crash (w&d. cronenberg, w. j.g. ballard)

Crash is a movie which is constructed upon a brilliant premise. About forty minutes in, Elias Koteas’ mysterious and charismatic psychopath introduces a staging of James Dean’s fatal crash, using identical cars, which actually collide. The world of the movie and technology fused in a single moment. The love of speed, which has driven the twentieth century, impaled on the steering wheel of the fixed punctum of the cinema frame. This moment seems to connect Hollywood with Marinetti’s Futurism, with Ducournau’s Titane, the automobile as the death drive of progress. The fact that the characters all want to have sex in cars, all the time, the cars being their potential murderers, only exacerbates the Freudian connotations where sex and death are all part of the same turbulent psychological crisis towards which modernity, and us, its guests, is constantly accelerating.

Having reached this point, 45 minutes into the film, it then feels as though Cronenberg wasn’t entirely sure where to go next. The tension that is laced into the film like a corset in the opening, a place where anything might happens, starts to slip as the characters settle into a playful Schnitzler-esque ronde, seeking to either screw or kill one another in the next car accident they can provoke. The film seems to decelerate rather than accelerate, and the brilliance of the opening forty five minutes becomes a tail light moving out of range, speeding away into a parallel film in another dimension, a dimension Cronenberg’s film would die to crash through to, if only it hadn’t lost the map.

super-cannes [j g ballard]

Despite not having read much Ballard, his transgressive British literary voice is so pervasive that it’s hard not to feel as though you know his work intimately. In part, one imagines, his success is down to the fact that, whilst transgressive, he’s also a consummate (and structurally conservative) storyteller. The narrative of Super-Cannes rattles along at a steady pace, even if it never really feels as though it’s close to hitting top gear. As a result, the concept behind the novel feels far more dangerous than the novel itself. 

This concept is beguiling; an exploration of a summarily twenty-first century world where corporate entities possess their own space, which they police themselves, a post-political space where you can invent your own morality. Super-Cannes is a large industrial/ residential park, near Cannes, where high-level execs get to do their thing. Which mostly involves working, but whose resident shrink has devised a novel way of letting off steam: organised petty crime. High-end execs don’t do squash or affairs; they go out into the streets and participate in some minor league brown shirt action, beating up immigrants, stealing valuables or sleeping with child prostitutes. Which in a Trumpian world doesn’t sound all that far-fetched. The narrator, a level-headed English pilot, Paul Sinclair, married to one of the site’s new doctors, gradually pieces together the truth of what is happening, before deciding to take radical action to bring down this neo-fascist enclave. The level-headed Englishman is one of the few prophetic notes that jars, but in so many other ways Ballard seems to be putting his finger on the brutal new realities of a world run by corporations. 

Having said which, the novel itself, which is framed as a detective story, with Sinclair investigating why his wife’s predecessor went on an insane shooting spree, feels somewhat prosaic. The twists and turns really do sometimes feel as though they’re going round in circles. The writer’s research is worn on the sleeve, and one imagines Ballard hanging out on the Cote D’Azur for months, suffering terribly as he made notes for his latest masterpiece. There’s something of a conjurer’s trick about it all: a story which claims to rent asunder the shroud of contemporary society, dressed up in the bows and ribbons of a highly consumable literary approach.