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taylorklong 's review for:
Crash
by J.G. Ballard
The best part of Crash was the "Introduction to the French Edition" that's included at the start and isn't in all of the copies. In it, Ballard makes a compelling case for the importance of science-fiction and writing about the future, and a solid argument for why he thought to combine sex and car crashes. Unfortunately, that's the only time in 200-ish pages that he had me convinced.
Ballard's tale of people who get aroused by car crashes and mutilated bodies has aged poorly. In the '70s, it was still predicting the future, and the subject matter was probably still shocking. But in a time when we've seen technology and sex combine in myriad ways, and books like 50 Shades of Grey are being read by middle-aged women on the beach (not that I find that shocking, either, but I'm sure they would've in the '70s), it doesn't feel stunning, or for that matter, correct.
Ballard was right about the isolating effect technology has had on sex, and computers, like the cars in Crash, do serve as a vessel. But the computer itself isn't the fantasy. The computer simply connects the fantasies. One could make the argument that the early days of computer technology did play a more direct role in sexual fantasies in that before things like webcams, you were typing, and the act of typing and describing sex was the turn-on (well, and the rubbing one out part). Now computers have webcams, and you can find free porn in a wealth of places, and the computer doesn't have the same role, per se, in the sex, beyond being a device for communicating or the means of delivery.
Frankly, though, I expected the connection between the crashes and the sex to be stronger. He's trying to convince the reader that the car crashes are what turns these people on, but when you look at it closely, it's the injuries and just having sex in cars that seems to do it for them. They look at photos of surgical and medical textbooks and it seems to give them a similar thrill. The attempts to blend the two was tenuous at best. I kept expecting them to fuck each other with parts of the car, or to start beating each other bloody during sex, or to drive while having sex, or to get in car crashes and then bang in the wreckage, and none of that ever happened. Granted, maybe that's the point - that faced with all of this, the mind just conjures up ways that it could be more explicit.
It seems like he was reaching for that kind of point, but it didn't fully come through. Ballard writes in this dry, repetitive, clinical style that makes the book boring. Trying to make the sensational and horrific boring could very well be the point, except that works against the other point that he's trying to make, which is that technology will become a significant part of our sex lives - I mean, wouldn't you want your readers to be turned on? That, to me, would've been more horrifying - to experience the same sexual drive and thrill as the characters do from all this carnage. Instead, the language isolates the reader and deadens them to the whole experience. The boring-ification of sex and car crashes doesn't say much about the merging of sex and technology so much as it says something about the way media and news are produced and presented right now.
I don't regret reading it, but I can't say I enjoyed the experience or would want to subject myself to it again.
Ballard's tale of people who get aroused by car crashes and mutilated bodies has aged poorly. In the '70s, it was still predicting the future, and the subject matter was probably still shocking. But in a time when we've seen technology and sex combine in myriad ways, and books like 50 Shades of Grey are being read by middle-aged women on the beach (not that I find that shocking, either, but I'm sure they would've in the '70s), it doesn't feel stunning, or for that matter, correct.
Ballard was right about the isolating effect technology has had on sex, and computers, like the cars in Crash, do serve as a vessel. But the computer itself isn't the fantasy. The computer simply connects the fantasies. One could make the argument that the early days of computer technology did play a more direct role in sexual fantasies in that before things like webcams, you were typing, and the act of typing and describing sex was the turn-on (well, and the rubbing one out part). Now computers have webcams, and you can find free porn in a wealth of places, and the computer doesn't have the same role, per se, in the sex, beyond being a device for communicating or the means of delivery.
Frankly, though, I expected the connection between the crashes and the sex to be stronger. He's trying to convince the reader that the car crashes are what turns these people on, but when you look at it closely, it's the injuries and just having sex in cars that seems to do it for them. They look at photos of surgical and medical textbooks and it seems to give them a similar thrill. The attempts to blend the two was tenuous at best. I kept expecting them to fuck each other with parts of the car, or to start beating each other bloody during sex, or to drive while having sex, or to get in car crashes and then bang in the wreckage, and none of that ever happened. Granted, maybe that's the point - that faced with all of this, the mind just conjures up ways that it could be more explicit.
It seems like he was reaching for that kind of point, but it didn't fully come through. Ballard writes in this dry, repetitive, clinical style that makes the book boring. Trying to make the sensational and horrific boring could very well be the point, except that works against the other point that he's trying to make, which is that technology will become a significant part of our sex lives - I mean, wouldn't you want your readers to be turned on? That, to me, would've been more horrifying - to experience the same sexual drive and thrill as the characters do from all this carnage. Instead, the language isolates the reader and deadens them to the whole experience. The boring-ification of sex and car crashes doesn't say much about the merging of sex and technology so much as it says something about the way media and news are produced and presented right now.
I don't regret reading it, but I can't say I enjoyed the experience or would want to subject myself to it again.