Enter
our competition to design the cover of a limited edition version of Crash
Crash would be a head-on charge into the arena, an open attack on all the
conventional assumptions about our dislike of violence in general and sexual
violence in particular. Human beings, I was sure, had far darker
imaginations than we liked to believe. We were ruled by reason and
self-interest, but only when it suited us, and much of the time we chose to
be entertained by films, novels and comic strips that deployed horrific
levels of cruelty and violence.
In Crash I would openly propose a strong connection between sexuality and the
car crash, a fusion largely driven by the cult of celebrity. It seemed
obvious that the deaths of famous people in car crashes resonated far more
deeply than their deaths in plane crashes or hotel fires.
Crash would clearly be a challenge, and I was still not convinced by my
deviant thesis. Then, in 1970, someone at the New Arts Laboratory, in
London, contacted me to ask if there was anything I would like to do there.
It occurred to me I could test my hypothesis about the unconscious links
between sex and the car crash by putting on an exhibition of crashed cars.
The Arts Lab offered me the gallery for a month. I drove around wrecked-car
sites in north London and paid for three cars, including a Pontiac, to be
delivered to the gallery.
The cars went on show without any supporting graphic material, as if they were
large pieces of sculpture. A TV enthusiast at the Arts Lab offered to set up
a camera and closed-circuit monitors on which the guests could watch
themselves as they strolled around. I suggested we hire a young woman to
interview the guests about their reactions. Contacted by telephone, she
agreed to appear naked, but when she saw the crashed cars, she told me she
would only perform topless – a significant response, I felt at the time.
I have never seen the guests at a gallery get drunk so quickly. There was a
huge tension in the air, as if everyone felt threatened by some inner alarm
that had started to ring. Nobody would have noticed the cars if they had
been parked in the street, but under the unvarying gallery lights these
damaged vehicles seemed to provoke and disturb. Wine was splashed over the
cars, windows were broken, the topless girl was almost raped in the back
seat of the Pontiac (or so she claimed: she later wrote a damning review
headed “Ballard Crashes” in the underground paper Frendz). A woman
journalist from New Society began to interview me among the mayhem, but
became so overwrought with indignation, of which the journal had an
unlimited supply, that she had to be restrained from attacking me.
During the month the cars were ceaselessly attacked, daubed with white paint
by a Hare Krishna group, overturned and stripped of wing mirrors and licence
plates. By the time they were towed away, unmourned, all my suspicions had
been confirmed about the unconscious links my novel would explore. My
exhibition had been a psychological test disguised as an art show, which is
probably true of Damien Hirst’s shark and Tracey Emin’s bed. I suspect it’s
no longer possible to outrage spectators by aesthetic means alone. A
psychological challenge is needed that threatens one of our dearer
delusions, whether a stained sheet or a bisected cow forced to endure a
second death in order to remind us of the illusions to which we cling about
the first.
In 1970, I began to write Crash. This was more than a literary challenge, not
least because I had three young children crossing Shepperton’s streets every
day, and nature might have played another of its nasty tricks. I have
described the novel as a kind of psychopathic hymn, and it took an immense
effort of will to enter the minds of the central characters. In an attempt
to be faithful to my own imagination, I gave the narrator my own name,
accepting all this entailed.
Two weeks after I had finished, my tank-like Ford Zephyr had a front-wheel
blowout at the foot of Chiswick Bridge. The car swerved out of control,
crossed the central reservation and rolled onto its back. Luckily I was
wearing my seat belt. Hanging upside down, I found the doors had been jammed
by the partly collapsed roof. The car lay in the centre of the oncoming
carriageway, and I was fortunate not to be struck by approaching traffic.
Eventually I wound down the window and clambered out.
Looking back, I suspect that if I had died, the accident might well have been
judged deliberate, at least on the unconscious level. But I believe Crash is
less a hymn to death than an attempt to buy off the executioner who waits
for us all in a quiet garden nearby. Crash is set at a point where sex and
death intersect, though the graph is difficult to read and is constantly
recalibrating itself. The same is true of Emin’s bed, which reminds us that
this young woman’s beautiful body has stepped from a dishevelled grave.
Crash created little stir when it first appeared in Britain, but 25 years
later, when the country was supposed to have liberalised itself, a
preposterous storm in the largest teacup When it finally opened there were
no copycat car crashes, and the controversy at last died down. Cronenberg, a
highly intelligent and thoughtful man, was completely baffled by the English
reaction. “Why?” he kept asking me. “What’s going on here?”
After 50 years, I was nowhere nearer an answer.
Fleet Street could find showed just how repressed and silly a nation we could
be. David Cronenberg’s film of Crash was premiered at the Cannes film
festival in 1996. The controversy continued for years afterwards, especially
in England. Desperate Conservative politicians attacked the film in an
attempt to gain moral credit as the guardians of public decency. One cabinet
minister, Virginia Bottomley, called for the film (which she had not seen)
to be banned.
The Cannes festival is an extraordinary media event, in many ways deeply
intimidating to a mere novelist. I took part in all the publicity interviews
and was deeply impressed to see how committed the stars of the film were to
Cronenberg’s elegant adaptation of my novel. I was sitting next to Holly
Hunter when we were joined by a leading American film critic. His first
question was: “Holly, what are you doing in this shit?” Holly sprang into
life and delivered a passionate defence, castigating him for his
small-mindedness and provincialism. It was the festival’s greatest
performance, which I cheered vigorously.
In England the film was delayed for a year when Westminster Council banned it
from the West End, and a number of councils up and down the country followed
suit.
Extracted from Miracles of Life by JG Ballard, published by Fourth Estate
on Feb 4 at £14.99. Buy it for £13.49 (inc p&p) from The
Sunday Times BooksFirst; 0870 165 8585
