ABOVE: Youtube uplink for Shanghai Jim (BBC Bookmark, 1991; produced by James Runcie).

by Pippa Tandy

SHANGHAI JIM (1991)

Director/Producer: James Runcie
Executive Producer: Nigel Williams
Starring: J.G. Ballard, Michael Troughton, Hans Gebruers

See here for a transcript of J.G. Ballard’s commentary from the film.

DOCUMENTARY FILMS about the lives and works of artists have many different functions. They may describe their private lives and relationships, expose scandals, and revise or reinforce received myths. They may celebrate or promote the artist. They may commemorate a centenary or whip up interest in new work.

The most successful, however, use the conventions and devices of film to add something to the work. They show how the artist works by simple critical demonstration. Martin Scorsese’s television documentaries about music and film are good examples. They combine autobiography with critical homage. Successful documentaries always include statements by the artist, but never rely on them, since they are notoriously inaccurate. They collage them together with imagery, spoken texts, re-enactments, file footage and visual, aural or written quotation from the artist’s oeuvre, so that we learn by seeing and hearing. They will often be reiterative, repeating motifs, phrases, images and fragments in new contexts so that the artist’s work and experience revolves in front of us.

Shanghai Jim is rather British and apparently modest in manner. Interestingly, no one is credited with the direction of this film. One assumes it is a ‘chappish’ collaboration between Runcie, Ballard and the crew (possibly a mix of East Asian freelancers and BBC artisans). The settings of Shanghai and Shepperton also provide direction. It succeeds brilliantly by allowing Ballard to talk as he would to a friend. It also takes its cues from his fiction. It completely eschews the usual unhelpful academic talking heads and their desiccated third hand commentary in favour of his first person, first hand moments. The only other interviews are with Ballard’s sweet round-faced daughters. Neither does Shanghai Jim ‘dramatise’ events. It uses actors set in scenes from Ballard’s life and work, not to reenact the past or to illustrate his fiction, but to indicate that this is how it might be or have been, but the viewer cannot go there.

Its form is dictated entirely by time, one of the preoccupations of Ballard’s writing. Since it only has 48 minutes to say what it has to say, it uses cinematic narrative conventions to open up the work, to expand time. Crossovers in time, achieved by montages of Ballard’s monologue, plus re-enactments and archival footage, amplify moments in his life and art. They show how his work brings the two together and propose ways of reading it, new entrances to the space of his fiction.

To make my case it is necessary to describe some sequences from the film.

ABOVE: The Bund, Shanghai, circa 1930, the year Ballard was born.

ABOVE: The Bund in 1991, the year Ballard returned to Shanghai (screenshot from Shanghai Jim; 1991).

The strategy of Shanghai Jim is already clear in its opening sequence: a panoramic view of Chinese ships sailing in front of a view of the old Shanghai skyline, and a reading by John Shrapnel from The Kindness of Women:

Some six hundred former internees, mostly women and children, sailed for England in a converted meat carrier. My father and other Britons staying behind in Shanghai stood on the pier at Hongkew, waving to us as the Arrawa drew away from them across the slow brown tide. When we reached the middle of the channel, working our way through the scores of American destroyers and landing craft, I left my mother and walked to the stern of the ship. The relatives on the pier were still waving to us, and my father saw me and raised his arm, but I found it impossible to wave back to him, something I regretted for many years. Perhaps I blamed him for sending me away from this mysterious and exhilarating city.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (1991; 60).

What we see, however, is clearly not the Arawa (the official spelling of the ship appears to be ‘Arawa’), nor post-war Shanghai, but rather a boy at a railing looking out from under a Chinese flag, on a boat of some kind, presumably in Shanghai. There is no attempt to illustrate the quotation; the boy is not in costume. A child from the present is placed into the imagined past that is Ballard’s fiction in Kindness, in what is, to use Ballard’s term, a recapitulation. (At the end of the film the present day adult Ballard replaces this child.) A dissolve to Eduardo Paolozzi’s title graphics follows: a collage resembling a turning Taoist wheel with ‘Shanghai Jim‘ written in Mandarin, the title in English superimposed at its centre.

The Paolozzi wheel (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

We then see Ballard packing a slightly battered suitcase, a meticulously folded shirt, a guidebook to Shanghai, a Sony video camera and an old style British passport on top. They are grouped neatly like the collections of objects seen in Ballard’s writing. Surely no one puts their passport in their suitcase. We are being invited to look at these things curiously for a moment, as though they make up some kind of Kim’s Game. Ballard closes and picks up the suitcase, walks to the door and turns to view the room. The camera adopts his viewpoint. We see his houseplants and his copy of his favourite Delvaux, and hear his voice:

Many people have said to me, ‘What an extraordinary life you’ve had’, but of course my childhood in Shanghai was far closer to the way the majority of people on this planet, in previous centuries and in the 20th century, have lived than, say, life in the Western Europe and the United States. It’s we here, in our quiet suburbs and our comparatively peaceful cities, who are the anomalies.

J.G. Ballard, Shanghai Jim.

In the last sentence Ballard, in one of the film’s manifest anomalies, closes the door on the room and we join him on the road to Heathrow, which dissolves to black and white archival film of the Japanese naval ensign and wartime footage of the Japanese in China as Ballard drives beneath a motorway overpass. A voiceover begins: ‘On the day he publishes the sequel to Empire of the Sun, a highly personal book, The Kindness of Women, Bookmark takes Ballard back to Shanghai for the first time in 45 years.’

Archival footage from Shanghai Jim, the kind that’s clearly the source for a number of scenes in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.

The first two and a half minutes of the film contain a densely packed sequence of images and quotations, a collage of Ballard’s writing, his accounts of it, and of his personal and fictional landscapes — the temporal and spatial situations of his work. The film then tracks Ballard through sites of key memories in Shanghai, and recapitulates passages from Kindness in China and England. There is a double purpose here, to trace earlier passages in the fictional life of Kindness, and to show Ballard’s return to the Shanghai he has not seen for nearly fifty years. Accordingly, Shanghai Jim shows writer and writing to have a common cause, not to explain the writing by the writer’s experiences, but to show how his life gave rise to his work.

Although his Shanghai experience is explicit in ‘Too Bad’, from ‘Tolerances of the Human Face’ (1969), his return to the experiences of his childhood in his longer works is relatively late. The film allows Ballard to talk about his past, to walk the streets of Shanghai, to sit in a club and watch a Chinese jazz band, and to visit his Shanghai homes at Amherst Avenue and at Lunghua Camp. These scenes are montaged with archival film, and with scenes of the boy (Hans Gebruers) re-enacting Ballard’s bicycle journeys around Shanghai and some of Jim’s actions in Empire.

Ballard’s voyage to Shanghai is framed as atavistic, something that he touches on at the end of the film as he sits in the room said to be his family’s quarters during their internment. He speaks of ‘coming to terms’ with his past, but this reckoning does not lead to comfortable closure. The images of the boy and Ballard (dressed like a film noir expat in a cream linen sports-coat) as they move through the setting of Shanghai make them look dislocated. These scenes are set against archival films of Shanghai, both of war and day-to-day city life, from which Ballard and the boy are patently absent. Neither Ballard nor the boy who stands in for him has returned to wartime Shanghai. It is a strength of the film that there is no such pretence. The effect is to emphasise the importance of both memory and imagery, key aspects of Ballard’s writing.

Ballard appears to be quite breathlessly moved as he stands in front of his old family house and discusses his memories of the place. He describes his entry into his old room at 31 Amherst Avenue with its blue ceiling and childhood bookshelf as being ‘like a sort of time capsule, really, that I’d stepped into after all these years’. And this happens after he has written of his childhood in Empire and Kindness:

This is 31 Amherst Avenue – the house in Shanghai where I spent my childhood. Coming back to Shanghai for the first time since 1946 has been a very strange experience, and of course the house is the strangest of all. I spent my entire childhood here, and I really came something close to adult life here.

So it is a strange experience. I keep trying to think what would have happened had the war not taken place. I would have gone on living here, and probably would have gone on living in Shanghai. So I see around me here a kind of alternate life that I never actually managed to live because of the war.

J.G. Ballard, Shanghai Jim.

‘A strange experience’: Ballard in front of 31 Amherst Avenue (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

A sequence follows, showing the interior of the house, shots of the boy mounting the steps, presumably to Ballard’s childhood room, and then looking out of the window. This is intercut with a shot of Ballard looking out of a window, but not the same window; rather, a window on the ground floor. Later in the film, a shot of the windows of Lunghua echoes these.

Other shots show an empty room, presumably Jamie’s blue room, with standard fans blowing. It was apparently a hot day, and at one point Ballard seems to wipe sweat — surely not a tear — from his face. We do not see him in his room. Was it too hot to use cameras up there for very long? Had there been someone working at the desk who was politely waiting on the stairs for the film crew to leave? The gaps in this film show us the difficulties faced by the film-makers, but a critical virtue is made of necessity. Just as the Ken Burns effect is the result of Burns’ reliance on still photographs in his remarkable documentary series on the American Civil War, so in Shanghai Jim the difficulties of filming a return to the past strengthen the film’s account of the artist and his work. Shanghai remains potent in memory and in the writing.

ABOVE: ‘Time had stopped in Amherst Avenue’ (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

ABOVE: Jamie Ballard’s Blue Room (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

In Shanghai Jim I believe we have a rare, if not the only recording of J.G. Ballard reading his own prose. He stands adjacent to the subject of the passage, and reads from what looks like a proof copy of The Kindness of Women:

Of all the places of wonder, the Great World Amusement Park on the Avenue Edward VII most amazed me, and contained the magnetic heart of Shanghai within its six floors. … A vast warehouse of light and noise, the Amusement park was filled with magicians and fireworks, slot machines and sing-song girls. A haze of frying fat gleamed in the air, and formed a greasy film on my face, mingling with the smell of joss-sticks and incense. Stunned by the din, I would follow Yang as he slipped through the acrobats and Chinese actors striking their gongs. (KW, 18)

There is something disturbing about hearing this fictional version of Ballard’s experience delivered in his first-person, by-now-familiar voice. He could be describing an actual event, but not necessarily so. The authority and formal distance of his reading distinguishes his delivery from that of his spoken responses, which contain the stresses and pauses of recollection. Artifice and memory combine to reveal the texture of his life and work. More archival film follows, this time of the amusement park, as Ballard’s voice tells us:

All my characters spend their time constructing personal mythologies which can sustain their inner lives. My characters tend to be solitary, which is an unfortunate trait I think inherited from me, and they are experimenting with themselves as if they were…dreams.

As we hear this the boy cycles obliquely towards the camera, then Ballard walks in the same direction among a Shanghai crowd. He looks just a little flustered, perhaps by the heat. He mutters something. We hear what sounds like a bicycle bell and the last of Ballard’s voiceover coincides with his face coming almost to fill the screen.

His expression, slightly worried or thoughtful, matches the voiceover. Rising strings in the background carry over into a particularly compelling example of the use of archival footage, and one of the most interesting sequences in the film: a night scene of burning ruins and water. From slightly above we see a boat with a machine gun mounted on its prow. Armed soldiers aim warily at the shore as the boat moves through water, a Japanese sentry scans the area, a searchlight is rhymed with a shot of the moon emerging from clouds, followed by a return to the burning ruins at the water’s edge. Over this the opening passage from Empire of the Sun is read, and at either side of it we see the hot and bothered looking Ballard, in cream coat and open necked shirt, and Ballard the boy, walking among the crowds in Shanghai. The effect of this is particularly surreal, as the imagery of destruction is countered with its tragic contrary forces, art and youth, in the form of Ballard and an imagined boy-self.

Later we see Ballard (now in panama hat) enter through the gates of Lunghua, the wartime Civilian Assembly Centre where the Japanese interned European civilians. He sits and describes the room that was his family’s home from 1942-45. There has been no attempt to tidy away mess in the room before shooting, but while this might suggest the chaos of camp life it is unlikely that these spaces would have been anything other than neatly ordered. Nonetheless, the mess gives the room the dereliction that Ballard admires in abandoned objects and spaces and helps furnish the mise en scène of his writing.

ABOVE: ‘In a strange way I quite enjoyed my life here’ (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

Other perspectives of Lunghua are more prosaic. When Ballard stands on the roof of F-Block, ‘the main administrative building’, and identifies the various parts of Lunghua, disappointingly there is no pagoda. What looks like the Shanghai skyline may be seen in the hazy distance, however, rather like the view of Heathrow from parts of Shepperton.

Ballard’s young adult self is re-enacted by actor Michael Troughton, whom we see wandering around Shepperton, engrossed in newsreels and crash tests in the cinema and on television, watching a fighter plane landing at Lakenheath, and dissecting corpses at Cambridge. One sequence shows the real Ballard standing in front of machinery at a gravel quarry. The camera slowly moves from left to right across his thoughtful face, and as he turns and looks across the gravel lake it picks up Troughton, who stands on a small promontory at the water’s edge and returns Ballard’s gaze for a moment. There is a cut to a mid-shot of Troughton who then turns away. The voiceover through this sequence, which follows a shot of Troughton under a willow, and one of a railway worker in Shanghai, is another reading of an edited passage from Kindness:

The past had slipped away, taking with it my memories of Cambridge and Canada, of the dissecting room and … even of Shanghai. The warm light over Shepperton reminded me of the illuminated air that I had seen over the empty paddy fields of Lunghua as I walked along the railway line, but the light that filled the splash-meadow came from a kinder and more gentle sun. The children … who played by the stream had taken the place of the dead Chinese lying in the Lunghua creeks and canals. For the first time I was living in an endless present that owed nothing to the past. (KW, 126-7)

The result is paradoxical, in that memory is countered at the same time as it is invoked. One wonders what it might have been like for Ballard to stand in front of the camera and turn to view a version of his younger self. On the whole, and despite the courteous diffidence he displays so often, he is remarkably unselfconscious in front of a camera, as Simon Sellars points out in his essay on Cokliss’ Crash!. He is doing this for the same reason that he has done so many interviews, because he takes his work seriously. In front of the Shepperton Film Studios, Ballard speaks of how ‘Shepperton has insinuated itself into my fiction over the years’. We are shown images of gravel pits accompanied by a reading from Vermilion Sands. From these sequences we can see the ways in which the terrors and wonders of the modern world may be present in its apparently most banal settings. Shepperton’s specific location in space and time makes it an exemplar of this effect, but reading Ballard’s work allows us to see it in our own environments. From the juxtapositions in these sequences we can see that the mental landscape of Ballard’s life and art is clearly around him at all times, as it is around us if we care to look at it. In other words, the main achievement of Shanghai Jim is the way that it images the ‘Ballardian’ for us.

‘Living in an endless present’: Ballard turns to look at his younger self (screenshots from Shanghai Jim).

One of the most interesting sequences is that of Ballard’s visit to the scene dock at Shepperton studios. This sequence follows a re-enactment of a younger Ballard watching footage of crash-testing, and is framed by Ballard speaking to interviewer:

In a psychiatric case history one’s getting to a mythic core of what makes up human nature, and this is what I was interested in. My characters are all driven by the need to find some sort of truth. They may have to construct this truth for themselves. They resort to a set of desperate stratagems, I think that’s a common to so many of my characters. I mean, the characters may choose strange ways of finding salvation, but its salvation they’re all after. They’re obsessed with the need to find the sustaining mythology of their lives, to pursue that mythology to its logical end whatever the cost. They’re all embarked on these strange quests.

J.G. Ballard, Shanghai Jim.

Ballard’s voiceover continues as he walks into the Shepperton scene-dock, his gait familiar by now: head slightly tilted to see what is around him and arms loosely by his side, thoughtful, slightly anxious, purposeful, but no harm meant to anyone:

In a psychiatric case history one’s getting to a mythic core of what makes up human nature, and this is what I was interested in.

My characters are all driven by the end to find some sort of truth. They may have to construct this truth for themselves. They resort to a set of desperate stratagems, I think that’s a common to so many of my characters. I mean, the characters may choose strange ways of finding salvation, but its salvation they’re all after. They’re obsessed with the need to find the sustaining mythology of their lives, to pursue that mythology to its logical end whatever the cost. They’re all embarked on these strange quests.

J.G. Ballard, Shanghai Jim.

The camera scans the area and then returns to Ballard. Whether by accident or design, a number of Ballard’s preoccupations come together here. The scene dock is like an arcade of visual memory, a coalescence of Aragon’s Paris Peasant, Benjamin’s Arcades Project, and Ballard’s The Crystal World, in which Ballard stages some events in a setting of arcades and a market place where Christian and pagan fetishes are sold, and where the light and the dark may be divided in the architectural spaces of the French colonial streetscape.

As he paused by the boat, feeling the crystals along its sides, a huge four-legged creature half-embedded in the surface lurched forward through the crust, the loosened pieces of lattice attached to its snout and shoulders shaking like a transparent cuirass. Its jaws mouthed the air silently as it struggled on its hooked legs, unable to clamber more than a few inches from the hollow trough in its own outline now filling with a thin trickle of water. Invested by the glittering light that poured from its body, the crocodile resembled a fabulous armorial beast. Its blind eyes had been transformed into immense crystalline rubies.

J.G. Ballard. The Crystal World (1966; 96-7).

As he rounds a corner, two crocodiles appear, one stacked on top of another larger one.

‘The crocodile of memory’ (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

In speaking of the amphibian life of The Drowned World, Ballard also recalls an alligator in Shanghai Zoo:

Among the characteristic fauna of the Triassic age were both crocodiles and alligators, amphibian creatures at home in both the aquatic and terrestrial worlds, who symbolize for the hero of the novel the submerged dangers of his quest. Even now I can vividly remember the enormous ancient alligator housed in a narrow concrete pit, half-filled with cigarette packets and ice-cream cartons in the reptile house at the Shanghai Zoo, who seemed to have been jerked forward reluctantly, so many tens of millions of years into the 20th century.

J.G. Ballard. ‘Time Memory and Inner Space’, in The Woman Journalist, Spring 1963, repr. in V. Vale and A. Juno, J. G. Ballard, 100-101, 100.

The crocodiles in the scene-dock are exemplars of all the other objects there. They are stage properties, like those used in Ballard’s fiction, objects in and through which we image our relations with the world. Whoever chose to include this sequence in Shanghai Jim is making visible to us an aspect of Ballard’s method. Ballard approaches the crocodiles, almost cautiously walks around them and turns to look at them. As he does, he stands in front of a large map of the ‘far-East’, the world of Lord Jim, of Ballard’s youth and the Pacific War. Above him is a pub sign, ‘The George’:

‘Lord Jim’ (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

Ballard then walks to the other side of the crocodiles, and is here flanked by a piece of scenery, a panel of windows from a passenger jet. As he views the crocodiles and then turns to descend a set of stairs into sunlight, Shrapnel reads an edited passage from The Crystal World:

He strolled through the deserted arcades, noticing, as he did each morning, the strange contrasts between light and shadow despite the apparent absence of direct sunlight in Port Matarre…. Somewhere in the crystalline streets of Mont Royal were the missing fragments of himself, living in their own prismatic medium.

This sequence is another example of the way this film uses documentary conventions to show us how Ballard works. Rather than a dramatisation of a passage from The Crystal World, this film gives us a performance by Ballard in a museum of his writing and memory and of the media landscape. We go backstage, as it were, into the dressing room of Ballard’s imagination, and that of our times.

This seems strange because it appears to be quite separate from the theme of return to Shanghai, and draws particular attention to The Crystal World. Not so strange however, if one considers what the sequence achieves in less than two minutes. It adds to the film by deploying the metaphor of stage properties, drawing attention to the ways in which Ballard makes use of objects and images in the sets of exhibits that he is constantly shuffling and reordering in his writing. The Kindness of Women might be seen as a catalogue of the objects of Ballard’s memory, a dangerously deceptive guide to his creative life and a milder form of the catalogue of experiments in The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard’s visit to a particular object in what is effectively a museum of his place and time seems not so strange if we consider it as a counterweight to the journey into an irrecoverable past. The plenitude of the scene dock ironically mocks the relative emptiness of the room at 31 Amherst Avenue, a room which looks as though it has just been vacated for the camera by its usual inhabitants.

It would be easy to get a documentary film about Ballard wrong. The readings of the texts from Ballard’s collages might have been more effective as voiceovers to a scene of a Shepperton supermarket, rather than the gyrations of a nude dancer. The acid trip visuals are a bit cheesy. A lot of the archival footage is not credited. It would be good to see a shooting script for the film, a full list of credits, and to find out how the whole thing was designed and put together.

Shanghai Jim succeeds, however. It avoids reductive explanations of the work and uses the medium of television well, although most viewers will now see it on their laptop screens via Youtube. It illuminates, and is at times moving. Importantly, it amplifies Ballard’s fiction for us and allows us to recognise the Ballardian nature of our own lives

Pippa Tandy, August 2007

Many thanks to Susanna and Stephanie Shen for their Mandarin Chinese translation, to Liz Harding for scans, and to David Bromfield for editorial suggestions.

..:: APPENDIX
+ Transcript of J.G. Ballard’s commentary from the film.

..:: MORE IN THIS SERIES
+ Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon
+ Thirteen to Centaurus

“In a sense, I’m assembling the materials of an autopsy, and I’m treating reality – the reality we inhabit – almost as if it were a cadaver, or let’s say, the contents of a special kind of forensic inquisition… I regard all these as data which will play their role in whatever hypothesis I am proposing to offer, to explain the significance of mysterious and apparently unrelated objects, this huge network of ciphers, and encoded instructions – perhaps – that surround us in reality.”

– J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Graeme Revell (Summer 1983), RE/Search: J.G. Ballard (San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1984)

“Cadillacs, Coca Cola and cocaine, presidents and psychopaths, Norman Rockwell and the mafia… the dream of America endlessly unravels its codes, like the helix of some ideological DNA.”

– J.G. Ballard, Introduction to Hello America (1981)

Mallory stared at the distant gantries of Cape Kennedy. It was difficult to believe that he had once worked there. ‘I don’t think even Perth, Australia, is far enough. We need to set out in space again…’ ”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982)

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J.G. Ballard’s imagery reveals the fossil record of the Cold War as it remains in ruined installations, text, movies, photos and the contemporary psyche – the ‘helix of some ideological DNA’ as he puts it. Growing up here on the edge of the world – Perth, Western Australia – I have always been very interested in Cold War iconography, partly because of childhood memories such as the flights of the Soviet Sputnik and of John Glenn. Less fondly, I recall mucking in with a neighbour’s children to fill sandbags for his nuclear fallout shelter.

This piece – originally presented as a Powerpoint presentation containing 39 slides and attendant discussion – is intended to promote these connections. It’s a kind of sketch for a longer piece I plan to make in another life. It comes out of a paper I presented at The American History of Science Society Annual Meeting at Milwaukee in November 2002. I planned it as a presentation where I read a paper and screened images. It didn’t quite work that way and I ended up running back and forth to a photocopy service to produce overhead transparencies as there were not enough data projectors to go around. The paper itself is an offshoot of my PhD dissertation which I am currently ‘finishing’.

– © Pippa Tandy

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Harvey’s anatomy of blood circulation (circa. 1628)

Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire.”

– J.G. Ballard, Ambit, No. 33 in 1967

For over forty years, in the late twentieth century, the Cold War and its omnipresent technologies provided the matrix, the essential mediating structure for experience of all kinds. The Cold War conditioned the possibilities, the pattern of a new culture, which was determined almost entirely by the technologies that it threw up. Through these and the cultural processes they initiated, it delineated, measured and defined the space in which newly emerging conditions of human existence came to be configured and consolidated. The priorities of the Cold War were embedded within the human, essential to life as we know it. The language and imagery of this configuration were hinged on powerful determinant metaphors making visible the relations of anxiety, power and desire that mediated the changing relations between human beings, their culture and technology.

Still from Atomic Café, documentary film by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty (1982)

I had seen these fossils before. Each of the bones I had remembered clearly, etched by the moonlight as I lay on the floor listening to the screaming of the birds as they struck in their sexual frenzy at the church tower. I remembered the shin bones of the archaic boar, and the barely human skull of a primitive valley dweller who had lived by this river a hundred thousand years earlier, the breastbone of an antelope and the crystalline spine of a fish – together the elements of a strange chimera. I remember too the terrifying skeleton of the winged man.”

– J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)

The work and writing of J.G. Ballard offers a field guide to the Cold War life world and its cultural productions. He applies his ruthless imagination to charting its phyla, to treating the evolving phenomena of the Cold War as a problem in taxonomy. He constructs sets of documents, charts, descriptions that open up the violent fusions, the unquestioned imperatives of the era of forensic inspection. For Ballard this new planet earth is ‘a deranged zoo and someone has left the cages open’. He describes his imagination at work, feeding on the ‘compost’ of ‘strange crossovers in the new communications world’, scientific and technological ‘plankton’, discarded documents from wastepaper baskets, images from World War II and the Cold War. Ballard calls all this ‘ideological DNA’ (J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone, December 1987, Issue 413, p.57).

It is the key to understanding the present moment. It is not that the Cold War began and is now ended. Rather, it constitutes the cultural genetic inheritance that continues to shape our lives at every level and will do so for the foreseeable future. While the actual origins of the Cold War go further back, its structure becomes visible with the Manhattan Project and the American decision, against the advice of nuclear theorists and practitioners such as Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard and others, not to share discoveries and developments in nuclear weapons research with the Soviet Union.

Student textbook image of Klinefelter’s Syndrome chromosomes

In the field office he came across a series of large charts of mutated chromosomes. He rolled them up and took them back to his bunker. The abstract patterns were meaningless, but during his recovery he amused himself by devising suitable titles for them. (Later, passing the aircraft dump on one of his forays, he found the half-buried juke box, and tore the list of records from the selection panel, realizing that these were the most appropriate captions. Thus embroidered, the charts took on many layers of associations.)

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’, (1964)

Ballard states that ‘science fiction is a response to science and technology as perceived by the inhabitants of the consumer goods society’. The Cold War thus redefines the scope of literature and literary practices. There is no longer one literature but rather ‘fictions of every kind’. The writer must approach his subject matter ‘like a scientist or engineer’ and ‘out-imagine everyone else – scream louder, whisper more quietly’ (J.G. Ballard, ‘Fictions of Every Kind’, Books and Bookmen, Feb. 1971).

Still from Dr No (dir. Terence Young, 1962)

The subject matter of SF is the subject matter of everyday life: the gleam on refrigerator cabinets, the contours of a wife’s or husband’s thighs passing the newsreels on a color TV set, the conjunction of musculature and chromium artifact within an automobile interior, the unique postures of passengers on an airport escalator”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Fictions of Every Kind’, Books and Bookmen, Feb, 1971

Ballard’s work and life parallel the growth and change in industrial technologies of World War II and the Cold War. He is both product and critic of the cultures effected by these technologies. His life experience brought him up against the material conditions of experience. His writing is informed by patterns, by repetition and return as he visits and revisits his subjects, He opens them to changing angles of vision and shifting distances and focus, as though through a set of variable focus lenses.

Still from Alphaville (dir. Jean-Luc Godard,1965)

Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia.

– J.G. Ballard, Introduction to the French edition of Crash, (1974)

In 1951 Lancelot Law-Whyte wrote of the ‘increasing awareness of the morphological character of many of the sciences, which are now seen to be concerned with complex structures or forms of particular kinds’. He anticipated the ‘simple and comprehensive method of describing the changing form or structure of a complex of relationships’ which was highlighted by the determination of the double helix structure of DNA two years later (Lancelot Law White, Note to ‘Chronological Survey on Form’, in Aspects of Form: A Symposium on Form in Nature and Art, 1951).

Still from Atomic Café, documentary film by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty (1982)

Television has glamorized war for us, whether the movie drenched jungle palette of the Vietnam newsreel or the sinister black-and-white film relayed to our living rooms from the nose-cone cameras of Desert Storm’s smart bombs, which almost incite the television viewer to become a cruise missile.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The last Real Innocents’, The New York Times, 1991

Awareness of and interest in morphology is central to Cold War culture. Morphologies of the time are frequently articulated into culture through images. According to Lawrence Alloway, the word ‘image’ became a term that could be used to ‘describe evocative visual material from any source, with or without the status of art’, in the early 50s (Alloway, ‘The Development of British Pop’, Lucy Lippard, ed, Pop Art, 1966). This was when Ballard was reading medicine or wandering around London picking up work, writing advertising copy and selling encyclopaedias.

Still from Kiss Me Deadly (dir. robert aldrich, 1955)

In essence, science fiction is a response to science and technology as perceived by the inhabitants of the consumer goods society, and recognizes that the role of the writer today has totally changed – he is now merely one of a huge army of people filling the environment with fictions of every kind. To survive he must be far more analytic, approaching his subject matter like a scientist or engineer. If he is to produce fiction at all, he must out-imagine everyone else, he must scream louder, whisper more quietly.

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Fictions of Every Kind’, Books and Bookmen, Feb, 1971

Also in the fifties, mechanical reproduction, spurred on by new technologies, increased the availability of images and their use in advertising and popular culture. Images thus became specimens, to be collected, reconfigured and exhibited, and ‘accessioned’ into taxonomies of desire. Both artists and the mass media gathered images from all sources into their archives.

Still from Ice Station Zebra (dir. John Sturges,1968)

It’s photography and the cinema above all which provide us with reflections of this landscape. Television seems to me to supply a particularly important role, in the continuous flood of images with which it inundates our brain: it perceives things on our behalf, and it’s like a third eye grafted onto us.”

– J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Robert Louit, Magazine Littéraire no.87, April 1974

Magazines such as Life and Look increasingly exploited the potency of modern consumer imagery in the context of the culture and the technological events of the Cold War. Reiterated cycles of images became the currency, the everyday iconography, of the times. These images are now a vocabulary of the twentieth century, on the one hand a repository of cute kitsch, on the other, a powerful set of revelatory devices, as attested by the fact that many of the ‘key’ images of the period are now ‘owned’ by corporations.

Ballard is very aware of the power of these images. He is a visual writer, deploying images from his own archive, those of other artists and of the mass media. In collaging these images Ballard is also making a taxonomic frottage of the visual culture of his time, and a map of the human condition they inspired.

Still from Ice Station Zebra (dir. John Sturges,1968)

The Image Maze. Talbot followed the helicopter pilot across the rain-washed concrete. For the first time, as he wandered along the embankment, one of the aircraft had landed. The slim figure of the pilot left no reflections in the silver pools. The exhibition hall was deserted. Beyond a tableau sculpture of a Saigon street execution stood a maze constructed from photographic billboards. The pilot stepped through a doorway cut into an image of Talbot’s face. He looked up at the photograph of himself, snapped with a lapel camera during his last seminar. Over the exhausted eyes presided the invisible hierarchies of the quasars. Reading the maze, Talbot made his way among the corridors. Details of his hands and mouth signposted its significant junctions.

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The University of Death’, The Atrocity Exhibition, (1970)

Ballard’s palaeontological treatment of technologies as cultural artifacts is essential for any analysis of the culture of the period. Ballard’s imagery makes visible the ontological structures of the emergent Cold War subject. It reveals the relationship between the body and the technological prosthesis of the ‘outside’ world, in which nature and artifice are violently conjoined.

Still from Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1961)

The series of weapons tests had fused the sand in layers, and the pseudo-geological strata condensed the brief epochs, microseconds in duration of thermonuclear time. Typically the island inverted the geologist’s maxim, ‘The key to the past lies in the present.’ Here, the key to the present lay in the future. This island was a fossil of time future, its bunkers and blockhouses illustrating the principle that the fossil record of life was one of armour and the exoskeleton.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964).

The relationship between the body and the technological prosthesis of the ‘outside’ world, in which nature and artifice are violently conjoined, is apparent in both his method and subject matter, as in the ‘Terminal Beach’ quote above.

B-29 flying over Tinian Base in the Marianas, 1945, courtesy Smithsonian Institute (National Air and Space Museum) Washington DC

In all probability the airplane is banked and is turning, although your sensations make you feel it is in straight and level flight. Don’t act according to your sensations. Check and cross check your instruments.”

– Pilot’s Information File, 1944: The Authentic World War II Guidebook for Pilots and Flight Engineers, Schiffer Military/Aviation History, Atglen Pennsylvania, 1995, Section 4, Man Goes Aloft, ‘Sense of position in Flight’, Part 9, 1 (Revised August 1, 1944)

For Ballard, the conditions of thought, action and desire are shaped by technology, via the exterior, by technology’s tropes as images and artifacts, in their military form, or, in their familiar domesticated manifestations. They are the sites for ramification of power, authority and sexuality such as the freeway, the cine-camera, the interiors of cars and fighter aircraft and most especially the omnipresent imagery of conflict and technological apocalypse, such as World War II air battles, in particular those of the Pacific war, and images of Vietnam and atomic bomb tests.

Still from Kiss Me Deadly (dir. robert aldrich, 1955)

Brushing the flies from his mouth, Jim walked into the men’s ward. The decaying air streamed down the plywood walls, bathing the flies that fed on the bodies pied across the bunks. Identifiable by their ragged shorts and flowered dresses, and by the clogs embedded in their swollen feet, dozens of Lunghua prisoners lay on the bunks like sides of meat in a condemned slaughterhouse. Their backs and shoulders glistened with mucilage, and the splayed mouths in their ballooning cheeks still gaped as if these bloated men and women, dragged from a banquet, were gripped by a ravenous hunger.

He walked through the darkened ward, the tin of Spam held tightly to his chest, breathing through the magazines cupped over his mouth.”

– J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (1984)

These figures, actual and imagined, have entered social and individual consciousness as recognizable and meaningful entities. The abandoned motels, rusting rocket gantries, drained swimming pools and deserted bars of Ballard’s fiction are ‘spinal landscapes’, the settings which arouse liminal memories of ‘the formation of the brain’s visual centres’ (‘The Assassination Weapon’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970), revealing the evolutionary development of vision and consciousness and the informing power of technology over this development.

Still from Alphaville (dir. Jean-Luc Godard,1965)

At dusk on the second day he left the bed and went to the window for his first careful look at Cocoa Beach. Through the plastic blinds he watched the shadows bisecting the empty pool, drawing a broken diagonal across the canted floor. He remembered his few words to the cab driver. The complex geometry of this three-dimensional sundial seemed to contain the operating codes of a primitive time-machine, repeated a hundred times in all the drained swimming pools of Cape Kennedy.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982)

They even suggest a parasitical relationship, in that technology exploits and mimics the structures of human consciousness in order to evolve. Ballard’s practice examines the man-made environment as a field of scientific investigation to discover the shaping processes of human subjectivity.

Still from Atomic Café, dir. Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty (1982)

Identifying the island with himself, he gazed at the cars in the breaker’s yard, at the wire-mesh fence, and the concrete caisson behind him. These places of pain and ordeal were now confused with pieces of his body. He gestured towards them, trying to make a circuit of the island so that he could leave these sections of himself where they belonged. He would leave his right leg at the point of his crash, his bruised hands impaled upon the steel fence. He would place his chest where he had sat against the concrete wall. At each point a small ritual would signify the transfer of obligation from himself to the island.

He spoke aloud, a priest officiating at the eucharist of his own body.

‘I am the island.’”

– J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island (1973)

The middle decades of the twentieth century were crucial in the establishment of the rule of what Herbert Marcuse called ‘technological rationality’. The same imperative dominates military, industrial and domestic life, having entered and consolidated its authority in these spheres during this period. Futurism and its attendant discourses of streamlining, speed, growth and progress both describes and assists this colonization of the present.

Still from Edward Steichen’s film for The Fighting Lady (1944)

Airports and airfields have always held a special magic, gateways to the infinite possibilities that only the sky can offer. In 1946, when I first came to England, a dark and derelict shell of a country, I used to dream of the runways of Wake Island and Midway, stepping stones that would carry me back across the Pacific to the China of my childhood. At school in Cambridge, and later as a medical student at King’s College, I would flee all that fossilised Gothic self-immersion and ride a borrowed motorcycle to the American airbases at Mildenhall and Lakenheath, happy to stare through the wire at the lines of silver bombers and transport planes. Airports then were places where America arrived to greet us, where the world of tomorrow touched down in Europe.

– J.G. Ballard in Blueprint: Architecture, Design and Contemporary Culture, No. 142, September, 1997

The future gets closer and closer, and even co-exists with the present in the many signs of its potential. It is glimpsed in the 1950s, and earlier in some places, in a freeway flyover, a city skyline, in the images reproduced from a biologist’s microscope or a physics laboratory. It is this period and imaginative crucible of the co-existence of present and future that J.G. Ballard calls ‘the near future’. The near future is the potential of the future in the present.

Eventually the present and future collide and the effect is that described by the computer Alpha-60 in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville: ‘But no one has lived in the past and no one will live in the future. The present is the form of all life.’

Still from Kiss Me Deadly (dir. robert aldrich, 1955)

The pallid skin was marked with a hatchwork of weals where his fingers had tried to scratch away the names of the cities. For a moment he resembled an Aztec priest ready to dismember himself.”

– J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981)

To put it another way, the future is latent in the present, and the near future is the place in which this latent meaning becomes manifest, the ‘inner space’ or psyche of the everyday. Ballard creates a mythic, speculative time and space and uses it to explore the relationships between humans and technology. (‘The future is the key to the present’ – Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’ 1964).

Observation bunker at Trinity Site, still from video, Pippa Tandy (2000)

Wings of light hung from his shoulders, feathered into a golden plumage drawn from the sun, the reborn ghosts of his once and future selves, conscripted to join him here in the streets of Cocoa Beach… The flow of light had begun to slow, layers of time overlaid each other, laminae of past and future fused together. Soon the tide of photons would be still, space and time would set forever.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982)

The unifying technological ‘achievement’ of the century is the nuclear bomb. The first atomic device exploded at Alamogordo in July 1945 and turned the desert at ‘ground zero’ to glass. The nuclear explosion itself is a metaphor of sophisticated transformation, involving both implosion and explosion, and generating the mutative effects of radiation. As the most powerful metaphor of the century it also diminishes the power of metaphor to discriminate experience, as though the science and technology of this event appropriates language and imagery to its own ends in one momentous displacement of energy.

Still from Alphaville (dir. Jean-Luc Godard,1965)

I want a mythology that starts now, this moment in time, and runs forward… This is a mythology that obviously draws heavily on science and technology, and also on the communications landscape (which is a completely new thing, a parallel world which we inhabit), because they play such an important part.

– J.G. Ballard interviewed by Graeme Revell, J.G. Ballard, RE/Search: (San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1984, 1991)

While this effect may not have been immediately apparent, the development of nuclear weapons ultimately ‘reordered’ everything from time, space and sex to food and sleep. The Cold War induced a nuclear ‘reality,’ a unitary, monolithic fact so ‘extreme’ as to be beyond metaphor. The single most extreme metaphor became banal, a mere fact of life. It provoked the ultimate, very public, death of metaphor as the primary practical means to structure knowledge, culture and the quotidian.

Ballard imagines the means to resist and revalue its received representations, to recover language and imagery from the grip of both the technocrat and the literary moralist.

Student textbook image of Klinefelter’s Syndrome chromosomes

Around the brass vent at the deep end lay a small museum of past summers – a pair of his mother’s sun-glasses, Vera’s hair clip, a wine glass, and an English Half-crown which his father had tossed into the pool for him. Jim had often spotted the silver coin, gleaming like an oyster, but he had never been able to reach it.

Jim pocketed the coin and peered at the damp walls. There was something sinister about a drained swimming-pool, and he tried to imagine what purpose it could have if it were not filled with water. It reminded him of the concrete bunkers in Tsingtao, and the bloody handprints of the maddened German gunners on the caisson walls. Perhaps murder was about to be committed in all the swimming-pools of Shanghai, and their walls were tiled so that the blood could be washed away?”

– J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (1984)

His ‘even more extreme metaphors’ respond to this process at its end point in the everyday. Their luminary, repetitive quality parallels the reiterative, neurotic monolith of Cold War imagery but tilts it to give the reader a sideways view of the machine at work. Like the Los Alamos ‘gadget’, the monolith is now vaporized but its images and artifacts remain, a powerful mysterious presence that is the subject of Ballard’s work.

Still from Ice Station Zebra (dir. John Sturges,1968)

In the centre of the table was a huge roulette wheel, its transparent bowl illuminated from below. It was spinning slowly, and the projected light raced across the walls and ceiling, dappling the display map of the USA and everything else in the room with a series of racing letters.

… BALTIMORE … TAMPA … NEW ORLEANS … PORTLAND … TOPEKA … TRENTON … KNOXVILLE …

As the names circled the room, Wayne felt Paco nudge him forward. Sitting at the head of the table, in the place reserved for both President and croupier, was the naked figure of Manson. Illuminated by the roulette wheel, his waxy skin glowed like a painted corpse’s…

Reflected from the glass target wall, the names of all cities of America rippled across Manson’s skin so that he resembled an aging harlequin in an alphabet suit. His left hand scratched absent-mindedly at the electric names that glimmered across his skin.”

– J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981)

‘The nuclear reality’ – ‘technological rationality’ taken to its extreme – produce the conditions that Ballard observes in the late 1960s, that he calls ‘the death of affect’, an ‘ambiguous world’ born of ‘the marriage of reason and nightmare’. The term implies a paralysis generated by ‘sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.’ The television screen, ‘a third eye grafted onto us’, is one of the vectors that admit technology and its implications directly to human desire.

In the leaflet handed to guests at his exhibition of crashed cars in 1970, Ballard writes:

The 20th century has given birth to a vast range of machines – computers, pilotless planes, thermonuclear weapons – where the latent identity of the machine is ambiguous. An understanding of this identity can be found in the automobile.”

– J.G. Ballard, leaflet distributed at new sculpture, New Arts Laboratory Gallery, Robert Street, London (1970).

Ballard sees in the car, or in cars and roads, the stylisation of human cruelty, sexuality and obsession, and human bodies echo this stylisation in the gestures and postures of death, disfigurement and sexual congress which take place in the site of the motorways of the modern city. And the freeway is the domestic version of the runway and weapons testing site.

Map of The Atomic Bombing of Japan, August 1945 from The Manhattan Project, United States Department of Energy, 1999, p.52

The series of weapons tests had fused the sand in layers, and the pseudo-geological strata condensed the brief epochs, microseconds in duration of thermonuclear time. Typically the island inverted the geologist’s maxim, ‘The key to the past lies in the present.’ Here, the key to the present lay in the future. This island was a fossil of time future, its bunkers and blockhouses illustrating the principle that the fossil record of life was one of armour and the exoskeleton.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964).

Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930. He enjoyed the privileges of life in its expatriate British community. This continued even after the ‘Rape of Nanjing’, the fighting between Japanese and Chinese forces in Shanghai and the accidental bombing of the Avenue Edward VII in 1937 and the death of 1,012 people, mostly Chinese refugees. After Pearl Harbour, however, he and his family were interned by the Japanese in a Civilian Assembly Centre, an experience that he recalls in some short stories and his novels, Empire of the Sun and its sequel The Kindness of Women.

Still from Alphaville (dir. Jean-Luc Goddard, 1965)

At the time he had found himself wishing that Catherine had been with him – she would have liked the ziggurat hotels and apartment houses, and the vast, empty parking lots laid down by planners years before any tourist would arrive to park their cars, like a city abandoned in advance of itself.”

– J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island (1973)

In the Kindness of Women, Ballard sums up the effects of his experience of war in China:

In Shanghai, from 1937 to the dropping of the atom bombs, we had been neither combatants nor victims, but spectators roped in to watch an execution. Those who had drawn too close had been touched by the blood on the guns.”

Aerial photograph of Tinian Base in the Marianas, 1945, courtesy Smithsonian Institute (National Air and Space Museum) Washington DC

The series of weapons tests had fused the sand in layers, and the pseudo-geological strata condensed the brief epochs, microseconds in duration of thermonuclear time. Typically the island inverted the geologist’s maxim, ‘The key to the past lies in the present.’ Here, the key to the present lay in the future. This island was a fossil of time future, its bunkers and blockhouses illustrating the principle that the fossil record of life was one of armour and the exoskeleton.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964)

Ballard was a student of medicine at King’s College, Cambridge for two years. The experience of the dissecting room helped model the tension between disaffection and responsibility in his writing. The experience is recalled in The Kindness of Women, as both carrying meanings to do with Ballard’s traumatic past, and as a training ground for his practice as a writer. Cadavers do not appear like the dead as much as like ‘visitors from another planet’ and the experience of dissection is ‘as close as you can get to another human being’, linked both physically and imaginatively to erotic experience.

This was central to Ballard’s concerns and methods in his writing, analogous to the clinical biopsy:

Doing anatomy was an eye-opener: one had built one’s whole life on an illusion about the integrity of one’s body, this ‘solid flesh’. One mythologizes one’s own familiar bits of flesh and tendon. Then to see a cadaver on the dissecting table and begin to dissect it myself and to find at the end of term that there was nothing left except a sort of heap of gristle and a clutch of bones with a label bearing some dead doctor’s name–-that was a tremendous experience of the lack of integrity of the flesh, and the integrity of this doctor’s spirit.”
– Ballard interviewed by Lyn Barber, Penthouse, vol 5, Sept. (1970)

Observation bunker at Trinity Site, still from video by Pippa Tandy

Arrival at the zone. They sat in the unfading sunlight on the sloping concrete. The abandoned motorway ran off into the haze, silver firs growing through its sections. Shivering in the cold air, Talbot looked out over the landscape of broken overpasses and crushed underpasses. The pilot walked down the slope to a rusting grader surrounding by tyres and fuel drums. Beyond it a quonset tilted into a pool of mud. Talbot waited for the young woman to speak to him, but she stared at her hands, lips clenched against her teeth. Against the drab concrete the white fabric of her dress shone with an almost luminescent intensity. How long had they sat there?”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The University of Death’, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)

Ballard’s science fiction arises precisely out of the Cold War conditions that also effect the transmission of American culture in Britain. While in the RAF in Canada, Ballard read a lot of American science fiction magazines. Back in England, (in about 1953) while waiting to be released from the RAF he wrote his first SF story, ‘Passport to Eternity’.

I was still in the RAF when I wrote that story. I wrote it at RAF Booker, which was a base for cashiered aircrew, for people being thrown out of the Air Force. We sat in this airfield, near High Wycombe, a sort of transit camp, straight out of Kafka in a way. There were great gloomy huts by the pines on the edge of these empty runways where we reject aircrew sat around, trying to keep warm by the one stove. They didn’t bother to keep us warm, and there was nothing to do. There were two squadron leaders who were in charge of processing us, and they had to wait for various documents to arrive. As mine had to come from Canada, I spent a long time there. Weeks went by, and I sat around waiting for my name to be called. Suddenly a name would be called out., the man in question would go to meet these squadron leaders, and five minutes later he would be a civilian and leave the base forever. One didn’t know when this was going to happen, so with all this spare time on my hands I thought ‘I’ll write a science fiction story!’ Which I did. I’d been reading all this stuff in Canada. For some reason I wrote ‘Passport to Eternity’, which was a sort of summary of it all in a way.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’, RE/Search: J.G. Ballard, San Francisco: RE/Search Publications (1984)

Still from Atomic Café, documentary film by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty (1982)

After his arrival at the clinic Franklin’s first patient was a badly burned fighter pilot who had taxied his jet through the doors of a hanger. The second was one of the last of the astronauts, a former naval captain named Trippett. The pilot was soon beyond reach in a perpetual dusk, but Trippett had hung on, lucid for a few minutes each day. Franklin had learned a great deal from Trippett, the last man to have walked on the moon and the last to hold out against the fugues – all the early astronauts had long since retreated into a timeless world. The hundreds of fragmentary conversations, and the mysterious guilt that Trippett shared with his colleagues, like them weeping in his dreams, convinced Franklin that the sources of the malaise were to be found in the space programme itself.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘News From the Sun’ (1982)

The story fulfils the general criteria of science fiction: it is futuristic in setting, it speculates about technologies, in particular, the relationship between boredom, leisure and technology and it predicts the development of biotechnologies and the technologies of ‘virtual reality’. The media landscape is the landscape of the psyche and marriage has a new role. Where it once was an institution in the apparatus of patriarchy, it has become an instrument of technology. Ballard also very clearly demonstrates the relationship between military technologies and leisure, something that perhaps arises from the conditions of the making of this story.

Still from John Sturges, Ice Station Zebra (1968)

A metallic blue light, as if in some hospital intensive care unit, shone down on the marble-skinned body of a middle-aged man lying on a surgical couch in front of a battery of television screens. He was naked except for the towel around his waste, and held an aerosol inhaler in one hand, a remote-control TV unit in the other. The blue light trembled against his white skin, and gave it a look of engorged, unhealthy activity, that of trapped venous blood struggling to return to an over-active heart. His eyes were fixed on the tiers of screens, as if his real existence resided in this ionised flow of flickering images rather than in his own restless musculature.”

– J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981)

These conditions are those of the beginnings of the nuclear arms race, in particular the contest for nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, and the break-up of the globe into zones regulated by the speed and range of these systems was underway. The pilots who had been so much a part of the iconography of World War II were soon to be superseded by ICBMs. The displacement of human labour by machine has the effect, as it did in the industrial revolution, of defining superseded human labourers, not as inappropriate because of their human qualities, but as inadequate machines. Those ‘reject aircrew’, presumably unfit for the new world order of B-52s and jet fighters, were being returned to the quotidian where they would be enlisted as consumers.

Edward Steichen’s film for the Fighting Lady (1945)

The sunlight faded. A few inches from me, through the water-dimmed windshield, a once-human face grimaced at me. A drowned man wearing an aviator’s helmet, his mouth fixed in a death-gape, lay across the controls, arms swaying towards me in the current that flowed through the cabin door.”

– J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)

This was also the time of the exhibition ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ (1953) at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, organized by Eduardo Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson and Alison and Peter Smithson. In this exhibition the practices of sculpture, photography and architecture were set together to make an exhibition of images from reproductive media (photography of different kinds) anthropological images and objects, children’s art and other sources. It drew from the flux of images that accompanied the American rise to industrial power and the domestication of powerful technological structures in western life.

Max Ernst, Europe After the Rain (1940-2)

War. The possibility at last exists that war may be defeated on the linguistic plane. If war is an extreme metaphor, we may defeat it by devising metaphors that are even more extreme.

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century’, Zone 6, Incorporations, ed. Jonathon Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Urzone 1992)

For example, the Smithsons’ Golden Lane City, Great Britain, a pastiche of a drawing of high rise domestic architecture, photographs of people enjoying ‘modern life’, and popular heroes Joe di Maggio and Marilyn Monroe, prefigures the media culture daily life that will become prevalent in the 1960s. Technology provides the domestic structures, both social and physical, and the images of human life that are to take place within these structures. Britain’s relationship to America is thus figured in a manner that appears as a corollary to the figure of the bleak airfield and its cold huts filled with idle airmen where Ballard wrote his first science fiction story. Both are fully articulated in ‘Passport to Eternity’, which speculates on the relationship between boredom, leisure and technology, and is an essay on desire flickering between the active fields of military and consumerist technologies.

Still from Kiss Me Deadly (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1955)

Leached away by the camera lens, the dimension of depth is missing from the room, and the two figures have an increasingly abstract relationship to each other, and to the rectilinear forms of the settee, walls and ceiling. In this context almost anything is possible, their movements are a series of postural equations that must have some significance other than their apparent one.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The 60 Minute Zoom’ (1976)

In 1956 Ballard saw the exhibition ‘This is Tomorrow’, at the Whitechapel Gallery. This exhibition, seen as central to the development of British Pop Art, invokes in its title the notion of the near future. Richard Hamilton’s ‘Just What It Is That Makes Today’s Homes So Different’, a key work in this exhibition, articulates clearly the presence of the technological in the daily lives of modern humans. Ballard shared the approach to the media environment taken by these Pop Artists.

Still from John Sturges, Ice Station Zebra (1968)

In terms of television and the news magazines the war in Vietnam has a latent significance very different from its manifest content. Far from repelling us, it appeals to us by virtue of its complex of polyperverse acts. We must bear in mind, however sadly, that psychopathology is no longer the exclusive preserve of the degenerate and perverse. The Congo, Vietnam, Biafra—these are games that anyone can play.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Tolerances of the Human Face’ in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)

It was supported by his experience firstly as a technical writer and as assistant editor on the journal Chemistry & Industry. This was a journal published by the Society of Chemical Industry, in Belgrave Square where Ballard worked for three or four years, an experience he describes as ‘sailing with jaws open through a great sea of delicious plankton’. (Shanghai Jim: A Film about J.G. Ballard, produced by James Runcie, BBC, 1991)

Photograph (1958-65) by Paul Virilio, from Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975, trans George Collins, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995)

His face was still numb from the sea air, and he was intent on his communion with the empty sand and the block-houses. Walking along the beach, he had been surprised by the size of these concrete monsters. He had expected a chain of subterranean pill-boxes hiding within the sea wall, but many of them were massive fortresses three storeys high, larger than the parish churches in the near-by towns. The presence of the blockhouses, like the shells of the steel pontoons embedded in the wet sand, had pulled an unexpected trigger in his mind. Like all examples of cryptic architecture, in which form no longer revealed function – Mayan palaces, catacombs, Viet Cong sanctuaries, the bauxite mines at Les Baux where Cocteau had filmed Testament d’Orphée – these World War II blockhouses seemed to transcend time, complex ciphers with a powerful latent identity.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘One Afternoon at Utah Beach’ (1978)

Ballard was less interested in adventures in outer space than in what he calls ‘inner space’, the ‘terrain’ where the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality meet and fuse’ (Ballard, introduction to the French edition of Crash, 1974). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard’s writing brought him closer and closer to the near future with works like The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1973) and High Rise (1975).

Still from Atomic Café, dir. Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty (1982)

The air shed its light.”

– J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island (1973)

The Atrocity Exhibition is about the ways in which the modern world, or the human psyche, has become an exhibition of atrocities to be viewed via the television set, films, advertising billboards and other mass media forms. It is also a novel about the ways in which the exterior world maps our desires and psychopathologies.
Its main method is the experiment.

Trinitite (Desert sand vitrified by heat of Trinity blast, detail of photograph by Pippa Tandy, 2000)

All week they had watched the montaged sequences of commercial pornographic films, listening without response to Talbert’s analysis of each posture and junction. Catherine Austin stared at the giant frames. Fossilized into the screen, the terraced images of breast and buttock had ceased to carry any meaning.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Great American Nude’, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)

Ballard sets up a series of simulations in a novel that is a kind of laboratory of the technological events of the period. Recurring images in the dream landscapes of ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ and other stories include body matter such as spinal tissue, brain matter, genital and reproductive matter, muscles, blood, bone, lymphatic fluid, skeleto-muscular intersections, nerves, eyes and optic function, dactylic pads, and thighs. These are brutally juxtaposed to details of modern technology – details of car parts, instruments, helicopters, museums, and apartment blocks. He thus releases his characters’ actions and their settings from the trap of psychological realism.

Photograph of M3 looking towards Heathrow from Shepperton, by Pippa Tandy (2002)

Freud’s classic distinction between the manifest and latent content of the inner world of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. A dominant element in this reality is technology and its instrument, the machine. In most roles the machine assumes a benign or passive posture – telephone exchanges, engineering hardware, etc. The twentieth century has also given birth to a vast range of machines – computers, pilotless planes, thermonuclear weapons – where the latent identity of the machine is ambiguous even to the skilled investigator. An understanding of this identity can be found in the automobile, which dominates the vectors of speed, aggression, violence and desire. In particular the automobile crash contains a crucial image of the machine as conceptualized psychopathology. Tests on a wide range of subjects indicate that the automobile, and in particular the automobile crash, provides a focus for the conceptualizing of a wide range of impulses involving the elements of psychopathology, sexuality and self-sacrifice.

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Crash’, in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)

Ballard uses the forensic tools of science fiction to expose the relationships between objects, the mind and the body: In ‘The Summer Cannibals’ (1969), for example, an architectonics of the body in a technological landscape is described:

A Confusion of Mathematical Models. Holding her cheap Nikon, he led the young woman down the bank. In the sunlight the drained river stretched below them, a broken checkerboard floor. At the mouth a delta of shingle formed an ocean bar, pools of warm water filled with sea urchins. Beyond the silver span of the motor bridge lay basins of cracked mud the size of ballrooms–-models of a state of mind, a curvilinear labyrinth. Handing her the camera, he began to explore the hollows around them. Images of Bardot’s body seemed to lie in these indentations, deformed elements of thigh and thorax, obscene sexual wounds. Fingering the shaving scar on his jaw, he watched the young woman waiting with her back to him. Already, without touching her, he knew intimately the repertory of her body, the anthology of junctions. His eyes turned to the multi-story car park beside the apartment blocks above the beach. Its inclined floors contained an operating formula for their passage through consciousness.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Summer Cannibals’, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)

Trinitite (Desert sand vitrified by heat of Trinity blast, detail of photograph by Pippa Tandy, 2000)

Already too, the relic hunters were at Cape Kennedy, scouring the burning saw grass for instrument panels and flying suits and – most valuable of all – the mummified corpses of dead astronauts.

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Dead Astronaut’, (1968)

Ballard shows how technology makes its own boneyards, the discarded shells, or evidence, of the conditions of human life. The figure of the dead airman, either recovered from his crashed plane or forever immersed in its wreckage as part of a marine dreamscape, the chrysalis of the new subject, awaiting or undergoing transformation recurs frequently.

Still from Ice Station Zebra (dir. John Sturges; 1968)

Pirate Radio. There were a number of secret transmissions to which Travis listened: (1) medullary: images of dunes and craters, pools of ash that contained the terraced faces of Freud, Eatherly, and Garbo; (2) thoracic: the rusting shells of U-boats beached in the cove at Tsingtao, near the ruined German forts where the Chinese guides smeared bloody handprints on the caisson walls; (3) sacral: VJ Day, the bodies of Japanese troops in the paddy fields at night.

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)

The palaeontological, in the form of a ‘geological layer’ of shattered glass in Crash, the last, dying dogfish of the short story, ‘The Deep End’, or the remains of an astronaut orbiting earth in a long defunct space capsule, unite past, future and present.

Gravel pit Wraysbury, photograph Pippa Tandy (2002)

Five years later, after I resigned from NASA, we made our first trip our first trip to Cape Kennedy. A few military units still guarded the derelict gantries, but already the former launching site was being used as a satellite graveyard. As the dead capsules lost orbital velocity, they homed onto the master radio beacon. As well as the American vehicles, Russian and French satellites in the joint Euro-American space projects were brought down here, the burned-out hulks of the capsules exploding across the cracked concrete.

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1968)

For Ballard the airfield is a place of gestation, and a parodic birth occurs with detonation –- or re-entry of a derelict spacecraft – at the dropping zone, or ‘ground zero’.

Still from Alphaville (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)

In the field office he came across a series of large charts of mutated chromosomes. He rolled them up and took them back to his bunker. The abstract patterns were meaningless, but during his recovery he amused himself by devising suitable titles for them. (Later, passing the aircraft dump on one of his forays, he found the half-buried juke box, and tore the list of records from the selection panel, realizing that these were the most appropriate captions. Thus embroidered, the charts took on many layers of associations.)”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’, (1964)

The concrete formations, the metallurgical and aerodynamic artefacts of World War II and the Cold War are Ballard’s specimens. The names Eniwetok, Guam, Wake Island and so on resonate as the places from which aircraft began their bombing missions or as the sites of weapons tests. Their positions in the Pacific, distant but strategic, give them particular imaginative qualities. They are archaeological sites, places to which one might return in some atavistic dream:

Beach Fatigue. After climbing the concrete incline, he reached the top of the embankment. The flat, endless terrain stretched away on all sides, a few oil derricks in the distance marking the horizon. Among the spilled sand and burst cement bags lay old tyres and beer bottles. Guam in 1947. He wandered away from here, straddling roadworks and irrigation ditches, towards a rusting quonset near the incline of the disused overpass. Here, in this terminal hut, he began to piece together some sort of existence. Inside the hut he found a set of psychological tests. Although he had no means of checking them, his answers seemed to establish an identity. He went off to forage, and came back to the hut with some documents and a coke bottle.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Assassination Weapon’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970

Trinity street sign, Los Alamos, New Mexico, still from video by Sophia Bromfield (2000)

War. The possibility at last exists that war may be defeated on the linguistic plane. If war is an extreme metaphor, we may defeat it by devising metaphors that are even more extreme.

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century’, Zone 6, Incorporations, ed. Jonathon Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Urzone 1992)

The new creature, the Cold War, imprints its presence on the physical and psychic landscapes of its time. Ballard is actively aware of this process, makes it the subject of his practice. He makes his frottages of the mineralized Cold War imprint, or biopsies of its remnants. These he assembles, orders and identifies, to suggest the possible conditions that gave rise to the phenomena of the late twentieth century.