APOLLO ROULETTE, PART 2

by Brian Baker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poster for Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the photographic series Astronaut Suicides by Neil Dacosta.

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

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

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

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

APOLLO ROULETTE, PART 1

by Brian Baker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: ‘Las Vegas Club’ by Troy Paiva.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Bluffield.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

Zero.

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

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

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

‘Zero pays the house, Wayne.’ (215-6)

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

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

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

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

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

by Simon Sellars

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

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

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

ROGER CORMAN: THE ‘X EFFECT’

Still from X.

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

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

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

Still from X.

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

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

Still from X.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN CARPENTER: THE ‘X Continuum’

Still from They Live.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Panels from ‘Nada’.

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

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

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

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

Still from They Live.

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

Still from They Live.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘HOW TO RECONSTITUTE YOURSELF’

LEFT: The preacher from X.

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

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

LEFT: The preacher from They Live.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image found on the internet. Creator unknown.

Notes

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

References

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

Films

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

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.

Martin Pichlmair has written an interesting article for Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, ‘Grand Theft Auto IV considered as an Atrocity Exhibition’, that draws parallels between the controversial GTA and Ballard’s most experimental work:

This review outlines the intersections between Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar North, 2008) and the British novelist J.G. Ballard’s experimental text “The Atrocity Exhibition”. Obvious parallels like the dominant roles of cars and carnage are supplemented by more subtle similarities. Grand Theft Auto is an “Atrocity Exhibition”, a deliberately instigated scandal, and a cynical masterpiece.
…
J.G. Ballard is convinced that science fiction authors should pursue the exploration of inner landscapes rather than be writing about adventures in outer space. Not unlike Grand Theft Auto, he seeks to articulate the pathology that underlies consumer society… Most of his novels exhibit civilisation in a state of disintegration, dystopian landscapes and protagonists unable to shake off their past. The hostile landscape acts as an expression of the personal struggle of the hero, its inhabitants gradually regressing into savages. The protagonist is the only constant, stubbornly sticking to his foredoomed path while elegantly sidestepping all dangers. Grand Theft Auto also tells the story of a man who keeps his path in a world bare of illusions.

Without wishing to distract from Martin’s eloquent argument, I wonder why Crash wasn’t considered alongside Atrocity (to which it can be considered a sequel) and Ballard’s 1968 exhibition of crashed cars, which Martin does refer to. Indeed, Atrocity blueprints the later novel in its chapter entitled ‘Crash!’, which, as Ballard explains, ‘was written a year before my exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory, and in effect is the gene from which my novel Crash was to spring’. Elsewhere, Atrocity records the first, enigmatic appearance of Vaughan, Crash’s ‘nightmare angel of the expressways’. In effect, Crash amplifies the tensions Martin rightly identifies as underpinning the Atrocity dynamic, such as ‘the psychotic principal character … who regards all other people as inhabitants of his mental landscape’.

Interestingly, the connection between the hyper-aestheticised violence of Crash and the elegant carnage of autogeddon-style computer games is something Matt Bittanti drew upon in his experiments with gamics, ‘the combination of comics and videogames’:

I love the idea of gamics, but I’m not really interested in storytelling, so for my first experiments, I decided to cut-and-paste various popular artifacts. “F.E.A.R. I.K.E.A.” combines the fetish for IKEA’s catalog with Monolith’s awesome FPS. “CRASH” is what happens when you play too much Burnout while reading JG Ballard’s stories; “WAR/GAMES” is about the ideology of games, while “SIM-BAUDRILLARD” is about… well, you get the drift, right?

ABOVE: Matteo Bittanti’s Crash, part 2.

BALLARDOSCOPE: SOME ATTEMPTS AT APPROACHING THE WRITER AS A VISIONARY

by Jordi Costa

The exhibition JG Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium, celebrating the work and enduring influence of J.G. Ballard, opens tomorrow at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

Please enjoy the CCCB’s wonderful promotional film for the exhibition, a Lynchian, impressionistic cut up with main ingredients: Marilyn Monroe’s ghost, Ballard’s mellifluous tones, snatched Aphex Twin, what looks like James Dean’s car and a severe case of the night terrors.

And below is the prologue to the exhibition catalogue, a deep tribute to JGB composed by Josep Ramoneda, Director of the CCCB.