Crash (Bfi Modern Classics)

BFI Modern Classics Rob White Series Editor Advancing into its second century, the cinema is now a mature art form with an established list of classics. But contemporary cinema is so subject to every shift in fashion regarding aesthetics, morals and ideas that judgments on the true worth of recent films are liable to be risky and controversial; yet they are essential if we want to know where the cinema is going and what it can achieve. As part of the British Film Institute's commitment to the promotion and evaluation of contemporary cinema, and in conjunction with the influential BFI Film Classics series, BFI Modern Classics is a series of books devoted to individual films of recent years. Distinguished film critics, scholars and novelists explore the production and reception of their chosen films in the context of an argument about the film's importance. Insightful, considered, often impassioned, these elegant, beautifully illustrated books will set the agenda for debates about what matters in modern cinema.

Crash I )~lVid (:rOl1l'l1berg's Post-mortem on

J. C. Ibllani's 'TLljectory of E1te' lain Sinclair

"

Publishing

First published in 1999 by the

British Film Institute 21 Stephen Sireet, London W1 P 2LN Copyright © lain Sinclair 1999 The Brilish Film Institule is the UK national agency with responsibility for encouraging the arts of film and lelevision and conserving them in the national interest. Series design by Andrew Barron & Collis Clements Associales Typeset in Italian Garamond and Swiss 721 BT by D R Bungay Associates, Burghfield, Berks Printed in Great Britain by Norwich Colour Print, Dray1on, Norfolk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-85170-719-X

Contents Acknowledgments 7 1 Novel as Audition Piece 8 2 Liquid Mirror: Ballard Dissolves to Cronenberg 21 3 The Other Crash Films 25 4 Cronenberg's Crash 43 5 White Nights on the Bauhaus Balcony 62 6 J.G. Ballard and James Ballard 74

7 Atrocity Exhibitions 95 8 The Trajectory of Fate 104 Credits 124 Bibliography 128

CRASH I 7

Acknowledgments My thanks to Rob White and Nick James who proposed a book on Cronenberg's Crash at the strategic moment when I wanted an excuse to make contact with J.G. Ballard. Rob White's effectiveness in digging out lost films was complemented by some very astute suggestions about the (dis)organisation of my argument. I am grateful to J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Chris Petit and Sandy Lieberson, for sparing the time to give me interviews. Claire Walsh and Gerry Goldstein were helpful in setting these up. Paul Buck filled out details of an early visit to London by Cronenberg. Moorcock made a number of scarce items from his archive available and guided me towards a proper sense of the New Worlds era, when he and Ballard were co-conspirators (and inspirations to the rest of us).

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1 Novel as Audition Piece VAUGHAN: JAMES:

VAUGHAN: JAMES:

James Ballard?

Yes? Crash victim?

Yes.

David Cronenberg, Crash script

Crash, the novel by J.G. Ballard, appeared in 1973, one of the cultural markers that signalled the end of the 60s. All the elements in the book characters, landscape and psychopathology - had been drilled and rehearsed through a series of earlier texts, notably The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), where the feral Vaughan first appears. The former day-patient, Vaughan, he had often seen in the back row of his classes, or moving through the other students in the library forecourt at some private diagonal. .. The dented plates of his forehead and the sallow jaws were features as anonymous as any police suspect's. The musculature of his mouth was clamped together in a rictus of aggression, as if he were about to commit a crude and unsavoury crime.

Ballard's compacted novels of the 60s and early 70s read as much like storyboards for unmakeable films as auditions for future books. He revealed himself as a master of the list, the image cluster, the questionnaire; rapidly cut high-angle drifts across previously underimagined territory and savagely implicated close-shots. Spinal canals. Conradian lagoons infested by cretaceous monsters. Hot jungles breaking through the tarmac. Sexually alluring corridors. Formulae for assessing the ridges and contours of alien pudenda. A vocabulary that lurches between Victorian circumlocution and forensic exactitude. Ballard was in exile at Shepperton, a returned colonial; a time-traveller trying to recreate, through cabbalistic rhythms and repetitions, the Proustian excitement of scenes witnessed in childhood. Ballard's lists would operate like unoptioned shooting scripts.

CRASH I 9

Nobody could be expected to act on these instructions, they were magical and potentially threatening to the fabric of the received world. Image and text: Ballard worked in parallel with William Burroughs. Word as a virus of control. The project was one of decontamination: to turn hurt back on itself. To anticipate and expose harm through a series of hermetic exercises, uncensored fugues, improvisations on a narrow menu of effects. The script was a form of spoiled prophecy: cars of the abandoned motorcade Cine-films as group therapy. Patients were encouraged to form a film production unit, and were given full freedom as to choice of subject matter, cast and technique. In all cases explicitly pornographic films were made. Two films in particular were examined: (1) A montage sequence using portions of the faces of (a) Madame Ky, (b) Jacqueline Kennedy (Johnson oath-taking) .... (2) A film of automobile accidents devised as a cinematic version of Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed.

For Ballard the shooting of home movies, amateur pornography in suburban bedrooms (parodic replays of ex-pat theatricals, antidotes to tropical ennui), has been consistently advocated as an energising device. The narcoleptic rentiers of Cocaine Nights are encouraged to break out of their sun-dazed sleep by indulging in tennis, heroin and afternoon skinflicks behind the shaded windows of modernist apartment blocks. Films are like false memories, implanted fantasies. 'Last Year in Marienbad for the 1990s ... with a hint of Pasolini's Theorem.' These chamber performances are unusual: it does matter if there is film in the camera, tape in the camcorder. It's the actors that are of no account, the storyline that is redundant. What's needed is an image strip, raw material that can be processed, reshot, textured until it achieves essence: a new colour. Ballard reworks the familiar tropes: the flyer crossing the private airfield towards an open car, the woman leaning over a balcony, t!le rape witnessed by a complicit chauffeur. But in repetition the meaning changes. The same motifs must be tested, time and again, until they lose their potency and achieve an independent identity. Perhaps that is the

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true project: to kill the messenger, the fool who feels obliged, there's no choice, to keep on writing. oyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our dreams and longings - these diseases of the psyche had now culminated in the most terrifying casualty of the twentieth century: the death of affect.' So Ballard asserts in his introduction to the French edition of Crash. 'The death of affect.' It's not easy to know if the purpose of Ballard's art is to counter a general paralysis of the emotions with metaphors of heat, or whether the author uses his skills to bring about the condition that he fears the most. Does he write his way back towards a tenderness for the world in which he has been abandoned? Or does he save himself by brutalising all human sympathy? There was another solution. It was one that Ballard wasn't always eager to employ. Pass the buck. Write a book whose elements were so seductive, visually and thematically, that some stooge would be persuaded to take over the material and option a film. Of course this film would be tautologous. The more faithful, the more unnecessary. But that has never been an obstacle. There is no-one more dangerous, as Sandy Lieberson (the producer of Per/onnance) told me, with a hint of self-mockery, than an illiterate who loves literature. Hideous abortions have been performed by civilised commissioners who collected cult classics in the same way that they stockpiled unopened first editions. 1fophy make-overs. Novels neutralised by respect. Far better to treat the originals as Burroughs treated Time and Ltfe; hack them into ribbons, overprint the photographs, paste them together in a random order. Deactivate their malign potency. Their fetish for manipulating the future by printing the news before it happens. Tp1~ad, really, that Crash has not been filmed,' Ballard told the [." interviewers from Re/Search in 1982. 'Because I can see myself beginning , to believe the movie version - my own imagination de/onned by the \ damned thing, squeezed into somebody else's mold.' That was always the twist, the Faustian bargain. The movie would promote the author, bring him some financial return on work already done, but his private text (undiluted by publication) would no longer belong to him. If it could be

-----

CRASH 111

effectively translated into this other medium, then it was a failure; because the defi . . 'd novel is that it can exist only on its own jgm.s. Anything that succeeds as a film should have been a film in e first place. Ballard understood that a new reading of Crash would not only affect the general perception of the book, but would actually alter the ordering 0/ the typed words. The book would no longer be ].G. Ballard's Crash. It would be some curious unresolved hybrid. Elizabeth Taylor, the key motivating element, would vanish, and the sexual polarities of his urgent, almost confessional tale would be bent. The fecund dirt around the scars would achieve an unlooked for elegance. Faecal matter would be edited out. And the strange particulars of London that Ballard pressed into a Blakean mapping of his own would dissolve into the netherworld of David Cronenberg's Toronto. And he would love it. He would proclaim this new Crash, which he meticulously referred to in promotional interviews as 'Cronenberg's Crash', as 'a masterpiece'. 'No question about it. I think it's his best film ever, actually.' (As he, with justifiable prejudice, considers Empire 0/ the Sun to be Spielberg's finest hour. 'A remarkable piece of work,' he told me.) Film and book are undeclared rivals, quarrelsome siblings. Here, on the one hand, is a customised version of a superfluous (but affectionately remembered) dream. Here is another artist, a man who has enjoyed, in some senses, a parallel career, sharing responsibility for a work perpetrated by a writer who was, in the opinion of the publisher's reader at Cape, 'beyond psychiatric help'. But, from an equally valid perspective, Ballard, in another mood, declared that 'all great novels are unfilmable, because they're so interiorised'. Interesting dislocations arise as the writer moves between alternate worlds. Ballard remembers Deborah Unger's confusion at Cannes when he introduced her to Claire Walsh, the inspiration for 'Catherine', the female lead in Crash. When I interviewed Ballard in Claire's flat, above a mini-mart in Goldhawk Road, he narrated this episode. 'Claire won't mind me saying this, because I've said it in public: Claire is the basis of the character Catherine. Catherine Ballard. I remember, when I was writing the book, I said, "Shall I call the character

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based on you 'Claire'?" She said, "Urrun, perhaps not." So I called her "Catherine". 'When we met Deborah Unger, when we arrived at Cannes, I said, "Deborah, by the way, this is Claire. Claire is the basis of your character." Poor Deborah Unger, who is a former philosopher, a student of philosophy from Vancouver University, more or less collapsed in panic.' And she was right. How else should she respond to being unexpectedly confronted by an avatar of herself - as a middle-aged Englishwoman, a real presence, without the filtering subterfuges of cinema, make-up, wardrobe, flattering lighting? Both these women, the young Canadian actress, lean and blonde, and the mature Londoner, who had been the inspiration, twenty years earlier, for the heroine in a notorious novel, stood back, at an equal distance, from the role in the film. Claire, as the person who triggered the creation of the fictional character, had become an involuntary co-author. Deborah Unger, through her reading of the role, her mediated performance, reinvented that literary projection. 'Catherine Ballard' didn't belong to either of them. But without them, she had no existence. David Cronenberg, as the franchised film-maker, the asset-stripper of the modernist cult canon, was positioned on the far side of Ballard's novel, facing the author, as Unger faced the woman who was the inspiration for Catherine. He was prepared for it, this time. He'd been here before. First with Stephen King. And then Wtlliam Burroughs. The ultimate challenge. Everybody wanted to pay their respects to The Naked Lunch, the Olympia Press pocketbook of 1959. To honour the man by squirrelling away a first edition (in uncommon dustwrapper); by boasting of how soon after publication they had read it; by dropping in on Bill in Paris, Tangiers, the Bunker on the Lower East Side, or the red frontier cabin in Lawrence, Kansas. To be photographed with the great skull of the century was pretty good. There are albums of these things, Burroughs stiff as a cigar store Indian. But the ultimate trip was collaboration, coauthorship, to do the film of the book. What this means, if you pull it off, is a licence to rewrite The Naked Lunch. All the heads were up for it: Anthony Balch and the rest,

CRASH

the latL'Comers straining Balch hrought

Fin'. HI'

to

to

pastiche the repetitive, hypnotic style that

his Burroughs fllms (\Fi!/iam BIIYI {/ Parrol, '[r)wcI:I OpCIl

('111- UpI. ChoI/I al

No ') (Pari\), Bil! am! 7rJllY). All the Hoppers

and Fondas (with their pitch-it-to-Corman parasites) saw Burroughs as the ult in1
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either back projection drifts (Hitchcock), during which it would be safe, the car wasn't going anywhere, to indulge in any form of sexual geometry, or the classic monochrome of Kiss Me Deadly. Headlights sweeping the curves of the coastal highway. The sound of the power of this heavy machine, under control, taking the tight bends. A naked woman in a trenchcoat holding up her arms. Godard's Made in USA is the film where the paranoid poetic of McCarthyite pulp (Mickey Spillane to Richard Stark and Lionel White) tries to accommodate the realpolitik of the car crash as weapon of social control. Crash could have been made in 1967 or 1968 in this fragmented style, in the way that Ballard wrote The Assassination 0/ Kennedy COl1Jidered as a Downhill Motor Race, but by the time the deal was done in the mid-90s, he wanted a representation that looked as smooth and unflustered as late Bunuel. SINCLAIR: You've described the assassination of President Kennedy as an 'energising event'. Would Godard have seen it in those terms? BALLARD: No, I think the political perspective would have prevented him from doing that. The Kennedy assassination of '63 could be regarded as a detonator. We move from a pre-electronic world, in imaginative terms, into an electronic world. TV really arrived here, colour TV in particular, at that time. You saw things live on television in the mid-to-Iate 60s. You saw the Vietnam War virtually live. Oswald was shot dead live on TV. I remember watching TV with my parents in Manchester in something like 1951. There was only one channel. We looked at a screen the size of a lightbulb. The idea that TV plugged into reality seemed absurd. By the mid-60s, TV was a window into the world. It was an unfolding in real time.

Television and the suburbs. Crash really belongs on TV; on tape, surveillance footage. You need to eliminate the authorial presence. Ballard was so well tuned to this unedited reality: the dead meditation of channel-hopping at the end of the day's work, taking whatever comes without selection, feeding it back into the evolving text. Postmodernist quotation. A refusal to make cultural judgments. Moorcock said that what disturbed him most about Ballard was the ineradicable notion 'that

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the Shanghai camp must have been exactly like a leafy suburb. Part of the psychosis which is driving him - and that's great - came out of the same narrow tendencies that Kingsley Amis had. It sounds like Norbury. It's straight Norbury.' Chris Petit saw Ballard's Shepperton house as a colonial bungalow. He was dug into, and making the best of, an alien world. Internal exile. With TV as the news from elsewhere. American soaps and cop shows pitching a dream gulag that he would never need to visit. Hawaii Five-O and The Man/rom UNCLE. 'The odd thing about Ballard,' Petit said, 'is that you'd expect, from the writing of the books, that his movie viewing would be avantgarde. And you could imagine him wanting to see a version of Crash @med by Fassbinder. But then you actually discover that his expectation of cinema is one of wanting to be entertained. And what he actually likes is mainstream American cinema, Charley Varrick and The Getaway.' SINCLAIR: Is Crash a novel of the suburbs? BALLARD: There's a huge bias in the English novel towards the city as subject matter and setting for the novel. I take quite the contrary view, needless to say. I regard the city as a semi-extinct form. London is basically a nineteenth-century city. And the habits of mind appropriate to the nineteenth century, which survive into the novels set in the London of the twentieth century, aren't really appropriate to understanding what is really going on in life today. I think the suburbs are more interesting than people will let on. In the suburbs you find uncentred lives. The normal civic structures are not there. So that people have more freedom to explore their own imaginations, their own obsessions. And the discretionary spending power to do so. There's a sort of airport culture - with its transience, its access to anywhere in the world. Social trends of various kinds tend to reveal themselves first in the suburbs. The transformation of British life by television in the 60s took place, most of all, in the suburbs, when VCRs came in. In the suburbs you have nothing to do except watch TV

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An inner-London, or an inner-city, version of Crash would be impossible. The logistics just aren't there. The traffic moves too slowly. One doesn't have the imaginative freedom.

Part of Ballard's charm lies in his perversity, his unashamed espousal (or celebration) of everything that right-thinking liberal humanism opposes: junk TV; cars, vertically stacked housing developments, multi-storey car-parks, airport sliproads, pornography, Salvador Dali, Helmut Newton, rogue scientists, the narcoleptic conformity of the suburbs, whisky, cigarettes, pin-ups, ennui, alien