Crash (1973)

I struggled some with this J.G. Ballard novel, which doesn’t have much in terms of characters or story. It earns any outrageous reputation it may have for its premise, conflating sex and auto accidents, actively repulsive in its wanton fetish breeding. I thought I might have detected echoes of Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Crowd,” which is similarly unnaturally fixated on auto accidents. Like the David Cronenberg movie that came of Ballard’s novel in 1996 (not to be confused with a 2004 movie of the same name), Crash the novel is weird and unsettling. But it is also now unfortunately dated in a couple ways. First the OPEC oil embargo circa 1973 changed a lot of attitudes about car culture. Then climate change has made these kinds of fetishes more taboo. When Ballard was writing he was exaggerating but it felt more in the realm of possibility. It’s much less the case now. Crash feels to me inert, wallowing in depravities and extremes of masochism, e.g., wounds are equated to sexual apertures. Male organs and the cum are flying. I’m not sure which was harder to deal with, the lugubrious pace or the endless coarse sexualizing. It feels closer in spirit to Tom Wolfe’s celebration of customized cars in the ‘60s than SF. But I do appreciate the single-mindedness here. Ballard takes his meditation on cars and sex a good distance down the road. Another nice detail is setting it in and around the airport section of London. The architecture of the setting does much to get at the themes even better than all the weird sex. It’s pavement and roadways and curling bridges and vehicles on land and in the air, all screaming machinery and petroleum. The novel is mercifully short, just over 200 pages. My copy had an introduction written by Ballard in 1974 which has some good points but also feels a little empty on science fiction. Is Crash even science fiction? It’s not much like anything else I’ve ever seen, save only perhaps the 2021 movie Titane, which is more clearly science fiction and should not be missed btw. Ballard’s near future is very near, or was in 1973, and the speculative elements are more about currents in perversion. But let’s not oversimplify trying to escape the implications. At base it’s a novel about the relationship of humans and the machines they build, intended not just as tools but literally as extensions of ourselves. Sexuality just comes along for the ride. It’s a good idea and Ballard attacks it and grinds it to dust as he goes. I never caught much momentum to the narrative, which made it sloggy. But there are some pretty big ideas in here at the same time. Don’t read this when you’re going through a breakup. That’s probably my best advice.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

"The Recognition" (1967)

J.G. Ballard's story probably has to count as one of the best in the Dangerous Visions collection, if only because it's so artfully done in terms of setting and maintaining a mood (not to mention Ballard's subsequent reputation). But ultimately I think it fails by being a little too smugly ambiguous. It's summer solstice time and a small town in the vague country is visited by both a traveling fair and a circus. The circus arrives after the fair and must set up on "waste ground." It's a small circus, with some half-dozen cages occupied by animals we never see. It arrives late in the day, sets up, and people are told it is leaving in the morning. Most of the townspeople go to the fair and only a few visit the circus. Not many even know it's there. Those who do can't quite make out the animals, and occasionally a maddeningly familiar smell is in the air. At the end of the story our first-person narrator has had "the recognition" of what that smell is and what that circus is all about. It might be gauche to say, but I wish Ballard had spelled it out a little more, so I could have a recognition too. Still, there's a wonderfully mordant air about this one. Ballard really captures the fascinating sense of so many carnival scenes (and/or elements such as clowns) as sick, wrong, mysteriously depraved. Really this story is hardly science fiction at all but feels more like something on the order of a fairy tale. For what it's worth, Ursula K. Le Guin and to a lesser extent Ray Bradbury were also good at pulling this off. Checking in with the internet, I found a plurality agreed with me the story is slightly underdone. Others had ridiculously easy answers ("the smell is humanity," whatever that means). Still others pointed out details that seem significant. At least one of the cages, for example, locks from the inside. This could well be a story that improves with careful rereading, or discussion. And that's fine—even makes the case for Ballard as transcending his home genre, which is a case often made for him. I haven't read much of him beyond this and the novel Crash but I'm starting to think I need to read a little more. Still, even taking it just in terms of what's in the story, it seems designed to annoy. The narrator is so pleased with himself that he calls the story "The Recognition" and then declines to name whatever it is he recognized. Sure, right, I get it, "the smell is humanity"—but does that mean like outhouses, or body odor, or cooking food, or plain old spiritual malaise? Or what? And what is inside those blasted cages? This is arguably a strange and unfortunate case of not telling and not showing, but somehow it's still a pretty good story.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

Fly Away Home (1996)

USA / Canada, 107 minutes
Director: Carroll Ballard
Writers: Bill Lishman, Robert Rodat, Vince McKewin
Photography: Caleb Deschanel
Music: Mark Isham
Editor: Nicholas C. Smith
Cast: Anna Paquin, Jeff Daniels, Dana Delany, Terry Kinney, Holter Graham, Jeremy Ratchford

Sometimes I think Fly Away Home may be something like my token selection out of the ghetto of G-rated movies. All the reviews seem to find a way to mention that rating very quickly and usually also include the phrase "family fare" too (so glad I got them both out of the way myself). There are things to say about this, as there are about the other extreme of this spectrum, the X or NC-17 or "unrated" rating, or whatever it is called now. Both are commercial curses—in the case of the G it tends to relegate to a narrow market where I suspect managing children and their parents are more the goals and everything else secondary. At the other extreme—what is the last movie released with one? Henry & June? Midnight Cowboy?

With Fly Away Home it's almost certainly director Carroll Ballard who is most important in making it such an extraordinarily effective story, whose thoughtful themes are rarely cheated on and, indeed, are front and center right in the title: flight, and home. He pulled off a similarly elegiac stunt involving animals and sad children nearly 20 years earlier with The Black Stallion. Fly Away Home is populated with stock figures and sequences for a G-rated picture— funnee aminals, tender and frolicsome music, approximately six kind persons and/or institutions for every malevolent one, etc.—but it hits very hard at the longings and experiences of people of all ages (there, I said that too).