BARBER: Have you ever been involved in a car crash – you seem preoccupied with car crashes recently.
BALLARD: No, I’ve never been in one. Serious car crashes take a very long time to recover from, and if I’d been in one I’d probably have a different view of them. But the car crash is probably the most dramatic, perhaps the only dramatic, event in most people’s lives apart from their own death, and in many cases the two will coincide. It’s true people are dying in Vietnam and people are being involved in all kinds of other violence, but in America something like 35,000 people die in car crashes every year, and about 7,000 over here, and about 12,000 in Germany. And the totals are rising. It’s a tremendous dramatic event, fascinating and even exciting. That’s why all safety campaigns which aren’t backed up by penal legislation are doomed to failure.
A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylising of motion, consumer goods, status – all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really, a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing). That’s why the death in a crash of a famous person is a unique event – whether it’s Jayne Mansfield or James Dean – it takes place within this most potent of all consumer durables. Aircraft crashes don’t carry any of these elements whatever – they’re totally tragic and totally meaningless. We don’t have any individual rapport because we’re not moving through an elaborately signalled landscape when we go aboard an aircraft: it’s only the pilot who’s moving through that. It’s like people who are good chess players watching top chess players play chess. When one player defeats another, the good chess player understands what has happened, whereas you and I wouldn’t have a clue.
Really, it’s not the car that’s important: it’s driving. One spends a substantial part of one’s life in the motor car and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in 1970, the marriage of physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the twentieth century reaches just about its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there, the speed and violence of our age, its love of stylisation, fashion, the organisational side of things – what I call the elaborately signalled landscape.
BARBER: Surely the twentieth-century image ought to be something like a computer?
BALLARD: I don’t see that. Computers may take over that role in fifty years’ time, but they certainly don’t play it now. Most people have no first-hand contact with computers yet. My bank balance may be added and subtracted by a computer but I’m not aware of it.
BARBER: How do people respond to your car crash theory? How did they react to your exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Lab this spring?
BALLARD: People used words like ‘cynical’ or ‘perverse’ or ‘sick’. There’s a whole series of subjects people are not really honest about. Violence is another one. Most people take the view – I would myself – that violence is wholly bad whatever form it takes, whether it’s the huge violence of Vietnam or the violence of, say, police brutality. But the point is that we’re also excited by violence, and if we are attracted to it, it may be for good reasons. If we were honest about the Vietnams of the world, the real appeal of these events, we’d see them in a totally new light and they might never happen again.
Honesty always enriches our lives, just as it has in the area of sex. I think it’s good to explore it, to find out why Mondo Cane movies are such tremendous successes, why the newsstands of Japan and America are loaded with sadistic literature. Obviously this serves some sort of role. Conrad said: ‘Immerse yourself in the most destructive element’ – if you can swim, fine. I just want to know why people need violence and how can one come to terms with this thing. The Vietnam War clearly fulfils certain needs and one must be honest and work out what they are. We’ve all taken part in this war, given the tremendous TV coverage; we’re all combatants.
BARBER: Surely the point is that we’re not being shot, we’re just enjoying the show.
BALLARD: Absolutely right. The important thing is that it is a show. All of us have made the world in which we live – we’re not forced to watch the newsreels on television, we don’t have to look at the pictures in illustrated magazines. This war, if it is a show, is a show at which we are the paying audience, let’s remember that. All I’m saying is that one ought to be honest about one’s responses. People didn’t in fact feel the kind of automatic revulsion to the Biafra war that they were told they should feel. They were stirred, excited, involved. It may be that one needs a certain sort of salt in one’s emotional diet.
BARBER: Perhaps these overexcited responses come from leading sheltered lives?
BALLARD: Everybody has a sheltered life. Life in northern Europe is particularly sheltered. What’s the old quotation by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam: ‘As for living, our servants can do that for us’. Living is one of the most boring things one can do. The really exciting things, the most interesting experiences, go on inside one’s head, within those areas covered by the intelligence and imagination. It’s not particularly interesting to go to the supermarket and buy six TV dinners, or have your car filled up with petrol, or shuffle up an airline escalator queue. It’s much more interesting, let’s say, to think about those things.
BARBER: That could apply to sex as well.
BALLARD: Right. I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer possible simply because if anything is to have any meaning for us it must take place in terms of the values and experiences of the media landscape, the violent landscape – this sort of Dionysiac landscape of the 1970s. That is why I bring in things like the car crash. A whole new kind of psychopathology, the book of a new Krafft-Ebing, is being written by such things as car crashes, televised violence, the new awareness of our own bodies transmitted by magazine accounts of popular medicine, by reports of the Barnard heart transplants, and so on.
There’s a new textbook of psychopathology being written, and the old perversions are dead. They relate to a bygone age. A fantasy like a man dressing his wife in a gymslip and beating her belongs to the past. What we’re getting is a whole new order of sexual fantasies, involving a different order of experiences, like car crashes, like travelling in jet aircraft, the whole overlay of new technologies, architecture, interior design, communications, transport, merchandising. These things are beginning to reach into our lives and change the interior design of our sexual fantasies. We’ve got to recognise that what one sees through the window of the TV screen is as important as what one sees through a window on the street. But I don’t mean exclusively television when I talk about the communications landscape: I mean every facet of one’s experience through newspapers, magazines, television. If you take something like travelling by aircraft to Paris, it’s a very fictional experience. One’s actual physical experience of going from London to Paris by air is completely overlaid by advertising and commercial and fashion concepts.
BARBER: Who or what controls this sort of experience?
BALLARD: Well, it’s a democratic world. It’s controlled by the people who design the handrails of airport stairways, who design hostesses’ dresses – the smiles the hostesses give you are themselves a kind of fictionalised smile based on an image of the sort of smile they should give us. Nothing is spontaneous, everything is stylised, including human behaviour. And once you move into this area where everything is stylised, including sexuality, you’re leaving behind any kind of moral or functional relevance. I mean, this is the thing about the pill – not that it gives women freedom, because it doesn’t – but it removes the orientation provided by the reproductive impulse so that, let’s say, there’s no longer any reason why intercourse per vagina should be any more satisfying or any more desirable or any more right, morally or organically, than say