Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
In the spirit of Spooky Season, my wife and I just watched the Cronenberg version of The Fly, which I'd never seen before.
I nearly vomited while watching it. Possibly the single most disgusting, repulsive film I've ever seen in my life. We finished watching it over three hours ago, and I still feel a bit nauseated.
A masterpiece. I'm never, ever going to watch it again.
That's our boy Dave for you. Absolutely king of body horror, disgusting yet masterly. eXistenZ was a terrible movie plot-wise but the effects were fantastic, disturbingly visceral. I do think his best movies were the more mainstream ones: Dead Ringers has a fantastic performance from Jeremy Irons and the movie is much better than the source novel (it also convinced me that Geneviève Bujold would be good as Janeway in Star Trek Voyager when her name came up for that, before she noped out of it) and M. Butterfly is also great. Hmm - maybe it's a coincidence Irons is in a starring role in both of those? But I also liked Rabid which is just plain horror (I can take or leave all the metaphors about AIDs, STIs, etc. that critics like to discuss about it).
Agreed, eXistenZ did nothing for me in terms of story, but the gun made of teeth and gristle was awesome. I loved Dead Ringers, probably my favourite of his films that I've seen.
I'm curious about Crash. Maybe twenty years ago, I tried reading the source novel, but found it painfully slow and uneventful. May have to try again.
One of Ballard's oft-used techniques is repeating shocking things over and over again while using dry medical language until there is nothing shocking about (in Crash) the explicit mangling of human bodies in car crashes and people finding that arousing and having sex immediately while the wounds are still fresh. It will obviously vary significantly by reader whether they find anything worthwhile in that approach. Crash might be his most extreme version where it really could've been 1/2 or 1/3 the length without much loss in what he seemed to be going for. For the most part, the short story was his best medium and his novels are varying in quality.
His approach is intended for satirical purposes, to create a jarring disconnect between the story's emotional state and the subject matter its dealing with. Car crashes drew his interest because they sit at an intersection between domestic consumerism and horrendous violence. Most people are likely to get into a car crash in their lives, and cars are extremely dangerous, as well as sexy, machines, yet no one raises an eyebrow at their ubiquity. Likewise he tended to go on about how desensitized people are to mass violence through news reporting, and the steady normalization of pornography in mainstream culture, an equally generally unremarked upon phenomenon, at least relative to its broader significance. Personally I would say these were and still are very relevant materials to be dealing with in fiction. He shines a light on them in interesting ways, providing more enhanced perspectives than what you'd get from the anime smut most people in the rationalist sphere seem to get. What he doesn't do is focus on the narrative element of suspense, which is probably the main reason people often find him boring. I myself find him boring at times, but his ideas and stylistic approaches are as frequently able to spark my interest. The distancing effect of the medical jargon in particular is capable of enhanced power, ironically because it refuses to do what's expected for the subject matter. Its best employment was probably, in fact undoubtedly, in The Atrocity Exhibition, though, not Crash. There's some good surreal distancing in The Terminal Beach, too. One way to enjoy Ballard's satires is to remain conscious of the humor in them.
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