Gendered Money Drabble

"In numerous novels, plays, and poems, the culture of 1980s Britain and its people are represented in terms of extremes: rich and poor, empowered and victimized, enlightened and ignorant, enthusiastic and embittered.

So begins J. Miracky's exploration of Martin Amis's Money - an almost pitch perfect description of the juxtaposed Extremes that John Self experiences through the course of the novel, his suicide note. Although Money seems a very Self motivated (pun intended) novel, driven solely by the vulgar and hedonistic character as he navigates through the world, it is a novel that actually depends wholly on that "Royal Wedding/Riots in 1981" world to properly function. It is not so much John Self that the reader is asked to react to but his reactions to a 20th century world and what that world means not only to him and the characters in the book, but to us as well.

I think it's interesting how, in the early pages of Money we experience the world exactly as Self experiences it. Everything is described with a hazy gloss, everything is funneled directly through his eyes with no sense of reality (in some ways, parts of the novel remind me of the unreality of Crash in that respect). Cab drivers, bell-hops, strippers, even smells and sounds all seem to be things that come at him, like a never ending landscape to a driver on a long stretch of highway. It's a sort of constant bombardment of information that's never processed or meditated upon, in keeping, as Miracky says, with the "attention-deficit-disordered quality" of John Self.

I agree that media and the general climate of Thatcher's England, though never addressed in a concrete way, is a huge part of what makes Self's life what it is. His addiction to things, to the very notion of addiction, is an idea that I think many people now living in even this 21st century world with its excesses and its uncertainties can relate to.

In the scene where Self leave's Martin Amis, after telling him about his undoing by Frank the Phone - I saw the breakdown of Self's usual worldview. The world was coming at him - a real, objective world beyond the sheen of television and porno mags. He hears "the streets scream," and indeed this is the most real reaction to the world that he's had throughout the entire book. He says "you're told about street culture," by the media, by the world, and for the first time he actually looks and sees the world for what it is - perhaps not for what it actually is but certainly for what it actually is in relation to him, his actual self, and not the false self that he's built up with the identity of a director, with his addictions, with his obsessions with Martina and Selina. Suddenly he's rejecting that TV is real - and the realization frightens him. Because if TV isn't real, if the shadow of the life he's built for himself isn't real, if the last hundred or so pages of the novel isn't real than that means he isn't real, either.

Cronenberg's 'Crash' - A Reaction

David Cronenberg's 1990s film adaptation of Crash is a movie that, for me, succeeds and fails on two different levels. Like most film adaptations, there are several superficial changes to the landscape of the story in comparison with the JG Ballard book, the biggest change being that the book takes place in and around London, while the movie takes place in Toronto. That's fine. The characters being British or Canadian or American is really irrelevant, because just as in the book we have the same labyrinthine highways and car parks,the same detached, almost surreal atmosphere.

The casting makes sense. Perhaps with the slight exception of Holly Hunter as Helen Remington (who just really annoys me), all the characters felt and looked very much as I'd imagined in my mind. In fact, Elias Koteas was almost exactly like the Vaughn I had pictured in my mind, both physically and in his mannerisms. His performance was my favorite of the film.The overall tone of the film, too, mirrored for me in many ways the tone of the book. Everything was very stark, very gray, very detached. Even presented with the mundane images of an overpass or an airport or a hospital corridor, there was something still very strange and alien about this world.

I think Cronenberg did a very good job of staying true to the book dialogue-wise, there are scenes that lift whole passages from the novel, which you rarely find it book to film adaptations which tend to truncate a lot of important speech. But then, for me, Crash is a book that does not rely heavily on actual dialogue to begin with - it is rather what happens in between and especially what happens in Ballard's mind that is the driving force of the narrative.

And in that way, the film failed as a successful adaptation. It's interesting that throughout the past several weeks everyone has been talking about how "cinematic" the book is. And here we are with the visual representation of the visual manifestation of that cinematic quality and it's like: "Oh, yeah. Traffic. This looks cool." The movie is visually striking (the last shot of Ballard and Catherine is pretty amazing), but it is missing some of the pathos that makes the novel not just a never ending series of violent sexual escapades in cars.

The movie, to me, comes to nothing. It makes a strong effort of capturing and distilling the meaning of these characters' actions, but somehow it all rings even more hollow than the book. It's disturbing, but not in a thought provoking way. It even, at time, got to be a little dull. I think the story also suffered a great deal from the absence of an "Elizabeth Taylor" like figure for Vaughn to be obsessed with. I think it's important that while the Ballard/Vaughn/Catherine dynamic is important, Vaughn's quest for immortality should be embodied in a movie star and not in the couple.

I think Cronenberg made a bold attempt at adapting the novel. Crash is most certainly unlike any film I've ever seen, and I'd very much like a second viewing to try and wrap my head around how I feel about it definitively.

In any case, I've found the last ten minutes of the movie with commentary from David Cronenberg himself. It's interesting to hear him discuss the impetus behind the choices he made - for instance, in the sequence in which Ballard is chasing Catherine, James Spader had originally played it as more predatory and ruthless. But Cronenberg decided that wasn't the right tone, that he should be "playful and exuberant," and so the whole sequence was reshot. Anyway, enjoy:

Final Crash

As I finished the last pages of Ballard's Crash, an acute feeling of uneasiness came over me. Why, I don't know. Perhaps it had to do with the strangeness, the eeriness in how we leave the characters. Or perhaps it had to do with the fact that I had no idea what to think, and I generally try to know exactly what I think at the end of any book, any movie, any TV show.

I can't say that I can work through, at least not on a first reading, what Ballard's full "intent" behind Crash was. I think, perhaps, his intent was what we discussed in a past discussion in class: a novel which would serve as a fractured mirror to our own world. From its setting to its characters, to even the way the story is presented, nothing in Crash is recognizable or "right." It's "wrongness," too, is not presented as glamorous or exciting, perverse in the way some late night movie on Showtime is.

The elements of technology, of the melding of flesh and chrome, create a sensibility so odd that all I could really take form it was "OK. This is disturbing." But what's also interesting, what might also speak to what Ballard's intention was, is that after a while...it isn't disturbing. It all becomes just as matter-of-fact and commonplace as Ballard's own descriptions of his world.

The reader is conditioned to and desensitized to the clinical, detached descriptions of human sexuality and behavior. So that, for me, is what I mostly took away from Crash. Perhaps that in fact is what the uneasiness was - an uneasiness with my eventual acceptance of the world in which I was a visitor.

I'm excited to watch David Cronenberg's film adaptation of the book - partly because the book struck me as very cinematic despite its limited and claustrophobic setting, and also because I've always been interested in Cronenberg's own sort of twisted view of reality. Perhaps watching these characters speak, move, and interact with one another will add another layer of understanding to my reading experience.

The Composite

This is great, I found a blog that posts images of literary characters using law enforcement composite sketch software. Below is a composite of Vaughn, using the following description from Crash:

"His exhausted face, with its scarred mouth…As his pock-marked jaws champed on a piece of gum I had the sudden feeling that he was hawking obscene pictures around the wards…But what marked him out was the scar tissue around his forehead and mouth, residues of some terrifying act of violence…Heavy black hair…Broken and re-set nose bridge…His features looked as if they had been displaced laterally, reassembled after the crash from a collection of faded publicity photographs. The scars on his mouth and forehead, the self-cut hair and two missing upper canine gave him a neglected and hostile appearance…His hard mouth, with its scarred lips, was parted in a droll smile."

Is he how you imagined him?

imitation of sorts

If there was something wrong with him, or me, I couldn’t tell. We couldn’t tell, because the reality of the situation had escaped us long ago.

There were four of us that night, or two, that night at the lake, which in the winter gloom was like a smooth black mirror against the black sky, mottled with violently blinking stars and a muffled moon.

In the summer we had come here, to be all alone and together. And in the summer, here, by the lake in the daytime when it was a murky, ineffectual green, the color sludge, he told me what he wanted us to do.

It had to be us, he said, because we knew. We knew listening to someone speak and processing the speech, the words falling out of their lips and tripping over their tongues in a burbling stream of bullshit, and we knew what it was to be only half there, to be in several places at once all at the same time, and we knew what it was to look at a person (like a mother, a teacher, or a sanitation worker) and imagine with explicit detail choking them to death, or shooting them in the skull at point-blank range, a cartoon spray of blood speckling our faces as we blew their brains out.

This is what he did sometimes, he told me, to comfort himself. “I picture people that I love die.”

We knew like no one else could know or cared to know and so, really, it had to be us.

At the lake, in the relative silence of the evening I could see, refracted in the light that glinted off the cool steel handle of the knife, the tiny fragments of all our lives that had led up to this exact moment. It was an intricate mosaic of cause and effect, of action and outcome, all so deafeningly clear that it was almost disgusting.

He said nothing. I remember he held his hand up, briefly – a strange, jerky motion that we couldn’t understand and therefore did not bother to process. When the blade sliced through the thin layer of skin that had lain taut over his Adam’s apple it had been simultaneously the most glorious and most mundane thing I’d ever witnessed.

Glorious, of course, in its banality.

It was rather easy, after that. I had the strange, almost comical image of a ripe tomato in my mind as I watched the blade slice through skin and muscle, sometimes hitting bone.

“See how you’re brother’s blood cries out to me from the earth,” one of us whispered – a half remembered Bible verse.

It went on like this for some time.

We laid his body out along the lakeside. This long, useless thing. Blood, bright, the color of a dress I’d seen once at a party once, was gushing from the wound his throat in spurts, in stops and starts, as if his body hadn’t decided yet whether it wanted to die.

We sat next to him, but we didn’t touch him, or look at him, not even when he moaned something, inaudible, and reached out his hand. Acknowledging the act would have ruined integrity of the thing.

Eventually one of us said, “Is he dying? I think he's dying.”

And then, "I want to go home...I don't like it here. It's dark. I'm scared."

Another one of us laughed. I don’t know who.

Ballard's 'Crash'

The first four chapter's of J.G. Ballard's Crash were...interesting. I think Robin mentioned on the first day of class that what most if not all transgressive literature does is not only "upset-wildly held values" but also, you know, make us uncomfortable. Uncomfortable because we see something of ourselves in between the lines? Perhaps...perhaps not.

What struck me immediately about the text was the clinical, matter-of-fact way in which the language was written. Sex isn't just sex, it's "the sexual act." The ass crack isn't the ass crack it's "the natal cleft." The first pages are just this wild micture of bodily fluids - blood, semen, feces, sweat - it's pretty unpleasant to read, but it makes for a very defined introduction to the narrator. The language he uses, as stark and matter-of-fact as it is in some places, also provides further understanding into the way he thinks.

Because all the unpleasant, perhaps nasty, perhaps upsetting things he talks about (unpleasant, nasty, and upsetting for us) is described as if they were the opposite. There are constant mentions of rainbows - lighting up Vaughn's scarred face, refracted in puddles of urine, or the bruises on John's chest. The aftermath of these accidents, too, are described in such a way, like the "fragments of tinted windshield" set in a victim's forehead "like jewels." The way the narrator sees the world and describes the world is always a little off than how "normal" people would.

All of these little quirks and ticks just d more to create a character who is not in the least likable but very intriguing. I'm even more intrigued, however, by the mysterious character of Vaughn, whose obsession seems to be even more intense than the narrator's.

I'm eager to continue on with this story - it's giving me an insight into one way in which this sort of subject matter can be tackled. I recently saw a documentary about objectum sexuals (one of the people followed is the infamous woman who married the Eiffel Tower), and it formed the catalyst for a story I've been working on about someone who falls in love with her neighbor's house. I admire how Ballard has written this character rather unapologetically, neither condemning nor condoning his actions but just presenting them for what they are - I hope I can do the same.

You can watch the first part of "Married to the Eiffel Tower" below:

Nabokov's "Natasha"

In Valdimir Nabokov's short story "Natasha" we are presented with characters living in separate realties from one another. Wolfe, who lives out fantasies of a life as a man-of-the-world, Natasha, who lives in an ethereal limbo of self-denial and Khrenov - in a reality that is and isn't defined by the present, a reality that's slowly deteriorating, punctuated only by unpleasant dreams of his past.

For me, Nabokov's language always seems to distance itself from the characters, and thus the characters from the reader. By the time Wolfe and Natasha share their date in the the park, we realize that we really cannot trust anything they say or do - they are too far gone.

The story, to me, seems more cinematic than literary - in that so many of the descriptions, which are so specifically visual ("the sleek, girlish part of her hair") seem like the flashes or glimpses of cut up images that you would see in a fim. So, I found myself reading this story and being more affected by the tone and the feel of it rather than whatever plot there was. A sort of hazy, sleepy, other-worldly feel - slightly upsetting, but in a subtle way.

I recently saw a film called We Need to Talk About Kevin that, while certainly not comparable at all in terms of story, seems to have this intangible tone that the story does: