APOLLO ROULETTE, PART 2

by Brian Baker

In part 2 of ‘Apollo Roulette’, Brian Baker’s sequel to ‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’, an ‘auto-displacement’ Ian Fleming/J.G. Ballard mashup, Baker continues to apply the method to desert imagery in Ballard’s work.

In this, the final thrilling instalment, Baker finally uncovers the deadly secret that powers the American ‘nuclear state’: an apocalyptic game of APOLLO ROULETTE!

Now read on for Part 2, or return to Part 1 and the supercharged moment when it all began!

Serenity. Patient B had been driving his Aston Martin convertible towards La Tzoumaz on a clear, sunny early summer’s day. According to the Swiss police reports appended to the file Bluffield had received from the Service, there were signs of a second automobile in the vicinity of the accident, but the Aston was the lone vehicle found at the crash site. The car had ricocheted from the stone balustrade and careered across the road, impacting against the wall of the mountain road almost head-on. The passenger in the car, Theresa B, his wife of some four days, was killed instantaneously. Despite impact fractures to knees, leg and hip, B escaped major trauma to vital organs, although blood loss was marked. B had remained conscious while Swiss paramedics and emergency rescue teams had reached the crash site an estimated 90 minutes after the incident, and was also conscious while being extricated from the crushed cabin of the Aston. He was airlifted to a private clinic in Geneva, while his wife’s remains were returned to her family in Marseille.

Viva Las Vegas. In Ballard’s ‘Myths of the Near Future’, Sheppard finds his resurrected wife Elaine in what was once ‘no more than a park-keeper’s hut, some bird-watcher’s weekend hide transformed by the light of its gathering identities into this miniature casino’ (1082). The impacted, ‘annealed’ images of itself project the hut into some kind of ideal state, just as Sheppard had encountered the elderly images of a roadside hamlet transfigured into younger, idealised versions of themselves earlier in the story. Sheppard mis-recognises the co-presence of multiple identities as Las Vegas neon, a profane city of light illuminating Cold War deserts.

When Eight Bells Toll. ‘You could have asked me, B, instead of sneaking around like a thief in the back yard,’ said Felicity as they drove in the Cadillac towards Groom Lake. ‘I think we’ve found our mail has gone unanswered lately,’ said B, trying not to sound affronted. ‘And in any case, my trespass is not exactly, well, official.’ Felicity looked over at her long-time friend and colleague, and saw a ragged, rather bruised man, and not from his recent ordeal. ‘We’d heard that you’d had an accident, or that you’d gone rogue,’ she said, frowning. ‘Licence revoked?’ ‘No, not exactly,’ he said, looking back at her ruefully, ‘but it’s more than what you’d call a holiday. I think they wanted me to take a little rest in a village they have set up on the coast, but I needed some answers first.’ As they drew up to the checkpoint, B asked, ‘Do we have clearance?’ ‘Not to worry,’ said Felicity. ‘Forget the Official Secrets Act. You’re in God’s Own Country now. Welcome to Wonderland.’

Fugue Time. Ballard’s paired stories ‘News from the Sun’ and ‘Memories of the Space Age’, plus ‘Myths of the Near Future’ have analogous structures.[1] The protagonist, a doctor, undergoing the effects of ‘space sickness’ connected to the NASA space program, searches for a ‘door in the universe’ out of time itself. The protagonist’s wife, emotionally or sexually involved with a provocative, perhaps unbalanced male antagonist, precedes her husband into the zone of transcendence (symbolically if not literally). In ‘Myths of the Near Future’, this is figured as a kind of resurrection. Mallory, in ‘Memories of the Space Age’, a flight-physician once attached to the Shuttle program, travels back to Florida to confront the meaning of the space sickness, and the former astronaut Hinton, whose murder of a fellow astronaut in orbit precipitates the time-crisis. Hinton now occupies the Cape Kennedy launching grounds. Mallory suffers from, and gradually starts to embrace increasing periods of ‘fugue time’, when he enters a kind of fugue and time coagulates, then solidifies around him. This is most iconic in the ‘block’ of water he suspends himself in when submerged in Gale Shepley’s swimming pool: ‘Once he immersed himself in the pool, delighted to be embedded in this huge block of condensed time’ (1059).

Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (commissioned for Ballard’s short-story collection Memories of the Space Age).

In his musings about Gale’s pet cheetahs, or the tiger kept in a nearby cage (whose door he would like to open) there is something Edenic about Mallory’s appreciation of fugue-time: the lion can indeed lie down with the lamb in ‘condensed time’. As in ‘News from the Sun’ the space/ time-sickness is a doorway to transcendence, precipitated by the space program but superseding it. At the end of ‘News from the Sun’, the doctor Franklin (who had worked at a clinic treating astronauts and other who exhibited fugue symptoms, as he does himself) and the astronaut’s daughter Ursula Trippett speak a kind of infant ‘babble’ in fugue, an index of a return to human existence prior to the fall of language (Babel) or even the structuration of the subject. While an earlier story, ‘Mr F is Mr F’ narrates a male protagonist’s return (literally) to the womb, this is figured as vampiric, and the story ultimately descends itself into misogyny. In the ‘fugue time’ stories, the return to a uterine pre-subjectivity is cast as a polyvalent, multiple continuity with a revivified nature (where even the desert is restored by endlessly multiplying palm trees, reproduced perceptually in, and out of, time).

Level 9. As they entered facility 51, two technicians in white protective suits barred their way into the atrium. ‘Sorry,’ said Felicity. ‘I’m afraid they’ll give you the full decontamination treatment, as you’ve never been here before. We have some, ah, friends in this facility that might catch a cold. I’ll go through and see you downstairs later.’ She left him to be guided into a booth, where he undressed and threw his clothes into a chute to be incinerated. His body was inspected, enumerated, diagnosed. His skin, cleaned, depilated and abraded. His brain, scanned. His torso and vital organs monitored, his internal fluids filtered. His hair, cropped; his chin, chest and genitals shaved; his eyes, inspected by a senior ophthalmic surgeon; his mouth, investigated by an orthodontist; his anus, probed by a noted proctologist. At each cleansing, at each scan, he descended down a level, from red, to yellow, to purple, to grey, to white. As he cleared Scanning, dressed all in white, his body glowing, he felt altogether a new man.

The winged man. Flight is a recurring motif in Ballard’s oeuvre, and Gregory Stephenson notes this in relation to Crash:

The imagery by which the transcendent character of the experience of automobile collision [...] conveyed in the novel is that of light and luminosity, of ascension or flight.[2]

This imagery is found throughout Ballard’s writing, most notably in the stories ‘News from the Sun’, ‘Memories of the Space Age’ and ‘Myths of the Near Future’, but can also be found in the novel The Unlimited Dream Company (written around the same time, and published in 1979, but set in Ballard’s own locale, Shepperton). There, the protagonist Blake crashes a light aircraft into the Thames at the beginning of the novel, but achieves a curious kind of resurrection. He brings with him fantastical powers to transform the suburb of London. At one point in the narrative, he attempts, Pied Piper-like, to draw the townsfolk into the air:

The sky was brightening as we rose through the cool air. I felt the townspeople lying serenely within me, sleeping passengers in this ascending gondola propelled by some profound upward dream. They were carrying me away towards the sun, eager to lose themselves in a communion of light’.[3]

This ascension ultimately fails, but in the contemporaneous stories, the flight imagery is indeed connected with an escape from time. They also have an evolutionary dynamic. In ‘Memories of the Space Age’, Hinton, the astronaut-murderer, is first seen flying WWI biplanes. As the narrative progresses, the aircraft ‘descend’ the evolutionary ladder in terms of powered flight: ‘as every day passed these veteran machines tended to be of increasingly older vintage’ (1041). Like Kerans in The Drowned World, whose consciousness descends back ‘down the spinal column’ as the novel goes on, evolution in Ballard’s texts is typed both in terms of a kind of de-evolutionary imperative for the human psyche (towards the liberation or transcendence offered by the ‘macrocosmic zero’) and in terms of the false ‘progress’ of evolutionary mis-steps. The NASA space program is itself figured as an ‘evolutionary crime’ in ‘News from the Sun’ (1019), one that ‘cracks the hour-glass of time’ and causes the fugues and ‘space sickness’.

By contrast, human-powered heavier-than-air craft are typed as benign: Gale Shepley, the murdered astronaut’s daughter, pilots one in ‘Memories of the Space Age’; Martinsen flies a ‘cat’s cradle of plastic film and piano wire’ (1063) in ‘Myths of the Near Future’; and in Hello America, the fleet of crystalline aircraft that appear above Las Vegas at the end of the narrative indicate most clearly the fragility of this image of flight as transcendence. The mythic, metaphorical imagery of flight always supersedes human attempts to traverse the heavens, from Kittihawk to Cape Kennedy. The image that encapsulates this is at the beginning of ‘Myths of the Near Future’, where Sheppard sits in the cockpit of a crash-landed Cessna on Cocoa Beach. After being rescued from the stranded craft, Sheppard realises that Martinsen has drawn a massive Aztec bird upon the sand, which grasps the Cessna symbolically in its talons. Soon after, the light aircraft is caught by the tide and broken into pieces.

Islands. Bluffield found it difficult, in fact nearly impossible, to penetrate the psychological armature patient B had erected. He would not talk about his wife, nor about the crash itself. In exchange for the run of the clinic and its park, B had agreed to keep a journal. Bluffield had hoped that the estranged form, the distance between writing and reading, might allow B to slip his armour, inadvertently perhaps. Any signs or clues would be an improvement on the impassive non-engagement Bluffield faced on a daily basis. Bluffield lit a cigarette and opened B’s journal. He found there technical drawings, calculations, a series of versions of da Vinci machines, worked through again and again, compulsively, exactingly. It provided little enough evidence of anything but the precision and determination B had demonstrated throughout his career. Bluffield was not surprised, but still, a little disappointed.

On his second read-through, Bluffield thought he had indeed found what he was looking for. On a page dominated by a drawing of an aero-screw, covered almost entirely by mathematical equations, a compulsive palimpsest, Bluffield read: ‘Report on the assassination of Theresa B by unknown forces.’ Bluffield looked for a continuation throughout the journal, but found nothing. The phrase itself was illuminating, revealing a high degree of paranoia; the seeming externalisation of guilt as outside agency; the ascribing of malign purpose in the word ‘assassination’; and once more, the desire to estrange and distance in the objective ‘report’. But was there a connection between the phrase and the drawings?

Double constellations. In his essay ‘The Solar Anus’, Georges Bataille conjures images of circularity which are bound up both with elemental (natural) forces and with sexuality, figured as an excessive dream in which a man lying in bed with his female lover inhabits some kind of cosmological pattern of arousal: ‘trees bristle the ground with a vast quantity of flowered shafts raised up to the sun. [...] From the movement of the sea, uniform coitus of the earth with the moon, comes the polymorphous and organic coitus of the earth with the sun’.[4] The phallicism of masculine desire is arrayed against the liquidity of the feminine: ‘The sea, then, has played the role of the female organ that liquefies under the excitation of the penis’ (7). The essay encodes a growing excitation, with the sexual images becoming more extreme and violent, until the penultimate paragraph in which the narrator declares ‘I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night’ (9). Sexuality and violence (violation) are a crucial connection for Bataille, as a kind of overflow or excess (a key term) which countermand the imperatives of taboo that order and regulate work towards work and reason: ‘there is in nature and there subsists in man a movement which always exceeds the bounds, that can never be anything but partially reduced to order’.[5] This excess does not equate with transgression, however, for ‘transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it’ (63).

Poster for Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.

Transgression, paired with taboo, are organised into a social system that regulates expenditure and consumption. The sun, for Bataille, becomes what Fred Botting and Scott Wilson call ‘the supreme solar giver. Giving heat, light, life, the sun signifies the purest form of the gift, pouring out energy with no thought of return.’[6] This expenditure is the type and source of excess or overflow, and in ‘The Solar Anus’ is explicitly marked as violent: ‘The Sun exclusively love the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds it incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal territorial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray’ (9). The Sun is the frustrated lover of the Night, the night which finds its own material image in the anus of the young woman. Defecation is (though the image of the volcano) opposed to, yet is analogous to the orgasmic expenditure of the sun’s ejaculation; love, screaming in the narrator’s throat, is ‘the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun’ (9). Parody, however, connects: ‘each thing is a parody of another’ (5). At the beginning of the essay, the narrator screams ‘I AM THE SUN’ (5), but the rest of the essay marks the inability of that sun/subject to achieve orgasm, remaining in a state of excitation. The Sun, the desiring male subject, desires the night, the anus of the young female lover, but ultimately the opposition between sun and anus, transcendent overflow and base materiality, collapses into the palindrome of the sun/anus: ‘the solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is the night’ (9).

The Tenth Circle. Hand in hand, B and Felicity, dressed in identical environment suits of bright white cloth, wandered into the Garden, a habitat of gymnosperms, ferns and bryophytes, located on Level 9. Kneeling by the side of a pathway was a small man in a white labcoat, digging with a hand-trowel in the tilth. Hearing them, he stood up, brushed his hands together to remove the earth, and waited for them, both hands extended in welcome – or benediction. ‘How are our friends?’ asked Felicity. ‘All is well,’ replied the man, in English with a light French accent. ‘Introductions,’ smiled Felicity. ‘B, this is Doctor Lacombe, the Director of our Institute of Xenogamy here at the facility. Doctor, this is B, a visitor.’ ‘A visitor?’ repeated Lacombe. ‘Are we all not visitors here, at the centre of the Earth?’ Lacombe moved to B’s side, interlocked his arm, and began to walk them through the Garden. ‘I think you must have come a long way to find us, my dear B. What is it that you want?’ ‘Certainty,’ said B.

Apostles of the Prismatic Sun. In Ballard’s Crash, the terminal transgression occurs when the narrator ‘James Ballard’ sodomizes Vaughan, the renegade scientist. Ballard meets Vaughan for the last time in “the mezzanine lounge of the Oceanic Terminal [...] this house of glass, of flight and possibility”.[7] They then both take LSD, and embark on a drive through London. The city is transformed into a tableau of light, and this vision is accompanied by both physical intimacy and images of transcendence:

Taking my eyes off the road, I clasped Vaughan’s hand in my own, trying to close my eyes to the fountain of light that poured through the windshield of the car from the vehicles approaching us. An armada of angelic creatures, each surrounded by an immense corona of light, was landing on the motorway either side of us. [...] With my right hand I parted his buttocks, feeling for the hot vent of his anus. For several minutes, as the cabin walls glowed and shifted, as if trying to take up the deformed geometry of the crashed cars outside, I laid my penis at the mouth of his rectum. [...] As I moved in and out of his rectum the light-borne vehicles soaring along the motorway drew the semen from my testicles. [...] Sitting together, we were washed by the light flowing in every direction across the landscape (21: 199; 202).

The sun/anus is achieved through a consummation of the act of sodomy deferred in Bataille’s ‘The Solar Anus’, but this transcendence is only temporary. At the beginning of the next chapter, Ballard experiences a vision of a ‘retinal horde’, a veil of flies that returns him to the base material, the excremental: ‘Flies crawled across the oil-smeared windshield, vibrating against the glass. The chains of their bodies formed a blue veil between myself and the traffic moving along the motorway. I turned on the windshield wipers, but the blades swept through the flies without disturbing them. Vaughan lay back on the seat beside me, trousers around his knees. [...] The flies covered Vaughan’s face, hovering around his mouth and nostrils as if waiting for the rancid liquors distilled from the body of a corpse’ (22: 204). Transcendence, visions of angels and of light, collapse back into the pit. The excremental vision is also found in Ballard’s The Drowned World (1963), where London, transformed into a post-catastrophic lagoon, is drained: ‘Veils of scum draped from the criss-crossing telegraph wires and tilting neon signs, and a thin coating of silt cloaked the faces of the buildings, turned the once limpid beauty of the underwater city into a drained and festering sewer’.[8] For Ballard, beneath the visions of light there always lurks the materiality of shit.

Ocean’s Eleven. ‘I want to know what is really happening’, said B. ‘Is this really happening?’ asked Lacombe. ‘Why, where do you think you are?’ ‘In Wonderland…’ said B, gazing at this primeval Garden folded deep within the Earth. ‘Dr Lacombe, will the visitors..?’ Lacombe smiled patiently. ‘Return your wife to you? Perhaps only if you do not look over your shoulder on the way back to the surface.’ Lacombe guided them through the Garden towards a portal, where he stopped, stood before B and took his hands. ‘I cannot tell you what you will find’, he said. ‘It may be the answer you seek. It may be a doorway into a very private hell. Do you wish to continue?’ B nodded slowly. ‘You are sure, I can see. Very well, my dear B. I envy you.’

News from the Sun. ‘[I]t seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time [....] And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.’[9]

Majestic Twelve. ‘Come with me,’ Felicity said as she punched the code into the portal lock. As the door ascended in its frame, they entered an enormous space, like an aircraft hanger the size of a landing field. He looked behind him to see control booths and a large screen; before them, lights receded into the darkness. As they began to halo and evanesce, he looked up into the darkness of the roof space. Stars constellated the darkness, and as he watched, they began to move and congregate, patterning onto whorls and galaxies and spiral arms. The lights expanded, moved downwards. Time cooled. Amber, cobalt and scarlet balls floated above the apron, sentient, glowing. He watched as a large presence, dark light, extruded from the vault, extended downwards, and pulsed halfway along the runway. He looked down and saw his hands sparkle, flaked with gold, flickering with crystalline images of themselves, a diamantine body occupying the same space as himself. His clean, pure body rang with celestial song. Felicity smiled, her head Madonna-like, eyes burning with divine fire. He watched in wonder as angels began to drift down from the stars, their beauty a thousand suns. He raised his arms and began to ascend into the air, his body encased in a celestial coronation armour. He embraced the secret and benign inhabitants of the air, their love a star that filled him with white.

Thirteen to Centaurus. In total, there were eleven manned Apollo missions ‘proper’. Apollo 7 to 10 were training and testing flights, two in Earth orbit, two in lunar orbit. Apollo 11, crewed by Neil Armstrong, ‘Buzz’ Aldrin and Michael Collins, were the first Apollo mission to land on the surface of the moon, in July 1969. Apollo 12 was crewed by Pete Conrad, Alan Bean and Richard Gordon, who, at the charismatic Conrad’s instigation, wore identical Hawaiian shirts and bought identical sports cars when training. Apollo 12’s Saturn V was struck by lightning – twice – on takeoff, but the crew managed to avoid aborting the mission. Al Bean subsequently left NASA and now paints highly colourful painting of lunar landscapes, incorporating actual moondust and pieces of his mission patches. Apollo 14’s Commander, Alan Shepherd, the only one of the original ‘Mercury Seven’ astronauts (commemorated by Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff) to command an Apollo mission, took a golf club with him and played on the lunar surface.[10] Apollo 17 was the last lunar mission, in 1972. Apollo 18-20 were cancelled due to budgetary constraints. Apollo 13’s mission nearly ended in disaster. An explosion aboard the craft on the way to the moon meant that the landing was aborted, and the lunar module used as a ‘life raft’ to get the crew back to Earth.

However, these would not have been the first casualties of the Apollo program. Apollo 1 (as it was later designated) never launched. Its crew, Virgil (Gus) Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, were killed on the launch pad when a fire swept through the Command Module in a test situation. There are two plaques remaining on the launch pad where the disaster occurred. One reads: LAUNCH COMPLEX 34, Friday, 27 January 1967, 1831 Hours. Dedicated to the living memory of the crew of the Apollo 1: USAF. Lt. Colonel Virgil I. Grissom, USAF. Lt. Colonel Edward H. White, II, U.S.N. Lt. Commander Roger B Chaffee. They gave their lives in service to their country in the ongoing exploration of humankind’s final frontier. Remember them not for how they died but for those ideals for which they lived.

The other reads: In memory of those who made the ultimate sacrifice so others could reach for the stars, Ad astra per aspera, [a rough road leads to the stars] God speed to the crew of Apollo 1.

From the photographic series Astronaut Suicides by Neil Dacosta.

Storms. Doctor Bluffield set down the sheaf of case notes and walked to the large window of his office. As he stood and watched two nurses hurry across the afternoon furnace of the piazza, he realised the futility of his work with Patient B. B’s refusal to engage in discussion about the death of his wife, his refusal even to acknowledge it, indicated some deeper trauma. ‘He clearly feels a deep-seated guilt about the death of his wife,’ said Bluffield, ‘but I simply cannot reach him. Perhaps it is time to consider a more radical form of therapy.’ He turned and smiled at his female colleague, who was sitting in the Eames chair opposite his desk. ‘I know you’ve published on psycho-drama and role-play, Felicity. What is your clinical opinion about its possible effectiveness in patient B’s case?’

Coda: Apollo 13. He woke up in his room at the Stardust. It was dark. He fell off the bed, groped to the bathroom and turned on the light. In the mirror he saw a shaven man, stubbled skull, naked, eyes a scorched blue. A straight razor had been dropped in the sink. He closed his eyes and pressed his hands together. Clearly he would find no answers in Las Vegas, nor in the desert. He would have to go to the launching grounds at Canaveral. Perhaps, among the gantries and the detritus of the Apollo program, he would find peace, and find her again.

Now return to Part 1 and the supercharged moment when Brian Baker’s APOLLO ROULETTE all began!

[1] J.G. Ballard, ‘News from the Sun’, pp.1010-1036; ‘Memories of the Space Age’, pp.1037-1060; ‘Myths of the Near Future’, pp.1061-1084; The Complete Short Stories (London: Flamingo, 2001).
[2] Gregory Stephenson, Out of the Night and into the Dream: A Thematic Study of J.G. Ballard (New York, Westport CT & London: Greenwood Press, 1991), p.71.
[3] J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) (London: Triad/Panther, 1981), ch.27, p.161.
[4] Georges Bataille, ‘The Solar Anus’, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1985), p.7.
[5] Bataille, Eroticism (1957) trans. Mary Dalwood (New York & London: Marion Boyars, 1987), p. 40.
[6] Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, Bataille (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2001), p.96.
[7] J.G. Ballard, Crash (1973) (London: Vintage, 1995), ch.21, p.193.
[8] J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1963) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), ch.10, p.119.
[9] Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971) (London: Flamingo, 1993), p.67; p.68.
[10] Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff  (1980) (London: Picador, 1990).

APOLLO ROULETTE, PART 1

by Brian Baker

In this sequel to ‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’, an ‘auto-displacement’ Ian Fleming/J.G. Ballard mashup, Brian Baker applies the method to desert imagery in Ballard’s work.

Finally, Baker uncovers the hidden logic at play in the American ‘nuclear state’ – a deadly game of APOLLO ROULETTE!

Tune into Ballardian.com for Part 2: the final thrilling instalment of Brian Baker’s Apollo Roulette!

Double Zero Wheel. He clicked the cartridge into the chamber of the service revolver, carefully closed the cylinder, and placed the mouth of the barrel against his temple. What was it he had said to Markham? ‘I understand that double-O’s have a very short life expectancy.’ He wondered now how many of those deaths were suicides. Somehow the service revolver seemed right, for doing the decent thing. He had killed too many men with the Walther, and didn’t want to be a notch on his own gun.

The Gernsback Continuum. At the beginning of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), the narrator and his attorney are on the way to cover the ‘fabulous Mint 400’ in Las Vegas. The text famously begins: ‘We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas’ (3). Thompson is driving along the former Route 66, now known as Interstate 15. To the west of Barstow is Edwards Air Force Base. Edwards was the site of the X-plane testing program in the 1950s, which eventually gave way to the ‘spam in a can’ astronautics of the Friendship, Mercury and Apollo programs. The men of Edwards Air Force Base, ‘folk heroes of our time’ according to Lyndon Johnson,[1] inhabited a variant of frontier masculinity appropriate to Edwards’s desert setting, and was exploited in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and its screen adaptation.

Thompson, driving east of Edwards towards Barstow, experiences an hallucination, a fata morgana, a common desert phenomenon. Brought on by the desert light and psychotropic drugs, Thompson hallucinates what William Gibson, in ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, would call ‘semiotic ghosts’, ‘semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own’.[2] In this story, the narrator encounters a vision of ‘the air thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things [...], mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters [and] smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury’ (8-9). He sees Tucson as ‘a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era’ (9), ‘an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come’ (8). Thompson sees not a fascist utopia, but bats; and not bats, but UFOs; and these UFOs are the semiotic phantoms of the American Space Program made manifest by a cocktail of narcotics and desert speed.

One, Two, Three. No, not yet. He lowered the gun and placed it gently on the glass-topped table by his right hand, where it settled with a hard double click. His hand went automatically to the shaker and poured the last of the vodka martini, but he already felt nauseated by the two glasses he had downed before. Dutch courage? He shuddered. He really was finished if he needed help to pull the trigger. Some of his fellow agents, he knew, had descended into a whiskey-sodden fugue before the inevitable end had come, a danger to themselves and to others and their deaths ultimately something of a mercy. When the instrument begins to feel, he thought, it’s past time for the Service to hone the edge of a new blade.

Algebras of chance. In Hello America, the roulette wheel becomes the means by which the deranged President Manson decides which of the ruined cities of America to target with the remaining stockpile of cruise missiles and ICBMs. In the words of President Manson, Ballard diagnoses the ‘American dream’ of migration and aspiration as a gamble, with Las Vegas the latter-day cradle of the modern USA. ‘Europe doesn’t exist for me any more, Wayne – except that I see that it is waking now like an old dog, smelling us here and trying to get its snout into this new America I’ve built. It was a gamble, Wayne, a gamble with my own life. I put everything on the one spin of the wheel each of us is given, a small stack of dreams and hopes’ (153). Manson’s is a materialist vision, lacking the transcendent: even hopes and dreams are but small chips in an unwinnable game.

Clouds. Doctor Bluffield stood at his office window and gazed across the piazza of the clinic, which opened towards the saucer-shaped water tower that blazed white in the southwestern sun. The clinic was a plate-glass spacecraft fallen among the green knolls of the science park. The sculpted gardens reflected the serenity of purpose of the bio-medical corporation under whose aegis the clinic operated. The clinic’s main building incorporated a heat-reflective skin which maintained a carefully-controlled temperate environment within. Outside, the heat was well over a hundred degrees, according to the monitor on Bluffield’s desk. In the piazza, by the fountain – an indulgence in this climate, as were the lawns – a man in a loose-fitting, white tracksuit was calmly proceeding though a T’ai Chi warm-down sequence,  like some kind of swaddled and articulated mannequin.

Fata Morgana. Vermillion Sands is a desert resort that is the location of a sequence of short stories that were collected in the 1971 volume Vermillion Sands.[3] In the fantastical desert space of the resort and its outlying desert villas, Lagoon West and Lizard Key, glider pilots carve cloud formations into mobile sculpture, flying ‘sand rays’ are hunted akin to the Albatross in Coleridge’s ‘The Ancient Mariner’, and the pathologies of the resort’s inhabitants – movie stars, poets, glitterati – are made manifest. In ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’, a psychotropic house, in which a film star murdered her husband, ‘recalls’ these emotions and causes the relationship of the new inhabitants to disintegrate. In a sense, ‘Stellavista’ is a ghost story, a haunted-house narrative. The emotional ‘ghosts’ are technological revenants; the house itself takes on the psychosis of its owner as a kind of pathological prosthesis, and itself becomes murderous. The pathology of the male narrator also becomes aligned with the trauma encoded in the house’s psychoactive circuits and the phantasmal ‘presence’ of the femme fatale/ murderess, Gloria Tremayne. 99 Stellavista is a classic Ballardian pathologised technology that threatens but ‘beckons more and more persuasively from the margins of the technological landscape’.[4]

Two Tribes. In the morning B hired an open-topped Corvette Sting Ray and put the hiking gear in the trunk, using the Swiss passport and a sheaf of soft dollar bills he had won at blackjack two nights before. It certainly wasn’t baccarat at the Royale, but the sharp spike of adrenalin, even dressed in casual clothes among these holidaying Midwesterners, so anxious to lose their roll, as they called it, was gratifying. It was even something of a relief. If it wasn’t the pleasures of the roulette wheel in the warmth of a Mediterranean evening, at least it wasn’t sitting alone with a loaded revolver at his right hand. The heat was oppressive on Highway 15 as it spooled north from the city limits. The resort shrank like a discarded postcard in the rear-view mirror, and like those other desert cities, Phoenix and Reno, seemed as unreal as a fata morgana once left behind. Runnels of sweat slicked his white linen shirt to his back, and he had to blink away salty droplets behind the incognito of his glasses. The desert called to him, but the still-rational remainder of his mind worried that the Corvette might not prove reliable. He didn’t like the idea of buzzards and coyotes picking at his bones. It reminded him too much of what he did for the Service.

Image: ‘Las Vegas Club’ by Troy Paiva.

Synchronoclasmique. ‘The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun’s rays. Nights of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural order of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heat of the desert – a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of the traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.’[5]

Three Days of the Condor. He awoke in the passenger seat of the Corvette, parked under some scrub out of sight of the highway. He had tried to limit his water intake in order to preserve his supplies for his hike to Groom Lake, and had taken the salt tablets, but still he felt drained by the sun. The relative coolness of the evening revived him slightly as he climbed out of the automobile and retrieved his gear from the trunk. Night was falling over the Range like a soft rain. A bar of gold light at the horizon faded as he looked up at the enormous sky, the constellations seemingly close enough to touch. He had heard that other lights, other shooting stars, had been seen in the Tikaboo valley and by motorists on Route 375, but he dismissed these reports as black propaganda. Since the demise of the Sky Flash program, British involvement in advanced aeronautics had been limited to client status, and the Service would dearly have liked to obtain hard information about what research was being pursued at NAFR. His trespass would not be the first by a British agent, and he often wondered what side he was meant to be on. This intrusion, however, had its own agenda.

Survival Kits. Throughout The Atrocity Exhibition (1969), a collection of experimental short-story ‘condensed novels’, there are references to a group of items (photographs, documents, physical objects) called a ‘kit’: there are eleven in total.[6] Kits are also found in ‘News from the Sun’ and ‘Myths of the Near Future’. In ‘News from the Sun’, the kit is a ‘shrine’ left for the doctor Franklin by Slade, the would-be astronaut whom Franklin refused to allow on the space program on psychological grounds.  The kit consists of: a fragment of lunar rock; a photograph of Marion Franklin in the shower; a faded reproduction of Dali’s Persistence of Memory; a set of leucotomes; an emergency brain donor card (1016). The function of such a kit is made much more explicit in ‘Myths of the Near Future’, where Sheppard suggests that the kit is a ‘machine, of a kind. A time-machine’ (1077). It consists of: ‘a framed reproduction of Magritte’s The March of Summer, a portable video-cassette projector, two tins of soup, a well-thumbed set of six Kamera Klassic magazines, a clutch of cassettes labelled Elaine/Shower Stall I-XXV, and a paperback selection of Marey’s Chronograms’ (1068).This ‘survival kit’ (‘of a special kind’) is quite typical in its references to Marey, Surrealist art, sexual experimentation or transgression, and visual technology. These are themselves condensed representations of key Ballardian icons and concerns: time, sex, vision.

The Four Horsemen. It had been simple enough to evade the guards in their pick-up, though the warnings about the use of deadly force on the ‘Restricted Area’ signs had given him some pause. Trespass was one thing, but shooting dead an American serviceman, even an armed one, was something else entirely. He kept tramping in the cool desert air, his body responding as of old to exertion and deprivation. He felt the straps of the backpack on his shoulders, but the discomfort was familiar and welcome. The first fingers of dawn light were haloing the horizon off to his left, and so he had perhaps an hour until he needed to find a hide, from the sun and from surveillance. He wasn’t far from Groom Lake now, but would wait until tonight to try to penetrate the area proper. Until then, he would manage his body’s needs, and his thoughts.

Signs of the mineral. ‘Why [...] are the deserts so fascinating? It is because you are delivered from all depth there – a brilliant, mobile, superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning and profundity, a challenge to nature and culture, an outer hyperspace, with no origin, no reference points.’[7]

Space/Time Crisis. As he walked down the main staircase, Bluffield could see the man in white framed in the large windows that let polarised light into the atrium of the clinic. The man was a rather troubling patient, but there was little enough to distinguish him from either his fellow patients or the clinicians. Bluffield left the building by the large plate-glass doors and immediately began to perspire. He stepped across the paving to where the man went through his warm-down exercises.

‘How are you with muscle strains, Professor?’ asked the man. ‘Do they come under your area of expertise?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Bluffield.

‘So you can mend complicated machines,’ said the man, indicating his forehead suggestively, ’but not simple ones?’

‘I don’t really consider myself an engineer,’ said Bluffield.

‘The metaphysical rather than the material?’ asked the man. ‘Well, never mind, I’ll persevere.’ He continued with his slow, graceful articulations.

‘Two o’clock,’ said Bluffield brusquely, somewhat nettled by the man’s self-possession. He resumed his walk across to the car park. The water tower cast a dark shadow in the morning light. The fronds of the palms, moving in the slight breeze, whispered some secret arboreal language to the desert air.

Image: Atomic fireball, Trinity test, White Sands, 1945.

Alamagordo. ‘The first atomic-bomb test against the backdrop of White Sands, the pale blue backcloth of the mountains and hundreds of miles of white sand – the blinding artificial light of the bomb against the blinding light of the ground.’[8]

Saturn V. His chest screamed as he ran in ballooning strides down the scree slope, a tiny avalanche of dust and gravel ploughing ahead of him. The hammering blades of the helicopter broke waves of pulverizing sound upon his head as he dashed sideways out of the searchlight beam, a jack-rabbit fleeing the hunter’s gun. He felt he was being flushed towards a trap, but exhaustion and terror dulled his reactions. Time became a chain of moments as he hopped from rock to rock, scuttled from brush to brush in a vain attempt to deceive his pursuers. He ran up a cleft in the rocks, a small island on the desert floor, hoping for some crevice into which he could push himself, some tunnel into which he could bolt. As he jumped down the other side, he saw several guards standing in the beams of their pick-ups, and he knew the chase was over. He stumbled towards them, heaving for air, and then fell to his knees. After a few seconds, he found a small, scratchy voice. ‘Where are you going to take me?’ he asked. A man in a dark suit came forward through the blinding beams of light, offering a hand to help him onto his feet. ‘We’re going to take you to our leader,’ he said, smiling.

A simultaneous structure. In the 1971 film The Andromeda Strain, directed by Robert Wise, a ‘crystalline’ alien virus lands in the American desert attached to a meteorite, and causes catastrophic effects on the human circulatory system, The focus of the narrative is to find a solution for this virus through scientific means: by understanding why a very young baby and an alcoholic old man did not fall victim to the virus that devastated a small desert town. A group of scientists descend 5 ‘biologically cleaner’ underground levels of a top-secret base until they arrive at a secure and sterile environment in which to study the alien life form. This base is located at Lake Mead, Nevada, south-east of Las Vegas and on the opposite point of the compass to the Groom Lake testing grounds. Its location places the base in a clear relation to both underground nuclear missile silos and secure Cold War ‘bunkers’ used to protect military chains of command in the event of a nuclear war.

Still from The Andromeda Strain (dir: Robert Wise, 1971).

The security of biological hygiene is short lived in The Andromeda Strain, however: the virus also corrodes the flexible seals that close off ‘secure’ spaces. It is not by human agency that the virus is rendered harmless: it mutates into a non-lethal form, and it is the failure to ‘destroy’ the virus by a nuclear detonation (that would have caused exponential mutation and growth and widespread dissemination of the virus) that is the major human achievement therein. The Andromeda Strain is a diagnostic text for Cold War science fiction in its discourses of hygiene and security, and its near-phobic coding of the alien as biological other. In Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964), the insane SAC General Jack D. Ripper’s paranoia migrates from Reds-under-the-bed rhetoric to phobias about his own body: he avoids fluoridated water (and sexual orgasm) as he is concerned to protect the integrity of his own ‘precious bodily fluids’ from contamination. This discourse informs The Andromeda Strain, as it does Ballard’s Hello America (1981), where the (again, insane) ‘President’ Charles Manson reveals to the protagonist Wayne his use of the remaining American nuclear stockpile after an environmental catastrophe has rendered the USA half desert, half jungle:

‘I had to take them out, Wayne, there was a threat of plague in the east. I used the old cruise missiles. Before his breakdown my partner renovated the warheads and guidance systems. They’re slow but reliable, like homing pigeons going back to a hot supper. Think of it as a necessary prophylactic measure.’[9]

The ‘plague’ is the threat of the eastern seaboard of North America being re-colonised from Europe: the discourses of infection and ‘cure’ are deployed to rationalise the destruction of a threat of invasion.

Six of One. The dark-suited man offered little in the way of conversation as they sped along Groom Lake Road in the pick-up, but his body language was unthreatening, even friendly. The other guards had gone about their business, leaving him alone with the suited man, although he had been asked, politely, to hand over the Walther. The police-band radio squawked occasionally on the dash, but there seemed little else going on in the Range. The sun was coming up behind and to the left of them, and the desert was emerging from the night in grey and blue and ochre. The pick-up slowed as it approached what seemed to be an abandoned desert diner, a dusty roadside shack with wooden porch and lettering on the roof, an old Burma-Shave sign out front, and long dark shadows painted across the blacktop. Parked at an angle to the porch was a clean, black government-issue Cadillac, the kind of car that Agency officers drove, not without a sense of irony, around Langley. As they pulled up in a volume of dust, he wondered who the driver could be.

Ballard’s short-story collection ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1988), with Ernst’s ‘Europe After the Rain’ on the cover.

L’Amerique sidereal. The military-industrial complex, a phrase coined by President Eisenhower in a jeremiad delivered on his leaving office, is crucial to the post-war economy of Southern California. According to Dale Carter:

Simultaneously, by transferring over $17.5 billion to the southern and western United States between Fiscal years 1962 and 1969, the space agency’s budget made a proportionally greater contribution to what was ultimately the more painful mechanism, not only of the Rocket State’s growth but also of its eventual succession. The contribution itself had two distinct yet related dimensions. On the one hand, the more than $13 billion worth of prime contracts and subcontracts which initiated the rapid growth of the Cape Canaveral region and secured the prosperity of the Houston and Los Angeles industry and commerce during the 1960s indirectly helped elevate new generations of Florida real estate speculators, California construction firms, and other Sunbelt entrepreneurs and financiers: a new community  of interest born of the Vietnam war boom whose relative independence from the power elite’s east coast operational core would allow them to ride out the recessions of the early 1970s and underwrite the rise of the New Right during the rest of the decade.

On the other hand, vast prime contracts awarded to companies like Boeing and North American Rockwell by NASA during the 1960s directly fuelled corporate giants which, while more closely aligned with the Republican establishment or pro-military Democrats than with the New Right’s highest circles, were nevertheless integral to Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 (234-5)

The American ‘rocket state’, in which the space program (and especially Apollo) acts as the spectacle element in the economic system of the Cold War, is most in evidence in the prosperity of Southern California and Florida, both critical sites for Ballard’s short fictions.

***

Now: Zero. On an American roulette wheel, there are 36 numbers, 18 red and 18 black, from 1 to 36. There are also two green sections of the wheel: Zero (0) and Double Zero (00). Both pay the house.

***

Seven Days to Noon. Strangely, the dark-suited man used some kind of electronic card-reader and keypad to open the door of the diner, which led directly down a short flight of steps. He blinked in the bright overheads as he took in a modern institutional canteen, in brushed steel, white melamine and glass. Several men, Special Agents by the cut of their jackets, were collecting food at a self-service counter, while others sipped coffee, chatted or scanned documents at an archipelago of small tables. At one, a tall chestnut-haired woman in a midnight-blue trouser suit stood up and faced them, as the dark-suited man guided him by the elbow to her table. Now he knew he the driver was. ‘Felicity Vespertine,’ he said, smiling. ‘Why are you here?’ ‘B,’ she said warmly, clasping his hand firmly and pulling him toward her, kissing him on both cheeks. ‘Howard,’ she said to his companion, could you grab a couple of coffees for us before you go, and a sandwich? B here looks famished.’ ‘I think the word you’re looking for, Felicity,’ said B, ‘is finished.’

Macrocosmic Null-X. In Hello America, the young protagonist Wayne finds himself, towards the end of the narrative, in a mocked-up ‘War Room’ at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, in which the deranged President Manson spins a roulette wheel to determine which ‘infected’ North American city will be targeted by what remains of the Cold War nuclear arsenal. Reluctantly, Wayne throws:

Zero.

Wayne watched the ball circle the illuminated bowl, safe and defused in its empty niche. No city was marked against it!

With relief he blurted: ‘Mr President, there’s nothing there, no city – ’

Manson laughed affably, the chuckle of a conjuror who has just deceived a small child.

‘Zero pays the house, Wayne.’ (215-6)

In his article ‘”Zero Pays the House”: The Las Vegas Novel and Atomic Roulette’, Ken Cooper suggests that Las Vegas and ‘the bomb’ are inextricably intertwined, not only by the city’s proximity to the Nevada testing grounds, but through metaphor: ‘everyone is a subject of the nuclear state; we are all in the same casino. So, to extend the metaphor, How do we get out of the casino when we’re tired of playing atomic roulette?’[10] The ‘game’ of MAD is a game of chance, but all outcomes are ultimately that of defeat. Wayne in Hello America, however, flees the city by ‘Sunlight Flier’, a fleet of crystalline human-powered aircraft that provide an irresistibly surrealist gloss on Ballard’s motif of flight as transcendence. The dream of Las Vegas inhabited by Wayne, that of a ‘past America [and] city of antique gamblers’ (236), is itself the final victim of the logic of the Cold War.

Vapours. Patient B had arrived at the clinic in Vermillion Sands some three months ago, after a long convalescence in Geneva. The Swiss clinicians had performed exemplary work on B’s physical injuries – on cursory examination, one would hardly notice the fractured tibia, cracked hip, two broken patellas and contusions around sternum and ribcage – but B’s physical condition was of less concern to Bluffield than the psychological. B was clearly a highly intelligent individual, but his strongly practical cast of mind caused him to disengage from Bluffield’s approaches, or even reject them outright. B had no interest in the problem, it seemed, no insight into his own psychological processes, and Bluffield had failed to interest his patient intellectually in the clinical models at work. B seemed content to live in a quotidian world of regular exercise and small-scale concerns. To explain that, Bluffield knew, there was no need for recourse to deep theoretical structures.

Helios. Apollo, the Greek and Roman god of the arts, but also of rationality and architecture, became increasingly identified with Helios, the sun god, in Hellenic times. Why is Apollo, the sun-deity, named for the NASA moon programme? Perhaps the reason is that Apollo is patron of the arts and of philosophy, of music (of the spheres) and science. Apollo is also an oracular god, implicitly a deity of what is to come. More troublingly, perhaps, Apollo was the centre of a cult of masculine youth. With goddesses Artemis/ Selene more properly identified with the moon, is the NASA Apollo program a conquering, or erasure, of the cosmologically feminine?

Tune into Ballardian.com for Part 2: the final thrilling instalment of Brian Baker’s APOLLO ROULETTE!

[1] Dale Carter, The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American rocket State (London: Verso, 1988), p. 153
[2] William Gibson, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, ed. Bruce Sterling (London: Paladin, 1988), pp.1-11 (p.7).
[3] J.G. Ballard, Vermillion Sands (1971) (London: Phoenix, 1992).
[4] J.G. Ballard, ‘Introduction’ to Crash (1973) (London: Vintage, 1995), unpaginated.
[5] Jean Baudrillard, America, (1986) (London: Verso, 2010), pp.137-8.
[6] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) (London: Harper Perennial, 2006).
[7] Baudrillard, America, p.133.
[8] Baudrillard, America, p.4.
[9] JG Ballard, Hello America (1981) (London: Flamingo, 1993), ch.20, p.154.
[10] Ken Cooper, ‘”Zero Pays the House”: The Las Vegas Novel and Atomic Roulette’, Contemporary Literature 33:3, Fall 1992, 528-544(p.534)

by Simon Sellars

This is an earlier version of an article published in Continuum, Volume 24, Issue 5 October 2010, pages 721-33. Both versions were based on a paper given by Simon Sellars at the Monash University conference, B for bad cinema: aesthetics, politics and cultural value.

Recent academic discussions of ‘badfilm’ and ‘paracinema’ have highlighted the re-appraisal of ‘all forms of “cinematic trash”’ (Sconce 1995, 372). This article addresses the theme by contrasting films from two of the most well-known purveyors of ‘cinematic trash’: X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963), directed by Roger Corman, and They Live (1988), directed by John Carpenter. In X, a scientist develops X-ray vision, seeing into the fourth dimension and something so shocking he rips his eyes out. This act is analogous with Corman’s career as purveyor of trash cinema: refraining from pushing badfilm’s power to the absolute limit; foregoing the gift of ‘second sight’; content to exist on a marginalised, second-tier, parallel reality to the Hollywood mainstream. In They Live, Carpenter re-empowers the thesis: the hero stumbles on a secret society that has developed sunglasses to see through the real to the alien-generated subliminal messages in advertising and politics. Rather than withdrawal, Carpenter’s hero declares: ‘I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass – and I’m all out of bubblegum’. Unabashed, glorying in his outsider status, Carpenter reappropriates Hollywood values in a cheap ‘bubblegum’ universe, deploying trash culture as a smart bomb that aims to prise apart not only cinematic convention but also reality itself.

Ultimately, both films, in very different historical specificities, and linked by the work of J.G. Ballard, offer up the B-movie as a response to the gathering global and economic forces of late capitalism, signified by what Slavoj Žižek identifies as the ‘ideological state apparatus’ of the Hollywood movie-making machine (2002).

ROGER CORMAN: THE ‘X EFFECT’

Still from X.

Roger Corman, known as the ‘King of the Bs’, was a force of nature. An undeniably intelligent and daring filmmaker, more often than not he seemed a hyper-manic combination of accountant, adrenalin junky and huckster than a maverick artist with a vision. Reminiscing about an early script, he said: ‘I told [the production company] I would give them the film if they would give me all of my money back immediately as an advance against distribution and I would do the same thing on three more films, so I could set myself up as producer’ (Emery 2003, 120). He even seemed in competition with himself: ‘I did Bucket of Blood in five days and … Little Shop of Horrors in two days and a night, but that was really an experiment and a joke to see if I could do it’ (Emery 2003, 121). In 1963, Corman completed The Terror in three days on sets leftover from The Raven, also from 1963. That year, too, he somehow found the energy to direct X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, with its portrayal of Dr James Xavier, who experiments on his own eyes with a super-powerful X-ray serum. The ‘X-effect’ is exponential as Xavier begins to see through more and more layers of reality: right through his eyelids and beyond, then through walls and buildings. When he sees through a sick girl’s skin to discover a malignancy her operating doctor has missed, Xavier disables the doctor by cutting his hand and performing the operation himself, saving the girl’s life. Facing a subsequent malpractice suit, the funding for his experiments is cut. Feverish from the X-effect and sleeplessness, his grip on sanity worsens and he lashes out at a colleague, inadvertently pushing him out of an upper-floor window to his death.

Xavier hides out in a backwaters town. Under thrall to a manipulative carnival hustler, he performs circus tricks as a sideshow ‘mind reader’ (in actuality, he reads people’s ID cards through their clothing). Needing money to progress his experiments, he follows the hustler to another anonymous, small town, where, in a distortion of his former life, he looks through sick people’s skin to identify diseased internal organs. He then provides a diagnosis to the victim, who, having abandoned hope, is grateful and willing to reward him. Of course, he must hand over a cut to the hustler, becoming ever more embittered as a result.

Another colleague finds him and Xavier escapes with her. His observations become increasingly deranged: ‘I see the city as if it were unborn … Limbs without flesh, girders without stone, signs hanging without supports, wires dipping and swaying without poles … flesh dissolved in an acid of light: a city of the dead’. Wearing modified sunglasses, with a thickness that retards the X effect to some extent, he works a Las Vegas casino, winning money by seeing through card decks and slot machines. However, when his sunglasses fall off, his horribly blackened eyes are revealed to the crowd and he flees to the desert, stumbling across a religious revival tent complete with blood-and-thunder preacher. Now he has begun to see through the final layers of reality and into the heart of the universe. Recoiling in horror, Xavier addresses the preacher: ‘I’ve come to tell you what I see. There are great darknesses, and beyond the darkness, a light that glows. And in the centre of the universe: the eye that sees us all.’ The preacher exhorts: ‘You see sin and the devil! But the bible tells us what to do: if thine eye offends thee, pluck it out!’ Xavier, unable to bear the burden of seeing what no one has seen before, takes the advice and gouges out his own eyeballs.

Still from X.

There have been many interpretations of the film. Ann Reynolds sees Xavier’s condition as a cinematic corollary of Robert Smithson’s ‘ruins in reverse’, symbolising the illusory hopes of future utopias (Reynolds 2003, 116). For Akira Mizuta Lippit, Xavier’s experiments invoke ‘the nuclear age, a premonition of total catastrophe destined to follow’ (Lippit 2005, 145). But in this act of self-immolation – Xavier putting out his eyes rather than trusting the perceptual logic he has set in train[1] – there seems an even clearer analogy: namely, with Corman’s directing career. In 1961, Corman made The Intruder, which dealt with small-town racism. This raw, uncompromising film garnered excellent reviews yet failed to make money. Subsequently, ‘after [this] financial disaster … Corman never again forgot the importance of the bottom line’ (Dixon 2005). His films from then on would be designed to make money first and foremost, with ‘art’ and ‘worthiness’ as secondary commodities. In his autobiography, he even devotes an entire chapter to the ‘disaster’ that in his mind was The Intruder, an act of pathos according to William D. Routt: ‘What was the big artistic “risk” here? Apparently, as it turns out, it was Corman’s sense of personal self-worth. Yet here, as the details of financial risk are spelled out, what seems significant is risk itself, a nameless danger that posits the film maker as One against the Rest: art as a specific, fraught enterprise’ (Routt 1994, 57).

This moment of realisation reached its apex when Corman founded his production company, New World Pictures, in 1970. He would not direct another film for 20 years, [2] an absence clarified by this 1974 announcement: ‘my earlier theories of the director as auteur are undergoing some revision and I’m beginning to think the producer is more important than the director’ (Morris 2000). For Charles Griffith, screenwriter on Little Shop of Horrors (1960), such an outcome was assured insofar as Corman ‘uses half his genius to degrade his own work, and the rest to degrade the artists who work for him’ (Griffith in Gray 2000). Although Corman had given up directing himself, he still wielded power over New World’s staff directors. According to Paul Bartel, once filming had started on Bartel’s Death Race 2000 (1975), Corman excised much of the black humour in the original cut, replacing it with excessive gore and positioning it as a knock-off of Norman Jewison’s blockbuster, Rollerball, from the same year. As Bartel observed: ‘It was very important to him to be the David against the studio Goliath, and to come up with a cheap version that could be marketed along the same lines as some megaproduction’ (Gray 2000, 121). For Joe Dante, another Corman protégé, Death Race 2000 was ‘a real pop-art masterpiece before Roger got to it’ (Gray 2004, 121). Inadvertently, Corman’s autobiography confirms this angle. His account of the creative process surrounding Death Race 2000 is told entirely from his own perspective; Bartel and the screenwriters are barely mentioned: ‘When I read the story,’ Corman writes, ‘I thought: You can’t do this as a straight and serious film’ (Corman and Jerome 1990, 205).[3]

Still from X.

There is no small irony at this fate befalling Corman, whose forsaking of edgy, independent drama (typified by The Intruder) for cheap, moneymaking thrills, while running roughshod over colleagues, echoes that of Xavier. After all, the scientist was finally on the verge of a major metaphysical breakthrough only to succumb to fatal hubris. Destroying his talent, he subsists by performing cheap carnival tricks solely to raise cash before eventually rendering himself blind – literally, but also metaphorically blind to those around him.[4] Again, Corman’s autobiography hints at a literal act of self-sabotage. Reflecting on his enforced layoff from directing, Corman asks himself:

‘Did I quit out of fear? Did I let myself get wrapped up in the business of New World so I wouldn’t have to confront any insecurities I may have had about my worth as an artist, as an auteur? … Was New World a way for me to remain master of my own limited universe and reject a mainstream system that would only compromise my creative freedom and financial autonomy?’ (Corman and Jerome 1990, 231)

Today, he has pushed this logic to its bitter end: Corman’s latest productions are virtually unwatchable, a view held by detractors and admirers alike. Winston Wheeler Dixon, an avowed fan, voices the consensus:

‘These later films are extremely problematic … they are all but invisible to the public, being released solely through US cable networks, or on straight-to-home-video deals… [Their] excessive … sex and violence … makes many … uncomfortable …. [They] seem devoid of any artistic impulse whatsoever, designed solely to make money.’ (Dixon 2005)

In fighting such a longstanding resistance war against Hollywood, indeed against his own talent, Corman has marginalised himself out of existence, victim of a system that today fights back in very different ways – with absorption. As the novelist J.G. Ballard cogently observes: ‘the time span between the Rebel – the Revolution – and Total Social Acceptance is getting shorter and shorter …. In the future (this is part of the problem in the arts as well) you’ll get some radical new idea, but within 3 minutes it’s totally accepted, and it’s coming out in … your local supermarket.’ (Ballard in Savage 1978, 107).

Thus, Corman’s later work, defiantly yet ineffectually schlocky, is decidedly out of step when appropriated by a Hollywood simulacrum that has not only successfully mimicked exploitation values, but also, as Greg Villepique notes, Corman himself:

‘[Before] Jaws and Star Wars … studios allotted big budgets to historical epics and character-driven dramas while tossing off exploitation films on the cheap, so Corman was at least competing in the same ballpark as the majors (albeit from left field). Since the mid-70s, the studios’ priorities have flipped and they’ve poured all their resources into aping, with far more polish, Corman’s audience-pleasing strategies – tongue-in-cheek, $100 million Arnold Schwarzenegger and Will Smith blow ’em-ups that simply out-Corman Corman.’ (Villepique 2000)

In a world of commodity fetishism, where the lag between radicalism and flaccid cliché becomes negligible, what space can the ‘rebel’ hope to occupy?

JOHN CARPENTER: THE ‘X Continuum’

Still from They Live.

They Live begins as a sombre affair. John Nada, a humble working-class drifter, needs a job and a place to sleep. Finding work on a construction site, he is offered a bed in a shantytown. He becomes intrigued by a nearby church and sneaks inside, overhearing a resistance group bent on bringing down the government. Later, the police discover the shantytown, bulldozing it and arresting the freedom fighters. Nada returns to the now-empty church, finding a box of sunglasses left behind.

LEFT: An alien, as seen by Nada sans shades…

Putting on a pair, he is stunned to discover that they reveal hidden messages in billboards and signs: ‘OBEY’, ‘MARRY AND REPRODUCE’, ‘SLEEP’, ‘CONFORM’. Dollar bills now read: ‘THIS IS YOUR GOD’. When he takes them off, everything is normal again. But there is an even bigger shock when the sunglasses reveal that certain people are in fact shapeshifting aliens with skeletal faces and metallic eyes. Nada flees and takes refuge in a bank, where with his enhanced vision he sees that most of the customers are aliens. At this point, the film shifts gears without warning, becoming unabashedly ‘cartoonish’. At the sight of the enemy, Nada instantly slips into cocky, wisecracking mode, a jarring transition from his previously low-key demeanour, as he blows apart the aliens while spitting out corny one-liners almost as much as bullets, like a B-film version of Arnold Schwarzenegger (he is muscle-bound, too, enhancing the comparison).

LEFT: …and as seen by Nada, with shades on.

This dramatic shift in tone has been criticised widely, with many commentators lamenting its supposed undermining of the Althusserian account of false consciousness inherent in the film’s first half. Barry Keith Grant is typical: ‘They Live … abandons its cultural critique halfway through to concentrate on [Nada’s] improbable heroics … Ironically, the film becomes exactly the kind of formulaic escapist entertainment it begins by critiquing as the opiate of the people’ (Grant 2004, 18). But what if the film is suggesting there is no way to step outside of ideology, no way to unwork false consciousness, but that the best one can do is to rework it to satisfy personal need? This then speaks of the difference between Corman and Carpenter, and ultimately of the difference in cultural value of the B-film in the 1960s (loitering in some kind of rebellious ‘outside’) and the B-film today (as fully absorbed, hyperreal selling point). Nada is like a badfilm version of Schwarzenegger’s character Doug Quaid in Total Recall (1990), who does not realise he is an undercover secret agent, but is instead brainwashed to think he is an ordinary labourer – just like Nada. But when danger comes, Quaid’s training kicks in automatically and he transforms into the lethal agent he was all along, as seamlessly as Nada does when the bullets begin to fly. Nada, then – indoctrinated, brainwashed, but subliminally aware – is the secret agent of badfilm. When he assumes his wisecracking, B-movie action stance, he is turning the autonomous, controlling intelligence the film rails against back against itself.

They Live sits within a continuum of SF works that challenge the consensus reality of consumer and mass-mediated culture. Examples include: Ray Nelson’s short story ‘Eight O’Clock in the Morning’ (1963), the basis for Carpenter’s screenplay alongside the ‘Nada’ comic strip (1985) that Nelson adapted from his story;[5] Ballard’s ‘The Subliminal Man’ (1963); Philip K. Dick’s Ubik (1969); and the films Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956), The Truman Show (1998) and The Matrix (1999). In terms of They Live, ‘The Subliminal Man’ is most revealing. In fact, it seems to have inspired ‘Eight O’Clock in the Morning’ (and therefore could be said to be the real inspiration for They Live),[6] although Nelson’s story comes off as little more than a heavy-handed rewrite with freaky aliens added for shock value. ‘The Subliminal Man’ features a world (minus aliens) in which subliminal messages control the populace through advertising and billboards, part of a society structured around conformity and planned obsolescence. There is only one make of car (only one make of everything: cigarettes, household goods, foodstuffs), produced in the same colour and specifications each year and designed to wear out at six-monthly intervals, and consumers become trapped in unbreakable shopping contracts, locked into the pursuit of false fulfilment.

Panels from Ray Nelson’s ‘Nada’, first published in Alien Encounters #6, 1985.

A man, Hathaway, becomes agitated about a series of giant signs erected on city outskirts and shopping centre perimeters. They don’t advertise anything – their facades are blank, shuttered grilles – so their true purpose is a mystery. But Hathaway believes they carry subliminal messages designed to control the populace. As he tells his doctor, Franklin, in a scene reminiscent of Nada’s futile pleas to others to understand the truth: ‘If you can’t believe your own senses what chance have you left? They’re invading your brain, if you don’t defend yourself they’ll take it over completely! We’ve got to act now before we’re all paralysed’ (Ballard 2006, 569–70). Franklin watches Hathaway climb one of the billboards, where he attacks a switch-box and destroys the sign’s grille, revealing, in another clear parallel with Carpenter’s film, a cycling and repeating display underneath:

‘The phrases, and every combination of them possible, were entirely familiar, and Franklin knew that he had been reading them for weeks as he passed up and down the expressway.

BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY
NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES’ (Ballard 2006, 576)

‘The Subliminal Man’, while not specifically referring to the concept of X-rays as a hard scientific process, does reveal a sense of ‘seeing beyond’ consumerism, and the fake reality consumerism begets, thereby aligning itself with both X and They Live. As Steven Connor notes in his overview of the history of X-ray vision in art, literature and myth:

‘X-rays promise a utopia of pure spiritual essences, in which it would be possible to see through the obscuring veil of materiality, and in the process leave it behind, moving to a higher plane, or to a more refined condition. [Yet] they involve an irreducible necessity for some form of material meditation, a screening, detaining, or fixing, which seems to compromise, or indefinitely to defer the immaterialist dream of a world in which all that is solid may be melted into air.’ (Connor 2008)

This dream of ‘seeing through the obscuring veil of materiality’, and the necessity for ‘material mediation’, fits well with the kind of critical terrain in the 60s and 70s that would come to position advertising as an ideological system that denies consumers ‘true’ identity by virtue of a supersaturation of all modes of informational output. For Judith Williamson, the false image of ourselves bestowed by buying into the referent system of advertising is a system which devalues and erodes our nature and obscures ‘social realities’, resulting in a situation where ‘ideology and symbolic or signifying structures combine to form a Platonic system where everything means something else, and nothing is what it is’ (Williamson 1978, 170). In fact, ‘The Subliminal Man’ fictionalises the devolutionary effects of advertising and the forbidding sense that ‘nothing is what it is’. While the story’s narrative device seems an obvious influence on Nelson, its denouement recalls both Corman and Carpenter. As Hathaway is shot by the police and falls to his death – punished, like Xavier, for the sin of knowing reality as no one else can – Franklin orders yet another new car, as if nothing has ever happened, as ‘blind’ as everyone in They Live. But while the texture of the story is undeniably prescient in its central message, that the media landscape has redefined the world as itself, it, like Corman’s film, is essentially old-style message SF: socially aware science fiction depicting one man against the system, where the hero’s rebellion is brutally crushed and his broken body used as a totem to warn the rest of society.

Panels from ‘Nada’.

What exactly was in the air in 1963? As all three texts were formulated that year, it is fruitful to analyse Ballard’s story as a hinge text that embodies elements of both Corman’s and Carpenter’s films, yet one that points the way forward to a ‘Ballardian’ solution to the problem of futile rebellion – a solution Carpenter would also arrive at. Ballard refined the thesis of ‘The Subliminal Man’ in his experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which depicts the struggle of a schizophrenic man, ‘T-’, to formulate new sensory responses to the emergent dynamics of the burgeoning media and communications landscape in the 1960s. The Atrocity Exhibition mirrors Marshall McLuhan’s observation that the ‘medium, or process of our time – electric technology – is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life’ (McLuhan and Fiore 1967, 8). It is a work that places its protagonist ‘inside’ the image, absorbed within the Spectacle, with no ‘outside’ of which to speak or to safely retreat to. There is no limit to the multiple fantasies the media landscape feeds to ‘T-’, and which nourish his psychopathic tendencies, which then take on a life of their own: an invasion of the actual by the virtual. As Ballard puts it: ‘the nervous systems of the characters have been externalized, as part of the reversal of the interior and exterior worlds. Highways, office blocks, faces and street signs are perceived as if they were elements in a malfunctioning nervous system’ (Ballard 2001, annotations 76).

Mirroring the text’s Burroughsian cut-up narrative technique, ‘T-’ cuts and pastes the major cultural and political events of the 1960s into a bricolaged, reordered version of reality playing inside the cinema of his mind, with himself in the lead role. This is a process summarised usefully by Dominika Oramus:

‘[Ballard’s characters] live surrounded by texts which invade their minds, but they cannot focus long enough to appreciate any complex messages. The characters dream about violence and excitement in their own lives, and the mediascape (ever full of aggressive imagery) makes them long for the re-enactment of atrocities: ‘all those scenes of pain and violence that illuminated the margins of our lives’.’ (Oramus 2007, 161)

It is precisely this sense of ‘re-enactment’ that They Live inhabits, placing it further along a historical and cultural specificity that bears no relation to X, indeed to Corman’s career. In the early part of the film, Nada is as indoctrinated as everyone else, with no agency over the external conditions he finds himself in. As Carpenter intercuts banal television shows with inane conversations on the street, suggesting they are symbiotic, Nada, when asked how he plans to make ends meet, blithely parrots Reaganomics: ‘I believe in America. The opportunity will come’. Yet he does get smart, reworking those external conditions in a performative manner that evokes not only Ballard but also Simon Cottle’s sense of media consumers who, in ‘late-modern societies and, in their mediatized expression, periodically summon and galvanize collective beliefs, myths and solidarities – collective sentiments and appeals increasingly performed on a global media stage’ (Cottle 2006, 428).

Still from They Live.

Rather than Xavier’s fatal withdrawal, Nada declares, in the film’s most quoted line: ‘I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass – and I’m all out of bubblegum’. Unabashed, glorying in his outsider status, Carpenter reappropriates Hollywood values in a cheap ‘bubblegum’ universe that invades, reinvigorates and repopulates what Žižek (himself borrowing from Jean Baudrillard) calls the ‘desert of the real’ – the ideology of late capitalism (2002, 15). This intent is made blatantly clear from the opening titles, which display the words ‘They Live’ fading into graffiti on a desolate railway overpass. This simple dissolve is indicative: in Carpenter’s world, badfilm is the reality; there is no place left to stand outside of mass mediation. Perfomativity, the audience reacting within the dynamic system of media ritual enacted on the global media stage, with ‘spectators’ mirroring content back to ‘producers’, becomes, if enabled correctly, the last – the only – line of resistance.

Still from They Live.

Studying the ‘role of media in processes of manufacturing consent’, Cottle suggests that it is inadequate to conclude that mass media has an unquestioned role in enacting ironclad attitudes and frameworks through which processes such as ‘moral panics’ are channelled. Instead, he speaks to the issue of perfomativity in audience reception:

‘[Media] ritual only comes alive experientially, emotionally, subjunctively, when actively read by audiences/readerships who are prepared to ‘participate’ within it as symbolically meaningful to them, and who are prepared to accept the imagined solidarities on offer. Performativity, then, is not confined to the performative ‘doing’ of media producers but includes the ‘doing’ of ‘spectators’ as well, who actively enter into (‘commit themselves to’) the proceedings and who can identify themselves and their sentiments within them.’ (Cottle 2006, 428-9)

For Cottle, if this process can be used to enable moral panics (which are dependent on being actively ‘read’ by audiences, before being reflected back onto the global sphere), then it can also be used to re-project more intimate details of the audience’s experience and social lives, all the while remaining inside the technology of media ritual, a dynamic, interlocking system with constituent parts ‘producers, performers and participating audiences’ (Cottle 2006, 429). To return to the narrative conceit of X-ray vision, of seeing beyond, the notion of perfomativity in mediatised landscapes (mediascapes) can be seen as analogous to a form of brake or control – Connor’s ‘material mediation’ – on the capacity to see beyond. But why would we need it?

Connor describes how the very idea of X-ray vision has historically induced anxiety and terror because ‘the problem with X-rays is that, for the most part, what they like best is to go through things, and to go on going through things unless or until they meet something, like lead, that absorbs or scatters them’ (Connor 2008). To demonstrate, he identifies X as a ‘dystopia’ in which ‘every last pocket of opacity has been seared away, leaving a vitreous desert of universal transparency’, and he aligns the film with Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, with its preoccupation with depthlessness and the fatal blurring of private and public realms: ‘In a world in which everything must be made visible, and in which “value radiates in all directions”, the transparency of evil is indistinguishable from the evil of transparency’ (Connor 2008).

In this account, seeing everything, a process to which we willingly succumb via commodity fetishism, is the tool of an oppressive, autonomous system that exposes us to its inner workings: the truth that is revealed may not be a truth we are ontologically equipped to handle, with its inescapable highlighting of the fact that our free will has been stripped to the bone, and that this outcome has been smuggled in via our own collusion. The prediction of Baudrillard’s contemporary, Paul Virilio, is also apposite. Probed about our heavily surveilled and intrusive Western society, Virilio was asked: ‘But what shall we dream of when everything becomes visible?’ To which he replied: ‘We’ll dream of being blind’ (Wilson 1994). The disturbing parallel with Xavier’s fate need hardly be stated. Thus, for Connor, ‘the problem of how to see X-rays, or to employ them indirectly as a form of visual perception is similar to the problem … with the schoolboy fantasy of a universal acid, capable of burning through any substance: so what do you keep it in?’ (Connor 2008). Appropriate to this analysis of trash culture, Connor approaches the conundrum as Superman might. After all, ‘In order to exercise his X-ray vision, Superman would need some arrangement whereby the rays could be bounced back to him, as though he were able to exude some kind of screen which could be sent out in advance of the X-rays in order to reflect them’ (Connor 2008).

Let us return to the two films, then, with this framing question in mind: ‘If you have a narrative device that can see everything: what do you keep it in?’

‘HOW TO RECONSTITUTE YOURSELF’

LEFT: The preacher from X.

They Live subverts the thesis of X in a number of ways. Both feature apocalyptic preachers, that old B-movie staple. In X, the preacher exhorts Xavier to destroy himself and he is all too willing to comply. They Live’s preacher, however, implants the idea in Nada’s mind that there is another layer of reality of consumerism to be unpeeled, thereby leading him to the church, the sunglasses and the jouissance of self-realisation.

In one scenario, trash culture destroys the protagonist; in the other, it enables him to become complete. In both films, the sunglasses themselves, a heavily iconic popcult signifier, reinforce the division. In X, Xavier’s pair hinders his ability to see through reality, but Nada’s sunglasses allow him to see beyond, with the fullest sense of liberation – ‘like a drug’, he says.

LEFT: The preacher from They Live.

Crucially, Nada is in control of the process. He can turn the ‘high’ of popular culture on and off by taking the sunglasses on and off, whereas Xavier is helplessly trapped inside a spiralling nightmare – there is no permanent way to halt his worsening condition.[7]

Further, when Xavier is on the run, the subculture he is drawn to, filled with sideshow freaks and circus workers, is unequivocally depicted as degrading, lowlife, exploitative, even as it provides him with a living. In They Live, when Nada hides out, his subcult of freedom fighters is nourishing, welcoming, each warrior dedicated to one other: ‘There’s no need to wear your sunglasses,’ he is told. ‘We’re all human in here’.

ABOVE: X’s subcult. BELOW: They Live’s subcult.

Even the character’s names are overripe with signification. ‘X’, which refers to Xavier himself (as the film’s subtitle makes clear), is the classic signifier of negation, but also a generic marker, as in ‘Brand X’. Xavier, then, is everyman, but one who thinks he can rise above it, thus negating himself, cancelling himself out in the process. ‘Nada’, too, signifies generic values, literally nothingness (in Spanish and Portuguese, ‘nada’ means nothing) but in Carpenter, the name signifies the obvious blank slate that his character has become – the bland everyman ripe for reinscription. Inevitably, Corman’s real-world circumstances yet again mirror his film world’s inherent bias. Like Xavier, he became repulsed by what he had become, and the world towards which he was drawn: ‘Fairly early on, I began to worry that New World Pictures might become too closely associated with exploitation films … I did not want to personally be identified, even stigmatized, by exploitation filmmaking’ (Corman and Jerome 1990, 188, 189).

Between the two filmmakers, there is another critical parallel/division: as Corman did before him, Carpenter, in recent times, has forsaken directing indefinitely. Yet this too effects a very different outcome. Carpenter has embraced the world of computer games, as a consultant on the first-person shooter computer game F.E.A.R. (2005). Tellingly, he describes the game in terms of ‘cinematics’, pointing out that ‘you,’ as the user, ‘are the character’ and that there is no difference between creating a suspense scene for film or game.[8] This merger between Carpenter, films and gaming was predicted 17 years earlier in They Live. When Nada and his sidekick Frank make their way up through the floors of the alien-controlled television studio, their goal is to destroy the antenna that beams the signals masking the subliminal messages and the aliens’ real faces. In the smoking hallways, strewn with debris from their shootouts with alien guards, Nada and Frank hear voices and must decide in a split second whether to fire automatically and risk killing humans. The entire sequence, with its rapid-fire decision making seen from Nada’s perspective and its ultimate goal of blowing up a vital installation in an alien base, is nothing less than a first-person shoot ’em up computer game – in live action.

ABOVE: still from They Live. BELOW: screenshot from F.E.A.R.

Here, Carpenter seems to anticipate the badfilm zeitgeist as outlined by Brendan Murphy and Jane Mills. Murphy points to the emergence of a new mode of filmic production that not only ‘blurs production and consumption’ as a result of our Web 2.0 society, encompassing social media, the aesthetics of appropriation and the cutting-edge interactivity of computer games, but that also looks to the B-movie world as a kind of shared repository of generic, iconic signifiers that create meaning across cultural, aesthetic and even political boundaries (Murphy 2009).[9] This corresponds with what Mills highlights as the breaking down of the traditional binary opposition between Hollywood and ‘not Hollywood’ (that is, most alternative/independent cinema movements) by a globalising, hybridising process that provides a ‘fluid screenscape in which cultural phenomena flow in and out of the frame’ (Mills 2009).

How does They Live resolve these strands of cultural data? According to Janet Maslin, Carpenter directs the film ‘with B-movie bluntness, but with none of the requisite snap’, while the ‘B-movie casting is another problem’ (Maslin 1988). But there are two ways to take the badfilm tropes she criticises: as a universal sign of narrative/aesthetic weakness, or, with Murphy and Mills in mind, as a liberating mesh of codes and signifiers that actually support the film’s critique. In fact, They Live draws more from Nelson’s comic strip ‘Nada’ than from the original short story upon which both comic and film are based.[10] The comic features the same sudden shift in tone from conspiracy theory to all-out ‘superhero’ action, a narrative device de rigueur for the pulpy comic-book world but apparently not for the serious world of film that Maslin wants They Live to inhabit.

Rather than lacking ‘requisite snap’, Carpenter is in fact completely true to his source material (moreover, more faithful to pulp fiction as revealing of reality than ‘serious’ literature), even if he does make one vital modification (although this in no way devalues his respect for pulp). In They Live, when Nada finally destroys the antenna, the film ends abruptly with a groan-inducing punchline. As a woman makes love to her partner, Nada destroys the antenna and the signal is switched off. The partner’s alien face, no longer electronically masked, is suddenly revealed to the woman. As she looks on in horror, he asks, ignorant of his outward appearance and only concerned with his sexual performance: ‘What’s wrong, baby?’ This awful joke is also present in ‘Nada’, but whereas Nelson hints at a subsequent war against the aliens brought on by their unmasking, Carpenter does no such thing. Instead, he immediately cuts to the credits with absolutely no hint of a new revolution sweeping out the old, no realistic, tangible sense of political upheaval: just that final, terrible gag as the film’s exclamation point.

The same joke twice. ABOVE: Panel from ‘Nada’. BELOW: Still from They Live.

Typically, Carpenter has been criticised for not being able to deliver a sense of the world after the alien signal has been destroyed. However, to return to Žižek, not even a provocateur of his experience has been quite able to imagine what exactly comes after capitalism.[11] Far more compelling in Žižek’s discourse is the methodology by which he uses examples from popular cinema as metaphoric circuit breakers in political discussion. For Žižek, Hollywood itself is the ultimate ‘ideological state apparatus’ (Žižek 2002, 16), inherently political in that it produces a cultural product – popular film – that belongs to a wider system of ideology that invents reality and supports cultural myths and institutional structures. According to Žižek, revolutionary cinema is therefore ‘cinema as the art of appearances telling us something about reality itself, about how reality constitutes itself’. When ‘the coordinates of your reality disintegrate’, the problem becomes ‘how to reconstitute yourself’ (Žižek in Fiennes 2006). In contrast to commentators who protest that They Live sells out the leftist critique it sets up, Žižek uses the film’s sunglasses premise as a crucial metaphor for the need to unwork the ‘real message’ lying beneath Republican ideology:

‘The glasses … function as a device for the critique of ideology. In other words, they enable [Nada] to see the real message lying beneath the glossy, colorful surface. What would we see if we were to observe the Republican presidential campaign through such glasses? The first thing would be a long series of contradictions and inconsistencies.’ (Žižek 2008)

Extrapolating to the aftermath of 9/11, Žižek demonstrates how the demonisation of the Islamic enemy is seen as an insidious by-product of American global expansion. For Žižek, we must reject the binary opposition that supports a war on terror, instead adopting ‘both positions simultaneously; this can be done only if we resort to the dialectical category of totality: there is no choice between these two positions; each one is one-sided and false …. The two sides are not really opposed …. They belong to the same field … The choice between Bush and Bin Laden is not our choice; they are both “Them” against Us’ (Žižek 2002, 50-1). This instantly recalls They Live, in which Carpenter ensures there is no distinction ‘between them and us’ (aligning the film with Mills’ Hollywood/not Hollywood hybridity): the aliens in their human guise are seamlessly integrated into our world, and it is only by a trick of the light that we are able to see them differently.

In the face of this ‘dialectical category of totality’, Žižek suggests that: ‘Instead of imposing our version of universality (universal human rights etc), universality – the shared space of understanding between different cultures – should be conceived of as an infinite task of translation, a constant reworking of one’s own particular position’ (Žižek 2002, 66). This returns us to Cottle’s media performativity and to Carpenter’s latter-day career as remaker/remodeler of his own B-movie legacy. Like Corman, Carpenter has his own empire – not producing other people’s work, but recycling and remixing his own, on (at the time of writing) no fewer than five big-budget remakes of his films. Undoubtedly, he is adept at ‘constantly reworking his own position’.[12] This is in stark contrast to Corman, eternally casting himself as David against the Goliath of Hollywood, yet slaying only himself (as Žižek might argue, ‘resistance is surrender’).[13] Indeed, Routt specifically examines how Corman’s adherence to the ‘outside’, and his blindness to fluidity of hypercapitalism, constantly undercuts his position: ‘Corman’s case, particularly in the “enigma” of the way in which his taste is transformed into that of the public, seems exemplary to me partly because what he … clearly thinks of as dichotomies keep melting into one another’ (Rout 1994, 60).

Meanwhile, the default critical position is that Carpenter, the filmmaker, is in decline. As Philip Kerr caustically observes: ‘the modestly titled John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars … is no exception to this decline, in that it finds the director now feeding off his own corpse … I myself was sad to see a once inventive talent eating his own excrement’ (Kerr 2001, 44). But Carpenter has always ‘fed off his own corpse’, fully aware of dichotomies that melt into one another: his entire oeuvre features repeated motifs, aesthetics and concepts, extending down to his self-composed soundtracks, with their minimal and repetitive refrains. Further, his films borrow just as freely from the films he admires as they do from his own work. As he said in response to an interviewer who detected elements from his films in other directors’ work: ‘I’ve made money off the creativity of Howard Hawks, Sergio Leone, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, John Sturges, Orson Welles, and many many others for my entire career – how can I complain when it happens to me?’ (Bright 1999).

With this statement, Carpenter situates himself as a nodal point in Mills’ ‘fluid screenscape of cultural phenomena’. If Xavier/Corman is the hubristic, overreaching modernist, then Nada/Carpenter is the exuberant postmodernist: ‘eating his own excrement’ is perhaps the Faustian pact Carpenter pays for delivering such astonishing work, a golden period stretching from his first feature Dark Star (1974) to They Live 14 years later. Accordingly, the jamming of the signal at the end of They Live is badfilm producing its own transmission, performing its own means of production, reconstituting itself from signals beamed out, mirrored back and reworked in the endless play inherent within Murphy’s proscribed repository of generic signifiers.

In They Live, that last scene – that note of purest trash reflected back to the horrified woman, back to the viewer of the film, a mirror halting the progress of the X-ray vision that demands to see beyond into the world to come – is the product of this new, reordered transmission. As ‘material mediation’, it is the ultimate solution to the problem of reconstitution, to the metaphoric problem of unstoppable X-ray vision, which, in Žižekian terms, is very much ‘your reality disintegrating’.

It is a solution that Xavier/Corman, forever scrabbling to find an outside from which to fire bullets, was never destined to achieve.

Image found on the internet. Creator unknown.

Notes

[1] Earlier, the cocky scientist had proudly announced about his experiments: ‘I’m closing in on the gods’.
[2] According to Greg Villepique: ‘As if to formally declare himself all washed up as an artist, Corman made a surprise return to directing for the 1990 time-travel stinker Frankenstein Unbound, a film sunk by his refusal to spend a little more money on effects; nobody much noticed its brief theatrical run’ (Villepique 2000).
[3] Elsewhere, he reflects: ‘We are a violent … species. If we weren’t … the sabre-toothed tiger would be … the dominant species. But the humans killed them. I touched on this in Death Race 2000’ (Corman and Jerome 1990, 162).
[4] Xavier, of course, kills one colleague and fails to heed another’s warnings about the serum’s side effects.
[5] Both Nelson’s story and comic strip are standard alien-invasion fare. Carpenter’s reworking is markedly more political, ironic, anti-consumerist and popcult-savvy.
[6] This is further borne out by publication dates: ‘The Subliminal Man’ was published in New Worlds in January 1963, while Nelson’s story appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction in November that year.
[7] Carpenter’s masterstroke, not present in Nelson’s short story or comic strip, was to use the sunglasses as the device that reveals reality. In Nelson’s original story and comic, Nada ‘wakes up’ through hypnosis and is unable to turn the effect off.
[8] In an interview, Carpenter explains: ‘There’s a quality to [F.E.A.R.’s] visual cinematics …. I’m a video game fan from the old days, and I love first person shooter games. I’m a big fan of DOOM, but this is … a leap forward in terms of graphics which is the first thing you look at as a director. How does it look and how does it play and how does it feel? … The audience, whether it’s for a game or for a movie, invests in the characters on screen and psychologically bonds with them. What happens to them is what emotionally happens to you. In F.E.A.R., you are the character, so you already step into it, assuming that things will jump out and they will be frightening”’ (Ferrante 2005).
[9] Recall Nada’s appropriation of the Quaid character in Total Recall, the latter film itself a kind of glorified, unabashed B-movie made with Hollywood money.
[10] Amusingly, Nelson’s son Walter wrote on his father’s Facebook fan page: ‘Dad’s short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” had been pretty much continuously in print in multiple languages since the late ’60s. In the early ’80s, a friend convinced Ray to turn it into a graphic novel called ‘Nada’. The Nada comic hadn’t been on the shelves for a week before John Carpenter was on the line. The moral of this story is that Hollywood doesn’t read books, but does read comic books (er, graphic novels)’ (Nelson 2008).
[11] As he writes: ‘One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return’ (Žižek 2007, 4).
[12] And philosophical about it, too: ‘It’s a brand new world out there in terms of trying to get advertising. There’s so much going on that if you come up with a movie that people have never heard of they don’t pay attention to it – no matter how good it is. So it becomes, “Let’s remake something that maybe rings a bell and that you’ve heard of before”. That way, you’re already ahead. I’m flattered, but I understand what’s going on. They’re picking everything to remake. I think they’ve just run down the list of other titles and have finally got to mine (laughs)’ (Matloff 2007).
[13] This phrase refers to the title of Žižek’s 2007 article, in which he outlines the ‘defeat of the Left’: ‘The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this predicament is to call for a new politics of resistance. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone seizing it, are accused of remaining stuck within the ‘old paradigm’: the task today, their critics say, is to resist state power by withdrawing from its terrain and creating new spaces outside its control. This is, of course, the obverse of accepting the triumph of capitalism. The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left’ (Žižek 2007, 4).

References

+ Ballard, J.G. 2001. The Atrocity Exhibition [1970]. London: Flamingo.
–––––– 2006. ‘The Subliminal Man’ [1963]. In The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1, 559–77. London: Harper Perennial.
+ Bright, Marc. 1999. ‘John Carpenter Speaks to the “John Carpenter Website”.’ http://www.geocities.com/j_nada/carp/interview/jcspeakstojcpage.html.
+ Connor, Steven. 2008. Pregnable of Eye: X-Rays, Vision and Magic. http://www.stevenconnor.com/xray.
+ Corman, Roger, with Jim Jerome. 1990. How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. New York and Toronto: Random House.
+ Cottle, Simon. 2006. Mediatized rituals: beyond manufacturing consent. Media, Culture & Society, 28, no. 3: 411-32.
+ Emery, Robert J. 2003. The Directors: Take Three. New York: Allworth Press.
+ Dixon, Winston Wheeler. 2005. Roger Corman. Senses of Cinema, August. http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/06/corman.html.
+ Ferrante, Anthony C. 2005. John Carpenter and game producer Rob Loftus uncover the nature of F.E.A.R. mania.com, 31 October. http://www.mania.com/john-carpenter-game-producer-rob-loftus-uncover-nature-fear_article_49967.html.
+ Grant, Barry Keith. 2004. Disorder in the Universe: John Carpenter and the Question of Genre. In The Cinema of John Carpenter: the Technique of Terror, ed. Ian Conrich and David Woods, 10-20. London and New York: Wallflower Press.
+ Gray, Beverly. 2000. Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books.
+ Kerr, Philip. 2001. Mars bores. New Statesman, 10 December.
+ Lippit, Akira Mizuta. 2005. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
+ McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. 1967. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam Books.
+ Matloff, Jason. 2007. John Carpenter’s Business of Insanity. MovieMaker, 31 July. http://www.moviemaker.com/directing/article/john_carpenters_business_of_insanity.
+ Maude, Collette. 2008. They Live. Time Out. http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/79208/they-live.html.
+ Mills, Jane. 2009. Hollywood’s ‘bad’ other. Conference paper given at B for BAD Cinema, Monash University, 15 April.
+ Morris, Gary. 2000. Roger Corman on New World Pictures: An Interview from 1974. Bright Lights Film Journal, no. 27, January. http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/27/cormaninterview1.html.
+ Murphy, Brendan. B Grade 2.0: Gondry, ‘Sweding’ and B-movie tropes in emerging social media culture. Conference paper given at B for BAD Cinema, Monash University, 15 April.
+ Nelson, Ray. 1963. ‘Eight O’Clock in the Morning’. Fantasy and Science Fiction, November.
–––––– 1985. ‘Nada’. Alien Encounters, no. 6.
+ Nelson, Walter. 2008. The Story Behind They Live. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ray-Faraday-Nelson/44349104571?v=feed&story_fbid=91694579571.
+ Oramus, Dominika. 2007. Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard. Warsaw: University of Warsaw.
+ Reynolds, Ann. 2003. Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
+ Routt, William D. 1994. Art, popular art. Continuum: the Australian Journal of Media and Culture, 7, no. 2.
+ Savage, Jon. 1978. J.G. Ballard, in V. Vale (ed.), Search & Destroy #7-11: The Complete Reprint, San Francisco, V/Search Publications [date not given].
+ Sconce, Jeffrey. 1995. Trashing the academy: Taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style. Screen 36: 371-93.
+ Villepique, Greg. 2000. Roger Corman. Salon, 13 June. http://www.salon.com/people/bc/2000/06/13/corman/index1.html.
+ Williamson, Judith. 1978. Decoding Advertisements. London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd.
+ Wilson, Louise. 1994. Cyberwar, God And Television: Interview with Paul Virilio. Ctheory.net, 1 December.
+ Woods, David. 2004. Us and Them: Authority and Identity in Carpenter’s Films. In The Cinema of John Carpenter: the Technique of Terror, ed. Ian Conrich and David Woods, 21-34. London and New York: Wallflower Press.
+ Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on 11 September and Related Dates. London and New York: Verso.
–––––– 2007. Resistance Is Surrender. London Review of Books, 29, no. 22.
–––––– 2008. Through the Glasses Darkly. In These Times, 29 October. http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3976/through_the_glasses_darkly.

Films

+ Carpenter, John. 1988. They Live. Alive Films.
+ Corman, Roger. 1963. X: the Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Alta Vista Productions.
+ Fiennes, Sophie. 2006. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (written and presented by Slavoj Žižek). Amoeba Film.

Advertiser’s Announcement: ‘Sex: Inner Space: J.G. Ballard’. Ambit no. 33, 1967.

Better Living through Psychopathology
Benjamin Noys (2009)

Presentation at at ‘The Future’, David Roberts Art Foundation, Fitzrovia, London (5 November 2009).

The image of the future which I have selected is one of the series of J. G. Ballard’s pseudo-advertisements that he published in Ambit no. 33 in 1967. Ballard explains that:

Back in the late 60s I produced a series of advertisements which I placed in various publications (Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various continental alternative magazines), doing the art work myself and arranging for the blockmaking, and then delivering the block to the particular journal just as would a commercial advertiser. Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within the formal circumstances of classic commercial advertising – I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match, Newsweek, etc. To maintain the integrity of the project I paid the commercial rate for the page, even in the case of Ambit of which I was and still am prose editor. I would have liked to have branched out into Vogue and Newsweek, but cost alone stopped me … (R/S 147).

The actual image is a still from Stephen Dwoskin’s 1963 film Alone (USA 1963 13min), of a woman masturbating. The text is a typically concise and forensic manifesto for Ballard’s own counter-science fiction.

The reason for my fascination with this image as an image of the future, which is in fact over forty years old, is that it represents the deliberate attempt to construct an image of the future that can resist the obsolescence of the future. This might seem an ironic proposition when we consider the fact that this image was created in the mid-60s – a time when, as Ballard retrospectively notes, ‘people … were intensely interested in the future’ (1994). Yet, he also notes that ‘[s]adly, at some point in the 1960s our sense of the future seemed to atrophy and die’ and that, by the 70s, only ‘a few romantics like myself still believe[d] that our sense of the future remain[ed] intact’ (1994). In fact, the atrophy of the future took place because of the impoverishment of our images of the future. The possibility of the future became blocked by those images of the future that seemed to attest to faith in a better tomorrow: the space race, two years away from the moon landing, pop futurism, the consumption-driven Keynesian compact, ‘the dreams that money can buy’, ‘advertising and pseudoevents’ (R/S 96). These images of a promised land of ‘outer space and the far future’ (R/S 97) had been predicted and generated by the science fiction of the 1950s. Locating himself as a science-fiction writer Ballard recognised the exhaustion of this tradition in its realisation: ‘by an ironic paradox, modern science fiction became the first casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create.’ (R/S 97)

Ballard’s image is a counter-image to this atrophy and impoverishment of the future. It is a ‘chromosome of the future’ designed to ‘divide and grow in the reader’s mind’ (Ballard 1994). We can understand it as belonging to that conceptual Third World War Ballard would later invoke in The Atrocity Exhibition: ‘The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.’ (AE 11) With the threat that ‘the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present’ (R/S 97), the counter-image tries to extract a new future; the obsolete science-fiction of outer space has to give way to the new science-fiction of inner space. Reviewing Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 1969 Ballard remarks ‘[t]he psychopath never dates’ and speculates that: ‘perhaps one reason why the American and Russian space programs have failed to catch our imaginations is that this quality of explicit psychopathology is missing.’ (R/S 104) In response conventional science-fiction can only ratify its own transition to archaism, by producing images of the future that are ‘a kind of historical romance in reverse, a sealed world into which the hard light of contemporary reality was never really allowed to penetrate.’ (R/S 97) (Ballard’s reference is 2001, but I also think of Star Wars).

The colonisation of reality by fictions requires a dialectic of involution and externalisation. We turn inward to the body and the psyche – fiction is a branch of neurology – as ‘the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.’ (R/S 98) And yet that inner reality has been turned inside-out, as our innermost desires are always-already realised by science, pornography, and advertising. For Ballard the usual elements of the so-called ‘human condition’ – sex and death – are the first casualties of this war. Instead of de-conceptualising them, to recover their ‘natural’ form, à la Reich or Marcuse, we must take them as manipulable elements ‘of a wholly conceptual character’ (AT 80). The ‘node of reality’ is not even some residual or surplus (Lacanian) capital ‘R’ Real, which could resist the totalising forces of mediatisation. Instead, ‘We’re living in an abstracted world, where there aren’t any values, where rather than fall back, one has to, as Conrad said, immerse oneself in the most destructive element, and swim.’ (R/S 161)

To wage this Third World (Image) War we have to move deeper into our own psychoses (AT 9) – to immerse ourselves in the image-stream to wrest the future from the perpetual present by an ‘elective psychopathy’ (Ballard 2008). The subsumption of the psyche makes it available for further re-conceptualisation, for the invention of new pathologies and new perversions. Ballard’s image is a radicalisation of the fact ‘that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike’ (AT 56). We can imagine it as the creation of one of the psychiatric patients in The Atrocity Exhibition, the future image guerrillas of this Third World War: ‘these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor’ (AT 7). The involution to inner space, to scenarios of nerve and blood vessel, forms an alternative ‘conceptualized psychopathology’ (AT 99) of re-externalisation.

The ‘future’ is now an image concocted from the iconography of the mediatised unconscious, in which Jung’s archetypes and Freud’s drives are re-figured in ‘the nasal prepuce of L.B.J., crashed helicopters, the pudenda of Ralph Nader, Eichmann in drag, the climax of a New York happening: a dead child.’ (AT 20) The result is that these images become reversible; as one character ponders in The Atrocity Exhibition: ‘Are space vehicles merely overgrown V-2s, or are they Jung’s symbols of redemption, ciphers in some futuristic myth?’ (AT 84) Instead of merely being quaint and anachronistic technologies harnessed to an anodyne future, we can re-conceptualise and re-pathologise space vehicles. The science-fiction writer creates a new ‘predictive mytholog[y]’ (R/S 42): myths of the future that are also performative acts to create and construct that future.

From the original Doubleday edition, Michael Foreman’s artwork for an Atrocity Exhibition chapter, ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’.

Through the choice of psychopathology as a conscious act we can shape new written mythologies of memory and desire. The images of the ‘future’ that previously closed-out the future can now become the material for mythologies of a truly new future. Of course, the problem of such a mythology is that the more successful it is the more it is absorbed by the very mediascape it mimetizes. As Ballard writes ‘A lot of my prophecies about the alienated society are going to come true’ (R/S 155), however, if they come true, then they become superfluous. In The Atrocity Exhibition a ‘Festival of Atrocity Films’ is put on in a venue presumably very much like this one: ‘the results were disappointing; whatever Talbot had hoped for had clearly not materialized. The violence was little more than a sophisticated entertainment. One day he would carry out of Marxist analysis of this lumpen intelligentsia.’ (AT 19) Leaving aside the interesting question of what that analysis might be, and its relevance today, Ballard presciently probes the neuralgic point of his own fiction. The coinage ‘Ballardian’ is the very sign of this ironic success, as Ballard’s own fiction succumbs to the fate he had sketched for the science-fiction of the 1950s: ‘bec[oming] the first casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create’.

It appears that the angle between two walls does not have a happy ending. Ballard’s own creation of himself as a brand or concept becomes another image in the media stream. This, however, is the essential risk of Ballard’s own active nihilism, which accepts that abstraction and conceptualisation operate all the way down: there is no point of immunity or safety from which one might safely create a ‘pure’ image of the future. His images of the future are always, explicitly, transitory, with ‘in-built-obsolescence’. In response we could extrapolate two possible positions from Ballard’s work. The first is that of a quasi-Weberian re-enchantment of a denuded reality through re-conceptualisation. In The Atrocity Exhibition the character Travers ‘has composed a series of new sexual deviations, of a wholly conceptual character, in an attempt to surmount this death of affect’ (AE 80) We could also cite Ballard’s retrospective tendency to position The Atrocity Exhibition as a work of moral commentary. We fall back from the future into a kind of Swiftean satire, at once reactionary and conservative.

The second position is something like what Nietzsche calls ‘completed nihilism’: the traversal and transcendence of the nihilism Ballard anatomises. In this case, Ballard’s dialectic proceeds by the ‘bad side’: the worse the better. He remarked in a 2006 interview that: ‘I’m somebody who stands by the side of the road with a sign saying, Dangerous Bends Ahead – Slow Down.’ He pauses. ‘Although it is true that I sometimes seem to be saying Dangerous Bends Ahead – Speed Up.’ (in Brown, 2006: 20) That speeding up, this accelerationism, of course risks passing from an active nihilism to a mere passive nihilism: the embrace of what is, and the closure of any possibility of the future, or the courting of a deliberate cynicism that re-converges with the position of the moral critic as disgusted and disenchanted observer.

This unease or instability is I want to suggest the reason why Ballard’s image of the future is so resonant. This image, of course, appears as a very 60s image, imbued with the kind of deliberately perverse utopianism that no longer registers with us except in the forms of nostalgia or cynicism. The difference is that this image disjoints itself from that moment by its prescient refusal of the usual models of repression, liberation, and recuperation. In The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard notes that images of elective psychopathy, in which Vietnam combat films are shown with a muzak soundtrack, create an environment ‘in which work-tasks, social relationships and overall motivation reached sustained levels of excellence’ (AT 94). The release of repressed desires can be made to serve the logic of the ‘perpetual present’ of accumulation. This is the mechanism of ‘repressive desublimation’, sketched by Marcuse, in which our desires are ‘liberated’ as the ‘dreams that money can buy’. In response the writer can only immerse themselves and swim, by imagining ‘an optimum torture and execution sequence’ (AE 93). This image fascinates me as an image of the future because it embraces fully the saturation of the future by abstraction and the only remaining possibility being further abstraction. For all its kitsch retro-sixties styling the encrypted moment of resistance figured in this image is the embrace of a future that never really took place, in which the only form of a future we can construct is one that takes place through absolute abstraction.

Bibliography
Ballard, J. G. (1984), Re/Search: J. G. Ballard 8/9. [R/S]
___ (1985) The Atrocity Exhibition [1970], London: Triad Granada. [AE]
___ (1994) ‘Introduction’ in Myths of the Near Future, London: Vintage.
___ (2008) ‘An Exhibition of Atrocities: J. G. Ballard on Mondo Films’, An Interview with Mark Goodall, The Ballardian, http://www.ballardian.com/jg-ballard-on-mondo-films [consulted 16 April 2009].

Brown, M. (2006) ‘From Here to Dystopia: Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Telegraph Magazine 2 September: 16-22.

Nietzsche, F. (1968) The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage.

Adam McEwen. Honda Teen Facial, 2010. Boeing 747 undercarriage. Approximately: 137 13/16 x 118 1/8 x 71 11/16 inches (350 x 300 x 182 cm).

JG Ballard’s writing has a strong connection to visual art, from surrealism to Pop. It informed his work and led to him befriending some of the leading artists of his time, while in turn his work has been an influence on today’s crop. The Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard at the London Gagosian attempts to represent these diverse strands. It’s a timely exhibition, organised in the wake of Ballard’s death but a long time coming given his growing influence over the last few years. Works have been sourced to the best abilities of a private if respected gallery, explaining a haphazard exhibition that, although at times stretching the definition of its remit, always holds interest.

The first item on entrance is Adam McEwen’s “Honda Teen Facial”, an imposing Boeing 747 undercarriage that summons half-remembered, grainy footage of the Lockerbie bombing, or more appropriately Ballard’s short story The Air Disaster. McEwen’s aims are ambiguous. In an aerospace museum, this piece would mean something quite different, but in connection with Ballard it can only mean violence and death. This simple juxtaposition, summoning connections that aren’t necessarily there, is reminiscent of some of Ballard’s earlier writing and was also a mainstay of the surrealists, some of whose work is in an easily-missed room to the left.

Hans Bellmer. Story of the Eye, 1946. Etching, red ink and pencil on paper. 12 x 9 3/4 inches (30.5 x 24.8 cm).

John Currin. Rotterdam, 2006. Oil on canvas. 28 x 36 inches (71.1 x 91.4 cm).

Salvador Dali, Man Ray and Hans Bellmer are represented, each with rather underwhelming works that belie the Gagosian’s limited pulling power. Dali’s pencil drawing of a head with a lobster holding a sewing machine on top is self-derivative as only Dali can be. Unsurprisingly, Bellmer’s drawings exhibit a twisted sexuality that is cringeworthy yet fascinating. His illustration for Bataille’s The Story of the Eye (itself a work of displaced sexuality with obvious Ballardian resonances) depicts the pucker of a lady’s anus, acting like a magnet to the eye. While Ballard’s love of surrealism excuses Bellmer, John Currin’s “Rotterdam”, a contemporary painting of a sex act copied from a pornographic magazine, is not only irrelevant but misrepresentative, suggesting the curators have taken inspiration from false media imagery surrounding the author.

Detail from Ballard’s “Project for a new novel” (1958).

There is a suggestion that this odd little room is meant to be a look into Ballard’s psyche, and one of the most interesting works is the writer’s own “Project for a New Novel”, a collage of photocopies from the pages of Chemistry and Industry magazine, where Ballard worked briefly after leaving Cambridge University. The yellowed pieces of text deserve academic scrutiny but fall short compared to the more rounded works around them. They feel unfinished, a prototype for later work, which in a way, of course, they are. Next to them is a simple Man Ray photograph of a woman, different from his more famous manipulated precursors of filmic special effects. The photo is uncanny in its similarity to an often reproduced photo of Ballard’s dead wife Helen. Perhaps I’m also making unnecessary juxtapositions, but it is an otherwise baffling edition to the exhibition, though quite possibly the only Man Ray the curator could get hold of.

LEFT: Chris Foss’s artwork for the cover of Ballard’s Crash (Panther, 1975). RIGHT: Dinos & Jake Chapman. Bang, Wallop. By J and D Ballard, 2010. Book: 7 3/4 x 5 x 3/4 inches (19.4 x 12.8 x 2.2 cm.

LEFT: Louis Gréaud. The Future, 2009. Oil on canvas. 57 x 41 inches framed (145 x 104 cm).

Other rooms aren’t as themed, revealing an eclectic and extensive exhibition that can be hard to take in, with its almost random sensory overload. Some of the least successful works are the ones most obviously inspired by Ballard. Loris Gréaud’s “The Future” is a canvas displaying painted text of Ballard’s famous equation “sex x technology = the future”, along with a reproduction of his signature. It is an uninteresting work that buys into Ballard’s cachet with little effort. Another piece of text painted onto a canvas, Ed Ruscha’s “Fountain of Crystal”, which reads “A Fountain of Spraying Crystal Erupted Around Them” vies with it for blandness. The Chapman Brothers’ manipulated Ballard texts, “Bang, Wallop. By J&D Ballard”, a stack of fake paperback books on sale for a tempting but ultimately mercenary 25 quid, at least inject a bit of disrespectful humour, despite a familiar shallowness of thought. Who knows, though — maybe there is something hidden in their exhausting pages of random sentences.

Of the famous contemporary British artists on display, the divisive Damien Hirst is most successful. “When Logics Die”, a metal table covered in surgical instruments overlooked by glossy photographs of medical procedures, is both a nod to Ballard’s experiences as a medical student and a simplified expression of the connection between technology and flesh that Ballard found so philosophically interesting and that Hirst finds so rewarding visually. Turner Prize runner up Roger Hiorn is represented by an engine coated in his trademark copper sulphate crystals, which inevitably reminds of the more famous “Seizure”, an entire council flat given the same treatment.

Paul McCarthy. Mechanical Pig, 2003-2005. Silicone, platinum, fiberglass, metal and electrical components 40 x 58 x 62 inches (101.6 x 147.3 x 157.5 cm).

Works with an, at-best, tangential connection to Ballard stand out, foremost being Paul McCarthy’s “Mechanical Pig”, an astonishingly life-like plastic sow cruelly wired up to machinery, twitching and heaving in a tortured coma. This freakshow attraction goes beyond sensationalism to bring us face to face with our mechanised use of livestock, and is a great example of contemporary art’s relationship with impact advertising. I was mesmerised by its laboured breaths, each one threatening to be its last. In the same room, a strange, ramshackle structure of untreated timber and plywood juts from a wall. Accessed through an innocuous but incongruously aged door in the adjacent room, Mike Nelson’s “Preface to the 2004 Edition (Triple Bluff Canyon)” is a replica of a public room, a theatre lobby perhaps, its expert, dusty detail indistinguishable from the forgotten spaces it draws inspiration from. Like German artist Gregor Schneider, who creates replicas of the anonymous cellars of his suburban childhood, Nelson’s installation is eerie and unsettling. The familiar is made unfamiliar and we are inevitably reminded of fiction, ghost stories and horror films, finishing Nelson’s artwork ourselves.

Mike Nelson. Preface to the 2004 Edition (Triple Bluff Canyon), 2004. Film booth. Dimensions variable.

These two works are the most immediate in the exhibition and rightly stand out, but Crash’s real triumph is the handful of pieces that marry both a deep, unequivocal connection with Ballard and artistic brilliance. Inevitably some are by well-known names, but there are a couple of surprises. Easily missed is Malcolm Morley’s “The Age of Catastrophe”, an oil painting of a sunny, Mediterranean harbour overlaid by a plummeting aeroplane and a submarine suspended from an abstract frame. Chaotic and complex, the painting’s creation date of 1976 is important, suggesting a fascination with WWII’s long-lasting, violent psychological presence — familiar to any reader of Ballard.

Tacita Dean. Teignmouth Electron, Cayman Brac (Ballard), 1999. Color photograph. 44 1/8 x 51 3/16 inches framed (112 x 130 cm).

Dan Holdsworth. Untitled (Autopia), 1998. Chromogenic print. Diptych: 41 7/8 x 52 3/16 inches each (106.5 x 132.6 cm).

Photography is well represented. Tacita Dean’s “Teignmouth Electron, Cayman Brac (Ballard)”, where an abandoned scientific concrete structure barely reveals itself through lush trees, provides a perfect visual accompaniment to Concrete Island or Rushing to Paradise. Dan Holdsworth’s photos of empty, night-time motorways directly and effectively channel one of Ballard’s most familiar obsessions. But it is the in moving image that Ballard’s vision really comes to life. Jane and Louise Wilson’s DVD installation, “Proton, Energy, Blizzard”, with its footage of a rusting and seemingly abandoned Soviet rocket installation that nevertheless clanks and hums with mechanical life, is an hypnotic film that posits an answer to the perplexing problem of translating Ballard’s work to film. Stripped of narrative, this purely visual film manages to convey the awesome majesty of failed, large-scale scientific endeavour, and the mundane machinery behind nuclear annihilation, as well as our pathetic attempts to explore the universe. It reminded me of the human insignificance and terrible entropy so beautifully explored in one of my favourite Ballard stories, “The Voices of Time”.

Eduardo Paolozzi. Two prints from the General Dynamic F.U.N. series (1970). 50 plates. 20 frames: approx. 12 x 18 1/8 inches each (30.5 x 46 cm).

Eduardo Paolozzi‘s two sets of screen prints, “General Dynamic F.U.N.” and “Zero Energy Experiment Pile (Z.E.E.P.)”, go further, dealing with the fundamental philosophical ideas behind Ballard’s work. Paolozzi was an influence on a youthful Ballard and later a mentor and friend, and his prints are both dazzlingly original and directly tuned to Ballard’s vision. In an overwhelming array of brightly coloured pop-culture images taken from space-exploration books, boys’ comics and Jane’s weaponry textbooks, images of missiles, bombs, rockets, tanks and submarines — along with diagrams, motifs and cutaway illustrations — are infused with a gaudy joy at odds with the often frightening technology they depict. The light-speed rate of change in the 60s, which Ballard cannily emphasised as technological and communications based, as opposed to more commonly referenced societal critiques, is expressed brilliantly by Paolozzi, who cleverly adds a sheen of psychedelic colour — the filter through which society saw, and dealt with, this technological future shock.

Andy Warhol. Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice), 1963. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas. 48 x 41 3/4 inches (121.9 x 106 cm).

A more familiar artist from this period is Andy Warhol, who Ballard believed was one of the few Pop artists to stand the test of time. Warhol’s “Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice)” is an almost perfect depiction of the changes in communication in the 60s – the immediacy, sensationalism and brutality. The rapid deployment of mass visual entertainment in television, coupled with existential attitudes to morality brought about by WWII, combined to produce a bloody but newly distanced fascination with death, tempered with the fetishisation of celebrity explored by Ballard in The Atrocity Exhibition and, later, Crash. The piece is understated and easily overlooked. A green monochrome print featuring repeat images of a car crash complete with supine victim, it presents these ideas in their very simplest terms and is devastatingly effective. The celebrity side of the equation is of course represented by Warhol himself, the first artist to present himself as a product, churning out signed works in his Factory. This aspect of Warhol is often dismissed as egotistical, money grubbing, but that viewpoint ignores his nuanced reflection of the world he existed in. Ballard wrote about celebrity while being scared of it himself; Warhol embraced this new phenomenon, revelling in it.

It is Warhol’s brilliant translation of the changes around him that connects him to Ballard and makes “Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice)” the most important work in the exhibition. Both men represent a mature artistic culture that distanced itself from the political hectoring of pre-WWII art, and absorbed and translated a world of rapid change with cool detachment. The exhibition’s motorways, cars, aircraft and sexual imagery are only superficially Ballard. Tucked away on a back wall, in a small and at first insignificant-looking work, is where you find the essence of Ballard’s work presented succinctly by another twentieth-century great.

Many thanks to Mike Bonsall for his help with this review.

‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’

by Brian Baker

Instructions/ Introduction

Readers hoping to solve the mystery of J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Beach Murders’ may care to approach it in the form of a card game. Some of the principal clues have been alphabetized, some left as they were found, scrawled on to the backs of a deck of cards. Readers are invited to recombine the order of the cards to arrive at a solution.* Obviously any number of solutions is possible, and the final answer to the mystery lies forever hidden.

Brian Baker, 2009

Originally published in 21: Journal of Contemporary and Innovative Fiction, Issue 1 (autumn/winter 2008/09). Reproduced with permission.

♣♠♥♦

Architecture (A♣). Physical space is crucial to the Ballardian imaginary, from the eponymous tower block in High-Rise (1975) to the ‘gated communities’ and science parks of Super-Cannes (2000) and Millennium People (2003). Counterposed to images of flight and transcendence found in many of his stories, the urban environment is often an imprisoning space. In his article ‘J.G. Ballard and the Architectures of Control’, Dan Lockton argues that ‘One of the many ‘obsessions’ running through Ballard’s work is what we might characterise as the effect of architecture on the individual’, while complicating his argument by acknowledging the mutual implication of inner and outer, psychological and environment: this blurring being Ballard’s method of ‘reflecting the participants’ mental state in the environment itself’. [1] Lockton also suggests that ‘[t]he architecture […] acts as a structure for the story’ in locating the protagonist and ‘plot’ firmly in an ‘obsessively explained and expounded’ architecture. I would like to develop this argument by suggesting that the informing structural principles of Ballard’s short stories, particularly that of the period beginning with ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) and embracing The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) but also later short fictions, are spatial and iterative: geometry and algebra.

Ballardian (2♣). On the BBC Radio 4 arts review programme Front Row, presenter Mark Lawson, in introducing a discussion of Ballard’s autobiography Miracles of Life, suggested that ‘he’s one of the few writers to have become an adjective — Ballardian’. [2] An author who attains the status of an adjective runs the risk of reduction to culturally received ideas of their work (often erroneous and masking the texts themselves) or, worse still, it makes them the object of caricature or burlesque. To become an adjective suggests a certain kind of cultural visibility (or even cultural power), but also indicates a possible ossification through repetition: another reduction, to a set of representative images, ideas and tropes. In this case, ‘Ballardian’ signifies a recurrent set of narrative structures, characters, and particularly iconic places and things, many of which were identified by David Pringle in his groundbreaking critical work of the 1970s:

Such things as concrete weapons ranges, dead fish, abandoned airfields, radio telescopes, crashed space-capsules, sand dunes, empty cities, […] beaches, fossils, broken juke-boxes, crystals, lizards, multi-storey car-parks, dry lake-beds, medical laboratories, drained swimming-pools, […] high-rise buildings, predatory birds, and low-flying aircraft. [3]

To assert a ‘Ballardian’ imaginary is to suggest a limitation to his work, a finite set of materials out of which a range of texts are worked (and re-worked). It is a critical commonplace to note the ‘obsessional’ return to key images, objects and concerns in Ballard’s work – from emptied swimming pools to a desire to transcend time – that could have reduced his texts to a set of symptoms of an identifiable pathology (and did, in the notorious judgement on Crash by a publisher’s reader). At best, Ballard’s ‘obsessional’ return to a limited creative palette can be used to articulate a consistent and particular vision of the world – what Mark Lawson, characterising ‘Ballardian’, called a ‘way of looking at the world and describing it’ – or is, at worst, a boring and repetitive re-working of the same old material by a ‘minor’ (genre) writer who lacks a wider engagement with human life. ‘Ballardian’ is perhaps best understood (a) as a symptom of genre, and the repetition-with-difference pattern of much genre fiction; and (b) as an effect of Ballard’s structural reliance on iteration.

Confetti Royale (9♣). The original title of the story collected in the 2001 Collected Short Stories as ‘The Beach Murders’ is ‘Confetti Royale’, signifying its intertextual relation to Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953) and the Cold War spy or espionage narrative. The impenetrable motivations of the characters in ‘Confetti Royale’ – two Russian agents, on CIA operative, an ‘absconded State Department cipher chief’ and ‘American limbo dancer’ (whose actions entirely exceed this belittling characterization) – both anticipate the labyrinthine logic of Le Carré’s espionage fiction and compromises the more straightforward and linear adventures of Fleming’s secret agent. There has been some recent speculation on the Ballardian website about the connection between Ballard and Fleming, particularly with regard to The Wind from Nowhere (Ballard’s 1962 ‘disowned’ apprentice novel) and its megalomaniacal industrialist Hardoon, who could be seen as a an analogue of the Bond super-villains who seek the chimera of ‘world domination’. [4] While ‘Confetti Royale’ is a playful iteration of espionage fiction, its card-game structure raises to a formal principle the centrality of the game between Bond and Le Chiffre in Casino Royale. Here, the 27 textual elements (Introduction plus 26 alphabeticized titled paragraphs) are strewn as ‘confetti’, compromising the ordering principles of the baccarat tables or Cold War ideologies.

Diamonds Are Forever (6♣). The 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (OHMSS) was the first to be made without Sean Connery. The opening 15 minutes is suffused by a self-reflexivity which marks out the problematic nature of generic repetition-with-difference. The new Bond, George Lazenby, looks directly at the camera at the end of the pre-credits sequence, when the ‘girl’ he has been fighting for drives off, and says ‘This never happened to the other fellah’; the film’s title sequence replays scenes from earlier Bond films; and when Bond ‘resigns’ and clears his office drawer, key objects from earlier films are introduced with aide-memoire musical leitmotifs from previous Bond films overlaid on the soundtrack. Anxiety-provoking difference is suppressed by reference to the recognisable and familiar, even at the risk of disrupting the film diegesis. In 1971, not only did Bond return, but so did Connery. Diamonds Are Forever is Bond’s ‘revenge’ mission for the death, in OHMSS, of Bond’s wife Tracey (the ‘girl’ who escaped him at the beginning), and is largely set in Nixon’s USA. A morally rotten, bloated film (featuring two sadistic homosexual assassins as an index of its gender sensitivities), Diamonds Are Forever’s main location is Las Vegas, the ‘old’ Vegas of the Dunes and the Sands, the excessive, corrupt Vegas of Bugsy Siegel and the Mob.

Diamonds Are Forever plays the megalomaniacal Blofeld – murderer of Bond’s wife and manipulator of the diamond trade to create a laser-bearing ‘killer’ satellite – against one ‘Willard Whyte’, a helpful billionaire resident of a Las Vegas penthouse suite. This character’s good-ole-boy persona fails to mask the fact that he is a Whyte-washed reiteration of a real-life Las Vegas resident, Howard Hughes, who in real life more nearly approximated Blofeld. Unlike Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953) and the 2006 film version of this Bond narrative, where the high-stakes card games function as a trope for ideological conflict and the dangerous fluidity of capital markets and financial flows, Diamonds Are Forever makes little or no play with the casino chronotope. Ballard’s own Las Vegas novel is Hello America (1981), the most generically ‘science fiction’ of his later works. This novel narrates a journey by a European exploratory mission to a depopulated, post-apocalyptic United States, where they find a self-anointed (and self-named) President Charles Manson, who has assumed command of the remainder of America’s nuclear arsenal. Hello America uses the Las Vegas gambling icon of the roulette wheel, rather than the card table, to critique the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. As Ken Cooper suggests, ‘self-destruction […] is the inevitable payoff of atomic roulette’. [5]

Experimental Fiction (7♣). Ballard’s most formally experimental period lies between ‘The Terminal Beach’ and The Atrocity Exhibition. Although his later novels are iterative in their narrative and textual patterning, they are much closer to ‘mainstream’ literary fiction’s spatial continuity and temporal causality. However, in his short fiction Ballard did return to formally experimental or innovative texts, often playing with textual conventions. ‘The Index’ (1977) consists of just that, ‘the index to the unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography of a man who may well have been one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century’, one Henry Rhodes Hamilton, but the mystery of who he was and the status of the text remains unresolved; ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976) consists of annotations to the subtitle of the story (‘A discharged Broadmoor patient compiles “Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown”, recalling his wife’s murder, his trial and exoneration’), each word of which is footnoted; and in ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985) the respondent implies that he has assassinated the second incarnation of Christ in 100 ‘answers’. [6] These texts are organised by absence or ellipsis, the architecture of the stories signifying a missing central element or text that reader must configure or enunciate for herself/himself. Non-linear, spatial in design, Ballard’s later experimental short stories are textual games that posit a foundational enigma, a mystery that the reader must work to decode.

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age).

Fugue Fiction (5♣). The ‘fugue fictions’ are three connected short stories that Ballard published around the turn of the 1980s: ‘News from the Sun’ (1981), ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982) and ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982). A close examination of these stories discloses the iterative principle at work even in Ballard’s later texts, where formal fragmentation has given way to more linear narrative models. A paragraph from ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1962) pinpoints the shared emphases of these stories:

The implication was that the entire space programme was a symptom of some inner unconscious malaise afflicting mankind, and in particular the Western technocracies, and that the space-craft and satellites had been launched because their flights satisfied certain buried compulsions and desires. [7]

In ‘Memories of the Space Age’, the protagonist Mallory, a doctor in the NASA program, confesses to his unconscious complicity in the first orbital murder, by a borderline-disturbed astronaut named Hinton. This act produced a kind of ‘space-sickness’ of fugue-states and loss of temporal awareness that is centred on Cape Canaveral: ‘he had torn the fabric of time and space, cracked the hour-glass from which time was running’. [8] The fugues experienced by Mallory and the protagonists of the two other stories are a kind of congealing of time, a transcendence of clock time; in ‘News from the Sun’, these fugues are explicitly typed as a return to a pre-lapsarian state of consciousness. In ‘Myth of the Near Future’, the protagonist Sheppard pursues his terminally ill wife to Canaveral, where the time-effect may ultimately revivify her. All three stories are patterned on a triangulation between the protagonist, his wife (or lover), and an antagonist; a fourth figure is present, outside of the primary triangulation, who is either an astronaut or connected to the space program.

‘News from the Sun’: Franklin-Ursula-Slade (Trippett)
‘Memories of the Space Age’: Mallory-Anna-Hinton (Gale Shepley)
‘Myths of the Near Future’: Sheppard-Elaine-Martinsen (Anne Godwin)

The triangulations suggests a geometric/architectural emphasis, but the sense that these three fictions, published in sequence, are reworkings of the same conceptual material and re-deploy the same motifs (flight, the space programme, fugue states and time) signifies their centrality to the Ballardian iterative complex.

Gemini. (4♣) The Space Age is a crucial source for the Ballardian imaginary, from the negotiations of cargo-cult imperialism in ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1963) to the assassination of a messianic astronaut in ‘The Object of the Attack’ (1984). The icon of the astronaut is central to the ‘fugue fictions’ and their sense that NASA’s manned space programs were a cosmic transgression, an hubristic leap out of biological time which has catastrophic psychological consequences. Many of Ballard’s texts are centred on Cape Canaveral, from ‘The Illuminated Man’ (1964) (itself later incorporated – reiterated – into The Crystal World (1965)), where time crystallizes, to ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982), where the Cape is the epicentre of a kind of ‘space sickness’. However, it is not Apollo imagery – the Moon landings – that regulate Ballard’s Space Age imaginary. His astronauts have orbital trajectories. In ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1968) and ‘The Cage of Sand’ (1962) orbiting capsules containing dead astronauts form a kind of artificial constellation in the night sky, while the protagonists wait at Canaveral for their orbits to decay. It is not Apollo, but the Mercury and Gemini programs – manned orbital missions that grew in complexity and duration, but stayed within the ambit of Earth – that provide the backdrop for Ballard’s Space Age. This is no New Frontier, no ascension to other planets, but a limited, problematic endeavour.

Hearts and Minds (8♣). The title sequence of the 2006 Casino Royale plays with the centrality of the card game and the casino to its narrative. In motion-capture animation (where computer-generated graphics are overlaid on live action), a silhouetted polygon Bond fights, shoots, and is finally shown (in a live-action ‘reveal’) to be Daniel Craig, the ‘new’ Bond. The roulette wheel becomes a sniper-scope target in these graphics, as clubs, diamonds and spades become weapons embedded in the torsos of antagonists, ‘blood’ flowing across the screen from their wounds. Bond is himself ‘cut’ by playing cards in one animated sequence, but is invulnerable; no blood seems to flow there. The interrelationship of the casino, the roulette wheel and the playing card with the neo-colonial adventurism represented by the Bond imaginary invites us to read the film itself as a kind of spectacle or game, masking its ideological premises.

Iterative (3♣). Crucial to the idea of a ‘Ballardian’ text is patterning or what I have suggested as iterability. It would be difficult to deny that Ballard returns to similar ideas, or narrative structures throughout his work: it is the effectiveness of the patterning that is crucial, the combination and re-combination of elements to work through a coherent world that provides Ballard’s texts with imaginative power. David Punter, in Modernity, concurs, stating: ‘What is most significant […] is that Ballard is a repetitive writer, a writer of repetition.’ [9] The first formally ‘iterative’ Ballard short story is ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964), in which the textual fabric of the story is fragmented, split into 22 sections (21 of them subtitled), echoing the psychological fragmentation of the protagonist Traven (the earliest incarnation of the ‘T-‘ figure who recurs, as ‘Tallis’ or ‘Talbot’ or ‘Trabert’) who can also be found in Ballard’s iterative masterwork, The Atrocity Exhibition. ‘The Terminal Beach’ and particularly the Atrocity Exhibition texts are non-linear and non-causal in terms of narrative; in ‘The Terminal Beach’, the concrete blocks of the nuclear testing site Eniwetok Island form a maze, ‘their geometric regularity and finish [seeming] to occupy more than their own volumes of space, imposing on him a mood of absolute calm and order.’ [10] Here the spatial ordering of the text is more properly geometric rather than algebraic (iterative), but the repetitive, disorienting regularity of the field of blocks is a figure for a space that repeats itself endlessly. This motif can also be found in the more classically dystopian short story ‘The Concentration City’, where the urban ‘build-up’ has no boundary, no end, and a train journey to find its limits returns the protagonist to the starting point is a regressive, looping trajectory; and in the repeated face of Cordobès on the deck of cards placed upon Quimby’s balcony table in ‘Confetti Royale’.

James (10♣). J.G. Ballard’s first names are James Graham. Only in his Crash alter-ego is Ballard ‘James’, a knowing self-implication in that text’s transgressive sexual material; he was ‘Jimmy’ as a boy, ‘Jim’ to his adult friends. The diminutive, ‘Jim’, humanises Ballard, and it is this name which is given to his ‘autobiographical’ selves in Empire of the Sun (1985) and The Kindness of Women (1991). Opposing this is the self-alienated ‘J.G.’, a not-quite nom de plume that masks the ‘real’ Jim Ballard. Ballard’s textual interrogation of unitary subjectivity is reflected in this circulation of names, and the surnames of his protagonists – Sheppard, Maitland, Franklin, Sinclair – are themselves iterative signs. James Bond, by way of contrast, is never ‘Jimmy’, ‘Jim’ or ‘Jamie’: always ‘James’.

Kennedy (J♣). After his assassination in 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s name was given to the Cape where the NASA space program still has its operational base: Canaveral. This naming has now been reversed, but the Space Center still bears JFK’s name. It is Kennedy who is seen to be the ‘author’ of Apollo, giving the political and economic impetus to reach the Moon through the rhetoric of the ‘New Frontier’ and a sustained arms race (symbolically as well as militarily), though it could be argued that it is Lyndon Johnson who was most committed to the American space program in the 1950s and 1960s. Kennedy’s assassination is, in some sense, a ‘ground zero’ for contemporary American culture, and he looms large in the algebra of icons that Ballard constructs in the period of The Atrocity Exhibition, along with the president’s widow, Jackie. The implication of glamour, celebrity and violent death is embodied in the icon of JFK; in ‘The Assassination of John F. Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’, a key text in The Atrocity Exhibition, the moment of assassination also becomes a fatal game.

‘Continuously creating his own image’: J.G. Ballard self-portrait, double exposure, 1950 (photo via RE/Search Publications).

Lunghua (Q♣). With the publication of Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of Life, it became apparent that, as much as I would like to resist a biographical reading of Ballard’s work, it is Ballard’s own childhood that has had a fundamental regulatory effect on the Ballardian imaginary. In Empire of the Sun, Ballard playfully encouraged the reader to ‘spot’ the Ballardian icon in an autobiographical context – the drained swimming pool, the crashed plane – while simultaneously denying that autobiography provided any kind of key or code to understanding his work. His life, as represented in both Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, is filtered through the medium of fiction. In the light of Miracles of Life, I would now like to suggest that it is Lunghua, the resettlement camp into which he, his parents and his sister were interned during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in World War Two, that is the model for the Ballardian social environment. Lunghua is enclosed, fenced off from the outside world; it is a place where work is scarce; where a system of social codes and conventions regulate personal interaction; where games, hobbies, organised events schedule the lives of its inhabitants; and where existence shades inevitably into a slow decline unto death. A place to rebel against, if space can be found; a space to escape from, if escape is possible. Lunghua is the model for the high-rises, gated communities, science parks and suburban dormitory towns of Ballard’s later fiction.

Metacriticism/metatext (K♣). ‘What is distinctive about The Arcades Project – in Benjamin’s mind, it always dwelt apart – is the working of quotations into the framework of montage [….] the transcendence of the conventional book form would go together, in this case, with the blasting apart of pragmatic historicism – grounded, as this always is, on the premise of a continuous and homogenous temporality. Citation and commentary might then be perceived as intersecting at a thousand different angles, setting up vibrations across the epochs of recent history, so as to effect “the cracking open of natural teleology.” And all of this would unfold through the medium of hints or “blinks” – a discontinuous presentation deliberately opposed to traditional modes of argument.’ [11]

Spades ♠

(A♠) Macro-economic tidal systems. B sat down in the oak-panelled room of state opposite Sir Richard Markham. Markham assessed this loose-limbed man in the ragged flying jacket. A constellation of scars around his mouth and jaw-line traced the trajectory of his chequered history as an agent. Markham accepted the logic of the situation – an agent lasted a few years in the field, no more – but B had gone further than most, much further in many ways. The grey, haunted eyes that looked through Markham scanned the ocean bottom of his psyche, cut adrift from the time system of Whitehall.
‘You’ve been away, B,’ said Markham.
B’s eyes refocused.
‘In a manner of speaking.’

(2♠) Auto-intentional displacement. B realised, as he stood on the moving walkway in the inner hub of Charles de Gaulle airport, that the geometry of the architecture expressed a latent psychopathology. The concrete tunnels of the travellators indicated a profound desire to return to the amniotic peacefulness of the womb, the octagonal central atrium and suspended Perspex walkways revealing a fascist worship of the late General in the form of an architectural homage to his nasal septum and zygomatic arch. B found himself profoundly identifying with the unknown would-be assassin who had missed his opportunity to be the French Oswald in 1965. It was clear to him that the French, for all their insistence on grands projets like CDG, inhabited a fundamental and psychotic cultural landscape in which the tension between their embrace of modernity and their nostalgia for empire went unresolved.

(3♠) Goldeneye. As he dipped the clutch of the Aston and thrust the gearstick into fifth, B remembered the death of his wife. It was, he now understood, a special form of automobile accident. Blauveldt and Blunt, whom he had previously recognised as enemies, were in fact the agents of an underlying logic of necessity. Since the death of his wife, B had slipped further and further out of time, occupying fugue states where hours slipped by. Now, as blades of sodium light accelerated across his windshield, B felt himself again returning to the fugue state that had plagued him since her death, the Aston congealing in a viscid block of time.

(4♠) Operation Grand Slam. B opened the attaché case. In it he found what Markham had called his ‘assassination weapon’. It consisted of: (a) reproductions of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’; (b) a pulp spy novel by one Richard Markham; (c) Eadweard Muybridge’s series photographs of horse and rider; (d) soft inner flying helmet and communication rig of B-29 navigator, USAAF issue; (e) November 1963 edition of Time magazine; (f) an unused prophylactic wrapped in a tin foil sachet; (g) black-box voice recording of co-pilot, Concorde air disaster, Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris; (h) .25 Beretta pistol.

(5♠) Heliotropic. Dr Catherine Penny waited in the secure car park of the Jodrell Bank radio telescopes, as the man in the ragged flying jacket paced the grounds, where the massive volumes of the dishes sprouted like some monstrous alien crop. Dr Penny thought of B‘s grey, haunted eyes, and turned the heating in the MGC up a notch. What B was looking for, he could not find amongst the files and despatch boxes of Whitehall. Could he find it here, among the constellations?

(6♠) Index of Alienation. B calculated the angle between Dr Penny’s rigid torso and her splayed thighs, as she sat like an ill-propped mannequin on the edge of his bed. The conjunction between her naked body, the vintage bottle of Bollinger and the torn foil of the prophylactic sachet brought back disconcerting memories of the buckled armcove on Monaco race day. He turned back to the light box he was building to display x-ray plates of his own fractured clavicle, femur, and kneecap.

(7♠) Quantum theory. ‘Pay attention, B,’ said Quinn, the head of the special quartermaster stores. ‘One day these things could conceivably save your life.’
He placed another card on the desk and invited B to respond.
‘Come on,’ said B. ‘What will it be next? Solitaire? The Tarot pack?’
‘This is for the good of your health, not mine,’ replied Quinn, ‘though God knows it’s difficult enough to tell the difference these days. How did you find Switzerland?’
B smiled. ‘The facilities were excellent. The doctors pronounced me in fine physical shape.’ The lie was automatic, almost unconscious, thought Quinn.
B’s eyes defocused, the deck of cards indecipherable sigils beneath his hands.

(8♠) Beretta .25. Sitting on the balcony of his room in the Loew’s hotel in Monte Carlo, B watched the workmen fix road markings for the motor racing that would take place next week. The late afternoon sun painted the harbour with gold as he finished the club sandwich and drained the last of the glass of Johnny Walker Black Label. On his knees was the conference pack of the neurosurgery symposium he was attending, where he hoped to catch up with Blufeldt. Blufeldt had assumed the legitimate identity of a specialist doctor and had attached himself to a radical clinic in Bern, Switzerland. He was giving a paper on neurology, brain injury and fugue states. B stood up, brushed the crumbs from his knees, and pinned his identification tag onto his shirt. At least the others would know who he was supposed to be.

(9♠) Jackie O. As B entered Catherine Penny from behind, he registered the way her hips, flaring out from the waist, repeated the sensual curves of the mouthpiece of the telephone. Her back, bent rigidly over Markham’s desk, echoed the planes of the reclining chair that sat, as in a psychiatrist’s consulting room, to one side of the grand office. As he moved inside her, B thought of the coil that sat in Catherine’s womb like an ironic plastic echo of the DNA double-helix. He held Catherine’s hips as if he were piloting the Aston at high speed down the autobahn between Köln and Berlin.

(10♠) Neverland. ‘Blaufeld is in Florida,’ said Markham, looking at B carefully. ‘Down at the Cape, the disused launch site. We don’t think he’s interested in the physical possibilities of the gantries, but…’
‘I always wanted to be an astronaut,’ said B. ‘The NASA program drew a lot of astronauts from Navy fliers, like Sheppard. I met him once. A difficult man. He told me flatly that no Royal Navy Commander could ever make NASA grade.’
‘Space,’ Blaufeld had said, ‘is money.’

(J♠) Solar Transits. The strip lighting haloed from Bluffield’s large, pink, shaven skull as he looked up at B from under cerebrotonic brows.
‘You’ve never understood my work, James. God knows I’ve tried to explain. But I knew you’d come. Particularly here, of all places.’
B looked out of the office windows and saw the rusted, half-ruined gantries propped like a disused stage-set against the Florida sky. He could feel the .25 Beretta in its clam-shell holster beneath his left arm, but knew he would never use it now. The cool afternoon seemed to stretch forever, like the nearby glades.
‘How long have you been having these fugues, James?’ asked Bluffield.

(Q♠) Restitution. Karen Blunt sat astride the Yamaha, revving it slowly, her aviator shades reflecting the parking lot where B sat in the open-top Pontiac. One side of B’s face was turning coral in the intense afternoon sun, as he lived out a waking dream, his memory tapping out the algebra of his past. Karen’s dark hair cascaded onto her sturdy shoulders and chest, which were buttoned up in a grubby NASA flight suit scavenged from Kennedy. Here at Cocoa Beach, outside the bar where the astronauts once dreamed of flight, B and Karen pitched in the oceanic tides of time.

(K♠) Pinewood to Shepperton. In the attaché case B found his instructions from Markham, consisting of a sequence of defaced postcards posted to B by Bloveldt, from Cape Kennedy, Florida; the Alamagordo testing grounds, New Mexico; Utah Beach, Normandy, France; and Fort Knox, Kentucky. They read, in date order: ‘(1) Maiden flight of Concorde (2) Abbey Road (3) Rolling Thunder (4) Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong walks on moon (5) The Wild Bunch (6) Inauguration of President Richard Milhous Nixon (7) Medium Cool (8) d.o.b 20 March (9) Let It Bleed (10) The Stones in the Park (11) Tommy (12) The election of French President Georges Pompidou, succeeding General de Gaulle (13) Woodstock (14) Altamont Speedway (15) On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (16) The Atrocity Exhibition.’

..:: CONTINUED: >> Part 2 ::…

‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’

by Brian Baker

..:: CONTINUED from >> Part 1 ::…

♣♠♥♦

The Joker. The Joker in the pack is the card that, in some games, can replace (or substitute for, take the place of) any of the others. In this sense, the Joker is the empty sign.

♣♠♥♦

(A♥) Time Drill. ‘I don’t remember much about my father,’ replied B.
‘No, I’m sorry, you misunderstand,’ said Bluefield. ‘I meant Markham, Sir Richard Markham.’
‘Ah…’ B looked a little confused, then passed a thin, sunburnt hand across his eyes. Bluefield thought B looked exhausted after his ordeal in the Pontiac. Karen Blunt had finally rescued the half-blistered scarecrow figure in his ragged flying jacket, and at least the soft flying helmet had prevented too much sunstroke. Even now, after a week’s rest and medical attention, Bluefield could see the sores around B’s dirty neckline, beneath the leather collar of his jacket.
‘Are you really a doctor?’ asked B, looking up.
‘Of a special kind.’

(2♥) Unwritten histories. ‘You’ve been in Florida before?’ asked Karen.
B was surprised to hear her speak in light, rather melodious accentless English.
‘Yes, some time ago. I met a man by the name of Scaramanga.’
Blowfield smiled gently and looked down at his large, soft hands. Pink and scrubbed, they looked out of place on the dusty grey melamine table-top. They sat in a red vinyl horseshoe-shaped booth in the abandoned diner, three Coca-Colas in green bottles growing ever closer to blood heat in front of them.
‘I read that case,’ said Blowfield. ‘You weren’t quite yourself to begin with, I recall.’
B’s eyes flickered as he began to enter another fugue.
‘And who am I now, doctor?’

(3♥) Whisky and soda. The fugues seemed to take the place of any true dream sleep, but that afternoon B drew up a sun-lounger beneath an overgrown palm, and drifted to sleep by the side of the drained swimming pool. He dreamed of flight. Propeller blades flashed from his shoulders in the golden sunlight as he ascended into the Florida sky, below him the gantries and concrete aprons of Canaveral. A space-age archangel, clothed in light, he rose until he could see the curvature on the blue rim of the earth and the vault of the sky deepened to a crushing black. Turning on his back, in coronation armour flashing like a new star, he awaited blissful deliverance.

(4♥) Kuomintang. B sat in the wrecked Aston, its red leather trim burst like a rotten scarecrow. He toyed with the broken instrument stalk as he stared at the cracked dials and buckled binnacle, the Aston’s instruments frozen at the crash speed of a hundred and twenty. Feeling his cracked kneecap, B pressed down on the accelerator pedal and saw, through the frosted windshield, the roads of the International Settlement in Shanghai, where he sat on his father’s lap as they drove down empty boulevards in the grandiose Packard that his father bought to impress high-ranking Chinese officials.

(5♥) Viennese Benediction. ‘Who do you want to be, James?’ asked Blovelt.
‘Is it a matter of choice, doctor?’
‘For you, it’s a matter of necessity,’ said Blovelt, drawing aside the Styrofoam cup of coffee.
‘I think you may have the question wrong, if I may say so,’ said B. ‘It’s not a matter of who do I want to be, but why?’
Blovelt slowly traced the parabola of his pink skull with his left palm.
‘Have you seen her, again?’
B seemed, with an effort of will, to come to himself, and looked searchingly at Blovelt, certainty and horror at home in the grey eyes.
‘She’s out there on the gantries, doctor,’ said B. ‘She keeps escaping me, and I don’t have much time left. But I’ll find her.’

(6♥) X-1. In one of his increasingly rare periods of physical activity, B walked towards the Apollo gantry and heard the spluttering engine of the Cessna. Through the cockpit window, as the aircraft circled the gantry, B could make out the habitual white coat, red shirt and pink skull of Blyfield, the man who had murdered his wife, but who had now somehow brought her back to him. Blyfield was waving, pointing to the top of the gantry, and as B looked up, he saw a figure clambering among the rusted geometry of the access platforms. There she was. As B made his way to the stairwell on aching, sore legs, he heard the Cessna’s engine cut out, and watched as Blyfield wrestled the aircraft to a controlled crash landing on the concrete apron.

(7♥) Cobalt Blue. B and Blueweldt met in the mezzanine of the Monte Carlo convention centre, which presented itself as a provincial casino without the formal wear. The foyer was crowded with middle-aged men in light summer suits.
‘Dr. Blueweldt, I assume?’ asked Bond, peering at a name tag.
‘My dear James! How lovely to see you here!’ Blueweldt warmly clasped B’s hand. ‘How have you been?’
B looked searchingly into Blueweldt’s eyes for signs of dissimulation.
‘Have you been to any of the panels?’ asked Blueweldt ruefully. ‘Second rate, to a man. As you can see, they all look like middle-management executives. Appearances, in this case, are not deceptive.’
Blueweldt’s own light-blue three-piece blended him in perfectly with the crowd, but B’s worn leather jacket, cracked aviator glasses and khaki pants identified him either as a media don or a stray patient. B opened his conference pack and scanned the schedule of panels.
‘Nothing of interest next, doctor. Shall we step outside for a sundowner and a talk?’

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age).

(8♥) Yarrow Stalks. As he finally stepped onto the access platform near the top of the rusting Apollo gantry, legs shaking and a fugue beginning to come on, B saw his wife looking at him from a pool of silver sunlight. His wife pointed away from Canaveral, out into the light and air. He wondered if she was beckoning him to step out into the æther and join her. He edged further along the platform towards the open end, feeling the pull of the light airs that breathed past the gap. As he approached, time slowing, he realised what his wife was pointing towards – there he seemed to see, in the far distance, the light shining on the Everglades, a burnished mirror of the sun. He stared, the reflected light searing an image onto his retina. Turning, slowly turning, he realised that his wife had gone.

(9♥) Dilation of the Iris. Ordinarily, B only found motor vehicles interesting if he was behind the wheel, and despite the glamour of the grand prix circus that had now arrived in Monaco, this week was no exception. He had lost track of Blaufield some time before the end of the neurology conference, having become bored by the presentations of the delegates and unimpressed by the exhibits and displays. He had drifted off into strolling the streets of the city principality, unwilling to return to London and admit – perhaps to himself most of all – that he had lost the urgency of the hunt. He haunted the harbour, obsessed with the Mediterranean light playing upon the water and the large white motor yachts that now filled the marina. Time, here in this piece of France that was not France, seemed to stretch into a long, martini-filled afternoon.

(10♥) Emergency Procedures. Using his conference accreditation to flash the security staff, B made his way with the crowd onto the deck of a large motor launch and accepted a glass of champagne from a waiter. His worn leather jacket and aviator sunshades gave him just the right kind of down-at-heel glamour so that the crowd accepted him as an out-of-work American character actor or throwback racing driver, scion of a far less technical and bureaucratic age. Bored by the upscale small talk, he drifted to the stern rail of the launch and looked back across the marina. At his elbow, a young woman in matching aviator glasses coughed slightly, and said, ‘Thinking of jumping?’
He turned and looked at the self-possessed young woman in the pale blue silk dress who leaned into him, looking up, and saw his own rather ragged features reflected in her glasses. She was a head shorter than B, but held herself with a kind of rakish confidence that marked her difference from the crowd behind them.
‘No, of flying,’ he said.
‘You’re not a race driver, then?’
‘I can’t say I’m much of anything.’
‘You do, however, have a name?’
‘It’s James. James B.’

(J♥) Facts in the Case. They stood arm in arm as the fumes from the high-octane engines hazed the sidewalk, pressed as it was with spectators. Their ill-timed stroll had locked them into the very circus they had hoped to avoid. The falsetto roar of the factory-team racing cars blasting past the barriers stilled their conversation, and they communicated by way of near-hysterical mime, raised eyebrows, pointedly directed eye movement and clasps of the hand. Both wore smiles that the crush and the noise could not erase. B motioned with his head to cut past the end of a run-off area to walk away from the crowds and up into the town away from the circuit. As they disengaged themselves from the crowd and walked past a race marshall frantically waving a red flag, B was suddenly conscious of a blast of engine-hot air that lifted him bodily then slammed him back onto the asphalt. Time and space wheeled like a burst tyre. His ears full of the roar of the dying high-performance engine, he turned his head to the right and saw her propped up against the buckled armcove, smiling slightly at him and tenderly brushing away the drops of blood that spilled from a graze in her scalp onto the white cotton dress.

(Q♥) Left Luggage Office. ‘Come in,’ said Markham.
‘Thank you,’ replied Professor Blowfield with a slight bow. ‘You would like to discuss the case of James B?’
‘Yes. Although when he came back from Switzerland, he professed the desire to return to active service, his behaviour has been erratic to say the least. Here is a record of the surveillance that one of our top female operatives has been conducting.’
Blowfield took up the file that had been slid across the desk to him, and scanned down the list of B’s movements and activities. His eyebrows, beneath the dome of his naked forehead, raised in surprise once, then again. ‘Here?’
M smiled ruefully. ‘I thought that once B’s dalliance with a wife had been ended, he would come back to us. It seems he has, in fact, gone much further away. Is there anything else we can do?’
Blowfield winced, and dipped his head. Looking up at Markham, he said, ‘There’s one more thing we can try. After that…’

(K♥) Zoëtropic. B drove out to one of the abandoned small towns on the edge of the glades, looking for an airboat. He finally found one in the late afternoon, one that started after a little tinkering, and seated high in the driver’s chair, he powered up the caged propeller and swung the airboat out into the middle of the reed-choked creek. He throttled back and let the engine idle as the boat skimmed out into the glades proper, skirting the causeway he had driven on. Once out into flat water, he opened the airboat up, skimming at a speed that seemed literally unearthly, a dream of flight, airborne on water, airborne on light. He glanced to his left and saw his wife sitting beside him looking forward into the sun, dark hair streaming behind her, light cotton dress swept against her breasts and torso. He looked ahead, feeling the fugue coming on him again, and pointed the airboat towards the sun that dipped molten gold into the Everglades.

Diamonds ♦

New Worlds (6♦). Under Michael Moorcock’s editorship from 1964, New Worlds magazine became the home of the science fiction ‘New Wave’. The archetypal New Wave science fiction story was textually experimental and formally and/or generically self-conscious; alienated from the mores and conventions of contemporary mainstream culture (and mainstream ‘literary’ writing); and infused with a cynical, dystopian or counter-cultural politics, signified in the recurrent use of the scientific concept of entropy. Moorcock has written about New Worlds:

Style and technique was merely a means to an end – frequently a very moral means to some very moral ends. We were looking at the Vietnam War, Kennedy’s assassination, the computer revolution, the armaments industry, the manipulations of the media, the profound hypocrisies of the liberal bourgeoisie, the appalling condition of the majority of human beings on the planet, the useless currency of outmoded or inappropriate political language. But our response was scarcely a puritan one and neither did we recoil from experiencing our subject matter. We relished and embraced change, we celebrated the advent of new technologies and theories which opened up the multiverse for further exploration, which helped us understand our own behaviour and which provided us with some profound and spectacular metaphors! If the world was going to hell, we were determined to see how, but we were also determined to enjoy it while it was happening. Our curiosity was considerably greater than our uncertainty. [12]

The iterability of Ballard’s work makes him a central player in the ‘New Wave’ and in New Worlds.

Out There (8♦). James Bond is crucially implicated in the social and ideological practices of tourism and consumerism; but Bond is ‘at home’ anywhere, as in From Russia, With Love, where he is accepted in the Turkish gypsy caravanserai as a kind of ‘brother’ and is even accorded the honour of judging the outcome of a dispute between women. As Vivian Halloran notes in ‘Tropical Bond’, the issue of ‘passing’ for local recurs in Bond texts which consistently, she argues, ‘complicate Bond’s whiteness’; following Edward Said’s argument about Kipling’s Kim in Culture and Imperialism, I would like to stress here that Bond can ‘pass’, even as a non-white other, where the ethnically troubling ‘villain’ (from Dr No onwards) most assuredly cannot. [13] Ballard’s protagonists are alienated everywhere, even ‘at home’; the fragmentation of the Traven/ Talbot/ Tallis figure is of a different order to the disguises that Bond affects, under which the ‘real’ James Bond still exists. In The Atrocity Exhibition, there is no such foundational unitary subjectivity. Where the Ballardian protagonist travels to different parts of the world, he only ‘passes’ in that the indigenous people recognise such a radical psychological dislocation in him that he is not really there at all.

Pleasure Periphery (7♦). Ballard and Fleming share an interest in what Michael Denning calls the ‘pleasure periphery’, ‘the tourist belt surrounding the industrialized world’: the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, or certain parts of East Asia. The centrality of tourism and travel to Bond texts is echoed in such Ballard texts as ‘Having a Wonderful Time’ (1978) or, more importantly, Cocaine Nights (1996). Denning writes, after quoting from a scene in Fleming’s From Russia, With Love:

Here we find the epitome of the tourist experience: the moment of relaxed visual contemplation from above, leaning on the balustrade; the aesthetic reduction of a social entity, the city, to a natural object, coterminous with the waves of the sea; the calculations of the tourist’s economy, exchanging physical discomfort for a more “authentic” view; and the satisfaction of having made the ‘right’ exchange, having “got” the experience, possessed the “view”. [14]

It is no coincidence, argues Denning, that the Bond narratives find their location in the ‘pleasure periphery’: Fleming’s texts articulate the ‘tourist gaze’ (analysed by John Urry), the mobile gaze of consumption embodied by jet-age travellers to ‘exotic’ tourist destinations. [15] In Ballard’s fictions, the ‘pleasure periphery’ is the location for what Andrzej Gasiorek diagnoses as ‘a world dominated not by work but by leisure’, although in Kingdom Come (2007) and elsewhere, the ‘pleasure periphery’ has now been imported to the centre. [16]

Queens and Kings (3♦). In ‘Confetti Royale’/‘The Beach Murders’, Quimby, who is identified several times as the ‘dealer’ of the deck of cards that ‘he set out […] on the balcony table’, both plays a card game alone (with which he ‘amused himself in his hideaway’) and, by extension, with the other characters in the story. [17] Each card has two aspects: the number or face upon it (denoting its value), and on the reverse or back, a picture of the bullfighter Cordobès, whose image is thereby repeated fifty-two times across the table, another figure of iteration. There are no easy homologies between Queen, King and Jack and the characters in ‘Confetti Royale’, however (even though there is a Princess): what is important is the role of the dealer, and the game itself. The game as metaphor for espionage informs this short story as it has the spy genre since Kipling’s Kim (1901) and the colonial ‘Great Game’ played by Britain and Russia for domination of the Indian subcontinent. Kim’s fluid and liminal subjectivity is an index of the instability of the spy-subject at the centre of espionage narrative: the secret agent becomes the ‘double agent’. [18]

Illustration by Michael Foreman for the original Doubleday edition of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Reified Subjects (4♦). David Punter, in The Hidden Script, identifies the centrality of subjectivity to Ballard’s concerns in his fiction. Punter writes:

The long tradition of enclosed and unitary subjectivity comes to mean less and less to him as he explores the ways in which person [sic] is increasingly controlled by landscape and machine, increasingly becomes a point of intersection for overloaded scripts and processes which have effectively concealed their distant origins from human agency. [19]

Punter’s assessment of Ballard’s critique of subjectivity can be exemplified most clearly in The Atrocity Exhibition, where the Traven/Tallis/Talbot figure, whose ‘breakdown’ is materialised in the fragmented form of the text and in the iterated (‘obsessional’) motifs, is a liminal or fractured subject. Ballard’s critique of contemporary life is articulated largely through his destablisation of unitary subjectivity, a fragmentation which leads to the release of ‘unconscious’ forces and desires which remain obscure (as conscious ‘motivation’) to the subject that enacts them. Figures for the fragmented or replicated subject can be found in ‘Confetti Royale’, for instance, in the repeated image of the bullfighter Cordobès on the backs of the cards, or in the first paragraph, where Princess Manon sees herself in the mirrors: ‘In the triptych of mirrors above the dressing table she gazed at the endless replicas of herself’. [20] Ballardian subjects are rarely agents in their own narratives; agency is displaced on to the ‘provocateur’ antagonist, Vaughan or Wilder Penrose, the third point in the Ballardian triangulation.

Secret Agent (5♦). Fleming’s Bond, by way of contrast with the Ballardian subject, seems all agency, however ‘secret’. Bond, though, is acted upon in the death of his wife in OHMSS, and is subjected to a beating of his genitals, administered by Le Chiffre, in Casino Royale. There are limits to Bond’s agency. Also in Casino Royale, Bond is at first ‘defeated’ by Le Chiffre and the cards and is only saved in his mission by the offer of ‘Marshall aid’ (American finance) by the CIA operative Felix Leiter. His rescue from Le Chiffre is also ex machina, as a Smersh agent enters and kills Le Chiffre and his crew, only to leave Bond alive as he has no orders to kill the British agent. The fantasy of total agency represented by the figure of Bond, an expression of Cold War and decolonisation-era anxieties about Britain’s geopolitical role and influence, is destabilised by the texts themselves.

The Beach Murders (2♦). At the missing centre of ‘Confetti Royale’, the 1966 short story that was renamed ‘The Beach Murders’, is Quimby, the ‘absconded cipher chief’ from the US State department, who is the ‘dealer’ of the pack of cards that feature throughout the narrative. Quimby is an encoder, the master of this textual game, though he himself remains an enigma (his motivations obscure even to himself: ‘what these obsessives in Moscow and Washington failed to realize was that for once he might have no motive at all’). [21] The retitling of the story – the text becoming its own double – emphasises the murders rather than the Cold War espionage milieu, placing the enigma ‘who killed?’ at the heart of the generic recoding: the text becomes a detective fiction rather than a spy fiction. As the ‘Introduction’ to the text suggests, the form of the story is an invitation to the reader to decode the narrative, recombine the 26 alphabeticized paragraphs and narrative events to resolve the text by identifying the murderer(s). No such resolution can take place. Of the murders, the following can be stated:
1. the Russian agent Kovorski murders the Romanoff Princess Manon (with certainty: her death is described).
2. the ‘American limbo dancer’ Lydia is killed (accidentally) by a bomb planted in the CIA agent Statler’s Mercedes by Kovorski (paragraph ends at the point at which she presses the starter and sets off the device)
3. Quimby kills the Russian agent Raissa (less certain, but probable)
4. Kovorski is shot and killed by an unknown assailant
5. Statler is killed in an unknown manner by an unknown assailant
6. Quimby and Sir Giles are left alive at the end of the narrative (probable, because there is no narrative of their deaths)

Of the murders, then, one is known; two are probably ascribable; two remain mysteries. The fate of two characters, including Quimby the ‘dealer’, in unknown. The recombinatory game ‘fails’ because there is, and can be, no solution to this criminal narrative. We might suspect that Quimby, as the ‘dealer’, is responsible, but the murderer(s) might also include Sir Giles or other (unknown) figures. The ‘Introduction’ also suggests that the textual game of deduction is doubled: the ‘solution’ to the ‘mystery of the Beach Murders’ requires a ‘key’, perhaps the very phrase that Lydia lifts from Kovorski’s Travel-Riter ink ribbon. As the text foregrounds from the very beginning, ‘any number of solutions is possible, and a final answer to the mystery […] lies forever hidden.’ [22]

Upwardly Mobile (10♦). James Bond is a curiously classless figure, despite the over-coded aristocratic connoisseurship purveyed by the Roger Moore film incarnation. In the film of Casino Royale, Bond and Vesper Lynd travel by high-speed train to Montenegro (the re-location of the casino). After dinner, the two swap character assessments/ character assassinations. After Bond essays a rather trite analysis of an anxious, beautiful-but-brainy femininity, Lynd reverses the trick: Bond is an orphan, the product of a public school and Oxford education (where he never ‘fitted in’), and MI6 via the SAS. Lynd then asks how his lamb was for dinner; ‘Skewered,’ says Bond. ‘One sympathises.’ Bond may be embarrassed by the ease in which Lynd is able to ‘skewer’ his character, but its detail signifies how dis-located he is in terms of social structures: he is an outsider, ‘maladjusted’, a status which in fact generates his mobility as a secret agent. Bond’s popularity can partly be read as a reflection of the aspirational, economically mobile, consumption-oriented imperatives of the British middle class in the 1960s and afterwards – the period of the Bond film phenomenon. Ballard’s own life history echoes Bond’s: not an orphan, but with distanced parents and Chinese servants in loco parentis; public school in England post-war (the Leys School in Cambridge), then Cambridge University; a short spell in the RAF, then marriage and life as a professional writer. Ballard’s connection to, and insight into, the mores and aspirations of the affluent British middle class is clear throughout his writings. Ballard is, in some ways, as exemplary a twentieth-century Englishman as is Bond, even though both are ‘outsiders’.

Vesper Lynd (Q♦). The second point of the Ballardian narrative triangulation, the wife or lover, is often unfaithful or even lost to the protagonist. Even Crash’s Catherine Ballard is no femme fatale, however; sexual infidelity is less a matter of betrayal than of a mirror-image of the protagonist’s own personal trajectory of (self)alienation and (self)discovery. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, drawing upon the critical work of Rene Girard in her text Between Men, writes of an ‘erotic triangle’ in texts, where the (unspoken) relationship between two rival males predominates over, and regulates, the relationship each has with the ‘third’ point of the triangle, the female. The female thus becomes a counter or marker in a system of exchange: a medium or locus of repressed male desire. [23] Ballard’s triangulations are a geometry of homosociality and homoeroticism, made most explicit in Crash, but present everywhere.

War Fever (J♦). The title of Ballard’s last short story collection, ‘war fever’ symbolises the underlying pathology at work during the Twentieth century: an implication of desire, destruction and death.

X = ? (A♦). Ballard’s texts tend to work particularly through the recognition of the component. This is most evident in The Atrocity Exhibition, where each chapter is itself a ‘condensed novel’ and each titled paragraph thereby a ‘chapter’. Here, the architectural/ iterative imperatives of the Ballardian text are at their fullest extent. Brian McHale, in Postmodernist Fiction, suggests that ‘a pattern of repetition-with-variation’ is a central compositional motif in Ballard’s 1960s disaster fiction, and goes on to propose that ‘a fixed repertoire of modules, many of them repeated from the earlier apocalyptic novels, are differently recombined and manipulated from story to story’. ‘All this suggests,’ argues McHale, ‘the game-like permutation of a fixed repertoire of motifs – “art in a closed field”’. [24] Ballard’s ‘modular’ texts are therefore devices to work another iteration on the Ballardian algebra, the triangulation of protagonist, wife and provocateur/antagonist. Where P is the protagonist, A is alienation, V is the provocateur, W is the wife, and T is time:

X (Transcendence, Escape, Death) = ((P/A x V) +/- W) –T

It is not the aesthetic of the fragment that is central to the Ballardian text; it is the algebra of the iterative component or module.

You Know My Name (9♦). The title song of the 2006 Casino Royale was written by Chris Cornell and David Arnold, and performed by Cornell. Its rock dynamics give the title sequence a kinetic edge, and is one of the more memorable of recent times. Its title and refrain, ‘You Know My Name’, signifies that the Bondian imaginary, like the Ballardian, is recognisable without (necessarily) being explicitly named.

Zones of Transit (K♦). The Ballardian protagonist is often in movement, physically and metaphysically; between one place and another, between one state and another. Cast in the role of detective in Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and Kingdom Come, what is revealed by the protagonist’s investigations is of less importance than the progressive shedding of the layers of repression, self-delusion or unknowingness that constitute the protagonist’s world-view, compromised by the experiences the investigation leads him into. Just as there is no solution to ‘The Beach Murders’, only a game to be played, Ballard’s texts remain unresolved, in transit.

♣♠♥♦

The Joker. There are two jokers in the pack; like Gemini, twins, red and black. They do not conform to one of the four suits, but take their colours. They are part of the pack but not part of it, always present but unused in many card games. The extra two cards, a kind of supplement, disrupt the seductive numerology of 13 that otherwise attends the ‘French deck’ of cards: 52 cards, in 4 suits, 13 to a suit; 13 x 2 = 26, the letters in the alphabet; 13 x 4 = 52, the number of weeks in a year; 13 is the number of disciples present at the Last Supper, the unluckiest of numbers. The extra two cards, the jokers, the twins, indicate that all this significance is but a game. The jokers are the fly in the ointment, the empty sign, the absent code.

♣♠♥♦

Notes

[1] Dan Lockwood, ‘J.G. Ballard and the Architectures of Control’, Ballardian: The World of J.G. Ballard, 3 January 2008 . Accessed 18 February 2008.
[2] ‘Obeying the surrealist formula’: Iain Sinclair & Hermione Lee on Ballard’, Ballardian: The World of J.G. Ballard, transcription of discussion between Mark Lawson, Hermione Lee and Iain Sinclair on Front Row, broadcast BBC Radio 4 5 February 2008 . Accessed 18 February 2008.
[3] David Pringle, Earth is the Alien Planet: J.G. Ballard’s Four-Dimensional Nightmare (San Bernadino CA; The Borgo Press), p.16.
[4] Simon Sellars, ‘My name is Maitland, Donald Maitland’, Ballardian: The World of J.G. Ballard, 9 February 2008 . Accessed 19 February 2008.
[5] Ken Cooper, ‘“Zero Pays the House”: The Las Vegas Novel and Atomic Roulette’, Contemporary Literature 33:3 (Fall 1992), 528-544 (p.539).
[6] J.G. Ballard, ‘The Index’, The Complete Short Stories (London: Flamingo, 2001), pp.940-945; ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.849-855; ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.1101-1104.
[7] J.G. Ballard, ‘A Question of Re-Entry’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.435-458 (p.453).
[8] J.G. Ballard, ‘Memories of the Space Age’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.1037-1060 (p.1049).
[9] David Punter, Modernity (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), p.137.
[10] J.G. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.589-604 (p.595).
[11] Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, ‘Translator’s Foreword’ to Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge MA and London: Belknap Press, 1999), pp.ix-xiv (p.xi).
[12] Michael Moorcock, ‘Introduction’ to The New Nature of the Catastrophe, Moorcock and Langdon Jones, eds. (1993) (London: Orion, 1997), pp. viii-ix.
[13] Vivian Halloran, ‘Tropical Bond’. Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007, Edward P. Comentale, Stephen Watt and Skip Willman, eds. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 158-177 (p.165).
[14] Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and ideology in the British spy thriller (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 105; p.104.
[15] John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 2nd edition (London: Sage, 2002).
[16] Andrzej Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p.26.
[17] Ballard, ‘The Beach Murders’, The Complete Short Stories, p.663.
[18] See Brian Baker, Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000 (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), chapter 2.
[19] David Punter, The Hidden Script (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), p.9.
[20] Ballard, ‘The Beach Murders’, The Complete Short Stories, p.663.
[21] J.G. Ballard, ‘The Beach Murders’, The Complete Short Stories, pp.663-668 (p.664).
[22] Ballard, ‘The Beach Murders’, The Complete Short Stories, p.663.
[23] I have myself written on this in relation to Crash: Brian Baker, ‘The Resurrection of Desire: J.G. Ballard’s Crash as a Transgressive Text’, Foundation 80 (November 2000), pp.84-96.
[24] Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987), p.69; p.70.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ The ‘DNA of the Present’ in the Fossil Record of the Cold War Through the Imagery of JG Ballard, Related Sources and Documents in Various Media
+ ‘My name is Maitland, Donald Maitland’

Illustrations by Mike Saenz for two Ballard stories in Semiotext(e) SF: ‘Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty’ and ‘Report on an Unidentified Space Station’.

Rudy Rucker’s wonderful reminiscences about the early days of cyberpunk (‘it felt like being an early Beat’), Bruce Sterling (who ‘loved all things Soviet’) and William Gibson (the man with the ‘flexible-looking head’) got me thinking once again about Ballard’s role in the shaping of the cyberpunk mythology.

In his introduction to the Mirrorshades anthology, Sterling wrote: ‘The cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science-fictional world… the techniques of classical “hard SF” … are not just literary tools but an aid to daily life. They are a means of understanding, and highly valued.’ Sterling’s reference to ‘hard SF’ — time-honoured narratives infused with the spirit of scientific investigation — suggests an affinity with the traditions of the genre, a love of the dizzying ideas and sheer scope of the best SF writing. However, his positioning of the cyberpunk movement as ostensibly a form of realism indicates a shift in the genre’s relationship to the technology it once idealised:

‘Science fiction — at least according to its official dogma — has always been about the impact of technology. But times have changed since the comfortable era of Gernsback, when Science was safely enshrined — and confined — in an ivory tower. The careless technophilia of those days belongs to a vanished, sluggish era, when authority still had a comfortable margin of control.

For the cyberpunks, by stark contrast, technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.’

Sterling, introduction to Mirrorshades.

Early Sterling (photo courtesy Rudy Rucker). ‘He dug the parallel world aspect…’.

For Sterling, there was no doubt as to Ballard’s importance in shaping this attitude, when he called attention to the latter’s ‘unblinking, almost clinical objectivity’, which makes him an ‘idolized role model to many cyberpunks’. He reiterated this impact at the recent Kosmopolis panel on Ballard:

In the circle of American science fiction writers of my generation — cyberpunks and humanists and so forth — [Ballard] was a towering figure. We used to have bitter struggles over who was more Ballardian than whom. We knew we were not fit to polish the man’s boots, and we were scarcely able to understand how we could get to a position to do work which he might respect or stand, but at least we were able to see the peak of achievement that he had reached.

Sterling at Kosmopolis.

Another cyberpunk link worth noting is the inclusion of two Ballard pieces, ‘Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty’ and ‘Report on an Unidentified Space Station’, in the anthology Semiotext(e) SF (1989), edited by Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson (the man behind ‘Hakim Bey’) and Robert Anton Wilson. Alongside Ballard there appeared writing from the three editors, and from Sterling, Gibson, Ian Watson, William Burroughs, Colin Wilson, Robert Sheckley, Philip José Farmer and others. The introduction to Ballard’s stories acknowledges a clear debt:

Without J.G. Ballard, none of this would exist. We’re weak on SF history, but we think it fair to say that Ballard was among the first world-class writers (perhaps along with the Soviets) to realize that SF was no longer merely a pulp genre, but had become the only possible vehicle for a mythos of the modern world, that it had replaced the psychological novel as the central artwork of our culture.

Anonymous, Semiotext(e) SF.

In the Acknowledgements, Bey/Wilson writes: ‘Despite the already daunting size of the anthology, I feel compelled to mention some writers who should be in it, but, for various reasons, aren’t… Samuel Delaney and Thomas Disch … Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss…’ These names suggest Wilson’s desire to replicate the strategies not only of Ballard but also of New Worlds, which is further reflected in the anthology’s collage illustrations, concrete poetry and impressionistic typesetting. The intent is clear and the inclusion of Gibson and Sterling, alongside Burroughs and Ballard, made it plain: for the editors, cyberpunk was the New Wave updated for a new era, its relevance as enduring as ever. And for Wilson, as it was for Sterling, Ballard remained the key, a writer able to straddle eras with deep insight into the increasingly science-fictional nature of day to day life.

Peter Lamborn Wilson at Living Theatre, NYC. Photo: amc.

The influence of Ballard on Semiotext(e) is also underscored by the anthology’s inclusion of Michael Blumlein’s story ‘Shed His Grace’. It features a character called ‘T’, who sits before a bank of TV screens displaying various broadcasts from TV and cinema, distorted and magnified many times over. When T selects clips of President Ronald Reagan and the First Lady and freezes on their smiles, he strips naked and projects live-action images of his genitals onto the middle screens. Absorbed inside televisual reality, he then amputates his penis while the Reagans ‘watch’, with T apparently unaware of the consequences to his body in the real world. This seems both homage to and reimagining of Ballard’s own character (often referred to as ‘T-’) in The Atrocity Exhibition — who of course was obsessed with the then-Governor Reagan. But Blumlein updates the template for the 80s, when Reagan’s presidency was seen as a farce of sickly emotion masking devastating consequences for ordinary people. The story also echoes Ballard’s ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978), which features a character obsessed with a bank of TV monitors, similarly oblivious to the destruction he performs on his own body, so lost is he in the ‘gaze’.

Back in the New Worlds era, in 1964, Ballard noted the SF elements in Burroughs, which: ‘play a metaphorical role and are not intended to represent “three-dimensional” figures. These self-satirizing figments are part of the casual vocabulary of the space age’. For Ballard, Burroughs’s importance is that he ‘illustrates that the whole of SF’s imaginary universe has long been absorbed into the general consciousness, and that most of its ideas are now valid only in a kind of marginal spoofing’. This then provided a test bed for Ballard’s own work, in which ‘the next five minutes’ was to be the focus rather than the next 500 years, documenting the SF of today, so thoroughly absorbed and integrated into our everyday lives as to go unnoticed.

Early Gibson (photo courtesy Rudy Rucker). ‘High on some SF-sounding substance…’.

It was a move demonstrably ahead of its time. Almost 50 years later, when asked if the present day had caught up with his work, Gibson replied: ‘I thought that writing about the world today as I perceive it would probably be more challenging, in the real sense of science fiction, than continuing just to make things up… I don’t know if I’ll be able to make up an imaginary future in the same way… things are changing too quickly… you don’t have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future’.

Today, people continue to reignite heated debate about the worth of SF – re-asking the question ‘Does the future have a future?’, to quote Ballard. But anyone who has absorbed Ballard’s work has been privileged to know the outcome of such a debate for quite some time.

That is, ‘no’. The answer is No. No future for you.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘The Projectionst’ by ‘Alan Marker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

In Melbourne a few months back, I had occasion to see John Foxx’s live soundtrack performance and presentation of Tiny Colour Movies, a selection of found-film fragments. Regular readers will recall that I interviewed Foxx in 2006, when the TCM album had just been released. At the time John was maintaining the line that the album was the soundtrack to a found-film collection owned by one Arnold Weizcs-Bryant, who, we were told, collects home movies and ‘repurposed movie fragments’, indeed any type of film produced outside of commercial considerations and not meant for public consumption. John, so the story goes, attended a private screening of Arnold’s collection and was compelled to create a soundtrack to accompany these resonant images, what he calls ‘tiny colour movies’.

According to the TCM liner notes:

Arnold stipulates that the movies he collects must be short — none is more than seven or eight minutes long, and some have a duration of only a few seconds. He insists that these represent a new kind of art. One which is only now becoming possible to recognise. Photography has recently become acknowledged as a new technological art form and commercial cinema is currently undergoing this kind of reassessment … these ideas cross over with Stanley Brakhage. Indeed Arnold was very excited when he discovered Brakhage’s work a few years ago, since he feels it confirms many of his long held views about the aesthetic beauty and cultural significance of film fragments.

John Foxx, TCM liner notes (2006).

ABOVE: ‘Stray Sinatra Neurone’ by ‘Max Forbert’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

One of the filmmakers in Arnold’s collection is a certain Max Forbert, who makes what John terms ‘assemblage movies’. Forbert, supposedly a janitor in Hollywood, collected film scraps saved from the cutting-room floors he was sweeping for a living and later compiled them into his own sampled productions, a fragment of which was found by Arnold after Forbert’s death:

This is a section of a Forbert film that he identifies as using cutting room outtakes from a Sinatra movie, among others which remain unidentified. Shots are: Back view of a man in a suit looking through the window of a set interior (too tall for Sinatra — possibly an extra brought in to test-light a scene). Some brief outdoor shots of cars driving through a glittering downtown New York. Close-up of a woman applying deep red lipstick — again this appears to be a test shot of make-up and lighting. Location shots of Paris and Rome. Intricately cut together, these damaged fragments become an almost tactile essay on the sensual textures and enigmatic images that film can make available.

Foxx, TCM liner notes.

In the liner notes, John talks of the beauty of the imperfections in the films, the scratches and grain, the bleaching from wear and age, ‘elements which only add to the mystery, the emotional and intellectual resonance, and the sensual appreciation, of film’. Tiny Colour Movies, then, is not only an interesting document but also one that has overtly Ballardian overtones. For starters, there’s Ballard’s own interest in the subversive potential of home movies. But also, as I tried to tease out in the interview, The Atrocity Exhibition features many examples similar to what John identifies as a ‘sample film aesthetic’ in the Weizcs-Bryant collection, including therapeutic DIY film groups designed to aid the recovery of schizhophrenic patients:

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) Jeanne Moreau, (c) Jacqueline Kennedy (Johnson oath-taking). The use of a concealed stroboscopic device produced a major optical flutter in the audience, culminating in psychomotor disturbances and aggressive attacks directed against the still photographs of the subjects hung from the walls of the theatre. (2) A film of automobile accidents devised as a cinematic version of Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed. By chance it was found that slow-motion sequences of this film had a marked sedative effect, reducing blood pressure, respiration and pulse rates. Hypnagogic images were produced freely by patients. The film was also found to have a marked erotic content.

J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

Throughout Atrocity, T-, the book’s troubled protagonist, stitches and sutures together fragments from the media landscape — TV broadcasts, snatches of film, billboard representations of movie stars, the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination (even the ‘time music of the quasars’, derived from a strange contraption on his roof, a sculpture consisting of ‘antennae of metal aerials’) — into a form that will make sense to his disordered psyche. This is most clearly expressed in Ballard’s dictum that politics today has become a branch of advertising that sells personalities rather than policies, and that as a result politicians involve us in their fantasies without our consent — fantasies of power, ego, domination, celebrity, lust, all disguised as governance but which are really designed to place us in peripheral roles as impotent bystanders in the major decisions affecting our lives. In Atrocity, then, Ballard’s schizophrenic patients involve politicians in their fantasies, notably the hapless figure of Ronald Reagan:

The conceptual role of Reagan. Fragments of Reagan’s cinetized postures were used in the construction of model psychodramas in which the Reagan-figure played the role of husband, doctor, insurance salesman, marriage counsellor, etc. The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the non-functional character of Reagan. Reagan’s success therefore indicates society’s periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which re-formulate the roles of aggression and anality… In assembly kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.

ABOVE: T- devising the ‘optimum sex death of Ronald Reagan’ in Jonathan Weiss’s film of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Essentially, T- reclaims the inner space he feels has been invaded by media and advertising — the colonisation of the subconscious and the stealing of his memories — repopulating it with a collaged, open-ended landscape of images drawn from the free circulation of signs and signals of what we can now view, with hindsight, as Ballard’s own proto version of hyperreality.

As Ballard says,

The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylized glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings.

J.G. Ballard, annotations (1994) to The Atrocity Exhibition.

This strategy of treating all media and perceptual inputs as equal, with no distinction between the inner world of fantasy and the outer world of reality, seems a clear precursor to the kind of culture-jamming hacktivism that would reach a peak in the 90s with the sound artists Negativland and their followers:

Negativland occupies itself with recontextualizing captured fragments to create something entirely new — a psychological impact based on a new juxtaposition of diverse elements, ripped from their usual context, chewed up, and spit out as a new form of hearing the world around us.

As audio artists, we pursue a uniquely contemporary and wholly appropriate creative process which inevitably emerges out of our electronic age of media saturation and the reproducing technologies available to all consumers.

Negativland, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 (1995).

ABOVE: JGB in London Orbital.

More explicitly, Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, in the film version of London Orbital, acknowledge a clear debt to Ballard, whose influence over the film looms large, both in the interview with him in the middle section and in the reading by Sinclair of JGB’s ‘What I Believe’ that frames it. Sinclair and Petit see the Bluewater shopping centre, ‘Ground Zero’ for the film’s aesthetic, as an architecture mediated by technology, specifically the omniscient CCTV cameras which in their endless, plastic and formless state create what the filmmakers call ‘a new nostalgia, a new boredom, a new kind of time’. If everything is filmable then, Petit and Sinclair’s method of resistance is to become like the surveillance camera, to always be open and to always be filming but to locate the degradations in the tape, the fraying at the edges, recovering and recycling elements of old technologies, what Esther Leslie calls an ‘aesthetic of refuse’, drawing on the double meaning of ‘refuse’: as both rubbish, in that if everything is filmable then everything is junk, valueless; and as resistance, ie refusing to be dissolved into the ‘electronic slums’, to use Petit’s term. Thus Sinclair inserts his home movies into the end of the film, recovering a memory that is in danger of being overwritten yet still framed in the logic of the image, both inside and outside at once — an aesthetic that instantly recalls Atrocity and many other Ballard stories.

Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies project seems a direct descendant of this lineage, especially given this statement of John’s from our interview:

Movies will be played with, just as sound was sampled, for fun and surrealism. Simply because it can be done. I remember positing this five years ago in a talk at the London College of Music and Media. Around that time, I made a movie called A Man Made of Shadows from several other movies. This made a new movie from existing films by collaging, repurposing, hommaging, stealing, sampling, appropriating. Whatever you like to call it. ‘Repurposing’ is my current fave term, along with ‘theft’. Watch out Hollywood. Movies had better get used to this because it will happen. Inevitable.
…
We’ll also need to develop new aesthetics of film, to regard elements formerly regarded as faults as intrinsic qualities inherent in film itself. The beauty of scratches, bleached out film ends, emulsion faults, grain, frameslip, etc. Just as we now value surface scratches in audio sampling.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘Lost New York’ by ‘George Wilkes’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

So, freighted with all of this intertextual baggage, I was therefore very excited to learn that John was bringing the Arnold collection to Melbourne; I knew he’d premiered it overseas with a live soundtrack, but that’s about all I knew. I hadn’t really done much research on John since we last communicated, but I still harboured the suspicion that, as I detailed in the afterword to the interview, Arnold and the filmmakers were fictitious personas and that the films were in fact John’s own inventions. I sensed various clues that gave the game away including the name of one of the filmmakers, ‘Alan Marker’. This seemed far too close to the aura of Chris Marker (but with an amusingly British first name), especially given John’s stated admiration for La Jetée, which of course is also about memory being overwritten and recovered.

I felt there were more clues, not least the fact that the synopses of the various filmmakers and their motivations in the liner notes to the album resembled John’s own very individualistic short stories, especially one he wrote a while back called ‘The Quiet Man’ (for even with the best of intentions the best of artists can find it hard to disguise their ‘voice’ when inhabiting alter egos):

The old newscasts affected him greatly, the Kennedy Assassination, the images of Christine Keeler, early Beatles footage, all in a slightly worn Black and White. He edited together a film containing all these images and more, and played it constantly. He found it profoundly moving, the images gaining even more emotive power with each viewing. All these characters of his past moving in old daylight, waving and smiling and moving on.

One of his favourite films was The Swimmer starring Burt Lancaster, and he often played this without the soundtrack, drowning in the crude beauty of its early technicolour.

At home, too, he kept a small 8mm projector for playing home movies that he came across in his exploration of the city’s deserted apartments. He was fascinated by all the tiny intimate details of these films, the jerky figures waving from seaside and garden at weddings and birthdays and baptisms, records of whole families and their pets growing and changing through the years.

John Foxx, ‘The Quiet Man’, 1978.

In fact, my musings sparked off quite a bit of debate in various forums about the nature of Arnold, with many people, including myself, initially believing the entire story of Mr Weizcs-Bryant and his amazing collection of found film.

But John remained tight-lipped… or so I thought. More on that later.

ABOVE: ‘Skyscraper’ by ‘Jerry Golden’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

From the first film of the performance, I was drawn into the degraded beauty of the Super 8 footage and the blown-out and colour-saturated celluloid on display. And yes, this was clearly found footage, the genuine article. It appeared I was wrong — you can’t fake period details, hairstyles and cars, on John’s limited budget. But it had been assembled artfully, like the looped film of traffic on LA freeways drawing out the beauty of this perpetual motion sculpture. Or time-lapsed shadows and sunlight passing across buildings, slowed down or reversed, the motion of the elements becoming imperceptible, the buildings and backgrounds the same but not quite as shadows gently ripple across them as if the fabric of time and molecular space was slowly re-weaving itself. When a building became covered completely in shadow, the film was edited so that another building emerged from the black and into daylight, a slow modernist dance of compacted grace and proportion. It seemed a trick of the mind designed to evoke the passing of civilisation, like the classic Ballardian ideal that treats reality as just a stage set that can be pulled away at any moment.

At this point, I thought I might need to re-assess: if these films were genuine, maybe Arnold was, too.

There was much to enjoy throughout the program. Extraterrestrial, sun-soaked clouds magnified to massive proportions so that they seemed composed of nothing but pure colour and grain. Flickering film projected onto women’s faces, turning them into shapeshifting cats and dogs with whiskers and elongated ears. A naked woman underwater, swimming among the wrecks of submerged automobiles as the sunlight from above the surface turns her and everything it touches into a blue dream.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘Underwater Automobiles’ by ‘Robert Rouncefield’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

But then I began to imagine that John had made a very clever play: he’d inserted what I was sure were his own films into the found footage. The giveaway for me was twofold. First, the film ‘Smokescreen’ by ‘Unknown’ featuring a man walking into a series of smoke-filled rooms — we never see his face as it is either obscured by smoke, or he is filmed from the side or behind. In the liner notes, Arnold says this:

I saw these marvellously lit sequences which seemed to have a very definite story, yet there is no explanation or development or resolution. We can have no idea what the filmmaker had in mind. Because of this lack of resolution, they seem strangely suspended. You begin to make connections, you feel compelled to write a story. But there is none. There can be none. The effect is tantalising, like a damaged and incomplete fragment of memory.

But, I’m sure, both the film and this explanation is very obviously the voice of Foxx; this film, to me, is another iteration of Foxx’s ‘quiet man’ persona, the ghost moving through the streets of the city, his identity never quite coalescing, always escaping the gaze. As John has said, ‘The point of view I’ve always worked from is that of a ghost in the city — someone who is a sort of drifting, detached onlooker — but still vulnerable and trying against the odds to maintain a sort of dignity in the face of all the static.’

ABOVE: ‘Smokescreen’ by ‘Unknown’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

There appeared to be more confirmation in the film ‘A Peripheral Character’ by ‘Evan Parker’, a montage of shots supposedly featuring a mysterious extra from Hollywood films:

He has appeared in dozens of major Hollywood movies and American television series, yet he is completely unknown to the public. He appears as a background character, a passer-by, often wearing a grey suit, or a raincoat. His calm unhurried walk, his spectacles, his lapel flower and his habit of turning his head briefly (seemingly so that his face will be momentarily on the film), are what eventually make him distinctive. The film was researched and assembled by the man who first discovered his existence, Evan Parker. Parker is an academic whose field is the evolution of Hollywood. In the course of his studies, Parker watched hundreds of films and had begun to speculate about making a study of the extras, those figures passing by in the background. That is when he began to notice one who appeared to be present in several movies. Intrigued, Parker began a search and was surprised to discover the presence of this figure in dozens of major and minor Hollywood movies. This is a slow-motion montage of all the clips of his appearances so far discovered. His identity remains unknown.

TCM liner notes.

Note the reference to the GREY suit!

‘A Peripheral Character’ is an intriguing concept and very well put together, but at times you could tell John had judiciously selected clips of not the same mysterious person, but of similar looking actors from dozens of films, always with their face half turned away, or shot from behind, or bending over — you might just be convinced if you weren’t paying close enough attention that you were viewing just the one ghost in the city.

By the program’s end, I felt as if I’d finally worked it out for sure: that ‘Arnold Weizcs-Bryant’ was merely another psuedonym for Dennis Leigh (Foxx’s real name), and that it was indeed John Foxx himself who is the passionate collector of found footage, the underground filmmaker inspired by what he has stumbled across to create his own ‘sample films’, his own ‘tiny colour movies’…

And the live music? Well, it was classic Foxx, yes, lovely electronic washes drifting as timelessly as the shadows and sunlight of the films. I do like John’s work, but even so I have to say I was disappointed that there didn’t seem to be much improvisation, given that this was ostensibly a live performance of the soundtrack. Tracks stopped and started exactly when the films did, and it all seemed a bit too perfectly sequenced, too faithful to the CD. I would have liked more of a continuous flow, more segues to sustain the atmosphere, more improv, more of the scratches, collages and squelches that John so admires in the films, for as good as the music is, it just seems far too clean, too digital in the live context to suit the conceptual conceit of the films themselves. As a standalone CD it’s great; as an audiovisual package, I’m not so sure.

And then it was question time, and John appeared from behind his bank of keyboards, dressed head to toe in black like a handsomer version of Lux Interior. Before the show I’d thought of sticking my hand up and asking him if Arnold really did exist, but as I was watching the films I decided it just didn’t matter at all to me anymore. Whatever the answer, either way, John’s assemblage of the results had become compelling — if John wanted to keep up the pretense, if indeed that’s what it was, I was happy to play along. Besides I’d already voiced my suspicions two years ago and I didn’t want to seem like a curmudgeon or a stalker by hounding him forever more about it. Also, I was curious to see if anyone else in the audience would broach the subject. Perhaps no-one even cares…

ABOVE: Stills from ‘A Peripheral Character’ by ‘Evan Parker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

Questions were asked about Ultravox, about the soundtrack and always John’s answers were mystical, evasive, talking of dreams and flight. Then someone asked him about the Hollywood extra. ‘Did you ever ask Arnold if he had any info on the extra, or whether he’d tried to trace his identity?’ John fidgeted, looked a little uncomfortable. ‘Er… no’ he replied. The mere mention of Arnold appeared to be making him nervous.

Then someone else stuck up a hand. ‘John, I read the piece on Ballardian where you talk about the influence of J.G. Ballard on your work.’ Ah, he’d read my interview, meaning he’d know of the afterword where I first expressed my doubts! We were getting warm, no doubt about it, but would this guy pop the burning question? But ‘Which of his novels is your favourite?’ was the interrogation and the moment had passed again.

A few more questions and then someone asked John if he wanted a beer. He quickly said he’d love one, but then just as quickly said his goodbyes and hustled off the stage, always the enigma, always elusive, never to be seen again. The end.

And I couldn’t help but think of part 2 of our interview, for I was greatly surprised to see him in Melbourne in the first place.

Because when I asked him if he would ever tour Australia, this is what he said: ‘I’d like to. But it will most likely be as drifting molecules about twenty years from now…’

POSTSCRIPT: After the screening, my dormant interest in John Foxx was reignited and I went Googling for more information. As I mentioned, all I really knew of the background to this project was what had emerged in our interview. As far as I knew, for others, as it was for me, the mystery was still sustainable. Little did I know that John had recently come clean! In this post on John’s forum, for example, it’s claimed that ‘The footage that JF and Mike Barker use in TCM is bought at car boot sales, jumble sales and at market stalls. Sometimes people put their home movie collections up for grabs on ebay… this is then digitised and re-edited to produce TCM.’

And this is confirmed in an interview John did just before the Melbourne screening:

I used to buy reels of film (from Brick Lane and Portobello Road markets) and didn’t know what they were and view them to see if there was anything interesting on them. Eventually I amassed all this stuff and didn’t quite know what to do with it. Then I saw this collector’s reel of films one night and thought ‘Yeah — that’s exactly right! It is finite. It does have a place in history’. And some of it is unique and some of the stories behind the pieces are very interesting too. It’s like reading an obituary; which is something I like — it’s not morbid at all. It’s very interesting because you get a summation of someone’s life and their achievements…

So, is it actually John’s collection on display? It would appear that way, yes, judging by this interview. It would appear that Arnold is John, just as John is Dennis. And what of the filmmakers and their backstories? As I wrote in the afterword to the 2006 interview, after mulling over the ‘Frank Watts’ film:

Urban drift; walking through the city; submitting to psychic entry points … surely this is yet another brilliantly evocative John Foxx short story? Yes — the more I think about it, the more I think that’s the case … re-reading the liner notes, the parallels with these ‘filmmakers’, with their obsessions and aesthetics, to Foxx himself now seem all too obvious (let’s not forget that ‘John Foxx’ is a character that Dennis Leigh himself has said he inhabits because ‘John Foxx is smarter than me’).

Arnold’s ‘filmmakers’ are called Robert Rouncefield; Jerry Golden; Earnst Lubin — like ‘John Foxx’, these are humdrum yet fanciful names, mythical yet ordinary, dull names to the point of incandescence. Their bios and summaries exhibit all the traits of the condensed novels in The Atrocity Exhibition.

But there would be one final nail in the coffin…

ABOVE: John Foxx answering audience questions after the Sydney screening of TCM.

Something else I found in my latest research was this video of John’s Q&A after the Sydney performance of TCM. Note that this was filmed the day after the Melbourne gig. Now recall the Melbourne audience member who asked John if he wanted a beer. Finally, watch the Sydney video: as the uploader writes, ‘Note the beer in his hand. Someone from the audience was kind enough to rush off and get him one.’

Someone had obviously been taking notes in Melbourne, had flown up to Sydney, and wasn’t letting John rush off the stage without a drink this time!

Perhaps they thought the beer might loosen his tongue just a little. Indeed, it appears that way for in this Q&A John is far more expansive and revealing than in the session I attended, and even goes so far as to say that some of the TCM movies are outright fiction, ‘complete lies’ as he calls them, created by him under the guise of a fictitious filmmaker and inserted into the program to mess with the audience’s perception:

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Did you cut some of those movies up?

JOHN FOXX: Oh, some of them were invented. And some aren’t. And I want to use these films as a way of telling stories. And being dishonest. Because I think dishonesty’s really interesting. What do you call someone who tries to convince you that something is true when it’s not? You call them a liar, don’t you? So what do you call an author? And that’s the thing that really interests me, is that line between truth and fiction. So some things are true in the movies, and some are complete lies. And I think it’s very interesting to try and work out which is which. Some of them are totally fabricated and some aren’t. But they’re all made up of the real thing.

So what one of the filmmakers practices, in other words cutting Hollywood up into pieces and reassembling it, I’ve been doing as well. And I want to continue doing that, because I think film is raw material now, to be used in any way we want. We’ve all grown up with that stuff. And I even dream it. Because I went to the cinema when I was 7, 6, 5 years old in Lancashire. And Lancashire was so grey, in England, and the cinema was so grey, everything merged together. You know, I was usually covered in soot when I was a kid, and everything was in black and white, the factory chimneys and smoke and all that, and when I looked on the screen it was the same thing. So all my memories of it are mixed up in the movies, old science fiction movies and utter rubbish. None of which I could understand as a kid, so I had to make things up with a kit from my own mind. It became a part of my dream language. And I still dream it. So I think we all mix stuff in strange ways because it’s in our heads, isn’t it? We’ve grown up with it. So why not reassemble it in the way we want to? Because we own it, you know — we don’t have to be dominated by it. It’s ours for God’s sake, not theirs — we own it.

However, I’m glad I went into the screening not knowing about John’s admission. It meant there was still a bit of mystery and wonder about the project, it meant I could ‘script’ the story a little bit as I tried to link and crosslink various ideas and theories — using a ‘kit’ from my own mind.

Does John’s admission matter in the end? No — the project stands on its own merits. I was reminded of how many people still take Empire of the Sun to be Ballard’s autobiography, and how they are often greatly surprised and sometimes angry to discover the book is as ‘fictional’ as the rest of his novels. In this day and age, surely it is not too farfetched to suggest that authenticity is just another mask? I personally love the idea of creating a character and inhabiting it so that the boundaries become blurred, inhabiting the interzones and interstitial zones, ‘the yes or no of the borderzone’ to borrow a phrase from Atrocity, escaping definition and classification.

As does Ballard, for that matter, who has his own passion for the idea of faked newsreels, and the notion of fiction passed off as truth:

The fake war newsreel (and most war newsreels are faked to some extent, usually filmed on manoeuvres) has always intrigued me — my version of Platoon, Full Metal Jacket or All Quiet on the Western Front would be a newsreel compilation so artfully faked as to convince the audience that it was real, while at the same time reminding them that it might be wholly contrived. The great Italian neo-realist, Roberto Rossellini, drew close to this in Open City and Paisa.

J.G. Ballard, annotations to The Atrocity Exhibition, 1994.

For anyone interested in Ballard — especially Atrocity — and experimental film, John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies performance is highly recommended. I’m not sure any of it is especially ‘cutting edge’ — Foxx’s liner notes, for example, state that the Alan Marker stuff (as commanding as it is, one of my favourites from the set) is ‘surely unique in the history of filmmaking’, yet I saw the exact same technique performed with skulls and ghost imagery last week in Melbourne by Australian artists who’d been practising it for some time. And overall, in terms of experimental and repurposed film, the phenomenal, unparalleled work of the likes of Guy Sherwin, the old master, and Ben Russell and Ben Rivers, the heirs, is certainly more of an assault in both audio and visual terms.

What Tiny Colour Movies undoubtedly is, however, is Foxxian: too cold by half for some, beautiful and sad for others, an industrial spiritualism and an unalloyed sensuality of machines.

Arnold Weizcs-Bryant: R.I.P.

..:: Previously:
+ John Foxx: A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture, part 1
+ John Foxx: A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture, part 2

..:: More information::
+ Metamatic: John Foxx’s official site
+ Tiny Colour Movies official site

I saw George Romero’s zombie flick Dawn of the Dead for the first time at the Melbourne International Film Festival last night. What a super film. What a statement. And very, very funny too. And in fact very reminiscent of Kingdom Come, for Dead, like KC, also features a sealed-off shopping mall in which a band of resistance fighters attempt to restart a micro society, sustained yet ultimately imprisoned by the trappings of consumer capitalism.

The mall in both Ballard and Romero becomes a city, a country, a galaxy, a self-sustaining micronational state seceding from reality, a State of mind absorbing and zombifying all it touches, and the faceless, cartoonish football hordes in KC are consumer zombies as much as the walking dead in Romero are metaphorically intended to be.

Yet, if you tweak your perspective just a little, the survivors in both could conversely be read as the oppressors, the old world clinging to its accumulated wealth, hording it for themselves in the face of the zombie attack — an all-devouring, ever-growing underclass.

For Romero, like Ballard, is nothing if not a master of ambivalence.

The most Ballardian part of the film is when the survivors seal off a department store — privileged retail space — from the zombies in the mall’s concourse, ie the tacky public domain. The survivors turn on the store’s muzak and roam the aisles to take whatever they want from the limitless, yet depthless wonders of consumerism, free to act out their decadent bourgeois fantasies, setting up their attic space with expensive furniture and luxury TV sets, even though the apocalypse that has blighted the outside world means there is nothing to watch anymore.

Watching this sequence, I could almost imagine yet another parallel world in which KC was written in the late 70s, and George Romero, the master of guerilla filmmaking — an aesthetic and a philosophy that informs the guerilla responses in his storylines — had become the first director to adapt Ballard for the big screen, setting the tone for future Ballard adaptations to come: raw, uncompromising, revolutionary, and shot through with the blackest humour, the perfect defence against insanity.

In short: how Ballard’s books, and Romero’s films, appear to me.

Over at Fantastic Journal, Charles Holland has a fabulous post that begins with a rumination on the 1:43 scale model of JFK’s presidential limo sitting on his mantelpiece, and makes its way to a very perceptive analysis of the nature of conspiracy theory as it applies to Ballard’s Atrocity short, ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’:

Ballard’s story differs from conspiracy theory in an important respect. Although, like them, it uses collage and displacement – the sliding in one of one scenario for another, storylines and characters cut and pasted from alternative worlds* – it works through absurdity, highlighting the seam between the accepted reality and the absurd version he posits in its place. Ballard’s story uses collage as an avant garde device of radical disjunction and violent displacement… Conspiracy theory strives for truth, but one that always slips away. By casting doubt on truth in the first place it inherently unbalances itself. Despite its controversy at the time of writing, Ballard’s story is as much a satire on conspiracy theory as it is a tasteless deflation of the importance of the event itself.

More at Fantastic Journal.

BALLARDOSCOPE: SOME ATTEMPTS AT APPROACHING THE WRITER AS A VISIONARY

by Jordi Costa

by Mike Holliday

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘News from the Sun’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age, Arkham House, 1988).

The late 70s and early 80s represent a sort of interregnum in Ballard’s career — between the last of the urban disaster novels, High-Rise (1975), and the success of Empire of the Sun (1984). During this period he published two of his most atypical novels, The Unlimited Dream Company and Hello America, and returned to earlier concerns with three short stories that are preoccupied with time, and which recall such works as The Crystal World and ‘The Voices of Time’. These three stories — ‘News from the Sun’ (1981), ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982), and ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982) — are all concerned with a psychological disturbance of our perception of the flow of time, a dislocation that has been caused, somehow, by human space-flight. These stories are so similar to each other that one might suspect self-plagiarism, were they not written by Ballard. In the chronologically arranged Complete Short Stories, they sit there one after the other, eighty or so pages of obsessive investigation of the same themes.

‘Memories of the Space Age’ can serve as an exemplar for all three stories. Dr Mallory, an ex-NASA physician, has driven from Vancouver with his wife, Anne, to reach an abandoned Cape Kennedy in search of Hinton — an astronaut who murdered his co-pilot whilst in orbit. Mallory and his wife are suffering from a ‘space-sickness’, in which time appears to slow so that a few minutes of normal time seem to last all day. This condition was first observed in returned astronauts, then in other NASA personnel, and has now spread out to envelop the whole of Florida. Mallory hopes that by returning to the source of the sickness he can understand its true meaning:

The murder of the astronaut and the public unease that followed had marked the end of the space age, an awareness that man had committed an evolutionary crime by travelling into space, that he was tampering with the elements of his own consciousness. The fracture of that fragile continuum erected by the human psyche through millions of years had soon shown itself, in the confused sense of time displayed by the inhabitants of the towns near the space centre. Cape Kennedy and the whole of Florida itself became a poisoned land to be forever avoided …

As time slows, it seems to Mallory that the world is bathed in a bright light, with ‘photons backing up all the way to the sun’. The descriptions of surrounding objects resemble those in The Crystal World: a fountain turns into ‘a glass tree that shed an opalescent fruit onto his shoulders and hands’, and ‘the waves were no longer running towards the beach, and were frozen ruffs of icing sugar’.

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age).

At the Cape, Hinton has collected a number of antique aircraft, apparently in an attempt to engineer his own escape from time:

We had to get out of time — that’s what the space programme was all about. … Flight and time, Mallory, they’re bound together. The birds have always known that. To get out of time we first need to learn to fly. That’s why I’m here. I’m teaching myself to fly, going back through all these old planes to the beginning. I want to fly without wings …

Hinton attacks Mallory from his aircraft, and Mallory realizes that his own real aim is to kill Hinton. They seek each other through the deserted Cape and abandoned suburbs, but eventually Hinton sets fire to his aircraft and, taking Anne Mallory with him, he climbs the Shuttle launch platform and steps off with her ‘into the light’. Knowing that time will have stopped for his wife and Hinton as they experience this final moment of flight, Mallory looks forward to his own ending — he plans to open the cage housing a tiger that was once part of a small zoo:

… without time the lion could at last lie down with the lamb. … The key to the tiger cage he held always in his hand. There was little time left to him now, the light-filled world had transformed itself into a series of tableaux from a pageant that celebrated the founding days of creation. In the finale every element in the universe, however humble, would take its place on the stage in front of him. … He would unlock the door soon … lie down with this beast in a world beyond time.

The other two stories repeat the formula, with variations. In ‘News from the Sun’ people who have been associated with the space-programme, or who watched the flights on TV, are suffering deep fugues that leave them unconscious and motionless for increasing periods each day. Some of the victims eventually learn to become conscious through these fugues and they then become aware of a world where objects are endlessly multiplied as their past, present and future selves become simultaneously present. The sickness in ‘Myths of the Near Future’ is characterized by a ‘reluctance to go out of doors, the abandonment of job, family and friends, a dislike of daylight, a gradual loss of weight and retreat into a hibernating self ‘ and in the later stages by a perception that time is slowing-down to an eventual frozen instant.

All three stories are remarkably similar. In each case, (i) the time distortions represent a psychic disorder caused by mankind attempting to leave the planet; (ii) each of the protagonists realizes that this change makes available to them a world where time no longer exists and all events — past and future — are simultaneously present; (iii) this new ‘world without time’ is characterized by a bright light; and (iv) the stories all include astronauts (or people who believe they are astronauts) and characters obsessed with flight, for example with micro-light planes, antique aircraft, and birds. Even minor elements are repeated: in all three stories the main protagonist has taken a long journey to or from Cape Kennedy once the psychological disorientation becomes apparent, and they each lose a considerable amount of weight as the condition progresses.

This repetition of themes in three stories in such a short space of time is rather puzzling, particularly as the concept of transcending time had already featured strongly in Ballard’s fiction in the early and mid-1960s. Why should he return to this theme in 1981-2? And why visit it three times in such a short period? In trying to understand this conundrum, it’s interesting to look at some of the comments that Ballard has made about his own creative activity, where he admits that the forces driving his imaginative processes are obscure, even to himself:

I just tend to write whatever comes mentally to hand, and what I find interesting at a particular time. These decisions as to what one’s going to write tend to be made somewhere at the back of one’s mind, so one can’t consciously say: ‘that’s what I’m going to write’. It doesn’t work out like that! (interview in ‘J. G. Ballard: The First Twenty Years’, 1976).

I’m barely aware of what is going on. Recurrent ideas assemble themselves, obsessions solidify themselves … (interview in ‘The Paris Review’, 1984).

I feel that the writer of fantasy has a marked tendency to select images and ideas which directly reflect the internal landscapes of his mind, and the reader of fantasy must interpret them on this level, distinguishing between the manifest content, which may seen obscure, meaningless or nightmarish, and the latent content, the private vocabulary of symbols drawn by the narrative from the writer’s mind (‘Time, Memory and Inner Space’, 1963).

If we take these comments at face value, then something within the landscape of Ballard’s mind was presumably driving him in the direction taken by these three stories from the early 1980s. Perhaps a clue is evident in his own personal situation. Following the death of his wife, Ballard had brought up his three young children on his own. His close involvement and the deep satisfaction he got from his family is evident in both his semi-autobiographical novel The Kindness of Women and his recent autobiography Miracles of Life. But by the late ’70s all three children had left home, and interviews at the time show the deep impact this had on him:

… the absence of those three children left a colossal vacuum in my life. … It is very strange … So I’ve been asking that question for at least a year — what the hell do I do now?’ (interview conducted in 1979 and published in J. G. Ballard: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, 1984)

I get up in the morning and the day just sort of stretches like the plains of Kansas, with not a speck on the horizon. Which is great, of course! (interview conducted in 1982 and published in Re/Search #8/9: J G Ballard, 1984)

And in The Kindness of Women, the fictionalized version of Ballard explains ‘I spent the whole of my adult life with children. Suddenly, when I’m fifty, there’s this colossal vacuum. Mothers feel the same way. Nature hasn’t provided a contingency plan — or, as Dick would say, nature’s contingency plan is death.’ So it isn’t surprising that Ballard’s unconscious creative processes should turn once again to the notion of time, and of time’s involvement with the creation of meaning in one’s life.

ABOVE: Artwork from Ambit for ‘News from the Sun’. Illustration by Mark Foreman.

But why the specific obsession with a ‘frozen time’? I think that to comprehend this, we have to go back to Ballard’s idea that reality is, at bottom, a construct of the human brain. This has long been has been one of his favourite themes in interviews, and here’s a typical example:

What I do have is the notion, which I take from modern experimental psychology, that the universe presented to us by our senses is a kind of ramshackle construct that happens to suit the central nervous system of an intelligent bipedal mammal with a rather short conceptual and physical range. We see rooms and people and have perceptions — but it’s all a construct (interview in ‘Rolling Stone’, 1987).

The roots of this idea seem to lie in Ballard’s boyhood in Shanghai and his early grasp of the notion that the everyday world is a sort of stage-set, as he describes in his autobiography Miracles of Life in a passage where he and his father enter a deserted nightclub:

[I] walked on tiptoe through the silent gaming rooms where roulette tables lay on their sides and the floor was covered with broken glasses and betting chips. Gilded statues propped up the canopy of the bars that ran the length of the casino, and on the floor ornate chandeliers cut down from the ceiling tilted among the debris of bottles and old newspapers. Everywhere gold glimmered in the half-light, transforming this derelict casino into a magical cavern from the Arabian Nights tales. But it held a deeper meaning for me, the sense that reality itself was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment, and that no matter how magnificent anything appeared, it could be swept aside into the debris of the past.

If our reality is a constructed reality, then this applies equally to our notion of time and those aspects of our lives that are closely connected with our sense of lived time, such as our memories, hopes, and ideals:

… the view of modern psychology [is] that the brain presents us with only a ramshackle view of reality, a partial construct imperfect in numerous ways, from the more trivial — the geometry of the rooms we inhabit — to the more serious — our sense of time, memory, our hopes, ideals and private mythologies (interview in ‘Impulse: The Magazine of Time and Space’, 1988).

And if our sense of lived time is a construct, then it becomes possible to conceive of an alternative form of reality that contains some form of timelessness or a non-linear time. But the source of this alternative notion of time must lie within ourselves, or as one of the characters in ‘Memories of the Space Age’ tells Mallory, ‘Doctor … The real Cape Kennedy is inside your head, not out here.’

Implicit in what Mallory refers to as ‘a world without time, an indefinite and unending present’ is the disappearance or metamorphosis of the future and of the past. The evanescence of the future is heralded in each of these three stories by the failure of the manned space programme and the resulting psychic disorientation, and is reflected in the landscapes, which are derelict or overgrown and largely deserted of inhabitants: ‘an immense silence of deserted marinas and shopping malls, abandoned citrus farms and retirement estates, silent ghettoes and airports.’ The shedding of the past can be seen in the loss of weight that occurs in those who experience time dislocation — as Mallory puts it, ‘he and Anne had each lost more than thirty pounds, as if their bodies were carrying out a re-inventory of themselves for the coming world without time.’ And the past explicitly withdraws in ‘Memories of the Space Age’:

Thankfully, as time evaporated, so did memory. He looked at his few possessions, now almost meaningless … The minutes were beginning to stretch, urged on by this eventless universe free of birds and aircraft. His memory faltered, he was forgetting his past, the clinic at Vancouver and its wounded children, his wife asleep in the hotel at Titusville, even his own identity.

But the stories do not represent the past and the future as disappearing completely. Instead they become available again in a new form of existence that brings past, present and future together simultaneously. In ‘News from the Sun’ and ‘Myths of the Near Future’ this occurs explicitly through a process that is reminiscent of the crystallization of the universe that takes place in The Crystal World — the multiplication of objects so that all the different versions, past, present and future, exist at one and the same time:

The sun was annealing plates of copper light to his skin, dressing his arms and shoulders in a coronation armour. Time was condensing around him, a thousand replicas of himself from the past and future had invaded the present and clasped themselves to him. … The flow of light through the air 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 (‘Myths of the Near Future’).

ABOVE: Artwork from Ambit for ‘News from the Sun’. Illustration by Mark Foreman.

But sometimes, the merging of time is more indirect, as in ‘News from the Sun’ where Franklin describes himself as having a ‘premonition of the past’ and a ‘nostalgia for the future’, or in this passage from ‘Myths of the Near Future’:

There was a sense of stop-frame about the whole of his past life — his childhood and school–days, McGill and Cambridge, the junior partnership in Vancouver, his courtship of Elaine, together seemed like so many clips run at the wrong speed. The dreams and ambitions of everyday life, the small hopes and failures, were attempts to bring these separated elements into a single whole again. Emotions were the stress lines in this over–stretched web of events.

The essential thesis of these three stories is that the withdrawal or transfiguration of past and future should enable us to live in a more real and rewarding eternal present, and this new mode of being is described as transcending our everyday existence entirely. When Hinton and Anne Mallory step off the Shuttle gantry into empty space, they will continue to exist in an eventless eternity that others will perceive as merely a few seconds as they fall to the ground. As Dr. Mallory reflects,

It was curious that images of heaven or paradise always presented a static world, not the kinetic eternity one would expect, the roller-coaster of a hyperactive funfair, the screaming Luna Parks of LSD and psilocybin. It was a strange paradox that given eternity, an infinity of time, they chose to eliminate the very element offered in such abundance.

One of the underlying attractions of apprehending the simultaneity of all existence is that it will somehow enable us to transcend death. In ‘Myths of the Near Future’, Sheppard is convinced that his wife is still alive even though she has died, and explains: ‘Everything that’s ever happened, all the events that will ever happen, are taking place together. We can die, and yet still live, at the same time. … No one who has ever lived can ever really die.’ And in an interview, Ballard tells us why The Crystal World is one of his favourite novels: ‘the idea that time might condense like ice, that we might somehow escape from that flux of time that sweeps us towards the end … is intriguing’ (interview in SFX, 1996).

If we can put to one side the ecstatic descriptions in Ballard’s fiction, it becomes apparent that an eventless eternity is the predictable result of the emasculation of the past and the future. Without memories, hopes or ideals to give meaning to the events of our lives, we find merely a series of occurrences, and the present starts to blur into an endless procession. But if this is the case, then the nature of such a world-without-time is ambiguous — instead of being a life lived to the full, an endless present can instead be deadening and boring, a major concern in Ballard’s later writings:

Once you move to the suburbs, time stops. People measure their lives by consumer goods, the dreams that money can buy. I think that’s more dangerous. People have no loyalties anymore. … Maybe we’re going to live in an eventless future. In a hundred years, the world might be very, very boring. (interview in ‘The Face’, 1988)

That Ballard holds this two-fold view of an endless present is not surprising, given the ambiguity that runs through all his work. Responding to a comment by Hans Ulrich Obrist that ambiguity is central to his writings, Ballard enthusiastically agrees: ‘I hope everything I have written is ambiguous, reflecting the paradoxical faces that make up human nature.’ Given this ambivalence, it is best to view an eternal present as one of Ballard’s extreme metaphors, or as an example of his predictive mythologies:

which in a sense provide an operating formula by which we can deal with our passage through consciousness — our movements through time and space. … mythologies that you can actually live by (interview in Re/Search #8/9: J G Ballard, 1984).

These predictive mythologies can be utilized via our imagination, and in Ballard’s iconography the imagination is often symbolized by flight:

Deserted runways have a tremendous magnetic pull for me. … The concrete strip just beckons one into new realms. Indeed, any major airport in the world charges me with a powerful sense of inspiration: they offer new points of departure for the imagination (interview in ‘ZG Magazine’, 1988).

Imagination has special significance because our perception of reality is, for Ballard, an artificial construct, and more particularly a type of construct that may have been necessary when mankind was struggling for survival in a dangerous world but which is limiting and restricting in a society where external dangers are largely absent and the need is rather for an exploration of alternative possibilities. Hence it is to imagination that Ballard looks for help in understanding how we are now to live:

Don’t forget that man is, and has been for at least a million years, a hunting species surviving with difficulty in a terribly dangerous world. In order to survive, his brain has been trained to screen out anything but the most essential and the most critical. Watch that hillcrest! Beware of that cave mouth! Kill that bird! Dodge that spear! … But now the world is essentially far less dangerous. (interview in ‘Penthouse’, 1979)

Bearing in mind the difficulties that a wholly rational being would have in coping with a largely hostile environment, there must be enormous evolutionary advantages in possessing a powerful imagination, contrary to what one would assume, or the pressures of natural selection would long since have eliminated anyone handicapped by this confusing ability to invent an imaginary alternative to the world presented to us by our senses. And that, I take it, is the vital function which the imagination performs for the central nervous system and a brilliant stratagem for dealing with crucial limitations in the brain’s picture of reality. … The more we can engage our imaginations, therefore, the better, and the most important task for each of us is to test the imperfections of reality against the perfectibility of the dream. (interview in ‘Impulse: The Magazine of Time and Space’, 1988)

We can now see why symbols of flight — antique planes, gliders, birds — figure throughout these three stories. It is only by using our powers of imagination that we can work out what Ballard’s extreme metaphor might mean for us, how we might live in a manner other than that ordained by a linear time that ‘runs into the future like a narrow-gauge scenic railway’ as Ballard tellingly describes the chronology of our lives.

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age).

In fact, at the end of ‘Myths of the Near Future’ the metaphor changes when the characters find that they can merge their past, present and future selves into a single body:

[Martinsen's] body was now dressed in a dozen glimmering images of himself, refractions of past and present seen through the prism of time. … [Sheppard] embraced the helpless doctor, searching for the strong sinews of the young student and the wise bones of the elderly physician. In a sudden moment of recognition, Martinsen found himself, his youth and his age merged in the open geometries of his face, this happy rendezvous of his past and future selves. … they would move on, to the towns and cities of the south, to the sleepwalking children in the parks, to the dreaming mothers and fathers embalmed in their homes, waiting to be woken from the present into the infinite realm of their time-filled selves.

There is no suggestion here of a transcendent and eternal existence within an instant of time. Instead, the present is re-established by incorporating the past and future within itself, and they once again become available to create a meaningful life.

So the continual struggle is to how to relate the present to past and future. If these relations become too rigid, then our understanding of reality becomes conservative and restrictive, a theme that occurs regularly in Ballard’s interview comments:

One needs to break the conventional enamel that encases everything. … All around us, in practically every aspect of our lives, decisions are being made for us to guarantee our safe passage through this world. … There’s a sort of constant struggle on a minute-by-minute basis throughout our lives, throughout every day; one needs to dismantle that smothering conventionalized reality that wraps itself around us. There’s a conspiracy, in which we play our willing part, just to stabilize the world we inhabit, or our small corner of it. One needs at the same time to dismantle that smothering set of conventions that we call everyday reality. (interview in ‘Re/Search #8/9: J G Ballard’, 1984)

The danger is that our memories, hopes and ideals act as conventions that stabilize our lives only too well. In reaction against this, we are driven towards the metaphor of a world without past or future, a world that is depicted in its most extreme form in Ballard’s ‘The Summer Cannibals’, one of the pieces that was included in The Atrocity Exhibition. The story concerns a visit by the protagonist (not named in this story, but I shall call him Travis) and his wife to a Mediterranean resort, the entire action taking place within a brief period of time — perhaps a couple of days. There’s much play on the way in which people’s lives are enervated at this type of resort: ‘exhausted by the sun, the resort was almost deserted’, ‘bodies … as inert as the joints of meat on supermarket counters’, and so on. Time passes, but nothing much happens, rather as in Ballard’s Vermilion Sands stories. This enervation is reflected in Travis’s relationship with his wife: ‘An enormous neutral ground now divided them, across which their emotions signalled like meaningless semaphores.’ And this neutral ground, which the sun opens up by bleaching away meaning, feelings, etc., is something that Travis can utilize — it opens up new vistas for him to explore. As meaning drains out of the resort and out of the lives of the people within it, the normal sense of time disappears. So the past, instead of being a history, becomes something that exists in our imaginations, and Travis can play around with his memories:

He remembered these pleasures: the conjunction of her exposed pubis with the polished contours of the bidet; the white cube of the bathroom quantifying her left breast as she bent over the handbasin; … her right hand touching the finger-smeared panel of the elevator control. Looking at her from the bed, he re-created these situations, conceptualizations of exquisite games.

And just as ‘the past’ disappears, so does ‘the future’, or at least that idea of the future as something that helps tie together our activities and lives. Instead, we have an open plain of endless possibilities — more exquisite games for Travis: ‘Was he playing an elaborate game with her, using their acts of intercourse for some perverse pleasure of his own?’

In a way, the absence of time passing, the lack of change, is reflected in the first and last paragraphs of ‘The Summer Cannibals’, both of which feature Travis’s wife waiting for him in the car as he wanders around on the beach. These two paragraphs, which bookend the story, are very similar — but are they two alternative versions of the same event? … or two different moments between which nothing much has changed? … or is there in no real difference between these two alternatives? And right at the end of the story, the disappearing footprints of the young man walking past Travis’s wife are symbolic of everything that may have happened: ‘she looked down at the imprints of his feet in the white pumice. The fine sand poured into the hollows, … [she sat] watching the last of the footprints vanish in the sand.’ The footprints just disappear, as if they were never there, vanishing to leave no trace. They have been erased just as surely as the events of the story. The past isn’t in the story at all, except in the memories that Travis plays with. And there’s no future referred to — the end paragraph is virtually identical to the first. So the short period of time in which the events of ‘The Summer Cannibals’ takes place is entirely self-contained — it only means as much or as little as Travis makes it mean.

‘The Summer Cannibals’ is one of Ballard’s extreme metaphors. However, if we turn from the fiction to reality, we see that we might be able to escape the conventionalizing effect of the past and future and live in a more congenial type of endless present, as Ballard did when bringing up his young children, such that one’s everyday life somehow ‘sits right’ with one’s memories and hopes without being determined by them. But (pace Ballard) time does not stand still — memories and hopes can always turn into constraints or into hollow catechisms, and the endless present can resolve into a mere series of events so that time stretches out in front like ‘the plains of Kansas’. This seems to me to be the sort of position that Ballard may have found himself in when he returned to the subject of time and wrote ‘News’, ‘Memories’, and ‘Myths’.

Ballard’s own resolution to these vicissitudes of time is hinted at in a contemporaneous vignette, ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******’ (1984), in which ‘B’ wakes up to a world totally deserted except for himself and the birds. After wandering around for some months and ascertaining that no-one else remains, he stocks up for the winter:

But his only visitors were the birds, and he scattered handfuls of rice and seeds on the lawn of his garden and on those of his former neighbours. Already he had begun to forget them, and Shepperton soon became an extraordinary aviary, filled with birds of every species. Thus the year ended peacefully, and B was ready to begin his true work.

ABOVE: Artwork from Ambit for ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******’. Illustration by Mark Foreman.

+ ‘News from the Sun’, first published in Ambit #87, Autumn 1981.
+ ‘Memories of the Space Age’, first published in Interzone #2, 1982.
+ ‘Myths of the Near Future’, first published in F & SF, Oct. 1982.
+ ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******’, first published in Ambit #96, 1984.

Over at Barnes & Noble, SF writer Paul Di Filippo makes a valiant attempt to get Americans interested in Ballard, making some pertinent remarks about market forces in the US:

One of the most visionary, autocatalytic, and influential writers of the past five decades, a genuine nonpareil and prophet, a true diagnostician of our postmodern malaise, is courageously but inexorably dying of advanced metastatic prostate cancer at the age of 77. He announced this sad news in the concluding chapter of his autobiography, published in February of this year.

But if you’re an American reader — even if you’re a fan of this author’s many classic books and knowledgeable about his career — chances are good that you don’t know this sad fact, that you simply haven’t heard. That’s because the author is British, and his autobiography, in the eyes of U.S. publishers, has merited no U.S. edition — no more than his last two neglected novels did. And North American press coverage of his plight has been limited to a few genre journals… a sad testament to the privileging of marketplace concerns over art, and also a hurtful slight to a writer whose main topic, in whatever elaborate guise, has always been the American Century.

‘J.G. Ballard. Essay by Paul Di Filippo’, Barnes and Noble, 2/6/2008.

It’s great to see Paul champion Kingdom Come (after all, it has only recently survived a fresh round of new-pleb point-scoring):

[In Kingdom Come] Ballard’s complex brief, simplistically rendered, maintains that the banishment of spirituality and the suppression of many primal human drives in favor of status seeking and the most limited hunter-gatherer reflexology has resulted in a crippled and clinically insane culture — a culture fated to erupt in irrational and often violent compensatory ways.
…
Ballard’s stock troupe of actors who have been his loyal partners forever — brutishly intellectual doctors, damaged femmes fatales, Fisher King sacrificial heroes — speaking their often hilariously out-of-sync lines, enact a perverse vest-pocket apocalypse. As always, Ballard’s vivid metaphors entice, and his acerbic aperçus provoke…

‘J.G. Ballard. Essay by Paul Di Filippo’, Barnes & Noble.

Paul’s passion for Ballard’s writing is obvious, drilled into every line, and while none of the info will be new to readers of this site (the piece is ostensibly used to promote both Kingdom Come and Miracles of Life), think of it as smart-bomb planted in the fertile plains of the mighty Barnes & Noble. Let’s hope the message gets through one day (and hopefully before 2080, when Ballard predicts America will fall into ruin):

A Blakean Cassandra honored in his own country, Ballard deserves equal laurels in America, a dream country whose portrait and influence he has so indelibly etched in his books, and which exists in no truer form than in his skull.

‘J.G. Ballard. Essay by Paul Di Filippo.’

Paul’s been a long-time champion of Ballard’s work and his imaginative criticism is notable for the fact that it pays equally incisive attention to the less well-known artefacts in Ballard’s armoury. In this 1990 article, for example, Paul links The Drowned World with The Day of Creation with pleasing results:

Nowhere, I believe, is the nature of Ballard’s art more evident than in the simultaneous junction and disjunction between one of his oldest works, The Drowned World, and one of his latest, The Day of Creation. What I would like to do here is, first set forth the similarities — ranked roughly in importance from most significant to least — in a kind of catalog for our hypothetical exhibition, and then deal with the differences between the two works — which, in the end, are almost more important than the recurrent themes and patterns.

In no way do I mean to suggest that the latter work is some rip-off or mere re-write of the earlier piece, anymore than one Dali canvas is a rehash of another simply because both contain soft clocks. In fact, The Day of Creation strikes me as the more mature and esthetically satisfying of the two, although lacking The Drowned World’s obsessive, world-shattering dementia.

Twenty-Five Years Of Drowning: Mapping J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World onto The Day of Creation. Paul Di Filippo, Quantum Science Fiction & Fantasy Review, No 37, Summer 1990, pp 13-15.

It’s well worth reading.

Also worth scrutinising is Paul’s wonderful 1991 interview with Ballard, which cheekily renders the conversation as a cut-up anatomy textbook (an anatomical marriage of science and pornography of course being one of Ballard’s main obsessions):

III. “WHENEVER I HEAR THE WORD ‘ART,’ I REACH FOR MY CHECKBOOK.”

The TRIFACIAL NERVE may be affected in its entirety, or its sensory

1) Have you ever read a contemporary genre fantasy? If so, do you feel saddened by the degeneration of the fantasy mode from the work of such visionaries as George MacDonald and Charles Williams and David Lindsay to its current state of endless Tolkien-trilogy ripoffs?

I don’t read either fantasy or SF anymore. Tolkien has had a disastrous influence.

or motor root may be affected, or one of its primary main

2) What do you think of the current state of SF?

Much healthier since the arrival of the so-called cyberpunks. They [are] An important sign that SF is returning to reality again. Most encouraging.

divisions. In injury to the sensory root there is anaesthesia of the

3) Do you find any validity in the term “postmodern,” as applied to fiction, architecture, etc., or do you believe it is merely a facade for retrogressive techniques and concerns?

Yes, [it's retrogressive]. Bogus nostalgia and theme-parkism, as far as architecture is concerned. As for the novel, post-modemism represents a dead-end, a desperate admission that the author has nothing to say and can only think of evermore devious ways of disguising the fact.

half of the face on the side of the lesion, with the exception of

4) What has happened to the experimental urge among writers? Can you point to a single innovator equal to, say, Beckett, among contemporary authors?

Burroughs [is such an innovator]. [But] bourgeois life is crushing the imagination from this planet. In due course this will provoke a backlash, since the imagination can never be wholly repressed. A new surrealism will probably be born.

‘Ballard’s Anatomy’, an interview by Paul Di Filippo, Science Fiction Eye, 1991.

Thank you very much, Paul Di Filippo!

Illustrations by Ferret, from Paul DiFilippo’s interview with Ballard.

ABOVE: ‘Joshua Says GO!’ by Troy Paiva. ‘A 30s twin-tail Lockheed Electra does the big sleep at Aviation Warehouse. Night, full moon, red-gelled strobe flash. Canon 20D.’

The photography of Troy Paiva treats us to canted visions of a crumbling, post-industrial America — decommissioned military bases, aircraft ‘boneyards’, abandoned desert towns. The scenarios are all shot at night and the work is presented straight out of the camera, mostly untouched by Photoshopping or other post-processing techniques. Troy uses available light, such as moonlight or sodium light (the latter of course plentiful in the modern-day archaeological ruins he haunts), but he also uniquely marks the shots with his light-painting skills (the introduction of hand-held, hand-applied light during the exposure) and the unearthly effects of red, green and blue-gelled strobe flashes. The cumulative effect is startling: like stills from a David Lynch film in a parallel universe in which Lynch, instead of adapting Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart for his twisted desert noir masterpiece, had chosen Ballard’s Vermilion Sands instead.

Simon Sellars

NOTE: Although I have tried my best to include a representative selection of Troy’s photos, I found it almost impossible to do justice to the scope, beauty and sheer volume of his work. If after reading this interview you find yourself wanting more examples, my advice is to start either at Troy’s official site or his flickr page and work your way from there.

I had arrived in Vermilion Sands three months earlier. A retired pilot, I was painfully coming to terms with a broken leg and the prospect of never flying again… I found a shallow basin among the dunes… The owner had gone, abandoning the hangar-like building to the sand-rays and the desert, and on some half-formed impulse I began to drive out each afternoon.

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’, first published in 1967, collected in Vermilion Sands (1971).

SIMON: Troy, when we first talked about your photos, you said, ‘People constantly refer to my photography as “Ballardian”.’ I can certainly see the connections, especially with Vermilion Sands and its sense of decadent ruin, a lurid, near-future civilisation lost in the desert sands. But is Ballard actually an influence on your work?

TROY: No. I came to him much later. I enjoyed the Vermilion Sands stories very much when I read them a couple of years ago and I can see why people connect my work with his writing. There is that sense of desolation and isolation, the fetishism of decay and destruction and a general sense of being outside the realm of normal society, as well as the melancholia of straggling on after everything has ended.

Same thing happened with Kerouac’s On the Road. After reading it recently I thought, ‘Wow, no wonder people keep saying that to me.’ Much of my photography stems from massive, epic road trips that criss-cross the southwest, where I cover thousands of miles in a couple of very surreal days. The mythology of The Road figures in a lot of my work. I guess these similarities show that human experience is roughly the same for all of us, we just have different ways of expressing it. See also Philip K. Dick.

The books of my formative years were George Stewart’s pastoral apocalypse classic Earth Abides, Hunter S. Thompson’s surrealist freak-out, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Stand, Stephen King’s pop-epic story of The End. Those three books kinda say it all about where my approach to the road, abandonment and the ‘post-everything’ world lies. And the movie Vanishing Point – that encapsulates my own road-trip mythology perfectly.

HENRY: ‘And there goes the Challenger, being chased by the blue, blue meanies on wheels. The last American hero, the electric Shinta, the demigod, the super driver of the Golden West.’

TROY: ‘And beans, lotsa beans.’ Man, I love that movie. It’s totally what the desert is about for me.

ABOVE: ‘Color Television’ by Troy Paiva. ‘Behind an abandoned restaurant in the sleepy Mojave Desert town of Yermo, CA. The density of the sky was caused by the October Fires in SoCal. You could taste every breath. Night, full moon 2 minute exposure, natural, yellow and red-gelled strobe and flashlights. Composite of 2 images.’

HENRY: There are other things your work brings to mind, like the Mojave Desert Phone Booth.

TROY: Love it. Wish I’d had a chance to shoot it! I got lost on a series of endless dirt roads trying to find it, many years ago. Almost got stuck and had to give up. It’s been gone for at least five years now.

SIMON: What exactly is it about the desert that appeals?

TROY: I just love the expansiveness and isolation – it’s primal and uncompromising. I love that you can go for days without talking to anyone. It’s a land of outcasts and oddballs, where non-conformists can thrive. An incredible volume of American mythology is based on the desert and Western expansion, from the Gold Rush to Route 66. I’ve even heard my photography described as an epitaph for the mythology of the American West.

Dr Paul Ricci was thinking: So this is New York – or was. Greatest city of the twentieth century, here you heard the heart-beat of international finance, industry and entertainment. Now it’s as remote from the real world as Pompeii or Persepolis. It’s a fossil, my God, preserved here on the edge of the desert like one of those ghost towns in the Wild West. Did my ancestors really live in these vast canyons? They came on a cattle boat from Naples in the 1890s, and a century later went back to Naples on a cattle boat. Now I’m making another stab at it.

Still, the place has possibilities, all sorts of dormant things might be lying here, waiting to be roused.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981).

SIMON: Your bio says your work is about ‘the evolution and eventual abandonment of the communities, structures and social iconography spawned during this country’s 20th century western expansion’. How did it come to be this way?

TROY: It’s simply who I am. When I was 13 my family went on a road trip, one of many, and we somehow found ourselves bouncing down 15 miles of bad dirt road to the classic ‘wild west’ ghost town of Bodie, arguably the most authentic ghost town in America. Today Bodie is kept in a state of ‘arrested decay’ and is a major tourist destination. Much of the road is paved and the parking lot is filled with tour buses, and in the summer the town is crawling with thousands of tourists from around the world. But back in the early 70s you could drive right into the centre of town and park. When we climbed out of the car we found we were the only ones there! I wandered that town alone for hours, slack-jawed at the thought that people would just walk away from furnished houses and businesses, a whole city, and never come back. I was hooked for life.

ABOVE: ‘Texaco Marine’ by Troy Paiva. ‘North Shore Marina, Salton Sea, 2001. Most, if not all, the letters are gone by now. Night, 100% full moon/star light, 8 minutes, f5.6.’

SIMON: I understand it’s your Salton Sea work that gets most of the Vermilion Sands comparisons.

TROY: Yes. The Salton Sea is an enormous, accidentally created salt lake in a remote corner of the SoCal desert. In the 50s developers built elaborate resorts and golf courses around its shores and the department of interior stocked it with game fish. By the 60s it had become an idyllic combination of Lake Tahoe and Palm Springs, half outdoorsman’s paradise, half retreat for the Hollywood elite. By the 70s, however, two years of record rain caused massive floods and the lake, which has no outlet, began to fester and decay. The smell became unbearable as massive algae blooms died off. Anyone who could afford to move away did. By the 90s fish and birds were dying on a biblical scale – in the millions – triggered by the algae blooms. It’s a horrible, filthy place rimmed with rotten modernist resorts, marinas and trailer parks (most of which have been torn down now), and decaying dead fish and birds. Today the Salton Sea feels very much like the epicentre for the end of the world, a poster child for mankind’s failure to tame nature.

Ballardian for sure!

Ronnov-Jessen: [In your novella 'The Ultimate City'] one could say that the dynamism represented by New York is actually the dynamism of decay.

Ballard: No, I don’t accept that. The city is abandoned, and with it, suspended in time, is a whole set of formulae for expressing human energy, imagination, ambition. The clock has stopped, but it will be possible for the boy to start it up again, just as in the novel Hello America where the young hero does precisely the same — except he attempts to do it on a continental level.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Against Entropy’, a 1984 interview with Peter Ronnov-Jessen.

ABOVE: ‘Precis’ by Troy Paiva. ‘A flipped Mitsubishi Precis, run over by a tank, in the abandoned base housing at George AFB near Victorville, CA. There were several smashed cars left in strategic lines of sight used for infantry cover during wargames exercises. The engine block in this thing was crushed like an egg. Shot March 2001, 160T film. Night, about 8 minutes, full moon, but overcast, yellow and purple-gelled strobe-flash.’

HENRY: Do you think your photos suggest a cryptic ‘signs of passing’ of American Culture from the world stage?

TROY: I suppose it can’t help but be interpreted that way‚ but I must also say the rest of the world has more ruins and debris left behind than America does. The internet is overflowing with amazing photography shot in the abandoned places of the 21st century. Spend an hour Googling ‘urban exploration’ and you’ll see that the culture is exploding worldwide, so whilst you got the concept right, it’s important to see it as a human, post-industrial thing rather than purely American.

UrbEx is as old as mankind. Humans have always been obsessed with both building and exploration. I’m sure primitive man explored the abandoned caves of his ancestors too. We’re drawn to ruins. It’s just how we’re wired as a species. Whereas the 20th century saw an unprecedented worldwide explosion of construction, by the dawn of the 21st century much of this expansion had failed or become obsolete, leaving the world littered with an amazing array of every type of ruins imaginable. Today we are experiencing a true golden age of abandonment.

SIMON: You describe it as a ‘culture’. That suggests it’s more than simply the illicit thrill of sneaking into abandoned or forbidden territory.

TROY: Yes. UrbEx, or Urban Exploration, is the pastime of visiting TOADS (temporary, obsolete, abandoned and derelict spaces), but not for scientific, anthropological or nefarious purposes. It’s about absorbing the atmosphere and wabi sabi soul of these places. A ‘finding beauty in decay’ aesthetic. I visit these lapsed spaces for several of the same reasons that normal people visit a serene mountain glen: the soul-cleansing quietude and the sense of feeling very small in a big universe. But ultimately it is an entirely different sensibility. Where most people see waste and blight in TOADS, Urban Explorers see elegant devolution and the weight of time.

Found the man Traven. A strange derelict figure, hiding in a bunker in the deserted interior of the island. He is suffering from severe exposure and malnutrition, but is unaware of this or, for that matter, of any other events in the world around him … He maintains that he came to the island to carry out some scientific project — unstated — but I suspect that he understands his real motives and the unique role of the island … In some way its landscape seems to be involved with certain unconscious notions of time, and in particular with those that may be a repressed premonition of our own deaths. The attractions and dangers of such an architecture, as the past has shown, need no stressing …

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

HENRY: Ballard has a strangely acute, Triassic sense of ‘deep time’ in his fiction‚ especially in short stories like ‘The Terminal Beach’. Similarly, in your book Lost America, you wrote, ‘The stars pinwheeling overhead and clouds smearing across the sky mirrored the compression of time created by the relentless pace of the trip.’ You said you were seeking to ‘heighten the unreality’ of these bizarre, spectral non-places.

TROY: It is a different reality. UrbEx night photography is very far removed from normal life, and my goal is to accentuate this surreal, otherworldly atmosphere in the work. One of the big attractions of night photography is this weird time-space distortion thing. Most of the night shooters I know are philosophical about the process. The exposures are minutes long, giving you time to sit in the dark and absorb the scene. Regardless of whether you are shooting cranes in an abandoned shipyard, or you’re on the top of a windswept mountain shooting thousand year old trees, it’s a wonderfully zen, contemplative experience.

ABOVE: ‘Hot Seat 2′ by Troy Paiva. ‘Shot at the abandoned Fort Ord Army Base in Monterey, CA. I recently learned that most (soon to be all) of the barracks and entire laundry have recently been bulldozed. Hundreds of buildings. Gone. Night, full moon, pink and green-gelled strobe-flash, 3-4 minute exposure.’

HENRY: You must get scared sometimes.

TROY: I don’t really worry about stuff very much. I have yet to see a ghost or the undead, although I’ve had thousands of weird experiences. I’ve shot in many supposedly haunted locations and seen and heard things that some people would pass off as paranormal, but nothing that couldn’t be attributed to wind, settling or vermin in the walls. What I have seen a lot of are big poisonous spiders, three-storey drop offs into the yawning darkness with no railings, copper thieves, rattlesnakes, rotten floors and wasted teenage vandals. I’ve come out of buildings crawling with spiders (I’ve had some very bad spider bites over the years), missed a rattlesnake bite by inches and been chased back to the car by a pack of wild dogs. I’ve been run off by crazy, desert-rat property owners racking shotguns. I’ve been swarmed by a heavily armed platoon of border agents in southern Arizona while I was shooting in a pet cemetery. I’ve had countless cuts and bruises and sprained and twisted ankles, and I once gave myself an excruciating second-degree burn while light painting with fireworks in a sandstorm.

Doing this is a whole lot of fun, but there are a lot of very real ways to get hurt or killed. The dangerous aspect of UrbEx night photography is just not something I dwell on. If I did I’d never leave the house.

SIMON: In Lost America you wrote about coming across a sacrificial altar used in an occult ceremony.

TROY: Yeah, that was nasty. They had sacrificed a sheep on a makeshift altar in an abandoned Air Force fire station in a remote corner of the Mojave desert. Blood and entrails were smeared everywhere, lots of evil graffiti about how much fun it is to kill. It was a miserable sight. Sad.

SIMON: You said it was part of the ‘growing evidence of downright creepy stuff’ you’ve encountered. Are you implying that this kind of activity is on the rise?

TROY: Is it on the rise, or has it always been there, bubbling away under the surface? I don’t have the answer for that. Remember what I said earlier about the desert being the last place where oddballs can thrive? Some people are just bigger oddballs than others, what can I tell you?

HENRY: I enjoy reading your interior highway dialogues [Troy wrote 12,000 words to accompany the photos in Lost America]. You should definitely do more existential travel essays – you seem to have a feel for it.

TROY: Thanks, but I clearly don’t have as much to offer as a writer that I do as a photographer. Urban Exploration needs a new young writer, this generation’s version of Lester Bangs or Hunter S. Thompson, who can bring it into a modern pop-culture context. I’m not that writer, but I’ll gladly play the photographic role of Ralph Steadman.

ABOVE: ‘Danger Zone’ by Troy Paiva. ‘Building 4900, abandoned. Decommissioned Fort Ord Army Base. It’s all in the details. Shot 1/07, night- totally dark space, red-gelled strobe and ungelled strobe through fenced room.’

SIMON: Do you know about the recent hysteria in Britain, with people being questioned and harassed by police for using a camera in public places under suspicion of terrorism? There has been a huge backlash from ordinary people demanding the right to take pictures in public without being branded a terrorist.

TROY: I’ve heard rumblings about that sort of thing here too, especially in big cities. No question, the climate for photographers has changed since 9/11. The police have all of us on a shorter leash. Here in western America everything is spread out though, so it’s much easier to fall between the cracks if you get out of the big cities. That’s why I like shooting in rural locations. You are a lot less likely to be hassled by the police or unsavoury characters.

HENRY: Ballard has described Shanghai as ‘cruel and lurid, polluted and exciting’. Except for ‘cruel’ this seems an apt description of your photography (I find your work too surreal to be genuinely malicious). Do you feel this same kind of frantic, otherworldly rush as you travel the land in search of… of what, exactly?

TROY: Ghosts. Not Hollywood movie ghosts-actors under sheets waving their arms, but the ghosts of technology, a slice of amazing human history that is already being forgotten as we rush headlong towards… whatever the hell it is we are rushing towards. I don’t believe in ghosts in the traditional sense, but these places carry a spiritual weight that is unlike occupied places or nature. The stillness and atmosphere, especially alone at night, can be an emotionally overwhelming experience. No question, it is a rush.

ABOVE: ‘Canted’ by Troy Paiva. ’1959 Buick at a nameless high desert junkyard near Lake Los Angeles, CA. Night, 2 minute exposure, full moon purple and green-gelled strobe-flash. Big and rusty.’

SIMON: Is America really changing as rapidly as your work suggests?

TROY: Yes, it’s changing faster and faster. America is all about speed and ‘the new’ so we’re always replacing things that don’t really need replacing. It’s interesting how the places and objects I find have changed over the years. Twenty years ago it was all about the debris left behind by the finned atomic-age, but now the focus has shifted to the debris of the 70s and 80s: junkyard minivans and wide-body airliners are replacing the big-finned station wagons and 707s. Disposable plastic replacing chromed steel.

Who knows where it’s headed? Surely we’re into another period of contraction in the West as gas tops $4 a gallon, which only means junkyards filled with giant SUVs and more abandonments to explore, but I have no idea where it will ultimately end up.

When Los Angeles is forgotten, probably what will remain will be the huge freeway system. I’m certain the people in the future — long after the automobile has been forgotten — will regard them as enigmatic and mysterious monuments which attested to the high aesthetic standards of the people that built them. In the same way that we look back on the pyramids or the mausoleums in a huge Egyptian necropolis as things of great beauty — we’ve forgotten their original function. It’s all a matter of aesthetics. I think that highways for the most part are beautiful. I prefer concrete to meadow.

J.G. Ballard, ‘How to Face Doomsday without Really Dying’, a 1974 interview with Carol Orr.

SIMON: How did you get interested in night photography?

TROY: In 1989 I was working as a designer/illustrator for a major toy company, drawing and painting every day in a heavily art-directed environment. After several years of that I lost any sense of the artistic fulfilment I was originally getting from the job. The last thing I wanted to do was draw and paint at home too, so I was desperate to find a new personal creative outlet. At the time my brother Tom was a full time photography student at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. One of his classes was in night photography. Being my brother, he knew I’d be fascinated by night shooting on a conceptual level, so he snuck me along to some lectures and shoots with the class in the decaying industrial sections of SF. It instantly dawned on me that this was the perfect way to photograph the abandoned roadside towns I was already exploring. After one trip to the desert to shoot at night I became totally obsessed and consumed by it.

ABOVE: ‘Alameda Corridor’ by Tom Paiva.

SIMON: Do you see any similarities with your brother Tom’s work?

TROY: When we were both learning the ropes in night shooting we frequently shot at night together. Now Tom lives in Los Angeles and he has a commercial photography business shooting large format architectural and industrial work. Living 500 miles apart, we seldom get the chance to shoot together anymore. Tom’s aesthetic is the complete opposite of mine; he doesn’t light paint, he doesn’t do the UrbEx-style locations, and his complex and meticulous – and ultimately gorgeous – large-format work is the exact opposite of my quick and dirty, guerrilla-style shooting. My compositional style tends towards a pop-surrealist, melodramatic and cartoony look, whereas his is a more stately and formalist style. His work is cool and elegant, mine hot and visceral. Yes, we’re both night photographers, but our styles couldn’t be more different. We’re very careful to avoid doing similar work specifically because we are both named ‘T. Paiva’ and we both make a conscious effort to avoid stepping on each other’s artistic toes. One way we’re similar though is that we’re both loners, but I think that is a trait that runs strong in most night shooters. It’s funny to watch a group of night photographers descend on a location – they usually say something like ‘meet you here at 1am’ and head off in opposite directions.

SIMON: Who else can you recommend in the field?

TROY: Jan Staller, Richard Misrach, Michael Kenna and Steve Fitch for sure. Studying the lighting work of O. Winston Link, William Lesch and Chip Simons back in the late 80s was really important for me, too. I’d sit there for hours, deconstructing their images trying to figure out how they lit their subjects. But maybe I owe more to David Lynch, Roger Deakins, Vittorio Storaro, Juan Ruiz Anchía, Emmanuel Lubezki, Tim Burton and a trillion other movie artists. I watch a lot more movies than I read photo books.

SIMON: What kind of equipment do you use?

TROY: I shot on film from 1989 to 2004 using cheap, outdated flea-market 35mm gear. It felt right for me to be shooting this forgotten junk with junk. This old work has a Holga-esque, toy-camera lo-fi quality that many find endearing today. I guess I was unintentionally ahead of the curve there too. I stopped shooting for a year in 2004 as the film era fizzled out, frustrated by lab closures, the lack of quality film processing and the low yield of acceptable work with my ancient equipment. In 2005 I moved to digital once I saw that camera technology had advanced enough to allow me to do noise-free time exposures. I now shoot with a Canon 20D and a 12-24mm Tokina zoom lens. I use a heavy, solid Slik tripod because I do a lot of work in wind and rough conditions and I need as stable a platform for the camera as possible. Regrettably, I was forced away from the ‘shooting junk with junk’ ethos by changing technology, but with the 20D already being superseded by several newer models in the past few years, maybe the 20D is already ‘outdated junk’ gear too.

ABOVE: ‘Speedlines’ by Troy Paiva. ‘Mid ’70s Chevy Monte Carlo at the Pearsonville, California Junkyard. This is the last of the Pearsonville work, I wanna try to head back soon tho. Night, 2 minute exposure, full moon, blue and green-gelled flashlight.’

SIMON: You’ve described your technique as ‘low cost/high impact lighting’. Is it therefore accessible for amateurs and people beginning to experiment with photography?

TROY: Absolutely. The advent of digital photography and the ability to chimp the shot on the back of your camera as you work has revolutionized night photography and light painting. In the film era you could shoot a whole roll of film and not know that the leader on the film never got picked up by the sprocket, let alone that your exposures were incorrect or your lighting was not bright enough.

All my lighting is done with a single 20 year old Vivitar 285 strobe flash and a collection of flashlights from a tiny keychain LED to a 1,000,000 candlepower spotlight. I have a set of theatrical lighting gels cut to small swatches that I just hold over the light source. Because the exposures are minutes long, I have plenty of time to do multiple flash pops and take my time with my flashlight work. Observers are often surprised by my low-tech lighting technique, asking ‘Is that really all there is to it?’ I have to keep it simple because this is frequently a guerrilla-style of photography. Travelling light is critical, so all my gear except the tripod fits in a small daypack, allowing me to get in, set up, shoot and get out quickly.

You can buy a flash like mine second-hand for $50. All of my flashlights could be bought at any drugstore like Target or Walmart. Every halfway-large city has at least one theatrical supply store where you can buy gel material. It costs about $10 a sheet. The reason for not trying light painting is not because of cost! Look at any of the myriad night photography or light-painting groups at a photo-sharing site like flickr and prepare to be overwhelmed with amateurs doing this kind of work in all sorts of locations. It’s everywhere now. I seem to have created a Frankenstein.

SIMON: Do you work fast?

TROY: I work incredibly fast compared to other night shooters. A lot of that is a product of having almost 20 years of experience, but I am a seat-of-the-pants type of artist in any media. The less thinking and planning and fussing over the piece, the more relaxed and natural it will be.

It’s kind of like a pianist playing a song with thousands of notes without sheet music: if they think about every note, they can’t possibly play the song. Rather, they turn off the conscious part of their mind and just let it flow. Same for painters and other artists. It’s no different for photography. The more you think, plan and try to get the shot, the more likely it will elude you.

ABOVE: ‘Las Vegas Club’ by Troy Paiva. ‘The YESCO sign boneyard, Las Vegas, NV. Shot May, 2000. Night, 160 Tungsten film, full moon, sodium and mercury vapor lights, red-gelled strobe flash. That’s the Luxor hotel spotlight. Legendary location seen in many TV shows and movies containing hundreds of old signs. Almost everything here was donated and moved to the Las Vegas Neon Museum across town shortly after I shot here, this lot was turned into more manufacturing/warehouse space.’

Had they any idea that Las Vegas was defended by a rag-tag army of children? In an attempt to blind their camera lenses, Manson continued to turn up the electric power flowing into the city. The neon façades of the casinos and hotels were now so many cataracts of white lava, walls of incandescent pink and purple that seemed to set alight the surrounding jungle, turning the Strip and the downtown casino centre into an inflamed, shadowless realm through which the occasional armoured car would appear like a spectral dragon on the floor of a furnace.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981).

SIMON: Funnily enough, given that your signature style is this unnaturally vivid primary-colour palette, I always picture purples and reds when I think of Vermilion Sands, more so Ballard’s Hello America. The gels you use irradiate your scenery – for me it really does evoke the near-future sheen of Hello America‘s abandoned United States, in which whole cities are buried in the desert, a vast continent paved over with accreted hyperconsumerism. But in photography at least, this seems an unusual approach to take with urban ruins – many would rather focus on the grey, rusting aspects of abandoned towns. Perhaps, like Ballard, you are breathing new life into these ruins, recombining them in new and unexpected ways.

TROY: Yes, you nailed it. Most UrbEx photography is a pure documentation of locations weathered to dreary and monochromatic greys and browns, but I’m taking it someplace else entirely by reanimating these places with light. Some say I’m bringing a festive, circus-like atmosphere to these dead places. It’s done in a sort of Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’ spirit. My colour choices are usually predicated on the actual colour of the subject and location, not because of some premeditated ‘I must use green tonight’ mentality.

I see it as embracing the idea of death rather than fearing it. It’s about accepting it and having fun with this darker side of the human condition. My work tends to inspire melancholia, especially in older people, because they remember these places from their youth. It reminds them of their own mortality, but I think that palpable sense of transience and loss in these places is actually exciting and inspiring rather than sad or futile. I suspect that feeling runs strong in many urban explorers.

Personally, I’m not that opposed to pollution – I think the transformation of the old landscape by concrete fields and all that isn’t necessarily bad by definition. I feel there’s a certain beauty in looking at a lake that has a bright metallic scum floating on top of it. A certain geometric beauty in a cone of china clay, say, four hundred yards high, suddenly placed in the middle of the rural landscape. It’s all a matter of a certain aesthetic response. Some people find highways, cloverleaf junctions and overpasses and multi-storey car-parks ugly, chiefly because they are made of concrete. But they are not. Most of them are structures of great beauty.

J.G. Ballard, ‘How to Face Doomsday without Really Dying’, a 1974 interview with Carol Orr.

HENRY: Ballard has said that his fiction is the ‘dissection of a deep pathology’. Do you also see your own work as a kind of surgical procedure, laying bare the arid and often post-apocalyptically tinged dreamscapes of the USA in all its mythical glory? Or is it more intimate, personal and emotional than that?

TROY: Jeez, these are hard questions. It is a very personal and emotional process for me. It is an artistic process more than an intellectual one. My photography is about these places as they are now, not as they were. It’s not socioeconomic commentary, an anti-technology or anti-military-waste rant, or a warning about rampant consumerism and conspicuous consumption, though it has been interpreted as such by others. Put simply, I love these places. I am laying bare this rotten underbelly, but I’m doing it because these places simply move me, not necessarily because of what they were, but because of what they are now. It’s all about the atmosphere and feeling, and I try to enhance this surreal vibe with my time exposures and light painting.

ABOVE: The cover of Paiva’s Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration, published by Chronicle Books.

SIMON: I see that Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG has written the foreword to your forthcoming book, Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration. As we’ve previously seen, Geoff shares a Ballardian approach to architecture and urban exploration.

TROY: My editor at Chronicle Books introduced me to Geoff. He was a last-second addition to the project when my original essayist fell through at the 11th hour. Geoff immediately ‘got it’ and wrote a very eloquent and flattering forward, quoting from The Atrocity Exhibition among several other books. I enjoy Geoff’s blog tremendously, especially when the subject of ‘the philosophy and aesthetics of abandonment’ comes up.

Paiva’s images of airplane graveyards, in particular, are all the more evocative and gripping when you consider that his father was a flight engineer, hopping planes from country to country. In his book The Atrocity Exhibition, J.G. Ballard describes a surreal landscape of crashed bombers, abandoned air warfare ranges, and disused runways. He refers to such images as ‘the nightmare of a grounded pilot,’ or ‘the suburbs of Hell,’ a ‘University of Death,’ across which people wander, stunned by the ruins all around them.

Geoff Manaugh, foreword to Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration.

SIMON: Tell us more about the book.

TROY: It’s broken down into five chapters: ‘Byron Hot Springs Hotel’, about an abandoned early 20th century resort; ‘16th Street Station’, about a derelict Beaux Arts inner city train station; ‘Decommissioned’, which covers over a dozen various abandoned military and industrial complexes; ‘Desert’, about the abandoned roadsides of the desert southwest; and ‘Boneyard’, a high-desert graveyard comprised of hundreds of junk aircraft.

While it’s as similar to Lost America as you’d expect two volumes of ‘light-painted night photography in abandoned places’ to be, this new one is about specific locations rather than general overviews of types of places. I have the first production copy sitting on the desk in front of me and it really looks sharp. It’s a much higher-quality piece than Lost America. The layout and design is much more sophisticated and refined and the print quality is a vast improvement. I’m frankly floored by it and I’m my own worst critic, so I’m pretty optimistic that other people are going to be floored by it too.

SIMON: What sort of research do you do, in terms of finding out sites to visit and photograph?

TROY: I drive around in the desert and scout locations. I have a collection of old road maps from the 50s, which I’ve studied at length. It’s fascinating to see whole towns on those maps that no longer exist. In the last few years I’ve had a lot of email from people telling me about great locations and I’ve been acting on some of these tips with great results. I’ve also been shooting with a lot of local UrbEx photographers who have introduced me to some spectacular spots very close to home.

ABOVE: ‘Wind Slice’ by Troy Paiva. ’1930s airliner in storage at Aviation Warehouse in El Mirage, CA, a Mojave Desert aircraft boneyard that services the film industry as well as recycles aircraft parts. Night, full moon, red-gelled flash. 2-3 minutes.’

He welcomed this journey into a familiar land, zones of twilight. At dawn, after driving all night, they reached the suburbs of Hell. The pale flares from the petrochemical plants illuminated the wet cobbles. No one would meet them there. His two companions, the bomber pilot at the wheel in the faded flying suit and the beautiful young woman with radiation burns, never spoke to him… Who were they, these strange twins – couriers from his own unconscious? For hours they drove through the endless suburbs of the city. The billboards multiplied around them…

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

SIMON: And your favourite shoot so far?

TROY: The aircraft boneyards are still my favourites. I’m an airline brat so I grew up around planes. There is nothing that can prepare you for walking up to half of a 747 laying on its belly in the sand. It’s just epic. I shot the derelict ocean liner ‘S.S. Independence’ earlier this year, days before it left to be towed to the breaker beaches of Asia. That was an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime shoot.

SIMON: Do you have a desire to shoot outside of America?

TROY: Oh sure: the abandoned industrial cities of Eastern Russia, Gunkanjima – that completely abandoned island city in Japan – the half-finished hotels of the Sinai, the abandoned Formula 1 racetrack at Reims, France… the list goes on and on. Realistically, though, there is more than enough in the American Southwest to shoot for a lifetime.

It’s mainly a money issue. Being a freelance artist in the 21st century is a low-budget lifestyle. Still, with a few deep-pocket patrons I’d be happily winging my way across the globe next week!

Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration is shipping on 2 July, 2008 and is available for preorder via Chronicle Books and Amazon.com.

ABOVE: ‘Clipped and Headless’ by Troy Paiva. ‘A mutilated Delta 727 fuselage on its belly at Aviation Warehouse in El Mirage, CA, a Mojave Desert aircraft boneyard that services the film industry as well as recycles aircraft parts. Night, full moon, red-gelled strobe flash. 2-3 minute exposure.’

..:: MORE INFORMATION
+ Troy’s official site
+ Troy’s Lost America site
+ Troy’s flickr stream
+ Design Shed, Troy’s freelance design and illustration site

ABOVE: JGB in 2006 (photo courtesy The Terminal Collection).

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

The interview below was published in a vast tome, an annual German review of the year in science fiction which came out in July last year. The interview itself was presumably conducted sometime in Spring 2007, after the publication of Kingdom Come and the re-issue two-volume set of The Complete Short Stories.

One suspects, in the end, that Ballard’s playful teasing of his interviewers results from a certain sanguinity about the state of his health; it’s less a callous dissimulation at the expense of his interlocutors than the resolution of the old Lunghua survivor. Evidently by the time of the interview he had already been visiting hospitals, as he notes their science fiction-like hypermodernity, and even advises his interviewers to visit one. I’d rather remember the Ballard of this interview, his sense of mischief intact even in the face of his physical atrophy, than the Ballard who has appeared in recent TV interviews, in which he seems oppressed by less considerate and more parasitical personalities.

Dan O’Hara

Many thanks to Michaela Pape for proofing these interviews.

WERNER FUCHS & SASCHA MAMCZAK: Mr Ballard, last year marked a very special anniversary for you: fifty years ago, in 1956, with the publication of your first story, your career as a science fiction author began.

J.G. BALLARD: Yes, that’s true. But don’t remind me of it! I’m an old man.

Well, your publishers have effectively reminded you of it by newly publishing a thousand-page-plus collection of all your stories from the last fifty years.

Naturally, I was very impressed. After all, that’s half a century of hard work, half my life, if you like. You know, short stories were always very important for me. Like many science fiction authors, I began by writing short stories, which isn’t the norm any more, at least not among British authors today. Today young authors would rather write novels straight off – and that’s precisely why these novels are mostly so poor. In every job you need a certain amount of practice, whether you’re a violinist or a joiner, and short stories offer writers a wonderful chance to acquire the necessary tools. The Mona Lisa, was, after all, not exactly Leonardo da Vinci’s first painting. In any case I learned what it meant to be a writer by writing short stories; what my weaknesses and strengths are.

Today, short stories – even SF short stories – have fallen out of style somewhat.

Yes, one’s become used to these overlong novels in which everything is explained and tidied up. At the heart of every good short story lies a certain ambiguity, a sort of “Yes, but.” That’s very seldom found in novels. And yet this ambiguity is the very stuff of life. Many people tell me I should write more short stories – and I reply that I don’t know where I’d publish them. When I began writing them fifty years ago, it was completely different: nearly every paper and magazine in those days published short stories, some of them even every day. And then there were of course the science fiction magazines, which had an almost insatiable appetite for short stories. The SF magazines in those days were an entirely wonderful training space for budding authors – one could pursue one’s obsessions, one’s fantasies; one could discover what kind of writer one wanted to be. It’s a little like the way that, in one’s youth, one has a lot of affairs: one learns how to make love. It’s different now: most young authors don’t know how to make love, and they don’t know how to write. Oh, well, that’s only the grumbling of an old man.

ABOVE: JGB in 2006. Photograph by Adam Bloomberg & Oliver Chanarin.

How, back then, did you come to write science fiction?

Now, most authors in those days were fans before they began to write professionally. Which means that they’d already written something or other in their youth, mostly for fanzines. With me it was different, I only came to science fiction later. I was twenty-six when I published my first story. Before then I’d scarcely read any science fiction. It was when I went to Canada with the Royal Air Force that I first became aware of SF. We were based somewhere in the Canadian provinces, it snowed incessantly, and there was nothing to do and nothing to read, not a single daily paper. So I started to read science fiction magazines – and I was extraordinarily surprised. It gave me a glimpse of a hitherto unexplored terrain. The then literary mainstream – the stories which the New Yorker or other magazines published – was purely oriented towards the past, both thematically and stylistically. That didn’t interest me. I was interested in the changes around us – the consumer society, the first computers, TV, the fear of nuclear war, gigantic motorway and airport complexes – all of that created a new landscape, an external landscape like the mental one. I wanted to write about that. So I thought, why not science fiction? One could investigate this landscape there.

And of course the nascent space age.

Of course. I remember very well how in 1956 – as I said, the year in which I published my first short story – I heard for the first time on the radio the Sputnik 1 signal: beep, beep, beep. The sound of a new world. So long, past! Hello, future! They were really very exciting years. Years in which, in practice, I wrote exclusively short stories.

Which authors – both within science fiction and outside it – influenced you the most back then?

Within SF, very few – I simply learned too little from them. I was weaned, if you will, on the classical European and American menu, and the one to make the most impression on me was Franz Kafka. He was the most significant writer of the 20th century, far more significant than James Joyce. Edgar Allan Poe and Dino Buzzati also fascinated me. Of the SF authors in those days I had the most respect for Ray Bradbury, but I’ve never written like him. He was too romantic, too naive for me at times.

What about Philip K. Dick? And Theodore Sturgeon?

I did like Sturgeon. Dick, less so – he was too American for me. Many British authors imitated the Americans in those days, so as to get published in the US magazines. And that’s exactly what I didn’t want. I’d prefer the neutral tone of a Robert Sheckley or a Cyril Kornbluth. But if you ask me who really influenced me – it was less writers than painters like Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio di Chirico, René Magritte. The surrealists. I wanted to create in words what they created on canvas. These dreamlike landscapes, this fascinating way of artistically realizing psychological states. You know, as a teenager I lived through the greatest surrealistic situation on the planet: the war. You go into the street, and half the houses are in ruins. A car sitting on top of one of the houses. And so on… War is full of surreal surprises, full of surrealist images. Back then it became clear to me that something in human culture was taking a dreadfully warped turn – and as an artist, a writer, I wanted to understand it.

LEFT: The Drowned World, German edition (Phantasia, 2008).

When your first stories were published in British SF magazines, what was the reaction in the USA? Were many of the stories accepted?

No, the Americans were very hesitant to publish my stories. They just didn’t understand what I was driving at. The American SF magazines of the late 50s and early 60s wanted conventional SF stories, stories set in the future or in space. An SF story set in the present irritated them terribly, and many of my stories were set in the present then. In time it got better, naturally, and many of my stories could then appear over there, but the experimental pieces were really published almost exclusively in Britain. So up to 1963 – when the success of my first really serious novel The Drowned World brought me a certain independence – I wrote almost entirely experimental short stories.

Can it be that your 1964 short story ‘The Terminal Beach’ marked a turning point in your work? With respect to what one generally designates ‘inner space’?

Absolutely. ‘The Terminal Beach’ is certainly one of my most important stories. Even though it was published in New Worlds, it wasn’t a science fiction story at all, but rather conveyed merely a certain science fiction atmosphere. It described a landscape that was the expression of a particular psychological state – our fear of nuclear war. Yes, I think ‘The Terminal Beach’ is the first real ‘inner space’ story and it leads directly to The Atrocity Exhibition, but also to novels like Crash, High Rise and Concrete Island. There, there are particular mental landscapes described throughout, like those made by the surrealists in their paintings.

‘Inner space’ was also the thematic centre of the start of the New Wave back then. When you look back today, how do you see your rôle in that literary movement?

I was the New Wave! (Laughs.) Well, in some ways there was something inevitable about the New Wave. Back then in the early 60s American science fiction had exhausted itself in repeating its themes, and people were looking for something new and exciting. You know, as soon as I began to write, I constantly saw in SF authors and especially in the American ones a collection of truly naive and, if you like, innocent men – people who truly didn’t know what they were doing. Ray Bradbury is a prominent example. A few years ago someone sent me a book about him, with many photographs. One of these showed Bradbury in his work room, which is about as large as a tennis court – and every millimetre of this huge workroom is stuffed full of toys: rockets, spaceships, dinosaur models, every kind of monster. A child’s room. A wonderful image for the American science fiction of these times, even for the whole of American culture.

You said that you wouldn’t describe ‘The Terminal Beach’ as a science fiction story at all. Would that go for everything you’ve written since?

Absolutely. I don’t see novels like Crash, High Rise or Concrete Island as science fiction. And I think that many people only describe it as science fiction because in that way they can neutralize the uncomfortable feeling it radiates.

Then what are these novels and tales?

Good question. They’re certainly not part of Realism, which dominates modern fiction – I’ve only really written one ‘realistic’ novel: Empire of the Sun. No, I think they belong to another literary tradition, one which goes back to Sade and which was carried on by writers like Genet or Celine. The bad boys of literature, if you like. An extraordinarily powerful tradition that deals with truths people don’t want to hear. I’ve always seen myself as a kind of moralist, one who stands on the roadside holding up a sign with the legend: Look out, dangerous bends, drive slowly!

ABOVE: JGB in 2006 (photo courtesy The Terminal Collection).

So, stories that read like science fiction, but aren’t?

Something like that. It’s simply that the themes of science fiction were eagerly ingested by the mainstream, and readers got on with them better and better. Just take William Burroughs, who I admire greatly: he demonstrated very early on, with his paranoid fantasies which naturally go back to Kafka, that one doesn’t have to be a science fiction author to write science fiction. No, I think that with The Atrocity Exhibition at the latest, I abandoned the genre for good. And I’ve not gone back to it since. But that’s not at all uncommon: even H. G. Wells began as a science fiction author, and at some point left off with it and wrote mainstream novels.

In the 80s with cyberpunk there arose a literary movement about which, in retrospect, one asks oneself if it was still science fiction.

Yes, I greatly admired the cyberpunk authors, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, many others. Whether they wrote science fiction or something else is hard to say. The fact is that new forms of communications have a great influence on literature, particularly the internet – and cyberpunk was the first expression of it. But it came too late for me. I’ve never owned a computer, and I still don’t have one even today.

But you surf on the internet now and then, don’t you?

Naturally. One cannot avoid it anymore. The internet’s a fascinating thing – it really has made the world into a global village.

Let’s come back to your short stories. Or rather to the fact that in the 90s you hardly wrote them any more…

I think that short stories are basically a playing field for young authors, a bit like the lyric. Moreover there are, as I said, scarcely any more opportunities to publish short stories. Of course now and then a magazine rings me and asks for a story, which is quite wonderful. But when I then ask how long it should be, they answer: 2000 words. 2000 words! That’s not a story, it’s a vignette. Yes, I stopped writing short stories in the 90s. But in some ways all my most recently published novels are extended short stories. But please don’t tell anyone.

And all these novels seem to have a common theme: the failure of every form of middle-class utopia.

Yes, in some ways. I’m very interested in social pathology, in what really drives us on in our everyday lives. My newest novel Kingdom Come raises the question of whether the consumer thinking of the present day might not at some point suddenly turn into fascism.

A very trenchant thesis.

Yes, but just take a look at what’s going on in these huge shopping malls. Evidently not much more than shopping is left for us. That and sport. That’s where we get our kicks, those are the new religions. I already believe that one of these days we could end up in a kind of leisure-time dictatorship.

But don’t events like the attacks of the 11th of September or the catastrophe in New Orleans remind people of the hard facts of reality?

I’m not so sure about that. I think it was difficult for many people to distinguish the picture of the collapsed World Trade Center from all the other images they know from Hollywood. It’s such a binary matter: real, unreal, real, unreal… And as for whether the current American administration finds itself brought down to reality or not, I very much doubt it. No, I think we live in dangerous times.

Do at least modern SF authors react appropriately to what’s going on around us?

I can’t say, I read practically no science fiction any more. You know, it’s like an old affair: if it ends, it’s gone forever. It doesn’t come back. What fascinated me about science fiction fifty years ago has long become a part of our everyday life, it’s permeated the whole of society. Just go to a modern hospital sometime – it’s pure science fiction. I only very seldom read novels at all. I read far more non-fiction, political analyses, biographies. The older one gets, the more one clings to facts.

And to come back to the aforementioned tome of fiction, your collected short stories: could you tell us what your favourite short story is?

Hm… My favourite story is probably ‘Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan’. That story changed everything for me.

And will there one day be a sequel? ‘Why I Want To Fuck George W. Bush’?

No, I really would not want to fuck George W. Bush! Hillary Clinton, maybe. If you know what I mean.

Many thanks for the chat, Mr. Ballard.

Originally published in German as Werner Fuchs and Sascha Mamczak, ‘George W. Bush möchte ich nun wirklich nicht ficken!’ in Das Science Fiction Jahr 2007, eds. Sascha Mamczak and Wolfgang Jeschke (Heyne, 2007).

ABOVE: Richard Gere as Blake: more vapourware…

None of my books are being made into films at the moment, all is quiet. A lot of Philip K. Dick’s books have been filmed; they fit the American mood. His novels are very paranoid and I think that touches a nerve in America.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed in SFX magazine, 2007.

I have been working my way through a stack of Ballard interviews from the 70s and 80s, and one consistent note is JGB’s regret at never cracking the American market. But his US stocks might have been very different if a few more of the film options taken out on his books had come to fruition, an observation brought home to me after reading David Pringle’s 1990 conversation with Ballard (published in Fear magazine and kindly sent to me by Martin J.).

In this interview there is much tantalising detail about these vapourware films, including the news that Steven Spielberg’s partner Kathy Kennedy was keen to option Running Wild a couple of years after Spielberg’s film of Empire. Ballard, however, feared it was “slightly too strong a dish for Spielberg” while speculating that “one of those John Carpenter directors might have fun with it”. He also talks of stalled development on a proposed film of The Day of Creation, before bemoaning the fact that “nobody has ever got it together” to film Concrete Island, despite the fact it has “been continuously optioned ever since it was published” and that it “would be quite easy and cheap to film”. The latest option on Concrete Island (at the time, 1990), Ballard reveals, was from someone in Australia!

But the biggest revelation is that Richard Gere wanted to make a film of The Unlimited Dream Company. According to Ballard:

Richard Gere … has taken an option on The Unlimited Dream Company with a view to playing the hero himself. I met him in London and was very impressed by him — highly articulate, thoughtful, serious-minded. He’s very interested in Buddhism, does work on behalf of various Buddhist missions. Reincarnation through one species to another is very much a part of Buddhist thought, and obviously that is what intrigued him about the novel. What would have been the insuperable obstacle of filming the flying sequences is no problem these days — they can do that extremely convincingly. But one must assume, to be sensible, that nothing will come of it.

Richard Gere as Blake! The mind curdles! I wonder if Gere intended to keep the Shepperton setting? Perhaps it would have suffered a fate similar to the remake of The Wicker Man, sadly ripped from its pagan context on a remote Scottish isle and relocated to a “repressive matriarchal” island off the coast of Washington. In any case, Gere’s star was soaring at that time, riding on the back of Pretty Woman, so I imagine the film would have exposed Ballard similarly, the way Spielberg pulled him into his slipstream.

Well, with all this new info addling my brain, I thought I’d compile a list of Ballard’s brushes and near-brushes with the film world. If anyone has any more info, I’d be glad to receive it.

BOOKS

The Drought (1964)
According to JGB in 1976:

I … wrote a script from my early novel The Drought, which was bought up for TV by David Frost, but he’s never used it.

And 20 years later:

People have tried to buy [the rights] back from David Frost, but he’s put an incredibly high price on them, so I’m afraid that novel will remain unfilmed… Hazel Adair [who bought the rights with Frost] read the novel, and she was very familiar with my stuff. She just wanted to film it straight, as it was. She saw it as exotic, with a strong story — when the taps run dry what do people do? You take it for granted that you’ll be able to find water somewhere if the taps run dry, but if the rivers run dry as well you’ve got a problem on your hands. Against that background, there is this urban disaster story going on, with the characters losing their suburban virtues and becoming more and more archetypal. So I think she saw it as having good roles, and all the rest of it. But, ah well, this was 25 years ago; I think it was ’69 when they bought the rights, and by then, of course, the British film industry had just fallen through the grilles in the floor.

Quoted in Ballard’s 1996 interview with David Pringle for SFX magazine.

The Crystal World (1966)
According to JGB (again, from the 1996 Pringle):

The Crystal World has been optioned quite a few times over the years. I think the film-makers are attracted to the visual possibilities of the crystallizing forest, and crystallizing helicopters and crocodiles and the like, but it would be very difficult to portray convincingly.

The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)
Filmed by Jonathan Weiss in 2000.

Crash (1973)

ABOVE: Jack Nicholson in Crash: “Heeere’s Vaughnie!”

1) Filmed by David Cronenberg in 1996.
2) B.C. (Before Cronenberg), Ballard told the RE/Search crew:

I’ve seen a filmscript of Crash by a very good English writer named Heathcote Williams. Some film company wanted Jack Nicholson to star in it. This version was set in Los Angeles with American characters, an American landscape — obviously that’s where the money is to make movies. It was a genuine translation, not just of language but of everything. I didn’t really like it. It was almost Disneyfied — “Walt Disney Productions presents Crash!”

Concrete Island (1974)
1) According to JGB in 1976:

I wrote a script from my novel Concrete Island, that a French director wanted to film. That was last summer. I don’t know if he’ll actually make the film.

2) Option from someone in Australia, as above (1990).
3) According to JGB in 1996 (SFX interview):

A French company holds the option at present, and is developing it: whether they can actually get the money together to finance it I don’t know.

High-Rise (1975)
1) Currently in development hell with Vincenzo Natali attached.
2) Optioned in the 1970s with Nic Roeg as director and Paul Mayersberg as scriptwriter. Roeg and Mayersberg of course made The Man Who Fell to Earth, a bittersweet reminder of what might have been: sweet because it’s such an amazing film, bitter because it’s not Ballard.
3) Bruce Robinson, writer/director of Withnail and I, wrote a High-Rise script in 1979. According to an IMDB commenter:

Bruce put a lot of work into it. He researched the architectural side of the story, as well as some particularly gruesome torture devices available to ‘ordinary’ people. He was commissioned by Euston Films, ending up writing a $35 million film. It was dumped because Bruce believed it would never be made. Please read ‘Smoking In Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson’ by Alistair Owen, for more about this script.

The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
Optioned by Richard Gere, as above.

Empire of the Sun (1984)
Filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987.

The Day of Creation (1987)
1) “Some interest”, as above.
2) In a 1987 interview, it was noted: “There are no immediate plans for a movie version of The Day of Creation, although Ballard says, ‘My film agent is getting a lot of response from directors and producers.’”

Running Wild (1988)
1) Interest from the Spielberg camp around 1990, as above.
2) In 2003, Samuel L. Jackson was bitten. Running Wild was supposed to be filmed by David Leland (Mona Lisa, Wish You Were Here), starring Samuel as “a forensic psychiatrist who investigates an unusual crime on a Pacific Northwest island. Running Wild is slated for production summer 2004 on Vancouver Island. The producers have partnered with Alliance Atlantis for this project.” Although the film was headed for the Wicker Man route, relocated to an American island, it, too, disappeared off the face of the earth.

UPDATE…
Sam is back in the game!

Cocaine Nights (1996)
1) Last year, Andy Harries, one of the producers of The Queen, optioned Cocaine Nights with Peter Webber (Girl with A Pearl Earring; Hannibal Rising) attached as director.
2) According to my snout, Tim C., Paul Mayersberg was set to write a Cocaine Nights miniseries for ITV. It never came through, of course.

Super-Cannes (2000)
In 2002 Jeremy Thomas (Naked Lunch; Crash) optioned Super-Cannes for John Maybury (Love is the Devil; The Jacket) to direct from a script by Mayersberg (The Man Who Fell to Earth; Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence; Croupier). At the time Thomas said, ‘Until we have a finished script there can be no decisions on casting, budget or start of shoot.’ Can we assume that Mayersberg never delivered that script, since the production has completely disappeared off the map? By the way, in Ballardian terms, that makes three strikes for Mayersberg: Crash, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes. None of them happened.

SHORT STORIES

The Vermilion Sands stories (1957-70)
According to Tim C., in 2000 the BBC planned a series based on Vermilion Sands:

This from a posting to the JGB list (no one ever managed to dig up further details): “The BBC is producing Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence and working on adaptations of Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, Kingsley Amis’ Take a Girl Like You, JG Ballard’s Vermillion Sands and Alex Garland’s Tesseract.”

‘The Sound-Sweep’ (1960)
As Tim C. notes, there was a mooted “BBC opera version of ‘The Sound Sweep’, as mentioned in Judith Merrill’s anthology England Swings SF (1968) and nowhere else.”

‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ (1962)
Filmed by Peter Potter in 1964 for BBC television.

‘Minus One’ (1963)
Filmed by Simon Brook in 1991.

‘Low-Flying Aircraft’ (1975)
Filmed as Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude by Solveig Nordlund in 2002.

‘The Enormous Space’ (1989)
Filmed as Home by Richard Curson-Smith for BBC television in 2003.

Special mention must be made of Crash!, the 1971 short film made by Harley Cokliss for the BBC. It stars Ballard and is based on fragments from The Atrocity Exhibition as well as drawing from various ideas Ballard was working on at the time. I always assumed Ballard wrote the script, but in the SFX interview he reveals it was in fact Cokliss:

The screenplay, or whatever you want to call it, wasn’t written by me; it was written by Cokliss. So I just did what he told me. He’d say, ‘walk across the roof of this multi-storey car park, Jim, and get into that car,’ so I’d do that. I think I wrote a voice-over, which I remember recording at Ealing Studios. But I can scarcely remember the film. I’ve no idea whether it was any good or not. The past is another country.

I’d say Ballard did write the voiceover, not Cokliss, given it features concepts that would later pop up in his non-fiction pieces and in the introduction to Crash. We’ll give Harley credit for the actual shooting script, though.

ORIGINAL SCRIPTS

‘Gulliver in Space’ (1964)
Original script for this episode of Jackanory, the British children’s show. According to JGB: “I really wrote it for my children, who were keen viewers at the time.”

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)

ABOVE: “Ooooga Booga…” Imogen Hassall as Ayak, Magda Konopka as Ulido and Victoria Vetri as Sanna in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. “No dialogue, just a lot of grunts” said Ballard.

Screen treatment for Val Guest’s prehistoric potboiler. According to JGB in a 1991 interview with Pringle and Richard Kadrey:

Back in the 60s, Hammer Films made a remake of the original One Million Years B.C. with Raquel Welch. The remake was a success, and they decided to make a sequel to their remake. They asked if I would do the original treatment, which I did. This was a film without dialogue, you would just hear a lot of grunts. I didn’t actually write a script; the shooting script was written by the director. For my treatment, I got a ‘screen credit’, my only screen credit up till Empire of the Sun. I’m very proud that my first screen credit was for what is, without doubt, the worst film ever made. An appallingly bad film that only distantly resembled anything in my original treatment.

While in Miracles of Life he really goes to town:

I was contacted by a Hammer producer, Aida Young, who was a great admirer of The Drowned World. She was keen that I write the screenplay for their next production, a sequel to One Million Years BC… She steered me into the office of Tony Hinds, then the head of Hammer. He was affable but gloomy, and listened without comment as Aida launched into a chapter-by-chapter account of The Drowned World, with its picture of a steaming, half-submerged London and its vistas of dream-inducing water.

… Hinds asked me what ideas I had come up with. Bearing in mind that the promised contract had yet to arrive, I had given little thought to the project, but on the drive from Shepperton to Soho I had produced several promising ideas. I outlined them as vividly as I could.

‘Too original’ Hinds commented. Aida agreed. ‘Jim, we want that Drowned World atmosphere.’ She spoke as if this could be sprayed on, presumably in a fetching shade of jungle green.

Hinds then told me what the central idea would be. His secretary had suggested it that morning. This was nothing less than the story of the birth of the Moon — in fact, one of the oldest and corniest ideas in the whole of science fiction, which I would never have dared to lay on his desk. Hines stared hard at me. ‘We want you to tell us what happens next.’

I thought desperately, realising that the film industry was not for me. ‘A tidal wave?’

‘Too many tidal waves. If you’ve seen one tidal wave you’ve seen them all.’

A small light came on in the total darkness of my brain. ‘But you always see the tidal waves coming in,’ I said in a stronger voice. ‘We should show the tidal wave going out! All those strange creatures and plants…’ I ended with a brief course in surrealist biology.

There was a silence as Hinds and Aida stared at each other. I assumed I was about to be shown the door.

‘When the wave goes out…’ Hinds stood up, clearly rejuvenated, standing behind his huge desk like Captain Ahab sighting the white whale. ‘Brilliant. Jim, who’s your agent?’

We went out to a glamorous lunch in a restaurant with Roman decor. Hinds and Aida were excited and cheerful, already moving on to the next stage of production, casting the leading characters. I failed to realise it at the time, but I had already reached the high point of my usefulness to them. I should have heard the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the ebbing tidal wave, but it was exciting to have an idea taken up so quickly and be plied with enthusiasm, friendship and fine wine. Already they were discussing the complex relationships between the principal characters, difficult to envisage in a film with no dialogue, where emotions were expressed solely in terms of bare-chested men hitting each other with clubs or dragging a handsome blonde into a nearby cave by her hair. In due course I prepared a treatment, some of which survived into the finished film, along with my ebbing wave.

As Hammer films go, it was a success, but I am glad that they misspelled my name in the credits [as 'J.B. Ballard'].

NOVELIZATIONS

Alien (1979)
Ballard was offered $20,000 to write the novelization of Alien, Ridley Scott’s classic film, a job which went to Alan Dean Foster in his stead. As Ballard told Pringle in 1984:

It was surprisingly easy to turn down. I wouldn’t mind doing the novelization of Alphaville, or even Huston’s Moby Dick or Hawks’s Big Sleep (Welles’s Macbeth would pose some problems).

(Still, there does appear to be some evidence that Ballard gave the Alien project more than a glancing thought…)

But despite what Ballard says in the Miracles quote above, that “the film industry was not for me”, in the SFX interview he actually regrets not being more closely involved with film. In fact, he sounds a little down about it. This is another interview I’ve just come across recently, and from it I was rather surprised to learn that Ballard’s burning passion was to write original screenplays and to collaborate with a gun director, forming a similar partnership to Graham Greene and Carol Reed.

Let me just catch my breath for a bit…

Someone really, really should have made that happen.

(But then again, precious egos would be at stake: today’s director’s are far too focused on writing their own scripts, to the detriment of good storylines.)

Here are Ballard’s closing remarks from the SFX interview:

I’ve had a lot of invitations, in recent years, to write a drama series — or to write original plays in the days when they existed. But I’ve always declined them because I’m not at my best working with a committee, and television is a world entirely made up of committees. It’s a huge collaboration. That doesn’t suit me. Cinema is quite different, actually; film is entirely driven by one or two people at the most — usually the producer first. The creative importance of the producer is underestimated by people who think that cinema is entirely the work of the director.

Not true: in my contacts with the film world, the producers have been more important than the directors, really (Spielberg and Cronenberg are virtually their own producers). Films are driven by (a) the producer, and then (b) the director, and you’re dealing usually with one person. I’ve never worked in film, and I regret that very much. Because I’ve always responded so to film, I regret that I’ve never been able to collaborate with a director I felt close to or in sympathy with — in the way that, say, Graham Greene was able to collaborate with Carol Reed. It’s a pity, but it just never happened, partly because most of my career as a writer has coincided with a period of two or three decades when the British film industry has virtually ceased to exist. Had my career as a writer begun 20 years earlier, say in the 1940s, probably more of my novels would have been filmed and I might well have got involved with some sort of simpatico director. But now it’s too late.

Nader at a news conference: ‘Sixties iconography: … the pudenda of Ralph Nader … the climax of a New York happening: a dead child’ (photo: UPI/Bettman).

Self-styled ‘consumer crusader’ Ralph Nader is again running for the US presidency.

To prep you on Nader’s qualifications, here is a dossier on the man, straight from the pages of The Atrocity Exhibition:

From Ballard’s annotations (Atrocity, 1990 edition):

Nader has only just survived into the 1990s, and it’s difficult now to imagine his name leaping to anyone’s lips, but at the time he sent a seismic tremor through the mind of the US consumer, challenging the authority of that greatest of all American icons, the automobile. Every car crash seemed a prayer to Ralph Nader.
…
His assault on the automobile clearly had me worried. Living in grey England, what I most treasured of my Shanghai childhood were my memories of American cars, a passion I’ve retained to this day. Looking back, one can see that Nader was the first of the ecopuritans, who proliferate now, convinced that everything is bad for us. In fact, too few things are bad for us, and one fears an indefinite future of pious bourgeois certitudes.

From the text (Atrocity, 1990 edition):

Dr Nathan gazed at the display photographs of terminal syphilitics in the cinema foyer… Despite the scandal that would ensue he had deliberately authorized this ‘Festival of Atrocity Films’… Behind their display frames the images of Nader and JFK, napalm and air crash victims revealed the considerable ingenuity of the film makers.

’Sixties iconography: the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, the pudenda of Ralph Nader, Eichmann in drag, the climax of a New York happening: a dead child.

Talbot climbed the slope, following this spectre along the embankment. He had witnessed the annunciation of a unique event. Looking down at the plaza, he murmured without thinking, ‘Ralph Nader.’

‘Talbot’s belief … is that automobile crashes play very different roles from the ones we assign them… 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.’

‘The transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader, our nearest image of the blood and body of Christ’ (photo: UPI/Bettman).

Talbot: False Deaths. (1) The flesh impact: Karen Novotny’s beckoning figure in the shower stall, open thighs and exposed pubis – traffic fatalities screamed in this soft collision. (2) The overpass below the apartment: the angles between the concrete buttresses contained for Talbot an immense anguish. (3) A crushed fender: in its broken geometry Talbot saw the dismembered body of Karen Novotny, the alternate death of Ralph Nader.

Captain Webster studied the exhibits. He fingered the shaving scar on his heavy jaw, envying Talbot the franchises of this young woman’s body. ‘And together they make up a portrait of this American safety fellow – Nader?’

‘The danger of an assassination attempt seems evident, one hypotenuse in this geometry of a murder. As to the figure of Nader – one must remember that Talbot is here distinguishing between the manifest content of reality and its latent content. Nader’s true role is clearly very different from his apparent one, to be deciphered in terms of the postures we assume, our anxieties mimetized in the junction between wall and ceiling.’

Ignoring her now, Talbot looked out through the dawn light at the converging concrete aisles. Soon the climax of the scenario would come, JFK would die again, his young wife raped by this conjunction of time and space. The enigmatic figure of Nader presided over the collision, its myths born from the cross-overs of auto-crashes and genitalia.

For Talbot the explosive collision of the two cars was a celebration of the unity of their soft geometries, the unique creation of the pudenda of Ralph Nader.

These erotic films, over which presided the mutilated figure of Ralph Nader, were screened above Dr Nathan’s head as he moved along the lines of crashed cars. Illuminated by the arc-lights, the rushes of the test collisions defined the sexual ambiguities of the abandoned motorcade.

Many factors confirmed this faulty union of time and space – the dislocated perspectives of the apartment, his isolation from his own and his wife’s body (he moved restlessly from one room to the next, as if unable to contain the volumes of his limbs and thorax), the serial deaths of Ralph Nader on the advertisement billboards that lined the airport approaches.

‘These erotic films, over which presided the mutilated figure of Ralph Nader’ (photo: UPI/Bettman).

Lateral section through the left axillary fossa of Karen Novotny, the elbow raised in a gesture of pique: the transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader.

Images of the Zapruder film hung on the fractured windshields, fusing with his dreams of Oswald and Nader.

‘Planes intersect: on one level, the tragedies of Cape Kennedy and Vietnam serialized on billboards, random deaths mimetized in the experimental auto-disasters of Nader and his co-workers.’

Time-zones: Ralph Nader, Claude Eatherly, Abraham Zapruder.

On the roof terrace, Kline walked among the mannequins. The plaster models of Marina Oswald, Ralph Nader and the young man in the laminated suit stood by the railing. Xero, meanwhile, moved with galvanic energy across the runways, assembling an immense motorcade of wrecked cars.

‘This motorcade,’ Dr Nathan explained, ‘we may interpret as a huge environmental tableau, a mobile psycho-drama which recapitulates the Apollo disaster in terms of both Dealey Plaza and the experimental car crashes examined so obsessively by Nader…’

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) Jeanne Moreau, (c) Jacqueline Kennedy (Johnson oath-taking)… (2) A film of automobile accidents devised as a cinematic version of Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed.

‘Damn you! Damn you all to hell!’ Still from Planet of the Apes, 1968.

Ben alerts us to Gerry Canavan’s extensive collection of apocalyptic images featuring a ruined Statue of Liberty. According to Gerry:

While writing the post, in connection with Ryan’s theory that the most salient feature of apocalypse in science fiction is the way in which the same images are simply repackaged for us over and over again, I was struck by the recurrence of a ruined Statue of Liberty as perhaps the quintessential icon of disaster since the 1940s. So struck, in fact, that I began to obsessively collect these images from the ‘net wherever I could find them. Submitted for your approval, the fruits of my labor…

Ballard, of course, also featured a ruined Statue of Liberty in his post-apocalyptic novel Hello America — albeit underwater rather than half buried in sand and debris:

Wayne struck the rail with both fists. He laughed aloud as the sailors ran past him. He realised now what had been missing from the mental picture of New York harbour he had carried with him across the Atlantic.

‘Wayne, for heaven’s sake…’ Anne Summers tried to calm him. ‘You’re going to have to swim, you know.’

‘Liberty! Professor Summers, don’t you remember?’ Wayne pointed to the Jersey shore, where a rocky island stood in the main channel. Even now the remains of a classical pedestal could be seen. ‘The Statue of Liberty!’

They stared into the water beside the Apollo. The lamp held aloft for generations of immigrants from the Old World had vanished, but the crown still remained around the figure’s head. One of its radiating spikes had left a ten-yard- long gash in the Apollo’s hull.

‘You’re right, Wayne. My God, though, we’re going down!’ Anne Summers looked round wildly, a hand to her blonde bun. ‘The equipment, Paul! What’s the matter with Steiner?’

The first rusty water foamed from the fore-mast pump-heads. Orlowski was screaming at the Captain, his plump index finger raised accusingly. But Steiner strolled in a leisurely way around the helm, a satisfied light in his eyes. He ignored the commissar and the pandemonium on the deck, his mouth relaxed as he spoke to the engine-room on the brass voice tube.

Below the stern the two-bladed propeller thwacked the water. A heavy black smoke billowed from the funnel. The Apollo made way, dipping cumbersomely through the waves. The cold pump-water raced across the deck to the scuppers, sluicing around Wayne’s ankles. Ricci and Anne Summers backed off, but Wayne stared down at the immense statue moving away from them.

At the climax of the evacuation of America, under the personal control of President Brown, the Statue of Liberty had been lowered from her plinth and prepared for shipment to the new American colonies in Europe. In a sudden storm, however, the wooden lighter built to transport the statue had broken loose from its tugs, drifted free across the bay and lost its bows on the razor-sharp keel of a scuttled freighter. In the chaos that filled the final days of the evacuation the exact location of the statue had never been established, and she had been left to break up in the cold waters of the next century.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981).

Above: ‘The Staircase’, by Troy Paiva, 2005. ‘Byron Hot Springs Hotel, Byron California. Built in the 1930s, used for POW interrogations during WWII. Abandoned for decades, many say it’s quite haunted. It IS noisy at night in there . . . Night,full moon, dark interior, blue and red-gelled strobe flash. Canon 20D.’

The brilliant work of Troy Paiva, photographer and ‘big-city spelunker’, was brought to my attention recently. This is most definitely Ballardian, in the dictionary sense, even though Troy tells me he only read Ballard recently. These irradiated visions of a crumbling, post-industrial America — decommissioned military bases; aircraft ‘boneyards’ — are all shot at night, using available light (sodium lighting, for example, plentiful in the urban archaeological ruins Troy uncovers), or the unearthly effects of red, green and blue gelled strobe flashes. The work is presented straight out of the camera, untouched by heavy Photoshopping or other post-processing techniques.

I’m hoping to soon find out some more from Troy about his work, and I’ll post the results here.

America’s space programme suffered unexpected turbulence yesterday when a revelation that astronauts were allowed to fly on the shuttle while drunk was followed by news of sabotage to the cargo of a forthcoming mission. Nasa officials are expected to confirm today that there have been at least two occasions when crew members were so intoxicated before their launch that they were deemed a flight safety risk.
…
The drinking claims come in a report commissioned by the space agency to investigate the behaviour of its astronauts in the wake of the arrest of shuttle crew member Lisa Nowak in February for allegedly stalking and attacking a love rival.

The panel discovered “heavy use of alcohol” by unspecified astronauts in the 12-hour period before a shuttle launch, according to Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine, which says it obtained an advance copy of the report.

The agency’s “bottle-to-throttle” rule prohibits any Nasa employee from drinking alcohol in the hours before a lift-off, yet at least two astronauts were apparently allowed to fly despite warnings from flight surgeons and colleagues that they were too intoxicated.”

[again -- thanks, Ben!]

If you compare this news item with the ‘strangle her before she strangles you’ entry, the question is begged: why can’t you be drunk on a simulated space flight? Surely, for realism’s sake, this would be A-OK.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Geoff Manaugh is a writer and essayist whose work has appeared in Contemporary, Space & Culture, Blend, Lumpen, Inhabitat, WorldChanging, the Oyster Boy Review, the Urban Design Review, Subtopia, Vector, things magazine, and The Allen Ginsberg Audio Collection (a short essay in the CD liner notes). He’s also a contributing editor at Archinect, and Senior Editor for David Haskell’s Urban Design Review. And he’s the main man behind BLDGBLOG, a blog devoted to ‘architectural conjecture, urban speculation and landscape futures’. BLDGBLOG is very popular — it’s namechecked in the current Blackberry Pearl ad campaign featuring Douglas Coupland. It’s also wildly divergent, eclectic and challenging, and it never fails to command the attention, as Geoff examines the built world from all angles, and even from the upper atmosphere (via Google Earth), leaping around from posts on London’s subterranean system of drains, sewers and bunkers to whole suburbs thrown into space; from Indian superhighways to acoustic landscapes; from cathedrals made of magma to ‘psychovideography’; from military urbanism to sustainable urbanism; from derelict utopias to 3D models of plate tectonics.

I spoke to Geoff Manaugh about BLDGBLOG, and Ballard, and Geoff’s as-yet-unpublished novel, and a lot more.

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Simon Sellars
————————————————————————————————–

SIMON: What motivated you to start a blog devoted to “architectural conjecture, urban speculation, and landscape futures”?

GEOFF: I was reading Super-Cannes, writing my own first novel, recovering from abdominal surgery, and auditing a university course about Archigram, the 1960s British pop-utopian architecture group; those things just came together somehow – and, one morning, on a whim, I started BLDGBLOG. Now I work on it almost constantly. It’s been two years.

BLDGBLOG became pretty well-defined, with a small but growing readership, and it had a voice, a tempo, an energy, a feel. It was no longer just an ‘architecture’ blog; it had its own direction and orientation, and it was even verging on science fiction in some ways. Short stories in the disguise of architectural theory. Ideas for screenplays. In that regard, BLDGBLOG became more literary – by which I don’t mean to compliment my writing abilities, but to say that the site became its own kind of genre: architectural criticism as a kind of literary form. Somewhere between science fiction, a short story collection, a Don Delillo novel, and a kind of technical catalogue for a world that didn’t exist. Which, incidentally, is how I view a lot of Ballard’s work. So if BLDGBLOG could ever equal Ballard in that regard, I’d be a very happy man!

It’s worth adding that a lot of the architects I admire also use architecture as a form of social critique, or political allegory: Archigram, Rem Koolhass, even Piranesi or Will Alsop. The Agents of Change. Speculative architectural treatises are an extremely exciting, if totally unacknowledged, branch of the literary arts. Look at Thomas More’s Utopia. Or China Miéville. Or, for that matter, J.G. Ballard.

Testing, testing… Is this on… Corporate, automobile test-landscapes. Deserted beach resorts. Ruined stripmalls.

‘Highways, office blocks, faces and street signs are perceived as if they were elements in a malfunctioning central nervous system’. J.G. Ballard

More soon.

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BLDGBLOG’s first post. Wednesday, 7 July, 2004
———————————————————————-

BLDGBLOG has covered diverse territory, but your basic obsessions were clearly set out in your very first post. Can you elaborate on the Ballardian elements in your work?

One of the things I like about Ballard is how he treats architectural space: highway flyovers, corporate campuses, flooded hotels, suburban home-development projects, abandoned swimming pools, army camps in the desert. He presents the modern, built environment as this kind of psychological field lab for testing new ways of being human. He encodes all this, or hardwires it, into the actual landscapes of his novels. You get humans trying to understand and psychologically accommodate themselves to the presence of vast, empty car parks, derelict hospitals, redundant freeways, under-subscribed exurban high-rises and so on. It’s a ‘malfunctioning central nervous system’ in spatial form, on the scale of a whole civilisation.

Ballardian space is psycho-spatial. His books are full of artificial lakes, highway medians, multi-storey car parks, strangely over-air-conditioned corporate boardrooms – and these all take on a kind of menacing, even confrontational, gleam, as if you’ve just stepped into some kind of unspoken mental challenge. The buildings and cities and landscapes in Ballard’s novels are more like psychological traps built by management consultants – not architects – who then fly overhead in private jets, looking down, checking whether their complicated theories of human cognition have survived the test. Where ‘the test’ is the world you and I now live in.

Each day, the towers of central London seemed slightly more distant, the landscape of an abandoned planet receding slowly from his mind. By contrast with the calm and unencumbered geometry of the concert-hall and television studios below him, the ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis”.

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J.G. Ballard. High-Rise.
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Of course, any built environment has a psychological impact on the people who live there. In Super-Cannes, for instance, the book’s setting – an office park – is haunted by a kind of ‘controlled and supervised madness,’ Ballard writes. One of the characters explains, at great length, how the too-perfect and over-manicured landscapes of this new corporate enclave inspire sexual violence and anti-immigrant raids – a rebellion against the boredom of tennis courts and well-mowed lawns. Every artificial landscape is the diagram of a certain psychological state – even if that just means reflecting the dominant aesthetic of the day. But the idea that the built landscape can be read as an ‘encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis,’ as Ballard writes, crossing generations and countries, just fascinates me.

Space in Ballard’s novels is never deeply textured or deeply described. Instead, you get these abstract non-places – a corporate campus, a media center, a fitness complex. You drive down feeder roads and airport roundabouts and cross-city motorways. You never enter a world of rich, Dickensian details. He’s like the anti-Dickens. You don’t walk past churches and bookshops and local bars and farmers’ markets and whatever else makes a believable urban setting; you’re always out in this weird edge-world of import warehouses and corporate development projects. Sports-car dealerships. The very lack of detail is what makes a setting Ballardian.

That’s Ballard’s fabled inner space, isn’t it — a neurological world unable to be verified beyond the shifting data of sensory input?

Yes and no. I think there’s a shift in Ballard’s work, from the earlier, almost psychedelic concerns of something like The Drowned World — where all the characters verge on an evolutionary regression to this kind of quasi-reptilian psychological state — compared to the more socioeconomic concerns of Ballard’s later novels, like Millennium People.

In other words, I’d agree with you that there’s a mental/cognitive/neurological world at play in Ballard’s work — but I think the larger significance of that world has shifted over the course of his career. For instance, Ballard’s early stories might suggest that one of the characters has an inability to perceive anything outside his own nervous system, for neuro-anatomical reasons; but now Ballard would emphasise something else. He wouldn’t blame anatomy — the human nervous system — but would use instead his own peculiar version of psychoanalysis to say that the reason you can’t understand or fully interact with the outside world is because of sexual repression or cultural hang-ups — or sheer corporate sociopathology — not because of your reptilian cortex, or because of certain hormones.

So I think Ballard’s gone from blaming the body, or neuro-chemical imbalances, on behalf of his narrators to blaming culture and the economy and sexual mores for his characters’ often hilariously bizarre activities.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Too many car parks – always a sign of a troubled mind”.

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J.G. Ballard. Super-Cannes.
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On BLDGBLOG, you once wrote, “Super-Cannes is a novel – but it’s also a work of architectural criticism”.

Yes — it’s about architecture and corporate real estate as much as it is about the central murder mystery we’re meant to solve. I think it’s a great book. Ballard managed to write a bona fide page-turner, with a genuinely gripping plot and loads of hilarious throwaway lines, and to do so even as he took the same kind of socio-architectural analysis from High-Rise – even Concrete Island – to a new level, critiquing global capitalism itself and not just suburban condo politics. Too often Ballard just comes up with a setting, or an image, while all the rest stalls, like in The Day of Creation, which I think is a failure. There’s nothing there — it’s a military camp in the desert, near a polluted river, with a derelict cinema and an unused airfield and … who cares? The book goes nowhere. Just write a poem, or take a photograph, or use that as one image in a much larger project — because there’s not enough there for a novel.

Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise are often spoken of in the same breath, given that they’re the most airtight, hermetically sealed Ballard novels of all, but I’ve never seen BLDGBLOG quote, or refine, or retool Crash in any way…

I found Crash almost unreadable – not because it offended me, but because I found it badly written and just incredibly obvious. More to the point, it didn’t read like Ballard was having a good time when he wrote it. It reads like he’d rather have been doing something else – and so the book feels dry. It feels sterile. His other books just zip along – and that feeling of effortlessness carries you with it.

I think Ballard said somewhere that if he ever got an erection while writing Crash — because of its weird, auto-centric eroticism — then he would have failed. But I think that’s exactly why the book itself fails: if Ballard actually had created a world of sexualised car crashes and literal auto-eroticism that had succeeded in turning him on, then that enthusiasm would have found its way into the writing. You would have felt it. As it is, the book was empty for me. Even the humour doesn’t ring true. It should have been a short story — because then, of course, I’d be saying it’s brilliant!

I think Crash is maybe too close to The Atrocity Exhibition. To some extent, Crash doesn’t even read like it’s meant to be published in novel form. The Atrocity Exhibition is very upfront with its nonlinear structure and its somewhat improvised – if also completely nonexistent – narrative, and so it works for me; but Crash neither rid itself of that Atrocity Exhibition-like fragmentation nor fit itself fully into the structure of a novel. Maybe it shouldn’t be called a novel: it’s just a text…

What do you think of Cronenberg’s Crash?

It’s alright — but I’m not a big fan. It takes itself way too seriously, for instance, and ends up just boring the shit out of everyone. I think it was miscast, badly paced, and not explicit enough about its themes. As it is, the movie appears to be about a bunch of dull and uninteresting Canadians who get into a car accident one day and end up wife-swapping. Yet, having said that, the movie isn’t funny at all.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

A film of High-Rise is in development, with Vincent Natali attached to direct. But does the symbolism of the high rise really apply to America? It’s not really a ‘high rise’ culture, is it?

I think only in low income, public housing projects — like Chicago’s Cabrini-Green — does high-rise architecture have any sort of psycho-sociological place in the United States. Obviously, you have high-rise living in Manhattan and Chicago and Boston and even L.A. — and Miami, Atlanta, and so on — but I don’t think the buildings themselves have been marketed to their future residents as ‘an experiment in modern living’, or some such, where the narrative of the building itself implies that something will be different there, something will happen there that has never happened before… Which I think was the explicit promise of London high-rises in the 1970s — especially Canary Wharf, later, during the Thatcher years — thus setting up the Ballardian twist: an architectural experiment gone awry. Of course, an American version of High-Rise would undoubtedly be set in a gated Orange County suburb. And I think it’d be brilliant. If I was a publisher I’d commission it, in fact,

Much of the discourse on Ballard springs from English critics. As an American, do you see him as an especially British writer?

Actually, no. I think, aside from vocabulary and punctuation and spelling — and Ballard’s settings, of course — it’s not at all obvious that Ballard is English. You can make points about sense of humour and so on, but Ballard doesn’t strike me as a British writer in the same way that Ian McEwan does, or Iain Sinclair. Or even Iain Banks. Ballard’s book don’t sell well in the U.S., but that’s entirely a top-down problem. I think the American publishing industry is in a state of free-fall, marketing all the wrong books in all the wrong ways. Trying to market Ballard would never occur to them. They want to sell people John Updike novels in hardcover — despite the fact that no one wants John Updike novels, and hardcover books are completely obsolete as a format. So they ‘experiment’ by publishing 900-page hardcover epics about farm life in 1920s Nebraska — and then still seem surprised that no one’s reading fiction in this country.

Short, good, fairly priced, intellectually progressive paperback books — that’s all you need.

Which Ballard book would you like to see filmed?

You’re going to think I’m out of my mind, but I’d like to see Steven Spielberg direct The Drowned World — as long as he didn’t add any kids to the screenplay. Or Danny Boyle film Concrete Island. Or, for that matter, Wong Kar-wai could film Concrete Island, in Chinese, set in Hong Kong. Or Shanghai — a nice bit of Ballardian symmetry there.

Spielberg? Interesting answer.

When I say ‘Steven Spielberg’ I really just mean the budgets, and the production values, and the technical abilities — the sets, the matte painting, the look — that went into something like Minority Report, or even the first forty-five minutes of War of the Worlds. I wasn’t thinking of Empire of the Sun at all, in fact. I think The Drowned World starring maybe Daniel Craig and Christian Bale, directed by Steven Spielberg — although I’m just thinking out loud here — might be good. But who knows. It could also be horrific.

Reversing the question, I’d love to see J.G. Ballard write a novelisation of Panic Room — or something else like that. I wonder if he could novelize Die Hard…?

Do you feel that Blade Runner’s an overrated text as far as architectural criticism is concerned? It always gets name checked, but one thing I feel it missed was the ‘invisibility’ of new technology. It’s probably the last of the old-school dystopian sci fi films, where the city itself was a major character, imposing and present…

As an architectural film, yes: I do think Blade Runner is over-rated. Even as a film about urban design or the urban future. But as a film about the overwhelming sadness of being alone in the world – in that regard I think it’s unbelievable, and deserves its reputation. The self-distrusting madness of thought, doubting your own reality, your own solidity, whether or not what you did yesterday was real: all obvious questions, of course, and all themes already done by the Existentialists, the Romantics, even The Matrix – but what I mean is that, in a world where it’s possible to work and grow old and be completely alone for the whole thing, self-disappearance is an interestingly under-explored phenomenon. And I think Blade Runner really tackles that. It’s a sad movie. It can sometimes be almost unbearable to watch.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Ballard once said that the “future will be boring”. From your enthusiastic mapping out of the future on BLDGBLOG, you clearly don’t agree.

Arguably, nothing’s boring — it comes down to whether you’re alert enough to find something of interest. If you’re willing to embarrass yourself expressing unexpected enthusiasms, for instance, then nothing’s ever boring. Weird things happen everywhere if you look for them. The international departure lounge at the Chicago airport, for instance, may sound like the most boring place on earth, but the whole point of the Ballardian project — the whole point of Ballard’s novels — seems to be to reveal the secret currents that exist in such a space: Freudian/sexual interest, Marxist/revolutionary interest, rightwing/Monarchist interest. Whatever interest. So there’s no real way of predicting whether or not the future will be boring. Arguably, the world will be at its most boring once everyone recycles their tins and eats vegetarian. Perhaps manufacturing AK-47s is the only way to liven things up.

I mean, if bird flu and nuclear terrorism and 9.0 earthquakes in the heart of Los Angeles — or even global currency deflation — all come to pass, then the future will be insanely fucking interesting, even exciting. It will be terrifying, obviously — but then the future won’t be boring at all. And, if you believe Ballard, even after the whole world gets turned into an endless highway system there will still be a million things to look forward to. Mega-crashes being only one of them.

It’s through enthusiasm — not anger — that Ballard’s major characters all discover their strange perversions. Crash, for instance, whether I liked the novel or not, is the ultimate example of this: being willing to admit that you’re sexually fascinated by car crashes. It’s not nihilism, after all; it’s falling in love with totally weird shit.

Can you elaborate on this BLDGBLOG statement of yours: “We have more to learn from the fiction of J.G. Ballard than we do from Le Corbusier?”

Sure. First, that statement should be contextualised a bit. The ‘we’, for instance, was referring to architects and architectural critics, not to mankind, or the human species. Or primates. That said, it was a comment more about genre than it was about Ballard’s, or Le Corbusier’s, own intentions. Whilst Ballard,