[E.O.M.S.]

Illustration by Trevor Brown.

Annotation & Commentary by the author, J.G. Ballard, to "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan", published in The Atrocity Exhibition, 1990:

"Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" prompted Doubleday in 1970 to pulp its first American edition of The Atrocity Exhibition. Ronald Reagan's presidency remained a complete mystery to most Europeans, though I noticed that Americans took him far more easily in their stride. But the amiable old duffer who occupied the White House was a very different person from the often sinister figure I described in 1967, when the present piece was first published. The then-novelty of a Hollywood film star entering politics and becoming governor of California gave Reagan considerable air time on British TV. Watching his right-wing speeches, in which he castigated in sneering tones the profligate, welfare-spending, bureaucrat-infested state government, I saw a more crude and ambitious figure, far closer to the brutal crime boss he played in the 1964 movie, The Killers, his last Hollywood role. In his commercials Reagan used the smooth, teleprompter-perfect tones of the TV auto-salesman to project a political message that was absolutely the reverse of bland and reassuring. A complete discontinuity existed between Reagan's manner and body language, on the one hand, and his scarily simplistic far-right message on the other. Above all, it struck me that Reagan was the first politician to exploit the fact that his TV audience would not be listening too closely, if at all, to what he was saying, and indeed might well assume from his manner and presentation that he was saying the exact opposite of the words actually emerging from his mouth. Though the man himself mellowed, his later presidency seems to have run the same formula."

Copies of this story were published by pro-situs on official Republican Party headed paper and distributed at the 1980 Republican Covention in San Francisco.

"The judge who presided over the recent Pirate Bay trial has denied he had a "conflict of interest", after a Swedish radio station revealed he is a member of the country's main copyright association."

Story at 'The Guardian' here.

(Yeah right!)

(Christian Bale in Spielberg's adaption of 'Empire of the Sun.)

I knew that something similar might happen when I began to write Empire of the Sun, a novel about my life as a boy in Shanghai during the second world war, and in the civilian camp at Lunghua, where I was interned with my parents. Coming to England after the war, and trying to cope with its grey, unhappy people, I hoarded my memories of Shanghai, a city that soon seemed as remote and glamorous as ancient Rome. Its magic never faded, whereas I forgot Cambridge within five minutes of leaving that academic theme park, and never wanted to go back. The only people I remembered were the dissecting room cadavers.

During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence. But how could I raise this Titanic of memories? Brought up from the sea bed, the golden memory hoard could turn out to be dross. Besides, there are things that the novel can't easily handle. I could manage my changing relations with my parents, my 13-year-old's infatuation with the war, and the sudden irruption into our lives of American air power. But how do you convey the casual surrealism of war, the deep silence of abandoned villages and paddy fields, the strange normality of a dead Japanese soldier lying by the road like an unwanted piece of luggage?

I waited 40 years before giving it a go, one of the longest periods a professional writer has put off describing the most formative events in his life. Twenty years to forget, and then 20 years to remember. There was always the possibility that my memories of the war concealed a deeper stratum of unease that I preferred not to face. But at least my three children had grown up, and as I wrote the book I would never have to think of them sharing the war with my younger self.

In fact, I found it difficult to begin the novel, until it occurred to me to drop my parents from the story. We had lived together in a small room for nearly three years, eating our boiled rice and sweet potatoes from the same card table, sleeping within an arm's reach of each other, an exhilarating experience for me after the formality of our prewar home, where my parents were busy with their expat social life and I was brought up by Chinese servants who never looked at me and never spoke to me.

But I needed to move my parents out of the story, just as they had moved out of my life in Lunghua even though we were sharing the same room. They had no control over their teenage son, were unable to feed or clothe him or pull those little levers of promise and affection with which parents negotiate domestic life with their children. My real existence took place in the camp, wheedling dog-eared copies of Popular Mechanics and Reader's Digest from the American merchant seamen in the men's dormitory, hunting down every rumour in the air, waiting for the food cart and the next B-29 bombing raid. My mind was expanding to fill the possibilities of the war, something I needed to do on my own. Once I separated Jim from his parents the novel unrolled itself at my feet like a bullet-ridden carpet.

Even then, I had to leave out many things that belong in a memoir rather than a novel. Lunghua camp, with its 2,000 internees, was a grimy bidonville, a slum township where, as in all slums, the teenage boys ran wild. There were unwatched screwdrivers or penknives to be snaffled, heroic arguments with a bored clergyman about the existence of God, buckets of night soil to be hoisted from the G-block septic tank and poured into the tomato and cucumber beds that were supposed to keep us alive when the Japanese could no longer feed us. In a bombed-out building I found a broken Chinese bayonet, sharpened the stump of blade and used it to prise away the bricks of the kitchen coal store, filling a sack with precious coke that would briefly break the chill of our unheated concrete building. My father said nothing, feeding the coke into a miniature brazier as he rehearsed his lecture on science and the idea of God. I ran off, and nagged the off-duty Japanese guards in their bungalows until they let me wear their kendo armour, laughing as they thumped me around the head with their wooden swords.

In 1984 the novel was published, a caravel of memories raised from the deep. Enough of it was based on fact to convince me that what had seemed a dream-like pageant was a negotiated truth. Curiously, my original memories of Shanghai still seemed intact, and even survived a return trip to Shanghai, where I found our house in Amherst Avenue and our room in Lunghua camp - now a boarding school - virtually unchanged.

Then, in 1987, like a jumbo jet crash-landing in a suburban park, a Hollywood film company came down from the sky. It disgorged an army of actors, makeup artists, set designers, costume specialists, cinematographers and a director, Steven Spielberg, all of whom had strong ideas of their own about wartime Shanghai. After 40 years my memories had shaped themselves into a novel, but only three years later they were mutating again.

Hazy figures now had names and personalities, smiles and glances that I had seen in a dozen other films: John Malkovich, Nigel Havers, Miranda Richardson. With them was a brilliant child actor, Christian Bale, who uncannily resembled my younger self. He came up to me on the set and said: "Hello, Mr Ballard. I'm you." He was followed by an attractive young couple, Emily Richard and Rupert Frazer, who added: "And we're your mum and dad."

Coincidences were building strange bridges. Thanks to the film studios in Shepperton, many of my neighbours worked as extras, and now called out: "Mr Ballard, we're going to Lunghua together." Had some deep-cover assignment led me to Shepperton in 1960, knowing that one day I would write a novel about Shanghai, and that part of it would be filmed in Shepperton?

Spielberg, an intelligent and thoughtful man, generously gave me a small role as a guest at the opening fancy-dress party. Warners had rented three houses in Sunningdale to stand in for our Shanghai home. When I arrived at the location I found an armada of buses, vans and coaches that filled entire fields and resembled the evacuation of London. Bizarrely, it also reminded me of the day we were bussed into Lunghua from our assembly point at the American club near the Great Western Road. I can still see the huge crowd of Brits, many of the women in fur coats, sitting with their suitcases around the swimming pool, as if waiting for the water to part and lead them to safety.

The Sunningdale house where the fancy-dress party was filmed closely resembled our Amherst Avenue home, but this at least was no coincidence. The expat British architects in the 1930s who specialised in stockbroker's Tudor took the Surrey golf course mansions as their model. Past and present were coming full circle. The Warners props department filled the house with period fittings - deco screens and lamps, copies of Time and Life, white telephones and radios the size of sideboards. In the drive outside the front door, uniformed Chinese chauffeurs stood beside authentic Buicks and Packards. A 12-year-old boy ran through the costumed guests, a model aircraft in one hand, racing across the lawn into a dream.

Surprisingly, it was the film premiere in Hollywood, the fount of most of our planet's fantasies, that brought everything down to earth. A wonderful night for any novelist, and a reminder of the limits of the printed word. Sitting with the sober British contingent, surrounded by everyone from Dolly Parton to Sean Connery, I thought Spielberg's film would be drowned by the shimmer of mink and the diamond glitter. But once the curtains parted the audience was gripped. Chevy Chase, sitting next to me, seemed to think he was watching a newsreel, crying: "Oh, oh . . . !" and leaping out of his seat as if ready to rush the screen in defence of young Bale.

I was deeply moved by the film but, like every novelist, couldn't help feeling that my memories had been hijacked by someone else's. As the battle of Britain fighter ace Douglas Bader said when introduced to the cast of Reach for the Sky: "But they're actors."

Actors of another kind play out our memories, performing on a stage inside our heads whenever we think of childhood, our first day at school, courtship and marriage. The longer we live - and it's now 60 years since I reluctantly walked out of Lunghua camp - the more our repertory company emerges from the shadows and moves to the front of the stage. Spielberg's film seems more truthful as the years pass. Christian Bale and John Malkovich join hands by the footlights with my real parents and my younger self, with the Japanese soldiers and American pilots, as a boy runs forever across a peaceful lawn towards the coming war. But perhaps, in the end, it's all only a movie.

(From 'Micropesia' here.)

J.G. BALLARD: I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape.

We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.

The styling of motor cars, and of the American motor car in particular, has always struck me as incredibly important, bringing together all sorts of visual and psychological factors. As an engineering structure, the car is totally uninteresting to me. I’m interested in the exact way in which it brings together the visual codes for expressing our ordinary perceptions about reality — for example, that the future is something with a fin on it — and the whole system of expectations contained in the design of the car, expectations about our freedom to move through time and space, about the identities of our own bodies, our own musculatures, the complex relationships between ourselves and the world of objects around us. These highly potent visual codes can be seen repeatedly in every aspect of the 20th century landscape. What do they mean? Have we reached a point now in the 70s where we only make sense in terms of these huge technological systems? I think so myself, and that it is the vital job of the writer to try to analyse and understand the huge significance of this metallised dream.

I’m interested in the automobile as a narrative structure, as a scenario that describes our real lives and our real fantasies. If every member of the human race were to vanish overnight, I think it would be possible to reconstitute almost every element of human psychology from the design of a vehicle like this. As a writer I feel I must try to understand the real meaning of a lot of commonplace but tremendously complicated events. I’ve always been fascinated by the complexity of movement when a woman gets out of a car.

J.G. BALLARD: The close relationship between our own bodies and the body of the motor car is obvious. American automobile stylists have been exploring for years the relationship between sexuality and the motor car body, the primitive algebra of recognition which we use in our perception of all organic forms. If the man in the motor car is the key image of the 20th century, then the automobile crash is the most significant trauma. The car crash is the most dramatic event in most people’s lives, apart from their own deaths, and in many cases the two will coincide.

Are we just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance? Each year hundreds of thousands of people are killed in car crashes all over the world. Millions are injured. Are these arranged deaths arranged by the colliding forces of the technological landscape, by our own unconscious fantasies about power and aggression, our obsessions with consumer goods and desires, the overlaying fictions that are more and more taking the place of reality? It’s always struck me that people’s attitudes towards the car crash are very confused, that they assume an attitude that in fact is very different from their real response. If we really feared the car crash, none of us would ever be able to drive a car.

J.G. Ballard in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

I know that my own attitudes to the crashed car are just as confused. The distorted geometry of this tremendously stylised object: let’s face it, the most powerful symbol of our civilisation. It seems to pull at all sorts of concealed triggers in the mind: the postures of people in crashed vehicles; deformed manufacturer’s styling devices (crashed General Motors cars look very different from crashed Fords); the stylisation of the instrument panel, which after all is the model for our own wounds. Driving around, each of us knows what is literally the shape of our own death.

J.G. BALLARD: I remember seeing some films on television of test crashes a few years ago. They were using American cars of the late 50s, a period I suppose when the American dream, and American confidence, were at their highest point. Metering coils trailed out of the windows and they had dummies sitting in them. They were beautifully filmed. They filmed them beautifully because they wanted to know what was happening. They weren’t interested in the aesthetics of the thing. These cars were in head-on collisions, right-angled collisions and sideswipes. And ploughing into other structures like utility poles. One could see four feet of metal suddenly become one foot. Filmed in slow motion, these crashes had a beautiful stylised grace. The power and weight of these cars gave them an immense classical dignity. It was like some strange technological ballet.

I remember looking at these films and thinking about the strange psychological dimensions they seemed to touch. They seemed to say something about the way everything becomes more and more stylised, more and more cut off from ordinary feeling. It seems to me that we have to regard everything in the world around us as fiction, as if we were living in an enormous novel, and that the kind of distinction that Freud made about the inner world of the mind, between, say, what dreams appeared to be and what they really meant, now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. All the structures in it, flyovers and motorways, office blocks and factories, are all part of this enormous novel.

Take a structure like a multi-storey car park, one of the most mysterious buildings ever built. Is it a model for some strange psychological state, some kind of vision glimpsed within its bizarre geometry? What effect does using these buildings have on us? Are the real myths of this century being written in terms of these huge unnoticed structures?

More exactly, I think that new emotions and new feelings are being created, that modern technology is beginning to reach into our dreams and change our whole way of looking at things, and perceiving reality, that more and more it is drawing us away from contemplating ourselves to contemplating its world.

J.G. Ballard 1971.

Gabrielle Drake in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

NB: Gabrielle Drake is Nick Drake's sister.
More Ballard here.

Bonus:
'Warm Leatherette' by The Normal.
Inspired by Ballard's 'Crash' this was by Daniel Miller and was the first release from Mute Records.