On Movies and Money

The Unsuccessful Car Crash?

On Crash: Novel vs. Movie

The all-at-once, blunt, matter-of-fact, bizarrely weird movie Crash, accomplishes the beguiling ambivalence to “apotheosis” as the novel did.However, I recently read a quote by Barbara Shulgasser of the San Franscisco Chronicle that stated,

“Cronenberg has said that he made the film to find out why he was making it. You may watch it for the same reason.”

I felt like the movie was more open ended in meaning than Ballard’s carefully constructed novel. This openness, to an already intensely interpretive novel, made the film feel nearly pointless. Without a doubt it incorporates most all of the sexual images of the novel, but leaves out important plot points and themes. I felt like the “electric highway” universe was more vividly pictured in the novel, with all the emphasis on images like the clutter of traffic, to depict the imposing technological age that traps everyone in a particular space. Cinematically, this could have been accomplished in the film easily, but I did not feel it was pushed hard enough.

The ambiguity in the movie of the viewer attaching onto any particular character’s consciousness, does mimic that of the novel. However, the way in which Ballard’s character perceives events occurring, does not match up to how I felt he perceived things in the novel. There's such a vividness of detail in Ballard's perception, that Cronenberg tried to replicate in the film with odd shots like a finger stroking a seat belt, or attention to things happening off screen away from the main action, but it could have been done more effectively so that the viewer is not just watching through the eye of the camera as their limitation, but also develops a perception of the camera's own consciousness as Ballard creates in his novel.

Ballard’s novel contained a particular articulation of events, and their overlap; contrasting repetitive themes through their collision that adds up to some over-all collective meaning. At the end of the movie however, I felt like I had seen an ineffective psychological take of sex in relation to the machines in which the acts occurred in, and how car crashes can affect someone’s consciousness.

What the fuck is Crash? A meticulous realism or free-floating psychodrama? Wish fulfillment or cautionary tale? Diagnostic or symptomatic? Satirical or speculative? The answer, H.G. Ballard might have said is: YES. Crash doesn’t operate by either/or; it follows the logic of chance in a universe that has raised its stakes against the occurrence. Cronenberg, on the other hand, had a different take and the movie felt undeniably incomplete to me.

MONEY $$

After beginning the first 50 pages of Money, it is evident that Martin Amis, is appealing to some sort of "common" human experience, as Ballard did in Crash. I feel as though, however, it is transforming into a nesting story of dimensions, putting the reader onto different planes of the “common” experience.

John Self, a largely unread media slickster who describes himself as ‘200 pounds of yob genes, booze, snout and fast food’ (31) assumes that his listener is his contemporary; they are somebody who lives in the year 1981 and is familiar with current affairs. However, there are general qualities attributed to this narrate's listening that does not obviously guarantee that he/she will be exactly like the narrator. Self seems to assume or rather suspect that the narratee is different from him, even though they are living in the same world.

He often interrupts his narrative with questions concerning the narratee’s habits and cultural background, such as:

“About me and reading (I don’t really know why I tell you this - I mean, do you read that much?): I can’t read because it hurts my eyes.” (42)

Self projects a narratee who is better educated then he is, his own knowledge of the world not extending beyond the current news presented by tabloids and the fast-food culture of the media.The cultural gap between John Self and the narratee is emphatically underlined in his self-conscious confessions of his attitude to people who are better educated than he is:

“As a rule, I hate people who are the beneficiaries of a university education. I hate people with degrees, O- levels, eleven-pluses, Iowa Tests, shorthand diplomas ... And you hate me, don’t you. Yes, you do. Because I’m the new kind, the kind that has money but can never use it for anything but ugliness. To which I say: You never let us in, not really. You might have thought you let us in, but you never did. You just gave us some money.” (47)

By creating a narrator who attributes to the narratee a number of contradictory properties and positions, Amis has put his readers in the communicative situation in which they must continually re-adjust his/her position in relation to the text. Furthermore, by inscribing himself into his own novel, Amis blurs the borderline between fiction and reality and intensifies the reader’s disorientation. The reader thus becomes involved in a metafictional game in which he/she is forced to experience directly rather than merely observe. This seems the novel’s central themes: the dissolution of the self in a (post)modern world, where everything and nothing is known and can be known; particularly through our often main focus on money.