The Train of Self

Further insight on John Self’s evident problem with alcohol appears between the pages of 107 and 108 (not to say there aren’t other examples of his lack of acumen with liquor), where he finds himself caught up in his own time yet again; ‘You know what time it is, my time? Four o’clock in the afternoon’. This complete disregard of the actual time, as opposed to the time in which his jetlagged body is set in, translates perfectly to his lack of concern for his own health. Caught up in the conflict of what to do, John turns to repetition in order to systematically line up all ‘six realistic options’ of activities he could do in that ‘afternoon’ (it is impossible to know whether or not it actually is the afternoon) while in New York City; ‘I could sack out right away […] I could go back to the Happy Isles […] I could call Doris […] I could catch a live sex show […] I could go out and get drunk. I could stay in and get drunk.’ The repetition of ‘I could’ appears to be John’s manner of empowering himself, proving to the readers that with his money, he has the choice of either getting shitfaced at one point in his activities, or be somewhat responsible and call Doris Arthur, perhaps to talk about his film, Bad Money in Europe and Good Money in the United States. With our previous knowledge of John’s alcoholism, it is fair to assume that he will be getting drunk. Again to show his ‘power’, John then claims to have done every possible option. He feels a necessity to over consume on every level of his life, ranging from his drinking and eating habits to his generous tipping policy (he gave 50$ in tip to Felix on his last trip in NYC). From his perspective, he feels as if he’s the one forcing his life forward, as if the natural force of time had no impact on his physical. He describes himself as ‘the train’ that is ‘doing all the moving’. Unlike us, regular human beings, John believes that he is in control of his entire life, the speed, direction, and final destination, California and the world of extravagant luxury and money.

C.R.E.A.M

Almost immediately, reading Money made me think of this song where C.R.E.A.M is an abbreviation for 'Cash Rules Everything Around Me', a motto that definitely rings true in the opening 50 pages of the novel.

Man + Money = Gorgeous Women

What first struck me reading Martin Amis’ Money, was his style of writing, a mix of a conversation with me, the reader, and a stream of consciousness. It is often the case that the narrator, John Self, a high-class (in his mind at least) London socialite and director of commercials, will go off random on a tangent rant, in which he often contradicts himself.  He is obsessed with physical attractiveness and is only distracted from it by extreme wealth.  Inevitably, the two elements combine into the cosmetic industry, an industry that greatly interests John since he has one of his two favorite elements in life; that is money.

In the passage I have chosen, John is at a lunch meeting with Fielding Goodney, a born-in-riches 26 year old, who is going to be the producer for John’s first film. As the conversation enters the realm of finances, John’s love of money isn’t enough to keep him concentrated on Fielding’s finance tirade. He tells the reader that he found himself wondering about the potential affair between Selina Street, his ‘girlfriend’, and Alec Llewellyn, his best friend. What’s strange is that he is not imagining them having sex, but imagines what Alec and Selina are doing post-coital, as if he was sure they were having an affair. He uses his own memories of being with Selina and simply places Alec into his own shoes. Ironically, he then proceeds to describing the lust that exists naturally between himself and Selina’s best friends. In them, he sees Selina with the additional excitement of being different bodily shapes. The fact that he has sex with Selina as a daily routine empowers her in his eyes, but at the same, adds an aura of excitement of the unknown to her best friends who are so similar to Selina, a part from the having sex part. It is then that he bombards the readers with questions, which we have no way of answering, only to answer them himself with evident confidence in his response.  Unlike the ‘normal’ lover, he does assume that Selina loves or even like him, but that instead, she a gold digger scheming to live off of his money. He sees no problem in this due to his belief that money brings beauty to even the repugnant of people, whether it is through ‘state-of-the-art cosmetic labs’ or squadrons of trophy wives. He concludes that the only reason his ‘girlfriend’ Selina Street would not cheat on him, an over-weight and pale middle-aged man, with Alec Llewellyn, because Alec doesn’t have the wealth that he does. Simply put it, John’s interpretation of life is the following: MAN + MONEY = GORGEOUS WOMEN.

Money by Martin Amis, p. 29

 

And he was away, his voice full of passionate connoisseurship, with many parallels and precedents, Italian banking, liquidity preference, composition fallacy, hyperinflation, business confidence syndrome, booms and panics, US corporations, the sobriety of financial architecture, the Bust of ’29, the suicides on La Salle and Wall Street…And I found myself wondering whether Alec has seen the single dead flower in the jamjar beside Selina’s bed, or heard her peeing and humming in the quiet bathroom, the black pants like a wire connecting her calves. There seems to be a thing about girls and best friends. I always fancy their best friends too, come to think about it. I certainly fancy Debby and Mandy, and that Helle from the boutique whom Selina hobnobs with. Perhaps you fancy your girl’s best friends because your girl and her best friends have a lot in common. They’re very alike, except in one particular. You don’t go to bed with the best friends all the time. In the sack she can give you one thing your girl can’t give you: a change from your girl. Not even Selina can give you that. Is Alec fucking her? Well, what do you think? Is she doing him all those nice favours? Could be, no? Here’s my theory. I don’t think she is. I don’t think Selina Street is fucking Alec Llewellyn. Why? Because he hasn’t got any money. I have. Come on, why do you reckon Selina had soldiered it out with me? For my pot belly, my bad rug, my personality? She’s not in this for her health, now is she? … I tell you, these reflections really cheered me up. You know where you are with economic necessity. When I make all this money I’m going to make, my position will be even stronger. Then I can kick Selina out and get someone better.

Cronenberg's Disappointing Adaptation

            For all its cinematographic appeal, ranging from the eerily beautiful motorway landscape to the unique choice of cars for each character, David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash failed to emulate my favorite part of J.G. Ballard’s novel, the inner conflict and mental processes that the main character, and narrator, James Ballard has. At many points while watching the film, I felt as if there was a vital element keeping all the aspects of the story together. For example, during the scene when James meets Helen Remington at the police junkyard, the movie failed to evoke the thoughts that James projects on Helen and assumes are her actual motives. The thought that she had undergone a rebirth through her accident with Vaughan and her husband, revealing a new sexuality, born from the fusion of her and James’ automobiles colliding with her husband dead on James’ bonnet, is one that cannot be perceived by the audience members who had not read the novel. I believe that the movie cannot be truly understand without having read the novel first, which is, in the end, a major shortcoming of the film. Although the film does evoke the sentiment that the characters live in a small, yet large, world dominated by technology and that a new form of sexuality, the union of machine and man, is arising, the film fails to portray the most vital element of the novel, the thought processes and analysis that only the novel’s narrator, James Ballard, has. In the end, I’d say that the film was a superficial adaptation of the novel, translating the aura of this strange world very nicely. However, the vital interpretations of this world seen through the eyes of James, in detail description of events with lesser importance and the excruciatingly descriptive crash fantasies, are completely missing. 

Mind Boggling End

Having finished reading the excruciatingly detailed, and at times painful, sex and technology induced exploits of James and Vaughan in the novel Crash, I have found myself still in shock by the world that J.G. Ballard has inhabited with his characters. Centered around the airport, the world in which James roams the streets is a massive labyrinth of highways, fly-overs, and major avenues. No matter where James is going, whether its Seagrave’s auto shop or Helen Remington’s home, the airport is used as a point of reference; ‘We were moving through a development zone on the southern fringes of the airport’ (pg. 92). The airport appears to be the center of James’ technology-dominated, a place where thousands of people interact on a daily basis with the greatest of transportation technologies, planes. James often describes ‘aircraft taking off from London Airport across the western perimeter [as] constellations of green and red that seemed to be shifting about large pieces of the sky’ (pg. 139). James recognizes that like cars, planes are on invisible highways as they cross the large sky, only with the capability of reaching greater distances than cars. There is a sense of continuity in the traffic, as if it could not be halted to a full stop, regardless of how heavy it is. In the end, a car accident, irrespective to the amount of cars involved, will never be able to fully halt the flow of traffic. Does James’ crash instigate the burgeoning of a life philosophy based on the flow of traffic? Is Vaughan nothing but a figment of James’ imagination, an attempt to comprehend the fairness of his own car crash?

Near the end of the novel, I began to doubt Vaughan existence as a physical human. There are a few passages that feed my suspicion of James creating Vaughan’s character just like the narrator from Fight Club does when he creates his alter ego Tyler Durden. The fact that James’ often makes absurd assumptions of what other people are thinking promotes the untrustworthiness in his story telling. For example, at the end of Crash, James explains that Vaughan follows his wife constantly with the possible intention of killing her in an accident, James feels ‘uncertain whether Vaughan would try to crash his car into Catherine’s, [yet he] made no attempt to warn her’ (pg. 218). The failure to tell a person you love that the ‘nightmare angel of highways’ (pg. 84) was after them seems to be an indication that James is either crazy or that he has no love for Catherine, which is simply not true. In addition, Catherine must have noticed if a man, that she supposedly knows, had followed her by car on a daily basis yet she ‘never referred to Vaughan’s pursuit of her’ (pg. 216). J.G Ballard has left me in a state of confusion, not knowing whether James and Vaughan are their own men, or if Vaughan and the whole story were only the result of James’ post traumatic stress disorder caused by his crash. Was James trying to escape his reality and find meaning behind his crash by creating this accident enthusiast, Vaughan?

BIKES

            Speeding down 5^th avenue beige Japanese bicycle, a group of disgruntled construction workers on a lunch break whistle at the woman in her white summer dress appear for a flash on my left. The have already gone but I already know, as sure as I know that my legs will keep spinning the pedals, that those men will remember the woman in the white summer dress as an ideal. They will return to their homes, hop on to their exercise bike in hopes of shedding the few extra beers they had the night before for the woman in the white summer dress.

            Zigzagging through a crowded street in NoHo, my body feels one with my bike. My feet are fused as one with the pedals; I sense every minor crevice in the black, tarry street pavement as if was walking bare foot. I peer into a yellow cab and see a child staring at me, his eyes betraying a sentiment of jealousy. He wishes he could have the freedom I have; feeling the breeze go through my hair as a cruise down the streets; seeking the fastest routes through labyrinths of traffic; the rush of narrowly avoiding an accident with cars or pedestrians, the most hated foes of my kind. 

            He city around me functions like the wheels of a bicycle, it maintains a constant cycle through the day and the night; pedestrians wait patiently for the walking signal as cars zoom by at full speed, blitzing the other side of the street like bicyclists shot-up with steroids as soon as the white luminescent walking figure appears. Automobiles quietly follow the traffic laws, causing waves of cars to roar down the avenues in cycles. Only I can break these cycles, snaking and winding between stationary vehicles as if they were obstacle cones and biking through red lights between two waves of cars.

In the corner of my eye, a woman’s slender and smooth legs appear to be extensions of her bike pedals. The white and red frame of her bike, with its small Hello Kitty stickers appear to be a rolling candy cane, waiting to melt between the scorching sun above and the hot black pavement. To my surprise, she has broken the cycle of the city as well, gliding without any care through an intersection as a new wave of cars has just entered it. Before I realize what has happened, she is gone, free to drift through the streets of New York forever.

Auto-Human Threesome

            Once again while reading Crash, I was taken back by James’ relationship with another character, Vaughan. With the knowledge that Vaughan has been for years recording car crashes through photography, analyzing and studying traffic patterns on the massive motorways and flyovers that surround the airport, which at times appears to be a city center in itself with ‘residential suburbs [surround] the airport’ (pg. 87). Vaughan is now introduced by James as the orchestrator of a recreation of an actual crash. James compares Vaughan to a film director, praising him for his artistry whilst putting him on a higher platform than everyone else at the racetrack stadium. The accident being reenacted is in itself a monstrous crash involving five cars, something that only the ‘nightmare angel of the expressways’ (pg. 84), Vaughan can do. James has an obvious admiration for Vaughan both for his depth of knowledge in crashes and the physical attraction he makes James feel. As with his past fantasy sexual partners, James fuses human flesh with the hard and shiny surface of chrome machinery.

            James fascination of technology, in particular cars, has essentially invaded social and sexual life. His attraction to Vaughan is transformed into fantasy of car-human fusions during sexual acts; ‘What most disturbed me about Vaughan was the strange stance of his thighs and hips, almost as if he were trying to force his genitals through the instrument panel of the car’  (pg. 89). It is only natural for James to have fantasized his soon-to-be idol Vaughan having sex cars, for it would represent the unification of the greatest crash philosopher and machine. At the same time, James is a little troubled by the thought he has made by using the word ‘disturbed’. Is it possible that James feels like he has crossed a moral boundary by imaging Vaughan in his most intimate moment? Does he feel uneasy with the new emotions he has for Vaughan? Does he wish to participate in a threesome with Vaughan and the car but does not feel up to the grade? I’m excited to continue reading Crash for possible answers to my questions.

Strange Relationships

            I was eager to continue reading Crash, looking forward to further fusions of technology and humans, more insight on James and Catherine’s relationship and more excruciatingly descriptive car crashes. Though I found all of the elements in my recent reading, I was most struck by James’ strange, yet natural, with the wife of the food engineer who died in the his first crash, Helen Remington.  The two meet at a police junk yard in a somewhat awkward situation of Helen walking by James’ old wrecked car with him in it; ‘As she raised her head she saw me through the empty windshield, sitting behind the deformed steering wheel among the bloodstains of her husband. Her strong eyes barely changed their focus, but one hand rose involuntarily to her cheek’ (pg. 69-70).  Helen acknowledges the connection between the death of her husband and James feeling undisturbed, a reaction that would appear strange to me.  Recognizing James believes that he should ‘launch into a formal apology for her husband’s death’, only to be immediately dominated by his sexual desires; ‘At the same time, her gloved hand on the scarred chrome aroused a feeling of sharp sexual excitement’ (p. 71). James is unable to have single interaction with another human (and with most cars) without having sexual thoughts. This only leads to the affair that will eventually occur between Helen and James, the lovers brought to union by the crash. As James drives around with Helen, in the same car as the one he had in the crash, he begins to anticipate coitus with her; ‘Had she any notion of the man, or woman, with whom her next sex act would take place? I felt my penis stirring as the lights changed’ (pg. 73). James is a man propelled by his sexual desires, and now satisfaction in simply driving randomly on the highways. The addition of Helen in his life completes his ideal of a mechanical and human fusion; ‘Her strong body, with its nervous sexuality, formed a powerful junction with the dented and mud-stained cat’ (pg. 71).