On the painkilling properties of falling down a YouTube rabbithole
This week I watched nearly all of the television interviews ever given by the writer J.G. Ballard. J.G. Ballard is my new boyfriend. We used to spend a lot of time together when I was 19, but it felt inappropriate to start a relationship when he was so much more dead than me. Over the last decade I have remained alive, but have made efforts to catch up with Ballard by eating too many crisps, and living in the United Kingdom.
If you’re not aware of his work, Ballard is best known as the author of Crash (1973), a novel about people who are horny for car crashes and / or the seductive anti-human forces of consumer capitalism. Throughout his life, Ballard wrote with unerring prescience about impending technological nightmares, alienated sexuality, and the simmering fascism of English suburbia. But most importantly, he is my boyfriend.
A bit of context about all this: for the past three days I’ve had a bout of excruciating migraines which have confined me to a dark room and I have gone mad.
While lying in bed, I decided to watch some interviews with Ballard. I’ve always loved his work, but I had no idea what he looked or sounded like. The answer in both cases is: the most English person who has ever lived.
And he only became more English as he got older:
As I let video after video autoplay, I realised I was engaging in a distinctly Ballardian hobby: amassing a huge catalogue of unnecessary information about a stranger. Unlike The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), this catalogue didn’t include a fictional scientific paper about the violent psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan, but it did feature Ballard claiming that women “don’t like SF” because they are “too mature.” Wrong on both counts, Jimmy - I like cyberpunk AND dick jokes.
I also learned that Ballard trained in anatomy, something which clearly influences his tendency to describe sex acts in excruciating medical detail. In works like Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, sexuality becomes removed from bodily reality and re-encoded onto strange constellations of objects and celebrities, which in turn are recorded by characters with cold encyclopaedic relish.
In this way, much of his fiction is concerned with the post-modern condition which philosopher Jean Baudrillard described in his essay The Ecstacy of Communication (1987). That is, the replacement of all previous forms of meaning with an orgy of information. To explain the concept further, here’s a section in which Baudrillard compares the form of the close-up photograph to pornography.
And yes, this philosophy is French.
The extreme opposite of seduction is the extreme promiscuity of pornography, which decomposes bodies into their slightest detail, gestures into their minutest movements. Our desire reaches out to these new kinetic, numeric, fractal, artificial and synthetic images […] However, we don’t look for definition or richness of imagination in these images; we look for the giddiness of their superficiality, for the artifice of the detail, the intimacy of their technique
Essentially: in a world of mass media, devouring increasingly granular data about something becomes a higher pleasure than any real experience of the object itself.
From my YouTube sickbed I was indulging in a deliberate ecstacy of communication. In a media landscape which implores you not to dwell on anything for more than 10 seconds, ingesting large amounts of information about a single topic becomes an almost meditative practice.
Indeed, I was consciously using unnecessary - and often tedious - facts about Ballard’s career to clog up my brain in the hope that some of the migraine pain wouldn’t be able to reach it. And it worked. Well, it was either that or the paracetamol, ibuprofen, and small measure of Ballard’s preferred offering to interviewers: scotch.
My favourite video was a 2003 BBC profile of the author in which he drives presenter Tom Sutcliffe to lunch. I mean, what could be more exciting than an interview where there’s a non-zero risk that the subject might dismember the presenter in a perverse car crash?
I joke, Ballard is very kind to the parade of overly-earnest men who interview him. However, he does like to play up to being the Motor-Pervert King of Concrete Dystopia - and you sense he is amused by just how seriously people are taking the bit:
SUTCLIFFE V.O: Flight has alway exerted a magnetic attraction for Ballard. When he suggests lunch, it’s at a favourite location: the Hilton Hotel just yards from the runway at Heathrow.
BALLARD: I’ve never actually stayed in this hotel. I’ve always liked it.
SUTCLIFFE: This really does look like a multi-storey car park.
BALLARD: Yes, that’s the idea.
So J.G. Ballard, thanks for being today’s YouTube boyfriend. Now call me back. I’m waiting by the Ouija board.
Want to get started with Ballard? I’d recommend Crash (1973) as well as the short stories Report on An Unidentified Space Station (1982) and The Intensive Care Unit (1977). My hot tip is that all the best short stories are in Volume 2 of the collected edition.
SOME ACTUAL PERSONAL NEWS
I haven’t blogged for a while as I currently have that rarest of things: a full-time TV writing job! I’ve left the lovely Hat Trick Productions and am having a few months off being a TV producer at the same time as being a writer. Can I just say… I did not know there was so much light in the day.
Of course, I’m looking to line up more writing work, especially in scripted, so give me or my agent a shout if you think I might be a good fit for your project. I promise I won’t talk about Crash in meetings. Much.
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