Closed

Crash

"We joined the fast westward sweep of the outer circular motorway. I moved the car into the slow lane as we turned around the central drum of the interchange, accelerating when we gained the open deck or the motorway, traffic speeding past us. Everywhere the perspectives had changed. The concrete walls of the slip road reared over us like luminous cliffs. The marker lines diving and turning formed a maze of white snakes, writing as they carried the wheels of the cars crossing their backs, as delighted as dolphins. The overhead route signs loomed above us like generous dive-bombers. I pressed my palms against the rim of the steering wheel, pushing the car unaided through the golden air...The bones of my forearms formed a solid coupling with the shift of the steering column, and I felt the smallest tremors of the road-wheels magnified a hundred times, so that we traversed each grain of gravel or cement like the surface of a small asteroid. The murmur of the transmission system reverberated through my legs and spine, echoing off the plates of my skull as if I myself were lying in the transmission tunnel of the car, my hands taking the torque of the crankshaft, my legs spinning to propel the vehicle forwards.
The daylight above the motorway grew brighter, an intense desert air. The white concrete became a curving bone. Waves of anxiety enveloped the car like pools of heat off summer macadam...The cars overtaking us were now being superheated by the sunlight, and I was sure that their metal bodies were only a fraction of a degree below their melting points, held together by the force of my own vision, and that the slightest shift of my attention to the steering wheel would burst the metal films that held them together and break these blocks of boiling steel across our path. By contrast, the oncoming cars were carrying huge cargoes of cool light, floats loaded with electric flowers being transported to a festival...Their radiator grilles formed mysterious emblems, racing alphabets that unraveled at high speed across the road service...
An armada of angelic creatures, each surrounded by an immense corona of light, was landing on the motorway on either side of us, sweeping down in the opposite directions. They soared past, a few feet above the ground, landing everywhere on these endless runways that covered the landscape. I realized that all these roads and expressways had been built by us unknowingly for their reception...
Around me the interior of the car glowed like a magician's bower, the light within the compartment becoming darker and brighter as I moved my eyes. The instrument dials irradiated my skin with their luminous needles and numerals. The carapace of the instrument binnacle, the inclined planes of the dashboard panel, the metal sills of the radio and ashtrays gleamed around me like altarpieces, their geometries reaching towards my body like the stylized embraces of some hyper-cerebral machine." -j.g. ballard

In the late 1970's, j.g. ballard envisioned a dystopian world of manufacture and restraint. Nature is replaced by infrastructure and its wastes, and man is hypnotized and subjected by his own creation. The electrically charged cityscape consumes the characters by preoccupying them: drug use begins, becomes both more frequent and more varied, while sex becomes equally compulsive, meticulously choreographed to mimic and celebrate the pain of past accidents, recreating exact collision positions but indifferent as to choice of partner. As they travel back and forth between apartments, parking garages and accident sites, characters begin to see their concrete and mechanized surroundings as organic, compatible and at times indistinguishable from their own construction. Typical pursuits of business or romance are meaningless and hardly present, while it becomes increasingly apparent that in absence of a place to settle the best thing is to be in motion, in the absence of definability, velocity still has value.

Like the machines which transport them, ballard’s characters are impersonally driven. Severed from their past lives, they gladly submit to the intoxications of an environment which demands of them only speed and motion. Dislodged from life as a salesman, the novel’s protagonist, James, no longer finds traditional forces of employment and finances compelling. Unable to effectively participate in his old life, James takes an extended leave of absence which blossoms into a binge of experience under the influence of the emotionally powerful and chaotic Robert Vaughn, a fellow accident victim obsessed with the brutality of automobiles and his goal of killing a famous actress.

Truly an Ahab, Vaughn pursues his goal of vehicular murder/suicide with such vehemence that the motives for his pursuit (fame, revenge, lust, habit, boredom) are less important then the fact of his efforts and their eventual result. A former television journalist, Vaughn’s accident disfigures him badly enough to end his career but fails to diminish his desire for fame. Obsessed with the technology which has displaced him from his former self, Vaughn haunts accident sites like an overzealous ghost, all the time plotting the perfect way to slay a star and secure his fame. In his perverted pursuit he attracts a following of fellow accident sufferers, each of whom endure the pains of repressed ambition and aimlessness, pains physically reflected by the scars they bear as evidence of hard restraint.

For ballard's characters enrapture has become a form of servitude. Their accidents have at once freed them from trivial pursuits, and bound them to the method of their enlightenment. Confronted by a meaningless existence explained to them in the loud language of vehicles breaking against one another, they became worshipers of the elegant designs of an empty culture, themselves doomed to be consumed by the motorways and vehicles whose simple beauty they once commanded - ignorantly, impassively - on their daily commute.