Money's style

“Nothing Happened. It never does, but it will. The revolving door shoved me into the lobby, and the desk clerk bobbed about in his stockade.”  (15)

            What immediately makes this unique to me is the way the main character is almost pushed through the world without a true drive.  He is going through the motions in this scene and allowing the world to just move him along.  He does this in the word choice of the description of the door “shoving” him through.  There is also a nod to this idea in the sentence before with the contradiction and how although he feels that his life does not go anywhere, it will because something else is pushing it along. The uniqueness here is shown in how the narrator controls how the reader sees the world and how bleak it may all seem.  This is the relationship the reader finds themselves in because they have no other viewpoint other than that of the characters to go by.       

Cronenberg's Film Crash

The David Cronenberg adaptation of Ballard’s Crash finds itself in an odd place film-wise.  Watching the movie was almost nothing like reading the book in my opinion.  The main thing about the movie that left me so disjointed was the mere fact that the audience had almost no access to the mind of the character of James Ballard whereas the book is completely set within his mind.  In a way this makes leaves the film feeling lacking and unconnected to the events taking place.  At times we just see Ballard staring at things in the film without any explanation and this hurts the viewers understanding of his inner fantasies and sexual desires.  There is something to be said that the film suffered from the fact that it was for ‘mass’ audiences and thus it is censored in certain areas.  Although Cronenberg went father than many directors would with the graphicness of the moments in the movie it is nowhere compared to the written work by JG Ballard.  While I am full aware that it was an adaptation I constantly thought throughout the movie that if I had not read the book I would most defiantly be utterly lost with the plot and motives of the characters, save for Ballard’s wife who is far more perverted than Ballard in the film while the opposite is true for the book.  There is one thing that Cronenberg nailed for me directly on the head, and that would be the world where this all takes place.  While it is Canada, only reviled by the cars license plates, it still has that blandness that JG’s ‘London’ did.  Overall the film may have a similar tone to the book to me it did not have the same grasping qualities that the book had, I did not understand the film Ballard the way I did the one in the book, not that I fully understood that character either.        

Ballard’s Intent

            J.G Ballard’s Crash is a book full motif.  Its major one in my opinion is the use of the James Ballard sexuality and the integration of technology into his fantasies.  He is constantly using the automobile as a vessel for his sexuality and his fantasies.  J.G’s intent with this use of sex and cars seems to be that he is trying to describe how the world is becoming to close to their technology and how easy it can for sex and technology to combine.  In this way I think J.G is being satirical and making his statement towards society.  Ultimately I believe that this story is a tragedy, not in the classical sense but maybe in the way that although it is satirical it ends and begins in death and the character does not become necessarily better in the end.  He becomes more of the sexual addict that he is in the process of becoming whole book.  While this may make argument that he has “improved” in this way throughout the book it is a bad type of approval by our standards. In my opinion he and Vaughn are different people, while one could argue they are the same person in the vagueness of Ballard during the death scene of Vaughn, I don’t think that this was the purpose of J.G.  I think that Vaughn needed to be a different person completely in order to influence Ballard the way he did.           

Ballard Attempt

              

Ticking 

            It only becomes quite at the moment where their heart stops that irritating noise.  I just would like it to all stop.  When I am home is the only time I can be at peace.  The two-foot foam filled walls keep all the awful noises out and the good ones inside.  The humming of my computers flawless processing unit sings a wonderful lullaby to me as I enter this beautiful home.  Whenever I leave these small walls and gleaming personal computer apparatus I find my self in a temper that does not fit my life. 

            The first time I found peace was when I was only a young boy.  I had received my first in a line of many computers. The first night the song that the wonderful hum made within the walls of my room almost put me to sleep, something was off however.  There was this other beat I could now notice that was out of sync with the glorious hum of the spinning of the sixty gigabyte hard drive and the snapping of electricity through the wires within the power supply.  It was a awfully out of tune apparatus that beat out of tempo with this electronic symphony.  It went at a mild fifty-five beats a minute, far off from the scale of my orchestra.  I wandered the hall of the cheap condo and found the noise was that of my brother as he lay in his crib.  That thud thud was ruining every sound from my glorious room.  I had to stop it.  Placing the pillow over his face made for an easy solution and holding him down was far simpler than I thought. Once I found that the tempo to my piece had be returned to one that flowed with the instruments of electricity better I fond no reason to stay by his lifeless side.