J.G Ballard’s infamous cult
novel Crash shocked and dismayed many readers upon release. It depicts a world
where the barriers between sex, cruelty and technology have been broken down,
as a group of traumatised fanatics explore the latent sexual potential of the
car Crash. In 1973, this assessment of the modern word seemed impossibly bleak.
Now, in 2019, the inextricable link between sex and machinery has become a
worrying reality.
Introduction - 'A Brutal, Erotic Novel'
‘This author is beyond
psychiatric help – do not publish!’ This infamous line, quoted in maybe every
article written about Crash, is apparently the reaction from a
publisher’s wife upon reading her husband’s edition of J.G Ballard’s definitive
post-modern novel. As hysterical as this reaction may seem, it was indicative
of the novel’s reception at the time. Crash is a wilfully challenging
book – mixing graphic descriptions of car-crash sustained injuries with equally
graphic sex scenes, all if which is presented in Ballard’s idiosyncratic
clipped and clinical style of prose. The
story concerns Ballard – purposefully named after the author himself for added
shock value – who discovers a latent sexual fetishism for car crashes after
being in one himself. His post-traumatic stress manifests as an accelerated
descent into sexual psychosis – he starts an affair with the woman whose car he
crashed into, and whose husband he killed in said accident – and meets Vaughan,
ex-television personality and self-appointed leader of a cult of similar car-crash
fanatics.
The novel is bleak and detached, as grey as concrete in tone. A product of the early 70’s cultural comedown
following the end of the 60’s, the novel is concerned mostly with a world in
which the ever-growing influence of the media landscape depersonalises us and
fractures our identities, despite its claims of unity and convenience. It is
about the intrinsic relationship between sex, death and machinery, to such an
extent that the characters in Ballard’s story are often placed on a level of
importance with machines, man-made structures and advertisements. This theory for a sort of cultural
patchwork is emblematic of Ballard’s manifesto, as all his novels explore not
only how modern living influences the man, but how he becomes a cog in the
industrial machine. Ballard is infamously notable for his exploration of what
he describes as ‘inner space’, as opposed to the ‘outer space’ explored by his
sci-fi contemporaries. It is why Ballard is at his most powerful when exploring
modern technology, and its influence on our collective psychopathology – as he
once claimed, he writes science fiction set ‘5 minutes into the future’.
Context - The Media Age
In his introduction to the novels
original French publication, Ballard writes: ‘The demise of feeling and emotion
has paved a way for all our most real and tender pleasures – in the excitements
of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena.’ This ‘demise of feeling’,
Ballard surmises, was the result of a series of factors. Post World War II
Europe – still reeling from the events of the war, both socially and economically
long into the 70’s – was marked by a dual increase in both technological
advancement and the birth of the media landscape. The events of the war, specifically
the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had proven beyond a doubt that technological
advancements and violence would be forever linked, as man found new ways of
expressing his inner death drive. The birth of a media landscape – pop culture,
advertisements, convenience products etc – blurred the lines between reality
and fantasy on a societal scale, and by extension brought violence, previously
hidden from the eyes of the public, into the public arena. This culminated, in
Ballard’s eyes, in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, broadcast repeatedly
around the world. Ballard highlights this moment as a causing a cultural shift –
it was the first act of real, gratuitous violence to be broadcast into people’s
homes through their television screens, predating footage of the Vietnam war.
With a single televised gunshot, the floodgates opened. Film, television and
music saw a sharp uptick in depictions of violence and sex in the late 60’s and
early 70’s. What is most significant here – and what inspired Ballard to pen Crash
– was that all this violence, this supposed ‘demise of feeling’, was made
possible by the ever-insidious presence of technology in our everyday lives. Ballard
decided that the automobile was most emblematic of this change in the cultural consciousness
– not only were they an example of advancements in modern technology, their
influence altered the very physical and cultural landscape of the 1970’s. Their
growing popularity resulted in miles of new motorways being built, whilst they
were also a central image in the new promotional landscape, where their role as
erotic symbol of masculine virility was established. But running parallel to
this was the motif of the car as a destructive force – Ballard was obsessed with
car crashes, scrap yards, car chases in films, as well as the central role of a
car in the J.F Kennedy assassination footage. The car was the ultimate symbol
of both 1970’s mechanical ingenuity and it’s violent, impulsive push towards personal
gratification. This is where we start to unravel the meaning of Crash.
Dismembered Bodies
The calling card of Ballard’s
style is his clinical, emotionless prose – he approaches the text as if a surgeon,
peeling away body parts methodically to reveal the reality underneath. As such,
Ballard’s characters are not fully fleshed out or engaging in an emotional
sense, but more vessels for his ideology. They act mechanically and often
strangely, pushed on by their impulses much like a robot is designed only to
follow its primary function. This approach is clearly reminiscent of Ballard’s
philosophy, wherein human beings are depersonalised and brought down to the
level of machines. This is particularly apparent in Crash, where the
ever-present anatomy of the car is constantly merged with the sexual acts that
happen inside them. The characters see the car crash as capturing a holistic sexual
experience, ‘a liberation of human and machine libido’. In addition to this,
Ballard and Vaughan are obsessed with what results when flesh and metal collide
– the characters are as excited by wounds and scars, perhaps more so, than by
their sexual partners natural bodies: ‘the lungs of elderly men punctured by
door handles, the chests of young women impaled on steering columns…to Vaughan,
these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality’. The phallic and yonic symbols
of the car are juxtaposed against the dehumanised descriptions of the human
body. In this sense, an important aspect of Crash is the use of
‘dismemberment’ – human bodies and cars alike are broken down into their basic
components and attributed individual meanings - a wound caused by a handbrake
holds greater erotic power than a vagina. In dismembering human bodies and
machines alike, Ballard draws a parallel between the two. Ballard’s decision to
dismember the human body is reminiscent of the techniques used in advertisements
– highlighting a leg, or a torso, attributing this body part power by removing
it from the corporeal body.
This is where the connections
between Ballard’s prose and the modern culture of the dating app become
apparent. Removed from their context, these body parts hold no significance –
it is only within the space of the car that these pieces of human anatomy
achieve their erotic potential. This is not only because the car acts as a
suitable setting – it is the co-existence and co-dependence of machine and
flesh that achieves this sexuality. Compare this, in part, to the purpose of
dating apps. Ballard landed upon the car because of its inherent destructive
potential as well as it’s erotic connotations, a destructive potential that
allows for bodily dismemberment to take place. If Ballard were writing today,
he surely would have recognised how dating apps – specifically queer-orientated
dating apps such as Grindr, which are more explicitly used for the purpose of
finding sex – illicit a similar erotic power through dismemberment, the screen
cropping our body parts for emphasis. Much like how the characters in Crash
need to the presence of the car to emphasise the sensuality of wounds and scars,
the sensuality of dating apps is achieved in how the technology inherently
alters, frames and adjusts our perception of the human body. The nude is based wholly in this
dynamic. The context of the screen allows us to highlight genitals and other
erogenous zones and disconnects them from the human body. Erotic art is as old
as time, but the technology allows us to act on our primal urges with more
efficiency than ever before, an example of Ballard’s thesis on how media and
technology allow us to isolate the object of our most base desires.
Shifting Identities - Sex and Violence
The car does not allow the same anonymity
as a phone screen, but the theory remains the same – once we become dependent
on machines, we merge with them, losing our individuality in the sex act. It is
crucial to note the passionless and mechanical sexual acts of Crash are
a direct result of the presence of the machine in the sexual act. In fact, it
is perhaps surprising to note that the only ‘tender’ sexual act in the book is
a homosexual encounter between Ballard and Vaughan. A certain homoerotic
subtext is present throughout the book, and its unlikely culmination can
suggest a mix of both positive and negative connotations. On one hand, the use
of a gay sex scene is perhaps damaging in its suggestion that these characters
have hit complete debasement, sodomy between two men a base act only possible within
the context of the car, and all the primal urges in encourages. This is
supported by the fact that both men are portrayed as nothing other than
heterosexual throughout the book. But also – and this may simply be the hopeful
analysis of a queer writer – the scene is the only sex scene in the book that
has some redemptive feeling of normality, perhaps even tenderness. True, both
men are tripping on LSD at the time, but the act itself is notable for being
the only act that happens in daylight, and the only one where the concrete
scenery – obviously influenced by the hallucinogens – takes on a beautiful
quality, framing these two lovers rather than absorbing them into its setting.
Whilst bleak dehumanisation is a
calling card of Ballard’s writing, he is also noted for his complete moral
ambiguity. Ballard is smart enough of a writer to not demonise technology, and
at times recognises its power for good as well as its power for corruption.
This is true of dating apps such as Grindr and Scruff as well – though they may
have aided in the decline of real-world queer safe spaces, if used differently,
they have become safe spaces of their own, removing the possibility for
infringement from the real world. This meeting between Vaughan and Ballard -
and nothing in the text suggests that it is sordid in any way (despite the necessary
references to ‘anal mucus’) - is also a moment allowed by the influence of
machinery. In allowing the characters to act upon their sexual impulses, the
motorway, the overpass and the car provide their own safe space. It is
Ballard’s refusal to pin too much moral judgement on the media landscape that
makes him a powerful writer, and more accurately reflect the influence of
technology on our culture over 50 years later.
Our current relationship between
sex and screens is more obviously exampled by our cultural obsession with pornography.
Figures vary, but it is estimated that at least 30% of internet content is
pornography – and more worryingly, 88% of porn involving women depicts explicit
acts of violence against them. This is another way in which Crash has
been prophetic – Ballard proposed that he had written the first ‘pornographic
novel about technology’. Now, technology and porn are entirely co-dependent.
Though the violence in Crash is not explicitly gendered, it is
intriguing that Ballard predicted the phenomenon of the intersection of
technology and sex would result in inherent violence. This is the result of
both the act of dismemberment (internet pornography, whether made by a studio
or amateur film makers, has the potential to dismember its stars through camera
angles) and what Ballard describes as our ‘apparently limitless powers for conceptualisation’.
Internet pornography differs very little in its tactics from mainstream media
advertisements – it plays simultaneously on our obsession with celebrity and
identity, whilst appealing to our cruelty by providing anonymity. We can enjoy
the perverse pleasure in attributing identities to porn stars, whilst retaining
enough distance so that we do need to hold ourselves accountable. The protagonists
in Crash similarly find pleasure in walking this thin line – Vaughan (a
symbol of celebrity himself, being an ex-TV presenter) has an obsession with dying
in a head on collision with Elizabeth Taylor (supposedly inspired by the death
of Hollywood star Jayne Mansfield, who perished in a car crash), the various influences
of iconic celebrity, sex and violence seeming to him the ultimate pleasure
experience. Tellingly, he succeeds in killing himself, but Taylor leaves
unscathed – the fantasy too close to disrupt the ‘natural’ order, the world of
media unscathed whilst the rest of us suffer for its existence. Our current cultural
obsession around pornography, and it’s sly presence in all media – again, porn
and advertisements play off similar ideas and methods – proves Ballard’s hypothesis
that the media landscape, rather than being made up of disparate elements, is
entirely linked, both within itself, and within our own obsessions with sex and
violence.
Conclusion - 'Dangerous Bends Ahead'
With all this said, it is easy to
see why Crash was so shocking upon its release – it tapped into a spring
of uncomfortable ideas that we can recognise on both an individual and cultural
scale. ‘I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in
the mirror’. This was Ballard’s reasoning for writing Crash, and in many
ways he succeeded. As with all speculative science fiction, it does a
disservice to see the work as a prediction – you ultimately set the work up for
failure – but as a warning, Crash has proven to be extremely pertinent.
The link between sex and death has been a subject explored in art of hundreds
of years, but Ballard was the first to recognise how the introduction of
technology into our lived experiences will bring these conversations out into
the mainstream. Crash suggested that we live in a world where our base
desires hide just under the surface, and all our efforts to improve ourselves as a species are a thinly veiled, subconscious task to make it easier for us to act
on these impulses. Our current attitudes towards sex, particularly through
apps, computers and mobile phones, has proven his thesis correct. Again,
Ballard, as a highly moral author, plays with complete amorality – he does not
explicitly condone or refute this phenomenon. He described Crash as ‘an
extreme metaphor for an extreme situation’. And as an extreme a metaphor as Crash
is, the situation has in many ways developed in ever more extreme ways. So what
is Ballard’s final message? Well, he claimed that he was simply a man, standing
at the side of the road with a sign stating, ‘Dangerous bends ahead – slow down’.
But, perversely, he also claimed that Crash was him playing the role of
the man, standing at the side of the road, with a sign stating, ‘Dangerous
bends ahead – speed up’.
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