ABOVE: Richard Gere as Blake: more vapourware…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOOKS

The Drought (1964)
According to JGB in 1976:

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

And 20 years later:

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

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

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

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

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

Crash (1973)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE…
Sam is back in the game!

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

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

SHORT STORIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ORIGINAL SCRIPTS

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

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)

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

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

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

While in Miracles of Life he really goes to town:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOVELIZATIONS

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

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

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

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

Let me just catch my breath for a bit…

Someone really, really should have made that happen.

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

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

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

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

We’re all suffocated by the consumer society and its entertainment culture, where everything is an image or imitation of something else. We’re so starved of the real, as we think of it, that we’ll happily watch CCTV footage of motorways, rain-swept precincts and corner shops.

J.G. Ballard, Literary Review, 2001.

White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice—it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)

“Up and then down: The lives of elevators” by Nick Paumgarten.

Is there anybody out there?

Tell me honestly, what would you do? Say you’ve installed SurveillanceSaver on your computer and you’re scanning the far reaches of inner space for signs of life. You stop, breathless, halted in your tracks by — at long last! — intimations of deviant activity. Because that’s what you’re really looking for, isn’t it? Low-level crime. Subterranean sexuality. State-sanctioned scopophilia. You’re not really interested in static civic squares and motionless, humanless hospital parking lots. For you know these are really blank slates, switching stations for ‘the new man’: enter one end, exit via any number of alternate universes.

After the umpteenth feed of pigs in pens, Eastern European building sites and spotty students looking at porn on university computers, you see this: a man nervously pacing around an elevator car, clearly trapped as the car is going nowhere. He opens the doors, sees only a brick wall. He sits back down. Sleeps. Wakes up. Panics. Screams soundlessly, for there is no soundtrack to inner space, in inner space no one can hear you scream, CCTV being as silent as the tomb. Of course, if you have trouble racking up your empathy a notch or two, you could always try playing some melancholy piano music in the background to enhance the humanity.

After a while, White decided to smoke a cigarette. It was conceivable to him that, owing to construction work in the lobby, the building staff had taken his car out of service and would leave it that way not only through the weekend but all through the week. That they could leave him here as long as they had suggested that anything was possible. He imagined them opening the doors, ten days later, and finding him dead on his back, like a cockroach. Within hours, he had smoked all his cigarettes.

“Up and then down: The lives of elevators” by Nick Paumgarten.

Would you applaud and cheer, like it’s some kind of panopticon performance art? Are you so desperate for reality that you would watch this man disintegrate without once trying to summon help? He’s fated to be trapped in that elevator for 41 hours: enough time for you to go out on the town and come back late at night to find out how’s he doing before you retire to bed. You wake up in the morning, log on, hoping to see if he’s resorted to masturbation to block out the pain of a featureless world closing in all around him.

Idea for a new reality-TV show: trap unassuming citizens in urban environments. An elevator, say, or an office-block toilet. A car wash. A factory. The garbage enclosure of a high-rise housing estate. A concrete island. Leave them there for the weekend. Beam the security-camera images to the world. Do they die? Play with themselves? Talk to God? Talk to you?

Record their emotional response. Rate it and vote on it.

The end.

I find “reality TV” absolutely fascinating. I think people are so desperate to find what they believe to be “reality”, that they will happily watch programs of CCTV footage filmed in underground car parks, rainy shopping malls and motorway junctions… in a sense, the drabber the better.

J.G. Ballard, BBC Online Chat, 2002.

..:: Previously on Ballardian…

+ Trompe l’oeil corridors
+ ‘What would Borges do?’
+ Gargle, don’t swallow
+ The Ballardian Primer: Surveillance Cameras
+ One Nation Under CCTV

According to Polygon Castle, there’s hope for the kids yet!

Since there’s never anything good on TV during the day, I switched it to the Cartoon Network, in the hopes that its programming would at least be tolerable (at least compared to the malodorous MadTV). But lo and behold, it was more than tolerable– the episode of “Squirrel Boy” (which, as a cartoon, I could grow to like, I think…) was a partial recreation of JG Ballard’s novel Concrete Island. Rodney the Squirrel gets stranded on a dividing island after a car crash, surviving there for over two weeks. Of course, it’s been ages since I read the novel, so I really only remember that bit. But still! I was amused.

Ah, that sounds truly transcendental. Here’s some more info on the episode, called “Islands in the Street”. You’re supposed to be able to watch the ep via the Cartoon Network, but I couldn’t get it to load.

The Concrete Island allusion may be accidental, but even if deliberate it wouldn’t be the first time children’s TV has wrestled with Ballard: in 1966 JGB actually wrote an episode, “Gulliver in Space”, for Jackanory, the venerable British kids’ show.

This fact was buried on IMDB, unknown and unreferenced by all scholars, fans and critics of Ballard for all this time — until 2007, when David Pringle stumbled across it. Mr Pringle was unable to believe it. But Rick McGrath took the initiative and wrote to Ballard, receiving this snippet of information from JGB in return:

Yes, I did write a script for the BBC TV’s children’s programme, Jackanory — I really wrote it for my children, who were keen viewers at the time.

Now I’m going to try and do my bit by hunting down the actual episode. But I don’t fancy my chances, given that the BBC may very well have, gulp, wiped it.

If anyone can help with unearthing footage of “Gulliver in Space”, even if it’s just providing some more concrete information as to its availability, please be in touch.

The house that Sam built … from Pam.

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

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

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

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

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

JGB, Atrocity, 1970.

Sam Newman: “Most people are wankers…”

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

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

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

Sammy, 2003.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All quotes, Ballard, Kingdom Come, 2006.

Oh yes. Now I remember how Kingdom Come ends…

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

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

Illustration by John Coulthart.

WINNER
Ben Slater; ‘Vista 8′

JOHN: Monochrome location scouting inside a high-rise hotel that looks half-finished. Remnants of an affair litter the piece: photographs, a high heel and the cutting to two cars so close together it would be difficult not to predict a Crash. As Christopher Brookmyre said, beware half-finished places, you know, the Death Star, Jurassic Park, Nakatomi Plaza…

SIMON: Ben’s film, shot among the Vista 8 high-rise in Singapore, seems to me like it’s recording the last moments of a suicide. You chance upon a mobile phone discarded in the high-rise’s courtyard; you press ‘play’, and this is what you find… I do like the snatched inclusion of Bowie’s man-machine classic, ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’.

MORE ENTRIES BELOW…

I’d like to organize a Festival of Home Movies! It could be wonderful — thousands of the things… You might find an odd genius, a Fellini or Godard of the home movie, living in some suburb. I’m sure it’s coming… Using modern electronics, home movie cameras and the like, one will begin to retreat into one’s own imagination. I welcome that…

J.G. Ballard, quoted in ‘Interview with JGB by Graeme Revell’, RE/Search No. 8/9, 1984.

We had eight entries in our little competition for 1-minute-or-less films shot on cameraphones, modelled after Ballard’s 1984 call for a ‘festival of home movies’. A reminder of the requirements:

+ Shoot a film using your mobile phone’s video function, no more than one minute in duration, and using no post-production or processing — the film must be shot entirely ‘in camera’.
+ The theme: anything at all to do with either one or both of the Collins English Dictionary definitions of ‘Ballardian’:

BALLARDIAN: (adj) 1. of James Graham Ballard (J.G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works. (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.

Mounting this exercise was hugely enjoyable for me and I was delighted to discover some real gems among the eight. I have been inspired by those Ballard ‘home movie’ quotes ever since I first read them years ago, and just the very the idea of unearthing ‘a Fellini or Godard of the suburbs’ has always excited (and humoured) me. So have we found one? Perhaps not. But we just may have discovered, finally, what lies in the angle between two walls…. (not even John Foxx, you may recall, could crack that conundrum).

To determine a winner, John Rivers from HarperCollins assigned points to each film, as did I. We then combined our rankings. The result is that Ben Slater, with ‘Vista 8′, came out on top. Ben wins a copy of Miracles of Life, plus these HarperCollins reissues: Millennium People, The Drought, The Crystal World, The Drowned World and The Unlimited Dream Company.

The runner-up is Pablo Sgarbi from Brazil, with ’120 Days of an Angle Between Two Walls’ (see below), and he receives a copy of Miracles. Congratulations to Ben and Pablo, and many thanks to all entrants and to everyone who supported and promoted the festival. Extra special thanks to HarperCollins UK for getting behind the idea, and to JGB for everything: always and of course.

Next year, who knows? Perhaps we’ll get entrants to simulate the filmed ratissages in Super-Cannes, or Bobby Crawford’s home porno movies in Cocaine Nights…

Here now are the remaining entries direct to you from BallardoTube, the Net’s only dedicated Ballard TV channel, where ‘history is just a first-draft screenplay’ (according to JGB in ‘The Greatest TV Show On Earth’), and where ‘premium subscribers can experience transexualism, paedophilia, terminal syphilis, gang-rape, and bestiality (choice: German Shepherd or Golden Retriever)’, as decreed by JGB in ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’.

RUNNER UP
Pablo Sgarbi; ’120 Days of An Angle Between Two Walls’

JOHN: A voice simulator spews forth graphic prose like a poetry machine from Vermillion Sands. Juxtaposed with images of ordinariness, a ceiling corner, a kettle, a cup of coffee. Reminding us what lies in the dark psyches of people everyday.

SIMON: Beautiful and hilarious: a robot reads a passage from the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, dispassionately intoning squirting buttocks and jets of blood, while common household objects ‘star’ on the screen: those elusive wall angles, a coffee cup, and so on. In its juxtaposition of extreme and violent sex with banal home appliances, this is perhaps the most ‘Ballardian’ film of them all. I love this entry a lot.

..:: Remaining entries (not ranked; in alphabetical order)

Shahin Afrassiabi; ‘Home’

JOHN: A static shot, half composed of white, with red material intruding beneath. A seemingly random collection of sounds from talk radio or television are heard, slowly snatches emerge. Mopeds, a body found on a golf course. Murder on the roads, in the suburbs. “They shouldn’t be here,” claims a politician or letterwriter and as if to answer the listener appears to move away.

SIMON: An effective study in boredom, the psychological blank slate against which all manner of deviant behaviour is exposed and spontaneously generated, like flyblown maggots on rotting meat…

Mike Bonsall; ‘Day of Creation’

JOHN: Machine noise, loud and abrasive. A tool kit, saws, cutting tools. The slow reveal of a pile of Ballard titles leads you to wonder if here JG’s works are being recut, sliced, diced and served again. The Day of Creation is the final title to appear. The maker has taken Ballard and chopped him up.

SIMON: Mike B. is the creator of the JG Ballard Short Story Concordance, and he is currently working on a concordance of Ballard’s novels. These projects required him to buy extra copies of Ballard books and to razor their pages for easily digestible scanning under the all-powerful OCR software, before they could emerge out the other side as digital mulch. This film, then, is a delightful little in joke aimed squarely by Mike at his own obsessiveness, but it also functions as a sly and clever appraisal of Ballard’s entire ouevre, which has always relied on repetition, recycling, détournement, collage, bricolage…

Julian Gough; ‘Flesh Frame’

JOHN: Micro-entertainment, as flesh is exposed on a computer screen. That it only takes up a quarter of the screen makes it look like the body has been filmed and is being edited. Only to blur into a sunset. Consumerism takes over as the computer screen turns and pulls away to a credit card rectangle ready to accept your chip and PIN.

SIMON: This film chases its own tail, eventually disappearing into the black hole of inner space. Utterly beguiling.

Russell Miller; ‘A Journey Through A Distant Land’

JOHN: Concrete, bleakness, a travelator that moves vs. a river refusing to run. CCTV-positioned footage of a seemingly empty street lined by lock-ups hiding ephemera, memory junk, yesterday’s crashes. Daylight as harsh as the artificial strip lighting. In a denial of creation we return to the water from which we emerged.

SIMON: Classic Ballardian imagery, here: the flyovers, the apartment blocks, the obsessive stalking of nothing in particular. An artificial eye scanning the ruins of a humourless Earth, perhaps…

Jack Strain; ‘Ballardian’

JOHN: An urban warrior applies his warpaint in slow-mo before a projection of traffic is destroyed in a deliberate act of vandalism. The whole process seems to be watched or logged.

SIMON: A fabulously evocative film, menacing and dark, and making full use of the competition’s ‘in camera’ editing stipulation. The burning frame is a wonderful touch, and the glimpse of madness at the very end is bizarre and unsettling, behaviour that is perhaps the only response to the crushing insanity of the outside world.

Supervert; ‘Superego’

JOHN: Big Ballard is watching you! And joined by a smaller version of himself. Ballard argues with himself over an unheard question. As we watch, we are given permission only to be refused a second later. We are eventually told ‘no’ twice and our audience is over. That the responses are from Sam Scoggins’s movie about The Unlimited Dream Company and the ’90 questions from the Eyckman Personality Quotient test’ give the film a different meaning, that you’re being fed the results of a psychological experiment, while appearing to participate in one yourself.

SIMON: This film manipulates footage from the Scoggins film and is just a little disconcerting. It’s like being given a glimpse into a malfunctioning brain, with its psychopathology unashamedly on show, brandished like a weapon. Ultimately the synaptic process is unfathomable and the viewer, like all readers of Ballard, is left on the outer, able to only impotently guess at the intent, forced to fill in the dots herself…

..:: Previously on Ballardian…

+ J.G. Ballard Pastiche Competition

Everybody will be doing it, everybody will be living inside a TV studio. That’s what the domestic home aspires to these days; the home is going to be a TV studio. We’re all going to be starring in our own sit-coms, and they’ll be strange sit-coms, too, like the inside of our heads. That’s going to come, I’m absolutely sure of that, and it’ll really shake up everything…

J.G. Ballard, quoted in ‘Interview with JGB by Andrea Juno and Vale’, RE/Search No. 8/9, 1984.

The mobile phone can be seen as a fashion accessory and adult toy as well as a break-through in instant communication, though its use in restaurants, shops and public spaces can be irritating to others. This suggests that its real function is to separate its users from the surrounding world and isolate them within the protective cocoon of an intimate electronic space. At the same time phone users can discreetly theatricalize themselves, using a body language that is an anthology of presentation techniques and offers to others a tantalizing glimpse of their private and intimate lives.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Impressions of Speed’, in Speed : visions of an accelerated age / / edited by Jeremy Millar and Michiel Schwarz (1998).

The fear of some of our best contemporary writers is that the British love of classic adaptations reflects an unhealthy obsession with the past.

Novelist JG Ballard is blunt about it. ‘I can’t stand these costume dramas. They drive me insane. It is all so phoney,’ he complained. ‘Why does the BBC spend so much time in the past? It seems the only thing we have to look forward to in this country is our nostalgia.’

The nation, he believes, has ‘always been in love with pageantry and uniforms’, but it is not something the BBC should repeatedly encourage.

‘There are too many hats. Everybody is over-dressed. We should have more drama set in the present day. These costume dramas feed our desperate need for a more deferential class system and a sense of order in society.’
…
The enduring appeal of the costume drama for its millions of viewers is harder to pin down … [Bill] Gallagher suspects these series are popular because they portray a simpler world… Ballard would disagree, of course. His most recent novel, Kingdom Come, was set in a shopping mall outside west London and asks whether consumerism in our society could ever turn into fascism. ‘We seem to have our heads in the sand,’ he said. ‘It is almost as if the present is too frightening to face.’

I don’t know, I just find all this rather amusing, the fact that the Observer journalist, Vanessa Thorpe, in composing this piece on Britain’s ‘love affair with braces and bonnets’, has seen fit to ring up Ballard for his opinion.

It is ultimately fitting, though, in that Ballard has always savaged what he terms ‘heritage England’, memorably describing London as ‘a city devised as an instrument of political control, like the class system that preserves England from revolution. The labyrinth of districts and boroughs, the endless columned porticos that once guarded the modest terraced cottages of Victorian clerks, together make clear that London is a place where everyone knows his place.’

Costume dramas, in his view then, seem equally ‘instruments of political control’, ‘endless columned porticos’ for the mind…

[ thanks, Tim C ]

It’s divided into six channels: (1) J.G. Ballard Interviews; (2) J.G. Ballard Documentaries; (3) J.G. Ballard Adaptations; (4) J.G. Ballard’s Top Ten Science Fiction Films; (5) Ballardiana; and (6) Ballardian Sound Art/Music. Access them via these links or the players below.

For now I’ve been adding clips uploaded by other users that fall under the ‘Ballardian’ rubric. There are interviews with J.G. Ballard and most of the adaptations of his work, plus other objects like Chris Marker’s La Jetee and bits and pieces from Sinclair, Moorcock, Tarkovsky, Foxx, Burroughs and others in the orbit. I’ll soon be uploading artefacts of my own: more rare Ballard interviews, maybe some car crash test footage, cadavers, airports, news from the sun, architectural geegaws, etc. If anyone has suggestions for what to include, please be in touch. The only rule is that the subject of the artefact (or creator of the artefact) has to have been mentioned in a reasonably significant fashion on this site, or at least have been significantly overlooked. If you’d like to be notified of further updates and additions, please subscribe to the playlist of your choice.

Thanks to the YouTube community for the uploads.

J.G. BALLARD INTERVIEWS
Ballard interviews.

J.G. BALLARD DOCUMENTARIES
Ballard docos.

J.G. BALLARD ADAPTATIONS
Ballard adaptations including ‘making of’ docos.

J.G. BALLARD’S TOP TEN SCIENCE FICTION FILMS
JGB’s ten, as reported in the Independent newspaper, 2005.

BALLARDIANA
Filmic artefacts inspired by, sharing similar concerns with, or pointing to memes in Ballard’s work.

SOUND ART/MUSIC
Music and sound art artefacts inspired by or sharing similar concerns with Ballard’s work.

Here’s an excerpt from the BBC documentary, The Martians and Us, focusing on J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. It features Ballard cheer from Brian Aldiss, Christopher Priest, Will Self, Roger Luckhurst, Brian Stableford and John Sutherland.

[ thanks, Pedro ]

This is Xander Walker’s excellent no-budget film of Ballard’s dark, scathing short story ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (one of the last shorts JGB ever wrote, unfortunately):

For reasons amply documented elsewhere, intelligent life on Earth became extinct in the closing hours of the 20th Century. Among the clues left to us, the following schedule of a day’s television programmes transmitted to an unnamed city in the northern hemisphere on December 23, 1999, offers its own intriguing insight into the origins of the disaster.”

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J.G. Ballard. ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (1992).
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But did you also know that William Gibson appeared in Wild Palms alongside Jim Belushi; that Philip K. Dick guest-starred in a 1971 episode of Bewitched; that Jorge Luis Borges stole the show in an ep of The Love Boat; and that J.G. Ballard tore up the scenery in the 1973 actioner Airport as Dr. Maitland, ‘the enigmatic psychoanalyst who diagnoses the condition of pilot Charlton Heston, a grounded astronaut who endeavors to pierce the stratosphere in a bulky 747 bearing the flag of an imaginary American airline’?

That’s according to the fearless Chris Nakashima-Brown, who gets his freak on over at No Fear of the Future.

“Television crime series…were filled with their huge carapaces, swerving in and out of alleys, reversing in a howl of burning rubber. Watched with the sound down, episodes of Starsky and Hutch resembled instructional films on valet parking”.

———————–
J.G. Ballard, 2005
———————–

Announcing the winner of our J.G. Ballard Pastiche competition, sponsored by the kind people at Harper Collins.

THE PREMISE
We know that as a struggling writer, J.G. Ballard originally moved to Shepperton to be near the famous movie studios, in the hope he’d be able to snare some scriptwriting work. Now picture a parallel world where Jim Ballard achieved that goal, becoming so successful that he relocated to Hollywood, where he became much in demand.

THE TASK
Write an imaginary 500-word extract from an imagined novelisation of Starsky and Hutch (either the original TV series or the recent movie)…as written by J.G. Ballard.

THE PRIZE
A copy of Ballard’s new novel, Kingdom Come, supplied by Harper Collins.

THE JUDGE
Lyle Hopwood, the reigning JGB Pastiche Champion. Lyle, of course, was the winner of Interzone magazine’s 1993 competition for “the best short extract from an imaginary novelization of the science-fiction movie Alien as it might have been written by leading British novelist J.G. Ballard”.

To help you on your way, we’ve reproduced Lyle’s winning story in — what else — the pastiche section. Sorry, Fredric.

THE CLUES
1) In his 2005 feature on CSI, Ballard wrote: “Television crime series…were filled with their huge carapaces, swerving in and out of alleys, reversing in a howl of burning rubber. Watched with the sound down, episodes of Starsky and Hutch resembled instructional films on valet parking”.

2) In his interview with this site Iain Sinclair declares, “Ballard’s a very easy writer to pastiche badly. I think he’s there with someone like Graham Greene as a stylist. There used to be a New Statesman competition to parody Greene’s style, and Greene came second when he entered”.

And the winner, as judged by Lyle Hopwood, is Steven Craig Hickman, whose entry is below. A copy of J.G. Ballard’s latest novel, Kingdom Come, courtesy of Harper Collins, will be winging its way to Steven. Runner up was Rocky Morrow, whose entry can also be found below. Special mention must be made of Rick McGrath’s entry, the movie poster at the start of this page: while it didn’t meet the requirements of the competition (sorry, we wanted text only), it’s certainly good enough to reproduce.

Many thanks to all who entered, and to Lyle Hopwood and Harper Collins, of course. Lyle’s comments on the top two entries follow Steven and Rocky’s ‘novelisations’.

———————————————————–

STARSKY & HUTCH: NOVELISATION BY J.G. BALLARD
Winner: Steven Craig Hickman

At dusk Starsky was still sitting in the cockpit of the Grand Torino like the pilot of an alien spacecraft. Unconcerned by the shifting tide of traffic advancing toward him across the blackened beach of this urban nightmare, he watched the luminous sun melt into the metalloid dreams of Bay City.

Hutch walked out of the shadows of the glass city like a new Apollo of the marketplace, flames sparking from his spectral torso as if the sun in one last desperate attempt to attain eternity had suddenly found in this strange flesh the perfected incarnation of a delirious thought.

Starsky held the key in his hand as if it were a secret accomplice to the dark mysteries of an arcane religion. He prepared himself for a final departure, one that would ennoble both himself and his partner into the greater mysteries of Time. The sparking flesh of Hutch moved steadily toward him as the neon dolphins flew above chromium air.

The last vestiges of the sun’’s decay flashed on the horizon like an angel of the apocalypse, as if to awaken the sleeping minds of all the lost souls before the great and terrible conflagration breaks over the glass sea of Time. In the finale every element of the universe, however abandoned, would take its place on this terminal stage in front of him.

As he watched Hutch suddenly rise into the air on luminous wings, he was reminded of all those ancient astronauts that still flamed above in their dead cages of steel like derelict gods thrown into the emptiness of this vast wasteland. He started the car and began moving toward his old partner in crime, the winged god of a new earth. He would embrace this flaming god of the sun one last time in a torsion beyond time.

————————————————————————————————–
LYLE’S COMMENTS: I particularly liked the length (short) of Steven’s story, the sheer compactness of similies per line and the impression it gave of absolute, almost mechanised intensity. It was, in more than one sense of the phrase, concentration city. And anything that ends with a sentence like that deserves a prize.
————————————————————————————————–

————————————————————————————————–
STARSKY & HUTCH: NOVELISATION BY J.G. BALLARD
Runner-up: Rocky Morrow

Starsky has begun to piece his world together. It has been three weeks since a traumatic cerebral injury rendered Detective Starsky an amnesiac. This report intends to inform the department head, Captain Harold Dobey, and his superiors of my partner’s present condition, a revolutionary cure suggested by a renegade mental health professional, and a possible danger.

I have been briefed by the doctors in charge of Starsky’s rehabilitation that mood swings are to be expected during this period of rediscovery. In particular, any presentation of depression and anger on the part of Starsky is to be understood and forgiven.

Starsky is sticking to the textbook. He is stubborn and refuses, almost violently, to be told point-blank of the particulars of his identity up to and including any information regarding his education, profession, sexual orientation, medical history, family history, military history, or the case of Starsky and I on Playboy Island parts 1 and 2.

He is certain that he will come back to himself.

According to notes provided to me by the trauma counselor, Lyndia Toxwater, David Starsky is open to learning about the present world. A quote from page 23: “He is a voracious reader of anything brought to him. The doctors tell me that he is not so much willing to ‘learn about the present world’ as he is trying to ‘lose himself in the written word’.”

The period of recovery for a person in Starsky’s situation is anywhere from a day to a lifetime. Toxwater suggested that an attempt be made to meet Starsky in the place where he most desires to be lost and, thus, is least resistant to being found.

Toxwater claims that the rate of success for this media neurotherapy is much higher than reported in the “big three” major mental health reference journals: Zepter and Hodges Illustrated, The New Journal of Disorders, and Abnormal Models (published in Spanish as The Aztec Cortex). Toxwater insists that there are at least a half-dozen medical journals dedicated to this, and related endeavors, in the Soviet Union. A telephone call to the Maywood Cesar Chavez branch of the County of Los Angeles Public Library was flirtatious but inconclusive.

With Toxwater’s advice in mind, I have placed the following three advertisements in several Los Angeles dailies:

Under the classification of Automobiles For Sale:

Must sell! Gran Turino red 2-dr
hardtop w/ white striping.
Chrome exhaust, bumpers, grill.
Great suspension, hugs road.
Perfect for the off-duty policeman.
Meets all fed regulations. New tyres.
Reply to box 4343 c/o this paper.

Under the classification of Miscellaneous For Sale:

Picture Yourself Watching This!
1970s era television.
Good condition, retro look.
Perfect for dedicated bachelor’s pad.
Reply to box 4343 c/o this paper.

Under the classification of Personals:

Have You Forgotten Yourself?
Sad SWM seeks Lonely SWM for
male bonding over cars, busting crime rings.
Slobs OK. Reply to Box 4343, c/o this paper.

It is my hope that “voracious reader” Starsky will see these “fragmentary allusions” (a phrase taken from a personal consultation regarding David Starsky with Lyndia Toxwater) and snap out of his fugue. As a bonus, all responses to box 4343 will be checked against our records for bail jumpers and fugitives. In the cases of paroled felons, any address change will be noted and filed.

Toxwater says that it is fortunate that the Los Angeles Police Department has chosen to not publicize David Starsky’s condition in local news media. A photograph of David Starsky accompanied by a caption with his name and medical condition would be a psychotraumatic event on a caustic level, effectively obliterating not only the progress that has been made, but also…

————————————————————————————————–
LYLE’S COMMENTS: I liked this as a story a great deal. It’s something that I would not be surprised to see published in a magazine (without references to Starsky and Hutch, of course). It works very well as a story and I found it engrossing and moving. I did not award it the prize for a similar reason: it was so engaging and the character seemed to have such an emotional need that I felt it was not quite Ballardian enough to take first prize. Excellent story, though, and the Ballard elements were carefully thought out and well rendered.
————————————————————————————————–

…LINKS
+ More Ballardian pastiche

This site’s pastiche section has always been one of our most controversial. Some readers see it as an affront to Ballard himself, but no doubt these wet blankets are devotees of theorist Fredric Jameson, the man who described pastiche in the postmodern age as “blank parody…devoid of laughter” — a dead impulse to endlessly recycle historical styles at the expense of inventing new forms.

But let’s turf the cultural baggage. We’re not talking insipid Wicker Man remakes or pointless shot-by-shot Psycho reconstructions, here. We’re talking pastiche spliced with incongruous elements, a new art form, nothing less than the mighty mash up, bastard pop culture that’s way more sexy than any theory. Yes, pastiche — if you’re not Britney Spears, or the White Stripes — can be a devilish way to pay tribute to your heroes.

And so we have it: BALLARDIAN’S FIRST-EVER COMPETITION.

THE PREMISE
We know that as a struggling writer, J.G. Ballard originally moved to Shepperton to be near the famous movie studios, in the hope he’d be able to snare some scriptwriting work. Now picture a parallel world where Jim Ballard achieved that goal, becoming so successful that he relocated to Hollywood, where he became much in demand.

THE TASK
Write an imaginary 500-word extract from an imagined novelisation of Starsky and Hutch (either the original TV series or the recent movie)…as written by J.G. Ballard.

THE PRIZE
A copy of Ballard’s new novel, Kingdom Come, supplied by the kind people at Harper Collins.

THE SPECIFICS
Send your entries via this form. The deadline is November 23, 2006. Your pastiche can be homage, satire, ‘blank parody’, etc — no limits.

THE JUDGE
Lyle Hopwood, the reigning JGB Pastiche Champion. Lyle, of course, was the winner of Interzone magazine’s 1993 competition for “the best short extract from an imaginary novelization of the science-fiction movie Alien as it might have been written by leading British novelist J.G. Ballard”.

To help you on your way, we’ve reproduced Lyle’s winning story in — what else — the pastiche section. Sorry, Fredric.

THE CLUES
1) In his 2005 feature on CSI, Ballard wrote: “Television crime series…were filled with their huge carapaces, swerving in and out of alleys, reversing in a howl of burning rubber. Watched with the sound down, episodes of Starsky and Hutch resembled instructional films on valet parking”.

2) In his interview with this site Iain Sinclair declares, “Ballard’s a very easy writer to pastiche badly. I think he’s there with someone like Graham Greene as a stylist. There used to be a New Statesman competition to parody Greene’s style, and Greene came second when he entered”.

Many thanks to David Pringle, Lyle Hopwood and Interzone for the inspiration for this contest.

The Amis/Self/Sinclair/Petit forward line is the standard attack — Ballard’s regular cheer squad, no less (missing only Alex Garland) — but personally I’d like to see these TV homages stretch out a bit more. Why not Ballard discussed by domantrices, RAF pilots, mechanics, architects, doctors, rugger players with stevedore arms, football hooligans, shopping mall general managers?

In any case, Ballard’s South Bank appearance was a bit of a surprise to long-time fans. In 1999, JGB was quoted in the Guardian as follows:

Most television is remarkably good, bearing in mind that it is a popular entertainment medium, but Melvyn Bragg poses a problem of his own making. The South Bank Show is a classic example of dumbing down: most television trivialises the already trivial, but the South Bank Show trivialises the serious, which is far more dangerous”.

To which Melvyn Bragg replied:

JG Ballard says that “The South Bank Show trivialises the serious”. I find this snobbish, offensive and depressing, particularly as I admire Ballard’s work and thought better of him. It’s also wrong. I think that a programme on UB40 is every bit as serious as a programme on Harold Pinter. We did both last season and neither was trivial.

If he has not seen them I would be happy to send him tapes of those two programmes, and from the same season, the programmes on Tony Harrison, John Tomlinson, Anish Kapoor, Lucy Gannon and the new South African choreographers. I am genuinely interested to know if he can tell me how any of those programmes fit his lazy smear. In Tony Harrison, for instance, there was a very long and detailed interview with the poet about his work: he read a great number of his poems and his verse film was also examined. Unless JG Ballard can prove his point, his comment stands as no more than a sad and sour little swipe”.

I’ve never liked UB40, myself…

OPENING LINE:
“Dreams of rivers, like scenes from a forgotten film, drift through the night, in passage between memory and desire.”

Another misunderstood book in the Ballardian canon, although Samuel R. Delany, in his 1998 review, gives it a red-hot go. Still, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was reviewing Kingdom Come, so similar are the critical tools he uses to those of present-day reviewers sticking the boot into KC. Guess we haven’t come very far, after all:

“In the unnamed Central African republic of the English writer J. G. Ballard’s new novel, two political factions are vying for power: on one side are the guerrillas of General Harare, once a dental student, now afflicted with boils and bad teeth. On the other is the police chief Captain Kagwa, nominally more friendly to the resident whites but with his own obsessive priorities, first of which is his ancient Mercedes and second the television crew that arrives at the town of Port-la-Nouvelle to document his suppression of the Harare insurgents.
…
Mallory, an Englishman who has come to this African country to run a clinic for the World Health Organization, has dreamed of bringing water to the arid land, from which Lake Kotto has receded only two years before. To that end he’s been drilling the lake bed. With the execution temporarily averted, Kagwa assigns the doctor to guide a crew of bulldozers repairing the Port-la-Nouvelle airstrip. As a machine unearths the stump of a huge forest oak, the roots pull free and water oozes into the hole – water that rises, spreads, till it becomes a river stretching to the north like ”a third Nile” with its source somewhere in the southern mountains.
…
Certainly from close-up, in paragraph after paragraph, Mr. Ballard constructs a moody and well-modeled landscape with as fine a writerly intelligence as we might hope for. But almost as frequently, when the actions of his characters come under his writerly eye, his account becomes thin, his dialogue wooden. The long view gives his book a rich allegorical air, a sense of quest and a steady rise in action – helicopter raids, blown-up dams, mysterious sexual trysts and clashes with Captain Kagwa – to suggest a near-classic adventure. But when we move in to look at the people, the relations between them, or the simple succession of events, things get very cloudy.”

Samuel R. Delany. ‘Saved by the TV Crew’.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money”. (from ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’).

From the 1996 Harper Collins edition:

The first-ever collection of J.G. Ballard’s articles and reviews, published over the last thirty years. In a long and highly-acclaimed career, J.G. Ballard has established himself as one of Britian’s most distinctive and admired writers, the author of such influential novels as Crash, The Drowned World, High-Rise, Empire of the Sun and, most recently, Rushing to Paradise. Throughout his career he has also been a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers. Now, for the first time, he has gathered together the finest of these pieces and grouped them under themes such as film, lives, the visual world, writers, science, autobiography and science fiction.

Marlon Brando, Nancy Reagan, Elvis Presley, Deng Xiaoping, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, William Burroughs and Graham Greene are just some of the people who feature in the ninety articles, together with many of the themes familiar to readers of Ballard’s fiction, includign Shanghai, television, surrealism, cars, motorways and the atom bomb.

The result is an astonishingly varied and fascinating collection — a provocative and entertaining review of the modern world, as seen through the eyes of one of this country’s most original writers.”

I happen to think that some of Ballard’s best writing can be found in the non-fiction realm; in fact, there was a time, when I first chanced upon his work, that I was convinced he was a superior journalist than a novelist. Although it’s not in this collection, I especially savour Ballard’s phrasing in his lovely meditation on Helmut Newton:

A company of beautiful women moves through the palatial corridors or gazes into the opaque depths of ornate mirrors, waiting for a last act that will never unfold. Even those women who are naked seem scarcely aware of themselves, as if their sexuality is defused by the strange bedrooms where they wait for the rich and powerful men stepping from their limousines in the courtyards below.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Lucid Dreamer’.

The Edge features a typically acerbic review of User’s Guide, by Gerald Houghton:

In 1977 Ballard wrote one of his most experimental and most brilliant short stories, ‘The Index’. Did the attached book ever actually exist? Was it all a figment of some deranged imagination? All that remains of this autobiography is a collection of names and page numbers; tantalising nudges and winks, like a road-map with the motorways rubbed out. It’s a game we can play with A User’s Guide To The Millenium: Hitler nuzzles up to Mae West, Dali to Nancy Reagan, Derek Jarman with Walt Disney, Lee Harvey Oswald and the young Jim interred in the Japanese camp. What, if anything, do all these and the rest have to do with this rather unpresupposing British author?

Ballard is never less than urbane, but his best dinner party manners mask real teeth. Thus he adores the Surrealists, Henry Miller, Joyce and Genet, but is dismissive towards others (Warhol), occasionally outright scathing (Nancy Reagan). The Ballard in these pages is clearly in awe of Burroughs’ reupholstering of narrative form, while describing himself as an old-fashioned storyteller. (It’s fulsome praise that should be tempered with a reading of his superb interview with Will Self in Self’s recent Junk Mail.) He is mystifyingly rhapsodic over Dali, surely the most overrated artist of the century. (What, one wonders, would Ballard make of the comment that Dali is the ‘kind of artist you think is brilliant when you’re 15′? Are you listening Damien Hirst?).”

..:: CONTENTS

1. FILM
Casablanca, Brando and Mae West, Star Wars and Blue Velvet…

• ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’ (1990)
• ‘Magical Days at Rick’s’ (1993)
• ‘Hollywood Sex Idols’ (1991)
• ‘Push-button Death’ (1991)
• ‘Hobbits in Space?’ (1977)
• ‘A User’s Guide to the Millennium’ (1987)
• ‘Courting the Cobra’ (1993)
• ‘The Samurai of the Epic’ (1991)
• ‘La Jetee’ (1996)
• ‘Blue Velvet’ (1993)

2. LIVES
Nancy Reagan, Elvis, Howard Hughes and Hirohito…

• ‘The Chain-saw Biographer’ (1991)
• ‘Survival Instincts’ (1992)
• ‘Fallen Idol’ (1991)
• ‘The Killing Time’ (1979)
• ‘Mob Psychology’ (1991)
• ‘Closed Doors’ (1977)
• ‘Last of the Great Royals’ (1989)
• ‘Sinister Spider’ (1992)
• ‘Lipstick and High Heels’ (1993)

More contents to come.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.” (from ‘Prima Belladonna’).

From the 2001 Flamingo edition (originally one volume; reprinted in two volumes in 2006):

For the first time in one volume, the complete collected short stories by the author of Empire of the Sun and Super-Cannes — regarded by many as Britain’s No.1 living fiction writer.

J.G. Ballard is firmly established as one of Britain’s most highly regarded and most influential novelists. Throughout his remarkable career, he has won equal praise for his ground-breaking short stories, which he first started writing during his days as a medical student at Cambridge. In fact, it was winning a short-story competition that gave him the impetus to become a full-time writer.

His first published works, ‘Prima Belladonna’ and ‘Escapement’ appeared in Science Fantasy and New Worlds in 1956. Ever since, he has been a prolific producer of stories, which have been published in numerous magazines and several separate collections, including The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever, Vermilion Sands, Low-Flying Aircraft, The Venus Hunters, Myths of the Near Future and War Fever.

Now, for the first time, all of J.G. Ballard’s published stories — including four that have not previously appeared in a collection — have been gathered together and arranged in the order of original publication, providing an unprecedented opportunity tp review the career of one of Britain’s greatest writers”.

Plus the obligatory endorsement:

Ballard is one of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilirating imagination — and a national treasure.”

Nicholas Royle, Guardian.

A large body of opinion says that Ballard’s a better short-form stylist than novelist. On some days, I agree. My first exposure to Ballard, aside from Crash, was his short story ‘The Subliminal Man’. It hung in my imagination like a sharp blade over a heifer’s neck. Absolutely incredible, the imagery of it:

The old cities were surrounded by the vast motion sculptures of the clover-leaves and flyovers, but even so the congestion was unremitting.
…
Then the flicker of lights cleared and steadied, blazing out continuously, and together the crowd looked up at the decks of brilliant letters. 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 NEW CAR NOW
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
…
They walked out into the trim drive, the shadows of the signs swinging across the quiet neighbourhood as the day progressed, sweeping over the heads of the people on their way to the supermarket like the blades of enormous scythes.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Subliminal Man’ (1963).

All the criticisms that are usually applied to Ballard’s novels — style over substance; lack of characterisation; thin plot — simply don’t apply in this format. In fact, in this realm they become virtues, as the sheer weight of Ballard’s imagination is compressed, and then unpacked, with full force. He didn’t dub the short pieces that make up The Atrocity Exhibition ‘condensed novels’ for nothing. Ballard’s a radical, a man who saw that the 20th-century novel was stifled by 19th-century function and set about stripping it to its very essence. That aesthetic became his body of short stories: quite simply, the man’s a master of the form and it’s a damn shame he doesn’t write them anymore.

I have the hardback, single-volume, supposedly complete version — a fallacy, for it only includes three pieces from The Atrocity Exhibition. I’m not sure if the new two-volume set rectifies that — probably not, considering it would take away sales from Atrocity itself.

It’s a bit of a cheat. If the publisher considers Atrocity to be a novel (as Ballard does), rather than a collection of short stories, then the Complete Short Stories shouldn’t contain any Atrocity pieces at all. According to Ballard expert David Pringle, there are three Ballard shorts that weren’t included, seemingly at the expense of the three Atrocities: ‘Journey Across a Crater’ (1970), ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B——” (1984) and ‘The Dying Fall’ (1994).

I call that a missed opportunity.

Update: reader Mike Holliday contacted me with some further comments on this collection:

Despite its title, the book does not include all of Ballard’s short stories. If we discount those that are shortened versions of Ballard’s novels (Storm-Wind, The Drowned World, Equinox), then the following are missing:

(i) The Violet Noon, an early non-professional story published while Ballard was at university

(ii) most of the stories included in the original edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, namely You and Me and the Continuum, The Assassination Weapon, You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe, The Atrocity Exhibition, Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy, The Death Module, Love and Napalm: Export USA, The Great American Nude, The University of Death, The Generations of America, The Summer Cannibals, Tolerances of the Human Face, Crash!

(iii) the so-called ‘surgical fictions’, Coitus 80, Princess Margaret’s Facelift, Mae West’s Reduction Mamoplasty, Queen Elizabeth’s
Rhinoplasty, Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty

(iv) a few other pieces, namely Journey Across a Crater, The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******, Neil Armstrong Remembers His Journey to the Moon, and The Dying Fall. It also excludes those items classified as Miscellaneous Media [including Ballard's collages for Ambit magazine].

In 2006, The Complete Short Stories was republished in two paperback volumes, but this edition omits the novella The Ultimate City.”

Disappointingly, there’s not a lot of decent criticism surrounding Ballard’s short-form work. Over at Rick McGrath’s site, however, John Boston has posted a thorough and interesting account of “the four short stories that got [Ballard] back into writing science fiction: Now: Zero (1959), The Waiting Grounds (1959), The Sound-Sweep (1960), and Zone of Terror (1960).”

..:: LINKS
+ J.G. Ballard’s Introduction to the Complete Short Stories

..:: CONTENTS

+ ‘Prima Belladonna’ (1956)
+ ‘Escapement’ (1956)
+ ‘The Concentration City’ (1957)
+ ‘Venus Smiles’ (1957)
+ ‘Manhole 69′ (1957)
+ ‘Track 12′ (1958)
+ ‘The Waiting Grounds’ (1959)
+ ‘Now: Zero’ (1959)
+ ‘The Sound-Sweep’ (1960)
+ ‘Zone of Terror’ (1960)
+ ‘Chronopolis’ (1960)
+ ‘The Voices of Time’ (1960)
+ ‘The Last World of Mr Goddard’ (1960)
+ ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ (1961)
+ ‘Deep End’ (1961)
+ ‘The Overloaded Man’ (1961)
+ ‘Mr F. is Mr F. (1961)
+ ‘Billennium’ (1961)
+ ‘The Gentle Assassin’ (1961)
+ ‘The Insane Ones’ (1962)
+ ‘The Garden of Time’ (1962)
+ ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ (1962)
+ ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ (1962)
+ ‘Passport to Eternity’ (1962)
+ ‘The Cage of Sand’ (1962)
+ ‘The Watch-Towers’ (1962)
+ ‘The Singing Statues’ (1962)
+ ‘The Man on the 99th Floor’ (1962)
+ ‘The Subliminal Man’ 63 (1962)
+ ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ (1962)
+ ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1962)
+ ‘The Time-Tombs’ (1962)
+ ‘Now Wakes the Sea’ (1962)
+ ‘The Venus Hunters’ (1962)
+ ‘End-Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Minus One’ (1962)
+ ‘The Sudden Afternoon’ (1962)
+ ‘The Screen Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Time of Passage’ (1964)
+ ‘Prisoner of the Coral Deep’ (1964)
+ ‘The Lost Leonardo’ (1964)
+ ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964)
+ ‘The Illuminated Man’ (1964)
+ ‘The Delta at Sunset’ (1964)
+ ‘The Drowned Giant’ (1964)
+ ‘The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon’ (1964)
+ ‘The Volcano Dances’ (1964)
+ ‘The Beach Murders’ (1966)
+ ‘The Day of Forever’ (1966)
+ ‘The Impossible Man’ (1966)
+ ‘Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer’ (1966)
+ ‘Tomorrow is a Million Years’ (1966)
+ ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’ (1966)
+ ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’ (1967)
+ ‘The Recognition’ (1967)
+ ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ (1967)
+ ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968)
+ ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1968)
+ ‘The Comsat Angels’ (1968)
+ ‘The Killing Ground’ (1969)
+ ‘A Place and a Time to Die’ (1969)
+ ‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’ (1970)
+ ‘The Greatest Television Show on Earth’ (1972)
+ ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ (1974)
+ ‘The Air Disaster’ (1975)
+ ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’ (1975)
+ ‘The Life and Death of God’ (1976)
+ ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976)
+ ‘The 60 Minute Zoom’ (1976)
+ ‘The Smile’ (1976)
+ ‘The Ultimate City’ (1976)
+ ‘The Dead Time’ (1977)
+ ‘The Index’ (1977)
+ ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977)
+ ‘Theatre of War’ (1977)
+ ‘Having A Wonderful Time’ (1978)
+ ‘One Afternoon at Utah Beach’ (1978)
+ ‘Zodiac 2000′ (1978)
+ ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978)
+ ‘A Host of Furious Fancies’ (1980)
+ ‘News from the Sun’ (1981)
+ ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982)
+ ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982)
+ ‘Report on An Unidentified Space Station’ (1982)
+ ‘The Object of the Attack’ (1984)
+ ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985)
+ ‘The Man Who Walked on the Moon’ (1985)
+ ‘The Secret History of World War 3′ (1988)
+ ‘Love in a Colder Climate’ (1989)
+ ‘The Enormous Space’ (1989)
+ ‘The Largest Theme Park in the World’ (1989)
+ ‘War Fever’ (1989)
+ ‘Dream Cargoes’ (1990)
+ ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (1992)
+ ‘The Message from Mars’ (1992)
+ ‘Report from an Obscure Planet’ (1992)

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY VOLUME 1

..:: BUY VOLUME 2

He writes: “We’re producing the movie “Shepperton’s Oracle” with a team of French web designers (www.panoplie.org). The project is first an interactive website with a chat bot around the universe of J.G Ballard for the French TV website Arte.tv (it’s like Channel Four in England). The website will be online by the end of 2006.

With the website we’re producing a documentary also titled “Shepperton’s Oracle”. The movie is like a biographical journey into the life and works of J.G Ballard in the 20th Century. We use movie materials from the public domain, shoots of Shepperton, and we have interviews with Sheppertonians. We’re using an interview with J.G Ballard that I’ve done for a French magazine as the oracle’s voice-over. The end of the movie will be fictional and will be shot in Dubaï.

With a website and a movie we would like to propose two different but complementary visions of the work of J.G Ballard.

Two years ago I realised for French TV another documentary about a writer that you know: Philip K.Dick (“Adickted: PKD from Blade Runner to Minority Report”). Making a movie about JG Ballard is something pretty logical for me. I have also in production this year another movie — about Space Tourism…”

I’m looking forward to the “chat bot”…it’s also good to see people delving into the psychogeography of Shepperton (if indeed there is such a thing). Thomas has expressed interest in doing something on this site when the film is completed.

The post says: “Working on the movie about J.G Ballard “The Shepperton’s Oracle”, i’ve found…an extract of General Motors vision for the future in year 56’. “The Shepperton’s Oracle”, the movie about Ballard will be done with a lot of public domain movies. There are three part in the movie : the past, the present and the future. The last part (the future) will be a fictional stuff shoot in Dubaï during this year…”

That’s all I know about it. I don’t know if it’s a bio or a ‘mockumentary’, but the ‘public domain’ approach seems similar to Weiss. I’m trying to find out more from the blogger, a mysterious French filmmaker called ‘Vertigo’…

Sure enough, on the BBC website Ballard is quoted as saying it is “Without doubt one of the greatest documentaries of all time”. There’s a clip from the documentary on the website”.

Experts Blame Cop Show For Educating Criminals

POSTED: 11:32 am CST January 31, 2006

CLEVELAND — When Tammy Klein began investigating crime scenes eight years ago, it was virtually unheard of for a killer to use bleach to clean up a bloody mess.

Today, the use of bleach, which destroys DNA, is not unusual in a planned homicide, said the senior criminalist from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Klein and other experts attribute such sophistication to television crime dramas like “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” which give criminals helpful tips on how to cover up evidence.

Prosecutors have complained for years about “the CSI effect” on juries — an expectation in every trial for the type of high-tech forensic evidence the show’s investigators uncover. It also appears the popular show and its two spinoffs could be affecting how some crimes are committed.

“They’re actually educating these potential killers even more,” said Capt. Ray Peavy, also of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and head of the homicide division. “Sometimes I believe it may even encourage them when they see how simple it is to get away with on television.”

A man charged in a recent double-homicide in northeast Ohio was a “CSI” fan and went to great lengths to cover his tracks, according to an affidavit filed by Trumbull County prosecutors.

Jermaine “Maniac” McKinney, 25, allegedly broke into a house, killed a mother and daughter and used bleach to remove their blood from his hands, prosecutors said. He also allegedly covered the interior of a getaway car with blankets to avoid transferring blood.

Prosecutors said McKinney burned the bodies, his clothing and removed his cigarette butts — which would contain his DNA — from the crime scene.

According to the affidavit, he also tried to throw some evidence into a lake, including a crowbar used to bludgeon one of the victims. The lake was frozen though and he shouted a profanity when the crowbar remained on the surface.

Investigators later recovered the evidence. McKinney, who was indicted this month on two counts of aggravated murder, aggravated burglary and other charges, could face the death penalty if convicted.

Cases where suspects burn and tamper with evidence seem to be increasing, said Chuck Morrow, chief of the criminal division in the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s office.

“People are getting more sophisticated with making sure they’re not leaving trace evidence at crime scenes,” Morrow said.

Klein said most crimes aren’t well planned and that detailed attention to prevent leaving trace evidence typically occurs in cases where someone has killed a family member or business partner.

“For the most part, our killings involve gang bangers who for the most part are pretty stupid,” she said.

Sophisticated planning and concealment of evidence are aberrations, not the norm, said Larry Pozner, former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

“Most people who commit crimes are not very bright and don’t take many precautions,” Pozner said. “CSI and all the other crime shows will make no difference.”

Yet, in the six years since CBS, which did not return phone calls seeking comment, introduced “CSI,” there’s been a trend of fewer clues like hair, cigarette butts and the killer’s blood left behind at crime scenes, Peavy said.

The more sophisticated the television story lines get, the better equipped criminals will be, Peavy said, adding that he never watches “CSI” because it’s too unrealistic.

Recently I’ve come across a piece by one of my favorite authors, J. G. Ballard, on a show I’ve become addicted to against my better judgement: Crime Scene Investigation (you can access Ballard’s article here). I was pleased and disappointed by Ballard’s analysis. Although a lot of his comments are perceptive, I think he missed some of the fundamental reasons for the appeal and popularity of this series.

I approach television nowadays with heavy doses of cynicism and trepidation. It’s hard to get me hooked. But after two episodes of CSI, I’m addicted. I cannot stop watching it, regardless of what my critical faculties say. I love it and hate it in equal measures.

I think the allure of the show derives mostly from what it borrows from the crime genre. Crime is the purest and most efficient form of narrative, one that allows endless permutations, but which adheres to a strong, logically seamless structure. I speak here of an archetypal, perfect crime narrative; one that perhaps does not exist, but which perhaps subsists in many remarkable examples of the genre. Every element in the story moves towards a final goal, an anticipated revelation, and every bit of plot must contribute to this final denouement. Hence the suspense, the narrative drive that compels reading, watching, discovering.

The characters are clearly defined by their relative position in a network of relationships: Detectives, suspects, perpetrators, innocent bystanders, etc. The detective acts as a kind of master storyteller, a demiurge enclosed in the world of the story, anticipating different twists and the possibilities that lurk behind the manifest events. The detective must weigh probabilities, hypotheses, plot scenarios, what-ifs? Form and content, plot and structure merge together perfectly in this genre, for each piece of text is (ideally) structurally necessary. The reader may even be allowed to know the identity of the killer from the beginning; and even then the crime story would obey this tight teleological structure. The story doesn’t even exist, it’s not a story, until we reach the end—and the whole edifice is glimpsed, and the swarm of possibilities collapse into a single reality.

The genre also permits a myriad interesting variations and detours. The crime narrative can be used to comment and digress on the society of the time. (Ballard himself has done this, in his remarkable foray into the crime genre, Cocaine Nights). A crime reveals skeletons in the closet, allows intrusion into intimate places. “What were you doing at 9:15 on Wednesday night?” The genre effortlessly opens the space for a piercing psychological intimacy.

A second dimension of the genre, always identified by theorists and critics, is the fact that it is concerned with morality. (This has, in part, to do with the historical beginnings of the genre in the urban, industrial environments of the nineteenth century.) The very fact of a crime—the act at the core of the narrative, the impetus—obviously implies a wrong, a morally reprehensible act. The stakes are high; the genre absorbs some of the functions of ancient myth, dealing with moral infractions, violence, monstrosity, the forbidden. In other words, the moral order.

Crime narratives are concerned with the social and institutional apparatus that comes to bear on such a transgression—as well as the human, psychological universe that surrounds the act. We may even be allowed to identify with the killer or criminal, forgive him or her, share his/her perspective. The narrative can also turn against this apparatus, exposing its flaws. The detective, as the human incarnation or focus of this apparatus, usually must be a sharp judge of character, a connoisseur of human nature. Again he/she is a surrogate of the writer.

Crime stories may not always have a ‘moral’, but they explore a moral universe. Even in its most jaded, disillusioned noir incarnations, the crime story still portrays a moral universe—or anti-universe where the good don’t always win, and where things are not black-and-white. Witness one of the great crime novels of all time, Dostoyevski’s The Brothers Karamazov, which realizes the philosophical potential in the old genre trick of having multiple characters, each with his/her own story. Each ‘suspect’ in Dostoyevski’s novel incarnates a perspective on life, a system of ideas.

CSI, of course, is nowhere as interesting as Dostoyevsky, yet it presents its own moral universe. The series boils down the structure of the archetypal crime story to its bare schematic skeleton, with some postmodern twists.

Firstly, the fiction of detection has undergone an interesting mutation in the age of forensic science. In this regard, CSI is part of a larger phenomenon, largely spearheaded by the novels of Patricia Cornwell, and the subgenre of ‘forensic detection’.

Nowadays every time you switch the TV on at prime time, you’re bound to see a corpse lying on a table, or some ghastly forensic procedure take place. The voyeuristic spirit of TV has now taken a worryingly morbid turn. What is the root of this obsession? Given the immense popularity of these shows, they definitely seem to touch a paranoid nerve. In fact, you need to watch the news to find their ‘real-life’ counterpart. Terror, fear, catastrophe.

But first, let’s look at the narrative side. In the subgenre of forensic detection (or whatever you want to call it) the whole process of reconstructing the events takes place in the laboratory, by following chains of deduction based on laws of physics, biology and chemistry. Whereas in, say, Agatha Christie’s novels, the detective must piece together the events from people’s testimonies and their inadvertent bodily or facial clues, here it is the objects that speak. Chemical substances, pieces of glass, blood splatters, footprints and, of course, cadavers. The only people the investigators are interested in are dead. Yet, the narrative thrust of the archetypal crime story is intact. CSI follows a very classic structure. Despite its flashy hi-tech gimmicks, we could call it conservative. All we get, in fact, is plot.

Grissom (the head of the crime forensics unit in CSI) is like a postmodern Sherlock Holmes. One of the things that makes Conan Doyle’s stories so delightful is that moment of revelation, when we find out what Holmes has been thinking, how he has logically pieced it all together out of clues that have completely passed us by. Grissom surprises us with similar inferences and logical gymnastics. But his reasoning is firmly techno-scientific. Grissom knows where to look because he knows his science. This is not to say that he’s stupid. He has hunches; but these are nothing without evidence. At the end of the day, what matters is the evidence, the scientifically incontrovertible facts. A CSI investigator might conclude from the impact lines in a piece of glass that a window was shattered from the inside. Grissom might deduce from the presence of a particular insect that a human corpse has been hidden nearby. To function properly, reason now needs a huge apparatus around it—a laboratory, lots of machines, a vast corpus of knowledge. Chains of deduction must be anchored on an institutionalized body of observation, on complex apparatuses of imaging and measurement, and on the strict following of police procedure. We have come a long way from the quasi-solipsistic, opium-fuelled rationality of Holmes.

That’s why we get no character interaction, no emotions, hardly any narrative ‘fat’. The suspects, once faced with the truth, hardly struggle. In the face of the unassailable evidence, they surrender feebly, blurting out their confession in time for the credits to roll. In the last couple of seasons, the creators of the show have been trying to give us more rounded characters, creating affairs and rivalries, and trying to generate more tension between the members of the team. The results are uninteresting, and add nothing to the show—in fact, we feel vaguely uncomfortable with their ‘human’ side. Ballard perceptively notes this austerity, and identifies the qualities of the setting, its strange claustrophobic ‘ecology’. Most of the action takes place indoors, and we rarely see the characters travelling anywhere. There are also a lot of close-ups. We inhabit the gaze of techno-scientific procedure: intimate yet inhuman.

Grissom is self-absorbed, literate, and quirky—yet somewhat infantile, emotionally stunted. Grissom’s obsessive quest for the ‘objective truth’ sits incongruously in the midst this technological paraphernalia. We get the feeling that his quaint idealism (‘science is about finding the truth’) has no place in the modern crime-fighting machine. And this is Grissom’s tragedy (and largely why we sympathize with him). His team-mates are happy to tag along, and don’t need this kind of grand justifications; most of the time they just look happy to have a job. I think we also sympathize with Grissom also because of William Petersen’s great performance in the role. Petersen plays the oddball Grissom with affection and humor, and the show becomes more interesting as soon as he walks into the frame. Despite his limitations, Grissom is somehow unpredictable; we just never know what he’ll come up with.

Needless to say, the purported ‘gritty realism’ of the series is curiously at odds with the fantastic, preposterous nature of the action. The dialogue is ludicrous, the attempts at humor fall flat on the face (when they are not in very bad taste), and not for a minute can we reasonably believe that we’re watching a faithful rendition of police procedure. For a start, forensic scientists are not detectives, and do not interrogate suspects or conduct investigations.

Yet this trashiness, this awkwardness almost, is central to the appeal of CSI. The patent artificiality acts as a buffer against the most unpleasant aspects of the reality that the show is documenting. Yes, because CSI does have a basis in reality, however dim; it hooks into powerful social and psychological forces. American film and TV (even US culture in general) can’t stomach realism. (Remember that realism is not about a faithful portrayal of reality but about verisimilitude: fooling the audience into thinking that what they are watching could easily happen). The only way Americans can recognize reality is when it mimics film (witness the attack on the World Trade Centre). A ‘realist’ crime show would simply be unwatchable. In fact, Australians make the best realist crime TV: Wildside and Blue Murder, for example. These shows are so stark and uncompromising they’re almost unpleasant to watch.

Even the celebrated, flashy computer simulations of CSI (in which we follow in clinical detail how a bullet enters the lungs, or the effects of a certain poison on the internal organs) are distancing devices, abstract and synthetic images that provoke a strange mixture of physical revulsion and intellectual remoteness.

Ballard misses the point completely. I think the massive popularity of CSI does not stem from the obscure echoes it strikes in the ‘collective unconscious’. Ballard likes this kind of explanation, and most of the time he’s quite persuasive. The reasons are partly psychological, yes; but they float much closer to the surface. CSI is, in fact, a parable about the War on Terror. It is full of paranoid warnings, admonitions, explorations of fear. The space the forensic investigators tread on every day is a landscape of death and remains, of accidents and rotten intentions. This is the modern traumascape, an unsafe and paranoid place, a netherworld of catastrophe and loss. No, there’s no heaven; just decomposing bodies, flesh cracked open on the stainless-steel table, organic fluids and chunks of tissue under the microscope. CSI portrays a world in which we have come to accept these things as necessary and inevitable—and, surprise surprise, it is our world. Perhaps the source of the fear is not limited to the War on Terror, but also to the war crimes that have ravaged the closing decades of the twentieth century, and which seemingly will also be a staple feature of the twenty-first. The terror arises from the collapse of the myth of globalisation with its happy vanishing of frontiers and cultural barriers. It is the dark awakening to the horrors of genocide and rabid nationalism. Maybe Grissom and his crew are symbolic stand-ins for the anonymous crews of forensic anthropologists that have to catalogue the mass graves in Bosnia, Sarajevo, Rwanda, South America, and countless other places.

But there’s a right-wing edge to CSI, a morally conservative paranoia that urges us to lock the doors and find refuge in—where? Where does Grissom find refuge? How do the characters gather the moral fortitude to deal with this horror on a daily basis? CSI doesn’t tell us. This is where right-wing moralism comes face to face with its own emptiness. Or alternatively (as a couple of shows have suggested) we must look somewhere else, outside this fallen universe. Shall we look to the church, to God for guidance? “You might not believe in God,” an unmasked murderer tells Grissom at the end of one of the episodes, “but you are doing His work.”

So, remember kids: In the immortal words of Robocop: STAY OUT OF TROUBLE.

– Andrés Vaccari

CSI … as characterless as life

It has no car chases, no shoot-outs, no emotions. So what makes Crime Scene Investigation so utterly compelling? The answer, writes JG Ballard, goes to the heart of our most basic fears.

JG BALLARD: “Television today is an ageing theme park, which we visit out of habit rather than in hope of finding anything fresh and original. At times I think that the era of television is over, but then it suddenly comes up with something rich and strange. A few years ago, hunting the outer darkness of Channel 5, I began to linger over a series called C.S.I: Crime Scene Investigation. After only a few episodes I was completely hooked, for reasons I don’t understand even today.”