Rage Magazine (mark Dery Interviews Crash Author J.g. Ballard

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Ma-r,k D~ry Interviews ORliSHS

J.G. Ballard fiction by Paul J. McAuley

TROM FILMS Still ToxicAfter All TheseYears

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Mark Dery: I wanted to begin with an intriguingremark David Cronenberg made to me in my recent interview with him: he said that during your recent public dialogue with him at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the question of the moralistic tone you took in your introduction to the French edition of Crashcame up. ,'ve always wondered about that, because it seems out-of tune with the book itself, which is flatlyreportorial, appropriate to the flattened affect of the characters. Cronen berg said that you confessed to him that you appended that introduction after Crashwas written, and that you had some doubts about how consonant it was with the book J.G. Ballard: The question you've asked is one which was asked by a member of the audience. David made it ~-_ quite clear that he didn't see the film as a cautionary tale, and I pointed out that at the time that I wrote Crash,roughly 25 years ago, I certainly didn't see it as a cautionary tale. I was exploring certain trajectories that' saw moving across the mental sky of the planet, followingthem to what seemed to be their likelymeeting point. Moral considerations were neither here nor there; I saw myself in the position of a computer attached to a radar set, tracking an incoming missile. In fact, most of the introduction consists of an endorsement of the nonmoralistic view of Crash,in that I make the point that an author can no longer preside like a magistrate over his characters and place their behavior within some sort of moral frame, which is the traditional stance of the author in fiction. Most criticism of the novel sees it as an instrument of moral criticism of life. I mean, that's the raison d'etre that justifiesthe teaching of Englishliterature at universities. MD: Well, American tabloid newscasts still follow that script. They always end with what amounts to a scriptural flourish, and .there's a Manichean sense that good has triumphed over evilon the slaughter bench of the six o'clock news. GB: Absolutely; that's very well put. I think that's true over here, to a lar~e extent, but I think it's more true in the States, because . k Americans are a very moralistic people for historical reasons we don t need to go into. Most of my Introduction disputes this

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view that the novelist is a moral arbiter, and it's only in the last paragraph that I actually say that I regard Crashas a cautionary tale. Which I do, inthe sense that Crash,whatever else it is, is a warning, and insofar as it issues a warning, it's a cautionary tale. I mean, a road sign saying,"Dangerous bends ahead; slow down," is not makinga moral statement, it's being cautionary. In that sense"Cd like to think that David's film is a cautionary tale. MD: In what regard? JGB: Well, I don't want to invoke Swift's"A Modest Proposal," because it's so easy to do, but it is possible to play devil's advocate by deadpanning an attitude which seems to be 180 degrees at variance with what one's supposed to be doing. MD: This often seems to be lost on critics, especiallyof the moralistic stripe, who, if they have a common

crash, and I can tell you it did not..ing for my libido! What I have said is that the ideo of car crashes is sexually exciting, which is very different and in a way much more disturbing: Why is it that our imaginations seem so fixated on this particular kind of accident? MD: Crosh'snarrator,JamesBallard, says at one point that it took a car crash to snap him out of his terminal emotionlessness: "For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body," he says. In Crash,the car crash functions as a bracing jolt that reconnects us with our bodies-bodies that are part of a material reality that seems to be receding as we spend more and more time on the other side of the screen, be it the computer terminal, the television, or the video game. JGB: Of course, it's the ideo of the car crash which jerks us out of our apathy; this is the important thing. One mustn't take brief episodes from a novel and try to generalize a complete moral universe from them, because these are just cogs in a machine whose purpose is unknown to the cog. I mean, the characters' roles within Crashhaveto be seen as fullyintegrated into an imaginary drama, and it's the drama as a whole that one should look at. MD:RobertTowers, in hisNew York Reviewof Books review of The Kindnessof Women takes you to task for the "lack of inwardness and psychologicaldepth" he sees in your writing. But I think he and others like him miss the point that your fiction constitutes a sychoanalysis of the postmodern

trait, seem to exhibit an almost painfulearnestness that vaporizes irony on contact. JGB: Absolutely. MD: And as a result there's a tendency,there, to take Crashliterally. JGB: You see, Ithink this ambiguityis very important. People have constantly asked me over the last year, (and they were sayingit to me nearly 2S years ago when Crashwas published), "What are you saying? Do you believe that we should all be going out and crashing our cars? You can't be serious!" But that ambiguityis part and parcel of the whole thing. In Crash,I'm taking certain tendencies which I see inscribed in the world we live in and I'm followingthem to their point of contact. Putting it crudely, I'm saying,"So you think violence is sexy? Well, this is where it leads." But ifyou say to me, "Do you think we should all go out and crash our cars?," I would say, "Of course not!" This is a very important distinction. I've never said that car crashes are sexuallyexciting; I've been in a car

sel

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To my mind,

you're one of the first novelists to offer a science-fiction premonition of the postmodern ego-a decentered self, to use the cultural critic Frederick Jameson's term, disoriented by the generic placelessness of mallsand retail chains and the vertiginous whirl of free-floating facts and images peeled loose from their referents. Does this resonate with your thinking? JGB: Absolutely. For the last 30 years, ever since I started writing the pieces that made up The AtrocityExhibition,I've been sayingthat we live in a world of complete fiction; so much of what used to be an internalized psychologicalspace within an individual'shead-his hopes, dreams, and all the rest of it-has been transferred from inside our individual skulls into the corporate sensorium represented by the media landscape. You see people, these days, who give the impression that their minds are a complete vacuum; no dreams or hopes of any importance-even to themselvesemanate through the sutures of their skulls, as it were. But that doesn't matter, in a sense, because the environment itself is doing the dreaming for them. The environment is the greater sensori-

um generating these individualhopes and ambitions, signs of the cerebral activity that has been transferred from inside the individual'sskull into the larger mental space of the planetary communications landscape. Now that's a very dramatic shift, because it means that Freud's distinction between the latent and manifest content of a dream now has to be applied to the outside world. You can't just say that these huge figments and fantasies that float across the planet and constitute our real sky can be taken at face value; they

can't.

.

Exactly 30 years ago, when I wrote my piece, 'Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,"when Reagan was governor of California, I was trying to (I won't say deconstruct, because that's a horrible word) analyze what Reagan really represented. Part of the problem that some critics have with the apparent lack of depth in my characters arises from the fact that my characters, right from the earliest days when I started writing fiction, were already these disenfranchised human beings livingin worlds where the fictional elements constituted a kind of externalized mental activity. They didn't need great psychologicaldepth because it was all out there, above their heads. MD: You and Cronenberg seem to share an interest in psychology in general and Freud in specific;have you two discussed psychology in relation to the characters in Crash? JGB: Not really. When Ifirst met David, I'd seen all his films,but I think in many ways we were so closely tuned to each other that we really didn't need to talk about our respective work. But there are a surprising number of resonances between Cronen berg's work and my own. I've always thought, from the beginning,that he was the perfect choice to film Crash. What's so interesting is that Crashis in many ways unlike any of his other films. So many of the Cronenbergian tropes, the biomorphic horrors and the pulsating washing machines and so on, have all been abandoned because they're not necessary anymore. The biomorphic horrors are implicit within the ideas being portrayed in the most realistic way. Likewise,you know, if you've got something as dramatic and contortionist as the car crash, you don't need to play around with the everyday structures of material things. MD: Watching the film, I was struck by the extent to which its pathological surrealism has come true. The whole idea of the sexuali~ of scars is enacted now in the so-called' modern primitive" subculture, where those on the far fringes of youth culture have taken up scarification as a fashion trend and a tribal totem. Crashseems lessand lesslike"an

extreme metaphor for an extreme situation." as you call it in your introduction. than a laboratory study of an increasinglypathological culture. JGB: Well, at the ICA conversation in London, I said to the audience that Crash illustrates what I call the normalizingofthe psychopathic-the way in which formerly aberrant or psychopathic behavior is annexed into the area of the acceptable. This has been proceeding for probably a century, if not longer, but certainly it has gathered pace tremendously in the last 30 or 40 years, and it's been aided by the proliferation of new communications technologies: television, home videos, video games, and all the rest of that paraphernalia, which allows the anatomizingof desire. The normalizingof the psychopathic is most advanced. o(course, in the area of sexuality. Sexual behavibr that my parents would have deemed a one-way ticket to a criminal insane asylum is now accepted in the privacy of the bedroom. tolerable if both parties are in agreement. We're much Jess shocked than we used to be by deviant behavior. I mean, the tolerance of male homosexuality and lesbianismand the huge range of what, previously, would have been regarded as out-and-out forms of psychopathy are now accepted. And this extends beyond sexuality, into other realms as well. To take a trivial example. among my parents' generation, shoplifting was one of the most reprehensible things the ordinary person could do, and if you were arrested, it would lead to social ostracism. Nowadays, ifyour neighbor was arrested for shoplifting,one would be sympathetic: "Poor woman, her husband's been havingall these affairs,she's been very unhappy..." We're extremely tolerant of behavior that would have outraged our parents' generation. MD: Again,in the introduction to Crash, you write that "the demise of feeling and emotion has paved the way for all our most real and tender pleasures...in the excitements of pain and mutilation." In Crash,sex, although unencumbered by the trappings of S&M,is characterized by a ritualized brutality that is undeniably sadomasochistic. What do you make of the strip-mailingof S&M,in the basement scene inPulpFiction,in Madonna's Sex, in Gianni Versace's bondage collection, in BatmanForever,and so on? S&Mseems to be emerging as the talismanic sexuality of millennialculture. JGB: It's puzzling,because if you don't share a particular sexual proclivity, it's rather difficultto get worked up about it. But I agree with you; it's everywhere-in magazines.advertising, and the like. And one wonders what the subtext really is; whether it's purely a sort of style. introducing a bawdy fascism-the glamour of the jackboot, the thrill of the psychopathic and the forbidden-or whether it's a kind of personal theater in which one sees a preview of pathological virtual reality fantasies. I don t know. It strikingly dramatizes all sorts of moral ambiguities; it's a willfulmimicry of activities that in any other space would be regarded as near criminal. MD: The Surrealists were great fans of de Sade. and enshrined him as an honorary Surrealist. Didn't you. at one time,

immerse yourself in him? JGB: Immerse myself in de Sade? What a thought! (laughs) MD: (laughing)I don't mean bodily, I mean mentally. JGB: Well. he was, in his way, a genius; I once described The /20 Days of Sodomas a "black cathedral of a book." De Sade is an enormously important influence on us today, and has been for a long while. He constructs a highlyconvincing anti-society which defies bourgeois society and liberalism by constructing a community based on torturers and their willing victims. Now, that's a prospect that the liberal conscience just cannot cope with. I'd like to think that Crashisa moviede Sadewouldhaveadored. MD: You seem to enjoy nettling ideologues and moral crusaders at both extremes of the political spectrum, and yet, in your reviewof MauriceLever'sMarquisdeSade[includedin Ballard'sA User's Guide to The Millennium],you raise the moral flag y,ourself,noting that "the jury will always be out" on de Sade, whose 'novels have been the pillow-books of too many serial killers for comfort." JGB: Well, that's a worry. isn't it? One can see, on one hand, that de Sade is an enormously important figure in European and American thought. On the other hand, he has been the pillow reading of too many psychopaths-the Moors Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hyndley,who killed children, for example. MD: Likede Sade, they're practically pop stars now. JGB: Yes, and I'm not sure that's a good thing. either. One of the SurrealistsBreton, I think-said that the ultimate Surrealist act would be to take a revolver and fire at random into a crowd. Now, one can salute the brilliance of that insight, but at the same time if somebody actuallyfound a revolver and put that insight into practice. one would have to deplore it. This same ambivalence,this ambiguity,is at the heart of something like Crash,and this is what people find difficultto cope with-that there's no clear moral compass bearing. I'llbe very interested to see how the film is received in the States. MD: Throu~hout the novel. there is an almost "paranoiac-critical" confusion, to use Salvador Dalis term, of bodies and the built environment. of flesh and commodity fetishes. There's an obsessive repetition of geometry. as in, "Myright arm held her shoulders, feeling the impress of the contoured leather, the meeting points of hemispherical and rectilinear geometries." Disappointingly,we catch only fleeting glimrses of this Euclideaneroticism in the movie. I kept looking for signature images like 'the conjunction of an air hostess's fawn gabardine skirt...and the distant fuselages of the aircraft," but they weren't there. JGB: One or two people have pointed that out. But to be fair to Cronen berg, no film can possibly contain the whole of a novel in a couple of hours. The important thing is to concentrate on the nervous system of the novel. I think David has done that; he's goneto the heart of the obsessionalworld that Crashdescribes. I've seen the film three or four times, now, and I constantly see things in it that I hadn't seen before. The performances are wonderful, and the film itself is very artfullyconstructed. It's ostensibly quite naturalistic. but in fact it inhabits a strange penumbral space. There's something deeply premonitory about it. deeply prophetic. Just as some films cast a light on the past. this one seems to cast a light into the future. MD: I'd like to end with a few obvious questions. One of Cronenberg's earliest feature filmswas a movie about cars, FastCompany,and the first movie he ever made was an a-millimeter documentary about auto racing in which a CBC producer was killedwhen his Triumph TR3 rolled over. Have you and he talked about cars? JGB: We talked about his Ferrari, and the differences between American indy car racing and European Grand Prix racing, over dinner in Cannes. He's a great car buff, which I'm not. People think I'm a car fanatic, but in fact I'm not in the least interested in cars, really. although I am interested in the psychologyof automobile design, car stylingas a barometer of the public imagination. Fluctuations in American automobile design over the decades seem to reflect the state of the American psyche: the enormous Baroque and confidence of the Eisenhower years, and then, after Kennedy's death, the puritanical slab, flat-sided and undecorated-the American car was in mourning. No, not in mourning-it was in denial, to use the latest jargon. But now it's started to get more exuberant, hasn't it? MD: There seems to be a rroliferation of post-Moderne compact cars-downsized versions of Raymond Loewys aerodynamic roadsters of the '30s. How do you psy78 ~ choanalyze this neo-streamlining vogue? JGB: Ithink it reflects an awareness of the future. Thirties design was

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strongly influenced by the sense that one would be living in the future, and I think people are getting more aware of the future as the countdown to the year 2000 comes. Maybe the human race is t'ling to escape. It can t go into outer space, because that's basically inaccessible, and it's already tried to escape into inner space through drugs and mysticism and to some extent, the Internet. Maybe it's going to try to escape into another realm altogether. God knows what it will be. MD: Your characters are always trying to tear loose from the timespace continuum. I wonder if,in a weird way, the car crash is an attempt to tear through the fabric of reality-to "break on through," as the '60s catchphrase has it. JGB: I think so, absolutely. As I've often said, we live in a world of manufactured goods that have no individualidentity, because every one is like every other one, until something forlorn or tragic happens. One is constantly struck by the fact that some old refrigerator glimpsed in a back alley has much more identity than the identical model sitting in our kitchen. And nothing is more poignant than a field fullof wrecked cars, because they've taken on a unique identity that they never had in life. MD: One could imagine the crash as the car's desperate attempt to establish-if only for a fleeting moment-a sort of selfhood, even at the expense of its existence. JGB: Exactly. Very strange, that; paradoxical. Also, there is a deep melancholy about fields fullof old machinery or wrecked cars because they seem to challenge the assumptions of a civilizationbased on an allpotent technology. These machine graveyards warn us

thatnothingendures.

MD: One last question: what sort of car are you driving now? JGB: Oh, this willshock you! I drive a Ford

Granada.

MD: Dear Lord. JGB: Iknow. But again, ('m not interested in cars. MD: You had a rollover right after com-

pletingCrash; didthe

novel in a sense impel that? Was that the final plot twist, an instance of the book leaking into reality? JGB: Well, had I died in the crash, two weeks after completing the manuscript, people would have said that this was a willed death, expressing the essence of the book. (think it was pure coincidence, actually, because I found writing the book a very fearful experience. I had three very young children crossing the road a hundred times a day, and never at any point during writing that book did I ever envisage putting that psychosis into practice. I was too frightened by what I was uncovering to want to test out the theories the book seemed to embody. So I certainly don't think I had a blowout because I wanted to. I think it was a case of nature imitating art. An extreme case.

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NEXT ISSUE: ~ark rvlews Derv .lnt~ Uavid Cronen berg!

----------------strongly influenced by the sense that one would be living in the future, and I think people are getting more aware of the future as the countdown to the year 2000 comes. Maybe the human race is t'('ing to escape. It can t go into outer space, because that's basically inaccessible, and it's already tried to escape into inner space through drugs and mysticism and to some extent, the Internet. Maybe it's going to try to escape into another realm altogether. God knows what it will be. MD: Your characters are always trying to tear loose from the timespace continuum. I wonder if,in a weird way, the car crash is an attempt to tear through the fabric of reality-to "break on through," as the '60s catchphrase has it. JGB: I think so, absolutely. As I've often said, we live in a world of manufactured goods that have no individualidentity, because every one is like every other one, until something forlorn or tragic happens. One is constantly struck by the fact that some old refrigerator glimpsed in a back alley has much more identity than the identical model sitting in our kitchen. And nothing is more poignant than a field fullof wrecked cars, because they've taken on a unique identity that they never had in life. MD: One could imagine the crash as the car's desperate attempt to establish-if only for a fleeting moment-a sort of selfhood, even at the expense of its existence. JGB: Exactly. Very strange, that; paradoxical. Also, there is a deep melancholy about fields fullof old machinery or wrecked cars because they seem to challenge the assumptions of a civilizationbased on an allpotent technology. These

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endures. MD: One last question: what sort of car are you driving now? JGB: Oh, this willshock you! I drive a Ford

Granada. MD: Dear Lord. JGB: I know. But again, ('m not interested in cars. MD: You had a rollover right after com-

pletingCrash; didthe

novel in a sense impel that? Was that the final plot twist, an instance of the book leaking into reality? JGB: Well, had I died in the crash, two weeks after completing the manuscript, people would have said that this was a willed death, expressing the essence of the book. (think it was pure coincidence, actually, because I found writing the book a very fearful experience. I had three very young children crossing the road a hundred times a day, and never at any point during writing that book did I ever envisage putting that psychosis into practice. I was too frightened by what I was uncovering to want to test out the theories the book seemed to embody. So I certainly don't think I had a blowout because I wanted to. I think it was a case of nature imitating art. An extreme case.

..

NEXT ISSUE: ~ark Derv .lnt~!;Vlews UaVlu Cronenberg!