Body work - interview with author J.G. Ballard and director David Cronenberg - Interview

ArtForum, March, 1997 by Andrew Hultkrans

AH: In the film, Cronenberg downplayed the fetishistic fascination with celebrity, which runs throughout the book, as well as in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). Obviously, the Liz Taylor fixation would have dated the film. But I'm interested in your fascination with fragmented celebrity bodies. Particularly in The Atrocity Exhibition, where the discrete body parts of Jackie O. or Liz Taylor become the building blocks for the psychological architecture of their admirers. What does this breaking up of the celebrity body signify for you?

JB: Well, I think it's something that takes place as we watch celebrities interviewed on television, or see them in close-up on cinema screens. I mean, we can explore every detail of their makeup. We can see, you know, the incipient mole that is appearing on Charlotte Rampling's right cheek. It applies equally to politicians and anyone who appears regularly on television, but film stars tend to be particularly attractive and beautiful. That's why they're there. Our imaginations begin to play over these stellar figures. We can't help but dismantle them in our minds. Their bodies are tantalizingly dose, almost closer to us than our own bodies.

As for Elizabeth Taylor, David and I both agreed that we wouldn't keep her in the plot. Because although she's still a remarkable presence, she would never have agreed to take part in the film.

AH: It would have been even more perverse. though. to have Vaughan be fascinated with the current Elizabeth Taylor, with all her plastic surgery.

JB: Yes. We would have been moving into a divine sort of place then. But in my novel, Elizabeth Taylor had an emblematic role. I wasn't that interested in the actual actress, but she stood for the last of the great Hollywood stars.

AH: You've often spoken of the death of affect in our near future. I was wondering if we aren't already there, and whether or not you mourn the loss of emotional depth or response?

JB: When I wrote about the death of affect in The Atrocity Exhibition in the late '60s, I was writing against a background of a sensation-hungry media landscape that seized on all the violent imagery emerging from Vietnam, from the Kennedy assassination, from civil wars in Africa - all that atrocity footage that gave The Atrocity Exhibition its name. I was writing about the way in which sensation had usurped the place previously occupied by some kind of sympathetic engagement with the subject. I mean, one saw blowups of the Kennedy motorcade used as backdrops in fashion magazines. Images that should have elicited pity and concern were drained of any kind of human response, in the way that Warhol demonstrated. His art really was dedicated to just that. I don't think it is quite so blatant nowadays. It is now incorporated into the way we see the world. In the '60s one would see fashion models flouncing around in front of a backdrop of the Kennedy assassination, or a napalm explosion. You'd think, "My God, what are they doing?" Now, of course, thirty years later, you don't even notice it.