The Atrocity Exhibition (1998)

 

Director: Jonathan Weiss

Screenplay: Jonathan Weiss and Michael Kirby

Adapted from the novel by J.G. Ballard

Cast: Victor Slezak as Travis Talbert; Anna Juvander as Karen Novotny; Michael Kirby as Dr. Nathan; Mariko Takai as Nurse Nagamatsu; Robert Patrick Brink as Vaughn Koester; Diane Grotke as Catherine; Caroline McGee as Margaret

An Abstract Candidate

 

J.G. Ballard’s source text, if a choice of word which lacks nuisance, feels confrontational. Part verse text, part reflection of the period, in context it is still a transgressive text even if of its time period. For the film and text, the structure is how Travis Talbert (Victor Slezak), a doctor at a mental hospital, has reached a breakdown, his own mania having pushed his students to work on projects based on his obsessions, such as World War III, documenting the wounds that could happen in such a conflict for one of the earliest examples in the film. The resulting adaptation is a curious film, one which did not succeed for me but is nonetheless fascinating, a 2000s film of a lower budget yet explicitly tied to the early seventies from a 1970 novel built around smaller pieces written over the sixties. The malaise of the 1960s going through to the Vietnam War, the production goes over multiples themes like the fear (and secret pleasure) in outer space NASA disasters or sexual wounds from car accidents, this novel also the prototype of Crash, Ballard’s later novel and the 1996 David Cronenberg film adaptation.

Its entire world, of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and nuclear bombs, does have content I admire, as reflecting a source text I also admire and yet is a peculiar piece as well. It was a novel for its seriousness, and in mind that it was built from a serious context that we will get into later on, that can be viewed as having an unintentionally funny edge, or at least that which does not get the desired reaction, even baring in mind that the film adaptation does have interpretations of the source which clearly meant to be intentional if sickly funny.  The film’s transgressions, among themes, can go from using real life footage of face lift surgery, graphic but clinical as the grimness is in seeing something usually a taboo, the reconstruction of the body, or its continuing of Ballard’s clinical take of sexuality from his writing, be it the one hardcore shot of footage used here or matching the erotic, even the legitimately sexual and beautiful in the human body, against perverse fixations. There is even a recreation of a controversial piece, which was published separately beforehand, Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, written in the style of a scientific paper trying to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan, when he was still the Governor of California.

The source text's structure means that this is less a plot onwards in the adaptation, and more of of events separated into chapters, as Talbert's mania continues and other doctors collect his research materials and creations to explain his psychosis. The tone of this entire production can be summed up with the “Imaginary Sex Death of Che Guevara” being an actual line of dialogue used in the film; it does come off as a parody, and I reflect that Ballard had a dry humour to his writing, with one of the reoccurring aspects from the novel being the surveys of sexual fantasies of famous people, collected from normal people off the streets, his attempt to tackle the cult of personality and celebrity culture growing at the time something I would not be surprised had as much a satirical edge as his serious reflections on this, as much as with tackling his fascination with sexual desire mutating from the malaise of the 20^th century.

The Jonathan Weiss co-written and directed work does feel matter-of-factly serious, which was what disconnected me from it, as this is attempting to tackle the kind of novel, from the era of Ballard’s more extreme work or William S. Burroughs’ cut-and-paste experiments, which could truly be “un-filmable”. Not because they cannot, but because you have to factor in tone, presentation and how the novels did not need to reflect having a beginning to a middle to an ending, something cinema is absolutely capable of, but in a different way due to have the projection of information has to be done with the confines of the moving picture form. The proto Crash segments, in staging automobile accidents, have not aged at all in how they have been adapted here, its conceptual auto disasters what Cronenberg managed to make timeless and transgressive in his adaptation. With dialogue feeling like Cronenberg here, Weiss' adaptation here has the strange air of referring to a work entirely of its time, of the seventies, and reflecting on the fifties and sixties beforehand, but caught in the late nineties into the Millennium as a production in look and resources. The fact that the themes and fetishistic details are obvious at times if weird is a factor to trying to digest this film, as it does not lead one by the hand or explain itself deliberately, like the operating room as the new modeling photo shoot location, but there are salient lines which feel more relevant as the time went on and the internet became more prevalent, when a doctor says of imaging new perversions to keep the act of sex alive. Some images like the case designed to personify a woman – a suitcase including vaginal smears, latex face mask moulds of her etc. – and to portrait her is something absurdist but also legitimately disturbing. 

There is a lot to admire in The Atrocity Exhibition but it reveals how much of the source text requires to be dissected and looked at in context to why Ballard wrote it. The novel is a peculiar one, which can be in legitimate danger as time passes of having been an indulgent piece meant to just shock. This is especially the case as there is no real plot that could be used to bring the viewer easily into this, the closest to a narrative progression in the film how eventually, after Travis' trajectory is shown and people try to examine his subconscious, he disappears and they take after him. The source material, openly influenced by Burroughs, was written with legitimate tragedy at its heart, the death of Ballard’s first wife Mary in 1964, the novel admitted as a coping measure for this sudden loss¹, and in mind it reflects even in its transgressions on the fear of nuclear winter, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and other concerns from the era all woven together in an attempt to find meaning within all of them. The novel, alongside being a series of smaller texts altogether, has touches like Talbert having different names per chapter, undercutting the sense of this all following a cohesive trajectory of cause leading to event. Ballard even structured this book with the idea that, if anyone wanted to pick a random chapter to read first and read the whole book in order, that was perfectly acceptable¹, and there is the sense that this film, whilst experimental and out there, does pull back from the extreme of a list based or segmented structure, still semblance of a theming rather than the lucid extremes of a surrealist film from the past decades before.

Some of it is having to work around the transgressions that the mind can conjure up perverse images of but a film cannot without obscenity laws being brought, such as that infamous Ronald Regan chapter, which is not the scientific research paper of before, even if the image of having sex with a woman, nude and hanging out of a car, with a picture of Ronald Regan on her face is bizarre and funny in its own way. Having to work around the cultural baggage which requires context, even something like this not being the Regan most known, the future president, brings up the issue of context being required, such as with the use of the footage from the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of 28th January 1986, where the shuttle when attempting to lift off into space tragically exploded during the launch process. That footage as well, and images of Japanese citizens who have suffered radiation disfigurement, do raise justifiable questions of whether this filmic adaptation comes off as the pretentious man’s shock compilation by accident, as those images, without absorbing their meaning and history context, can be exploitation in a very negative way.

Even seemingly benign images, to the film's credit, have more weight to them, such as adverts for a line of Crash Test Dummy toys, a red car among them one I had as a kid, which connected to the real life ones used to research car crashes; able to be crashed and broken into pieces when ran into table legs and sideboards of walls, these adverts for toys for children gain sinister connotations with what they are linked to. The thing is, needing to be faithful to the source text means The Atrocity Exhibition can be a barrage of images for a viewer, one I admire and could easily come to love, but with the ambivalence due to how The Atrocity Exhibition is a film to admire but one whose form even causes one to ponder what the source novel’s original intentions were. Especially as it exists as a work from a different era one attempts to see the relevance of decades on, this is absolutely a case of a film, now of a time before in historical context, attempting to evaluate a work from an earlier time before, which does feel a lot of questions surrounding its form fully.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Perverse

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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1) An analysis of The Atrocity Exhibition from A Useful Fiction, published on February 14th 2018.