So crazy shit becomes boring when normalised. Maybe the world needed to be appraised of this. Like how porn in general becomes ever more explicit, and ever more extreme, as the breaking of each taboo becomes normalised. Eventually, megadeath, or the vaginal evisceration of a woman is just as dull as another wank. I remember the good old days when playing doctors and nurses was excitingly transgressive.

It's not an Earth shattering insight: when you're tired of Crash, you're tired of death. That's about how good it can possibly be, I think: a demonstration of the banality of evil. — unenlightened

Internally, Crash normalizes some crazy shit, but the result is to de-normalize what we take to be unremarkable in the real world: the inhuman landscapes of flyovers, car parks, and airport hotels; selfish passionless sex; the love affair with cars; a horrific accident. Ballard wrote about the “death of affect”, referring to the replacement of feeling with mere sensation:

When I wrote about the death of affect in The Atrocity Exhibition in the late ’60s, I was writing against a background of a sensation-hungry media landscape that seized on all the violent imagery emerging from Vietnam, from the Kennedy assassination, from civil wars in Africa—all that atrocity footage that gave The Atrocity Exhibition its name. I was writing about the way in which sensation had usurped the place previously occupied by some kind of sympathetic engagement with the subject. I mean, one saw blowups of the Kennedy motorcade used as backdrops in fashion magazines. Images that should have elicited pity and concern were drained of any kind of human response, in the way that Warhol demonstrated. His art really was dedicated to just that. I don’t think it is quite so blatant nowadays. It is now incorporated into the way we see the world. In the ’60s one would see fashion models flouncing around in front of a backdrop of the Kennedy assassination, or a napalm explosion. You’d think, “My God, what are they doing?” Now, of course, thirty years later, you don’t even notice it.

I think a large part of the furor created here by Crash has been the desperate response of people who’ve seen a number of appalling atrocities on British television—like the massacre of sixteen five-year-olds in Scotland last March—and are looking for an explanation. You know, something must be behind this appalling event, and people think maybe there’s something wrong with the media world itself. — Ballard interview in Artforum magazine

Appraising the world of this is more than just about the banality of evil, I think. It’s a particular kind of banality.

But I want to pull back from the cautionary tale angle somewhat. Crash is an artistic reflection or exaggeration of reality that does not have a clear message, or one that is easy to explicate, but does that mean it’s just an indulgence of depravity?

But I want to pull back from the cautionary tale angle somewhat. Crash is an artistic reflection or exaggeration of reality that does not have a clear message, or one that is easy to explicate, but does that mean it’s just an indulgence of depravity? — Jamal

I guess it is one of those sanctimonious Malcolm Muggeridge type "I'm going into all this in great detail for your education and improvement" type indulgences. But I'm guessing on hearsay, because the whole horror/porn/thriller/gangster/ police /serial-killer/supernatural scene already bores me, so I'm not really concerned to find out either way.

But I'm guessing on hearsay, because the whole horror/porn/thriller/gangster/ police /serial-killer/supernatural scene already bores me, so I'm not really concerned to find out either way. — unenlightened

If the horror/porn/thriller/gangster/ police /serial-killer/supernatural scene bores you, allow me to recommend…Crash.

:lol: Thanks, but no thanks. Nature, History and Science programs have all the excitement I need.

Not sure I’d recommend Crash for excitement, but fair enough.

Thank you for your contribution. Next time I start a topic about a book you haven’t read, be sure to join in. :grin:

Next time I start a topic about a book you haven’t read, be sure to join in. :grin: — Jamal

Sure, but please try and find a book you somewhat like, next time. :razz:

Fair.

Speaking of books I haven't read, I just came to this fragment, and thought of this unhappy thread. Make of it what you can:

Context and relevance must be characteristic not only of all so­ called behavior (those stories which are projected out into "action"), but also of all those internal stories, the sequences of the building up of the sea anemone. Its embryology must be somehow made of the stuff of ' stories. And behind that, again, the evolutionary process through mil­ lions of generations whereby the sea anemone , like you and like me, came to be--that process, too, must be of the stuff of stories. There must be relevance in every step of phylogeny and among the steps.
Prospero says, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," and surely he is nearly right. But I sometimes think that dreams are only fragments of that stuff. It is as if the stuff of which we are made were to­tally transparent and therefore imperceptible and as if the only appearances of which we can be aware are cracks and planes of fracture in that transparent matrix. Dreams and percepts and stories are perhaps cracks and irregularities in the uniform and timeless matrix. Was this what; Plotinus meant by an "invisible and unchanging beauty which pervades all things?"

https://monoskop.org/images/c/c3/Bateson_Gregory_Mind_and_Nature.pdf

I was going to make a thread on "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", but I think I'll try this book instead.

Speaking of books I haven't read, I just came to this fragment, and thought of this unhappy thread. Make of it what you can — unenlightened

I don’t see what’s unhappy about this thread, and although I keep encountering the name of Bateson and am quite interested, I don’t know what to make of the quotation in the context of this discussion. I’d be interested in reading either an explanation of what you think its relevance is (without worrying that you’re judging Crash without having read it), or a new and exciting thread on Bateson’s Mind and Nature.

If I had to guess, I’d say you kinda want to say something like: Crash seems like a story without a context, a revelling in psychopathy untethered from context and norms; and that if you are going to throw out love, you better make it clear that doing so is not recommended.

But I might be reading too much into your post.

Incidentally, I found many scholarly papers that look at Ballard’s work in terms of Bateson or otherwise somehow combine them.

I might be reading too much into your post. — Jamal

Yes. On my part I was momentarily struck by a superficial connection between my rather feeble involvement here and my more engaging reading matter. But if others are also making the connection, there might be something significant to it.

You telling a story, Ballard telling a story, DNA telling a story, me telling the story of not reading the story of the story your story is about; all of these as cracks in the ineffable beauty of the world, as if the perfect story needs no telling. When one relates a story, one relates it to another, and the interaction is also a relatable story. And the moral of that is — that stories have morals, and are relationships that we morally judge.

But read Bateson. He is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Much more important than Ballard, because he moves the whole story of human thought forwards. Like Shakespeare, his writing is littered with cliches of his own invention.

You telling a story, Ballard telling a story, DNA telling a story, me telling the story of not reading the story of the story your story is about; all of these as cracks in the ineffable beauty of the world, as if the perfect story needs no telling. When one relates a story, one relates it to another, and the interaction is also a relatable story. And the moral of that is — that stories have morals, and are relationships that we morally judge. — unenlightened

This is interesting, obscure, and either agreeable or disagreeable. :up:

But read Bateson. He is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Much more important than Ballard, because he moves the whole story of human thought forwards. Like Shakespeare, his writing is littered with cliches of his own invention. — unenlightened

I’m speeding along a different road right now, but Bateson now appears slightly bigger in the distance.