that Freud is the great novelist of the twentieth century .... Perhaps he should be seen primarily as a novelist, with a great imaginative writer's ability to explore the human heart through the unfolding drama of a strong confrontational narrative.') Unger's narcissistic and unsatisfied fugue concludes with her sucking her thumb. (Baby Doll out of Lolita, by way of Bunuel's That Obscure Object 0/ Desire.)

CRASH I 47

Peter Suschitzky's camera is an accomplice, an expected intruder; without this instrument the scene would never happen. The sex act is fetishised, presented as a brochure of potentially arousing commodities: heels, legs, underwear, raised skirt. The lover is also from stock, an accessory with designer stubble and fiercely-laundered blue overalls. He is an extension of the machines he services. He comes with the set. Or, rather, he doesn't. He rubs, he licks. But there is no climax. This is only a part of something. Like much of the coupling in Crash, the preferred entry is from the rear. Dry, narcissistic, avoiding spill and flow and dribble. Couples do not face each other. This is very important to Cronenberg. The film's forward impetus is delivered through a precise artIculatran of heads within the rectangle. Participants are reluctant to look at each other. They stare out of the frame. They talk without eye contact. They are as ~-r-at-Cic-a-s..,.fi-g-u-re-s--,f.,....r-o-m-t"7h-e-Ergy~p....,tl~a-n-B~o-o...,k-o-ij"-"'lhe

..------

Dead. Who-is-looking-at-what sets the agenda for each of the short s~uences; couples in cars, together for the first time, give nothing away. They discuss destinations, list previous sexual partners, use the past to bring the present moment to life. When these stiff conjunctions are matched with Howard Shore's spare and repetitive score, the effect is cod-Japanese. A colonised virtual reality existence resembling the cyberworld of another Canadian, William Gibson. Gibson, out on the Pacific rim in Vancouver (he lived for a time in Toronto), is well placed to experience the Japanese software invasion, the pull of Californian weirdness to the south, and the dry-lightning of Tokyo bars, guest hotels, geishas and cannibalised occidental television: stars prepared to sell out as long as it is far enough from home. (Vancouver as the XFiles set.) The scene in the hangar opens a triptych of connected, but ~complete, sexual disp~ys. The couplings are orchestrated as much for the camera as for the performers. 'No satisfaction' is the sponsor's ~ssage. Fragmentary incidents (presented like an album of soft porn stills) contribute to an understanding of the permissive and complacent relationship between Catherine and J ames Ballard. Each episode is enacted by one partner and directed by the other. Catherine's rear entry sex with her flying instructor is an uninspired reverie by James Ballard.

46 I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

It's content is quasi-gay. Unger is a luxurious mannequin, a Dali doll. She is aroused by the proximity of the aircraft and allows herself to be serviced by a character who would be more at home in a muscle-beach pillow book. This short onanistic promo is an ad-man's pastiche of Antonioni's Red Desert or The Eclipse: neurasthenic camerawork, private planes, good clothes, sexual lethargy. Antonioni's fluid shooting style, at odds with the ennui of his performers, leaves Monica Vitti, as David Thomson notices, as an 'increasingly static and abstract' presence. Unger does not move. She stands, skirt raised, while the camera advances on its smooth track. The airport, with its culture of transition and anonymity, its satellite towers with ramps of parked cars, has always been a sexualised zone for Ballard. In Crash (the novel), his namesake 'gazed through the perimeter fence at the deserted standby runways of the airport' in a condition of agitated arousal. The geography of London's western fringes is eroticised in the red fug of a diesel twilight. Heavy rubber wheels leaving black marks on concrete. Multinational hotels. 'The areas peripheral to great airports,' Ballard told me, 'are identical all over the world. You can land at any airport these days and for the first twenty minutes, as you take your cab, you go through a landscape that is identical. You could be on the outskirts of Paris, damn nearly Nairobi. Two-storey factories, flat housing, warehouses.' The power surge of aircraft lifting over motorway links and reservoirs is the orgasmic roar of a pornographic cartoon. Torn skies are seen through 'the leopard-skin glove of the miniature steering wheel'. Ballard's obsessive study of the~een through the mesh of a perimeter fence) is reprised by Cronenberg, in~id forward track, as a provocative preliminary to the febrile joustings of James Spader and Holly Hunter in the airport car-park. This snatched vision is mysteriously aphrodisiac. The James Ballard character is turned on by fugitive encounters of architecture and climate, not by his adulterous partner. Airports are defined as the preferred setting for a narrative of arousal. 'During a journey to Paris,' Ballard writes in the novel, 'I had become so excited by the conjunction of an air hostess's fawn gabardine

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CRASH I 49

skirt on the escalator in front of me and the distant fuselages of the aircraft, each inclined like a silver penis towards her natal cleft, that I had involuntarily touched her left buttock.' Language, struggling to alleviate the urgency of its testosterone imperatives, reaches out for the baroque euphemism of 'natal cleft', as for one of Nabokov's strategic ironies. Cronenberg's choice of set for the opening sequence is perceptive: disengaged film-maker James Ballard's projection of his wife's adultery with a flying instructor. The flying instructor is a key Ballardian icon in the psychosexual theatre of his fiction, in which all the texts (short stories, novels, reviews, essays) are part of one project; a project that involves repetition, characters with the same names reappearing and vanishing, giving up their identities. The cast usually includes: a burntout doctor, a rogue scientist (with fabulous sexual charisma), a displaced writer (seen as advertising man, technical editor, travel journalist), a nurse, a psychiatrist, an air hostess, and a man in a flying jacket (combat vet). There is also an underclass of airport prostitutes, home pornography makers, art and drug dealers and poets who don't write. 'Sally strolled towards the Tiger Moth, which David flew in a vermouth commercial. She peeled away her silk scarf as if they were about to make love under its wing .... Within minutes Sally was wearing a Bomber Command jacket, and an antique helmet and goggles, a fetishist's dream of a white-haired woman in flying leather. As she stood on tip-toe and kissed David, her crutch ruled the airfield.' That's the version from The Kindness 0/ Women in 1991. Twenty years earlier, in The Atrocity Exhibition, the same formula was invoked: 'Almost without thinking she had picked him up in the basement cinema after the secret Apollo film, impelled by his exhausted eyes and the torn flying jacket with its Vietnam flashes.' Cronenberg is doing no more than directing Unger to enact a scene as it might have been conceived by a maker of vermouth commercials customising a J.G. Ballard synopsis. And so the triad unfolds: Unger's functional servicing as pictured by James Spader (as James Ballard). And then, immediately, the reverse panel: Ballard with his 'camera girl' (as fantasised in Catherine's post-

50

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coital reverie), This is a film set where nothing gets made, a sterile laboratory of posing technicians and state-of-the-art equipment. It's interesting that Cronen berg revises the published script which has the line, 'James, are you in there? Could we please get your stamp of approval on our little tracking shot?' to 'Steadicam shot', A hipper variant and also perhaps a twinning with the drift through the hangar. Meanwhile Ballard, in the camera department, is mounting his youthful employee from the rear, She is found, as the script suggests, 'stomach down, head resting on a black, crackle-finish camera magazine, her legs Newtonian gravilas reverie and exposure

CRASH I 51

spread'. Almost as if she had just surfaced from the pages of such a publication, part willing accessory, part lifestyle trophy. The film's first line of dialog]le, spoken as an assistant director ~ for bis boss (SF Sl:lmFftafts 11 Stllf frarn his dressing FQomJ, is playful. 'I'm looking for lames. Has anybody seen James Ballard? You know who I mean? The producer of this epic.' But which Ballard? That's reasel is the accredited producer ~re? what we're su ose 0 The film's opening sequence concludes on the balcony of t e Ballard flat, where Catherine gazes out over a 'busy expressway near the

I

Interzones

~~~,(

's}J'\}'J .

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airport'. This is the 'real time' starting point. The previous mirrored episodes (Unger with her lover, Spader with his sex toy) are enacted fantasies, with Unger pastiching Antonioni and Spader in a studio dedicated to making just such a @m. Now the couple are together. 'Where were you?' asks James - knowing that Catherine has been daydreaming. 'Did you come?' Colour colludes to fix the moment, the start of the story, the remote expressway and the imagined, silver-blue light. Light like the interior skyscape of a patient awaiting brain surgery. Fat clouds circumnavigate the oily surfaces of metal bearings. Dead light is the substance through which the estranged lovers consummate their differences. The relationship is compljcjt aAQ tited. James and Catherine, , a couple who cannot face each other, respect the distance J.G. Ballard "'[" l~ to measure between his characters and the w.,?rld. The set is perfect: a comfortable but anonymous flat (no furniture made before 1950), the door open to the air, the sound of traffic going nowhere. Rear Wiwjpw with a deckchair, a glass of warm whisky on the hour. Balcony as veranda: Camus' colon in a temperate city. Motorway as beach. Shanghai/Shepperton. A promotional spread by Salvador Dali. (Ballard introducing Dali's Diary 0/ a Genius: 'The gestures of minor domestic traffic, movements through doors, a glance across a balcony - become transformed into the materials of a bizarre and overlit drama.') Deborah Unger as a languid Madonna. Spader as a spy trying to infiltrate a Delvaux hoarding. Catherine Ballard stares out at the traffic, a sex-zombie porn star waiting for direction. Her skirt is raised to exposeller naked buttocks. This image, frozen into a still, struck me as paraphrasing Helmut Newton. It's an effect he's fond of: the potentially obedient (or sadistic) model, tall, faceless, flaunting the second face of her bared bottom as she leans over a balcony rail, or gazes indifferently out of the window of an expensive apartment or hotel room. Remember Newton's composition: In M Apartment. Paris 1971. 'Mooning' as a metaphor of othernes . Self-voyeurs. Physically striking women positioned jn such a way that t ey are lvorced from the bodies they display with such

l

--

CRASH

Will/lie

el l tI?e

Ne ~Jr~!sco,

Nice 1975

t:

Helmul Newloll

53

54 I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

flagrant disinterest. Winnie at the Negresco, Nice 1975. Newton's titles read like estate agents' brochures, gold-card expense account print-outs. Winnie, sprawled over the balcony, stilt heels and fur coat, head lit by the flaring aureole of street lamps and passing cars, is clearly a source for Cronenberg's composition with Deborah Unger as Catherine Ballard. Or so I thought. Ballard disagreed when I put it to him. He denied that Cronenberg had any particular interest in Newton, although he was himself a longterm fan. It is the 'elegance' that Newton, and Cronenberg (in Crash), aspire to that is the inspiration for an aesthetic to which Ballard has always responded. A cold surface, glassy and well-mannered, disguising mania. Hot news transmuted into autistic, fast-twitch prose. 'I think Cronenberg's Crash was a great success,' Ballard told me. 'A most elegant and mysterious @m. A very formal film. I think the surrealists discovered that if you're going to present extraordinary subject matter, put your characters into dinner jackets. Bunuel did this in L'Age d'or and all his later @ms. He had immense formality, high bourgeois houses and embassies where the most incredibly perverse things are going on. You can get away with it. The painters did the same. In Deivaux's paintings you have strange dreamlike scenes where statuesque nudes wander about against a background of immense formality, classical architecture. Cronenberg's Crash embodies that. It's the same formal elegance that you find in Helmut Newton - who I admire enormously.' Newton (with his suspiciously resonant name - part philosopher, mathematician, student of the Apocalypse, part Man Who Fell to Earth) sounds like a character Ballard invented, a sleekly perverse old charlatan hanging around the Mediterranean littoral in Cocaine Nights. He's a Bunuel without the humour, the canny exploitation of his own perversity; a German Bunuel. He articulates sets, inviting a new job description: setundresser. I asked Ballard if Newton's compositions always implied an undisclosed narrative. 'Yes, of course they do. They're like clips from an erotic film. I said that to him. I met Newton once. I was very happy to do so. A couple of years ago. I told him what a genius he was.'

CRASH

'Surek Cronenherg had Newton in mind with that balcony shot?' I persisted. 'I don't think so, actually. I never I'ail'('(/ the suhject. In Cannes 0;e\\'LOn was commissioned to film the cast and Cronenberg. But the Clll1nection ne\Tr occurred to Ille, because the film was so strong in its o\\'n right. There is the same elegant formality. Emotion is kept down to the minimuill - so th,ll the ideology is allowed to turn the wheel of dr:\Ill:llic 'lCtion. \'{'e are ne\Tr propelled into action by the emotions of the char:lClLTs, as in l11elodrama. I think th,\[ sort of icy detachment - it's II()/

ic\' but coo\, \'LT\, tangible - is ,\ triumph.'

.J:lI1ll'S Spelll", Holly HUlller DelJOIail Kelr
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What excites Ballard in Newton is the conceit that each image works like a sentence from a sensational novel, a prompt, take it on in any direction you fancy. Photographs storyboard lurid scenarios: TV murders, coke-snorting models wrestling in the 'powder room at Regine's', violence as a prelude to sex. But it's not the models (or Newton himself, seen in a 'hotel de passe', spreadeagled beneath a nude) that intrigue Ballard, it's the architecture, the tall, silent rooms. 'Fantasies of women dressed up in surgical gear and so forth. That doesn't turn me on,' he told the Re/Search interviewers, 'but I like his hotels - his women in hotels caught at some sort of moment.' Cronenberg constructs his film around these 'moments'. His version of Crash is, at one level, flickbook Newton. An essay on Ballard's reverence for Newton's pictorial 'genius'. Sets infected by covert narratives: the deserted trauma ward, the winestain blankets. Algaetoned airport runways. Spader's blue pyjamas against Holly Hunter's red dressing gown. Active colours, close in, worrying at a refrigerated blue background. The actors, dressed by Denise Cronenberg, have rummaged through Newton's cast-offs. Catalogue underwear worn for display. Or the absence of underwear and pubic clumps shaved into an outlandish geometry. Soft leather coats (as in Newton's Veruschka in Nice, 1975) or white raincoats that double for hospital gowns. High heels. A fetishisation of surface seen in its most extreme form in the space-cadet biker-chic uniform of Rosanna Arquette - who features in one of the @m's rare jokes, when she punningly takes a pre-rolled spliff out of a flap in her prosthetic thigh (a joint from a joint). The other actors, apparently, were envious of Arquette's gamey and hi-concept outfit. After a heavy session with Spader in one of a series of sliced-up cars in which she struggled, uncomfortably, take after take, to get the angles of penetration right, she would breastfeed her new baby on set. A Mad Max madonna. J.G. Ballard, replaying Cronenberg's Crash, sees it as resembling one of his earlier, more dangerous novels filtered through the aesthetic of Helmut Newton. He told the Re/Search interviewers in 1982 that

CRASH I 57

Newton's photographs 'are like stills from very elegant, slightly decadent movies'. Cronenberg's exercise came too late. It was part of the heritaging of Ballard; making his subversion safe, carrying it to the point where it could be discussed by hair-trigger moralists like the critic Alexander Walker. The value of Crash the film is easy to overlook. It belongs to its own time, not to Ballard's 60s. It belongs to a climate of pre-millennial boredom. It's a novella of the last days. It has to run for ever, hours and hours of road footage, centuries of sex without fertility or climax. It's a chamber work from the era of Clintonian telephone adultery (where the participants fall asleep). I want to see all the out-takes, the wet dawn motorways, the yawning, shivering actors. That's the vision that has been tapped. Post-surveillance anti-drama. The death of excitement. A riposte to Hollywood's mega-budget prostitution of the senses. We have to learn to endure boredom to the point where egoless enlightenment can be achieved. Crash works best if it's viewed as a necrophile masque, a postmortem on an undead book. The low-key performances, the subdued light, thc1acklustre physical permutations, all contribute to an ~helming sense of alienation. The film is alienated from itself, as ~ well as from Ballard's wild-energy novel. It's an elegy to boredom, loss~ futility: to Ballard's 'death of affect'. - T h e actors aren't delivering a script, they're under hypnosis. James Spader~ Deborah Unger have a prophehc function: as Icons. Their defining quality is an irritable narcissism. Perpetual arousal, the itch, coupled with perpetual dissatisfaction: compulsive humping, a Spanish fly quest for autoerotic stimulation, dead orgasms. Crash is a series of variations on Wilhelm Reich's recipe for cancer. Spader impersonates Ballard but he is really an avatar of Cronenberg, the blandest off-print in a lineage that goes back through the spectacularly wasted Christopher Walken (the urban vampire's vampire) to James Woods. 'Even though we don't look alike,' Cronenberg told Chris Rodley, 'Jimmy Wood's presence (in Videodrome) on the screen began to feel like a projection of me. It was exciting to find an actor who was my cinematic equal.'

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Cronenberg likes these alter egos, his vulpine wasters: stand-ins who, within the permissive register of cinema, can enact his darkest fantasies. Walken in The Dead Zone (Cronenberg's first lift from literature and bestsellerdom) was the ultimate doppelganger. 'It's Chris Walken's face,' Cronenberg reported. 'That's the subject of the movie; that's what the movie was about. All the things that are in his face.' Spader, like some kind of junior Walken cloning experiment (DNA diluted with strawberry milkshake), is a good enough actor to leave nothing in his face. It's uninhabited, a cartoonist's flick of the wrist. An unembarrassed modicum of self-love, flopping gold hair, smooth flesh, and eyes that suggest that the lights have not quite gone out. There might still be, submerged beneath the complacent inaction, a trace element of low cunning. He plays well against Unger. He doesn't have her stamina, her need to ask questions. She makes all the running in the only scene that might spoil the film's smooth curve of ennui by threatening to come to life: the scene when she rehearses Spader for his homosexual pash with Elias Koteas' Vaughan. ~ is one of the longest speeches in CraIh (Ballard's shorthand version of the Molly Bloom soliloquy). 'Is he circumcised? Can you imagine what his anus is like? Describe it to me. Would you like to sodomise him? Would you like to put your penis right into his anus, thrust it up his anus? Tell me, describe it to me.' Etc. I asked Ballard about the actors. He thought that Cronenberg had achieved perfect casting. All the quasi-stellar presences were up for it. 'Holly Hunter made a big effort to understand. Cronenberg told me that on set in Toronto they were holding what were virtually scminan', analysing the strange motivations of the characters and the whole background of the thing. They weren't just playing the roles assigned to them.' Ballard adored Unger, a Slavic, Newtonian presence. 'A Itunninglv beautiful girl, very sexy. Just right for the role.' Catherine, in the novel, is defined by the fantasies that are attributed to her,--;o::r:;i~m:;-;p:;-;o~s:;:;e;td""o"n""""h"'er..-----through the act of fiction. 'An interesting lesbian streak ran through Catherine's mind. Often as we made love she asked me to visualise her

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in intercourse with another woman.' Her appearance is too well grounded in the author's mind to require delineation. Cronenberg in his draft script specifies: 'dark, short hair'. Everything that Unger, with her shoulder-length blonde mane, contradicts. She acts with her hair, minor adjustments, tosses of the head that adverti~e the transit of small emotions. Or: she smokes. Self-absorbed, miming the aftermath (or preview) of a sexual anti-climax. For Ballard, effusive about the entire cast, everyone even loosely connected with the film, Unger is the pearl. (Questions of status see to it that she is not represented in the stills published with Cronenberg's Crash script. She's a newcomer and must give precedence to the supporting cast, Holly Hunter and Rosanna Arquette.) Un er has the high-cheeked sensuality of a blonde Ava Gardner, or one of Hitchcock s Ice women, urnmg so he hoped) with secret passions. She's got the chill elegance of a fashion plate but she's on heat. That's the pitch. That's why she has to deliver her lines in ~ breathy, breathless, Monroe-on-sixty-Marlboros-a-day whisper. She can't keep the bedclothes out of her voice. (The other actors contrive equally distinctive patterns of sounds: Koteas as Vaughan works around a persistent lump of gum, a rubbery tongue in the cheek. Holly Hunter as Dr Remington fights a valiant battle with a complicated orthodontic obstruction. Deep throat, southern gothic sassiness punctuated by severe carcinogenic draws on an unaccustomed cigarette. 'I started to smoke at the hospital.') Unger's eyes, rarely meeting those of her partners, drift across the silver-blue horizon, the flow of traffic. Traffic which has a life of its ~wn, co~ing and going like Hitchcock's birds, sometimes massing (on Ballard's first drive after his accident); sometimes, more ominously, vanishing from sight, leaving an empty highway. 'The traffic ... where is everyone? They've all gone away,' Ballard says to Catherine, shortly before he forces her off the road. Deborah Unger has the presence of a computer-generated simulacrum of a star from the great days of the studios. Afilm noir face, like Gene Tierney stepping in from the rain, back from the dead, in

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Preminger's Laura. Or Jane Greer in Jacques Tourneur's Out 0/ the Past. Bacall or Veronica Lake. Actresses who do the hair and the voice. Actresses whose iconic appearance predisposes them to a fixed set of narrative possibilities. The destruction of a fall guy hero. Provisional immortality achieved through suicide. J.G. Ballard, with his fondness for introducing the stars of the 50s and 60s, as figures of myth, into his compacted fictions, responded to Unger as to those who had alrea.dy, through their spectacular deaths, become part of the pantheon: Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Grace Kelly. (Michael Moorcock told me that Ballard was 'always obsessed with film stars'. 'Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Onassis, all that. They're his generation.') But Unger's Catherine is on the cusp of something stranger; the anamorphic giganticism of wide screen Cinemascope, unstable colour fields, giving way to television, video, virtual reality. Godlike presences who could no longer be trusted to stay within the ghettoes of Beverly Hills, Monte Carlo, Palm Springs, Acapulco. Unger's private life was her own affair, but her image, as it appeared in Crash, morphed dangerously from a negative Ava Gardner to a stylised reworking of Princess Di. Spader and Unger were the golden couple condemned to limbo, acting out a cycle of necrophile passions. Spader was precisely the soft-focus type of Di's brother, Charles Spencer; highbred, insecure, a bit of a chancer with potentially one good speech left in him. Spencer or James Hewitt: archetypes of the underemployed, Aryan drones waiting for the remittance cheque. 'Prophecy is ragged and dirty. Make it ragged and dirty,' Vaughan instructs the technician when he receives his 'wound tattoo'. He wants to turn the skin of his body into a map, a Blakean prophecy. 'Is this personal prophecy or global prophecy?' responds the tattooist 'with a hint of sarcasm'. Spader and Unger, sleepwalkers in a preordained narrative, become mantic. Their peculiar obsessions, re-enactments, rehearsals, are fated. They trap the shadows of future tragedies. The story which knows (and acknowledges) its own end is the paradigm of good art for Ballard. No vulgar shocks, no detours from the bloody diagram tattooed across the abdomen. As Cronenberg drew on Ballard,

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so Ballard found his inspiration in Dali (a portfolio that contained all the answers to the riddle of the Sphinx). Dali's work, according to Ballard, constituted 'a body of prophecy unequalled in accuracy since Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents'. 'Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our fears and longings, and our need to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game.' The tools for the creation of a valid mytholob'Y·

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5 White Nights on the Bauhaus Balcony He binds her to an authentic corpse, knee to knee, mouth to mouth, and flogs her until the back of her body is covered with blood.

D.A.F. De Sade, The 120 Days 0/50dom 'I never had an erection while writing this book, and would have regarded it as a failure if I had,' Ballard told Mark Dery. 'Think of the film as straightforwardly Sadean.' That certainly is one way to read Cronenberg's Crash: as a Sadean dance. All the characters are up for it, aroused, heroically willingly to slog their way through the backlist of sexual permutations. The film can be seen as a Francophile revision of an English suburban original. Cronenberg had lived in France in a village with a name that sounded as if it belonged in a Hammer film written by Oliver Sachs. 'He took a year off,' Chris Rodley explained in Cronenberg on Cronenberg. 'Spending much of that time in Tourettes-sur-Loup in southern France (a small village frequented by, among others, Andre Bazin, Terry Southern and Ted Kotcheff).' Ballard was willing to collude in the process of granting a European dimension to his novel. In the introduction to the French edition of Crash, he asserted that 'pornography is the most political form of .' He had, after all, seen Go ar s Week-end (which could have been subtitled Carryon Crashing). Godard shifts from a tastefully lit (dressed man and naked woman silhouetted against bright window) pastiche of sub-Olympia Press porn to a road rage farce, before retreating to Arcadian guerrilla theatre agit-prop (livened up by cannibalism) in the forest. Godard's surrealism is rougher, closer to Artaud and Jarry (megaphone infantilism) than to the glacial classicism of Delvaux that Ballard admired. Cronenberg's Crash is Georges Bataille serialised in Autosport. The film operates, as Gerald Houghton said in a review written for the magazine The Edge, 'in the crepuscular netherworld of pornography itself - the only place where consecutive sex scenes have any narrative strength'. 'The true genius of Cronenberg's approach,' he concludes, 'is

CRASH

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to use limitation to advanta~.' A pared-down progression of short scenes, alternating partners, familiar locations: underpasses, hospital wards, car washes, the airport car-park, the wreckers' yard. What is notable about Cronenberg's revision is that it makes its own spaCL' while remaining true to the last comma of Ballard's original. The viewer has to

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accept that in the end there is no precedence, book and film come t?.g_<:t~co:r i~_ p_
couple as if duplicating illustrations from a Germanic sex primcr. ThL'\" improvise, but always as solitary beings, playing out a rcaction shot to some other, alienated, act of intercourse that has taken pLlCC dscwhere. Vaughan reveals the map 01 skin

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'An author,' as Ballard says, 'can no longer preside like a magistrate over his characters.' The direction of the story is set by its first movement, the camera tracking into the hangar, and from that point the ....characters ~rind against each other like perpetual motion machines. The author disclaims responsibility. He is happy to let Cronenberg improvise in any way he wants. But Cronenberg's strategy is very simple. rely on memOQ( retype t~ovel, strip alit the Elizabeth T9)'lor element the London particulars, and nudge the sexual polarity back towards James and Catherine Ballard. The Cronenberg script is a slim sixty-five pages (and includes sub-plots that will be jettisoned). It aspires, in other words, to the condition of one of Ballard's compacted novels of the 60s. This is the outline: Catherine Ballard meets her lover while, apparently, taking flying lessons. James Ballard, at the same time, is enjoying (without much conviction) a quickie with a camera girl. Husband and wife compare notes. Ballard is involved in a car crash, killing the other driver. His wife visits him in a deserted trauma ward, where she does some moody smoking while distractedly offering a handjob. Ballard encounters Dr Remington, the wife of his victim, and has his first contact with the psychopathic Vaughan. Conversation is sporadic, abrupt; non sequiturs and programmatic monologues culled from the Crash novel. Gradually, the convalescent Ballard is drawn into a circle of paranoid/ecstatic car-death cultists, with Vaughan as their messianic prophet. After a ride to the airport, he couples with Dr Remington. Ballard and Remington attend a performance event at which Vaughan restages the fatal James Dean crash. When this event is broken up by a police raid, Ballard and Remington return with Vaughan to his workshop, where they meet the rest of the cultists. During a series of night drives and visits to wreckers' yards and car washes, the principal characters in the film engage in most of the obvious sexual combinations: Catherine Ballard with Vaughan {while Ballard drives}, Vaughan with an airport prostitute {Ballard again as voyeurlchauffeur}, Ballard with Remington, Ballard with the crippled

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Gabrielle (by way of a wound in her thigh), Remington with Gabrielle, Vaughan with Ballard. Between sessions (which operate as relatively discrete sado-masochistic fantasies), husband and wife attempt to pleasure each other and to contextualise their affairs as Sadean dialogues. The of the film is evenly paced, no highlights and few climaxes (in any sense), until Vaughan succee sin i ing himself (the ~l) and Ballard repossesses the wrecked Lincoln. Catherine Ballard is pursued and forced off the road by the Lincoln (~allard taking the place of Va1Jihan in the Kennedy assassination vehicle). Injured, but not yet killed, Catherine lies on the grass verge, where she is penetrated from behind by her husband. 'Maybe the next one, darling .... Maybe the next one.' The rapprochement, the (near) rebirth of emotion between this damaged golden couple, is Cronenberg's crane shot conclusion. The novel, classically looped in structure, brings James and Catherine Ballard together in the car in which Vaughan died ('a small spurt of semen after a short throe'). Ballard wanders among the wrecks. 'Reaching through the fractured windshields and passenger windows around me, I marked my semen on the oily instrument panels and binacles, touching these wound areas at their most deformed points .... With the semen in my hands ... defining for the last time the contours of Vaughan's presence on the seats.' A sacerdotal gesture to duplicate the acts of sodomy by which Vaughan and Ballard, renegade scientist and aesthete voyeur, were united in their insane project. 'Already I knew that I was designing the elements of my own car crash.' A bleak conclusion from which Cronenberg shies away, preferring to pitch for the sentiment of an amour lou. The job, so Cronenberg believed, had always been to reinvent 'film language in order to allow my characters to express themselves in their own emotional language'. A language of equivalents. Cronenberg finds

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unusual perspective, microscopic or macroscopic. These are the cuts: (1)

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High, tight angle. From above, down on a sliced section of the speeding orange car. Spader. Reflections on the metal. (2) Extreme high angle: bluegrey expressway. Cars like luxury toys. (3) Close-up leg wounds. As a map of skin territory. (4) Spader on balcony with his binoculars: 'I can't sit on this balcony forever. I'm beginning to feel like a potted plant.' The shifts of image and point of view are disconcerting, in just the way Ballard's short stories are disconcerting. They worry at our conditioned reflexes, how we have been taught to read: film or prose. After Cronenberg's first high angle establishing shot of the car we ex~ct (in the flow of linear narrative) to move inside, to get Spader's reaction to his release from hospital. Who is with him? What does he have to say?

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But instead we cut sharply to a g?d's-eye-perspective on the road which could as easily be a surveillance helicopter shot on Spader's car, or his own view, through binoculars, from his balcony. Cronenberg has successfully conflated the Ballardian el\uation and the Sadean list. He employs the sort of riff Ballard favoured in the

CraIh l section of The Atrocity Exhibitioli. 'The optimum auto-disaster. . The choice of death-postures include (l) normal driving position, (2) sleep, rear seat, (3) acts of intercourse, by both driver and passenger ... a crash complex was constructed containing elements not usually present in automobile accidents, i.e. strong religious and sexual overtones, the victim being mounted in the automobile in bizarre positions

CRASH

containing postural elements of both perverse intercourse and ritual sacrifice.' 'Crash,' Ballard told Mark Dery, 'is a movie De Sade would have adored.' Its hidden profile is 'the normalising of the psychopath'. And Cronenberg does everything he canto fulfil that ambition. In the standard generic product, the serial killer movie (Silence 0/ the Lambs, Sewn), the psychopath is isolated, at odds with the mundane world. In Cronenberg's film there is a mean temperature in which no single element is allowed to dominate. Nothing disturbs the Lithium calm. The crashes are minor shunts, articulated by an effectively understated soundtrack. When Cronenberg assembles his crash sequences, he cuts to dilute excitement. To keep these events within the circumference of the everyday (like Auden's Musee Des Beaux Arts: 'how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster')' The characters are zombies of the suburbs. There are no star performances. They are all bit players in a lost B-feature that has somehow scammed a serious budget. Holly Hunter and Rosanna Arquette are generous enough to behave as if they are lookalikes. They understudy themselves. They're in this nightmare together, a deleted book, a pre-posthumous movie. Where Godard in his auto-doom satire, Week-end, makes use of slogans, quotations, rants, flashing red and blue messages, Cronenberg keeps his sub-texts hidden, covert allusions, small nudges. We are encouraged to believe there is a Pynchonesque conspiracy of signs and secret gestures working beneath the surface. There's the Blakean allusion of a number-plate that spells ORC (According to S. Foster Damon: 'Ore's consort is the Shadowy Female, who is this material world.') There are numerological hints everywhere; the parking space marked 'Ballard 435', the '1983' peel-away label on the windscreen, '130' on the Porsche in the simulated James Dean crash. DO NOT ENTER on the wall in the airport car-park, behind the prostitute in her silver jacket, is both a graphic signature and a crude pun. Numbers and sounds form the grid through which Cronenberg's Crash has to be interpreted. The soundtrack is very clean and precise: a tiny implosion as Deborah Unger draws on a cigarette, or the hungry ,

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suck of Arquette on her thin spliff, abused tyres cornering in the multistorey car-park; sniffling, gum-chewing, and an unusually precise range of orgasmic gasps and mewlings. Sounds that work like a good, crisp prose style. No vulgar excesses. The chatter and chaos of the world have bien stripped and orchestrated, so that each modulation is given meaning. Mood is keyed by Howard Shore's interplanetary muzak, his tight electronic progressions. Ballard is ecstatic about the whooshing and sl~shing of the rollers in the car wash sequence. 'Oh, the car wash! One of the greatest scenes in cinema, marvellously erotic too. Brilliantly done. The sound is so wonderful. Crash will prove a template for an awful lot of @ms th;u-m:e gomg to be made. Hollywood film-makers, they have the resources. But European filmmakers will march forward to get to whatever the obsessive material is, the imaginative core of whatever a particular film is about.' Ballard and Cronenberg, both drawing on Burroughs, are artists on twin courses; subversive short texts from the underground behind them, public work achieved, now in the phase of revisionism, reinterpreting their past. Cronenberg's reading of Crash depends on the short track (or Steadicam shot), the nudge of a third consciousness. His carefully positioned characters show how a scene should be read by studying the angles of the head. A philosophy of the mirror: who watches the watcher? A threesome is the favoured combination, so that one participant can always play the voyeur, read the action as we interrogate his (or her) reaction. When only two actors are involved, tracking shots introduce the camera as:-<;Iltrogate ob.2Srver. But where Cronenberg tracks, Ballard zooms. Ballard has always favoured a first person narrative, the man in the deckchafr on the balcony. A 1V set, in the anonymous room behind him, playing out its grey interference, news flashes and American soap operas. Fact and fiction. 'The corporate sensorium represented by the media landscape.' Horror headlines, technical journals, Surrealist reproductions: jump cuts to create an unstable reality. ('For years,' Michael Moorcock said, 'Jimmy sat on that appalling armchair, which probably hasn't changed, in front of the 1V set, with a bottle of scotch, watching Hawaii Five-O. Which he

CRASH

Waler spoils Tile Cill wilsl, Illilpsocly

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would go on about as being one of the great important weather-veins of the twentieth century.') Rear Window would be a role model. Long lens snooping into the theatr;- (separat;;;;ns or frames) of an apartment house. Each brightly lit window, shining out of the sticky city night, like a television monitor. Multi-channel documentation. The decadent noir pulp of Cornell Woolrich formalised by Hitchcock's control freak classicism. Ballard's short fictions often exploit the technology of voyeurism, high angle observers using cameras or spy glassestOZapture a describaD1e portion of the widescreen world. The most obvious example of penetration from a static position is Ballard's story The 60 Minute ZOOIJl. The narrator, spying on his wife (who, as in Crash, has been provoked into enacting numerous adulteries for the benefit of her excited husband), calls his film 'this epic of the amateur carner '. low zoom is mechanically operated. The amera (as in eeping To a film about which Ballard has severe reservations) is a weapon; tea vanceon-ttre wife's hotel room is remorseless and predatory. The voyeur who is also the author of this sexual fantasy becomes a putative director. ThmI&rg of the electrifying image, worthy of Bergman or Polanski, that will be the climax of this @m almost derails my mind. 1 listen to the susurrus of the zoom motor ... 1 feel the first hint of an erection.' Cronen berg could do that 'susurrus' beautifully, or the 'complex of ciphers that would send a semiologist into a trance'. But where Cronenberg couldn't tolerate the Michael Snow formalism of a one-hour shot from a single camera position, Ballard's imaginative faculty is liberated by emanating from a fixed point. He can, through his fiction, become a virtual reality participant in an epic of fantastic perversity, only because he is so well rooted, as parent and wage-earner, in the reality of suburban Shepperton. 'I realise,' his narrator explains, 'that 1 have only been fully at ease with my wife while watching her through the viewfinder of a camera.' The heat of his interest, as spectator and recorder, makes him the third actor in the drama: 'So close am 1 that 1 fully expect them to incorporate me in their dialogue.' Ballard, even at this stage of his career (three years after the publication of Crash), was playing over scenes that would have to wait for

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D,1\'id Cronenherg to achieve their realisation. 'But even now, I dream of the ultimate voyeurist film, employing hizarre lenses that reach to some isolated halcony over extraordinary distances ... magnifying the moment of orgasm to a degree of absolute enlargement where the elements of her infidelity hecome totally ahstracted from themselves, areas of undifferentiated light that assuage all anger.' The zoom, for Ballard, is a magical device that converts text into image, a sensually provocative topography of hraille. In the Zoom Lens se~()11 of n1C Atrocity Exbibitioll, he wonders 'how he could invite' the \\'oman of his choice 'to pose for what she would no douht regard as a seL of ohscene photographs'? There are plenty of ohscene photographs in Cronenherg's Crasb, hut no hooks. Wcck-end, Godard's dystopian road rage sermon, is loud with literature, the inevitahle pantomime rants from Jean-Pierre Leaud. Crasb is a hibliophobic nightmare, nothing to hold the hungry eye - except photographs, forensic stills, pornography, wound profiles. Sifting the junk in Ballard's recovered wreck, the camera picks

lip on furtive sex Polaroids and a wank mag, A Fistful of Blondes. Spader tries reading just once, checking over the script for the next day's advertising shoot. He's driving home at the time, not concentrating, and this is when the crash happens. J.G. Ballard's one serious accident, crossing the carriageway of the Chiswick flyover, happened when he was returning to Shepperton from a film premiere.

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6 J.G. Ballard and James Ballard Kafka reshot in the style of Psycho.

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights Ballard doesn't like interviews, so he says. He gives more of them these days. He's obliged to, as part of the promotional machinery for the films; it goes with the turf. Busking his way through the Guardian gig at the NFT he looks comfortable with fame: lightweight suit, handkerchief flopping out of breast-pocket. Toff's accent, genial. An alarming resemblance to a house-trained Sir Les Patterson. 'The ex-RAF look', Chris Petit calls it. Nic Roeg and Jim Ballard, clubmen who don't belong. Years spent overseas. Decent blazers and indecent jeans (or flannels), long before that combination was fashionable. A reckless taste in shirts (Miami Vz'ce pimp) put behind him. Sharp intelligence masked by good manners, the drawl of the officer's mess; golden-hour whiskies at a bamboo table, stirred by an overhead fan. There was a major interview for the Re!Search scrapbook, undertaken in the era when Ballard talked, if at all, to brighter elements from the fan base. Kids who had read the books more thoroughly than he had. Californians who saw him as belonging to the lineage of Burroughs and Borges. Or British film students, like Sam Scoggins, who responded to the paranoid/visionary poetic, the borderland of consciousness, exotic imagery. They knew that Ballard had a line on time, on psychogeography; a way of recycling the sickly outwash of politics, splinters of the real, to make his own books of the dead. He meditated, without shame, on the suburbs and saw a future that was viable (but already played out). Hammering away on an old portable, he inspired the coming cyberpunks, the hallucinogenic day trippers. He gave science fiction a hot shot and killed it off. 'The ideal interview,' Ballard said, 'is one where I remain silent and you just ask a stream of hundreds of questions.' He prefers it if the interviewer hasn't read the books he's discussing. He dislikes the cult of first editions. Mike Moorcock tried to suggest that he had no time for

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books at all, other than Crash Injuries, The Wtmen Report and Moby-Dick (because Ray Bradbury wrote the screenplay). 'He'd seen the movie and liked it, so Moby-Dick became his first book,' Moorcock told me. 'He had no other books in the house. Ulysses and his review copies. Which he tried to burn. He had this pit in the garden.' 'Answers to a Questionnaire' (issued in the collection war Fever) is echt-Ballard, the perfect interview: all questions deleted, pick any answers you want and construct your own cut-up scenario. (3) c/o Terminal 3, London Airport, Heathrow. (19) My greatest ambition is to turn into a TV programme. (25) Already I was convinced I was in the presence of a messianic figure who would help me to penetrate the Nat West deposit account computer codes. (63) He announced that Princess Diana was immortal. (88) An-assination. Having read (or reread) most of Ballard's books, and having interviewed Moorcock and listened to his account of the New World days, I wrote to the man and asked if he'd be prepared to talk to me. (Realising, all too clearly, that my pedagogic research would have already disqualified me for the task ahead.) He replied at once, setting up at meeting at his friend Claire Walsh's flat in the Goldhawk Road, W12. (I was lucky. Claire knew the City and the East End and was knowledgeable about London fiction. She'd picked up on some strange details in my novels that I'd forgotten and nobody else had ever noticed.) Now my real problem began: was it legitimate to try (fruitlessly) to unweave biographical fact from the overworked palimpsest of myth and fiction? It was impertinent to draw parallels between Crash (novel or film) and Ballard's life. Moorcock, over a long afternoon at the Overseas League, had dredged up a mesmerising account of his friendship and alliance with Ballard, their meetings with Burroughs and Borges, sessions in the Swan in Knightsbridge, parties, brawls, visions, arguments, the trip to a wrecker's yard to recover the vehicle in which Ballard had his shunt. Ballard had said, repeatedly, that Crash was his most autobiographical book.

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So Goldhawk Road, as I explored it, became a septic drain running beneath the projective formalism of Cronenberg's film. Canada, specifically Toronto, was the place where Ballard's dream went to die. The events that had inspired the original text, the images, the territory, had been replayed in this neo-Sadean version. Parallel times. I was introduced to Claire who Ballard acknowledged as the inspiration for the fictional Catherine Ballard. And I was sitting opposite the writer ].G. Ballard, who was hugging his mug of coffee, in a friendly, cluttered space (shelves of books), and telling me why he called his fictional other James Ballard'. Perhaps the translation to Toronto was necessary, to free the film from the mess of biography, allowing Ballard's primary metaphors to reform in their essential chemical combinations. London was too full of particulars. The airport prostitute who was also 'a part-time cinema usherette for ever worrying about her small son's defective hearing-aid'. Or the 'courting couples in shop doorways' that Ballard recalled from his early days, driving down Goldhawk Road, visiting this flat in the 60s. He struck me, and I salute him for it, as a man who doesn't like change. The same house, the same work routine; year after year, book after book, heroic solitude, avoidance of literary politics, reputation mongering. The hermit of Shepperton. Last of the Romantics. He toys, now that he can go anywhere he wants, with the notion of moving down to Spain, shifting into that part of his fiction: Surrealist rockscapes, Hoxton hoods, drugs, pornography and multichannel1V Sunlight through the slats of afternoon apartments. But he settles for Sundays in Shepherd's Bush. I scuffle through the streets in my usual fashion, reading the signs and shopfronts, the shifty collages of laissez-faire capitalism: a staging post on the road out. Somewhere unnoticed, an overspill of the Bush; TV centre freelances and market traders, sub-academics and city planners spilling to the edge of the map. Flats for mistresses in 30s blocks with curved balconies and marine pretensions. Businesses forced out of the centre and making the best of it before the next visitation from the VAT man. (This is where, in one of those shoebox studios, Mike Reeves shot The Sorcerers.)

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I log a few snapshots: because now everything on the street looks like the answer to one of Ballard's questionnaires. Melville Court with its hierarchy of white balconies, waiting for binocular man to check out the traffic flow: the cough of diesel, not the mercury drift of the Toronto expressway. A car showroom with the notice: SERIOUS ENQUIRIES ONLY A silver Porsche and Edward Hopper reproductions on the wall. Flat-roofed, sub-Bauhaus experiments with trompe l'ceil windows. A modest flat above a Bangladeshi mini-mart. The fiction grows out of this undisclosed, over-familiar urban landscape. Ballard's trick: to forge a poetic out of that which contains least poetry, the mundane, the scruffy, the band beneath language. Goldhawk Road is West London's exhaust pipe. Fantasies of flow, escape, nocturnal motorways circumnavigating Heathrow's perimeter, are contradicted at every step by the basilisk reality of Chiswick and Brentford; road works, gridlock, tired concrete. I started the conversation by asking Ballard to deliver a short autobiography, in terms of the films he had seen. BALLARD: I was born in 1930. I started being taken to the movies in Shanghai when I was about six or seven years old. I've got a feeling that the first film I saw was Snow White. A pretty shocking film, actually. Frightened me out of my wits. I've never forgotten it. All that 'mirror, mirror, on the wall'. Pure evil vibrating across the cinema. Film-going was in its absolute heyday. My mother, during the school holidays, would otten say, 'Would you like to go to the cinema?' I'd say, 'Yeahl' I and the White Russian nanny - we had a whole succession of

them - would pile into the car and the chauffeur would take us to downtown Shanghai. And we'd sit in one of those vast empty auditoriums and watch some Hollywood movie. As a small boy I hated Sitting alone. The funny thing is that now I love it. We'd go into the circle. I used to nag my nanny - if I spotted a couple fifty yards away - to get us sitting right next to them. I saw a lot of films, all the films that Hollywood churned out. Then there was a break during the war. I went to school in Cambridge, at the Leys School, a boarding school..

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SINCLAIR: Malcolm Lowry went there. BALLARD: Yes, he did. We came from a similar background, quite mysteriously. Manchester. Cotton brokers. Very odd that. ... But, anyway, Cambridge. I used to sneak away whenever I could. I saw French and Italian classic films at the Arts Cinema - '46, '47, '48, '49. I left school and went to King's. Medical School. This was the heyday of Hollywood noir movies. I remember going to see T-Men. Which only cineastes have heard of. Hard-edged, really tough gangster film. I remember watching that and thinking it's much more important to see T-Men than to go and listen to Dr Leavis, or even my own anatomy lecturers. I knew that was part of the emerging culture.

I shared Ballard's enthusiasm for Anthony Mann. And for T-Men, which came from the period when Mann worked with the writer John C. Higgins and the great black and white photographer John Alton. 'Savage economy' is the quality David Thomson highlighted in these 40s Bpictures. T-Men featured an undercover agent forced to deny his wife in order to maintain a false identity. The mission always comes first, even when you have to silently witness a partner's murder. For Ballard a useful example of bent morality, the strange imperatives of a macho code: counterfeit identities, betrayal of domestic and personal ties, in order to defeat those who would undermine the economy by passing dud coins. Cronenberg, unlike Ballard, was never a film buff. As students they had something in common. They were both scientists who realised they'd made the 'wrong choice'. But, where Ballard plunged into afternoon cinemas and avoided novels, Cronenberg read ferociously and only attended the film-club to make up the numbers. He was no anorak, bingeing on the Apocrypha of zombie-lesbian beach parties from Mars, or ticking off the Bergmans. According to Peter Morris' biography, Cronen berg 'insisted that none of the films he saw influenced him except in the sense that he understood it was possible for film-makers to control their work just as novelists did'. SINCLAIR: Did you read pulp novels at this time? BALLARD Not really, no. Not until much later. I think I read Chandler as his

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books were published. I've always loved Hollywood thrillers. My idea of a perfect evening would be watching Point Blank. I actually bought the original of Point Blank, the book by .. Robert Strick? Stark, yes. Richard Stark. The novel is Just a pale shade of the film. So I've never really liked reading thrillers, but I love the films. SINCLAIR: Did Alain Resnals, Chris Marker, and the French New Wave directors influence your writing? The jump-cuts, fractured narratives, the relish for the City, the enthusiasm for comic stripS, posters, petrol stations? BALLARD: I don't think they did, to be honest. My first short story was published In 1956/57. And the other stories for the magazine New Worlds

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were also written around that time. I think I was exploring my own space. I don't know whether cinema had much influence. I remember going with Claire in '68, whenever it came out, to a special showing of Godard's Week-end - this was before I wrote Crash at the ICA. I remember thinking: 'He's got it wrong. Godard's got it wrong. He sees the car as the symbol of American capitalism, and the car crash as one of the wounds inflicted by capitalism on the docile purchasers of motor cars; people whose lives are completely modified by Wall Street. Whose sex lives are reduced to the kind of banal banter that you get in advertising commercials.' I thought: 'That's the wrong approach. He's missed the point. He doesn't see that the car is, in fact, a powerful force for good in its perverse way. And even the car crash can be conceived of - in imaginative terms - as a powerful link in the nexus of sex, love, eroticism and death, that lies at the basis of our own sexual imagination. With its heart wired into the central nervous system of all human beings.' I knew Godard didn't get it - because he saw the car crash in rather old-fashioned Marxist political terms. I felt when I started to write Crash in about 1970 - when I'd finished The Atrocity Exhibition (which contains a lot of forward references to what

would become Crash) - that I was on a totally different tack. The Godard approach was very specialist. But then Alphaville was a brilliant film, a masterpiece. No question about that. The interior space of Alphaville is so wonderful. I wish I could say that had influenced me. I hope it did. I love all those chrome hotels and the great Akim Tamirott, in his overcoat, sitting sadly on his bed. Eddie Constantine, the glamorous super-hunk. I think originally Godard was going to call it Tarzan vs. IBM. I loved that film.

Week-end and Crash. These films seem to sit at either end of a trajectory. If Ballard's story - 'the nexus of sex, love, eroticism and death, that lies at the basis of our sexual imagination' - was to be told in a form appropriate to its content, then 1968 was the time to get it done. The self-confident sloganising of Ballard's rhetoric belonged in the mouth of one of Godard's cultural messengers: Jean-Pierre Melville in Breathless,

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Week-end

\.

Sam Fuller in Pierrot Ie Fou, Brice Parain in Vivre sa vie. Crash, as a film of the late 60s, in the rough-hewn style of Anthony Balch's Burroughs prom os, incorporating found footage, crash demonstrations, might have achieved everything that Week-end aspired to; an energised dystopian polemic. And the perverse indolence of Godard's pornographic pastiche would have given some depth to the robotic fatalism of Cronenberg's Crash. Both films were in the wrong period. Ballard responded very positively to Alphaville and to Chris Marker's La Jetee (for which he wrote an enthusiastic notice in New World.l'), because he saw these films as parallel versions of his own work. They didn't inspire him with new ideas or new ways of seeing; they were descriptions, so he felt, of territory he had already mapped. 'A fusion of science fiction, psychological fable and photomontage, creates in its unique way a series of bizarre images of the inner landscapes of time.' Describing La Jetee, Ballard might have been writing the blurb for The

Atrocity Exhibition. A car crash was the pivotal event in another film of the period, another literary adaptation, Joseph Losey's Accident. But although the setting was pre-Morse Oxford, the technique was diluted Resnais (with Delphine Seyrig, escaped from Marienbad, to take a cameo part). Where Morse degenerates into a turgid promotion for the heritage industry

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ACCident

(country pubs, honeystone colleges, crossword snobbery, collectible cars. resurrected actors well-used to corpsing), the kind of overstretched material that makes the 24-hour, frame-by-frame projection of PI',l'c/?o look like a flickbook, Accident manipulates time to keep the wrecked car, the sound of breaking glass and tyres on the gravel, as the energy centre. This modified Cubist approach, oblique slivers of evidence reassembled. forward flashes, dialogue and effects used as part of a compositional field, gives some edge to a linear narrative. Cronenberg takes the opposite approach (a technique which Ballard sanctions): he sees time as a smooth curve. What has happened once will happen again, the forward momentum disappears into its own shadow. y~_~ You can enterthe_~ream at
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either back projection drifts (Hitchcock), during which it would be safe, the car wasn't going anywhere, to indulge in any form of sexual geometry, or the classic monochrome of Kiss Me Deadly. Headlights sweeping the curves of the coastal highway. The sound of the power of this heavy machine, under control, taking the tight bends. A naked woman in a trenchcoat holding up her arms. Godard's Made in USA is the film where the paranoid poetic of McCarthyite pulp (Mickey Spillane to Richard Stark and Lionel White) tries to accommodate the realpolitik of the car crash as weapon of social control. Crash could have been made in 1967 or 1968 in this fragmented style, in the way that Ballard wrote The Assassination 0/ Kennedy COl1Jidered as a Downhill Motor Race, but by the time the deal was done in the mid-90s, he wanted a representation that looked as smooth and unflustered as late Bunuel. SINCLAIR: You've described the assassination of President Kennedy as an 'energising event'. Would Godard have seen it in those terms? BALLARD: No, I think the political perspective would have prevented him from doing that. The Kennedy assassination of '63 could be regarded as a detonator. We move from a pre-electronic world, in imaginative terms, into an electronic world. TV really arrived here, colour TV in particular, at that time. You saw things live on television in the mid-to-Iate 60s. You saw the Vietnam War virtually live. Oswald was shot dead live on TV. I remember watching TV with my parents in Manchester in something like 1951. There was only one channel. We looked at a screen the size of a lightbulb. The idea that TV plugged into reality seemed absurd. By the mid-60s, TV was a window into the world. It was an unfolding in real time.

Television and the suburbs. Crash really belongs on TV; on tape, surveillance footage. You need to eliminate the authorial presence. Ballard was so well tuned to this unedited reality: the dead meditation of channel-hopping at the end of the day's work, taking whatever comes without selection, feeding it back into the evolving text. Postmodernist quotation. A refusal to make cultural judgments. Moorcock said that what disturbed him most about Ballard was the ineradicable notion 'that

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the Shanghai camp must have been exactly like a leafy suburb. Part of the psychosis which is driving him - and that's great - came out of the same narrow tendencies that Kingsley Amis had. It sounds like Norbury. It's straight Norbury.' Chris Petit saw Ballard's Shepperton house as a colonial bungalow. He was dug into, and making the best of, an alien world. Internal exile. With TV as the news from elsewhere. American soaps and cop shows pitching a dream gulag that he would never need to visit. Hawaii Five-O and The Man/rom UNCLE. 'The odd thing about Ballard,' Petit said, 'is that you'd expect, from the writing of the books, that his movie viewing would be avantgarde. And you could imagine him wanting to see a version of Crash @med by Fassbinder. But then you actually discover that his expectation of cinema is one of wanting to be entertained. And what he actually likes is mainstream American cinema, Charley Varrick and The Getaway.' SINCLAIR: Is Crash a novel of the suburbs? BALLARD: There's a huge bias in the English novel towards the city as subject matter and setting for the novel. I take quite the contrary view, needless to say. I regard the city as a semi-extinct form. London is basically a nineteenth-century city. And the habits of mind appropriate to the nineteenth century, which survive into the novels set in the London of the twentieth century, aren't really appropriate to understanding what is really going on in life today. I think the suburbs are more interesting than people will let on. In the suburbs you find uncentred lives. The normal civic structures are not there. So that people have more freedom to explore their own imaginations, their own obsessions. And the discretionary spending power to do so. There's a sort of airport culture - with its transience, its access to anywhere in the world. Social trends of various kinds tend to reveal themselves first in the suburbs. The transformation of British life by television in the 60s took place, most of all, in the suburbs, when VCRs came in. In the suburbs you have nothing to do except watch TV

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An inner-London, or an inner-city, version of Crash would be impossible. The logistics just aren't there. The traffic moves too slowly. One doesn't have the imaginative freedom.

Part of Ballard's charm lies in his perversity, his unashamed espousal (or celebration) of everything that right-thinking liberal humanism opposes: junk TV; cars, vertically stacked housing developments, multi-storey car-parks, airport sliproads, pornography, Salvador Dali, Helmut Newton, rogue scientists, the narcoleptic conformity of the suburbs, whisky, cigarettes, pin-ups, ennui, alien<1tion, sunshine and suicide. I found myself surrendering quite willingly to these well-honed techno-babble riffs delivered in the tones of Frank Muir in his ripest clubman mode. Weird emphases and rolling chuckles. Ballard has taken the germ of suburban consciousness and allowed it to mutate into something subversive and strange. Moorcock, who wrote pamphlets for the Liberal Party, reviews for the New StateslI1an, and who maintains a regular dialogue with Andrea Dworkin, finds it increasingly difficult to come to terms with the unvarying stance of his old ally. Moorcock's imagination lives in the mess of the city, Mother London, and in the heroic peristalsis of the mob. He sees Ballard's philosophy, his fondness for wound profiles, helicopters, surgery and fetishism, as deriving from a marriage of convenience between the Amises (father and son) and the sculptor Sir Eduardo Paolozzi. The Spy With my Face. fealuring lhe men from UNCLE

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'In a sense, all Jimmy's stuff,' Moorcock said, 'is like Paolozzi learning bullshit. Paolozzi went to Germany and came back speaking this ersatz jargon. He can go on for hours talking this crap. He and Jimmy were so

banal. Everything they thought about. It was like an Emma

Tennant dinner party. I wonder if this is just public-school barbarism? You can hear echoes of Jimmy in Martin Amis. Boy-techno-stuff presented in an aggressive way. Amis extended his narrowness through Jimmy. It gave him a channel.' Kingsley Amis in the

New Worlds' days was a big Ballard supporter.

BALLARD: I was published by Cape for twenty years and I don't think Tom Maschler ever really understood what I was doing. But he paid attention to people he felt were significant opinion makers. People like Kingsley Amis - who was a great fan of my early stuff like The Drowned World, my early stories, and hated The Atrocity Exhibition. He loathed it. I had a very close relationship with him. He was quite a sharp man, very astute. I don't want to speak ill of the dead. In a way he followed the Arnold Bennett trajectory. The boy from the provinces comes to London. Has a huge integrity and then gets seduced into a world of yachts and the south of France, the Greek islands. That happened to Kingsley, a bit. When I first met him in '62, I'd just written The Drowned World, my first novel. He was then in Keats Grove in Hampstead. With Elizabeth Jane Howard. I remember we ate meals on our knees. When I'd meet him in London, we'd meet in pubs. And then, in about two or three years, he started to change. We had to go to hotels and have pink gins. Things were changing. The Atrocity Exhibition was a book he could never get on with. That never worried me.

I just went on doing my own thing. There's not much element of conscious choice, you know. One tends to follow one's obsessions, hunches. It's all laid down years in advance. Kingsley Amis was born to be driven, not to drive. The Atrocity

Exhibition, which already contained all the essential ingredients of Crash, would have been deeply offensive to him. Foreign. French influenced. Mucked about with. Chopped up. Anti-American. Illiterate, basically. No

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proper structure. He may have arrived in London from the provinces, from Swansea, on the back of the success of Lucky Jim (book and film), but his was the authentic voice of the south London hills. Norbury. A lazy drone successfully translated to the Garrick bark, but it was always there. It's impossible to bleed the birthright of the suburbs out. Which is why, for a long time, nobody could imagine Crash being set anywhere except the isthmus between the Westway, Heathrow and Shepperton. Sandy Lieberson, when he considered producing a version of Crash, around the time of its original publication, was insistent. 'It would have to be done here, absolutely. With a good Elizabeth Taylor double.' Chris Petit, much later, discussing his ideas for Crash with Ballard, pressed for it to be shot within the topography of the London suburbs that Ballard had made his own. But Ballard wouldn't wear it. 'He sees Crash as much a Tokyo novel or a Toronto novel as a London novel,' Petit reported. 'I disagree.' My own feeling is that Ballard was very happy to have Cronenberg move the story to Toronto, to have it shot within a few miles of where the Canadian director lived; because that, in effect, took the heat out of it. Crash would be further distanced from any distracting autobiographical aspects, from the probing of noxious journalists. The film would then become the product Ballard scrupulously referred to as 'Cronenberg's Crash'. An elegant formalist exercise with a great car-wash scene. BALLARD: Jeremy Thomas and Cronenberg told me, about six months before Ihey started shooting, that they would shoot in Toronto. I think at other times they, vaguely, thought of shooting it around London. The original setting. But I thought Toronto was just right, the paradigm of North American cities (although it's not recognised like all the others). 'Oh, my god, a bit of The Rockford Files, The Streets of San Francisco and Kojak, coming up again.' Toronto is anonymous, and most of Cronenberg's films have been set there. Part of the eeriness of his early Toronto films is because you don't know where you are.

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Toronto is the subtopian nowhere in which The Naked Lunch was recreated. It was like going back into 50s, 60s, 70s television. Without the landmarks. Without the spit and bite of Cronenberg's visceral shockers, the psychically damaged apartment blocks that could have come out of Ballard's High-Rise; the shopping malls haunted by vampire agents and distant viewers. The night drives through streets so featureless they operated like a sick-neon labyrinth. Ballard was delighted to see his novel removed from all the markers that tied it to place, to potentially autobiographical specifics. He suggested that the names he gave to his characters, which were always, I felt, poignant signals of his intentions, were pretty much off the cuff. He doesn't reread his own work and most of his characters are variants on a number of set archetypes, so the names don't matter. SINCLAIR: The names of the characters in Crash seem coded to me. Is that wishful thinking? Catherine Ballard obviously derives from Catherine Austen (sometimes Austin) in The Atrocity Exhibition. Names that float playfully between two great female literary traditions of the nineteenth century: the necrophile romanticism of the Brontes and the domesticated irony, the control, of Jane Austen. With a bit of a nudge in the direction of the car. But you say that 'Catherine' might as well have been 'Claire', if Claire Walsh had been happy with that? Seagrave, surely .. BALLARD: Seagrave, of course. There was a landspeed record-breaker in the 30s. Yes, yes. I think you're probably right. I don't know about the origin of Vaughan. I think I just wanted a name that was different, you know. That didn't have any obvious associations. This created problems for the French because they can't pronounce it. They pronounce it 'Vogan'. SINCLAIR: What about the Travis!Travers!Traven mutations in The Atrocity

Exhibition? BALLARD: That was very self-conscious, based on - Jesus what was his name? - the German/American .... Yes, of course. B. Traven. He was used as a mysterious figure. So it was a wonderful name to give to a character who was himself disintegrating into multiple identities. Basically

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a psychiatrist having a mental or schizophrenic breakdown. I just multiplied variants on his name. Tallis and Traven and so on. But, no, I don't know where Vaughan came from. SINCLAIR: He turns up in The Atrocity Exhibition. He was there before Crash. BALLARD: Does he? Yes. He was a sort of psycho. I never read my own stuff. It must have come from there. There was a connection between the two. SINCLAIR: Yes, but how did he arrive the first time? If there is a first time, because I'm convinced all your work is one book. BALLARD: Well .... Yes, of course it is. Of course. That's true of all readers. One doesn't want to irritate. Yes, yeah, yes. I think I said years ago that fiction was a brand of neurology. I still believe that. There's always spare processing capacity in the brain. We see that when we sleep, dream ... I did record dreams at one period. I based one or two, not many, short stories of mine on dreams. I used to dream, when I was younger, very strangely plotted, story-driven dreams. Some of them made what I felt were good strong story ideas.

It was the genealogy of one name, Vaughan, that haunted me. There was nothing mysterious about the provenance, once Vaughan's christian name was revealed as 'Robert'. Vaughan the 'scientist as hoodlum', as Ballard called him, was another television spectre, grafted on to avant-garde literature by way of The Man/rom UNCLE. (Leo G. Carroll as 'Mr Waverly' linked this cold war pop art directly to Hitchcock's North by Northwest.) Robert Vaughn. But what's a missing lower case 'a' between friends? A deleted indefinite article. Vaughn was Hollywood's indefinite article: oily, slick, tight-mouthed, sharp-suited, moving on castors like a Nixon fixer. Better adapted to the small screen, where his defects (of character) could be more artfully husbanded. He always looked like a decommissioned CIA apparatchIk who ran a stable of remote viewers. A frame from the Zapruder film. You'd expect him to make his first appearance in a Return 0/ exploitation quickie. Vaughn had a face designed for remakes. He sneered effectively, as if the trash in which he was forced to earn a quick buck was endured only to fund much subtler

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pleasures, privileged collections. He was a premature XFiles spook, a bent insider. He even turned up in a film shot in a hangar: a set like the prehistory of the opening sequence of Cronenberg's Crash. Like The Thing from Another World customised for a sale to television. A crashed UFO with the bodies of aliens. Off-the-peg conspiracy routines delivered, as Derek Winnert says, 'by eager-to-please actors down on their luck'. Robert Vaughn or that reliable British 1V heavy, Peter Vaughan? Who got to Ballard first? You can see the Shepperton magus plucking the name from subliminally received credits; some piece of dead television that rolled through late enough at night to bypass the conditioned defence mechanisms. Irritants. The sharpness of the 'V' declining into the nasal snuffle of the 'hn'. But the name, whether Ballard used it consciously or not, was a homage to another tradition, metaphysical, occulted. To the poetry and alchemy of the twins from the Welsh borders, Henry and Thomas Vaughan. To secret histories. Geographies unsecured by time, sites where quests were launched and names disappeared. To Arthur Machen: whose story, The Shining Pyramid, hearkens back to the grail-haunted landscape of the Vaughan twins. Machen, on the first page, links London with this more fantastic zone. 'It has always remained a sort of enchanted picture in my mind as I sit at my desk and hear the traffic rattling in the street in the midst of whirling London .... "There is no Mrs Vaughan, I suppose?" "No," said Vaughan, "I am a hermit, like yourself.'" 'Vaughan's present role in the stadium seemed that of a film director,' Ballard says of his character when he stages the James Dean crash. Vaughan is always seen as the energiser; he directs the action, acts upon notions which remain latent for James Ballard. Kathy Acker insists that the magnetic field of Crash is the relationship between Ballard and Vaughan. 'Ballard's novel is a love letter to Vaughan.' Vaughan as the dark twin, the nigredo in the alchemical wedding. 'The whole film, actually, is Cronenberg's fucking of Ballard.' And so it is: in every sense. Because the experiment can only work through fusion. Director pleasurably fucking the text, guiding actors to play out the turbulent

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relationship between the co-authors of an event that must disguise its subversive agenda - the incubating of the light - behind a fluid and elegant theatrical surface; a cinema of formal gestures, prearranged acts, critical journeys across an alien landscape. 'Increasingly I was convinced,' Ballard wrote, 'that Vaughan was a projection of my own fantasies and obsessions and that in some way I had let him down.' Michael Moorcock, well-used to the exigencies of serial composition, understood the importance of names. He acknowledged the usefulness of having a figure such as his own Jerry Cornelius, a shapeshifter, a device who could be passed on to other writers (James Sallis and M. John Harrison, among others). 'Yes,' he told me, 'Travisffravers was very popular in those days. Multiples are ok. They're a reasonable device. I don't mind Jimmy using that device. He's someone who can't reveal himself to his nearest and dearest, let alone on the page.' It's disconcerting to find the identity of the principal character slipping, the letters of his name rearranging themselves, as they do in the sequence of short texts that make up The Atrocity Exhibition. Travisffravenffallis: the coding seems, at a pre-conscious level, to press so many buttons. First, as Ballard admits, there was B. Traven, the enigmatic German anarchist who turned up in Mexico; and who, according to rumour, John Huston found standing at the end of his bed, when he was shooting The Treasure 0/ the Sierra Madre. Then there was Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, every bit as apocalyptically psychotic as Vaughan. Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin used Mick Travis as the protagonist for their state of the nation satires - and featured Malcolm McDowell who thereby linked the project to A Clockwork Orange. Travis turns up as a character in Cormac McCarthy's Cities 0/ the Plain. Walter Tevis wrote The Man Who Fell to Earth. X. Trapnel was Anthony Powell's version of the self-mythologising Julian Maclaren-Ross. To understand the coded meaning of Crash, Crash as a disguised (disguised because so blatantly signalled) autobiography, you have to look first at the names. James Ballard, of course. The ingenuous, upfront use of his own identity: James Spader (looking like James Hewitt) playing James Ballard. Catherine, who might, had the 'real life' inspiration felt

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comfortable with it, have been called Claire. The multiple, but contradictory, resonances of Vaughan have already been outlined: psycho and mystic. Then there is Helen Remington. Remington: the trusty standup portable on which Ballard hammered out his texts. A name that becomes a classically surreal metaphor for sex as composition. Remington also suggests America: the painter and the rifle. (Moorcock, summoning up night drives through Notting Hill at the period when Ballard was writing Crash, remembers an American woman, 'Helen ... something'.) Gabrielle, played by Rosanna Arquette, is gifted with the christian name of a soap star of the day who acted with Ballard in a television documentary that involved plenty of driving and standing around in multi-storey carparks. Karen, Catherine Ballard's secretary, part of the lesbian sub-plot excised by Cronenberg, has no surname in Crash. In her earlier manifestation, in The Atrocity Exhibition, she was Karen Novotny. The kind of comic strip tag favoured by Godard, something out of Alphaville or Made in USA. But there is also a more direct source: a trashy docunovel called King's Road (1971), 'exposing the high life and low life of London's turned-on, beautiful people', written by the Czech 'model' and amateur spook, Mariella Novotny, who had a small role in the Profumo scandal. The book features all the usual elements of sex/dope craziness, including lesbian couplings and voyeurism. The names, apparently selected at random, play back into what Rick Slaughter calls Ballard's 'ongoing continuum that represents present-day life'. These Godardian masks, names that are found and not invented, anchor the characters to their period. They become shorthand notations in an abandoned diary. It was the huge success of Empire 0/ the Sun that gave mainstream literary commentators the opportunity to 'understand' and re-evaluate Ballard in autobiographical terms. Yet, paradoxically, Empire is more of a fictional construct, less the story of the development of Ballard's imagination than Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition. Empire 0/ the Sun, persuasively written, strong on all the attributes of memory (including false memory), provides a convenient framework for 'explaining' and domesticating Ballard's psychosis. After Empire 0/ the Sun, the early transgressive texts, the compacted novels, the

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collaged images of guns and bare-breasted women, would be gently revised; the story recast, as the author has every right to do, as The Kindness 0/ Women. As Ballard said: 'The past was the first casualty of World War II.' BALLARD: People think Empire of the Sun is straight autobiography and that therefore they can go back, if they're interested, through my early fiction and reinterpret it. 'Oh, now we know ... the swimming pools.' Of course in a city like Shanghai there are a lot of drained swimming pools. But I hardly noticed them at the time - any more than the abandoned houses and ruined buildings and the rest of it. Empire of the Sun is my life seen in the mirror of the fiction prompted by that life.

I was fifty-five when Empire was published. As they say, there are no psychopaths after the age of forty. I mean nobody becomes psychopathic after the age of forty. It may be that one calms down a bit. It's a wonderful time to write, when you are really young. But after Empire of the Sun and Spielberg, my life hasn't changed. I live in the same house. I think people expected me to start jet-setting around the world. My life didn't change at all. Claire and I have gone on in the same sort of life I've always lived. I think it's a matter of temperament. SINCLAIR Were you happy with the film of Empire of the Sun? BALLARD Yes, I was very impressed by it. It's a very imaginative film. It packs a powerful punch. I don't think the Hollywood film has ever come to terms with war - because war runs counter to the whole ethos, the optimistic, positive ethos. Every camera angle, every zoom, the language. The grammar of the Hollywood film is diametrically opposed to the rhythm and grammar of the experience of war: most of the time nothing happens, then something happens that makes everything even worse. But, bearing that in mind, I think Empire of the Sun was a remarkable piece of work.

Spielberg did a very useful job, in terms of Ballard's perceived status: he confirmed, in the most public way, the achievement of a book that had

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been saluted by all sides of the literary establishment; by Graham Greene and Angela Carter, who saw it as 'that great British novel about the last war for which we've had to wait forty-odd years'. (Spielberg, as if in response to Ballard's strictures about Hollywood and war, threw himself, for the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan, into an orgy of orchestrated hyper-realism, flying limbs, infernal sound and fractured rhythms.) Unusually for a contemporary British author, Ballard has been accorded two pseudo-biographies, respectable films made by men who wanted to do something more than exploit f1avour-of-the-month literary properties. He could enjoy, with characteristic generosity, the account of his fabulous childhood in the dream city of Shanghai and the urban fringe nightmare of Crash, the 'interior' poetic of his underground cult years, presented as an elegant exercise in Sadean philosophical tableaux. Exorcised (or celebrated), the franchised depiction of memory freed him to begin work on the less frantic, more 'feminised' books of late middleage. While Cronenberg, sharing a start in dystopian polemic, low budget shockers that were the urgent equivalent of Ballard's compacted novels, and having paid his dues to the modernist canon, had also placed himself in a position where he could, if he wished, readdress and revise his own history.

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7 Atrocity Exhibitions This malevolent and inaccurate vision of mankind is merely the fantasy of a sOlitary misanthrope out of touch with his times.

).G. Ballard on Wyndham Lewis Before writing Crash, and long before any of the film versions were sanctioned, Ballard set-designed a rehearsal for Cronenberg's leisurely tracking shots down lines of stalled cars towards some smoking construction of twisted metal: 'the conceptual auto-disaster'. To walk through the Camden gallery (an ex-industrial space) where his art show was staged would be to enter a narrative of fear, to replay violated emotions. Ballard's retrieved wrecks operated like a three-dimensional advance proof for The Atrocity Exhibition. In The Kindness 0/ Women Ballard gave this show a fictional gloss: 'The idea of staging an exhibition of crashed cars came to me in 1969, after the road accident. ... The strange circumstances of the accident, and the behaviour of the witnesses, seemed to spring straight from the special logic of the 60s. The exhibition at the Arts Laboratory, which intrigued some visitors and outraged a great many more, summed up many of my obsessions at the time, and clearly foretold the car crash that nearly killed me three months later. Right until its end, the decade continued to unravel its lurid mythologies.' Ballard's accident, his obsessive conjurings with the Kennedy assassination, the crashes that apotheosised Albert Camus, James Dean and Jayne Mansfield, became part of what he called 'the project'. The project countered the: perceived entropy of the suburbs, 'the death of affect', by allowing his imagination the freedom to play over the 'fertilising' horrors of lV/politics; the nexus of faked moonshots, comic strip conspiracies, Detroit techno-porn and the Hollywood/Las Vegas world brothel. Confront and celebrate. Michael Moorcock, recalling the exhibition, superimposed the event on Ballard's accident, a visit to the wreckers' yard (a scene that is mythologised in the repossession of Vaughan's 1963 Lincoln in Crash).

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'The Camden exhibition was pretty dull. Two or three crashed cars. That's about it. I think he had a Chrysler. He couldn't find the American cars he wanted. The biggest one he ever owned was a Granada. He wouldn't let that car go. He insisted I go with him one day to the wrecker's yard. He's arguing with the blokes and he gets the car back. It's not running, it's rumbling along. It stinks of death. It reeks of damp and mould. We're doing about ten miles an hour, everything steaming and banging. And he's insisting it's all right.' Ballard laughed when I mentioned Moorcock's account. 'Oh, that's a bit of myth making - but I think he's probably telling the truth. What happened was ... I had an accident, about a week after finishing Crash. My Ford Zephyr, a big English Ford, had a front blowout at the foot of the Chiswick Bridge ... rolled over, crossed the dual carriageway. Ended up on its back. The windscreen was shattered. The car was dragged to a police pound and it must have rained, because the upholstery - which I assume was made of plastic - must have contained some wool. Of course it smelt musty. That's what Mike remembers. I had the car repaired.' The two writers who worked hardest to make New Worlds one of the most inspirational, dynamic (and chaotic) publications of the period have now become rival chroniclers, competing to fix history through their endlessly revised and reworked fictions, their untrustworthy memoirs. Ballard and Moorcock were one of the many multiples of the fictional James Ballard and Robert Vaughan. 'During this period, as he sat in the rear seat of the Pontiac,' Ballard wrote in The Atrocity Exhibition, 'Travis was preoccupied by his separation from the normal tokens of life ... these became as fragmentary as the faces of Elizabeth Taylor and Sigmund Freud on the advertising hoardings, as unreal as the war the film companies had restarted in Vietnam .... At dawn, after driving all night, they reached the suburbs of hell.' This last sentence, sounding like Moorcock's impression of Cronenberg's films ('ghastly tosh'), echoes Alphaville: the melancholy city evoked by Eluard, where science fiction is created through a strategic cataloguing of the present moment. Prophecy is elective amnesia, tapping

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into the trajectory of fate, reading the future by cutting up yesterday's junked headlines. So what was the story of the exhibition of crashed cars that Ballard curated? 'I think it was 1969,' he told me, rather wearily, pushed again into the effort of recalling an overdescribed event. 'I think I'd finished The Atrocity Exhibition. All the pieces had been put together as a book and I was debating whether to write Crash - which I started in '70. I knew this American girl, Pam, she was in charge of the gallery at the New Arts Lab when it moved from Drury Lane to this former pharmaceutical warehouse. 'Anyway, I said to Pam, 'T d like to put on an exhibition. I'll put on an exhibition of crashed cars." Which I did: crashed Pontiac, crashed Mini, crashed Morris Oxford. It had the most raucous opening night party. There was a man called "Hoppy", John Hopkins. He was connected to the underground newspaper, IT, and he also ran this 1VX, closed circuit television, private 1V station. And he agreed to set up a closed circuit system in the gallery, among the cars. And I hired a young model to appear naked, to interview the guests at the party. 'Now all this was designed to provoke the audience. The whole thing was a psychological experiment - to see if my basic hunch about the latent, hidden psychology, the depth-psychology, of the car crash, was on the right track. Whether my hypothesis was accurate. It was a test. I was lab testing Crash. 'Curiously, there's a scene in one of the Atrocity Exhibition stories where the "T" character puts on an exhibition of crashed cars. One of which is a Lincoln, a crashed Lincoln Continental. So I was staging a scene from Atrocity Exhibition and monitoring it as a psychological experiment to testdrive Crash: Why had he organised this exhibition of crashed cars? The truncated vehicles, with their ruptured radiator grilles, were arranged in lines down the showroom floor. His warped sexuality ... had something of the same quality as these maimed vehicles. He had even produced a magazine devoted

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solely to car accidents: Crash! The dismembered bodies of Jayne Mansfield, Camus and Dean presided over its pages, epiphanies of violence and desire.

'I remember this young woman. It was so delicious. She walked into the gallery. I said, "Right, you're going to ... sort of ... or .... " She said, "I won't appear naked. I'll only appear topless." I thought, "that's interesting." She saw the sexual connection. She decided - for very complicated reasons I won't go into now - that she would not appear naked. Her genital area would remain covered. She would only show her breasts. Which she did.' Looking back, Ballard's experiment sounds closer to the Motor Show than to performance art, a parody that can only be distinguished from its original by the fact that there were no spivs in pinstripes with order books. When he wrote Crash, Ballard set the scene between Spader and Rosanna Arquette, which Cronenberg transposes to a luxury car showroom, at the Earl's Court motor show. Which is depicted as a theatre of sexual possibilities, the Camden Arts Lab exhibition with a better budget. Ballard recalled the opening night as an enjoyable curtain-call for the excesses of the 60s. 'It was like a formal gallery opening. Half the London demi-monde were there. They all got so drunk. Cars were covered with wine. The girl was nearly raped in the back seat of a Pontiac. There was an underground magazine called Frendz and she wrote a damning review of the exhibition. 'There was no supporting material whatsoever, no horrific graphics. Just three cars under gallery lighting. Very neutral. I was interviewed by some woman who worked for New Society. This was for some BBC programme. She was very aggressive. "How can you do this?" Everyone was so provoked. 'In the month the cars were on show to the public, they were constantly attacked. People poured white paint over them. They were upended. This Pontiac had a huge front-end collision, but, being a

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massively strong car, most of the rear windows, the passenger windows, survived. They were intact. But people smashed the windows, venting all this hostility. '''It's the green light, Ballard," I said. "You can get straight down to work." That was when Crash really begun: the lab experiment, the test drive, had proved my point. Had people been bored, I might have had different thoughts.' In a conceptual sense, the exhibition of crashed cars, neutrally presented under forensic lighting conditions, is as much about Ballard's take on Paolozzi as Cronenberg's Crash film is about his relationship with the novel. Formal elegance derived from pathological chaos. There was a period in the 60s when Ballard, travelling up from the suburbs, spent time with Moorcock, Paolozzi and others, as friends - but also as energising intelligences, figures who would inspire and provoke fruitful argument. Like Vaughan in the novel, these people were guides, seductive but dangerous; collaborators, representatives of the labyrinthine possibilities of the city. 'In 1967/8 Jimmy fell in with Paolozzi,' Moorcock explained. 'Both of us started seeing a lot of him. Jimmy shifted in that direction. Technostuff. Women with big tits and guns. Jimmy and Paolozzi were meant for each other. I've got photo sessions. Very bizarre photos. I was out of it, taking Polaroids. They're very strange. There's actually a New Worlds issue which has got a whole lot of them, the pictures I took with Paolozzi, Claire, Jimmy in the studio.' This curious portfolio, when I tracked it down in a scarce issue of New Worlds (no. 178), scarce because WH Smith took objection to a story by Norman Spinrad, is spectral and grey; memory slides carved out of ectoplasm. Six rectangular panels, windows on a lost era. Moorcock, in dark glasses, sporting a real beard that looks like it came out of a Professor Moriarty disguise kit. Paolozzi's head wobbling behind a vast desk. Ballard, face smudged through movement, alongside Claire on a sofa; his hands hanging loose, as if they had been pushed through one of Cocteau's liquid mirrors. Two frames spooked by camera shudder. An

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ugly television set playing back transmissions from the dead. The entire studio-set reading like an invitation to edit your own narrative.

New Worlds and the other magazines, including Dr Martin Bax's Ambit, where Ballard previewed the short routines that would make up The Atrocity Exhibition, favoured work that mixed poetry and science. (William Burroughs, like Ballard, had trained as a doctor, and continued Moorcock's pamnoid Polarolds. The studio 01 memory

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to use technical journals and medical research material, as an important source for his imagery.) Ballard's library contained Jacob Kulowski's Crash Injuries and Programs 0/ the Brain by John Z. Young, as well as reference books on Surrealism and White Women by Helmut Newton. There were personal connections with poets and scientists. Moorcock recalls both of these. 'Oddly enough, Jimmy's not that different to Peter Redgrove, the poet. They had this appalling fist fight, which I had to separate. I didn't want to really. It was rather good. Here's Redgrove with his mystical sense of right and Ballard coming out with his techno crap. Redgrove going bright red .... Eventually we took him home. He was such a sweet man. That's all there was to it.' And there was Chris Evans, one of the scientists who provided Ballard with useful data, print-outs from magazines. ('Chris Evans, of the Natural Physical Laboratory, was around. He was a false scientist, without any question. He had qualifications but he was a pseudoscientist.' Moorcock.) Evans, in various disguises, drifts through Ballard's fiction. 'The first of the new style TV scientists.' The prototype of Vaughan: scientist hoodlum. 'Modern technology,' Ballard wrote in his introduction to the Vintage reissue of Concrete Island, 'as I tried to show in Crash and High-Rise, offers an endless field-day to any deviant strain in our personalities .... We can tyrannise ourselves ... come to terms with aspects of our characters to which we have always closed our eyes.' In this strange period when Ballard was assembling his first Crash! texts for The Atrocity Exhibition, he was working long, regular hours in Shepperton, looking after his family and sometimes, at night, driving into London. It was a carefully balanced life, skewed and intense; a life of scrupulously divided compartments. Ballard told Re/Search that he felt himself caught up in 'that very peculiar thing whereby you only meet like vampires'. 'I used to feel like this,' he said, 'in the days when I was courting: I would fly in from the Thames Valley after dusk. I remember one girl I knew (I think it was Emma Tennant) .... She said, "Jim, I've never seen you before dark!" I said, "Christ, I am like a vampire!" Because she had children, I had children, and we only met in the evenings.'

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Scraps of biography, transcripts of forgotten interviews, photographs in the glove compartment, films that are overcome by respect for a dangerous original. Truth as an optional extra. Does it matter that the principal character in Crash shares the author's name, his public identity? 'It's meant to be disturbing,' Ballard told me. 'But also partly meant to be serious. To be honest. To root the book, as much as I can, in my own true self.' Then how, I wanted to know, did he feel about Moorcock's account of that period, the drinking, the Westway driving, visits to wreckers' yards, a dark night of the soul? Was this one great fiction writer attempting to colonise the life and work of another? 'Mike's a mythologist. People need to authenticate works of the imagination. People believe that a writer must be his book. It's not true. Crash was an extreme hypothesis. The mock scientific paper of The Atrocity Exhibition is a chromosome that contains the main themes of the subsequent novel, of Crash. 'There's a film of The Atrocity Exhibition. An amateur film made for 50,000 dollars - mostly spent on the rights to documentary inserts. But Cronenberg's film, on the other hand, is very stylish.' So, completing the circuit, comes the film of the work in which the novel of Crash had its gestation. The Atrocity Exhibition, directed by Jonathan Weiss, written by Weiss and Michael Kirby, is a painstakingly faithful transcription of Ballard's text. The author is delighted; once again the burden of responsibility shifts, now there is something out there that can be known as Jonathan Weiss' Atrocity Exhibition'. 'I almost felt as if I was reading the book as 1 watched the film, so close were the two,' Ballard wrote, in a letter of congratulation, sent to Weiss. Ballard sees the film as belonging to 'a new kind of cinema ... what 1 would rather call the poetic and imaginative cinema, along with Cocteau's The Blood 0/ a Poet and The Testament 0/ Orpheus, Strick's Savage Eye and the BunueVDaliAndalusian Dog'. It's a worthy completion, so he feels, to the trilogy of films adapted from his books.

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Weiss, shooting over a period of two years, has contrived a work so deferential to the original that it is virtually a proof of time-travel. But with this approach comes the risk of neutralising subversion by making it visible and graphic through the process of substituting Ballard's savage acceleration for a cold-blooded logic. Nothing, it struck me, could be further from Un chien andalou. There were no shocks, no diversions from the rule of Ballard's text: no perversity that had not been sanctioned. The film moved with the impetus of an academic thesis, cutting between archival footage and immaculately staged representations of Ballard's drama. The visual language of Weiss' Atrocity Exhibition is an attempt to duplicate the texture and rhythm of Ballard's prose. Weiss speaks of aspiring to the 'epigrammatic quality' of the original: short, tight sequences. His film, stopping down the excitement that came from reading Ballard's book at a period when its risks were still active, achieves the intended effect of 'listening to secret transmissions'. The element of ennui, in going back over that which is already known, provokes a pleasant state of reverie. The viewer is free to re-edit favoured passages, to drift away, substituting images for words (or words for images); musing on the nature of the Ballardian trajectory. How he collages newsreel, dream and the trance of language, to establish the curvature of prophecy.

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8 The Trajectory of Fate It's not a prophecy, it's just an extrapolation . ... The '63 Lincoln is the reincarnation of Vaughan.

J.G. Ballard Emes Spader (as 'James Ballard') glides through Cronenberg's Crqrb like ~leepwa~er, a mannequin on oiled tracks. He flinches from time to time, but the cancelled smile that frets across his sun god, Californian confidence, signals the fact that he is a man who is happy to trust in fate. The story is written. He has no problem with that. He will live with whatever the script predicts for him. That is one of the benefits of finding yourself in a posthumous project: the only questions to be resolved (the narrative outcome being already fixed) are of aesthetics, style. Which jacket to wear. How to look like a natural smoker in a period when such a transgressive gesture requires acting. What SpaderlBallard needs to know, and it's one of the few moments when he does something of his own volition, is: 'What are we into? What's the project?' In schizophrenic innocence, James Ballard (the character) has to ask Vaughan for a snappy summary of the author's message, the philosophy that underlies all their predetermined actions. (Both men will be tattooed with primitive symbols, skin maps that predict a tarot of future catastrophe.) Spader has to ask twice. 'What exactly is your project, Vaughan? A book of crashes? A medical study? A sensational documentary? Global traffic?' And he's fobbed off with some guff (like promotional material for an event at the ICA) about 'the reshaping of the human body by modern technology'. When Ballard raises the energy to put the question again, the two men are leafing through a package of photographs: 'famous crash victims', 'the Camus car'. Now Ballard has, by means of his wife's interrogation, been exposed to a form of alchemical marriage with Vaughan. 'Have you ever sucked a penis? Do you know what semen tastes like? Have you ever tasted semen? Some semen is saltier than

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others. Vaughan's semen must be very salty.' As an initiate he can be indoctrinated into the mysteries of the project. The past does not change but our reading of it is infinitely varied, constantly shifting with the mood of the moment. With age, 'maturity' and success, the impulse towards conformity customises rage and passionate insight into a designer psychopathology: the formal shadowplay of Cronenberg's Crash. Ballard, in saluting the film's elegance, is pleading for a fresh interpretation of his driven and compulsive novel. He felt, from the age of forty, the 'need to remythologise' himself. Cronenberg, equally engaged in cleaning up his act, leaving behind the venereal smears, the hungry wounds and the bad light, strips Ballard's text of all its faecal mess. Crash is a film without a sense of smell. There are no equivalents for the post-traumatic dribble that Ballard details in his novel. 'I sat there, dressed in another man's blood, while the urine of his young widow formed rainbows around my rescuers' feet.' By the time he reached Cocaine Nights, Ballard was casting himself as a burnt-out case, a displaced Graham Greene or Eric Ambler'crossing frontiers is my profession' - smuggling all the old tropes through the border post in a slick metallic case. Cronenbergian horrors beneath an immaculate Surrealist surface and a plotline lifted from

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Agatha Christie. 'You can't unzip me' is an echo of Videodrome. The rear entry sex and the geometry of gesture come straight out of Cronenberg's Crash. 'She turned on to her side, forced some spit on to her fingers and pressed them between her parted buttocks .... A ridge of tissue curved across her hip to the small of her back, the faint trace of a long-healed surgical scar.' Nothing in the machinery of the plot changes. 'We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind .... It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. ... The writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance.' So Ballard pitched his revisionist introduction to Crash. Novelty is not a requirement. Every new book reprises an established hand of images: 'this affectless realm, where entropic drift calmed the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools'. Any semi-literate with an Avid editing facility could assemble their own narrative from stock: car-park rapes, the air hostess seen from behind on a moving staircase, the drug doctor, the long focus lens peering into the afternoon apartment. 'You might have been dozing off at the wheel, or spying on a copulating couple.' Voice-overs (by].G. Ballard or Chris Petit) as an optional extra. 'A few drinks always make the car go better.' My belief is that Ballard, drawing on Burroughs and Ray Bradbury, identified a trajectory of fate, derived from his own sense of 'deep time', the crystalline images that decorate the borders of his fiction. He 'treated' episodes from the corporate sensorium, the parallel world of news headlines, advertisements, pornography and art. The Atrocity Exhibition was both a summary of everything Ballard had worked on in the 60s (texts, exhibitions, scripts) and a template for what was to come. 'The Kennedy assassination of '63,' Ballard said, 'was the detonator.' Vaughan, driving his semen-soaked '63 Lincoln, was an incubus summoned by that event: at once the President with his brain leaking into his hands and the voyeur/killer, with his telescopic sights, gazing down from the book depository. Dallas and Vietnam imposed themselves on Ballard's remapping of the London suburbs. So that the retrieval of Vaughan's trashed convertible from the police pound became

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the repossession of the ultimate necrophile icon of the period, the corpse of the suicided Marilyn Monroe. Taking the car in that scene,' said Cronenberg, 'is exactly like claiming Marilyn Monroe's body.' Cronenberg therefore colludes in Ballard's hidden project: the remythologising of his past. But such acts of will, magical realignments, carry heavy risks. A focus on the car crash as a 'fertilising' event will inevitably require, by the laws of the vampire, a repeated pattern of sacrifices. Human entities become gods. The girl from the soda fountain, or the dentist's waiting room, is exposed as the subject of mass fantasy. News/death excites the solitary writer. Did Ballard think it was a legitimate tactic to press real people, real names, into his incantatory texts) (11m: COllla: Marilyn MOl1roc; Plall for thc Afsassinatioll of

Jacquc/ilic K{'//l1cdy; Wlhy I Wcmt to Puck Ronald RcaS!.al1; Thc Assa.Bination ono!", rltz,gerald K{'//Ilcdy C0I1.\·ldered as a Downhill Motor Race. ) 'Yes.' he said. 'Once they become so famous that they have become fictionalised by their own fame, then I think they are part of the common property of the shared imagination of today.' ASS
lrorn JFK

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I didn't disagree with him. Strange things, post-Cronenberg, were happening to the Ballard mythology. I was amazed to see a small blue bird, uncaged, perched on a spike, as part of an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery dedicated to Speed-Visions 0/ an Accelerated Age (an exhibition for which Ballard had written catalogue notes). The incongruity of this mummified domestic pet, set amongst strident Futurist manifestoes, the Automaxima Car by Le Corbusier, and a battery of Virilio and Baudrillard quotes, was absolute. Until the conned punter checked out Mark Edelman Boren's card: Budgie stuffed with JG Ballard's 'Crash'. Mixed media (bird, book, wood). A taxidermal collision between Ballard and Hitchcock. How, I wondered, did Ballard feel about such manifestations? Would it bother him if some other novelist pressed his life into a sinsiter fiction? Could 'public' figures be projected into any scenario, however perverse? 'Absolutely. They are like gods. Princess Di and Thatcher were the last of them, the only English ones. We aren't important enough as a country. We don't generate the myths of the age. Most of them come from America. America is one huge dream generator.' 'Is satire still possible?' I asked. 'Yeah. Why not? I think so. I think anyone in the public eye is horrible phrase - fair game. If they are that famous they've already incorporated themselves into our dreams.' Ballard's trajectory of fate, his addiction to distant events, cooked and processed through television, begins with the Kennedy assassination. (Vaughan's fictive attempt on Elizabeth Taylor is a local variant. Taylor who had lived most of her life, since her days as a child star, in the virtual reality of the media world, bent news stories, whispered scandals, snatched photographs, was in England at the period of the Kennedy assassination making a high-budget, low concept movie (The VI.Ps) that exploited one of Ballard's favourite locales: Heathrow Airport.) J.G. Ballard's dream source, as he has frequently emphasised, was the mythology of America. James Batlard and Robert Vaughan, servicing a prostitute on an airport sliproad, are shaping their response to the great

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icolls of the postwar period, the vortex of energy that spins from the crash that killed Jackson Pollock to Jack Kerouac's re-imagined account (in Oil the Road) of his benzedrine-fuelled journeying with Neal Cassady. llomo-erotic blitzes across an ecstatically estranged landscape: 'Damn l Bam l ' He socked himself 'Yes l Rightl Oh mel' We didn't know what he was talking about. He took the wheel and flew the rest of the way across the stale 01 Texas ... 'Now, Sal, now Marylou, I want both of you to do as I'm dOing, dlsemburden yourselves of all that clothes .... Come onl' We were driving west into the sun; it fell In through the windshield.

. We sat In the

fronl seal, all Ihree. Mary Lou look out cold cream and applied it to us for kicks. Every now and then a big Iruck zoomed by; the driver in high cab caught a glimpse of a golden beauty sitting naked With two naked men.

All the memory drives of night cinema - the ticking car tracked hy Orson Welles and Russell Metty from the opening sequence of Touch of Evil, Tile VIPs

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the hallucinatory rush of back projection from Two Weeks in Another Town, Hitchcock's rhythmically alternating points-of-view in Vertzgo and North by Northwest, David Lynch's diseased reverie, Lost Hzghway - are colonised by the Ballardian project. ~car becomes the instrument of ~ Lewis Mumford speaks of it as 'a secret collaboration between the beautician and the mortician'. When car, film and visionary writer, are brought together, whatever emerges will contain the gift (or curse) of prophecy. Robert McNamara, one of Henry Ford II's 'whiz-kids', a future Secretary of State for Defense and President of the World Bank, arrived at Dallas airport, on his way to inspect the local plant. The manager, seeing him buckle himself into his seat-belt, said: 'What the hell's the matter with you? Are you afraid of my driving?' Premonitions of disaster were evident to anyone prepared to notice them. Ballard took Ralph Nader's 1965 consumer conspiracy thesis, Unsafe at Any Speed, as the devil's textbook. Its anti-Detroit rhetoric was anathema to a writer who used Crash Injuries as his major source of inspiration. Ballard's supreme perversity lay in his championship of the values of suburbia: the indulgence of the private car over any form of public transport. The car encouraged a lascivious hermeticism. Nader's exposure of the links between government and General Motors, the fact that 'the 1964 riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles were directly traceable to the inhabitants' inability to get to work by public transport,' made him (like the Godard of Week-end) a misguided crypto-Marxist in the Ballardian demonology. In this Ballard underwrites the Hollywood (military/industrial) depiction of the bus as a lethal, essentially socialist, means of shifting the fellahin. Use public transport and put yourself in the hands of a psycho is the message of Dirty Harry and Speed. Ballard's poetic is anti-populist, anti-city. It's a demented meltdown of Thatcher and Aleister Crowley: do what you will is all of the law, repression is death. No interference from the state, no nannying. Canary Wharf triumphal ism and the inalienable right to kill yourself on an orbital motorway as you fight your way to work. What is astonishing is the courage, the recklessness of Ballard's argument; the unashamed trust in his own psychopathology.

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Through the venomous intensity of his argument with Nader, Ballard's language comes to echo that of his contrary. Nader, describing a hideous tableau witnessed when he was hitchhiking, could be quoting from The Atrocity Exhibition. 'One time I saw a particularly gruesome crash in New England where a young child had been decapitated and I realised that the sharp edge of the glove compartment door was the instrument. ' 'Talbot's belief,' wrote Ballard, in response to the first wave of anticar rhetoric, 'is that automobile crashes play very different roles from the ones we assign them. Apart from its ontological function, redefining the elements of space and time in terms of our most potent consumer durable, the car crash may be perceived unconsciously as a fertilising rather than a destructive event - a liberation of sexual energy mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form: J ames Dean and Miss Mansfield, Camus and the late President. In the eucharist of the simulated auto-disaster we see the transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader, our nearest image of the blood and body of Christ.' There is a Catholicised, relic-worshipping aspect to Ballard's pantheon of road crash immortals. 'Surely Christ's crucifixion could be regarded as the first traffic accident?' he asked in The Atrocity Exhibition. (Heretics, after all, were banished upstream from the City of London. Alexander Pope and his circle chose to settle alongside the river in Twickenham. John Dee was at Mortlake. Ballard approved that tradition by living so long in the exile of Shepperton.) Through sacrifice comes immortality, he seems to be saying. Vaughan, a mad priest delivering a stock car sermon, claims as much for James Dean. 'James Dean died of a broken neck and became immortal.' By ritualising the great crashes, developing a language of liturgy and transcendentalism, Ballard keeps them in the loop. The same crashes happen over and over as new victims are initiated into the vision. Cronenberg's film, if it is interpreted in this light, begins to make sense. A cycle of repetitions and eternal returns. Actors fated to repeat themselves, to enact, without passion, a pattern of sacrifice that has

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already been transcribed. A gospel for somnambulists on the cusp of the Prozac and Viagra decades. The death of Albert Camus is the beginning of the BallardiCronenberg 'existential romance'. A writer who knew he had done his best work, a posthumous man who launched, like Goethe (with Die Leiden desjungen Werthers), a suicide cult. Suicide as a lifestyle: yellow cigarettes, Heidegger in pocket, open car flicking between lines of poplars. Fran<;oise Sagan granted the style a populist chic, a youthful make-over. And a linear descent to the mausoleum of auto-accident madonnas was soon established. Jean Seberg, a small-town girl from Iowa, gave her best performance for Otto Preminger in his version of Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse. From there it was a short hitch to the part of Patricia in Godard's Breathless; a passenger in Belmondo's death car, his Monogram quotation. Seberg's suicide in 1979, it is sometimes forgotten, took place in a white Renault in Paris. The police discovered her decomposing body, with a bottle of barbiturates, in a car that had been parked for around ten days in a quiet side street. James Dean followed Camus, and preceded Jack Kennedy, in Ballard's list. Dean, a notorious masochist who was to found, through his car crash, a necrophile cult, had been able to rehearse (or preview) the fatal rush of speed in his movies. In the chicken run sequence from Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause. In the drunken vamping of the pre-Dallas oil baron punk of Giant. (Dean, like the car-damaged Monty Clift, formed a fag hag, movie set friendship with Elizabeth Taylor.) Dean had a passion for car races. As did the young Cronen berg whose first experience with a camera was shooting 8mm footage. 'A guy, a CBC producer, was killed in the first race I shot, and I have that on film,' he told David Breskin. 'He rolled his Triumph TR3 in the chicane at Harewood Acres.' James Dean, as Vaughan describes him in Crash, was driving his silver Porsche to Salinas. A route which Michael Moorcock, a certified non-driver (he got worse, he told me, with every lesson), reprised. Dean's crash on the Californian two-lane blacktop was a significant marker on the trajectory of fate; an event that existed in two worlds,

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somewhere between a grandiloquent rhetoric of mourning and the strident vulgarity of newsprint. John Minton's Composition: The Death 0/ James Dean (of 1957) now appears like the end of romanticism, a fleshy carnation macerated in aftershave. It's too slow, too backward-looking and immobile; sitting awkwardly between the twilight of the flamboyant, melancholy gays of 40s Soho and the deadpan ironists of Warhol's New York. From the heroic (but futile) reworking of oil paint to the unforgiving spontaneity of the screenprint. The James Dean cult harked back to the days of Valentino, but it was the deaths of female stars that excited Ballard most. (It was pa-;t;r the culture of the 50s and 60s. Public scandal followed by the 'punishment' of auto-death. Ava Gardner, windblown, in her dark glasses, reckless in a white convertible, will, like all bad girls, come to a sticky end in On the Beach. Marianne Faithfull, fresh from the furry-rug drug raid, will crunch into the back of a lorry in Girl on a Motorcycle.) Cronenberg's Crash concludes with a homage to that eriod. The cranes ot, the overturne car, the urt woman. 'Maybe the next one, darling .... Maybe the next one.' Ballard, in the 60s, seems to be providing the text for a graphic novel by Andy Warhol. Warhol's Death and Disaster series, produced between Summer 1962 and Summer 1963, has both a Ballardian cast list and a Ballard obsession with auto-death. Five Deaths (of 1963) depicts, in a saturated red screenprint, an inverted automobile and a woman victim. Warhol's doctored industrial panels are windows for a Ballard cathedral. The wounded saints and madonnas of cosmic stardom. Elizabeth Taylor, a creature incapable of walking, is photographed as she is carried into her limousine or ambulance; a drift between lovers, hospitals, charity benefits. Colour is applied to Warhol's prints like lipstick to a bleached skull. Jackie Kennedy, a prime Warhol subject, is pressed into Ballard's pantheon. 'Half zipping his trousers, Koester lay back against the torn upholstery, one hand still resting on the plump thigh of the sleeping young woman .... Why was she wearing the Jackie Kennedy wig?' A travesty adopted for the same reason, we assume, that Seagrave sports

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fake breasts to present himself as Jayne Mansfield, and to attain the final post-mortem identification. To become the dead star and achieve immortality through suicide. 'Many volunteers,' Ballard wrote, 'became convinced that the fatalities were still living, and later used one or other of the crash victims as a private focus of arousal during intercourse with the domestic partner.' Jayne Mansfield, a parodic version of Monroe, a mammary trophy to be paraded around the war zones in Bob Hope's entertainment harem, was a high-IQ woman with a private income who was quite capable of manipulating her own image. Looking like a melting icesculpture, an hourglass of whipped cream and cherries sieved through a leopard-skin bikini, she thirsted for class, the status of an American princess: Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly. 'In my own sweet way of thinking, given the chance,' she told May Mann, 'I can be a warm, sweet, womanly Grace Kelly type. I admire Jacqueline Kennedy more than anyone else. I used to buy clothes from Oleg Cassini because I liked the covered-up look. I relate sometimes with Elizabeth Taylor, with whom I share many similar situations. I have tried so hard recently to switch my image to the real me, without success. But I keep hoping.' Cassini had been Kelly's lover as well as her designer. Mansfield, copying her clothes, could aspire to her ice queen style. In childhood she had the vision of a 'hot dusty road in the summer'. 'I imagined,' she said, 'beautiful winding roads in some far away place like the French Riviera. There was always a tall, dark, handsome knight coming to rescue me on his white horse. Later he came in a big white Cadillac.' (Like the dream Cadillac from Jaques Demy's Lola.) Mansfield always believed that the President's wife on her breathless tours of the White House furniture had been taking pointers from her films. 'Jackie Kennedy imitated my voice on TV' (As Mansfield fashioned her take on Monroe singing birthday greetings to Jack.) But Mansfield's closest identification was with Elizabeth Taylor. She pushed hard to share the same agent, Kurt Fringe. 'Elizabeth Taylor and I are unique in the fact that we believe in old-fashioned marriage .... I love goodies, like chili - Elizabeth's favourite.' So Mansfield auditions to take

CRASHI115

overthe lacuna at the heart of Cronenberg's Crash, the dark space vacated by the removal of Elizabeth Taylor from the story. Mansfield gets her\vish, by proxy, when she is impersonated by the stunt driver Seagrave. The nightmare of auto-death haunted her. Her father died of a heart-attack at the wheel of a car, while he was chauffeuring the young Jayne. 'I'd lay on the grass of his grave and kiss the grass over him.' Her adolescent fantasies were of white roads in Mediterranean sunlight. She wanted Grace Kelly's prince and she wanted to act with Cary Grant, as Grace had done in To Catch a Thief (She got her wish when she appeared with Grant in Stanley Donen's 1957 confection, Kiss Them For Me. One of the jobs that surely hastened Grant's retirement.) After her death in 1967, 'her beautiful head sliced off by the windscreen', Mansfield made a number of communications from the spirit world. According to May Mann, the recipient of these messages, Mansfield was trapped in a death-trauma limbo, like one of Ballard's undead fatalities. She had been cursed by Anton Lavey of San To Catch

a Thiel

116

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Francisco's Church of Satan when she refused to become the high priestess of his sinister cult. (Barbie-on-steroids is mind-fucked by Dennis Wheatley.) The curse took the curious form of projecting Mansfield and her lover, Sam Brody, into a BallardiCronenberg scenario of serial accidents. The death crash would be rehearsed and lived through on numerous occasions. The victims were caught up in the momentum of the inevitable catastrophe. ("'Faster!" Jayne kept saying, as we spun around curves on the winding roads of Bel Air. When Sam didn't drive faster, Jayne would press her foot on top of his on the accelerator, and the car would leap forward to a hundred miles an hour! 'Jayne," I screamed, "this is suicide. Stop this crazy speed." The speedometer went up to 120 with Jayne screaming, "Faster! Faster!''') There were many accidents. 'The Mercedes Benz was smashed beyond repair. Sam was pulled out, miraculously still alive. He was taken to UCLA Medical Centre with a broken hip and leg and internal injuries. Jayne rushed to the hospital.' In March 1967, three months before the fatal crash, Mansfield toured England in a 'Silver Cloud Rolls'. She arrived, and was met, at Heathrow. There were news photographs that now look like studies for Crash; the marked up, forensic stills that Vaughan shows to James Ballard as an aid towards seduction. The representative of the British Royal Family chosen to attend the funeral of Princess Grace in Monaco was Princess Diana. Grace Kelly had died in a Rover 3500 on the 'tortuous windy road' between Roc Agel and Monaco. Her death engendered a small spate of conspiracy theories: was she drunk, who was at the wheel, was the Mafia involved? The whole affair began to seem like a trial run (one of the serial deaths of the Ballard project) for Diana Spencer. Kelly had driven these roads with great panache in To Catch a Thief. The flaw, this time, was that there was no back projection. It was inevitable, with the crash in the Paris underpass, the ultimate marker in Ballard's trajectory of fate, that the brighter hacks would invite him to comment. After all, one of the first questions that

CRASHI117

Ballard asked the interviewers from Re/5earch, back in 1982, was: 'Did you see the film of Princess Di's wedding?' And he went on to speak about the possibilities of using video tape as a means of doctoring experience by cataloguing fetishes. 'You might get some obsessive, say, who finds himself collecting footage of women's shoes wherever they're shown (it doesn't matter if it's Esther Williams walking around a swimming pool with 40s sandals, or Princess Di) .... You could begin to, say, store film of car crashes or street executions.' So was he responsible? Had he activated a demonic psychopathology that could only be appeased by regular sacrifices? Was this the curse of prophecy? Does the visionary/paranoid writer, in the heat of composition, somehow fix the future? 'Well, a lot of people were ringing me up after Di's death, more or less accusing me of stage-managing the whole thing,' Ballard admitted. 'I didn't say anything at the time, because I think there's no doubting the fact that she died in a crashed car, pursued by the furies - like Orestes. A classical death, if there is one. The fact that she died in a car crash probably is a validating - in imaginative terms - signature. To die in a car crash is a unique twentieth-century finale. It's part of the twentieth-century milieu. The deaths of car crash victims have a resonance that you don't find in the deaths of hotel fire victims, or plane crash victims.' In the aftermath, the public mourning (which some commentators interpreted as a form of mass hysteria), the media improvised a coda to the Crash film. (Thus concluding the trajectory that had been launched with the Zapruder home-movie footage, single frames weighted with significance when they are replayed on television.) Now a drive, a journey from the river at Westminster, out to the edge of London and the start of the motorway, the Ml, can be shown in real time. No slick cutting (as in Bullitt), no inappropriately generated excitement. No cameras fixed inside the hearse. No chopped vehicles set on transporters. No back projection. It's a slow ceremony for the vehicle as much as for the dead body inside it. Conspiracy Tv, investigations funded by Fayed, attempting to turn newsreel and surveillance footage into high fiction,

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CRASH

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120 I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

follow. Fractured runs of illegitimate imagery that Ballard's compacted novels had anticipated thirty years before. Ballard chose, wisely, not to comment on these events. A humanist response was left to Michael Moorcock who published a story, The Spencer Inheritance', in The Edge, a lively, fugitive publication with an invisible readership. Moorcock reprised Diana's journey as a last hurrah for the London mob. He brought back his prankster 60s demiurge, Jerry Cornelius, for what he called 'a response to the immediate'. Moorcock's story, replete with the paraphernalia of relics, and his usual delineation of the fault lines of the culture, becomes a critique of the Ballard project. A playful pastiche of his former ally, the man whose car crash routines he had once published. 'Behind their battered Ford the smoking aluminium of the Morrises fused and seethed, buckling into complex parodies of Paolozzi sculptures,' Moorcock wrote. 'It used to be glamorous, dying in a car crash. But the 90s did with auto-death what Oasis did with the Beatles. They took an idiom to its dullest place. This wasn't suicide. It wasn't even assassination. It was ritual murder. How could they confuse the three? It was the triumph of the lowest common denominator.' Moorcock, like Ballard, has suffered from fools who cannot accept that he is not Jerry Cornelius or Elric, but a middle-aged man, a writer in exile who is trying to do the best job he can with the material he is given. The writer, Ballard stressed, is not a magistrate presiding over the morality of the characters he invents. These creatures go their own way, set their own trajectories - which the author struggles to describe. 'People read my books and think I'm just like my characters,' Moorcock wrote to Ballard in Letters/rom Hollywood. 'I'm too old for it these days, anyway. This confusion between me and my stories sometimes depresses me. Sometimes, too, it frightens me. I think they may be right.' 'What lay behind the antagonism between Travers and the unpleasant young director - some sort of homo-erotic jealousy, or another game?' Ballard asked in The Atrocity Exhibition. But he felt no jealousy, no sense of ownership, when Cronenberg re-authored Crash. It was necessary, in

CRASH I 121

order for his novel to survive in another era, that it be neutralised by esteem; that the idiom in which he worked should be, as Moorcock suggested, 'taken to its dullest place'. To Toronto. It would be stripped of particulars, amputated from the corporate sensorium, the media dome. ~ronenberg's Crash is a @m without news. Without newspapers.l.. books, live television. There are only spoiled Polaroids of lost passions and monochrome records of fatal accidents. Time is kept to a single band. Everything occurs in the present tense. It's the most extraordinary feature of the film: how Cronenberg manages to strip every resonance, every exit to the world of human emotions. This Crash doesn't predict the death of Diana, neither does it deny it. The participants in the sexual drama have no interest in anything beyond their own performance. 'Did you come?' is a repeated and rhetorical question. They are the dead talking to the dead. Cronenberg's exploitation of Ballard's cabbalistic arrangements of 'reality' and obsession also achieves a state where our reception of news and the soap opera lives of the famous receive a post-Crash spin. The 0.]. Simpson murder trial, the death of Nicole Brown and the helicopter-camera pursuit of Simpson's vehicle, can be seen as an event derived from Cronenberg's reading of Ballard (as the Kennedy assassination and the movie star crashes now belong within the bibliography of Ballard's associations). An essay by Elizabeth WUrtzel, 'Murder in the Doll's House', published in the Guardian's 'Weekend' supplement, features a full page photograph of Nicole Brown looking like someone who failed the audition for Deborah Unger's part in Crash. Golden hair, thong sandals, full-length fur coat exposing white underwear. Sharp focus against the haze of a gold-red background. Beach-front Helmut Newton. The story of the killing, the life of abuse, modelling and TV notoriety, is told in terms of cars, brand names, number plates. 'The blonde fox in the white Ferrari. That is how a screenwriter I know who lived in the same part of Los Angeles as Nicole Brown Simpson described the woman he used to see tooling around in her sporty little car ... or maybe just, as her licence plate suggested, L84AD8 ("late for a

122 I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

date").' So begins Wurtzel's essay, tapping the numerology, the Newtonian flash: the insistence that a narrative can be exposed through a series of sharply-lit images. The film of Crash exists only in its surface. 'I wanted,' Cronenberg said, 'the real to be hallucinatory.' That he achieves this aim is the ---triumph of his work: a document with absolute independence from the world, a film without context. The question that has to be asked is: 'how would Cronenberg's Crash strike us if it were not preceded by Ballard's book?' Imagine the film as an original with no roots in England and the 60s. Then, I think, it would be unutterably strange: dreamlike, possessed, controlled. J.G. Ballard, with his selective amnesia, his refusal to reread his own work, is coming to Cronenberg's film as to a performance event witnessed for the first time. He is therefore justified in calling this surreal translation 'a masterpiece'. It grants him an enriched memory of something that never happened. But the Canadian director, by carrying his faithful adaptation so far from its source, from the assassinations and excesses of television and mass media, depoliticises Ballard's frenzied satire. He makes the pornography safe and elegant. He finds a place, a stoical nowhere, where savage rituals can be enacted without pain; but, ironically, in doing so, he brought down on himself the public attention and the reflex yelps for censorship that Ballard's texts had originally escaped.

124 I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

Credits CRASH Canada 1996

Co-producers

Post-production

Stephane Reichel, Marilyn

Co-ordinator

Stonehouse

Samanlha Dubiel

Production Co-ordinator

Deliveries Co-ordinator

Director

Susan Phillips

Nicolelte Beasley

David Cronen berg

Assistant Production

Post-production Assistant

Producer

Co-ordinator

Kevin Downer

David Cronen berg

Abigail Tucker

Post-production Accountant

Screenplay

Production Manager

David Cronen berg

Marilyn Stonehouse

Malthew J, Rawley

Based on the novel by J G

Location Manager

Assistant Director

Ballard

Debra Beers

David J, Webb

Director of

Assistant Location

2nd Assistant Director

Photography/Camera

Manager

Tom Quinn

Operator

Mark Logan

3rd Assistant Director

Peter Suschitzky

Location Production

Michele Rakich

Editor

Assistant

Trainee Assistant Director

Ronald Sanders

Beverley Kolbe

Cassandra Cronen berg

Production Design

Production Accountant

Carol Spier

Joanne Jackson

Script Supervisor Leslie Druker

Music/Music Conductor/

Assistant Accountants

Orchestrations

Loretta VanHart, Matthew J.

Casting Deirdre Bowen

Howard Shore

Rawley

Extras Casting Donna Dupere Casting

@Alliance Communications

Business/Legal Affairs Andrea Wood

Corporation, in Trust

Office Production

Joel Guthro

B Camera Operator

Production Companies

Assistant

1st Camera Assistant

Jeremy Thomas and Robert

Michel Poirier

Michael Hall

Lantos present

Line Producer's Intern

2nd Camera Assistant

an Alliance Communications

Glace W Lawrence

Russel Bowie

production

Assistant to

B Camera 1st Camera

a David Cronen berg film

Mr Cronen berg

Assistant

Produced with the

Sandra Tucker

Russel Bowie

participation of Telefilm

Assistant to Mr Spader

B Camera 2nd Camera

Canada, The Movie Network

Phillip Tomalin

Assistant

- TMN

Assistants to Mr Reichel

Sandy Cooper

Executive Producers

Ramona Ng, Tracey Dodokin

Camera Trainees

Robert Lantos, Jeremy

Post-production

Jacqueline Pelle, Rilch

Thomas

Supervisor

Green

Co-executive Producers

Sandra Tucker

Video Playback Operator

Andras Hamori, Chris Auty

Andrew W Peart

CRASH I 125

Key Grip Michael Kirilenko

Set Decorator

Costume Co-ordinator

Elinor Rose Galbraith

Ann Henshaw

Best Boy Grip

Assistant Set Decorator

Wardrobe

Ron Yolevsky Dolly Grip Candide Franklyn

Danielle Fleury

Assistant/Seamstress

Scenic Artist

Sylvie Bonniere

S. John Bannister

Key Make-up Artist

Grips

Lead Set Dresser

Shonagh Jabour

Samuel Turturici, Steve Klys

Peter P Nicolakakos

Make-up Artist

Gaffer

Set Dresser

Katherine James

Scotty Allan

David Orin Charles

Assistant Make-up

Best Boy Electric

On Set Dresser

Leslie Sebert

Steven Morrisson

Nick Fischer

Key Hairstylist

Electrics

Set Dressing Driver

Mary Lou Green

Delroy P Jarrett. Jim MacCammon, Michael Anderson

Brian M. Travers

Hair Stylist

Construction

Frances Mathias

Co-ordinator

Assistant Stylist

Genny Operators

Joe Curtin

Carol Marinoff

Allan Angus, Neil Gover

Head Carpenter

Prosthetics Designer

Stills Photographers

Ian Fraser

Stephan Dupuis

Jonathan Wenk, Michael Gibson

Assistant Head

Special Effects Assistant

Carpenters

Dennis Pawlik

Special Effects

Dennis Perrier, Sabri Lariani

Main/End Title Design

Co-ordinator

Carpenters

Film

Michael Kavanagh

Colour Timer

Shop Co-ordinator

John Keenan, Gordon Becker

Dawn Rivard

Construction Accountant

Music Co-ordinator

Technician

Robert Steiner

Robert Cotnoir

Danny White

Head Painter

Music Preparation

1st Assistant Editor - Avid

Melissa Morgan

Holly Carroll

Tad Seaborn

Assistant Head Painter

Electronic Music

1st Assistant Editor - Film

Jacqui Hemingway

Preparation

Peter Watson

Stand-by Painter

Simon Franglen

Editing Interns

John Flynn

Music Contractor

Kathleen Cummins. Aaron Woodley

Property Master

Peter Schenkman

Christopher Geggie

Music Editor

E~ects

Inc

Ricardo Olivero

Art Director

Assistant Props

Suzana PeriA

Tamara Deverell

Sheri O'Rourke

Associate Music Editor

1st Assistant Art Director

Costume Designer

Tod Holcomb

Andrew M Stearn

Denise Cronenberg

2nd Assistant Music

3rd Assistant Art Director

Costume Supervisor

Editor

Arvinder Grewal

Brenda Gilles

Ben Tucker

126 I BFI MODERN CLASSICS

Music Scoring Engineer Gary Gray Second Engineer Bill Hermans Sound Mixer David Lee Re-recordlng Mixers Lou Solakofskl, Orest Sushko, Dino Pigat Control Room Operators Steph Carrier, Ian Rankin,

David Rose, Randy Wilson Boom Operator Denis Bellingham Sound EditingfTrans'ers Casablanca Sound Services (Toronto) Negative Cutting Francont Film Sound Effects Supervisor David Evans Sound Effects Editors John Smith, Tom Blelic Assistant Sound Effects Editors Chris Czopnik, Clive Turner Dialogue Editor

Foley Recordist Tony van den Akker Stunt Co-ordinator Ted Hanlan Stunt Drivers Ron Vanhart, Paul Rutledge, Shelley Cook, Tony Cordiero, Marco Bianco, Branko Racki, Brian Renfro, Peler Ellery. Peter Szkoda, Anion Tyukudi, Phil Chiu, Rick Parker, D. McLean Stand-in for Mr Spader Mark Adarns Stand-in for Ms Unger Christine Manning Stand-in for Mr Koteas Chris Gibson Stand-in for Ms Hunter Linda Terrio Motocam Operator Jamie Jones Transportation Co-ordinator Jazz Helie Driver Captain Tim Hilts

Supervisor Wayne Griffin Dialogue Editors John Laing, Dale Sheldrake Assistant Dialogue Editors Joe LaFontaine, James Robb ADR Recordist Chrislian Cooke Foley Artist Andy Malcolrn

Bill Leeking Head Driver Dean Wittaurn Drivers Walter Di Bacco, John Cocks, Doug Perry, Grant Volkers, Robert Geeves Avid Technical Consultant Jeffrey Krebs Dolby Stereo Consultant Bradford L Hohle

Foley Assistant Jarnes A. Gore

Dialect Coach Francie Brown

Picture Car Captain

Publicist Prudence Emery Catering Siudio Film Catering Craft Service Starcrah Payroll Services Payments Plus

CRASH I 127

James Spader James Ballard

Holly Hunter Dr Helen Remington

Elias Koteas Vaughan

Deborah Kara Unger Catherine Ballard

Rosanna Arquette Gabrielle

Peter MacNeill Colin Seagrave

Yolande Julian airport hooker

Cheryl Swarts Vera Seagrave

Judah Katz salesman

Nicky Guadagnl lalloolst

Ronn Saroslak assislanl direcior

Boyd Banks gnp

Markus Parilo man in hanger

Alice Poon camera girl

John Stoneham Jr Brell Trask

9,017 feet

100 minutes 11 seconds Colour by Deluxe Credits compiled by Markku Salmi, BFI Filmographic Unl!.

128

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Bibliography CRONENBERG

OTHERS

Desire: Cronenberg Does

Breskin, David, Inner Views: Filmmakers in

Umits of Car Safety

Ballard (Adelaide: Transit

Conversation (New York: Da

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BALLARD Acker, Kathy, Of Death and

Fahh, Nicholas, Crash: The

Ballard, J.G., The Drowned

Cronenberg, David,

(London Michael Joseph,

World (London: Gollancz,

Cronenberg on

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Cronenberg, ed. Chris

1994) Humphries, Patrick, Nick

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Radley (London: Faber and

Drake: The Biography

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(Ontario: General

Newton, Helmut, White

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Publishing, 1993).

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Morris, Peter, David

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Cronenberg: A Delicate

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Balance (Toronto: ECW,

- - War Fever (London:

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Collins, 1990). Women (London: Harper

MICHAEL MOORCOCK Greenland, Colin, The

- - The Kindness of

Frewin, 1971). Peth, Chris, Robinson (London: Cape, 1993).

Spada, James, Grace: The Secret Uves of a Princess

Collins, 1991).

Entropy Exhibition: Michael

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Moorcock and the British

(London: Sidgwick and

(London: Flamingo, 1996).

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Fiction (London: Routledge

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by Ballard (London:

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Creation Books, 1994).

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Oery, Mark, J.G. Ballard

Allison and Busby, 1969).

and David Cronenberg,

- - Letters from Hollywood

21.C., no.24, 1997.

(London: Harrap, 1986).

Juno, Andrea et aI.,

- - 'The Spencer

RelSearch: J.G. Ballard, nos.

Inheritance: A Jerry

819 (San Francisco, 1984).

Cornelius Story', The Edge,

Kadrey, Richard, 'J.G.

no. 7, May-June 1998.

Ballard and David Cronen berg on Crash', World M, no. 12, (1996).