The Kindness of Women

by J. G. Ballard

  Hanging from my seat belt, I saw the asphalt rush past a few inches above my face, a ceiling of racing gravel lit by my headlights. The windscreen exploded in a burst of glass chips. The roof collapsed, and the rearview mirror struck my forehead.

  The car had stopped and lay in the centre of the oncoming lane a hundred yards beyond the demolished traffic sign. I listened to the wheels spinning in the night air. Around me cars were slowing, horns competing with each other. Already I could smell the fuel dripping from the engine onto the glass-covered road. Drivers were running from their cars towards me. I switched off the engine and tried to free myself, but the collapsed roof had locked the door into its frame. Fuel pooled against the window as a dozen people rocked the car, trying to loosen the door. A man’s fist drummed against the pillar. I wound down the window, released my seat belt, and sank onto the warped ceiling.

  Hands seized my shoulders and dragged me from the cabin. Stunned by the blow to my head, I lay on the grass verge as a crowd gathered around my car. I could still see the rushing asphalt in the glare of headlights, as if death itself were speeding towards me, passing a few inches above my eyes.

  An ambulance man knelt beside me, frowning over his first-aid kit. He seemed uninterested in me and complained to the driver about some missing piece of equipment. A police vehicle, its beacon flashing, stopped within thirty feet of my car, which a group of young men were rocking from side to side. Two teenage girls in party frocks looked down at my face, moving from one dance slipper to the other on the cold night grass. They hummed the melody of a recent pop song, gazing at me as if I were a drunk at a party who had fallen at their feet.

  A cigarette lighter flared in the night air. Before I could speak Sally Mumford pushed between the girls. Drawing protectively on her cigarette, she peered over the head of the ambulanceman and lowered the lighter flame to my face, curious to see the driver of the car which had nearly killed her.

  * * *

  Four months later, in the last days of the 1960s, I stood with the cheering crowd in a disused soccer stadium in east London, watching the battered saloon cars of a demolition derby lumber around the muddy track. In the centre of the arena, helmet on her hip, Sally stood in white jeans and a crimson rally driver’s tunic. She was shouting angrily at David Hunter, now out of the race and resting behind the wheel of his demolished car. As Sally urged him on, whistling through her broken teeth, he lay back in his silver suit and stretched his arms, gazing contentedly at the rusty impacts around him.

  Watching these desultory collisions, I remembered my own crash and the exhibition at the Arts Laboratory. I still assumed that the exhibition had been designed to test the psychology of its audience, but David took for granted that its sole purpose had been to incite myself. Was my accident, in which I was lucky not to be killed, an attempt to die in an erotic death pact with Sally?

  David had suggested as much, when he and Sally visited me in Roehampton hospital. Looking up from my bed at this deteriorated couple, of whom I was so fond, I realised that I had exploited them in the same way that Dick Sutherland and Lykiard had exploited me. I wanted to help them, but the insane roller-coaster of the sixties had seized our lives and swept us headlong between its screaming rails.

  The last cars on the circuit heaved against each other like the bored bison wallowing in the mud pit beside the railroad bridge at Moose Jaw. I thought of the Hell Drivers in Shanghai before the war and the spectacular collisions staged by the casual Americans. Across the years their spirit seemed to hover over this modest track, and over the greatest of all motorised tragedies, Kennedy’s death by motorcade. I could still remember individual frames of the Zapruder film, endlessly anatomised on television and in a thousand magazine exposés. Had the events in Dealey Plaza been no more than the most elaborate of a series of staged accidents prefigured on that Shanghai race course of my childhood?

  Chilled by the winter air, the spectators shuffled their feet on the wooden stands. Nostrils quickened in the drifting smoke and engine fumes. The advertised highlight of the afternoon was the re-creation of a spectacular road accident, a multiple collision on a Manchester overpass in which a dozen vehicles had been involved.

  As a curtain-raiser, there would be a women’s event, and the crowd moved forward for a closer view. Sally and a group of women drivers, all in striped silk jackets, faces made up like streetwalkers, were gripping the roof sills of their cars and sliding their legs through the drivers’ windows. The spectators, heavy men in leather coats, pushed past me to the rail. They settled their hands deep in their pockets. They had come only for the women’s event, a figure-of-eight destruction course filled with jolting impacts, when every penis in the arena would be clenched within a hand.

  12

  IN THE CAMERA LENS

  “A film festival,” Dick Sutherland remarked over our third rum collins at the Copacabana Palace Hotel, “gives you a fair idea of what the future will be like.”

  “Beautiful but unapproachable women, frazzled men, and a million dreams held together by hype?”

  “That sort of thing. Lang’s Metropolis reshot in Las Vegas. It’s not that illusion takes the place of reality, but that out-and-out hallucination takes the place of illusion. Activities of the human brain it’s needed the whole of evolution to control are here let out to play. I love it.”

  “Dick, I thought you might. And what about our congress of science films?”

  “The same thing applies. In many ways, more so.” Dick smiled knowingly, always happy when he could provoke me. “Sooner or later, like everything else, science is going to turn into television.”

  “Does that sound sinister?”

  “Very. Exciting, though. What’s that idea you’re always trotting out…?”

  Dick liked me to repeat this weather-worn prophecy of mine whenever his confidence flagged or he found himself in a place where no one recognised him, the ultimate in sensory deprivation for the TV personality.

  “I forget … that you might be responsible for the first major scientific discovery to be made on television?”

  “That’s it. It could happen here. Rio is a total media city.”

  From the air-conditioned bar he gazed contentedly at the procession of giant floats that moved along the Avenida Atlantica advertising the star film of the festival, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Through the crowded traffic edged a fleet of silver spacecraft, resembling the demonstration models of an interplanetary nightclub. In their abbreviated foil space suits, the crews of hip-rolling young women flashed cocktail-waitress smiles at the crowds of tourists. For some reason, only the beggars and cripples squatting outside the beach hotels bothered to watch them. Waves of amplified music rose above the clamour of police sirens and the cries of lottery salesmen. Two light aircraft flew above the beach, and towed pennants advertising rival film attractions. Challenging them, giant fragments of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” drummed against the façades of the hotels and rolled out to sea to wake Poseidon himself.

  The carousel disappeared into the din and haze, instantly forgotten. Apart from Dick and the families of beggars, no one had paid any attention to the floats. Everything in Rio was dominated by the beach. This was no strip of basking sand on the Mediterranean model but a linear, open-air city in its own right, filled with thousands of sunbathers, kite and watch salesmen, ice-cream vendors and marauding beggar troupes, and a complete league of football teams playing on almost full-sized sand pitches. No one swam. The morose Atlantic breakers hurled themselves against the Richard Strauss crescendos, wave for wave, daring the film executives and festival organisers to match their epic reach.

  As Dick and I had noticed soon after flying in from London, Rio happily embraced the film festival and at the same time completely ignored it. Everywhere the crowds jammed the movie theatres, and the hotel terraces were packed with television crews, starlets, and producers. Fleets of limousines and buses ferried the delegates from one lavish embassy party to another, while gangs of pr
ostitutes and their pimps so packed the streets of Copacabana that they squeezed out any hope of finding a customer.

  But the city absorbed all this, as if the illusory visions of the festival scarcely matched the vastly greater illusion of Rio itself, a city that reminded me of prewar Shanghai in so many ways, but a Shanghai of tiled sidewalks ruled by the most confident and beautiful women in the world. Watching the bored policemen whitewashing the windscreens of illegally parked cars, I could almost believe that they were protecting the drivers from a blinding glimpse of this extraordinary sex.

  And above all this were the people of the favelas, the shanty towns crowding the dozens of large hills that rose from the streets of Rio. Where the poor and destitute of most cities occupied its nether regions, in Rio they lived up in the sky, coming down from the clouds to exhibit their undernourished and crippled children and pluck at the tourist sleeve. Had these impoverished people found the door to heaven open one morning, taken possession of its misty peaks, and discovered too late that they had been tricked by those with their feet on the firmer ground far below? “On you it looks great,” I heard a film executive remark to a beggar woman, carrying a bony child asleep on her dry breast, who dared to raise her withered arm to him outside the Copacabana Palace.

  However, it was easy for Dick and me to buy off our consciences with a few conference cruzeiros, and perhaps equally naïve. The gangs of confident pickpockets and the cripples viciously defending their pitches against any rivals reminded me again of Shanghai, with its rich beggars protected by their bodyguards. Shanghai, too, had been a media city, perhaps the first of all, purpose-built by the West as a test-metropolis of the future. London in the 1960s had been the second, with the same confusions of image and reality, the same overheating.

  In Rio fiction and reality still played their games. At a party given by the American Embassy we found ourselves in a reception line shaking hands with the crew of the Starship Enterprise, a group of grey-haired actors like venerable morticians. Famous faces surrounded us, older and unsuccessful impersonations of themselves. Struggling to make small talk to a producer’s wife, I felt that I, too, was an impostor, masquerading as myself in an unconvincing way. I was grateful for the light-show and the amplified music that raised all conversation to an unintelligible shout.

  Rescuing me, Dick pushed through the throng and seized my arm. “Jim—come and meet Fritz Lang…”

  He plunged into the press of dinner jackets towards a group of some twenty guests gazing down at what seemed to be the scene of a small accident. An elderly man in an oversize tuxedo sat on a straight-backed chair turned sideways to the wall. He slumped in the chair like an abandoned ventriloquist’s dummy, buffeted by the noise and music, the light-show dappling his grey hair a vivid blue and green. He looked infinitely weary, and I thought that he might have died among these garish film people. When I shook his hand and briefly told him how much I admired his films, there was a flicker of response. An ironic gleam flitted through one eye, as if the director of Metropolis had realised that the dystopia he had visualised had come true in a way he had least expected.

  * * *

  Lang’s resigned humour came to mind as we finished our rum collins at the Copacabana Palace and set off for the congress hall where the festival of scientific and documentary films was being held, an adjunct to the main festival, which the organisers had decided to sponsor as a tribute to Kubrick’s science-fiction epic. A crowd of film fans pressed around us when we climbed into a taxi, and Dick momentarily brightened until we realised that almost all of them were pickpockets, brothel touts, and voodoo pitchmen.

  “Hey, mister, you want voodoo? Real good voodoo?”

  “Mister, you want to watch a guy fuck a chicken?”

  “Only ten years old, mister. Real clean girls.”

  We shut the windows on a forest of arms. “Well, Dick,” I asked, “do you? It’s not exactly your everyday BBC wildlife film.”

  “Wait and see—you may be surprised, Jim. Even you.”

  Offering Dick my moral support, I sat in on his lecture and the panel discussions which he chaired, fascinated as ever by the sight of him working his audience like a seasoned music-hall trouper. Yet his performance seemed oddly subdued, as if he were trying to shrug off the repertory of television mannerisms he had cultivated so carefully since the Cambridge days. Now and then, as he acknowledged the audience’s laughter, he glanced at them in the same weary way that Fritz Lang had accepted my handshake. Rio was filled with old actor-managers trapped within their images of themselves.

  Dick’s laboratory at the Institute of Psychology was now little more than a public-relations bureau, and Cleo told me that he had secretly borrowed bench space in a colleague’s lab so that he could return to original research. Sometimes he would sit there for an hour, in this shrine to his younger self, unable as yet to come up with an original project. Then he would return to his own laboratory and become the reluctant fugleman of popular psychology, feeding news of the latest breakthroughs to his coterie of TV producers. I admired Dick and regretted that I had always encouraged him to think of the media world as his true laboratory. Sometimes, when I asked him about his own research, he became almost testy.

  Later, wandering around the wide corridors where the out-of-competition films were screened, I was surprised by the variety of documentary films being produced, only a fraction of which would ever reach the general public. Zoos, schools of dentistry, agricultural research stations, international hotel chains, hairdressing colleges, and a consortium of undertakers and embalmers all had active film units.

  In the glowing half-light the shirt-sleeved delegates stood by the lines of monitor screens, watching studies of the nose-wheel housing of the Boeing 707, the stress fractures of ice-hockey players, the life cycle of the cane toad, the architecture of brothels. As I turned from a close-up of an exposed nasal septum to another about the curing of sable skins the two seemed to merge in my mind. Were all these films moving in their reductive way towards the same undifferentiated end? Drained of emotion and value judgement, the lens of the scientific camera anatomised the world around it like a patient and pensive voyeur.

  The medical and psychological films showed the process most clearly at work. In the competition section of the festival I watched Dick introduce the afternoon’s programme on the theme: “Aversion therapy—desensitisation in the perception of sexual imagery.” The three films described work in Sweden, Japan, and the United States with habitual sex offenders, in which these doomed and gloomy men were exposed to endless images of their notional victims—small children, vulnerable women, racial targets, and fellow sex offenders. Doses of emetic drugs, surges of electric current, noise, and other aversive conditioning supposedly turned the subjects against the objects of their desire.

  As the succession of harrowing images passed by, I looked away from the cinema screen to the members of the audience. For the most part documentary filmmakers and professional psychologists, they gazed at the screen with the same steady eyes and unflinching expressions of the men in the Soho porn theatres or the fans of certain kinds of apocalyptic science fiction. Whenever the criminal subjects winced with pain or vomited into their sick basins, ripples of appreciation would move across the audience at some particularly striking camera angle or expository close-up, as the Soho patrons might have applauded a telling crotch shot or elegant anal penetration.

  Later, when we returned to our hotel on Copacabana Beach and our first frozen daiquiri of the evening, I said to Dick: “I need this. We should have gone to the voodoo. That was quite an afternoon.”

  “Gruelling stuff?”

  “I was watching the audience. The future may be like a film festival, but which one? Yours or the one at this end of the beach? They had the eyes of tourists at a death camp, the kind of tourists who keep going back.”

  “We’ve shocked you, Jim—that was worth coming to Rio for.” Delighted to catch me out, Dick glanced at me slyly over his glas
s. The rivalry between us, which for reasons of his own he had always encouraged, had become more open in Rio. “It’s interesting that scientific films unsettle you more than hard-core porn.”

  “But pornography is really very chaste—it’s the body’s unerotic dream of itself. Your films come straight from the psychopathic ward. Imagine how you’d react if you found them in the film library of a sex criminal.”

  “So…? Take a set of surgical instruments—innocent in an operating theatre, but in Myra Hindley’s handbag? You’re seeing them out of context.”

  “Nothing is seen in context anymore. Switch on your TV set, Dick, and you find a murdered prime minister, a child eating a candy bar, Marilyn lifting her skirt—what sort of scenario is the mind quietly stitching together?”

  “It might be interesting to know. Tell me.”

  “One of Cleo’s fashion magazines showed some models prancing about in front of a blowup from the Zapruder film—the Kennedy assassination as a fashion accessory?”

  “Of course. In the future everyone will need to be a film critic to make sense of anything.”

  “Not a psychologist?” His remark surprised me. “Surely, you…?”

  “No, I think the psychologist has had his day…”

  Dick stared coolly across the crowded terrace of the Luxor, at the relaxing delegates and the photographers waiting by the lobby in hope of a passing celebrity. Despite his success that afternoon he seemed dissatisfied, as if he accepted that the epoch of popular television, in whose secure playground he had thrived, would soon be replaced by a harsher and more open world, an ever-changing media landscape in which fame was as transitory as a mayfly. Like an astronaut unable to tether himself to the moon’s surface, he longed for a stronger gravity. The need for attention had sent him bounding ever higher through the airless dust of celebrity, and there was nothing now to pull him down. He often asked me about the children’s school results, glad to hear of their success and clearly envying me my family ties. He had never married, and his women friends moved through his life like game-show panellists, cheerful, optimistic, and unremembered. Even their fascination with Dick was never enough.