The atrocity exhibition (15 page)

The Film of Her Death
. Dr Nathan pushed back the metal door of the elevator head. Before stepping into the overheated sunlight on the roof he nursed the bruise on his left ankle. Vaughan had burst from the elevator doors like an ugly animal sprung from a trap. The noise of the helicopter’s engine had faded fractionally. Shielding his head from the down-draught, he stepped on to the roof. The aircraft was rising vertically, its camera trained on the body of a young woman lying in the centre of the deck. The black bilateral parking lines formed a complex diagonal structure around her. Holding his throat with one hand, Dr Nathan stared at the body. He turned to look behind him. Travers was standing by the elevator head, gazing at the body on the white concrete slope, jetsam of this terminal beach. Nodding to Nathan, he walked to the elevator.

Last Summer
. For Travers, these afternoons in the deserted cinema were periods of calm and rest, of a reappraisal of the events which had brought him to the multi-storey car park. Above all, these images from Koester’s film reminded him of his affection for the young woman, discovered after so many disappointments within the darkness of this projection theatre. At the conclusion of the film he would go out into the crowded streets. The noisy traffic mediated an exquisite and undying eroticism.

Tolerances of the Human Face.

The resonant title of this chapter I owe entirely to my girlfriend Claire Churchill (who formed the subject of my first advertisement - see
Re/ Search #8/9
, page 148). Working at a London publisher’s office in the late 1960s, she came across a scientific paper, ‘Tolerances of the Human Face in Crash Impacts’, and realized that here was a title waiting for its rendezvous with a Ballard fiction.

Fake Newsreels.

Bizarre experiments are now a commonplace of scientific research, moving ever closer to that junction where science and pornography will eventually meet and fuse. Conceivably, the day will come when science is itself the greatest producer of pornography. The weird perversions of human behaviour triggered by psychologists testing the effects of pain, isolation, anger, etc., will play the same role that the bare breasts of Polynesian islanders performed in 1940s wildlife documentary films.

From the Casualty Ward.

A first appearance of Vaughan, who was later to appear as the ‘hoodlum scientist’ in
Crash
.

Actual Size.

Jacopetti’s
Mondo Cane
series of documentary films enjoyed a huge vogue in the 1960s. They cunningly mixed genuine film of atrocities, religious cults and ‘Believe-it-or-not’ examples of human oddity with carefully faked footage. The fake war newsreel (and most war newsreels are faked to some extent, usually filmed on manoeuvres) has always intrigued me - my version of
Platoon, Full Metal Jacket or All Quiet on the Western Front
would be a newsreel compilation so artfully faked as to convince the audience that it was real, while at the same time reminding them that it might be wholly contrived. The great Italian neo-realist, Roberto Rossellini, drew close to this in
Open City
and
Paisa
.

Tolerances of the Human Face in Crash Impacts.

In the 1890s the most fashionable surgeons in London did indeed have their claques of society ladies present in the operating theatre.

The Six-Second Epic.

In the early 1950s a part-time prostitute who occupied the room next to mine in a Notting Hill hotel would dress her little daughter in a Marie Antoinette costume, along with gilded hat and silk umbrella. She was always present when the clients climbed the high staircase, and I nearly alerted the police, assuming these gloomy, middle-aged men had sex with the child. But a woman neighbour assured me that all was well
 
-during sex with the mother they were merely watched by the child. Before I could do anything they had moved. This was Christie-land.

A New Algebra.

The Russian astronaut Col. Komarov was the first man to die in space, though earlier fatalities had been rumoured. Komarov is reported to have panicked when his space-craft began to tumble uncontrollably, but the transcripts of his final transmissions have never been released. I’m sceptical of what may be NASA-inspired disinformation. The courage of professional flight-crews under extreme pressure is clearly shown in
The Black Box
, edited by Malcolm MacPherson, which contains cockpit voice-recorder transcripts in the last moments before airliner crashes. The supreme courage and stoicism shown by these men and women in the final seconds running up to their deaths, as they wrestle with the collapsing systems of their stricken aircraft, is a fine memorial to them, and a powerful argument for equal frankness in other areas.

Cinecity.

Our TV sets provided an endless background of frightening and challenging images - the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, the Congo civil war, the space programme - each seeming to catalyse the others, and all raising huge questions which have never been answered. Together they paved the landscape of the present day, and provide the ambiguous materials of this book, in which I have tried to identify what I see as the hidden agendas. Also, clearly, my younger self was hoping to understand his wife’s meaningless death. Nature’s betrayal of this young woman seemed to be mimicked in the larger ambiguities to which the modern world was so eager to give birth, and its finish line was that death of affect, the lack of feeling, which seemed inseparable from the communications landscape.

Too Bad.

‘The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unease, their unhappiness and mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two “Heavenly Powers”, eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?’ - Sigmund Freud,
Civilisation and Its Discontents
.

‘Homage to Abraham Zapruder.’

The violent newsreel footage shown on TV in the 1960s has now been censored from our screens, though a certain sexual frankness struggles on. Housewives strip on Italian game shows, sections of French television seem to be permanently topless, while call-girls star in thirty-second amateur versions of
Blue Velvet
on New York’s Channel 23. The last must be among the most reductive of all films, featuring a bed, a woman, and an incitement to lust, usually filmed in a weird and glaucous blue, an individual’s entire reason for existence compressed into these desperate moments. By contrast the professionally produced ads for the large escort agencies are as inspiring as commercials for a new hotel chain. Needless to say, I believe there should be more sex and violence on TV, not less. Both are powerful catalysts for change, in areas where change is urgent and overdue.

Conceptual Games.

‘After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A + B; a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving way to deductions and other sources of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement.’

The Goncourt Brothers’ Journal
, July 16, 1856.

Imaginary Diseases.

‘Bernouli’s
Encyclopedia of Imaginary Diseases
.’ My own invention, but some deranged pathologist might already have anticipated me. Physicians are capable of far more eccentricity than their patients realize, as Dr Benway, William Burroughs’s brilliant creation, illustrates in
Naked Lunch
. Given their generally phlegmatic nature, this seems surprising. As a medical student dissecting cadavers, I remember thinking: ‘These rather dull men and women will have reached the summit of their profession forty years from now, just when I start to need their help.’ Presumably the unequalled richness of their source material propels their imaginations along unexpected paths. Doctors have remarkably high suicide rates, perhaps a consequence of long-term imposed depression and easy access to lethal drugs. Psychiatrists, unsurprisingly, show the highest rate, paediatricians and surgeons (the latter the most worldly and ambitious of all) the lowest. The bizarre
Bulletin of Suicidology
in an early 1970s issue analysed US physicians’ favourite methods that year, from the most popular, lethal injection, to the rarest, two deaths by deliberately crashed light aircraft.

Death Games (a) Conceptual.

Nader again. His assault on the automobile clearly had me worried. Living in grey England, what I most treasured of my Shanghai childhood were my memories of American cars, a passion I’ve retained to this day. Looking back, one can see that Nader was the first of the ecopuritans, who proliferate now, convinced that everything is bad for us. In fact, too few things are bad for us, and one fears an indefinite future of pious bourgeois certitudes. It’s curious that these puritans strike such a chord - there is a deep underlying unease about the rate of social change, but little apparent change is actually taking place. Most superficial change belongs in the context of the word ‘new’, as applied to refrigerator or lawn-mower design. Real change is largely invisible, as befits this age of invisible technology - and people have embraced VCRs, fax machines, word processors without a thought, along with the new social habits that have sprung up around them. They have also accepted the unique vocabulary and grammar of late-20th-century life (whose psychology I have tried to describe in the present book), though most would deny it vehemently if asked.