The Unicorn Bookshop edition of Ballard’s Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan and the conceptual auto-disaster. Numerous studies have been conducted upon patients in terminal paresis (G. P. I.), placing Reagan in a series of simulated auto-crashes, e.g. multiple pile-ups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks (fantasies of Presidential assassinations remained a continuing preoccupation, subjects showing a marked polymorphic fixation on windshields and rear trunk assemblies). Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic character surrounded the image of the Presidential contender. Subjects were required to construct the optimum auto-disaster victim by placing a replica of Reagan’s head on the unretouched photographs of crash fatalities. In 82 percent of cases massive rear-end collisions were selected with a preference for expressed faecal matter and rectal haemorrhages.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968), later published in The Atrocity Exhibition.

“Is this not the meanderings of a dirty and diseased mind?” — that was the question which prosecuting counsel Michael Worsley posed in Court for BBC Radio producer George MacBeth in 1968. The subject of their discussion was a booklet written by J.G. Ballard and published by the Unicorn Bookshop, Brighton, titled Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan. MacBeth’s view was almost as surprising as Worsley’s — he told the Court that if the work became available for broadcasting, he would like to use it.

This surreal discussion took place at the trial of Bill Butler, proprietor of the Unicorn Bookshop, on charges of possessing obscene articles for commercial publication. However bizarre or absurd the proceedings in Brighton Magistrates Court might appear some 40 years later, they had an only too serious effect on Butler, who found himself having to pay fines plus legal costs in the order of £50,000 in today’s money. In a letter written two years later, he asked a correspondent to forgive his temper, explaining that his memory had, to all useful purposes, stopped at the date of the police raid on his bookshop, and that “I am, after all this, paranoid”.

As I looked through the records of the trial, a sense of depression settled on me … Butler seemed like a fly in a spider’s web, fighting the prosecution because he felt he could not do otherwise, yet fearing that at bottom the cause was a hopeless one. Having started out with the intention of investigating Ballard’s involvement with an obscenity trial, I became more interested in how it was that Bill Butler, a 33 year-old American poet, bookshop owner, and sometime publisher, became involved in this drama.

A relaxed-looking Bill Butler (from New Worlds #185).

The law on obscenity in the UK centered on the notion that an article — a book, magazine, or photograph — had to have a tendency to deprave and corrupt those who were likely to view it. The 1959 Obscene Publications Act had provided a defence if it could be shown that publication was in the public interest — for example, because of the article’s literary value. There followed a series of Court cases — sometimes great theatre, sometimes personal tragedy, and sometimes unpleasant listening — as the implications of the law were fought over in a society whose beliefs and tastes were rapidly changing.

The first test was theatre — sufficiently so for BBC television to commission and broadcast a drama about the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover some 45 years later. Prosecuting Counsel shot himself in the foot at the outset when he told the jurors: “Ask yourselves the question, would you approve of your young sons, young daughters — because girls can read as well as boys — reading this book? Is it a book you would have lying around in your own house? Is it even a book that you would wish your wife or your servants to read?” — the jurors reportedly smiled at such a bizarrely out-of-touch view of the world. Numerous defence witnesses were wheeled in to testify to the virtues of one of Lawrence’s lesser novels and its four-letter descriptions of adultery, although they all ignored the passage where the Lady is sodomised … the prosecution had either not read or not understood that scene, since they ignored it also. At the end of the trial, the jury found the publishers, Penguin Books, not guilty.

Mervyn Griffith Jones, QC, Prosecuting Counsel in the Lady Chatterley trial, as portrayed in a Private Eye spoof.

A series of other cases followed, less amusing, and often more discouraging for those who wanted to see a more open society. One of the lesser-known cases indicated the way things might go: Cain’s Book, a novel by the Glaswegian writer Alexander Trocchi, was prosecuted in Sheffield in 1964, and the police justified seizing the book on the grounds that it “seems to advocate the use of drugs in schools so that children should have a clearer conception of art. That in our submission is corrupting.” This extension of the notion of obscenity beyond the sexual was confirmed during an unsuccessful appeal by the publishers, when Lord Chief Justice Parker ruled that “there was no reason whatever to confine depravity and obscenity to sex”. John Sutherland later commented that:

[this decision] marked a new phase of obscenity-hunting in which the primary target would not be the work’s text (for instance its incidence of four-letter words) but the lifestyle it advocated, or that was associated with its author or even its readership. If it was risking ‘obscenity’ to be a junkie and a beat, it was also soon going to be similarly risky to be a hippy.

The truth of this judgment is only too apparent in the Unicorn Bookshop prosecution.

LEFT: The Calder 1963 edition of Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book, the subject of an obscenity trial the following year.

Bill Butler had managed Better Books on the Charing Cross Road in London, before moving to Brighton and then opening the Unicorn Bookshop during 1967. The shop specialized in poetry and American authors; in fact, many of its ongoing sales were by mail order to American universities. In late-1967, Butler returned to the U.S. for a short visit, leaving the shop in the hands of a young man who was then arrested for possession of drugs, convicted, and sent to a young offenders detention centre. According to Butler, “apparently he had had a container for the hashish and some scissors for the cutting of the hashish in the shop. Subsequently my shop was broken into and the meters pilfered. When the police came to enquire about this they seemed more interested in the sales of hashish than in the meters.”

Motion picture studies of Ronald Reagan reveal characteristic patterns of facial tonus and musculature associated with homo-erotic behaviour. The continuing tension of buccal sphincters and the recessive tongue role tally with earlier studies of facial rigidity (cf., Adolf Hitler, Nixon). Slow-motion cine-films of campaign speeches exercised a marked erotic effect upon an audience of spastic children. Even with mature adults the verbal material was found to have minimal effect, as demonstrated by substitution of an edited tape giving diametrically opposed opinions. Parallel films of rectal images revealed a sharp upsurge in anti-Semitic and concentration camp fantasies.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968), later published in The Atrocity Exhibition.

The Unicorn Bookshop, circa 1972 (photo from Frendz #28).

According to the police, someone then complained to them about a publication they had seen in Butler’s shop, Cuddon’s Cosmopolitan Review, an anarchist magazine containing a play by Tuli Kupferberg entitled “Fucknam”. A plain-clothes officer visited the shop on 15th January 1968, and purchased copies of Cuddon’s and the underground magazine Oz. The following day, a full raid was mounted and the police took away over 3,000 items (mostly copies of Oz), representing more than 70 different titles. The items seized included several issues of the U.S. literary magazine Evergreen Review, as well as books by Burroughs and Ginsberg. Also taken were three copies of Ballard’s Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, which had been found inside an addressed and sealed envelope.

LEFT: Oz #4, poster and front cover. Three thousand copies of the underground magazine were seized by the police from Unicorn Bookshop, but the charges were dropped.

Charges of possessing obscene articles “for publication for gain” were brought, but eventually the Director of Public Prosecutions dropped charges against half the items. Butler speculated that the DPP could not afford to drop the charges against all of the original 76 publications, since “he might have faced a suit from me for malicious prosecution. Thorny problem.” The remaining items that featured in the subsequent trial included issues of Evergreen Review and Kulchur, Cuddon’s Cosmopolitan Review, books of poetry by Herbert Huncke and John Giorno, and Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.

Butler decided to plead “not guilty” to the charges, regardless of having been three times refused legal aid by the magistrates even though he appeared to qualify on financial grounds. Between the raid and the trial, the drugs connection continued to rear its head:

A member of Brighton’s police force has visited the shop since the raid and among other things discussed the problem of drugs in the shop and users of narcotics frequenting the shop. It was suggested that I cooperate with the police by revealing names of people I suspected of using narcotics. … A barrister has advised me that in his view the police probably have it in for me. It has been suggested that the shop might be better off in London.

The trial took place in August, 1968. Since the raid, the entire world seemed to have been in turmoil … the Tet offensive had taken place in Vietnam; agitation and strikes had almost brought down the French government; an anti-War demonstration in London’s Grosvenor Square ended in violence; President Lyndon Johnson had announced he would not seek re-election; Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both assassinated; and the British politician Enoch Powell made his infamous “rivers of blood” speech. The day after the trial opened, the U.S.S.R. invaded Czechoslovakia; before it had finished, a week later, police had clashed with anti-war demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and France had exploded its first Hydrogen bomb.

The Summer of ‘68 … Revolution! … Smash the System! … Situationists! … J.G. Ballard!
(publication of Love and Napalm: Export USA in the student magazine Circuit, June 1968).

Rather more prosaically, the charges against Butler were being considered by the three magistrates — a retired Labour Exchange manager, an auctioneer’s wife, and a car salesman and garage proprietor. The defense called a number of “expert witnesses” to provide evidence as the literary value of the condemned items, among them George MacBeth, a poet who also worked as a producer for the BBC and had conducted a radio interview with Ballard the previous year. MacBeth cogently described Ballard’s concerns in Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan:

… here he is concerned with American politics and society and the ways in which, as he sees it, the feelings of sexual desire and love can only be aroused by violence and violent stimuli. He believes American society is sick and he is criticising the sickness in this work. … America is a most highly developed society where advertising is crucial and so is the projection of images. … This [piece] shows how human feelings of sex and love can be manipulated by violence. [It] shows the connection between the different kinds of violence, for example car crashes, Vietnam and racial violence.

At this point prosecuting counsel asked “Is this not the meanderings of a dirty and diseased mind?” “Certainly not,” replied MacBeth, “and it’s obvious to any man of goodwill who reads it.”

But the value to Bill Butler’s defence of two days of deliberation about contemporary culture and literary merit was debatable. Even defending counsel appeared baffled by some of the discussion, commenting at the start of his concluding speech that “it may be that some of us did not fully understand all that the expert witnesses were talking about, indeed I myself occasionally found it very difficult to understand.” In contrast, the prosecution’s approach was simple and direct — they called no witnesses beyond the police who carried out the raid, and relied on the magistrates’ judgement as to whether the books and magazines were obscene:

I rely on your examination of the works themselves to rebut the defence of public good. It is obvious that these books are obscene and it would not be in the public good for them to be published. I rely on this Court knowing a dirty book when they see one …

The prosecution’s strategy played on the problem at the heart of the 1959 Act. Expert witnesses could testify in Court as to a publication’s literary merit, but not as to whether it was obscene or tended to corrupt — that was the essence of the case and therefore a matter for magistrates or jurors. But how can publication be “in the public interest” if what is published tends to deprave and corrupt? The two major prosecution failures in obscenity trials following the 1959 Act were Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Inside Linda Lovelace: both were acquitals by a jury, and both were of books where the jurors stood some chance of understanding what they read, allowing them to conclude that the books were not likely to corrupt and deprave. (Even that may be overstating matters, since five of the jurors in the Lady Chatterley trial apparently had difficulty in reading the oath, let alone the book.)

In other cases, jurors and magistrates tended to react badly to being lectured at by expert witnesses about books they found difficult to understand. A remarkable case was that of the Yorkshire bookseller and publisher, Arthur Dobson, who intended to publish My Secret Life, a pseudonymous autobiographical account of a Victorian middle-class gentleman’s prodigious sexual career (1,200 women, described in 4,200 pages), which was first published for the author’s own amusement in an edition of six copies in 1888. Eighty years later, Arthur Dobson had got as far as typesetting the first two volumes before the police intervened. His subsequent trial at Leeds Assizes in 1969 appeared to be going well for the defence: the judge seemed not ill-disposed, cogent expert witnesses argued for the book’s value as a rare first-hand account of life in the Victorian underworld, and the witnesses dealt well with the prosecution’s attempt to display them as unworldly or inconsistent — on one occasion prosecuting counsel asked of a quiet-mannered academic: “Is this not the vilest thing you have ever read?”, only to receive the reply “You don’t mean that question literally, do you?”, followed by “Have you never heard of the concentration camps of the Third Reich?”

But all this was to no avail. When the jurors were sent to read the two printed volumes of My Secret Life, most looked only at the first few pages. It was subsequently reported that only two of the jurors were in the habit of reading books, and they had given up very quickly on the 19th century language in front of them. The expert witnesses who had impressed everybody else seemed to have little effect on the jury: Arthur Dobson was convicted and sentenced to a heavy fine, plus two years in prison (reduced to one year on appeal).

Banned in ‘69: My Secret Life by ‘Walter’.

At Bill Butler’s trial in August 1968, counsel had little difficulty in turning the expert witnesses to the prosecution’s advantage. He extracted from one witness, Mrs Anne Graham-Bell, the opinion that adults are not likely to be corrupted, thereby enabling him to portray her as an innocent who “is not to know the evil to which these sort of things lead”, unlike the magistrates, who, he suggested, had rather more experience of the corruptibility of adults than did the defence witnesses. Not unexpectedly, the magistrates found all charges proven.

Incidence of orgasms in fantasies of sexual intercourse with Ronald Reagan. Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan’s face was superimposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with ‘Reagan’ proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2 percent of subjects. Axillary, buccal, navel, aural and orbital modes produced proximal erections. The preferred mode of entry overwhelmingly proved to be the rectal. After a preliminary course in anatomy it was found that caecum and transverse colon also provided excellent sites for excitation. In an extreme 12 percent of cases, the simulated anus of post-colostomy surgery generated spontaneous orgasm in 98 percent of penetrations. Multiple-track cine-films were constructed of ‘Reagan’ in intercourse during (a) campaign speeches, (b) rear-end auto-collisions with one- and three-year-old model changes, (c) with rear-exhaust assemblies, (d) with Vietnamese child-atrocity victims.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968), later published in The Atrocity Exhibition.

But what about Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan? The three copies seized by the police had been taken from an envelope addressed to Mrs Graham-Bell, who at the time had been head of public relations for Penguin Books. In her evidence she explained that Bill Butler had told her about this new work by Ballard, and that she had agreed to forward copies to possible interested parties including the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. As was normal practice, she did not expect to be charged for these copies. This gave the prosecution a problem, since the charge involved publication “for gain”. It was obvious to everyone that Unicorn would not have given all the remaining copies away for free, and they were even noted as publisher inside the pamphlet, but the only evidence the prosecution could present to the Court were the copies that were supplied free of charge to Mrs Graham-Bell. After all his discussion of this supposedly “evil” publication, prosecuting counsel had to concede at the start of his closing speech that he couldn’t prove the offence, and asked that the charges relating to Ballard’s work be dropped.

However, in other ways the rules of evidence worked against the defence. They were not allowed to demonstrate that some of the works were widely available throughout the U.K., since the mere fact that a book is available to be bought somewhere is not evidence as to whether or not it is obscene. After Butler had been found guilty, his Counsel was finally able to quote the availability of the works in mitigation before sentencing. One of the issues of Evergreen Review had been included in the charges because it contained an extract from Justine, and defence counsel waved a copy of de Sade’s novel around the Court pointing out that it was an unexpurgated edition published in the U.K. which had sold 100,000 copies.

Not that this seemed to have any effect on the magistrates. Butler was ordered to pay fines plus costs of £419, and his own defence costs would come to much more than this. The Chairman of the Magistrates, the delightfully-named Mr Ripper, commented that John Giorno’s Poems — whose contents included Pornographic Poem — was “the most filthy book I have ever had to read”.

There was a bizarre ending as Mr Ripper went on to attack the expert witnesses:

May I say how appalled my colleagues and I have been at the filth that has been produced at this Court, and at the fact that responsible people including members of the university faculty have come here to defend it. It is something which is completely indefensible from our point of view. We hope that these remarks will be conveyed to the university authorities.

The end of the trial, reported in Brighton’s Evening Argus.

This attack later earned Mr Ripper a public rebuke from the journal Justice of the Peace, for criticizing witnesses “not because they have in any way misbehaved, but merely because they have exercised their legal right of expressing opinions which do not coincide with those held by the bench.” Ripper was quoted as saying that he had made his comments because he objected as a taxpayer to universities spending their money on trashy publications.

Advised by his solicitors that there seemed no realistic grounds for appealing the Magistrates’ decision, Butler was uncertain how to proceed. Eventually, on 21 November, his solicitors asked the Queens Bench for an order of Mandamus instructing the Magistrates in Brighton to state a case for the consideration of the higher court. This request was refused and Butler was left with a final bill in the order of £3,000. A year later, he wrote to a correspondent that, although he had received numerous offers of help, many remained unfulfilled and he still owed £2,500 to his solicitors, “who are beginning to moan ever so gently off in the distance. Like wolves.”

Bill Butler, circa 1972 (photo from Frendz #28).

The Unicorn Bookshop stayed open until 1973, when Butler moved to a remote cottage at Nant Gwilw, Wales, intending to concentrate on publishing. He died a few years later, whilst only in his forties, apparently of an accidental drug overdose. It seems fitting to leave the last words to the late William Huxford Butler, speaking during his trial in August 1968:

You regard it as important that we tell the truth in your court, and you put us under oath to do so. When any poet writes or an artist paints, he is under oath to something inside himself to tell the truth and the whole truth. Not to tell just those parts of the truth which are palatable and pleasing but all that is true – the good and the bad parts. Until he does that, he is incomplete as an artist and a poet.

Acknowledgements:

In researching this article I made considerable use of the records of the Unicorn Bookshop kept by the Archives department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Background on the U.K.’s Obscene Publications Acts came from Offensive Literature: Decensorship in Britain, 1960-1982 by John Sutherland (Junction Books, 1982), and Freedom’s Frontier: Censorship in Modern Britain by Donald Thomas (John Murray, 2007).

Mike Holliday, April 2009.

Soundwalk by MELANIE CHILIANIS; photography by Simon Sellars.

“The consumer society is a kind of soft police state. We think we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens. Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness.”

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come (2006).

We took a recent jaunt to Melbourne’s Crown Casino, prime Ballardian space, in order to map the coordinates of this micronational zone, this city state — consumer-driven control space. We took photos on a Nokia 6288 — photography disguised as furtive texting — while Mel Chil performed a secret sound walk. Her head bowed and her eyes averted (for soundwalkers must not allow the other senses to interfere with the keen art of listening), she strode silently behind us through the Zone, her super-powered, omidirectional microphone and optimal recording unit stuffed into her bag to note the results.

Her sound file* is below — play it loud while reading for maximum effect, for clearly the audiospatial disorientation engendered by Casino space plays a critical role in maintaining the illusion of languid disconnectedness.

* Note: you won’t see the audio player in Google Reader.

Crown Casino increases people’s perception of frequency of winning not only by having big visual displays and advertisements but also by having announcements over a loudspeaker of a poker machine jackpot winner. If every gambler who has lost everything is announced over the loudspeaker in the same way, problem gambling would be greatly reduced. Moreover, the promotion of the illusion of winning is also built into a poker machine in which a winning pay out is made with a loud noise as coins come crashing into the metal pay out tray to remind nearby players that winning is a real possibility.

Public Gambling Enquiry, Australian Vietnamese Women’s Welfare Association.

It’s a unique phenomenon… [a] metropolis … utterly devoted to leisure, something close to suspended animation. And it’s very inviting. But people lying on their backs are very vulnerable to predators.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Live in London’, 1996.

The signage declares, ‘We’re creating a new world at Crown’, a come-on none can resist. But even before entering the Casino, we were aware that we were no longer in the world of quotidian politeness. The first task was to pass through the borderzone, out on the concrete apron surrounding the complex, where brutal expediency in combat with pornographic greed meant that even bag ladies had to secure their shopping trolleys if left unattended.

But this isn’t reality, it’s not even a dream. It’s sort of a halfway house between the two.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Live in London’, 1996.

Opposite the Crown Entertainment Complex, bordering the west side, is the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. Its constructivist lines slice the sky like an obsolete, forward-thinking city of the immediate retro-future to come, a take-off ramp into the ozone that seems to suggest the only way out is through an ascent to heaven, or … this way, down, deep into the east, into Crown — into half-life.

He stared at the silent aisles, working out his challenge to this eventless world. We left the liquor store and paused by a Thai restaurant, whose empty tables receded through a shadow world of flock wallpaper and gilded elephants. Next to it was an untenanted retail unit, a concrete vault like an abandoned segment of space-time.

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights, 1996.

We enter, ‘wearing the Crown‘, instantly absorbed by the otherworldliness of the Casino. The effect is total — there are no clocks anywhere to be seen, creating a timeless zone in which the breakdown of the biological clock (the legend of old ladies urinating at poker tables, rather than missing a hand, for example) is the only indication of chronometry. Perhaps the only remaining link to temporality is the schedule of the televised horse racing. A horse — horses? — seem to haunt the interior…

There is no natural light of any kind, no windows. Mirrors take up entire walls, distending the innards of the place into infinity. The long walk between the mid-section of poker machines and blackjack tables seems to never end. Hovering alien ectoplasm, the sickly UV of Giger-style nightmares, falls into view. Magic mushrooms hang from the ceiling, glowing lysergically. We are in a bunker, are we in a bunker? Miles below the Earth’s surface, below the Earth’s surface? Drinking, gambling and watching spooling sports. Palms itchy.

The first shrines had begun to appear, wayside altars for passing shoppers, places of pause and reflection for those making endless journeys within the universe of the dome.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come, 2006.

Hanging from the ceiling, a plaster-cast altar of motorcycle fascism, its strident coat of arms larger than the machine itself. Lest the devotees become too overwhelmed and seize the handlebars, a sign warns: “Display Model Only”. Trinkets pile up on the carpet around the altar, burnt offerings of cigarette butts, an unused condom packet, coins, keys. No passing cleaner makes an effort to clean this up and it seems arranged in a perfect concentric ring. Skin hurts.

The resilient carpet is custom designed and can soak up blood, vomit and semen without leaving visible trace. A crazy man says he knows the man who made it and he makes a fortune, too. He also designs bodybags for prom queens addicted to cocaine and ultraviolent bondage. Did a crazy man really say that he knew a man? (Bringing new meaning to the game of ‘craps’, another urban legend tells of sliding compartments in the toilets that can quickly open to dispose of suicidal high-rollers who lost everything without bringing the corpse back through the main arena.) Very near by, another man looks over suspiciously at our furtive photographic activity, but then he seems distracted by what would appear to be an insect buzzing around his head. He bats at it but there is no insect anywhere to be seen. As we walk away, he seems to be madly shaking invisible bugs out of his hair. Is he shaking invisible bugs out of his hair?

The people no longer wish to be freed from their chains, preferring to use them to accessorise their designer handbags instead. Eyes pop.

The neon façades of the casinos and hotels were now so many cataracts of white lava, walls of incadescent 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).

This green-skinned hepcat appeared to us as if in a dream, doffing his cap with sleazy grace. ‘Come with me to the Food Court’, he moaned in our already twitching ears. ‘I know a mystical place — a snack bar — where they spike the Alcoholic Super Slushies with Viagra, and where cyborg men with vat-grown muscle can inflate their pecs with a bicycle pump to 150psi. It’s called Food & Booze Express City and it’s open 24/7, natch, because you know it, don’t you, man, that Dreamland never sleeps. Oh, and dig: the women are unFUCKINGbelievable’.

Crawford gazed across the peninsula at the gutted shell of the Hollinger house.
‘A year from now some hotel or casino complex will stand there. On this coast the past isn’t allowed to exist.’
‘Why not keep the house as it is?’
‘As a tribal totem? A warning to all those time-share salesmen and nightclub touts? That’s not a bad idea…’

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights.

The final sane act of Nietzsche, that great admirer of self-serving individualism, was one of pity — to collapse to the floor and cradle a beaten horse. In this one compassionate act, he disavowed a lifetime of celebrating self-interest. At Crown, they have decapitated the horse and mounted its suffering head as a totem of gambling law: ‘Let he who is strong fill his pockets, and he who is weak empty his’.

This glowing tube filled with inanimate coin is in actuality a super-computer that runs on pure cash. Pulsing throughout that pile of super-compacted currency is a liquid charged with megawatts of electricity and data, a new breed of viscous fibre optics that draws upon the inordinate strength of abstract social wealth to create simulated neurological pathways with highly complex processing power greater than military mainframes. This super-computer runs the whole operation here at Crown Casino and it is called ‘Mr Severin’. Mr Severin’s word is law and he will not tolerate any deviance from that law at any time.

A lake of neon signs formed a shimmering corona, miles of strip-lighting raced along the porticos of the casinos, zipped up the illuminated curtain-walling of the hotels and spilled over into mushy cascades. Under the ultramarine sky, so dark now that the tone had left their faces, the spectacle of this sometime gambling capital seemed as unreal as an electrographic dream.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America.

We became touched by a presence that was almost entirely indescribable except in rhyming couplets of ever-increasing incredulity, ridiculous-sounding as we mouthed them aloud, like cod Shakespeare. An alien intelligence reaching deep into our souls to finger our pathetic humanity with a cold machinic rationalism that was actually a little bit naughty and a little bit nice. A mystical vision appeared — for we were in the circuit, now — a monolith slowly, slowly descending from the ceiling. White light grew and grew. In the zone.

‘Remember, Richard, consumerism is a redemptive ideology. At its best, it tries to aestheticize violence, though sadly it doesn’t always succeed.’
…
‘Every shopping mall and retail park turning into a local soviet. A popular uprising that starts at the nearest Tesco. It’s possible. There’s a hunger for violence, that’s why sport obsesses the whole country. Everyone’s suffocating — too many barcode readers, too many CCTV cameras and double yellow lines. That second bomb really got them going.’

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

While their wives indulged in the more passive pursuits of bingo and fruit machines, the mankind gathered in their pit to drink, watch high-volume, biff-and-bash contact sports and back their armchair punditry with hard cash. The more they drank, the more they lost. The more they lost, the more they drank. A gloom began to permeate the air, so much so that condensation seemed to drip from the walls like Amityville house blood, and one sensed that sporadic, remorseless violence might break out at any moment. On the sport screen, some rugby players tore off their clothes and compared biceps and for a moment it seemed the crowd might follow suit. Only one measure could prevent this — a variety show. Mr Severin: call on Elvissey!

Completely Elvis: The Elvises are in the building! Their uncanny sound and appearance will make you feel as if you are watching the King himself. Amazing musicianship elevates the entertaining and genuine portrayals of the famous songs we all know and love. The incredible authenticity of the show takes you on a ride that is unprecedented. Costumes, charisma and charm are coupled with the songs that made Elvis the undisputed ‘King of Rock and Roll’. This combination of artists is not like any ever seen in Australia before.

Crown Casino, 2009.

This man, this fat, tubular, tubercular man – his impersonation was no longer of Elvis, but of a thousand other Elvis impersonators. A discount simulacrum. His women had feathers up their bums and on their heads, and these vixens liked to conga-line to within an inch of some men’s lives. Beer boiling in the glass.

“The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich”

Hunter S. Thompson.

Projected above our heads, 20 feet high, on the big sports screen: the manifestation of schizoid hyperactivity.

Fleeting impressions, an illusion of meaning floating over a sea of undefined emotions. We’re talking about a virtual politics unconnected to any reality, one which redefines reality as itself. The public willingly colludes in its own deception.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

The horse equine reporter man reads the racehorse results, stutters in vertical hold, image flickers and splits straight down the middle to finally reveal the really real reality underneath. A snarling, digitised mutilation. Mr Severin has had a breakdown — someone, somewhere in here has won far too much cash. The system cannot cope, gets stuck in an infinity loop, cracks and breaks. The noise of clinking coin and tolling fruit-machine bells seems to increase to unbearable levels. But that is the great release, for we have pierced the veil, seen beyond, out into the desertified Racecourse of the Real. No gears and pulleys behind the mask, Phil K Dick-style, but a roiling, raging black void of utter nothingness.

Headaches and a necessary evacuation followed.

One day there would be another Metro-Centre and another desperate and deranged dream. Marchers would drill and wheel while another cable announcer sang out the beat. In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

Photograph: Eamonn McCabe.

There’s a new interview with JGB in the Guardian, conducted by James Campbell. It’s short, it lazily rehashes the same old stuff about Ballard’s house and (perhaps as a result) it is filled out with asides from M. John Harrison, Iain Sinclair and others.

James Graham Ballard is a large man with mischief in his eye and the social manner of a retired civil servant. At 77, he is portly, with grey hair curling on to his shirt collar. He has a full-on way with a good chablis – “More! More!” – but is considerate enough to inquire of his guest: “Do you have a motor car out there? We don’t want you to be killed.”

Ballard encountered Burroughs, whom he greatly admires as a writer, on a number of occasions. “A very strange chap.” Sinclair feels that “the two men, respectful and appreciative, never quite understood each other when they met. Both were set so deep in their visions. Other figures are aliens or rivals.”

He explains that his most recent novel, Kingdom Come (2006), “posed the question: could consumerism turn into fascism? The underlying psychologies aren’t all that far removed from one another. If you go into a huge shopping mall and you’re looking down the parade, it’s the same theatrical aspect: these disciplined ranks of merchandise, all glittering like fascist uniforms. When you enter a mall, you are taking part in a ceremony of affirmation, which you endorse just by your presence.” Consumerism “has to a large extent replaced art and culture in this country. The principal entertainment industry nowadays is soccer which, with its marching supporters’ groups, is not that far removed from fascism.”

Further to yesterday’s post on Lord Horror, I urge you to follow it up with a reading of this interview with Britton and Butterworth over at Reality Studio. It’s about the Savoy duo’s meeting with Burroughs in 1979 and is in two parts, the first conducted by Sarajane Inkster in 1997 and the second following up that theme — Burroughs/Britton/Butterworth — from March this year with Keith Seward.

It’s full of fabulous detail. Britton and Butterworth’s admiration for the great man is etched into every word:

Butterworth: His best poetic writing, especially his depiction of things gone, in broken, fragmented images — a yearning for the absolute, and at the same time an intense sadness or grief for man’s inability to attain ’something’ lost — produces an acute nagging pain inside me. It is like the worst love sickness, a terrible ache in the stomach, a feeling of fragility. I sense his loss, his fear. I pick it up off him like a worrying parent does off a child. Of course, if his writing did just this, that would not make it great. What makes it great is the way he is able to use this peculiarly intense emotion to describe reality, unbearable beauty and awfulness of the universe, of distant galaxies as well as the human life processes.

Indeed, Burroughs remains an endlessly fascinating character after all this time. I enjoyed the descriptions of his home, aptly dubbed “The Bunker”:

Britton: My memories of William Burroughs at that date are mixed up today with the images you see of him on film. You know — “Did I really meet him, or was it the dream celluloid Burroughs who sat opposite drinking tea?” However, I do remember thinking that the Bunker was definitely an extension of Burroughs’ personality. Burroughs added ambience to the place, which was an old gymnasium — the sort you would see depicted in gangster films set in the Brooklyn of the ’30s, where Pat O’Brien plays the honest priest, and all his young punks are working up a sweat in the gym — Huntz Hall, Leo Gorcey, etc. You could just see Burroughs as the Daddy, The Bowery Daddy, and the Dead-End Kids as his private street gang. Even their name sounds like one of his creations.

There was a flight of long stairs up to the Bunker which was a long room with a couple of side-rooms and a kitchen. I remember the “john” — a partitioned-off area with a row of old-fashioned tiled urinals, which had the sort of sleazy sex connotations you would expect of Burroughs’ living quarters.

Butterworth: There were no windows. It was where Burroughs lived, slept and worked — like a bunker.

I wasn’t aware that Savoy had planned on publishing Burroughs until I read this, missing out on the deal after the cops rained down heavy on them. Savoy has definitely had more than its share of bad times:

Unknown to them in 1979 — the time of their visit to the Bunker — they were soon to be dealt a body blow. Returning to England, after successfully contracting to publish the paperback edition of [Burroughs'] Cities of the Red Night, Savoy was hit by the first of three big raids. (Two other raids, in 1989 and 1990, concerned the publication of their novel Lord Horror and various graphic works.) Led by “God’s Cop” Police Chief Constable James Anderton, this raid was a co-ordinated simultaneous swoop on their main retail and publishing premises, and almost achieved the intention of shutting down their company. It was the culmination of many smaller raids. In total, hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of stock were seized and not returned, including Savoy-published titles by Samuel Delany, Charles Platt, and Jack Trevor Story. At the same time, an unrelated action by the Times Mirror Organisation in America dealt a body blow to the publishing house New American Library. This had a knock-on effect on Savoy’s distributor-publishers, New English Library, who went into liquidation. Savoy was forced into temporary bankruptcy in 1981, and in 1982 David Britton was jailed — the first of two jail sentences connected with his publishing which he had to endure. Savoy lost Cities to another publisher.

It strikes me on reading this passage that the police — via this and further raids on Savoy — rather than suppressing the message of Lord Horror, actually proved its thesis, for these are the actions of a fascist state apparatus by any other name. In fact, I am struck by the number of works that paint England in this light, sort of like Philip K. Dick’s alternate-history classic The Man in the High Castle applied over and over to the British Isles instead of the US: the Allies lost, the Nazis won, they are here in your backyard and you don’t even know it. Let’s see, what have we? It Happened Here; Privilege; A Clockwork Orange; Children of Men; V for Vendetta; and Lord Horror, towering above all.

Aside from that I was heartened by the interview, with Britton and Butterworth, these apparent scourges of the English way of life, admitting to a bad case of nerves upon meeting Burroughs, the Literary Outlaw himself. I know how they feel. When I interviewed Ballard in 2006, although it was over the phone I was sick with worry, chiefly about matching wits with someone of his calibre and falling woefully short of the mark (at the time I put on a bit of bravado and bluster to anyone who asked me about the interview, so it’s only now I can reveal the truth!). I’ve never been one to put artists of any sort on pedestals and I’ve never really had a hero of any kind, unless you count Peter Shilton, Kenny Burns and John Robertson in the 1980 European Cup Final, but Ballard’s work changed my worldview a long time ago. In this respect I can only concur with Butterworth:

Regardless of what you manage to take away intellectually, you get something else off these great people. As Andy Warhol once said, it’s best you DON’T KNOW THEM in any way, because that way they still have an aura to touch you with.

Butterworth also talks of meeting Ballard at a New Worlds party, but he froze:

I went to several of the parties, unfortunately not the ones Burroughs attended. I lived too far away to go to more than a few, and only learned afterwards in agonised constriction that Burroughs had been to the ones I missed. Jimmy Ballard attended some, so it’s very likely he met him there.

My memories (as a 20-year-old) of Ballard are frustrating. I didn’t know what to say to him, even though he was there in front of me at a party and was talking to me and only me. By the time I met Burroughs I was twelve years older and had brought Dave as cover, so got slightly more out of that.

Butterworth also tells the story of how Burroughs was introduced to Arthur C. Clarke by Mike Moorcock, which ended with them getting along famously. I’ve always loved the delicious image of Clarke attending New Worlds parties amidst all these young rebels, and especially so after reading Moorcock’s piece on Clarke in the Guardian earlier this year:

I was a very young journalist of 17 or so when Arthur C. Clarke invited me to celebrate his birthday before he returned to Ceylon, where he had recently settled… A bottle in my pocket, I knocked at the door to be greeted by Fred. “It’s round the corner,” he said. “I’m just off there myself.” He turned a thoughtful eye on the bottle. “I don’t think you’ll need that.”

Promising, I thought. Ego (Arthur’s nickname since youth) has laid everything on… we arrived at a church and one of those featureless halls of the kind where the Scouts held their regular meetings. Sure enough, inside was a group of mostly stunned friends and acquaintances holding what appeared to be teacups, one of which was shoved into my hand as I was greeted by Arthur in that Somerset-American accent that was all his own. “Welcome,” he said. “Got everything you want?”

“Um,” I stammered. “Is there only tea?”

“Of course not!” beamed the mighty intelligence, who had already published the whole concept of satellite communications on which our modern world is based.

“There’s orange juice, too.”

Read the rest of the Britton/Butterworth chat over at Reality Studio. It’s good stuff.

The house that Sam built … from Pam.

MelbPsy gets all Atrocity Exhibition on Sam Newman’s ass house:

“As he stood beneath the fractured, glacial stare of Pamela Anderson, her linear geometry echoed a television howl. Vomit, violence, tabloid architecture. Was this, he wondered, the denouement of the French Revolution?”

For those outside of Australia, Newman is a local type, an ex-footballer who built a new career out of being an all-purpose media boor. So the script goes, nothing is beyond him, whether it’s allegedly monstering pregnant women in supermarkets or, yes, erecting a larger-than-life facade of Pamela Anderson (“we’re just good friends,” says Sam) to breast his inner-city property.

MelbPsy’s ironic appropriation of the Atrocity aesthetic is completely appropriate, then, given that book’s concern with irradiated images of celebrity culture beamed aloft on 400ft-high billboards:

“He recognized the woman from the billboards he had seen near the hospital — the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor Pammy Anderson. Yet these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives, the film actress provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness.”

JGB, Atrocity, 1970.

Sam Newman: “Most people are wankers…”

In Atrocity, when the main character erects mindscapes and celebrity billboards, he’s using the radiation of the media landscape against itself in order to clear autonomous zones — “neural intervals” — ready for inscription by brand-new auratic powers…

…while Newman has been run over by his girlfriend in her car (giving him a broken leg and ankle) and has been beaten up by an ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend (giving him a broken nose). Yet Sam has used these highly publicised sexual pecadilloes to create his own independent nation, the United State of Sam, seceding from Australia on the back of its strident Constitution, customised and retooled from all that negative publicity and now reoccupying and re-broadcasting across all media:

“Most people you meet are wankers, pure and simple. Women are schemers, men are liars. That is all you have to remember … I’m just about the only heterosexual left in my street. I’m thinking of leaving the country before being gay becomes compulsory. I like women. Just remember they are schemers.”

Sammy, 2003.

He has been punched out not once but twice by separate footballers live on air, and is renowned for his trademark phrase, “You idiot,” hurled indiscriminately at the public — at mental defectives, immigrants, grannies, junkies, any old trash — while doing his roving “Street Talk” segments for The Footy Show, the sport-hooligan fest that made his TV name and on which he appeared in blackface after Aboriginal footballer Nicky Winmar failed to make his scheduled slot. He has more enemies than Max Gogarty, yet remains a wildly popular and highly paid celebrity.

According to this puffpiece, he serves an all-purpose role, functioning equally as virtual gigolo and cathartic release for the pent-up violence of ordinary lives:

“No small part of Newman’s attractiveness to women (and make no mistake about it, Sam Newman has a good deal to do with “The Footy Show”’s enormous popularity with women, who watch it in greater numbers than do men), is the impression he conveys of being a man who does not lose his temper. This is a man you can thump in the chest, reprimand, tease — without risking being hit. And this is a man you can flirt with, show your legs to (as did one elderly woman in a notable “Street Talk” segment), without fear that he will “lose control.”
…
Sam does not “control” himself. Sam calls idiots idiots. It does not really matter (to most of the audience) whether or not they are idiots, whether or not Sam has quoted them or represented them fairly. It matters that someone says what he bloody well reckons. Those without Sam’s license (women, for instance) can enjoy this vicariously.”

If you’ve read Kingdom Come, which of course charts The Rise and Fall of TV hack David Cruise and his Minders from Staines, Sam might be sounding familiar by now:

“It was tuned to the Metro-Centre cable channel, and showed an afternoon discussion programme transmitted from the mezzanine studio. The suntanned face of David Cruise dominated everything, and covered the proceedings like a cheap but over-bright lacquer. He was smiling and affable, but faintly hostile, like a bullying valet. Perhaps people in the motorway towns liked to be shouted at.”

“‘So David Cruise is the führer? He’s fairly benign.’

‘He’s a nothing. He’s a “virtual” man without a real thought in his head. Consumer fascism provides its own ideology, no one needs to sit down and dictate Mein Kampf. Evil and psychopathy have been reconfigured into lifestyle statements. It’s a fearful prospect, but consumer fascism may be the only way to hold a society together. To control all that aggression, and channel all those fears and hates.’”

“Cruise’s obsessions and sexual hang-ups were the compass-dance of a demented king bee, guiding the hive to a destination it had already chosen. His chat-show act, based on scripts I tailored around him, might be a performance, but it validated the hunger and restlessness of his audience. The housewives mailing their photographs to him were performing rituals of assent, expressing their longing for a faith beyond politics.”

“David Cruise casually referred to the ‘enemy’, a term kept deliberately vague that embraced Asians and east Europeans, blacks, Turks, non-consumers and anyone not interested in sport.”

“‘One thing David Cruise had was an unlimited supply of enemies. That was part of his strategy. You know that, Richard. You planned it that way.’”

All quotes, Ballard, Kingdom Come, 2006.

Oh yes. Now I remember how Kingdom Come ends…

Our man David Cruise in his latest campaign… Photo courtesy Metro-Centre.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Melborea Moronica: New ‘Depraved Species of Electric Flora’ Found Growing in Melbourne, Australia
+ The Rats that Ate Mill Park
+ The Drought: Water Vigilantes
+ John Howard: The Conspiracy of Grey Men

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

An Interview with Paul Plamper and Niklas Goldbach
by Dan O’Hara

In July on the roof terrace of the Ludwigsmuseum, the major museum of modern art in Cologne, I attended a ’screening’ of a radio play. I say ’screening’ because a film had been made to accompany the play, the combined effect of audio and film a little like Chris Marker’s La Jetée. Called Hochhaus, the play was a three-part adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise. A faithful rendition in terms of plot and themes, it transposed the action of the novel to Berlin in the near future. The programme described the play as follows:

Berlin, 2013. A star architect has built in the capital the tallest residential building in Europe. There he wants to create a social Utopia: the Neokommune K 13. Nothing is wanting in this autarchy, a completely self-sufficient closed system. But the high-rise becomes a pressure cooker of neighbourhood enmity and rampant, uninhibited class warfare. In the blink of a camera’s eye, this modern super-community regresses into a biotope of primitive lifeforms. Based on J. G. Ballard’s science fiction novel, Paul Plamper has produced a horror radio play of pressing sociological relevance, which could take place in every German home. “Never forget: You are Hochhaus!”

With the Kölner Dom looming behind the roof terrace, and a panorama of the city stretching away towards the west, some fifty or sixty people settled down to listen for three hours to the German version of High-Rise. At nine in the evening, the sky was at first still too bright for the audience to see much of the film, so many of them sat with their heads down or eyes closed, concentrating on listening. In any case the film appeared to be merely a static image of a huge skyscraper, a carbuncle of a compressed city, a futurist mockery of the Gothic Cathedral at our backs.

There were some very interesting angles taken in terms of adaptation – the film was made in parts of the old GDR, and there were persistent echoes of and references to Nazism, Speer’s social engineering through architecture being one of the more telling ones. I spoke to the author, Paul Plamper, and his colleague Niklas Goldbach, a video artist who made the accompanying film. Radio plays or ‘Hörspiele’ are hugely popular in Germany – the original broadcast, on WDR in November 2006, reached around 100,000 listeners – and Ballard is relatively unknown, so this radio adaptation would introduce Ballard’s name to an audience that had hitherto encountered him only through Cronenberg and Spielberg’s films. I wanted to find out why Plamper and Goldbach had chosen to adapt High-Rise. What relevance did Ballard’s 1975 novel have, in their view, for the Germany of the near future?

Dan O’Hara teaches English & American Literature at the University of Cologne. He is currently working on a monograph on J. G. Ballard.

NOTE: Performances of Hochhaus are due to restart on 12 January 2008 at the Theater Mannheim. See the endnote for more information.

DAN: Can I ask you first of all why you chose to adapt High-Rise? Because, as far as I’m aware, Ballard’s not very well known in Germany.

PAUL: No, he’s not that well known, actually. At least not when I was searching for a German translation of High-Rise a few years ago. There were some rare copies of an old edition being traded on the internet. I got hold of one of those and was immediately attracted. In Germany, the cultural establishment builds up a strong frontier between what they call ‘culture’ and what they call ‘entertainment’, and I think some, uhm, stupid intellectuals put Ballard more in the ‘entertainment’ Schublade, the entertainment category. But on the other hand you also have thinkers like Heiner Müller being admirers, so…

DAN: Really? I didn’t know about that. Heiner Müller, the ‘Hamletmaschine’ author?

PAUL: Yes, the dramatist. He liked science fiction and he liked crime literature. So, as you see, you find Ballard in different cultural circles. The science fiction and fantasy communities read him, and from time to time an open minded intellectual. That’s what I like about Ballard, he’s not easy to put in just one bracket.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: So what was it particularly about this one novel? What did you have in mind when you adapted it?

PAUL: Well, concerning the themes, I was looking for material for a ‘horror’ radio play. I wanted to do a monster radio play without monsters, but with humans. I discovered that Ballard is rather a specialist in this subject, and that his well-cultivated and very sensitive paranoia really makes him somewhat of a prophet; you know, he wrote the novel in 1975, and now the novel is being slowly caught up by reality. He was paranoiac enough to know what was going to happen.

I’m also looking for interesting acoustical situations for my radio plays. In High-Rise there’s a small society in a very condensed space. If you just look at social interaction: when it’s silent, you hear your neighbours in your room. The wall is something that separates you from them but the level of audio is really what separates you the least. You don’t see them but you hear them. So the sort of social pressure which has to be related is really well-suited to a radio play. I’m always searching for interesting topics, but most of all for subject matters that must be a radio play and no other medium, film, or whatever.

DAN: You move the action to future Berlin; I’m very intrigued by this shift.

PAUL: Well, since Ballard wrote High-Rise, things that happen in the novel now really happen in the middle of society, in public, in the media. So we thought, we won’t put the building in a suburb, as Ballard does – in the novel it’s in the outskirts of London, hidden away, where these terrible things can happen because nobody takes notice of it. We put our house right in the middle of Berlin, and it’s a prestigious project run by an architect who is a very adept publicist. He’s played by Martin Wuttke and we named him Philip del Ponte, a character like Daniel Libeskind or similar, you know, people who make grand architectural gestures and yet who are at the same time extremely clever in developing cute ideas to sell their architecture and to be in the public eye. We moved the whole story to the border of the Spree – this is actually 100 metres from here, where I live. Where before, there was the Wall, now there’s a gap at the river, and there are vast areas where a new centre is being developed for the media, MTV moved there for example. And there are gated communities. They’re like a virus spreading in Berlin. They have all these phony names like “Prenzlauer Gärten”. Well-to-do creative people start these projects like community projects; everybody has his financial interest, buys part of the building and thinks he invests in a social project.

NIKLAS: But there’s a new meaning to ’social’ for these people. It doesn’t have anything to do with the social vision of Ballard or anyone in the ’70s for example…

DAN: It’s not to do with community?

NIKLAS: No. Well, maybe it is, but not with the idea of a social system where the stronger help the poor, for example. I don’t think you could find anything like the social system Ballard presents in High-Rise nowadays in Berlin.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: When I think of gated communities in England, the ones that Ballard’s talked about for example in Running Wild, his 1988 novel, in which some children living in a gated community kill their parents, such gated communities are very upper-middle class, and people choose to live in them apparently because of fear. These are high-security environments with surveillance cameras, private security guards… I wonder if it’s the same sort of thing in Berlin?

PAUL: We’re talking about something new. This certainly exists, but what interests us right now even more is that you have such gated communities combined with the fact that you can buy being a ‘good person’. You can purchase a good feeling by moving into a living community of house owners. In the 60s and 70s there was the start of the Kommune in Germany, Kommune Eins and so on. Now it’s part of the market, and there’s no contradiction at all. Communal feeling has been absorbed by the market. It goes together with the fact that, yes, of course these people live gated, because they say “ok, I’m moving near Kreuzberg, how exciting, a real ghetto, so I have to protect our stuff a little bit. Generally I’m open minded, come on, I was punk in the 80s, but still, I don’t want to get robbed.” They’re not really frightened, they think they’re just rationally pragmatic.

NIKLAS: And also I think what’s kind of key for Berlin, I mean, you live Dan in Cologne, right?

DAN: I do now, yes.

NIKLAS: Cologne has a completely different structure as a city from Berlin, obviously, because of the separation and the Wall. Berlin was for such a long time a kind of playground for people to try out new social structures, but lately there’s this gentrification process in Berlin that’s really overwhelming. In Kreuzberg, which was or which still is an alternative quarter of the city, now there are rich people moving in and all these condominiums being built. I saw one house where you can park your car in front, on the same level as your apartment, to make it safer for you. So there are all these weird architectural ideas popping up, and then there are other areas like Prenzlauer Berg which is in former East Berlin, where you have a real gentrification melting point, where only families live and everybody behaves as if they live in a small village. So especially from that point of view, it makes total sense to put High-Rise in Berlin. Where else in Europe right now? Probably in East Europe soon, but right now this is the place where most of the gentrification is happening, or where it’s visible. A lot of money moved to Berlin because it’s the capital, and there are so many real gated communities: there’s one right in the middle of the city for example, next to a park, the ‘Volkspark Friedrichshain’; and they have a doorman. You can only get in if you pass the doorman, and then you have a street, and a pool, and little houses, like a suburb. And this is happening in 2007 – in the center of Berlin; Paul makes Hochhaus happen in 2013, not that far away. And I don’t think it’s that much of a utopia.

PAUL: We have a doorman called Weingarten in the radio play, played by an old actor from the East who I met at the Berliner Ensemble, Heinrich Buttchereit. He has a Stasi pass in the play; he’s been hired by del Ponte because he has the best techniques in surveillance and security… They’re just very well trained. At one point, when there’s an escalation of the situation in the house, Weingarten says: “it’s just as before: we don’t have the Wall in a vertical sense anymore, now it’s horizontal, in the house, between the upper class and the lower class.” He says “ok, now I have my Wall back!”

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: There’s a great deal of political content in your adaptation; and with these references to Weingarten being ex-Stasi and, also, Niklas, I think you said you’d filmed some parts in the ex-GDR, was that right?

NIKLAS: Yeah, that’s true.

DAN: There are echoes – deliberate echoes? – of the GDR, of the Stasi and of Nazi Germany. What’s the point of these echoes for your audience? What are you trying to say to them?

NIKLAS: Well, Berlin has changed so much, at least for me. My background is that I’m a visual artist, a video artist, and most of my work is about the role of the individual in a world on the edge of dystopia. Maybe this is a very pessimistic view – let’s say it’s an artistic view, it’s maybe not only my personal view. I’d worked with Paul before, on another radio play called Release that actually took place in a prison. He told me about his new play, and invited me to a pre-listening session, and I thought about images that could occur within the three acts of the audio play. First of all I went straight to the point where Paul’s fictional high-rise would stand, between Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, right on the border where the Wall was. I went and took photos. It’s a vast area, and I thought, well, what kind of architecture could be in this area?

All the three parts of the radio play are filmed in the former GDR, there’s not a single West German building. I think there are several reasons for that, but one reason is for example that the GDR system seems like a mixture of dystopia and utopia to me – it started as a utopia – of a social project. Del Ponte, the architect in the radio play, his idea is to make a social project that combines different classes of people. And this is actually what the GDR system had in common with del Ponte – maybe. His idea is to get rid of classes in this building; and that was also an idea of the GDR – West Germany never had that idea.

PAUL: You know, Ballard puts a big focus on the social classes in his novel, and at first you think, oh, the social classes, nowadays those concepts sound really seventies, but actually my thoughts are the exact opposite. West Germany since WWII has tried to have this soziale Marktwirtschaft – a social market economy – and until the beginning or the middle of the ’90s, it worked quite well. Do you have this expression, the ’social scissor’? It’s a like a scissor that’s wide or narrow: you have the classes drifting apart from each other or closer to each other. Up to the `90s, the scissor was half closed, but in the last ten years, this has been completely, outrageously reversed. Now you have the underprivileged again; you have a small upper class getting richer and more powerful. I thought that we had to start talking about classes again. Ballard wrote about them in 1975, and now it’s back, it’s a very hot topic again.

Part two of the radio play is really about this. And at the same time it’s like a fast-forward history of the extreme Left in Germany. From the initial spontaneous protests in the sixties, the fun Sponti actions, up to the Red Army Faction in the late seventies, which got to be rather violent and militarily organized. The camera-man Andreas Lang – in the novel he’s called Wilder – lives on the ground floor. Lang, played by Milan Peschel, is accused of having killed the first human in the house, the second victim after the dog. Lang’s first reaction to the accusation is to gather people around him, to play Skat, a card game. As an act of political protest, they play cards in front of the supermarket on the 23rd floor, and then their protest gets more violent. Lang moves from being a buddy of the underprivileged, to being their leader. He leads a Feldzug…

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

NIKLAS: Like a battle, a campaign.

PAUL: They go up the high-rise, trying to burn the food stores of the upper class. Barricades have already been built from sofas and so on, so that there’s no access to the upper floors anymore. Lang and his followers succeed in burning the food stores, and in a very irrational moment they announce hunger for the whole house.

NIKLAS: Their slogan is “Solidarity with the hungry people in this world”.

DAN: When I’m looking at your original blurb for the Ludwigsmuseum, it’s called a ‘Horror Hörspiel’. And yet…

PAUL: A sociological horror Hörspiel…

DAN: … yes. And yet there’s a huge amount of political content here.

PAUL: Ballard is a political author for me. Many pages in the novel are about the class system. I like his political content; but at the same time I fear that we sound like a couple of humorless Germans now, who do heavy, grey, intellectual type stuff, but don’t get us wrong, the radio play is meant to be pure entertainment; it has the rhythm of an action movie…

NIKLAS: This is what we said in the beginning about Ballard himself, that this is an entertaining book which also has the quality of political comment. It’s supposed to be entertaining, but there’s obviously a deeper meaning to it. For example, look at the function of del Ponte, the architect, as opposed to Andreas Lang, the leader of the revolution. Especially in 2007, I think a lot of different types like del Ponte are out there, you know, private people or private investors who take over functions of the state. He’s a private person sponsoring the lower class like, for example, some celebrities or rich people today give some of their earnings back to the lower class. So it’s a bit ambivalent, what he’s doing. To the outside world he looks like he’s a really good guy but in the end, he’s the one who’s living in the penthouse.

DAN: I wondered if you also had a sense of the fact that, in the book, there’s a very specific relationship between Wilder and Anthony Royal – between Andreas Lang and del Ponte in Hochhaus – there’s this Oedipal backstory in the novel. In a sense it’s as if Ballard’s using that psychological backstory to make a political point.

PAUL: Well, we have the same two characters – the big antipodes – and we pretty much go along with Ballard’s narrative. In the end, Andreas Lang, our Wilder, when he’s already quite animal-like, mounts to the upper floors and kills del Ponte. It’s almost the same story. And then he gets eaten by the women, by the Matriarchat.

When I read the novel, I felt that Ballard really likes to develop the characters and their steps in a psychologically logical order. He has plenty of time to explain what could be the psychological background of Wilder doing what he does, and of his regression into animal status and so on. But in a radio play you don’t have that much time; and also I had the sense that in 2006 you don’t have to explain why people freak out, it’s so obvious, that utopia is, I don’t know… I have the impression that Ballard still felt some sort of friction with a positive utopian vision of a society, and so he described its regression into a barbarian state. Sometimes I thought that Ballard in the novel places his figures in a kind of sociological chess game. This figure moves from here to there because of this and that. I didn’t feel it necessary to explain so much in our radio play. The dynamic is a musical dynamic.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN:I can see that perhaps you don’t need so much narration. But you did introduce a narrator, didn’t you? There’s an extra-diegetic voice.

PAUL: Yeah; the great Volker Spengler is the narrator. You might know him from his films with Fassbinder. Like in Greek tragedy where you have the person who sees things and advances them, his narrator seems to know everything. He’s the transcendent voice. Volker just does it merely by his great personality and his destroyed voice, which breathes a lot of what he has lived.

DAN: Yeah, he has a wonderful voice. What specific narrative changes did you make in the adaptation? You introduce an external narrator; you shift to a straight chronological narrative…

PAUL: A listener can’t grasp 30 people like in the novel, he has to concentrate a lot to get to know even 10. So my co-author, Kai Hafemeister and I tried to take as few characters as possible, so that we still could see this as a small society that evolves. We have eight or so main characters, and not many very small parts, because I personally have a big aversion to this ‘protagonist and many small parts’ thing. We try to create an emotional involvement with each character. We wanted to have characters that you want to get to know better with each episode, because they were broadcast on three consecutive Fridays. So we had to make you want to continue to spend your time with these horrible people.

DAN: And what function does the voice-over narration serve?

PAUL: He’s telling as much as is needed, as seldom as possible. When we call it a sociological horror radio play, he’s the horror part – supported of course by the soundtrack, which is by SchneiderTM. Spengler’s voice… It’s so difficult to describe it. Like a field in which an atomic bomb exploded… He has a post-World War Three voice…

DAN: It reminded me of Vincent Price or Christopher Lee…

NIKLAS: He’s the same kind of character…

PAUL: At the end-credits, Volker always says, ‘And remember: You – are High-rise…’ This is an allusion to a recent campaign of the CDU government in Germany. They wanted to try to impose more national feeling on us. You had all these stupid billboards – saying ‘You Are Germany’ everywhere. So Volker concludes each part – they get more and more horrifying – with ‘You Are High-rise’.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: Are you concerned about nationalism at the moment? In Ballard’s latest novel, Kingdom Come, he’s turned his attention towards specifically English nationalism.

PAUL: Yeah, I understand that. We recorded our radio play right before the soccer World Cup in 2006. There were young Germans with flags and the national colours on their faces, a new kind of ‘pop nationalism’. After what happened in the Nazi era, Germans thought they could finally show an non-violent national feeeling, just as in other countries. They had the feeling that everybody steps together, that we are a stronger society. This also infected our way of telling High-Rise, that people are trying to create this new community. And then you see what happens to it. Which would lead you, as a society as a whole, to the next war. In High-Rise, it leads you to the terrible end. I don’t know; I look at history as something cyclical, and not so much as a regression into a barbarian state. We tell the story of only one high-rise, and in the end we put a bigger accent on the fact that the women take over, as after WWII it was the Trümmerfrauen, the ‘rubble women’, in Germany who rebuilt society, and really started the German Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle. After WWII, it was the women who cleaned up the men’s mess. Like the Matriarchat in the novel. We emphasized this; you see there’s a new order evolving; it starts again, a cycle.

We have a saying, vor der eigenen Tür kehren – to take the brush and clean in front of your own door – and that’s what Kai and me are trying to do. We’re trying to tell the story as close as possible to us, as if it could happen next to us, as if it could happen within us. Of course that’s something that is much bigger than the rise of nationalism right now. It’s like High-Rise being an image for a deliberate prison, and this prison which is self-chosen just displaces your view of another prison, which is Homo sapiens not getting out of his monstrous skin. Homo sapiens has this trait of this monstrosity; let’s face the fact. It’s a very Ballardian thought. Goya once said ‘I don’t fear witches, or poltergeists, or ghosts, or braggers or giants, or evil men; I fear no creature but one – the human.’ He said that in 1790, and I think Ballard could have said the same thing. It’s really about human nature, High-Rise. All these allusions in Hochhaus to the downfall of the socialist system, or how they killed their own ideals in socialist realism – all of these elements are products of, and evolve from, human nature.

DAN: I don’t know if you came across Concrete Island, the novel before High-Rise? For a later edition, Ballard wrote a new introduction in which he refers to both Crash and High-Rise. He says something very close to what you’re saying, and what Goya said; he writes: “[A]s well as the many physical difficulties facing us there are the psychological ones. How resolute are we, and how far can we trust ourselves and our own motives? Perhaps, secretly, we hope to be marooned, to escape our families, lovers and responsibilities. Modern technology, as I tried to show in Crash and High-Rise, offers an endless field-day to any deviant strains in our personalities.” Which is precisely the point you’re also making, no?

PAUL: Yeah. And he also talks in High-Rise about the suppression of anti-social behaviour; the anti-social as something we have to suppress. But regarding Philip del Ponte, our architect, why he’s called that. It’s because there is an original for High-Rise. It’s called the Ponte Tower in Johannesburg. This is why in the beginning I was talking of Ballard as a prophet, because in Johannesburg you had in reality what Ballard’s story depicts. The Ponte Tower is 173m high, 54 floors high, with 2500 people living there and 470 apartments, and it was founded in the seventies too, as the most prestigious tower in town. Up to 2004 it was the biggest building south of the equator. In Johannesburg, you can see it from everywhere. It’s round, and in the middle you have this cylindrical space; it’s like a gigantic trash bin. After a while the Ponte Tower was full of drugs, gang wars and people throwing themselves from the floors – many, many people killed themselves by jumping into the building, into the middle – and everybody threw his trash in the middle so that there was three floors of trash. The whole building stunk terribly. Things were out of control at the Ponte, completely out of control. People trying to hire other people who owned guns to go out and do their shopping for them, because it was too dangerous; the elevators not functioning; child prostitution – it was incredible. You think, ah, Ballard must have known about this, but then the Ponte was founded in 1976 – Ballard wrote High-Rise only one year before. So our architect is called Philip del Ponte because of this tower; though he has an aristocratic ‘del’ in front of the ‘Ponte’…

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: To correspond with the ‘Royal’ of Anthony Royal, I suppose, yes?

PAUL: Yes.

DAN: It’s an unusual format; a radio play with a film accompanying it. Is this part of a bigger project, or a general direction you’re taking with your own work?

PAUL: We did the radio play first, and then I thought of how to present it in public because I thought it could be interesting to show it at the Hörspielzentrale, in a series of radio play events at the Hau, a theatre in Kreuzberg. Then of course I thought of Niklas, because he’s a specialist in architecture. We should describe the videos, no, Niklas?

DAN: I did want to ask you about the film for the first episode. There’s a sentence in High-Rise: “They would film the exteriors from a helicopter, and from the nearest block four hundred yards away – in his mind’s eye he could already see a long, sixty-second zoom, slowly moving from the whole building in frame to a close-up of a single apartment, one cell in this nightmare termitary.” Which is more or less exactly your first film, no?

NIKLAS: Yeah it is. But to be honest this is a coincidence… When Paul asked me to join Hochhaus, my first intention was to read the book, and then we decided, maybe it’s better if I don’t read the book… So instead I tried to concentrate on the characters in Paul’s version of High-Rise. And, as Paul said, most of my work is about the human environment and urbanism, and it has some formal characteristics. In my video work, for example, one of the characteristics is the manipulation of time and the control of the image, and the use of of post-production. It’s mostly about personal feelings of alienation or mass cultural fantasies; the key themes of the latest works are the contradictions between public and private spheres. I try to examine how this comes down to a personal level, and try to use video – this is a cheesy metaphor, but maybe it’s allowed – to use video as a temporal microscope, trying to capture the moment where the subconscious shifts objectivity. This is why I was completely blown away when I listened to the first version of Hochhaus, because what Paul had done on the audio level was actually what I’m trying to do on the video level in my work, because Hochhaus is highlighting the political tensions between these visions of utopia and the subjective experiences of individuals. Also, I think that humans mostly use architecture to express their power, in every form of society, and some of my videos are about the failure of architecture, about the failure of a utopia and its turning into a dystopia.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: Could you describe the three films, which accompany the three episodes?

NIKLAS: Ok. The first one, where you just said that there’s this zoom that’s described in the book. First of all it was a weird process to visualize this building because it should be mostly in the head of the audience, you know, you should imagine this building and it could have all different associations, but then I found the buildings at Ernst-Thälmann-Park, which is a socialist building park in former East Berlin. Ernst Thälmann was the leader of the Communist party during, I think, much of the Weimar Republic and his buildings are actually like a small version of what’s described in High-Rise. They were like small high-rises, but with a park around them and the buildings were on a hill so that everyone who was living in that building had a very good view, which is a kind of social idea. Obviously there are also bigger apartments on the very top and you had to be member of the socialist party to live in them, so there’s again this hypocrisy; I guess it’s a very hypocritical way to invent a social structure, when there’s power involved, anyway. I went first of all to the area where Paul’s version of High-Rise was supposed to take place, and Paul had already said that it’s close to this area where MTV and other big companies have started to have their flagship stores or their company buildings. I took pictures of one vast area where there was previously a club, and where now they’re building a big, multi-functional stadium. This is right where our imagined high-rise is, in the image in the first video. So what I did is I went to Ernst-Thälmann-Park and just stacked the buildings there on top of each other. This is obviously a metaphor: stacking these socialist buildings on top of each other to get a bigger idea of the whole thing.

PAUL: He did it almost like a plastic surgeon – from one house he makes a Tower of Babylon; it’s beautiful.

NIKLAS: It changes a lot of the content, I think. Regarding the technical aspects: at the beginning, the zoom, it’s a digital zoom, because the whole building itself is a Photoshop building. It’s combined with video in the background: the sky that’s shading from daylight into night is real; and also you see the skyline of Berlin, you see the TV tower in the background of the video, just to make the whole thing look a bit more real but also a bit like a comic. It looks like a fantasy building but it has this weird mixture of reality because it’s made from real images. The concept of the first part is that it begins in daylight, whilst in the radio play we’re listening to a TV show where the architect is talking about the building. He’s describing what you can see in the video; you look at my building, and listen to what Del Ponte says about his building. There are some parts where it’s really fitting and some others where it’s not fitting, which is good because then you have the idea that this is not the building: it’s just a placeholder for the building, in a way. When the first part of the audio play ends, it ends in the dark, at a party, and the first human dies. But this is happening at night, and so as the video image slowly zooms into the building, you end up at the entrance hall of the building, so metaphorically by the end of the first part you’re in the nightmare. It starts as a TV show, and in the end you’re in complete darkness, surrounded by the light of the windows – and you’re part of that building.

PAUL: Yeah, and the camera is right in front of the building, you know, in the entrance where the first dead person is thrown from the top floor…

NIKLAS: …out of the window…

PAUL: … that’s where the image ends…

NIKLAS: …yeah. And the people in the audio play are also looking out of the window, so they look down to the ground. This is where you find yourself at the end of the video.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

The second part was filmed in a building on the German island Rügen, a Nazi seaside resort. I think it’s the longest building in Europe: it’s 4.5 kilometers long, and it was the KDF building, which was built by the Nazis. It was part of the Nazi ‘Strength through Joy’ programme. It was supposed to be a hotel for so-called ‘good Germans’. It was never finished; it actually ended up as a ruin, but then after WWII the GDR used it as an army barracks, where the army of the GDR was stationed. And then after the Wall came down it was used as a youth hostel, and it still is – they had stopped using it as a youth hostel, but I read recently in the news that it’s re-opened, which is such a weird idea. When you listen to the audio play, the second film corresponds to what is really happening in the building, whereas the first film is derived just from the structure of the audio play. The first part introduces us to the house and the people, whereas the second part is where everything is turning from a utopia into a dystopia, or from a funny audio play into a horror scenario. In the audio play when a new chapter starts, you hear the sound of the elevator. So, in the second film, the audience is actually stuck in this elevator that you hear all through the audio play. It’s actually spectating what’s happening in the building, and you can see how everything’s falling apart literally in the image, when there’s this very slow fade from the intact floor of the building, which was actually Photoshopped, to how the building in Rügen looks today. So it fades from a fictional image into a real image, whereas the audience is just stuck in the elevator, and through the elevator doors, they’re forced to watch the process of decay.

PAUL: There are several buildings in Prora-Rügen, that are exactly the same size and so on. Some are well-kept, because there’s the youth hostel inside, then there are others which are just ruins, at least on the inside, you have all these cables sticking out. I think Niklas broke into one of those…

NIKLAS: …yeah, I did break in, I brought an axe…

PAUL: …to film the ruin, and so you see in 50 minutes a fade from a nice long, intact, well-kept floor, to the same floor as a ruined chaos of cables. The video does nothing but that.

NIKLAS: But in fact I used three images, because the floors that are intact where the youth hostel was don’t look as nice as the high-rise should look before the revolution or the battle starts. So I photoshopped it; the very first image when the elevator opens in the video is pure photoshop. And then it goes to the real image: how the intact floors look today. And then I fade into the parts of the building that are completely falling into disrepair.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: And then the third film, which reminded me of bits of Chris Marker, or Tarkovsky…

NIKLAS: I was really happy when I read that, because both of these visionaries are like real heroes of mine. So thank you for that…

DAN: Well, it’s a very clear visual echo. Ballard himself is a real fan of Chris Marker.

NIKLAS: Yeah, I can totally believe that. So, the third part is filmed in Rechlin. It’s a very, very small village in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania), so also former GDR. The houses you can see in the video were model houses for Germania, built by Albert Speer. They’re four or five-storeys high, and they look like miniatures of high-rises. You find them completely abandoned in the woods, and there are no signs for how to find them. I knew about the buildings from a documentary, so I went with a car, and I really had to search. There are no signs because there are still a lot of mines in that area from the war. What happened is that the Nazis used the buildings as test buildings, and they dropped bombs on them, because the buildings themselves were a mixture of a house where people were supposed to live and a bunker. They’re massive, made out of concrete. So that was their function; and now you find these four buildings in the middle of the wood, completely abandoned.

There’s a wild garden on top of the filmed ruin – and the end of the audio play is also taking place on the roof – this is where the women build a new society, a Matriarchat. But the video actually starts in the ruins of the building, whereas the audio play starts in this Circus Maximus arena, when Andy Lang is fighting against all the others and becomes the leader of the lower class by physical violence. Then the architect, del Ponte, comes downstairs and says, well, if you are a gladiator, I am Caesar. So there are all these references to ancient Rome; and these ruins in the film, if you look really close at them they have a similar kind of patina. But when you zoom out you see that they are part of a vision of another time in history. The building on Rügen and Speer’s buildings were part of a vision that didn’t include the human being. So for me they are an architectural metaphor of a society, or a reference to a model of society in which the human actually can’t survive.

PAUL: Because Niklas uses these extremely slow-motion fades, you look at the image, but you don’t see the change. It’s a very dramatic change, but it’s not obvious when you look at it in real-time. You feel that something changes, but you can’t really grasp it. It’s so perfidious, it’s subtle, and it’s absolutely not Hollywoodesque. It has a different kind of tension. Because the radio play is so dense – yet the videos give you the freedom to have your own image of the characters. At the same time the videos show the big process, what I talked of as the evolutionary cycle.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

NIKLAS: When I made the videos, there was this question about how you do a video to a radio play and not turn the whole thing into a movie. When I first listened to the radio play I wrote down a lot of images, but they’re all just details. In the end there was the decision to in fact just show one image in each video that’s slowly changing. 55 minutes is quite a long time for a video – and I think if you just use one image, and look at it for a long time, it kind of disappears and gets replaced by other images. Warhol said that if you look at one image and you think it’s boring, just look at it for ten minutes and if it’s still boring, look at it for like 20 minutes and so on… In our case, you’re looking at one image for 55 minutes, and there’s a change happening, but you also have the audio that’s guiding you through a completely different world. I noticed that some people during the shows were closing their eyes; it was fun for me to watch their reaction when they opened their eyes again because all of a sudden the video was at a completely different point. I think some people thought, oh, it’s just one image, I don’t have to look at that, and then after a while they noticed that a lot has changed.

DAN: Absolutely. I actually rather enjoyed the fact that, during the first part, it got dark on the video as it was getting dark in Köln.

NIKLAS: Yeah, it was. I was really happy that the screen itself was not on the side of the Dom, because that would have been really tough competition…

Dan O’Hara, 2008

Hochhaus is currently touring Germany; the next dates will be on the 12 January 2008, Theater Mannheim, and in February 2008 at the Kampnagel Hamburg. Eventually it will be available to buy at Paul Plamper’s future outlet for radio plays, Hörpark.

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Ernõ Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower, London W10. “I built skyscrapers for people to live in there and now they messed them up — disgusting.” Photo by See Wah, used under Creative Commons licence).

Dan Lockton is a design engineer and doctoral researcher at Brunel University’s School of Engineering & Design, on a brutalist West London campus somewhere between Shepperton and the Westway. He writes the Architectures of Control blog.

One of the many ‘obsessions’ running through Ballard’s work is what we might characterise as the effect of architecture on the individual. This is more than playful psychogeography: Ballard dissects architectural influence on his characters with technical precision, both intricate and dynamic, captured at 24 frames per second through a 35 mm lens but replayed in slow-motion, frozen and magnified, projected on the featureless concrete barrier bounding the mainstream carriageway.

I use ‘architecture’ here in a wide sense, including the whole of the constructed environment – physical, technological and social – because while, for example, High-Rise very clearly explores the way that architectural decisions can directly impact on human behaviour, some of Ballard’s more recent works such as Running Wild, Millennium People and Kingdom Come concentrate more on the effects of constructed social and psychological environments on their inhabitants/users, and Crash of course examines intimately the interface between technology and our bodies, and how the technological landscape shapes our own obsessions. Indeed, the phrase “psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments” in the Collins English Dictionary definition of ‘Ballardian’ is, while necessarily broad, impressively concise.

However, the argument is somewhat more complex: to a large extent, much of Ballard’s work makes it clear that he considers the seeds of behavioural change to be latent within every participant and merely drawn out by the environments and situations in which he or she is placed. Concrete Island, some of the elements of The Atrocity Exhibition, ‘The Terminal Beach’, ‘The Enormous Space’, ‘Motel Architecture’ and others all take this to the characteristically Ballardian level of actually reflecting the participants’ mental state in the environment itself:

…throughout The Atrocity Exhibition, the nervous systems of the characters have been externalised 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 central nervous system.”

The Atrocity Exhibition, annotated edition (JGB’s notes on ‘Algebra of the Sky’).

More and more, the island was becoming an exact model of his head… Identifying the island with himself, he gazed at the cars in the breaker’s yard, at the wire-mesh fence, and the concrete caisson behind him. These places of pain and ordeal were now confused with pieces of his body.
…
I am the island.

Concrete Island, chapter 9.

Culver St, Salisbury, Wiltshire. Photo by Tom Goskar (used under Creative Commons licence).

In terms of conventional ‘architecture’, it is the landscape of highways, the blockhouse and the multi-storey car park (many of them “very large structures”) which recur throughout Ballard’s work, with aspects of their geometries (canted decks, angles between walls, and so on) both a cipher for the possibilities of human relations and a method of reinforcing the obsessive thought-processes of the characters involved.

The architecture also acts as a structure for the story — few writers incorporate the affordances and disaffordances of their fiction’s settings so tightly into the plot as Ballard does: this is especially obvious in High-Rise (and less so in Kingdom Come) where a single edifice is the focus of both the overall plot and everything that happens within it, but even ‘detective story’ details such as (in Super-Cannes) Sinclair searching for and finding Greenwood’s dried blood inside the drainpipe below the top deck of the (multi-storey) car park are integrated inescapably into the nature of Ballard’s narrative. Would the events of, say, Super-Cannes or Cocaine Nights engage the reader to the same extent if the architecture of the locations, both physical and psychological, were not so obsessively explained and expounded?

My own area of research relates to what might be called ‘design with intent’, or, more dramatically, ‘architectures of control’, a term most notably used by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig to describe the way in which systems (such as the internet) regulate and shape users’ behaviour through the embedded ‘code’ of the system itself, orders of magnitude more powerful than any external legal regulation. Ballard explores consumerism-driving behaviour-shaping most notably in ‘The Subliminal Man’, where, alongside subliminal advertising on giant roadside signs designed to spur ever-faster product replacement cycles, a system of rubber studs embedded in the road surface, the pattern of which is regularly changed, enforce regular tyre replacement by causing damaging resonance — “increasing the safety and efficiency of the expressway… [and also] the revenues of the car and tyre manufacturers.”

Architectures of control in the built environment work on different scales, from the large-scale layouts of cities and campuses to encourage or discourage certain behaviour, to mundane small-scale examples such as benches designed with central armrests to prevent the homeless sleeping on them, anti-skateboarding features on walls and even rough paving to make it uncomfortable to sit down or for barefooted protestors to congregate. Similar ideas have been expressed in different fields, at different times, by different people: for example, for Bruno Latour and Madeleine Akrich, the emphasis is very much on the designer (or architect) ‘inscribing’ intent into a system or environment, prescribing and proscribing what behaviours will be produced, but the architectural effects explored in Ballard’s work are, more often than not, divorced from conscious intent on the part of the architects – part of Ballard’s usual “recognition of unconscious forces” [1] (my emphases):

Take a structure like a multi-storey car park, one of the most mysterious buildings ever built. Is it a model for some strange psychological state, some kind of vision glimpsed within its bizarre geometry? What effect does using these buildings have on us? Are the real myths of this century being written in terms of these huge unnoticed structures?

‘Crash!’ voiceover, 1971.

In most roles the machine assumes a benign or passive posture – telephone exchanges, engineering hardware, etc. The twentieth century has also given birth to a vast range of machines – computers, pilotless planes, thermonuclear weapons – where the latent identity of the machine is ambiguous even to the skilled investigator.

‘Crash!’ in The Atrocity Exhibition.

Under the Westway. Photo by Drew Leavy (used under Creative Commons licence).

Ballard in no way tries to imply that the architects and civil engineers who envisaged the Westway, Western Avenue and London’s Motorway Box intended to create or inspire the events of Crash or Concrete Island, but the fact that Maitland (Concrete Island) is, professionally, an architect, is surely significant. Where Ballard does allow us to examine an architect meeting the consequences of his work — Royal in High-Rise — there is an apparent lack of conscious reflection by the architect on the actual architectural effects involved but something of an implication of intent, at least in terms of the whole thing being a perverse experiment on the part of its creator (much like Crawford in Cocaine Nights and Penrose in Super-Cannes, or even Vaughan, the “TV scientist” in Crash).

Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space, a seminal work in modern urban planning, had been published in 1972, three years before High-Rise, and includes studies of real apartment blocks and estates Balkanised and destroyed through escalating architecturally-driven deterioration of the social fabric, although none to quite the level of atavism and collectively self-enforced agoraphobia that Ballard brings us. This distaste for the outside world, the wilful insularity of the residents, is a notable theme in High-Rise, and of course parallels some of the thought processes of the enclave residents of the Residencia Costasol (Cocaine Nights) and Pangbourne Village (Running Wild):

The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape. Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence.

High-Rise, chapter 2.

It’s interesting to note Ballard’s own recognition of embedded (or ‘inscribed’) code in architectural design in ‘A Handful of Dust’ [2], an article for the Guardian (emphases mine), where the idea of the planned community also rears its head:

But the modernists maintained that ornamentation concealed rather than embellished. Classical columns, pediments and pilasters defined a hierarchical order. Power and authority were separated from the common street by huge flights of steps that we were forced to climb on our way to law courts, parliaments and town halls… So modernism was a breath of fresh air and possibility. Housing schemes, factories and office blocks designed by modernist architects were clear-headed and geometric, suggesting clean and unembellished lives for the people inside them.

‘A Handful of Dust’, The Guardian, 20. iii. 2006.

This idea is further explored in the notes on ‘Locus Solus’ in the annotated version of The Atrocity Exhibition, (and, specifically with the planned/gated community theme, in ‘The Largest Theme Park in the World’, Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Running Wild):

…the peculiar geometry of those identical apartment houses [along the Mediterranean coast] seems to defuse the millenarian spirit. Living there, one is aware of the exact volumes of these generally white apartments and hotel rooms. After the more sombre light of northern Europe, they seem to focus an intense self-consciousness on the occupants.

The Atrocity Exhibition, annotated edition (JGB’s notes on Locus Solus).

Tasers and other defence paraphernalia on sale in a Cannes shopping centre, 2005. Photograph by Dan Lockton.

In Super-Cannes, however, there is an explicit link drawn with the totalitarian potential of architectural determinism as a method of social control, which brings Ballard closer to more ‘conventional’ dystopian territory. It’s not comparable with the wartime horrors of Empire of the Sun, but is in keeping with the dark conspiratorial undercurrents of the book (my emphases):

Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems.

Super-Cannes, chapter 29.

Surveillance cameras hung like gargoyles from the cornices, following me as I approached the barbican and identified myself to the guard at the reception desk… High above me, fluted columns carried the pitched roofs, an attempt at a vernacular architecture that failed to disguise this executive-class prison. Taking their cue from Eden-Olympia and Antibes-les-Pins, the totalitarian systems of the future would be subservient and ingratiating, but the locks would be just as strong.

Super-Cannes, chapter 15.

This last quote is one of my favourites from all of Ballard’s work, and it’s notable from the ‘architectures of control’ perspective to see the strains of latent suburban fascism being explored in the recent Kingdom Come, entwined with the planned manipulation of populations through mass media and the advertising which Pearson devises; it will be interesting to see if Ballard continues exploring this area of modern totalitarianism, whether he can further develop this perspective, and what direction he takes next.

While this brief article merely scratches the surface of Ballard’s interest in architectural effects on people, I hope it shows that this area, in many forms, is a running theme throughout much of his work — a fascinating thread, evolving yet consistent in its depth, over fifty-plus years of writing.

Dan Lockton, 2008.

[1] Chris Hall, ‘Extreme Metaphor: A Crash Course In The Fiction Of JG Ballard’.
[2] J.G. Ballard. ‘A handful of dust’.

Review by Rick McGrath

To mark this month’s release of Kingdom Come in paperback, former ad man Rick McGrath takes another look at KC from ‘the perspective of marketing, advertising and psychopathology’. He also takes a look at the Metro-Centre website, a viral-marketing tool used to promote the book, and asks, ‘The abattoir? Not too gloomy?’

If you haven’t read the book yet and need a taster, HarperCollins have helpfully onlined a PDF of the first chapter.

HAS the kingdom come to this? The marketing mavens at HarperCollins Publishers have gone “bad is good” and invented a fake Metro-Centre website in order to help promote sales of J.G. Ballard’s latest novel, Kingdom Come.

Inspired by the novel and the adcap antics of its protagonist, Richard Pearson, “2006 UK Adman Of The Year”, this ersatz shopping centre has attempted to represent itself as revealed in the novel, with David Cruise interviews, St George’s shirts, maps, hours of operation, local news, sports — anything to enhance the illusion. Then, in June 2007, just before the release of the softcover HarperPerennial PS edition of Kingdom Come, they upped the ante. They kept the site’s flowery Metro-Centre sunflower background (which had already changed from 4C to B&W), but brutalized the bland logo into a reversed Helvetica motorcycle gang armpatch, and started running their own versions of Pearson’s psychopathic campaign, ironically attempting to foster consumer interest using irrational ads.

LEFT: David Cruise stands forlornly in an empty parking lot. Apparently we don’t have to wait much longer… one assumes the cars will soon arrive (photo copyright Metro-Centre 2007).

Ahh… the joys of marketing: use an imaginary ad campaign to sell a real book about an imaginary ad campaign. You have to give them credit, for it’s a sad fact that Kingdom Come, in hardcover, was met with mixed notices from UK reviewers when it was published in September 2006. City critics know nothing of the suburbs. But now the publication of Kingdom Come, the softcover, offers an opportunity to re-examine the novel from the perspective of marketing, advertising and psychopathology … and the hidden message behind Pearson’s “ironic” ad campaign.

Pearson, remember, is a recently-fired and divorced advertising executive who leaves his London flat to venture out and into the suburbs to a town called Brooklands, off the M25 motorway, to finalize the estate of his recently-murdered father. Who killed dad? Turns out nobody really cares, and Pearson, dazed and confused in this unlandscape of the uncreative, stands out like a slogan without a brand, writhing in newly-felt emotions as he slowly learns the truth about his now ultimately estranged pater.

No matter. All this is just psychological background for Pearson’s main activity in the novel: unleashing his radical ad campaign for a stupendous shopping complex they call the Metro-Centre.

It takes awhile to get there, but Pearson’s psychotic proclivity to link product and buyer finally crashes into consciousness when he meets the very Ballardian Dr Maxted, a professor-like psychiatrist who loves to make summatory pronouncements and who introduces Pearson to the concept of “elective insanity” — psychopathologies which are “waiting inside us, ready to come out when we need it”. Maxted is always right and never wrong. Pearson falls instantly for this intellectual father figure.

So it’s no surprise that Maxted makes the telling prediction, lecturing Pearson that “the future is going to be a struggle between vast systems of competing psychopathologies, all of them willed and deliberate, part of a desperate attempt to escape from a rational world and the boredom of consumerism”. Hmm… hey, that’s a marketing concept: if rationality is prison-like and our only amusement is more of the boredom of going out to buy something useless, then maybe irrationality will free us and add some excitement to our lives… and perhaps make shopping a pleasure again! Helluva notion. For Pearson, this certainly is the basis of an advertising campaign. But which “competing” psychopathology to use?

Pearson knows the answer. His own self-doubts guide him. He’s already tapped into the power of “elective insanity”. In London, Pearson experimented with what he called a “strange” ad — unfortunately, the first campaign he tried it on worked so well he was fired. Full kudos for being brave, but the campaign for a new micro-car — “Mad is bad. Bad is good.” — dives into a pool of irony so deep as to confuse the public into buying the car and killing themselves by completing the slogan’s logic and concluding “mad is good”. And that is sophisticated London. This is not. Again happily undeterred by any thoughts of consequences, Pearson decides to reprise his radical concept: “Brooklands and the motorway towns were the ultimate consumer test panel, and here I could put into practice the subversive ideas that had cost me my career”.

What’s truly subversive about this campaign, however, is its deeper, latent meaning: this is not a campaign for the Metro-Centre, this is a campaign designed to tap the darkness of Pearson’s own unrealized psychopathologies. Oedipal guilt springs to mind. Too Freudian? How about emasculated male ego? No matter. The sublimation begins. In essence, Pearson unconsciously uses his campaign to advertise his own neuroses upon an already-restive society only too happy to consume the deviance of his “elective insanity”. Sounds bad, but once again the Ballardian character obsessively seeks to touch his inner self by dominating the external environment.

Charged with purpose, Pearson immediately gets to work. Not surprisingly, his deepest insight is right out of Freud: true capital is emotional — once you have their hearts, their wallets will soon follow. Once you have their Ids, their Egos will soon follow. Pearson explains to his newly-recruited pitchman, David Cruise, how this situation can be exploited: “People accumulate emotional capital, as well as cash in the bank, and they need to invest those emotions in a leader figure”.

If this is psychopathologic, David Cruise’s first emotions are anger and hate, possibly against an unidentified victim. The booze angle will become part of the campaign’s theme (photo copyright Metro-Centre 2007).

But what kind of “leader figure” will the population invest in? Do they want a dictator whose specific message demands racial fears and violence? No, says Pearson. “There is no message. Messages belong to the old politics… No slogans, no messages. New politics. No manifestos, no commitments. No easy answers. They decide what they want”. Hah, hah. Hardly. People consume what they’re given. Pearson’s anxieties require him to fictionalize his own psychopathogies. But how? For Pearson, that’s easy: use the irrational. “Madness is the key to everything. Small doses, applied when no-one is really looking.” Sneaky boy has been peeking at Mum again.

Once he’s concocted his concept, Pearson goes on to coach Cruise on how to pull off this acting job: “Be nice most of the time, but now and then be nasty, when they least expect it. Now and then slip in a hint of madness, a little raw psychopathology. Remember, sensation and psychopathy are the only way people contact with each other today.” Get the feeling Pearson is describing his childhood? That Cruise might be another kind of father-substitute … as well as Pearson’s projection?

For the media mix, Pearson chooses giant billboards and relentless TV commercials, along with a regular consumer affairs show on the Metro-Centre’s TV station. With this visual approach, and utilizing the appropriate “raw psychopathology”, Pearson re-creates Cruise as a “fugitive and haunted hero of a noir film … as a trapped creature of strange and wayward moods — grimacing, frowning, angry, morose, hallucinating and obsessed.” Pearson unwittingly describes himself.

Let’s see how Ballard captures these “wayward moods” in Pearson’s ads. The novel describes two billboards and six television commercials. A sophisticated marketer, Pearson has designed a campaign which builds on itself through evocative scenes, each slightly more deviant than the last. They are indeed as zany and irrational as Pearson, although he later calls them “ironic soft-sells”, which is in itself a masterpiece of self-delusion.

Billboard #1: Cruise as a “fugitive and haunted hero”, sitting at the wheel of his car, staring ahead at the open road, “and whatever nemesis lay in wait for him.”

Billboard #2: Cruise in a “nightmare replay of a Strindberg play”, threatening and confused as he stares across a showroom of kitchens.

TV Spot #1: Cruise staring “almost ecstatically” at a beat-up garbage can.

In TV Spot #2: Cruise rings doorbells at random, and when the housewife answers the door, he scowls at her as if to hit her, or beg a place to stay.

TV Spot #3: Cruise “haunting” the Brooklands racing circuit and his mind being “tortured” by squealing tires.

TV Spot #4: Cruise following a group of schoolgirls across a Heathrow concourse “like a would-be child abductor.”

TV Spot #5: Cruise howling from the roof of a multi-storey car park.

TV Spot #6: Just hinted at, but apparently the action takes place in a slaughterhouse. Pearson asks: “The abattoir? Not too gloomy?” And is answered: “Never. Existential choice.” So fraught with death one hardly needs to know the plot.

As with all great campaigns, these advertisements build on each other in such a way that, “Together they made sense at the deepest levels, scenes from the collective dream forever playing in the back alleys of their mind.” Unfortunately, that collective dream turns out to be the physical reality of senseless violence, complete with fascist tendencies.

Our man Cruise doing the Strindberg play thing in a showroom with washers and TVs. Today we’re just a little suicidal… (photo copyright Metro-Centre 2007).

Pearson himself calls these ads “tense but meaningless psychodramas”, but of course the “meaning” is in the tension itself — with Cruise a kind of subhero of Pearson’s subconscious. It’s Dr Maxted’s “elective insanity” dressed up in noir. No longer trapped in their civilized cage of guilty repression, the populace of Brooklands quickly responds to Pearson’s siren call of the instincts and gleefully embraces the Metro-Centre’s call to consumerism … and darker action.

Does the campaign work? Of course, and only too well. Unfortunately, the results are similar to Pearson’s car campaign — increased sales and increased violence. The population of Brooklands, already primed by a spectacle diet of aggressive sports and nationalist mobbing, rush to spend their emotional capital: Cruise achieves celebrity status, Metro-Centre becomes a self-contained church of consumerism, the cash registers ring, and all is outwardly well in Happy Valley. By day. By night Brooklands reflects the dark side of Pearson’s psychopathic campaign. His deep guilt and sexual anxieties are reflected in the street crowds around him. These basic instincts rule the streets and sports stadiums; the individual becomes a mob, and the situation becomes dangerous.

The ad man’s moment of self-realization comes as he’s driving the streets. Reflecting on the violence around him, Pearson muses: “I saw myself as taking part in a merchandising scheme in a suburban shopping mall, using a ‘bad is good’ come-on that was meant to be the ultimate in ironic soft sells. I had recruited a third-rate cable presenter and some-time actor to play the licensed jester, the dwarf at the court of the Spanish kings. But the irony had evaporated, and the slogan had become a political movement … The ad man was faced with the final humiliation of being taken literally.”

A humiliation, indeed -– and the turning point in the novel. But, just in case we still don’t get it, Ballard neatly sums it up. In a meeting between Pearson and Dr Maxted, we finally reach analytic ground zero.

Dr Maxted: “You saw fascism as just another sales opportunity. Psychopathology was a handy marketing tool. David Cruise was your tailor’s dummy … a psychopath with genuine moral integrity.”

Pearson: “Still, everyone admired him.”

Dr Maxted: “Why not? We’re totally degenerate. We lack spine, and any faith in ourselves. We have a tabloid world-view, but no dreams or ideals. We have to be teased with the promise of deviant sex. Our gurus tell us that coveting our neighbour’s wives is good for us, and even conceivably our neighbour’s asses. Don’t honour your father and mother, and break free from the whole Oedipal trap. We’re worth nothing, but we worship our barcodes. We’re the most advanced society our planet has ever seen, but real decadence is far out of our reach. We’re so desperate we have to rely on people like you to spin a new set of fairy tales, cosy little fantasies of alienation and guilt.”

Whoa. So much for English culture. But this pessimistic view is, of course, the reason for the novel in the first place. In an ad, ad, ad world, you get what you psychopathologically deserve.

Cruise’s moment of ecstasy with a beat-up garbage can. The overturned shopping trolley is a nice touch; the billboard was posted in Shepperton (photo copyright Metro-Centre 2007).

Without a doubt Richard Pearson is an interesting addition to the stable of unstable Ballardian characters. He enters the novel a typically damaged professional, emasculated by his wife, fired from his job, and looking for the killer of his alienated father. Lost in this unfamiliar landscape, Pearson transforms it by transforming himself, rewriting his nightmares into an ad campaign of irrationality, which he survives and emerges from as a physically damaged but mentally healthier and wiser individual. Whew. And he gets the girl. And yes, she’s a mother figure.

Ultimately, Pearson’s cathartic campaign comes across as Ballard’s real advertisement for his version of a well-balanced life. Pearson’s failure becomes his salvation. If the Metro-Centre campaign is an externalized, artistic version of Pearson’s inner psychological state, then his recovery comes with its ultimate self-destruction. Once again Ballard confirms his longstanding theme of personal affirmation by following one’s obsessions. Through Pearson, Ballard creates his own extreme advertisement for personal and social redemption: Turn your back on the tabloids. Grow a spine. Have some faith in yourself. Go after your dreams. Have some ideals. In other words, get a life.

In a real way, Kingdom Come the novel is an advertisement itself: read it as a very long print ad warning about the real dangers of subversive dreams when they’re carpet bombed on empty lives. Oh yeah, and admen are crazy. You’ve been warned…

Rick McGrath

..:: MORE INFO
+ Rick McGrath’s J.G. Ballard Collection
+ Ballardian’s interview with Rick McGrath
+ More on Kingdom Come
+ Metro-Centre website

Mike Holliday explains how to read J.G. Ballard’s 1979 novel The Unlimited Dream Company as a fascistic work.

Ambiguity is one of the defining features of J.G. Ballard’s fiction. Consider, for example:

+ Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women – to what extent are they fiction and to what extent autobiography?

+ Crash – about which the author himself appears undecided, sometimes describing it as a psychopathic hymn, but on another occasion as “a cautionary … warning against [a] brutal, erotic and overlit realm”.

+ The Atrocity Exhibition – the book which best displays Ballard’s refusal of unambiguous interpretations, and his dictum that the reader, rather than the writer, should bear “most of the hard work” in interpreting “a more oblique narrative style, understated themes, private symbols and vocabularies”.

However, Ballard’s 1979 book The Unlimited Dream Company contains, on the face of it, little in the way of serious ambiguity. To most readers, the eye is taken by the lyrical descriptions of the transformations wrought on Ballard’s home town of Shepperton, and the emotions are engaged by the progress towards a near-mystical transcendence of the day-to-day world. The outline of the story is straightforward. The main protagonist is Blake (fairly obviously named after William Blake), a young loner who steals a light plane and crashes it into the Thames at Shepperton. He somehow escapes from the submerged plane and is assisted by a number of local residents. But he finds himself physically unable to leave Shepperton, and begins to develop a series of magical powers with which he can transform the town and its inhabitants. Blake experiences flying as a condor, swimming as a whale, and running as a deer; and he seeds a luxurious growth in the local plant life using his own semen. Under his influence, the townspeople start to give up their sexual inhibitions and their interest in material goods. Blake learns to fly unaided and passes on this gift to the others; he also finds that he can absorb other people and animals into his own being. At the end of the book, the inhabitants of Shepperton fly upwards into the waiting universe, whilst Blake stays behind in order to work a similar transformation on the rest of the world and looks forward to a unification of the entire universe in a mystical transcendence: “we would merge with the trees and the flowers, with the dust and the stones, with the whole of the mineral world, happily dissolving ourselves in the sea of light that formed the universe … celebrating the last marriage of the animate and inanimate, of the living and the dead.”

Certainly Malcolm Bradbury concentrated on the lyrical and optimistic aspects of The Unlimited Dream Company in his review of the book for The New York Times, lauding it as “a remarkable piece of invention, a flight from the world of the familiar and the real into the exotic universe of dream and desire, … a dreamy pastoral”, although Bradbury did think that at times the pastoral tone became “too innocent”. And in Out of the Night and Into the Dream, his book-length treatise on Ballard, Gregory Stephenson describes Blake as “the first truly whole, truly heroic figure in Ballard’s oeuvre”, who undergoes a “peaceful, affirmative and finally joyous metamorphosis.”

But the eye and the emotions are deceived, for beneath the surface of The Unlimited Dream Company lies the possibility of other, less straightforward, interpretations. For one thing, the status of the reality of the book’s events is never resolved: are they hallucinated by Blake as he lies trapped in the submerged plane? … or are they are a reflection of his delusional state as he wanders around Shepperton? … or is this straight fantasy and we are meant to understand that these unbelievable things actually happen? Any single interpretation is supported by sections of the text, only to be undermined by others.

But this uncertainty as to the ‘reality’ of the book’s events is itself a function of one critical fact: everything in the book is described as it is perceived by its narrator, Blake – and on Blake’s own account of his early life in Chapter 2, he is manifestly a delusional paranoiac. For example, he tells us that he was thrown out of medical school after becoming convinced that a cadaver was alive and terrorizing another student into helping him march it around in an attempt to revive it. On another occasion,

I was arrested by the police for being over-boisterous in the children’s playground … I was gripped by a Pied Piper complex, and genuinely believed that I could lead the twenty children and their startled mothers, the few passing dogs and even the dripping flowers away to a paradise which was literally, if I could only find it, no more than a few hundred yards from us.

—————————————————————————-
J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company (p13).
—————————————————————————-

And Blake already has a Messianic belief in himself:

Rejected would-be mercenary pilot, failed Jesuit novice, unpublished writer of pornography … for all these failures I had a tenacious faith in myself, a messiah as yet without a message who would one day assemble a unique identity out of this defective jigsaw.

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p13).
———————–

To describe Blake as a classically unreliable narrator, as Andrzej Gasiorek does in his recent book on Ballard, is putting things mildly.

In fact, the lyrical descriptions of Blake’s awareness of his growing powers, and of Shepperton’s subsequent mutation, together with the singular narrative perspective, take the attention away from the darker side of Blake’s behaviour following his plane crash. He retains his paranoiac delusions, one example being his assumption after the crash that the bruises he has suffered are due to an attempt to kill him, rather than an effect of the accident or a genuine attempt at artificial respiration. He then goes around comparing the size of people’s hands to the bruises on his chest, in order to try and identify the culprit. There is, of course, no reason why anyone would want to kill him – it’s a paranoid delusion that feeds his own sense of self-worth.

The Thames at Shepperton, around the spot where Blake must have crashed his plane (photo: Simon Sellars).

As the book progresses other aspects of Blake’s personality and behaviour become apparent.

He is particularly susceptible to the suggestions of others:

Blake is extremely suggestible; in fact, much of his behaviour and thoughts are based on what others say or on events around him. Early on in the book, Miriam St Cloud asks Blake, somewhat humorously, whether he is some sort of Pagan God, and later on her mother suggests to him that he might start a flying school to teach the townspeople to fly (“I’ll talk to the people at the bank”, she adds). In both cases, Blake latches onto the comments as reflecting his own potential powers, and goes on to behave as if he really were a Pagan God and can teach people to fly like the birds.

The spreading of his semen around Shepperton to produce a luxuriant foliage is suggested to Blake by two occasions where he notices unusual plants growing nearby, in one case rising from the ground between his legs, “as if in response to my own sex”. From this, Blake develops the idea of fertilizing the whole of the town from his own sperm.

LEFT: Father Wingate … Blake’s “anti-conscience”.

Blake readily accepts Father Wingate’s suggestion that he stopped himself from “raping” the blind girl, Rachel … but this just isn’t true – Miriam St Cloud had to pull the little girl out of Blake’s arms. In fact, the priest seems to act as an “anti-conscience”, providing Blake with reassurance as to his motives and desires, at one point telling him to go ahead and possess Shepperton: “Blake, take your world … Look at it, it’s around you here”.

Most significantly, Blake takes all too literally Father Wingate’s suggestion that “For all we know, vices in this world may well be metaphors for virtues in the next. Perhaps you can take us all through that doorway”, and uses it on a number of occasions to justify to himself his increasingly megalomanic behaviour. For example, just before devouring a 12 year old girl as a “small, sweet breakfast”, he says:

I had dreamed of crimes and murders, unashamed acts of congress with beasts, with birds, trees and the soil. I remembered my molesting of small children. But now I knew that these perverse impulses had been no more than confused attempts to anticipate what was taking place in Shepperton, my capture of these people and the merging of their bodies with mine. Already I was convinced that there was no evil, and that even the most plainly evil impulses were merely crude attempts to accept the demands of a higher realm that existed within each of us. By accepting these perversions and obsessions I was opening the gates into the real world. [my emphasis]

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p177).
———————–

He is subject to abrupt changes of mood and thought:

One example of Blake’s changeability occurs early on in the book, when he sees that the three children have built a mock grave for him. He asks himself “Am I dead?” and becomes annoyed: “I kicked the flowers from the grave, pushed through the dusty foliage and stepped back into the park.” But at this point Blake’s mood suddenly changes, and his concern that he might have died disappears in an instant: “Immediately the light trapped below the trees rushed towards me, happy to find something living to seize upon. … I was certain that I had not died”.

The lack of stability in Blake’s emotions and thoughts is exacerbated by his incipient megalomania. He makes emotional declarations concerning what he wants to achieve, which are then contradicted by his later actions. One example occurs when he is preparing for his last attempt to leave Shepperton, and ecstatically describes how he wants to unite with the “fish and the birds, the flowers and the dust, … within the great commonwealth of nature”. But the following afternoon, he regards the birds very differently:

The thousands of birds sat on the roofs of the abandoned cars, perched in the gutters of the supermarket and post office, and on the portico of the filling-station. Together they seemed to be waiting for something to happen. Were they expecting me to fly again for them? Irritated by the silence, I hurled a concrete chip into the flock of flamingos standing around the fountain in the shopping mall. They staggered into each other, flailing their wings in an ungainly pink glare.

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p178).
———————–

Blake rationalizes away his own behaviour:

His suggestibility and abrupt changes of thought mean that Blake easily rationalizes his own conduct. For example, here’s the description of his attack on his fiancée prior to stealing the plane:

While watching my fiancée dressing in the bedroom, I felt a sudden need to embrace her. … But as I held her shoulders against my chest I knew that I was not moved by any affection for her but by the need literally to crush her out of existence. … Only when she collapsed around my knees did I realize that I had been about to kill her, but without the slightest hate or anger. Later, as I sat in the cockpit of the Cessna, excited by the engine as it coughed and thundered into life, I knew that I had meant no harm to her. [my emphasis]

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p14).
———————–

As I’ve already noted, Father Wingate’s comment about “vices being metaphors for virtues in the next world” is frequently used by Blake to justify and rationalize his own behaviour. Here’s another example:

I remembered my bizarre attempt to suffocate Mrs St Cloud, the strange way in which I had tried to rape the little blind girl, and the unconscious young woman I had nearly murdered in her apartment near London Airport. These crimes and lusts were the first stirrings of the benign forces [sic] revealed to me in Shepperton. … Remembering Father Wingate’s words, I was certain now that vice in this world was a metaphor for virtue in the next, and that only through the most extreme of those metaphors would I make my escape.

———————–
Ballard, UDC (pp167-8).
———————–

Later on, he muses about the townspeople: “For all their hate, I was glad that I had taught them how to fly. Through me they had learned how to become more than themselves, the birds and the fish and the mammals, and had briefly entered a world where they could merge with their brothers and friends, their husbands and children”. This has a superficial ring of truth, because it matches some of the lyrical descriptions that Blake gives of what was happening, but it’s rubbish – he actually states several times in the preceding pages that he intends to keep the inhabitants within himself so as to provide the power that he requires to escape from Shepperton and pursue his wider megalomanic aims. And even this contradiction can be rationalized away:

I thought of … my conviction that I would one day slaughter all these people. I was certain that I had no wish to harm them, but only to lead them to the safety of a higher ground somewhere above Shepperton. These paradoxes, like my frightening urge to copulate with young children and old men, had been placed before me like a series of tests. [my emphasis]

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p122).
———————–

He attributes his own behaviour to others:

When Blake first sees Father Wingate, just after coming back to consciousness following the plane crash, he attributes to the clergyman both his own suspicious attitude and his desire to violently crush others out of existence (as he had attempted to do to his fiancée just hours before):

Seeing his strong physique at close quarters, the shoulders still trembling with some strange repressed emotion, I could easily imagine him deciding to crush the life out of me and send me back to the other side before everything got out of hand. He was deliberately exposing the suspicions that crossed his face, trying to provoke me. I was tempted to grapple with him, force my bruised body against his and hurl him on to the oil-stained grass.

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p25).
———————–

Shepperton film studios: backstreet dream factory (photo: Simon Sellars).

And a couple of pages later, he generalizes his own suspicions onto the whole population of Shepperton:

Their faces seemed almost hostile. … the placid town into which I had fallen had a distinctly sinister atmosphere, as if all these apparently unhurried suburbanites were in fact actors recruited from the film studios to play their roles in an elaborate conspiracy. … For whatever motives, one of these people had tried to kill me.

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p26).
———————–

Blake’s megalomania and sense of self-importance:

Blake becomes megalomanic to the extreme. In fact, when stripped out of the self-lyrical context that surrounds them, his declarations are repetitive and tedious: “I greeted the sun as an equal, a respected plenipotentiary I admitted to my domain” … “Feeling the sun bathe my naked body, I worshipped myself” … “I was almost sure now that my powers were limitless, that I was capable of anything I wished to imagine” … “Once I had devoured everyone in Shepperton I would be strong enough to move into the world beyond …, a holy ghost taking everyone in London into my spirit before I set off for the world at large” … “I was the first living creature to escape death, to rise above mortality to become a god” … “I would fly on across the planet, merging with all creatures until I had taken into myself every living being, every fish and bird, every parent and child, a single chimeric god uniting all life within me” … and there is much more along the same lines.

His sexual feelings are transmuted into violence and possession:

All of Blake’s near-victims, whom he attempts to crush to death, are female: his fiancée, the little blind girl, Mrs St Cloud, and Miriam St Cloud. Although on Blake’s account he acts without wishing any harm to the victim, there is always some sort of sexual feeling, thought, or circumstance that is present. For Blake, sexual feelings are transmuted into violence and possession.

The desire to crush rather than to embrace is one symptom of Blake’s desperate need for physical closeness and possession of others. The other main symptom is that after his plane crash he does not eat, but wants to feed off the bodies of the local inhabitants: “Although I had eaten nothing for forty-eight hours, I was hungry only for the flesh of my own species. And I would take that flesh, not with my bruised mouth, but with my entire body, with my insatiate skin”.

Although Blake does on occasion release those with whom he has merged, the underlying impulse to keep and to hold is obvious, as can be seen from the following two examples, which are worth quoting at some length:

Within me I could feel the bodies of ten-year-old Sarah and her little brother, and of a teenage boy. Jealous of their freedom, I had not released them when we landed. I needed their young bodies and spirits to give me strength. They would play forever within me, running across the dark meadows of my heart. I had still not eaten, although this was the fourth day since my arrival, but I had tasted the flesh of these children and knew that they were my food. [my emphasis]

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p164).
———————–

I lusted after this youth. His smell of fear excited me … I lusted after him, but for his body and not for his sex. … In the back seat of a flower-bedecked limousine I embraced him gently, caressed his nervous skin, pressed his cold hands against the gates of my body. At the last moment, as I eased him into my chest, he gave a sudden cry of fear and relief. I felt his long legs within mine, the shafts of his bones forming splints around my femurs, his buttocks merging into my hands. … His grimace with all its terror and ecstasy moved through me like a claw seizing my face. With a last sigh he merged within my flesh, a son reborn into his father’s womb. … While he lay within me, his identity fading for ever, I knew that I would never release him, and that his real flight was taking place now across the skies of my body in the rear seat of this limousine. The last motes of his self fled through the dark arcades of my bloodstream, down the sombre causeways of my spinal column, following the faint cries of the three children I had taken into me that afternoon. … I embraced him within me as I embraced myself. [my emphasis]

———————–
Ballard, UDC (p174-5).
———————–

LEFT: Illustration from The Book of Urizen, by William Blake.

Blake’s personality and behaviour have strong similarities to the mind-set of fascism: for example, the megalomania, the paranoid delusions about others, the exclusion or demonization of doubters or those with alternative points of view. In particular, the fascist requires that everything must cohere together as one – and Alistair Cormack has pointed out that this is well described by a line written by the namesake of Ballard’s protagonist, William Blake: “One command, one joy, one desire; One curse, one weight, one measure; One King, one God, one Law” (The Book of Urizen).

The protagonist of The Unlimited Dream Company is a delusional paranoiac, and it is interesting to note how closely he conforms to an early description of the anti-Semitic and fascistic personality by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (originally written in the middle of the Second World War), the authors characterize the fascist and anti-Semitic personality as essentially paranoid, and as based around an inverted relationship between the interior and exterior worlds. In non-paranoid individuals, there is a learning process forced on us by our interactions with the physical and social environments, by means of which we learn to distinguish between that which lies within us and that which lies without, and hence we are able to learn the processes of “distancing and identifying, self-awareness and the conscience.” Therefore, an individual’s mind normally develops and changes so as to reflect the external world and the changes that are perceived there: in a phrase, “the alien must become familiar”. But the paranoiac individual attempts to make the environment match their own interior world: the alien is therefore something that must be destroyed or devoured. There is a resulting confusion between the inner and outer worlds; intimate experiences may be interpreted as hostile and “impulses which the subject will not admit as his own even though they are most assuredly so, are attributed to the object – the prospective victim.”

This leads to a set of behaviours that is typical of the delusional paranoiac. Aggressive wishes are projected outwards in the form of evil intentions belonging to others. Aggression may then be acted out in the form of “supposed self-defence”, and hatred may develop into a “generalized urge to destruction. The sick individual re gresses to the archaic nondifferentiation of love and domination. He is concerned with physical proximity, seizure – relationship at all costs.”

Because the paranoiac has difficulty distinguishing internal and external worlds, he “becomes poorer rather than richer. He loses the reflection in both directions: since he no longer reflects the object, he ceases to reflect upon himself, and loses the ability to differentiate. Instead of the voice of conscience, he hears other voices.” In one sense, such an individual is overflowing: he is continually transferring himself outside himself. But this is a flow into nothingness; and as a result the paranoid individual “overflows and fades away at one and the same time. [The paranoid mind] invests the outer world boundlessly with its own content; but it invests it in fact with the void: with an overstatement of mere means, relations, machinations, and dark practice without the perspective of thought.”

The paranoid mind is therefore prone to merely repeating its own self, and the result is a “closed circle of eternal sameness” which bears a resemblance to the omnipotence of a God: “It is as though the serpent which said to the first men ‘you will be as God’ had redeemed its promise in the paranoiac. He makes everything in his own image. He seems to need no living being, yet demands that all serve him. His will permeates the universe and everything must relate to him”.

Adorno and Horkheimer view fascism as this behaviour transferred to the political sphere: the paranoid’s world view is taken to be normal, and to reflect the world as it actually is. But isn’t Adorno and Horkheimer’s account also an explicit description of Blake’s behaviour throughout The Unlimited Dream Company? Thus:

+ There is a confusion between the inner and outer worlds

+ Hearing other voices instead of the voice of the conscience.

If we consider Blake to be a fascistic personality, then we can also see the defective nature of the transcendent future that he promises to the people of Shepperton. As Alistair Cormack has suggested, the sense of community in the book is a parody of the real thing; in fact, it seems to consist of not much more than Blake’s capricious declamations of his feelings for those whom he is transforming according to the dictates of his own imagination and then assimilating into himself. In this imitation of true community, everything moves in one direction, from the paranoid individual (as from the megalomanic Fuehrer) to the rest of the world. There is no “reflection in both directions”, to use Adorno and Horkheimer’s phrase. The one exception occurs after Blake is shot by Stark, when he “cures” the three small children of their mongolism, blindness, and lameness; one of the children responds by saying “Blake, thank you … Can I help you?” Reciprocity briefly makes its presence felt, only for the dream of transcendence to resume, culminating in Blake’s rhapsody about the union of the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate.

The world that Blake creates for himself out of Shepperton is indeed “closed and circular”. … He wants to close-off the town from the outside world. … He starts a process whereby the other humans are all de-differentiated from one another, and begins to assimilate their individuality to himself in both a physical and a spiritual sense. … And he cannot tolerate any manifestation of independence, to which he responds with childish anger, for example when the inhabitants that he has absorbed attempt to rise upwards towards the sun: “Desperate to escape from them …, I pretended to climb towards the sun, and then plunged into the empty shopping mall, ready to dash us all against the ornamental tiles, scatter the corpses of myself and these townspeople across the appliances and furniture suites”. What Blake really wants, to paraphrase his own words, is to “embrace them as he embraces himself”; this would indeed be a world that is closed in on itself – such an embrace crushes the other out of existence, just as Blake’s physical embrace had tried to crush the life out of the women he has met.

LEFT: Lord Horror appeals to the townspeople (illustration by Kris Guidio from Hardcore Horror #2).

The way in which Blake wants to take the very existence of Shepperton’s inhabitants into himself is rather reminiscent of another, more notorious, fantasy novel — Lord Horror, David Britton’s extreme, and deliberately offensive, satire against fascism and anti-Semitism (published in 1989 and the last novel to be successfully prosecuted under the U.K.’s Obscene Publications Act, albeit overturned on appeal). Lord Horror’s hatred of the other in the form of ‘the Jew’ culminates with his devouring, all too literally, a Polish Jew in Manhattan, and Horror ruminates that by this method, “his body could simultaneously be home and grave [for the Jews] … perhaps he could rejuvenate himself endlessly and free himself from death.” A home and a grave — this is exactly what Blake offers the population of Shepperton. But in Lord Horror, David Britton gets it right. Horror takes to his bed and expires; by attempting to negate and control the other by assimilation into himself, Horror only succeeds in bringing about his own demise. The absorption of everything into oneself is a journey not to transcendence but to the void; as Adorno and Horkheimer suggest, the perpetrator “overflows and fades away at one and the same time”.

In fact, the transcendence that Blake offers up in The Unlimited Dream Company is as empty as that suggested by Adorno and Horkheimer or as portrayed in Lord Horror … all we are left with are vague phrases and the promise of the ending of all differentiation and individualization, a process which can only result in the annihilation of everything: “the last marriage of the animate and inanimate, of the living and the dead”.

LEFT: Lord Horror embraces himself
(illustration by Kris Guidio from Hardcore Horror #4)

Note: This article has its origins in my sense of dissatisfaction when I first read “The Unlimited Dream Company”, some twenty years after it was originally published. Here was the first book of Ballard’s for which I could feel no real empathy. I could admire the novel stylistically and appreciate the message of the power of the imagination, but the only emotion I felt from reading it was a vague sense of frustration and irritation – yet I wasn’t really sure why. A subsequent re-reading started to enlighten me – I was “reading through” the lyrical and pastoral descriptions and seeing Blake’s true personality, which was megalomanic but at the same time rather ordinary (a description that might equally well be applied to Hitler). Interpreting Blake’s actions and desires in this light led me to the idea of a “fascistic reading” of the book. The impetus to finally put pen to paper (or rather fingers to keyboard) came when I heard Alistair Cormack give a talk in which he arrived at a similar conclusion, expressed by reading the “dark side” of William Blake against the more usual optimistic and utopic view taken of The Unlimited Dream Company. Mike Holliday, July 2007.

..:: WORKS CITED

+ Adorno, Theodor W. & Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso, 1944/1997 (quotes are from pp. 187-192 of the Verso edition).

+ Ballard, J.G. Introduction to the French edition of ‘Crash’, translation into English in Foundation #9, November 1975.
—————— The Unlimited Dream Company, Cape, 1979.

+ Blake, William. The Book of Urizen, 1794.

+ Bradbury, Malcolm. ‘Fly Away’, review in The New York Times, 9 December 1979,

+ Britton, David. Lord Horror, Savoy, 1990 (though actually published in 1989)
———— Hardcore Horror #2, Savoy, 1990 (comic book).
———– Hardcore Horror #4, Savoy, 1990 (comic book).

+ Cormack, Alistair. ‘The Unlimited Dream Company: Blake and Ballard’, a talk given at the International Conference on J. G. Ballard, University of East Anglia, 6 May 2007.

+ Gasiorek, Andrzej. J.G. Ballard, Manchester University Press, 2005.

+ Stephenson, Gregory. Out of the Night and Into the Dream, Greenwood Press, 1991.

..:: MORE BALLARDIANA FROM MIKE HOLLIDAY

+ Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard
+ J.G. Ballard: A Collector’s Guide
+ ‘You And Me And The Continuum’: Doorman To The Atrocity Exhibition
+ The Atrocity Exhibition Discussions

Something is stirring over at our favourite shopping mall. After lying fallow for almost two months, the official blog of the Metro-Centre shopping centre in Brooklands stirs to life with a rather ominous poster campaign starring the failed talk-show host, David Cruise.

First, we were promised that ‘the wait is almost over’. And now, with a second poster reinventing Cruise as a Godardian neo-noir anti-hero, we are promised that ‘it will begin’…in five days’ time.

Will jaded shoppers respond?

Ballard vs The Blogosphere

Ballard was recently interviewed by the Guardian in a series on writers’ rooms. In this feature he said, ‘The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand and then I type them up on my old electric [typewriter]. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don’t think a great book has yet been written on computer.’

Predictably, a phalanx of bloggers leapt on this detail, including:

+ David Rothman at TeleRead:

So it harms literature when you can more easily shuffle around sentences and paragraphs and chapters? I can recall writing pre-computer, and it was not nearly as much fun or efficient. How many other TeleBloggers remember composing on paper in single-space, then snipping and pasting the results together? Of course, the classic defier of Luddites was Mark Twain, who used a then-newfangled device known as a typewriter. Meanwhile, horror of horrors, J.G.’s Crash, described by one reader as “about car-crash sexual fetishism,” is available as an e-book, and at least several other works are as well.”

+ Crayola Thief at Death on the Installment Plan:

JG Ballard … [makes] a rather idiotic assertion… The reason this makes me flinch is because it attributes the value of art to its tools. A writer captures the ideas pouring out of the brain. What difference does it make whether those ideas are recorded with computer, typewriter, fountain pen, dictation, quill, bloody finger, or chisel and clay tablet? If Ballard finds writing by pen the most effective for his craft, more power to him. But to suggest others must follow suit is a little too Stalinist for comfort. Might as well claim no good poetry can be written lefthanded.

I’ll wager that following the invention of the typewriter, a few squinty crustaceans grumbled that no great book could be written on one of those either.”

+ Paul at The Joy of Raki:

I read something by J.G. Ballard the other day, where he said that no truly great novel has so far been written on a computer. Bollocks. I bet someone said that a couple of years after the invention of the typewriter.”

+ Saleem, at The Neocrats:

The Guardian has … a running feature of “Writers’ Rooms”… Its effect is entirely other than intended: we see the absurd vanity and self-indulgence of novelists. Consider … J.G. Ballard, having detailed the ancient desk at which he writes long-hand, then transcribes an electric typewriter. “I distrust the whole PC thing … I don’t think a great book has yet been written on computer.” And so, the usual refrain, that everything needs to be done differently. Especially the writing of books!”

In the comments box, Saleem’s readers relentlessly kick the corpse, like nemoDreamer who says, ‘What a silly remark, Mr Ballard’.

Although reader Dorian Gray is more even:

Even though I love my PowerBook I empathise with this nostalgia for simpler times. I’d think twice before making a one-way journey to 1965 (by the way, I hope we’ve all seen Wong Kar Wai’s 2046), but why should I not take what was beautiful from that era and combine it with the more moral society we live in today? … A certain kind of artist has always been concerned with the process. It may be a little self-indulgent, but it’s not illegal, immoral or fattening so we should probably indulge them too.”

However, he then goes on to make this baffling statement: ‘By the way, I find Ballard’s room to be an oppressive horror that reeks of Colonialism, but I won’t begrudge him his typewriter.’

Interesting. Where is the oppressive horror in this? It’s a little messy, perhaps, but still.

+ Meanwhile, Matt Merritt at Polyolbion was in two minds:

I was interested to read JG Ballard’s comments … especially his assertion that no great novel has yet been written on a PC. It struck me that I’ve absolutely no idea whether he’s right, simply because I’ve no idea how most writers write. Was he being a bit of a grumpy old man (why should a PC be considered less ‘authentic’ than a typewriter), or was he making a point about the particular way a computer allows you to write? I know a lot of writers, even if they have no qualms about computers generally, like to get their first drafts down on paper by hand, maybe because it makes you think that little bit harder about every word if there’s not the option to delete and rewrite straight away.”

+ While sixteenbynine at Qwerty Dept. sounded a rare note of sympathy (like his novels, Ballard’s latter-day public utterances are treadmilled; he’s made the exact same typewriter claim before, and sixteenbynine is responding to a pre-Writers’ Rooms instance):

J.G. Ballard … threw down [the argument] that no good novel was ever written with a word processor (his drafts are done entirely in longhand). I don’t personally agree with taking it to that extent, but I can understand where all of this comes from. One of the things the word processor enables (along with the Internet, and blogs, and all the rest of it) is uninhibitedly bad writing. Anyone can write anything and publish it in a way that can now be theoretically read by the whole of the world. I saw countless examples of this not just when the web was in its infancy, but even before that — on BBSes, on CompuServe, and on USENET (where a tremendous amount of horrifically bad writing continues to proliferate). This is not simply because there is no professional editorial oversight, but because there is no personal editorial oversight.”

I have a little sympathy with the negative view — it’s a provocative statement, guaranteed to raise the hackles of anyone born with a mouse in their hand. Still, I don’t think we should take everything he says entirely seriously; perhaps this particular backlash is a consequence of the image that’s been thrust on Ballard, that he’s some kind of sage or techno-prophet. Could it be that this statement of his is merely the generation-specific opinion of someone born in 1930? Or perhaps he’s being deliberately reactionary, the literary equivalent of the old Surrealist provocation: firing a gun into the crowd.

——————————————————————————————————

Ballard vs the Guardian’s Readership

Now let’s move on to the backlash surrounding Ballard’s recent piece on Dali and film [thanks to Tim C for directing my attention to all of this]. In response to Ballard’s eulogy, Guardian readers were up in arms.

First up, Michel Faber of Ross-shire wrote in to say:

Ballard’s conception of Dalí as an ultra-modern dude energetically engaged with the zeitgeist (in contrast to old fuddy-duddy Pablo) is a little surreal. Apart from anything else, Dalí painted in the style of Velázquez and Vermeer, 17th-century artists he venerated far above the modernists, whose efforts he disdained. Equally peculiar is Ballard’s assertion that Picasso “seems to have seen nothing of the world on the far side of the windscreen” of a chauffeur-driven car. The phrase “self-enclosed mind” could have been invented for Dalí.”

Alan Burns, via email, was short but sharp:

JG Ballard has Picasso being uninterested in the world while being driven around Cannes, but over the border in Spain was a town called Guernica.”

While Ben Murray of Brighton challenged Ballard’s accuracy:

JG Ballard’s article on Dalí’s early cinematic work grossly overstates his role in the production of both Un Chien Andalou and L’Âge d’Or, giving the impression that they were his creations. In fact, the films were more fully the work of Luis Buñuel, who directed, edited and co-scripted them. The eye-slashing sequence was not “probably thought up” by Dalí, but based on a dream of Buñuel’s. A rift developed between the pair before the completion of L’Âge d’Or, and it is acknowledged that the film is almost solely the work of the man who went on to become one of the greatest film-makers of the 20th century.”

But that wasn’t all. A week later, Eduardo de Benito of Cley next the Sea, Norfolk had this to say:

Who is JG Ballard trying to kid by offering an image of Dalí as some kind of revolutionary seer who “fully grasped the deranged unconscious forces that propelled Hitler and Stalin into the daylight”? As most people know, the only things that Dalí ever managed to grasp were wads of greenbacks. He spent the last decades of his life sucking up to the wealthy Catalan bourgeoisie and kowtowing to general Franco, a not insignificant chum of one of the two tyrants whose “deranged unconscious forces” he had allegedly grasped in the 1930s. And indeed, Franco – notorious for, among many other things, his crap taste in art – bestowed no end of honours on the “revolutionary seer”.”

Pretty strong meat.

But let’s leave the last word to David Pringle, over at the JGB Yahoo Group:

See, they’re still at it! Criticizing Dali for being Avida Dollars. Why don’t they condemn Warhol or Damien Hirst on the same grounds? (They were/are worse.) Or even Francis Bacon — who, as I understand it, ended life a very rich man?

“He spent the last decades of his life sucking up to the wealthy Catalan bourgeoisie and kowtowing to general Franco…”

Ah, I think that’s the real explanation for the spleen still vented at Dali. They disapprove of him on political grounds — and for being what he was, a Catalan bourgeois. It’s not a judgment on his art, nor even, really, on his money-making propensities (the latter is just a blind — wealth is OK if it’s enjoyed by people who make the right political noises).”

Those were my thoughts, too — Ballard was commenting on Dali’s art, not his politics. So what’s the problem? In reference to the Bunuel/Dali films, Bunuel’s role is fully stated.
Ballard clearly does not imply that they were solely ‘Dali’s creations’, except to say that he ‘probably’ thought up the eye-slashing scene. ‘Probably’ is not a synonym for ‘definitely’.

As for the Picasso riposte, well, it’s apples and oranges really, isn’t it? Pick a side.

Now, what’s really interesting about this backlash is that it’s not really aimed at Ballard. Dali is the real target of reader scorn. And within the white heat of that scorn something very complex appears to be churning, something rooted in centuries-old class struggles and political divisions. Something that people — of a certain age? a certain breeding? — just can’t seem to let go. However, Dali’s art and his influence, as strong today as ever, remain, and I’m pretty sure — unless I’ve missed some steaming great elephant in the room — that was the focus of Ballard’s piece. There’s simply no pleasing some people.

Let’s end it there, but not before this classic Orwell quote: “One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being.”

——————————————————————————————————
So, there you have it: two very public backlashes against the Seer of Shepperton. This, in England at least, probably all started with the negative notices Ballard received for Kingdom Come — for the first time in his later career, Ballard appears to be really up against it.

In Australia, we call this the Tall Poppy Syndrome.

Some of the following news is a little old; forgive me. I’m catching up on the last few weeks, after all. If there’s anything I’ve missed, please contact me.

UPDATE: passport located; and me, homeward-bound.

——————————————————————————————
+ BUT ISN’T IT JUST A NOVEL ABOUT WANKING?

Inspired by Alistair Cormack’s talk, ‘The Unlimited Dream Company: Blake and Ballard’, at the JGB conference, Mike Holliday has onlined ‘A Home and A Grave’, explaining how to read UDC, one of Ballard’s most ignored works, as a fascistic novel. Along the way, Mike offers up an intriguing match, suggesting that the ‘way in which [UDC's narrator] Blake wants to take the very existence of Shepperton’s inhabitants into himself is rather reminiscent of another, more notorious, fantasy novel – Lord Horror’:

…the transcendence that Blake offers up in The Unlimited Dream Company is as empty as that suggested by Adorno and Horkheimer or as portrayed in Lord Horror … all we are left with are vague phrases and the promise of the ending of all differentiation and individualization, a process which can only result in the annihilation of everything: “the last marriage of the animate and inanimate, of the living and the dead”.

Now, who among us will dare to rehabilitate The Day of Creation or Rushing to Paradise? (actually, I’m working on the latter).

——————————————————————————————
+ ULTRA-MAN

Speaking of the conference, k-punk posted a riposte to the perceived ‘feel-good’ vibe of that event. He found it ‘dispiriting’, apparently because of its focus on Ballard’s ‘exhausted novels’ and a desire to celebrate JGB’s work. k-punk suggests that the latter is especially pointless, given that he sees Ballard as already ‘ultra-canonic’ for ‘any group that matters’ (although virtually every entry in the list of cultural nodes he provides as evidence features k-p at the centre or orbiting near by).

——————————————————————————————
+ HEAD TO THE SOUTH

Still from Silent Running.

Dan Lockton Dan Hill has done it again with another superb post, this time meditating on James Birrell’s ‘Brutalist-lite’ architecture at the University of Queensland campus and the ‘rampant sub-tropical foliage engulfing it’. Mouth watering — he ties in one of my very favourite SF films, Silent Running, as well as The Drowned World before motoring on to the crux of his argument:

Australia seems poised at this junction right now, beginning to explore new and old ways of dealing with its water supply, from divining, to not-building dams – “a 20th-century response to 21st-century problems” – to finally recycling.
…
How to reconcile urban development with climate change? How to build a sub-tropical architecture that adapts to the environment? How to use dangerous environmental conditions to the benefit of a nation, a culture, a people?
…
Like Ballard’s hero, head to the south, into the sun, to find the future. It’s counter-intuitive, but it might just work

(For my own musings on a Ballard-refracted vision of Australia, see ‘The Drought: Water Vigliantes’ and ‘The Rats that Ate Mill Park’).

——————————————————————————————
+ BLDGBOOK

Another fine archi blog, the one and only BLDGBLOG, announces a publishing deal for a ‘book of the blog’ that will include two subjects very dear to my heart: Ballard and micronations. Congratulations, Geoff.

——————————————————————————————
+ CHUCK SOUNDS OFF

Chuck Palahniuk disses Ballard in a recent interview:

MT: Were you inspired by J.G. Ballard?

Palahniuk: The Crash book, you mean? Not really. I mean, God bless J.G. Ballard, but that whole ponderous eroticism of car crashes? You know, the idea of putting a hood ornament in Elizabeth Taylor’s pussy and all of that, I thought that was just too much.

[ thanks, Tim ]

Dunno about you, but to me, Palahniuk’s blatant misreading of Ballard’s intentions (violating Liz; there’s nothing of the sort in Crash, not even remotely) seems nothing more than a rebellious kid telling lies about Dad, when deep down the kid knows Dad has influenced him more than anyone will — or can — ever know. The other thing to note is that Palahniuk wrote a short story, ‘Guts’, in which the narrator has his colon sucked out of his anus by a pool pump — all described in clinical detail. Many people found *that* too much.

——————————————————————————————
+ SECHERESSE

The French edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, looking more like an early Kraftwerk album cover.

Herve Lagoguey has put together a comprehensive gallery of French Ballard cover art. We await the two Ricks verdict on these.

(For more JGB cover art, see Ballardian’s interview with Rick McGrath and our reprint of Rick Poynor’s ‘Collapsing Bulkheads’ article.)

——————————————————————————————
+ GRAVEST HITS

From the latest RE/Search newsletter:

Dominika Oramus sent us her disturbing, intelligent book: Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard, published by Univesity of Warsaw. For a copy write DORAMUS ul OSTROBRAMSKA, 84 m 129, 04-163 Warssawa, Poland. (I’m not sure how to send payment, or what the total cost is.)

——————————————————————————————
+ AND NOW, A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR…

Still from Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou.

Finally, let’s hear from the man himself, this time in Ballard’s ‘review’ of the Dali & Film exhibition at the Tate Modern (although there are no new revelations, Ballard instead relying on familiar riffs; k-punk’s ‘exhausted texts’ assessment is useful here):

[In Un Chien Andalou] there are no clues to behaviour. Ants pour from a hole in the young man’s palm. Rebuffed, he puts on a curious harness and drags towards the young woman a huge contraption consisting of two priests lying on their backs, tied to a grand piano across which is draped a dead donkey. What comes through this 15-minute film is the feeling that it would all make sense if its scenes were assembled in the right order. But of course it would not make sense, whatever the order, and I take this to be the point of the film. The reality we inhabit daily, our domestic interiors and their emotional dramas, the hands helplessly caressing a young woman’s breasts, the tennis racket she uses to drive away her unwanted suitor (the surrealists were intensely middle class), the small section of space-time we blunder through, are all equally unreal, though meaning and sanity seem tantalisingly within our grasp.

——————————————————————————————
J.G. Ballard. ‘Shock and gore’, The Guardian, Saturday May 26, 2007.
——————————————————————————————

Suburban Badlands: the Mill Park aftermath. Photo: Angela Wylie (from the Age newspaper).

The system is self-regulating. It relies on our sense of civic responsibility. Without that, society would collapse. In fact, the collapse may even have begun.”

——————————————————————–
J.G. Ballard. Millennium People (2003; p. 104).
——————————————————————–

On the morning of 2 January 2007, Melbourne woke to disturbing news. Under cover of night, a street in the northern suburb of Mill Park had been gripped by vigilante attacks. Cars had been torched and threats spray-painted onto vehicles and walls: ‘No more burnouts’; ‘You’re next’; ‘Tell your mates I know where they live’; ‘Any more and you will pay’; ‘We have had enough of this shit’. A series of news photos laid bare the currency of autogeddon, snapshots of vehicular expulsions littered about this quiet suburban enclave like the sigils of an initiatory consumerism. In the aftermath, residents told reporters of a long-standing hoon problem (‘hoon’ being Aussie for ‘hooligan’, with an automotive twist), with young petrol heads using the street for late-night drags and the obligatory, ultra-offensive round of tyre-squealing burn outs. Clearly, the burnings and graffito were the work of local vigilantes, fed up with their street being desecrated by these so-called hoons.

Autogeddon: Mill Park’s scorched-road policy. Photo: Angela Wylie (from the Age newspaper).

This was chilling stuff — apocalyptic reportage that bled car-crash fiction into reality. Flung headfirst into the uncanny valley, I was struck by the similarities with The Cars that Ate Paris (1974), the Peter Weir film set in the fictional Australian country town of Paris — it’s a Ballardian film of the first order. In this Parisian/Ballardian community, the locals manufacture road accidents, luring travellers to their death, or — if they survive — to a date with the town doctor, who performs medical experiments that turn accident victims into ‘veggies’: brain-damaged reflex mechanisms no longer capable of independent thought, only a group (re)action. Meanwhile, the crashed cars are scavenged for parts: old ladies polish carburettors as if they were prize jewels; the village idiot wears radiator emblems around his neck; and the mayor steals the best stereo systems for himself. In the background, the youth — Parisian hoons — rev their hotted-up cars in all-in drags, performing burnouts and generally disturbing the peace; this behaviour is tolerated by Parisians, with the hoons perceived as a kind of byproduct of the town’s peculiar economy.

However, when the hoons overstep the line by destroying the mayor’s property during a late-night drag, he orders the cars of the two gang leaders to be burned in a public display of humiliation, assisted by a vigilante squad caught up in forces its members don’t fully understand (they provide the support for the mayor’s reign, oiling the mechanism that powers the town’s closed-loop economy in support of vague rhetoric and empty civic pride).

‘You can’t burn a bloke’s fucken car!’. Still from The Cars that Ate Paris (1974; dir. Peter Weir).

That’s it — that’s the moment.

As we watch the burnt-out shells of cars smouldering in Paris’s main street, their drivers shackled and stripped of their metal skin, we feel the warning signals rippling out through the ocean of deep time, 33 years later, homing in on the events of Mill Park. The Cars that Ate Paris ends in civil war as the hoons take revenge, coming back bigger and badder than ever with lethal, spike-encrusted vehicles, destroying the town hall and other cornerstones of Parisian society in an orgy of tyre smoke and gear-crashing destruction.

After Mill Park, would Melbourne’s suburban badlands erupt in a similar fashion?

The catchment area of Heathrow extends for at least ten miles to its south and west, a zone of motorway intersections, dual carriageways, science parks, marinas and industrial estates, watched by police CCTV speed-check cameras… I welcome the transience, alienation and discontinuities, and its unashamed response to the pressures of speed, disposability and the instant impulse.”

—————————————————————————————-
J.G. Ballard. ‘The Ultimate Departure Lounge’ (1997).
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An ‘unashamed response to the pressures of speed, disposability and the instant impulse’ — here, Ballard could be describing the events of Mill Park, a similar catchment area dominated by the vectors of speed (the suburb is bifurcated by Plenty Rd, an enormous dual carriageway) and ‘the instant impulse’. According to Wikipedia, ‘Mill Park is not short of fast food restaurants, with McDonalds, Hungry Jacks, KFC and Pizza Hut all within proximity of one another’. That’s a strange aspect to highlight, but one that the author obviously felt was significant enough to include.

Noble Park Maccas, the scars of autogeddon clearly visible in the foreground (photo: Simon Sellars).

As I was attempting to digest the significance of the Mill Park attacks — as hard to swallow and keep down as a Big Mac — another outlying region, Noble Park, erupted in violence. One Friday night, in the shadow of the Noble Park McDonalds (or Maccas), the meeting point for what is by all accounts Melbourne’s biggest illegal drag meet, the newspapers told us that 1500 spectators lined the Princes Highway (’some with babies in prams’), watching rice rockets and muscle cars put the pedal to the metal for a few hundred metres, culminating in smoking orgiastic burnouts for the crowds:

Friday’s crowd was incensed at a police cordon and the use of anti-hoon laws to confiscate cars, and rampaged through a business at the intersection, looting and trashing. The McDonald’s restaurant, which has no official link to the drag racing but which is viewed by those attending as its spiritual home, was not trashed.”

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Michelle Coleman. ‘Hot cars, hot tempers: trouble flares at hoon HQ‘ (2007).
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When the police — just 50 of them, severely undermanned and disorganised — arrived and attempted to break up this scene, they found they were no match for the huge crowd, which, recognising its superior numbers, went in hard, driving the cops back…and then some. Presumably hopped up on a fuel-injected perfume of burning rubber, hoons and spectators alike went on the rampage, destroying the nearby Blockbuster video store and attacking traffic signals. Remarkably, the Noble Park Maccas was saved from harm, watching over the protagonists like a benevolent dictator (a worrying detail that could just about supply the basis for an entire separate essay).

‘No money, no grudging; pure fun’ — ‘car enthusiast’ Matt gives it some. Photo: Angela Wylie (from the Age newspaper).

Everyone knows Noble means Noble Park Maccas,” says Matt, 28, who has been attending illegal street drag racing at the corner of the Princes Highway and Elonera Road, Noble Park, for six years.

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Coleman. ‘Hot cars, hot tempers: trouble flares at hoon HQ‘ (2007).
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Just as The Cars that Ate Paris predicted, the hoons did return after Mill Park — bigger and badder than ever, trashing suburbia, overwhelming the cops and utterly destroying civic sensibilities, fuelled on by media coverage and trapped in a feedback loop of violent one-upmanship — an ‘autopian’, consumptive, synchronous economy. Like the Metro-Centre in Ballard’s Kingdom Come, the suburb of Noble Park was turned into a temporary autonomous zone, where mob rules and the game of ‘hypertrangsression’ ensures chaotic perpetual motion.

Benjamin Noys summarises the process:

Ballard’s recent work…puts into play the necessity for an apocalyptic or catastrophic violence to exceed the regulated violence of contemporary culture…to literally blow apart the limits of the existing order. Again the only way to exceed licensed transgression is through an out-bidding by another hypertransgression. This process recalls Baudrillard’s analysis of potlatch, the gift exchange of so-called ‘primitive’ societies, as a process of ‘continual higher bidding in exchange’… It also conforms to Baudrillard’s description of the terrorist act as ‘at the same time a model of simulation, a micro-model flashing with a minimally real event and a maximal echo chamber’… It belongs to the order of simulation, as it will be spectacular and an object of media interest…”

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Benjamin Noys. ‘Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard‘ (2006).
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Maximally echoing unto infinity, mobile-phone footage of the riot was uploaded to YouTube, sparking a fresh orgy of outrage in the mediascape. More vigilante attacks were threatened. Police threatened to impound the cars of all known hoons. The Noble Park perpetrators were promised they would be hunted down. TV current-affairs programs licked at the aftermath like a rabid dog. And dob-in-a-hoon telephone hotlines were set up, building on the post-9/11 hysteria that Australia has capitulated to so completely, a continuation of a process we succumbed to a long time ago.

It’s a process that maintains a disturbing convergence with car culture. According to Catherine Simpson, Australia has ‘a cultural fascination with road tolls; they are often detailed on the nightly news, as if they somehow signify how “we” are doing against the “enemy”…the rhetoric of warfare was often employed to curb rising road toll statistics. In 1946, the Australian Automobile Association declared…that traffic accidents: “constitute an enemy which takes almost as great a toll of Australia’s already sparse population as did the enemy nations in the second world war”.’

This notion of a faceless enemy, drilled into the collective psyche through popular culture, helps to explain why Australia has been so thoroughly aligned with US foreign policy and the War on Terror — this country is the perfect petri dish for injecting paranoia about the ‘faceless, unknown threat’ of terrorism. But today, as Bush and his war rapidly loses support, it’s becoming clear that Australian Prime Minister John Howard can’t back down for fear of admitting the last five years of unblinking US-aligned foreign policy were built on less-than-transparent foundations. So the machinery of anti-terrorism must continue to churn, as Howard insists on maintaining Australian troops in Iraq; meanwhile, back home, we have miserably failed to find suicide bombers under every bed.

And so we have the ludicrous image of ‘elite terrorism police’ stationed at Melbourne airport: unable to find actual examples of the menace we’ve been so primed to receive, they impotently issue parking tickets instead. As the narrator of Ballard’s Crash observes, while stuck in the frustration of a traffic jam going nowhere fast, ‘The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause’ (p. 151).

Beware the water cops (photo: Sandy Scheltema; from the Age newspaper).

But wait, there’s more: as Australia continues to be beset by drought, terrorist culture gives rise to water vigilantes, with citizens afraid of sneak attacks by members of their community for visibly watering their lawns. And all of it leads to the latest example: these dob-in-a-hoon hotlines, encouraging us to pick up the phone and anonymously ‘dob’ in young offenders in a kind of state-sanctioned vigilantism (‘dobbing’ is a very Australian term for turning someone in, lagging, grassing, ratting, informing).

I keep returning to Ballard’s ‘immense, motionless pause’ — as good a way as any to describe the bureaucratic Moebius strip that is the ‘Mill Park solution’. Mill Park’s local council has known about the hoon problem for some time: as the newspaper reports made clear, residents had been complaining long and hard — for the last 10 years, in fact. You’d think the obvious solution would be to install speed humps (‘road cushions’) — simple, effective, and safe. But that’s not the Australian way. When residents of a hoon-plagued street in another suburb, Dandenong South, dug up the road and installed their own speed humps, the council removed them within a day, without replacing them with road cushions of their own (and fining the residents to boot!) leaving the problem to fester still.

(Man, it’s hot in here…)

For 10 years Mill Park residents also tried to go through the correct channels, petitioning the council for ‘traffic calming’ measures including the fabled speed humps (‘traffic calming’ has been defined as the goal ‘of reducing vehicle speeds, improving safety, and enhancing quality of life’). The council responded with one of the most ludicrous civic pacification schemes in memory. As the minutes for June 2006 outline, this involved a multi-stage ‘Traffic Safety Education Program’, consisting firstly of a ‘mail-out to local residents advising of community concerns regarding excessive traffic speeds and inappropriate driver behaviour in their street, [reminding] them of their responsibility to drive safely and within the speed limit.’

A mail-out — that’ll teach ‘em.

(We’re at boiling point, now).

To enforce the suburban 50km/h speed limit, the second stage involved ‘the placement of THINK 50 50km/h bin stickers on rubbish bins.’

Stickers on bins — those hoons won’t know what hit ‘em.

(Too late: it’s all over. Mill Park bursts into flames).

The hoons return, bigger and badder than ever before. Still from The Cars that Ate Paris (dir. Peter Weir, 1974).

Faced with this sequence of events, you have to wonder if Mill Park is being used as some kind of exurban laboratory. Perhaps you could even identify the stages in the chemical process: sell cars as indestructible and sexy (how many recent car ads show vehicles morphing into Transformer-style robots? It’s a whole new genre in advertising); transform a suburb from isolated enclave to chaotic catchment area via inadequate traffic management, so that it becomes overrun by drivers and their indestructible attitudes (according to the council minutes, the streets off Plenty Rd have been increasingly used as ‘rat runs’ by motorists wanting to escape the traffic lights and interminable traffic jams of that monstrous thoroughfare); ignore residents’ complaints when the rats overrun it, or soft-soap them with Band-Aid solutions; sit back and watch the fireworks finally explode; move in with ’solutions’ that promote divisiveness, mistrust and a ’soft fascism’ perhaps best articulated by Ballard in Kingdom Come:

‘No slogans, no messages. New politics. No manifestos, no commitments. No easy answers. They decide what they want. Your job is to set the stage and create the climate. You steer them by sensing their mood. Think of a herd of wildebeest on the African plain. They decide where they want to go.’

Cruise chuckled… ‘How do I control them, impose some kind of focus? The whole thing could start to go mad.’

‘Mad? Good. Madness is the key to everything. Small doses, applied when no one is really looking’.”

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J.G. Ballard. Kingdom Come (2006; p. 146).
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Just like Paris, just like the satellite suburbs in Kingdom Come, Mill Park is a self-regulating system: auto-violence fuels the economy; the economy is auto-violence. Inescapably, through blatant inaction and a covert escalation of hostilities, the Mill Park councillors lit up the cars in Mill Park just as surely as the mayor of Paris did in Peter Weir’s parallel film world (where the mayor didn’t actually light the torch, but remained a malevolent presence in the background, pulling the strings).

To what end we can only speculate, but drip-feeding an approved ‘terrorist culture’ into local politics in response to the anarchic ‘horror’ of vigilantism seems to be an end result. By dobbing in a hoon, we have one more compelling reason to mistrust each other, to see ‘how we are doing against the enemy’ — safely, anonymously, and with the cloak of government sanctions to protect us.

There’s one final, Bizarro-world parallel: the image of the dobber picking up the phone to inform on the evil hoon (who, of course, is a product of the system). It’s a mirror of Paris’s mayor, in the film’s denouement, encouraging the previously ineffectual protagonist, Arthur (crippled by road trauma early on, but intoxicated by the thrill of violence in the end), to kill the leader of the hoons, who no longer serves a purpose save as a very public sacrifice.

As the Melbourne-based Fossil blog notes:

The Howard Government’s national security hotline (DOB IN A TERRORIST, 1800 123 400) received 42,000 calls in its first two years, between December 2002 and December 2004. Clearly there are a lot more dobbers than terrorists. In 2005-06, following the “support the system that supports you’’ campaign, Centrelink [the national organisation responsible for social-security payments] received nearly 120,000 calls to its dob-in-a-dole bludger line, alleging overpayments. About 2 per cent were genuine ['dole bludger' is Aussie slang for someone cheating the welfare system].

This is by no means an exhaustive list but if you wanted to you could reach for the phone right now and dob in: a hoon; a drug dealer; a drug cheat (sport); a water cheat; a “dodgy seafood retailer’’ – yes really; a litterer; a rubbish dumper; a wife-beater; an illegal immigrant; a “scammer’’; a dodgy cab; a dodgy taxpayer; a burglar; a backyard mechanic; a cockfighter; a dogfighter; and a software pirate, RRrrrrrrrrrr.

That’s a lot of dobbin’.”

Indeed it is.

Up against that critical social function, traffic calming — ‘enhancing the quality of life’, in other words — just doesn’t cut it in this day and age.

Simon Sellars.

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..:: REFERENCES
Ballard, J.G. (1973) Crash.
————- (1997) ‘The Ultimate Departure Lounge’.
————- (2003) Millennium People.
————- (2006) Kingdom Come.

City of Whittlesea (2006) ‘Ordinary Council Minutes’, June.

Coleman, Michelle (2007) ‘Hot cars, hot tempers: trouble flares at hoon HQ’. The Age, January 16.

Crawford, Carly (2007) ‘Dob-in-a-hoon hotline’. Herald-Sun, January 7.

Crawford, Carly and Cameron, Kellie (2007) ‘Mobs go on wild rampage’. Herald-Sun, January 14.

Elder, John (2007) ‘Vigilantes emerge in times of fear’. The Age, January 21.

Fossil blog (2007) ‘Are you a dobber?’. Fossil, March 14.

Inguanzo, Shaun (2007) ‘New humps for hoons’. Star News Group, 28 February.

Noys, Benjamin (2006). ‘Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard’. Ícone 9: 29-38.

Oakes, Dan (2007) ‘Car burns as hoon street anger bubbles over’. The Age, January 3.

Russell, Mark (2007). ‘Elite cops hand out parking tickets’. The Age, January 14.

Simpson, Catherine (2006) ‘Antipodean Automobility and Crash: Treachery, Trespass and Transformation of the Open Road’. Australian Humanities Review, Issue 39 – 40.

Weekes, Peter. ‘Sign of the Times — Water Vigilantes’. The Age, January 14.

Dig deep. Re-acquainting myself with these quotes, it’s interesting to note that Kingdom Come’s theme — ’soft fascism’ transmitted via the virus of consumerism — was well on the way to incubation:

Eden-Olympia’s great defect is that there’s no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems. … Places like Eden-Olympia are fertile ground for any Messiah with a grudge. The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.”

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J.G. Ballard. Super-Cannes (2000).
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What a shame it is, then, that this vision — so lauded back then — has palled in the media’s eye, if the reviews of KC are anything to go by.

Meanwhile, out there in the badlands, ‘affluenza’ attacks healthy hosts and remains unchecked, while the antidote is neutered, shuttered up and driven to the perimeter by barbarians.