The modern mythology of JG Ballard 

My take on Ballard, even as a young science fiction reader, was that he was here to remind us of how quickly modern civilization could collapse, and that our existential paranoia was based on that fear. We are only one bomb away from having to build a fire. A few collapsed supermarkets from having to hunt. One destruction of a working government from subjugation or possibly having to kill. We need writers like Ballard to remind us of these things. It all could end so quickly, and devolve into barbarism. Scary stuff, yes, but the psychological burden of being a modern man.

When the college I was working at was planning the official opening of the new art block I seriously suggested we get JGB to open it (we were in his neck of the woods after all), my pleas fell on deaf ears unfortunately, and so we got a royal prince instead… bit of a missed opportunity I think… RIP JGB… first stumbled across your work as a schoolboy in London… fifty years later your still our prophet…

I've revisited this essay a few times; I love how it was put together. Plus the "Confused, well Peter's going to explain" bit always makes me chuckle.

Brilliant essay! Loved the part where Ballard interrupted you at 12:30 to tell the truth. And what you said shortly after: "The anxiety of our modern existence is that we expect it is a fiction, and that just beneath that fiction are all the ancient terrors we hoped modernity had saved us from." 🎯 Of course it's not true, modernity hasn't saved us from ancient terrors. Those terrors are part of modernity's story, and therefore an essential part of modernity itself. There's far more terror hiding beneath modernity than beneath "underdeveloped" societies.

Ballard seems to me to be a totally reliable narrator. As far as i can remember I have never felt that he "played" me as a reader through the use of clever writing tricks. The characters and plot always seem to follow the logic of the initial set up and the motivational energy assigned to them. I wonder if this is part of his appeal to modern artists. To me the novels feel like airplane journeys - they take off, cruise at altitude then descend and land. I have had the same feeling about 10 times in my life with really great musical performances where the performers were presumably in a flow state. I'll have to do some re reading to confirm/deny this.

I saw this video a few months ago, along with finding the Mind Webs performance of the Garden of Time. A few weeks ago, the Met Gala was themed to that Ballard short story. On a whim, I just bought and quickly finished a used copy of High-Rise. Thank you for introducing me to Ballard!

How would Ballard have dealt with Grenfell Tower - an actual 'Towering Inferno'?

From an audio perspective this has the best editing of all your videos that I've listened to so far. I've replayed it so many times!

"Asylums with doors open wide Where people have paid to see inside For entertainment they watch his body twist Behind his eyes he says I still exist." [Atrocity Exhibition - Joy Division's tribute to Ballard]

I really love you for this! As my name suggests, I´m quite smitten with JGB! Also of note is his incredible influence on the vast post-punk generation. Whole music genres basically carry his DNA and he never knew how or why as hew just wasn´t listening to music much.

Another elegantly delivered analysis. I need to read more Ballard.

First rate research, writing, and production for JG Ballard and his many works and adaptations. Helped bring me up to speed on some of his tropes. Pleased to see some of the movies but I always thought they were more thought experiments. Bt this form of storytelling seems to have gained a new pane in the graphic novel.

After listening to this video multiple times I bought High-Rise, my first reading of Ballard, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I can't wait to read Crash next. Thanks for getting me interested in his work!

So Snowpiercer is a lazy reimagining of Ballard's tower, which is an homage to Dante?

Well done! Enjoyable and informative.

Wow…I did NOT really notice all the pools in his writing before. Now that you’ve pointed this out though I realize there are *SO MANY POOLS* in his works. Thank you.

This video drops right in the middle of my re reading of his books. Brilliant! I wish more would realize his brilliance especially here in North America

Thanks for making this - very educational and sent me back to the books !

Thank you for this

Honestly, as a massive fan of Ballard you've done a great job here with your analysis and with an engaging visual style as well.

You do indeed create unique content.

dAMN your killing it with these Ai images !!!!

I've always associated Ballard with William Burroughs and Philip K Dick, more than the other British sci fi writers, I don't consider them normal sci-fi, i feel these three had some profound insight each with a different search to seek truth within the simulacra with each writer putting up a fight against these phantoms, like shiva. desire and time being cut , drugs and images entering the body , all obsessed, all analyzing the microscopic. they had a special idea of fiction. Nova express, Atrocity exhibition, valis, these are grasps at something inexhaustible. great video

Ballards tower influenced by Bunuel's film The exterminating Angel.

Fantastic!

I remember what living in a high rise apartment building was like. The Projects. Newark, NJ, 1961. My man Ballard was exactly on the money. I remember my mother fulling me away from the center of the elevator floor so I wouldn't step on the urine.

if it interests anyone to be aware, ballard (and burroughs) was my impetus for developing procedural poetry and song platforms. as per my natal chart and lack of fraternal affiliation, my own work is occluded over the decades while more visible procedural poetry platforms never seemed to get it right. all you have to do, is use pure randomisation to fit words in grammatical form. the english language always had a structure, not one other proceduralist deigned to actually use the rules of the english language when proposing aleatoric method. they all used some clever technical method. it all sucked. my 'twirly purposes' video exhibits such technique (and a "guest" procedural lyrical technique which is distinctly different). of course i'm also afaik the first person in the world to implement procedural lyrical song in both nonrealtime and realtime form, but ML swiftly surpassed any other procedure's efficacy :) there's of course more to it such as EVP but ballard was cued in on procedural media, unfortunately humanity at large missed it, because all that thought provoking information would develop critical thinking instead of buying it at the lodge oops i mean shops. you are being sat upon.

Thank you,Am a fan

Fascinating

I wonder if the artist Simon Stålenhag (e.g. Tales from the Loop) was influenced directly, or indirectly, from Ballard. The "vibe" seems very similar. Also, what was that art at 10:16?

The location for the movie High Rise was a disused leisure centre where I used to swim. Abandoned swimming pools indeed. Real life is reassuringly weird.

Reminds me of the old Hawkwind number Flat block Of two dimensions Neon totem pole to the sky Keeping scores of people stacked up so high Above the ground But all they can hear is the sound Of the wind in the antennae It's a human zoo A suicide machine Childhood Of concrete cube shaped A flypaper stuck with human life Caged up rage Swarming all the time Tear out the telephones Rip up the pages of directories And wreck all these High speed lifts and elevators Be a sabotage rebel without a cause High rise Living in a high rise High rise Living in a high rise High rise Living in a high rise High rise All stacked up in a high rise block Starfish Of human blood shape Tentacles of human gore Spread out on the pavement from the 99th floor Well somebody said that he jumped But we know he was pushed He was just like you might have been On the 99th floor of a suicide machine

Tried a couple of Ballard's novels and never could get into them. (Empire of the Sun as a movie is great, however.) I enjoyed this presentation and find myself satisfied that I haven't missed much that is compatible with my recreational reading.

I discovered the fascinating work of mr Ballard in 1980 when I was a 18 year old - and I was hooked from the first paragraph of The Burning World... The rest is history...

Fantastic editing, and visuals. I’d never heard of JG Ballard before, thanks for introducing him. I’ll add him to my listen list. The movie looks like a good watch, although the ratings are quite poor…

I think this is your best video essay yet, both in content and presentation. Well done! Do you think Ballard would/could have applied his same perspective to the pre-modern man/world? An abandoned pool is an ingenious symbol for our particular breed of nihilism (and maybe it’s the only breed of nihilism), but what about the ocean? Is Ballard’s nihilism just as present in a non-modern world?

High-Rise is my favourite of the Ballard books and of the films it is my favourite as I'm working class I'm very much like the cleaner watching these professionals who hate everything in there lives but are doing the snakes and ladders of mortgage payments and the Lotas eaters who don't actually see me I'm a robot nonexistent to these people really high-rise has lots in common with the Time Machine in the class warfare could eventually lead to cannibalism with the Morlock working class eating the rich.

This is a commentary of how society is weird and dysfunctional.

Dangerous bends ahead-Speed Up!

So, I recently picked up Crash and I am struggling with it. Off the cuff I find it quite repulsive. I haven't been able to conquer my own biases against the graphic and disturbing sex that is rampant throughout the story to get to Ballard's message. These triggers of mine, I recognize, are likely unresolved psychological trauma from very early exposure when I was young and not mature enough to process. I may have to avoid Ballard's writing and focus on what others write about him in my effort to understand his message.

Top, I like his words. Thanks

Ok, I admit it, I never noticed all the pools in his writing.

The AI images really leave a bad taste

He was a Late Romantic Decadent, the sci-fi label is absolutely absurd. Could anything be more Freudian than a fixation of pools, a regressive longing for the long lost womb? His stories are prose poems of absolute regression, but the Arcadia he luxuriates in is a dead city, a forest of fallen columns overrun by lizards and poison poppies, but he trivializes it with that same brand of Rousseauism reborn in the postwar generation of the Sixties. His regressive Xanadu of the wrecked high-rise laughably ends in some kind of Robert Bly fantasy of ME TARZAN, YOU JANE postcard from the edge. None of this anything new either. In William Blake's “London,” institutions, symbolized by church and palace, oppress individuals. Their impersonal walls are deaf to the chimney sweep’s cry and soldier’s sigh same as Ballard's traffic jam prisoners. For Blake as with Ballard, buildings are society’s face, abstract, mechanical, lifeless. “London” has a radical new way of seeing grand works of urban architecture as blank, sinister monoliths. Blake prefigures Baudelaire and Kafka in his vision of the dead night-world of the modern city, today Ballard's arid grid of glass and concrete. His novels are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadomasochistic imaginist.

I like this video, but that film high rise was not good. Style over substance.