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Virtual Death: The Game Show
Author: Simon Sellars • Apr 18th, 2008 •Category: Ballardosphere, CCTV, YouTube, alternate worlds, boredom, consumerism, death of affect, inner space, surveillance, television
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
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is there anybody reading this web site besides me and the Crashman?
I am. Ballardian is probably my favourite blog. I’m not much of a commenter though.
Thanks Tim, I miss Sterne by the way, especially the suburb “reviews”. They were magic!
Heh, ta Simon. Sterne will probably be back later in the year.
fortunately (unfortunately?) we can’t have that now that cellphones are everywhere. even without a signal, i imagine people would resort to the pre-set games –minesweeper, etc — to keep from deeper feelings of distress. perhaps that’s more of a mental health risk than pacing back and forth.
Ah, but this poor chap didn’t do that. Have a look at the YouTube footage at the start of this post. Maybe he didn’t have his phone on him; according to the article I linked to, he was on his way back to work after a cigarette break. His phone was probably back at his desk. And even if he did, I think after 41 hours Minesweeper would be completely forgotten.
Indeed, I read the story a few days ago and I think the original report said he didn’t have a mobile with him. If I recall correctly, he also didn’t have a watch with him, so had no real idea of how long he had been in there at any point.
I read, but don’t write often…..love the creative thought weaving in and through Ballard, who this blog has prompted me to read more of.
“Talk to God? Talk to you?”
Is the camera visible? Wasn’t God a weak-force version of CCTV or the Panopticon before cameras were made visible? Didn’t always work, some still sinned anyways, but the same can be said with ubiquitous CCTV. In this case a monologue with the camera would be the contemporary version of prayer, wouldn’t it?
Or, put in different terms, when physically trapped in a material inner space doesn’t the camera offer a portal to a presumed outer space — even though (logically) it’s still actually inner space itself?
“Tell me honestly, what would you do?”
I’d watch. Wouldn’t you…?
Virtual Death: The Game Show (Or half the nation takes to the toilet) …. Would that mean a million wannabes with spiky haircuts would be trying desperately to get stuck in elevators and office toilets?
More seriously, anyone read the Don Delilo novel about a woman somewhere in Scandanavia that likes to watch cctv in her apartment and one night witnesses a crime? It sounds vaguely Ballardian, but I know probably won’t be.
Idea for a reality show: Welcome Home. Trap unassuming “contestants” in their own homes and secretly film them via cctv. Watch as they exhaust the potential of their own possessions.
Oh Simon – ye of little faith – don’t you know you’re always being watched, always being judged, always being loved?
What you’re doing is so car-crash good – most of us just keep watching open-mouthed.
It might seem like we’re not watching the monitors – but we are watching – and knowing we’re part of something never done before…
Mike, you have managed to weave a CCTV-style narrative into your response to my query about anyone reading the site! Brilliant!
Sean, I agree (and so, I believe, does Paul Virilio as it happens): addressing the camera is the equivalent of staring at the Eye of God.
Ian, yes I would watch — and did! To wit the YouTube footage at the start of the post. Did you see it? The only DeLillo I’ve read is White Noise and I loved it. I felt it was like an American Millennium People, very black, very funny. And your idea for a reality TV show: isn’t that what Ballard’s “The Enormous Space” is ostensibly about? See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk0H3AnjyOA.
I did see the footage, yeah. I’m gonna have a look on the cctv site you mentioned, too – sounds like my idea of fun.
Even if the guy in the elevator was heard he’d probably still have been ignored. There’s been something on the news in the north of england about some poor man that was knocked off his bicycle by a stolen car and killed on the dual carriageway outside of the city of manchester. He was knocked unconscious but might have survived had anyone stopped to call for an ambulance. Instead the evening traffic swerved around him, more than one car, according to police, hitting his body long after the initial collision. A disgusting version of concrete island, though of course I don’t wish to appear sanctimonious.
Re White Noise – it’s one of the funniest books I’ve read but i couldnt get into anything else of his. I wonder what the book about the cctv watching girl in sweden is called…? If I wasnt so lazy I’d google it.
re:
http://www.break.com/index/trapped-in-an-elevator-with-diarrhea.html
hahaha… =)