Chapter Eight, Part I:


Screen Games:
Ballard's fiction and film

Chain of many mirrors, the cinema is at once a weak and a robust mechanism: like the human body, like a precision tool, like a social institution. And the fact is that it is really all of these at the same time. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, (1977) [1] The Hughes Papers exhaustively analyses the possible involvement of the Hughes empire in political and financial corruption. But the present state of the art as revealed by Watergate and the Lockheed scandals suggests that Hughes’ activities in the fifties and sixties amounted to little more than discreet tinkering, and would barely be of interest except for his increasingly eccentric behaviour. I admire Hughes, above all for the casual way in which he closed the door on the world. Lying back on the couch with the blinds drawn, popping pills and worrying about fad diets while watching the 170th re-run of Ice Station Zebra, reminds me in many ways of life today in the Thames Valley. Hughes may well have been more in touch with reality than one assumes. J.G. Ballard, New Statesman, (1977) [2]

Part I. Chain of many mirrors

The strategies Ballard uses to write his fiction are close to those of filmmaking. The structures of film provide one of the technologies he uses to enter the events of his time and set up his mental landscapes. He selects the objects, figures, images, lights, and voices of his fiction, and assembles them to generate the mise en scene in which his characters can work. He then sets up points of entry into these ‘mythologies of memory and desire’. His fiction, as Iain Sinclair puts it, reads ‘like storyboards for unmakeable films’. It is not easy to make films of his work. His obsessive lists ‘would operate like unoptioned shooting scripts’.^[3] This is because his fiction is already too much like film, at least at the core of its technological structures.

In all its forms, film is the medium that most clearly discloses the relationship between humans and technology in the twentieth century. Film brings together the quotidian and the marvelous, and fuses the symbolic and the imaginary. It is the myth-generating ‘mill of images’^[4] in which technology both reveals and hides itself. It makes a space for the operation of ideology, but because that space can become the ‘neutral zone’ between outer and inner worlds, it is also capable of revelation. Christian Metz describes film as a topography:

Thus the constitution of the signifier in the cinema depends on a series of mirror-effects organized in a chain, and not on a single reduplication. In this the cinema as a topography resembles that other ‘space’, the technical equipment (camera, projector, film-strip, screen, etc.), the objective precondition of the whole institution: as we know, the apparatuses too contain a series of mirrors, lenses, apertures and shutters, ground glasses, through which the cone of light passes: a further reduplication in which the equipment becomes a metaphor (as well as the real source) for the mental process instituted. …we shall also see that it is also the fetish. [5]

This topography is a labyrinth — a system of interconnected screens, a ‘chain of many mirrors’ set within a landscape. It is also, like a labyrinth, technological, and is both revelatory and dangerous, a snare for those who enter it. As a technology film is unlimited in its ability to transform, reflect, distort and create. The flickering screens of film are faster in their speed of movement than the human eye because they are a set of displacements, able to hold the steady, sometimes empathetic, gaze of the beholder. Like Cocteau’s Orpheus, the viewer enters this labyrinth through the flat, two-dimensional surfaces of one of its many mirrors. This entry is not singular but continuous, as long as one is looking one is entering, and caught in the labyrinth of surfaces and depths. Shifting screens and devices such as the zoom assist this movement.

The viewer encounters this set of displacements as he or she would dreams. As Metz points out, film is both like and unlike dreams. The viewer is awake, and in the ‘normal’ situation the ‘regressive flux’ (that is, the movement of psychical excitation from the pre-conscious or the unconscious when the film stirs the viewer’s desires) is countered by the ‘progressive counter-flux’^[6] of perception active in the waking viewer, except that ‘in the filmic state… the counter-flux (which is here particularly rich, pressing, continuous) is that of the film itself, of the real images and sounds which cathect perception from without.^[7] The condensations and displacements of film and dream are shown to be technologically similar. Film is like dream in that:

the filmic state, despite wakefulness and counter-flux leaves room for the beginnings of regression … and is marked by more or less consistent psychical thrusts in the direction of perceptual transference and paradoxical hallucination. [8]

There is a similarity between viewing a film and dreaming. Action is suspended for the viewer in both:

The filmic situation brings with it certain elements of motor inhibition, and it is in this respect a kind of sleep in miniature, a waking sleep. The spectator is relatively immobile; he is plunged into a relative darkness, and, above all, he is not unaware of the spectacle-like nature of the film object and the cinema institution in their historically constituted form: he has decided in advance to conduct himself as a spectator (a function from which he takes his name), a spectator and not an actor (the actors have their assigned place, which is elsewhere, on the other side of the film); for the duration of the projection he puts off any plan of action. … To leave the cinema is a little like getting up: not always easy (except if the film was really indifferent). The filmic state thus embodies in a weaker form certain economic conditions of sleep. [9]

Ballard achieves his effects in a manner analogous to cinema. He textualizes quotidian objects and events to show their potential for ‘psychic excitations’, thus presenting an ‘inner space’, a landscape of hypnagogic moods and dream states. His writing also involves a set of screens and displacements. It embodies what Walter Benjamin calls ‘mimesis’, in the form of ‘non-sensuous similarities’ or ‘non-sensuous correspondences’,^[10] between the word and the signified. It is the first mirror (or screen) to be encountered by the reader. Other mirrors follow. In Ballard’s fiction, the relationship between the viewer and the projected image, the object to be projected, the source of light, and the traces on the film through which the light passes is a complex and irreducible one. He represents cameras and their uses and users, focussing both the film itself (the material with which a movie is made), cameras, lenses and their transformative powers. He also textualizes the architecture of cinemas to make his mental landscapes; these are usually derelict or used for purposes other than that for which they were intended. He turns the bare walls of modern architecture and concrete bunkers into screens.

Ballard repeatedly uses the apparatus of cinema advertising–posters and billboards. Film stars, in particular, the glamorous female pin-ups of the 1950s and 60s, such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, appear like dream encounters. The cinema and other kinds of screens that might be the ground of projected imagery recur, the baffles and camouflage scenery of some new labyrinth. His stories sometimes refer to specific popular feature films. These varied but related uses of film are part of the system of mirrors that Ballard makes, and further emphasize the complexity of technology’s role in the production of subjectivity.



Part II. Shifting Time Stations: ‘The Screen Game’ (1963)

Ballard makes filmmaking and its effects the subject matter of his fiction. He does this in ‘The Screen Game’, one of his Vermilion Sands stories. He sets up a place for the story in the unstable and derelict geology of ‘Lagoon West’, part of Ballard’s imaginary landscape of ‘Vermilion Sands’, a resort of the near future where geology is a predominant force, a force that contains or releases time. ‘The Screen Game’ is a story about film, myth and the displacement of screens. It is the ground for what is later realized in the more closely confined spaces of ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977) and ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978). The setting is a place of sand and reefs: as though Ballard has imagined the place of The Tempest after the sea has receded and drained away, but where thermal waves billow onto the dry shore, and the landscape enacts an ‘imperceptible transition between the real and the superreal’.^[11] Like other Ballard places, it is a place where the hyper-real is most visible. Here he reorders the Orpheus myth to show the encounter between art and desire, the ways in which technology intervenes in this encounter, and the way that technology may be used to articulate desire.

Ballard invokes film culture in the names of his characters and in allusions to actual films, such as Cocteau’s Orphée (1950) and Le Testament d’Orphée (1960), and Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (1959). A film company — Orpheus Productions Inc., part of ‘the ebb tide of the new wave’ — comes to ‘Lagoon West to make a film called Aphrodite 80 with its director, Orson Kanin — significantly named for Orson Welles and his screen personae ‘Citizen Kane’ and ‘Mr Arkadin’ — and co-producer Charles Van Stratten — also the name of a character in Welles’ Mr Arkadin (1955). Kanin is famous for an earlier film, Blind Orpheus, ‘a neo-Freudian, horror-film version of the Greek legend’. The narrator, Paul Golding, (a name possibly borrowed from the artist and author of a number of books on Surrealism, John Golding, or indeed the author William Golding) is an artist hired to make a set of huge painted screens as backdrops for Aphrodite 80. In making the screens Golding is supplying the conditions in which the film to be made. Golding’s friend, Tony Sapphire, explains to him that despite its name the film is actually:

‘Kanin’s final examination of the Orpheus legend. The whole question of the illusions which exist in any relationship to make it workable, and of the barriers we willingly accept to hide ourselves from each other. How much reality can we stand?’ [12]

Vision is accordingly an important motif in the story, along with the notion that screens may be constructed both to produce an artistic vision and ‘to screen out anything but the most essential and the most critical’ ^[13] to survival. The screens in this story are multiple and layered, they refigure space. Their discontinuities expose fragments of the landscape in disconcerting ways, introducing ‘an appealing element of uncertainty’.^[14] They, like Ballard’s other pavilions, can form a refuge or a trap. They are ‘both barriers and corridors’,^[15] a ‘cut-up’ of time and space:

Like the protagonist of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, trapped in a labyrinth of tilting walls, the Orphic hero of Aphrodite 80 would appear searching for his lost Eurydice among the shifting time stations. [16]

These time stations, both orienting points of reference within the passage of time and also places where one can enter or exit time, are the painted screens, each depicting one of the signs of the zodiac. They represent time in an archaic and symbolic manner. Ballard raises the issue of strategy and symbolic action in the story’s title. The characters use the screens as chess pieces. This is the game with which the story begins, although the rest of the narrative displaces it. A year after the filming, Golding and his friends play the game on the sand lake among the derelict and collapsing reefs. While playing, he catches a glimpse of a blue-clad woman on the balcony of the villa of Lagoon West. Ballard often uses this figure of the erotic, fragmentary and distant glimpse. It is a figure of time and desire, like the dislocated figure seen through a zoom lens, visible as a figure precisely because it is distant. Ballard describes the figure – and others like it – in such a way as to invoke the same dreamy setting as is seen in the paintings of surrealists like Delvaux. That is, he creates an image that is still, taken out of time because of its distance. In this case it initiates Golding’s story of the previous year and the sado-voyeuristic drama of the screens. He recalls his response to his first glimpse of this ‘strange sibylline figure’:

I felt that I had strayed across the margins of a dream, on to an internal landscape of the psyche projected upon the sun-filled terraces around me. [17]

This woman is Emerelda Garland, the former lover of Charles Van Stratten.^[18] She spends her time setting jewels into spiders, scorpions and other insects which she then releases. These strange and dangerous hybrids of art and nature, of the organic and the inorganic, are little time machines that move across the desert surface fracturing the light. The figure of Emerelda is herself a hybrid of mythic figures, Eurydice and Artemis, and later a vengeful Bacchante. Paul Golding is attracted to her, and pursues her when he sees her among the screens. Ballard uses the screens as metaphors of displacement and as devices for shifting and layering the components of his story. He builds the story on patterns of displacement, and on the structure of Freudian motives and contests.

The narrator learns that the mother of Charles Van Stratten, was a Jamesian matriarch ‘who sat like an immense ormolu spider in her sombre Edwardian mansion on Park Avenue, surrounded by dark galleries filled with Rubens and Rembrandt’,^[19] She had ‘ruthlessly eliminated’ Charles’ wives, and died at Lagoon West in mysterious circumstances. Her own husband died after the birth of Charles, and she ‘regarded Charles as providence’s substitute for her husband’. Emerelda now lives at Lagoon West, watched by the menacing Dr Gruber, another of the figures on a balcony in the pattern of voyeurism and pursuit with which Ballard structures so many of his stories. In this scenario ‘The Screen Game’ is a version of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer, the film of which came out in 1959, except that Ballard is using myth and Freudian method in other ways. Where Williams uses ‘Freud’s explorations within the psyche”, Ballard sets up an exterior space where he can reveal technology’s operation in the ordering of vision and time, and chart the approach of the near future. Characters are not Ballard’s primary concern; it is the spaces between them and their technological environment that matters here.

Ballard’s stories cannot be reduced to simple mythic equivalencies. Although they are powerfully informed by myth there are no stable one-to-one correspondences between the characters and mythic figures. The stories work by means of double displacements. For example, Oedipus is invoked by the relationship between Charles Van Stratten and his mother, and Electra by the relationship between his mother and Emerelda, but these correspondences are incomplete and unstable. Emerelda is Eurydice to Charles Van Stratten, and is described by Golding as having ‘a curious glacé immobility about her face’, her white skin has ‘an almost sepulchral quality, the soft down which covered it like grave dust’. Although Charles is the centre of the Jacobean family tragedy it is Paul Golding, the artist, (and a type of Daedelus, the maze maker) who is the protagonist of these myths. He is hired by Charles to paint the screens, and assists in Charles’ plot to entrap Emerelda within their spiralling corridors. Emerelda also asks Golding to paint some screens for her, duplicates of those used for the film. He describes himself as ‘less her lover than the architect of her fantasies’. He is both Orpheus the artist, and the would-be abductor of a murderous Eurydice. Ballard shifts his mythic references around like stage properties, to remake the myths in a new time and place.

Ballard also uses the Orpheus myth as another ‘screen game’. Charles Van Stratten tells Golding that he sees himself as Orpheus rescuing Eurydice from Dr Gruber, but, Golding observes, ‘He smiled bleakly, as if aware of the slenderness of the analogy and its faint hopes.’ Just as the screens in the story produce a ‘false’ landscape, so there are other feints and subterfuges in this story. The misleading title of the film is one, the deceptive nature of the film project itself is another. As Charles tells Golding, ‘this film is not as abstract as Kanin thinks. In fact its sole purpose is therapeutic.’^[20] This makes it an early version of the ‘therapeutic’ devices of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Kanin finds that the colours of the desert of Lagoon can only be reproduced with the artifice of studio models. Technology reproduces the real. Golding secretly paints more screens and hides them among the existing ones. The operation of another set of screens, analogous to those of dreamwork is set in place, and as they appear in the process of condensation and displacement, Ballard shifts them around.

Charles’ idea of the painted screens is to provide a ‘synthetic landscape’ to entice and trap Emerelda. ‘After all, if she knows that everything around her is unreal she’ll cease to fear it.’^[21] He later tells Golding, ‘Now I know that only the artist can create an absolute reality’.^[22] This figures the artist as one who works with the psychic screening process that protects us from primal terror, not just to assist in the process by making screens, as it were, but to negotiate the (perceived) gap between reality and imagination, or repressed desire and its fulfilment. He creates the hyper-real—the mythology of the psyche as it informs outer reality. His function is thus to work against patriarchal law in order to maintain the symbolism of that law.^[23] The former is achieved by the processes that reconfigure the landscape, the latter by the patterns that emerge from these processes.

Ballard works through three layers, that of the story itself, the plot — or pretext of filmmaking, and the painting of the screens. Between these layers other motives, drives and desires operate to complicate the work. The narrative moves through these layers analytically, to reverse the positions of the latent and the manifest. Ballard uses the plot of filmmaking as a double subterfuge or displacement. This requires that the filmmakers pack up and leave. The planned film is elsewhere, because the real, or rather hyper-real, film is being made with Golding’s screens. The story thus allegorizes Ballard’s filmic methods, and Sinclair’s observation about Ballard’s work as ‘storyboards for unmakeable films’.^[24]

Golding welcomes his role as screen painter, as a break from idleness, having almost succumbed to ‘beach fatigue – irreversible boredom and inertia,’^[25] something like space sickness in ‘Myths of the Near Future’. Concealed and uncertain motives also characterize the filmmakers’ interests. Golding describes Orson Kanin’s Blind Orpheus, as a ‘neo-Freudian, horror-film version of the Greek legend’:

According to Kanin’s interpretation, Orpheus deliberately breaks the taboo and looks Eurydice in the face because he wants to be rid of her; in a famous nightmare sequence which projects his unconscious loathing, he becomes increasingly aware of something cold and strange about his resurrected wife, and finds that she is a disintegrating corpse. [26]

There are different layers of unconscious motivation (or subterfuge and displacement) in this use of the Orpheus motif. Firstly there is Kanin’s ‘interpretation’, which forms the manifest content of his dream of Orpheus. There is the myth itself, as it is received in modern times, and there are other filmic versions of it, in particular Cocteau’s Orphée and Le Testament d’Orphée. There are layers of subterfuge and displacement in Kanin’s version: in breaking the taboo Orpheus is actually restoring Eurydice to Hades, because she has become something fearful to him. He is thus both transgressing a taboo and accepting its rule. He looks at her not to look at her, and becomes an Oedipus figure who turns from vision upon recognizing his mother. Further, unknown to Kanin, Charles plans for Emerelda to ‘play the part’ of Eurydice. There is also desire for, and fear of, death. Golding’s boredom is the key to this. His ‘beach fatigue’, like the dereliction and emptiness of the landscape of the resort, is the necessary condition for the dream-film of death and erotic desire that is to follow. It allows the psychic structures of the landscape to become visible. He is to be the paradoxical camoufleur for the film, rendering the latent content of the desert landscape in symbolic imagery, which then becomes a trap for Emerelda and a labyrinth for all the characters, including himself.

Golding does not say much about the process of the work itself, or of his interest in painting, and he is sceptical and satirical about Kanin and the other ‘avant-garde film men’. He learns of the commission from friends rather than directly from the film company and ‘Preoccupied by the prospect of [our] vast fees’, he enlists them to help him. Ballard figures him so that his motives are always at least at one remove from the visible, behind a screen as it were. Apparently ingenuously, and unaware of his own motives, Golding approaches Emerelda, but then becomes secretly involved by making extra screens. Like so many of Ballard’s characters, he is both subject and object of displacement and subterfuge.

As Kanin’s film is a pretext for Ballard’s story, the game is a pretext for Golding, firstly to enable the capture of Emerelda by Charles Van Stratten (and also by Golding), and later for Golding, Sapphire and another friend, Raymond Mayo, to relieve boredom. This boredom, or the psychic entropy of ‘beach fatigue’, like the attenuation in other stories, is one of the conditions that will allow the revelation of the hyper-real. The characters play with what is left after the film crew has gone, reiterating action the purpose of which is no longer manifest. When they return to the place at the end they find some of the screens buried in the sand, and they burn those that have rotted in the sunlight ‘in a pyre on the beach’. The re-appearance of Emerelda coincides with ‘the ascending plumes of purple and carmine smoke’^[27] of this burning, but while this signals their presence to her, smoke is also another form of camouflage and deception.^[28] It attracts and conceals, one term of the ‘smoke and mirrors’ of persuasion and deception.

Ballard makes geology one of the conditions of his story. He emphasizes its presence as an unstable and inescapable material force at a number of points. For example Golding ‘barely notices’, but is nonetheless aware of the landscape that he describes:

[W]e barely noticed the strange landscape we were crossing, the great gargoyles of red basalt that uncoiled themselves into the air like the spires of demented cathedrals. From the Red Beach – Vermilion Sands Highway – the hills seemed permanently veiled by the sand haze, and Lagoon West, although given a brief notoriety by the death of Mrs Van Stratten, remained isolated and unknown. From the beach houses on the southern shore of the sand-lake two miles away, the distant terraces and tiered balconies of the summer-house could just be seen across the fused sand, jutting into the cerise evening sky like a stack of dominoes. There was no access to the house along the beach. Quartz veins cut deep fissures into the surface, the reefs of ragged sandstone reared into the air like the rusting skeletons of forgotten ships. [29]

The transition from geology to metallurgy and back again is expressed in the simile of rusting ships, skeletal remains Ballard uses to order his representation of the human definition of space in The Drought. It is in this figure that technological relations emerge among the patterns of Ballard’s imagery. The assault of the film crew on the setting is likened to ‘the entire D-Day task force’, another image that links Golding’s artistic practice with that of the camoufleur. Virilio argues a correspondence between warfare and filmmaking, and the relationship between the development of aerial, surveillance and reconnaissance weapons and camera technologies is at least superficially obvious. Ballard shows the way that technology can function as an armature for the imagination, as it does for capitalism. He makes a connection between the technological and the imaginative apprehension of the material world in the making of screens. As he says, however, the making of screens, perhaps for evolutionary reasons, also invokes the displacements and subterfuges of the psyche. In reminding us of the ‘material and concrete’ pre-existence of that which becomes symbolic, Henri Lefebvre argues:

The labyrinth, for instance, was originally a military and political structure designed to trap enemies inextricably in a maze. It served too as palace, fortification, refuge and shelter before coming to stand for the womb. And it was even later that the labyrinth acquired a further symbolic role as modulator of the dichotomy between presence and absence. [30]

These transpositions, from natural forms to technological structures, and then to symbolic representation, are themselves a set of displacements. Uterine physiology, caves or coastal inlets pre-exist the use of a labyrinth as a military device, which later become a symbol, and, as Lefebvre adds, a condition of meaning as ‘modulator of the dichotomy between presence and absence.’ ‘The Screen Game’ establishes the conditions for the interplay of presence and absence and of ‘screening’ to take place. ‘What had begun as a pleasant divertimento, a picturesque introduction to Aphrodite 80, had degenerated into a macabre charade, transforming the terrace into the exercise area of a nightmare.’^[31] Ultimately, the protagonist and his companions are returned to their condition of boredom and reiteration of games and conversation under the gaze of the dangerous but compelling Emerelda Garland, but in the process Charles Van Stratten, a screen image of Golding, is killed by Emerelda’s Bacchante, an ‘armada of jewelled insects’.^[32] Golding and his friends are returned to a reiterative limbo. Paid ‘a dollar per square foot’ for his artistic practice he is a painter ‘in the tradition of Leonardo and Larry Rivers’, who, in the intersecting systems of capitalism and film making, is reduced to being a ‘cut-price dauber’.^[33] Ballard shows the co-existence of the requirements of capital and the desires of the imagination. The two engage by means of the armature of technology. When this occurs, desire, like a loose electrical charge, fires across this (metallurgical) armature. Capitalism, having exploited this energy, leaves, and the armature collapses. The imagination is left to float in an entropic landscape.

This collapse is in part the historical reason for the emergence of a romantic-gothic sensibility at the time of the industrial revolution, and explains the Surrealists’ interest in the derelict or ‘superseded’ mercantile objects and spaces of their recent past, at a time of rapid change. Ballard repeatedly uses the imagery of this collapsed armature — of rocket gantries, rusting ships, crashed aircraft, and other revelatory technological boneyards.^[34] He notices the revelatory potential of these objects, and so is able to textualize their effects in his fiction. By means of ‘their violent dislocation’ he frequently shows how they contain, in their dereliction, the melancholy traces of their former potential which is only visible in archaeology.

I am always struck by the enormous sort of magic and poetry one feels when looking at a junkyard filled with old washing machines, or wrecked cars, or old ships rotting in some disused harbor. An enormous mystery and magic surrounds these objects. I remember not so long ago being in the Imperial War Museum where they have the front section of the Zero fighter cut through the cockpit. One can actually stand looking into the cockpit. And one can see what’s actually underneath the plane; looking up into the interior, one can see every rivet. An enormous sort of tragic poetry surrounds that plane in the Imperial War Museum. One can see all those Japanese men at work; women in their factories in some Tokyo suburb stamping the rivets into this particular plane. One can imagine the plane later on a carrier in the Pacific…. This very touching poetry is completely absent, say, from a brand-new plane or a brand-new washing machine in a showroom, or a brand-new motorcar in a local garage window…. [35]

This is not nostalgia, capitalism’s attempt to batten on the imaginative potential of these remnants and re-configure them in terms of exchange value. Ballard frequently shows how they may have imaginative uses for those prepared to take the risk. ‘Poetry’ emerges when one can ‘see every rivet’, and objects become time machines giving their viewers access to the whole structure of technology – its work, its violence and its ordering of human life. Without the fictional imagination, however, once capital has moved on all that is left is the boredom and reiteration of the damned.^[36]

In ‘The Screen Game’, boredom and reiteration is set against the time-soaked geology of the landscape, and the zodiacal signs suggest the human attempts to extract symbolic reference points from time. Boredom is the slowing of time, and the arrival of the film crew speeds it up. With the presence of the film crew, geology becomes metallurgy by means of technology, but also by art, as William Blake shows.^[37] The sonic-sculptures that lie dormant in their ‘midnight silence’ in the desert around the film location, or keen ‘like banshees’ when disturbed, embody this idea. Like Emerelda’s insects they are hybrid forms.

Several of the older sculptures whose sonic cores had corroded had been broken up and left on the beach, where they had taken root again. When the heat gradients roused them to life they would emit a brief strangled music, fractured parodies of their former song. [38]

The sculptures have the capacity to pick up and return sound. Both organic and inorganic, metallurgical Aeolian harps, they are not only repositories of energy, but also melancholy entropic memento mori. They are objects of apprehension, distorting sound mirrors with the potential to repeat what they have ‘heard’, and supply a dislocated soundtrack to the desert. This dislocation of sound works like the effects of a zoom lens to affect vision and remove images from their time. When Charles Van Stratten stands on the balcony of Lagoon West the sonic sculptures reflect his psychic condition, emitting ‘a strange soft sequence of chords, interwoven by sharper, almost plaintive notes that drifted away across the still afternoon air’.^[39] They have become part of the geology of the landscape, and are different from the screens in their three-dimensionality, but nonetheless enact the relationship between humans and technology in the way they are both subject to, and in control of, time:

The harsh songs of the rogue sculpture still pierced the air. Two miles away, through the haze which partly obscured the distant shore, the beach-houses jutted among the dunes, and the fused surface of the lake, in which so many objects were embedded, was like a segment of embalmed time, from which the music of the sculpture was a slowly expiring leak.’ [40]

Through their distortions, their refiguring of sounds, they may be seen as analogous to screens. They return psychic expression to characters, however. They are also comic figures of ‘the return of the repressed’, and continue to emit the dying accusatory cries of Charles Van Stratten.

Ballard figures the transition from geology to metallurgy in Emerelda’s jewelled insects, the crystalline surfaces of which capture and fracture light. Their movements contrast with the slower time of the desert sand and they signify the menace of speed that is also associated with the ‘invasion’ of the film crew. After the retreat of the film company, the servants at Lagoon West, and Dr Gruber, boredom sets in; ‘the desert is without lustre’, the ‘summer house seemed drab and lifeless’, and the ‘sepulchral emptiness was only broken by the hidden presence of Emerelda Garland.’

The technology of film is one of condensation and displacement. These ‘two types of movement’ according to Metz, appear to be distinct, but ‘would appear to be so to speak inside one another’. ‘On the psychoanalytical level’, condensation may thus be seen ‘as a set of displacements’.^[41] The shifts from the latent to the manifest are enabled by compression.^[42] The multiple screens of film, or Metz’s ‘chain of many mirrors’, enable the transpositions of displacement. Ballard articulates this from a different angle and with a different purpose, as a kind of experimental taxonomy. He does this in his creation of a mental landscape that exposes the relations between natural forms, the structure of the psyche, and the transpositions of symbolism. Reality and illusion intersect in his landscape. A submerged geophysical energy, like ‘some subterranean fire-cloud’,^[43] colours the surface atmosphere.

Ballard presents a physics of time as its tides wash the reefs of the waterless ocean in the desert. Time is located, defined, released or captured in this landscape. Light is refracted and infused in the dust and sand, so that the desert itself is a screen, ‘painted’ by heat and light. Even the instability of the landscape (like the drift ice of Ice Station Zebra)^[44] suggests both the slippage of displacement and the collapsing of space in condensation. Ballard shows the tectonic slide and collapse that produces the multiple strata of symbolism:

The whole of Lagoon West was a continuous slide area. Periodically a soft boom would disturb the morning silence as one of the galleries of compacted sand, its intricate grottoes and colonnades like an inverted baroque palace, would suddenly dissolve and avalanche gently into the internal precipice below.[45]

Ballard reveals connections between dream and film that render insights about the death of affect. The death of affect occurs when there is a separation between ideational material and images, and actions. Just as he creates experimental hypnagogic states and invokes the devices of film, so he experimentally fetishizes objects, to strip them of their ‘normal’ affective associations, or at least to separate affect from object in the manner of both dreamwork and fetishization. Technology fetishizes objects by dislocating them from their original use and violence is a necessary corollary of this. When Ballard fetishizes objects he makes them time machines, enabling a cathexis that is otherwise discharged in the violence of technology. He shows how the technology of condensation and displacement in dream, and in film, can manipulate the release of affect, or can turn affect on and off.

Film can enable affect that is at odds with the viewer’s ‘better judgement’, for example, states of fear or in the discharge of sorrowful emotions when viewing a moving scene in what is obviously ‘only a film’. Conversely, affect may be disabled, incongruent or disordered. Firstly, for example, in violent Hollywood action films, repetition, noise and movement are constructed to produce a sense of pleasurable excitement (which may or may not be ‘escapism’), as opposed to the terror that would accompany such action in ‘real life’. This is achieved by virtue of the vicarious nature of the viewing, but it is clearly different from the sorrow expressed when viewing sorrowful scenes. Secondly, psychological affect may be displaced by aesthetic apprehension of images and sounds, for example, in a scene of a bomb explosion or the like. Thirdly, affect may be disabled, which Ballard seeks in Crash and short stories like ‘The Intensive Care Unit’, to free the viewer of all affective response. That is to say, when film disables affect, the ideational material of the film is free of ‘normal’ affective associations and is presented so as to replicate a kind of psychosis or psychotic state. In this experimental form film may disclose previously prohibited imaginative insights.

In On the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes of the significance of affect in dreams, and its undeniable aspect in contrast to dream ‘content’, which may be more easily discounted by the dreamer. He discusses cases of dreams where the affect one would expect from the ideational content of the dream is absent or different. This problem is solved for Freud, by his explanation that: ‘the ideational material has undergone displacements and substitutions, whereas the affects have remained unaltered.’^[46]

In other words, affect is independent and can be severed from dream images and dream stories. It is not subject to displacement, but is another means by which dream censorship can operate. That is to say, it becomes part of the system of representation in dreams:

For what is distressing may not be represented in a dream; nothing in our dream thoughts which is distressing can force an entry into a dream unless it at the same time lends a disguise to the fulfilment of a wish. [47]

This is particularly noticeable in dreams where the dreamer encounters with equanimity or pleasure something that in waking life would be repugnant to him. It is not that the dreamer would really like to do these things, but rather that the latent content is disguised by both the manifest ideational material of the dream and the incongruous affective response. In such a dream the relationship between affect and the limiting effects of moral attitudes is very clear. Affect is what stops humans from doing certain things. Freud goes on to discuss dissimulation or censorship, and the way in which ‘mutual inhibition’ operates in dreams to protect the dreamer from that which is to be repressed. Ballard uses this very strategy to make his fiction of the technological unconscious of the late twentieth century.

Just as the content of dreams may be at odds with the release of affect, so the absence of affect is a condition of fetishism, and a condition produced by technology. Fetishism is also enabled by condensation and displacement. Someone takes an attitude to something because he thinks it is something else. The film company sets up its screen barriers which attempt to counter the geological instability of the location and to locate moments of time, while Charles Van Stratten and Golding use them in their attempt to restore Emerelda to time.^[48] Ballard writes this story to reveal the structure of a cinema, a camera and a film location. Film is a set of screens that attempt to reorder light, to make light meaningful. It is a set of screens played at speed in an attempt to represent or duplicate time. Film is camouflage and revelation, presence and absence, manifest and latent content. It is an attempt to give meaning to time, while making its own time. Again, film is the cross traffic of manifest and latent meanings.



Go to: Part II of Chapter Eight