Rating: ★★½

J.G. Ballard (1930-2009) is one of the few science-fiction writers to have enjoyed mainstream acclaim, having both been nominated for the prestigious Man Booker Prize and winning the SF community’s Nebula Award. Ballard emerged in the 1960s and became one of the central writers of the British New Wave movement. Ballard’s early novels The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World/The Drought (1964) and The Crystal World (1966) are centred around apocalyptic catastrophes and are filled with a love of decayed, alienated landscapes where the characters gain a cathartic transformation as a result of the apocalypse. Ballard’s best work, in this author’s opinion at least, comes at short story length in collections such as The Terminal Beach (1964), The Disaster Area (1967), Vermilion Sands (1971), Low Flying Aircraft (1976), Myths of the Near Future (1982) and Memories of the Space Age (1988).

Ballard’s most acclaimed SF works were the thematic trilogy consisting of Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975) in which his desolate worlds are replaced with contemporary urban landscapes where protagonists find their catharsis by travelling beyond social taboo lines. Ballard’s mainstream discovery came with Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical work about growing up in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp in China, which was nominated for a bunch of awards, and later novels such as Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000) and Millennium People (2003) that leave the science-fiction genre behind, (See below for a list of films adapted from Ballard’s works).

The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), also known as Love and Napalm: Export USA, was a collection of very loosely interlinked stories, some of which Ballard had previously published as short stories. The work is more a surrealist one than a work of science-fiction, featuring the protagonist wandering through a decaying vision of late 1960s popular culture where iconic figures, the landscape and the protagonist’s decaying mental state start to blur together as he searches for meaning in it all. The book gained quite a degree of controversy for featuring real-life figures such as John F. and Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and especially chapters entitled Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan? and The Assassination of John F. Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race. The title of the book was later borrowed for a song by Joy Division.

The Atrocity Exhibition was the first film made by the American Jonathan Weiss and the only film he has made to date. Weiss made the film on a very low-budget over a period of six years. This would have meant that Weiss had begun shooting before David Cronenberg’s internationally acclaimed adaptation of Ballard’s Crash (1996), but that the film was not released until after the Cronenberg did. In tone, Weiss makes a film that resembles something of early Cronenberg films like Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970), which were less dramatic films than surreal quasi-documentaries that circle around fictional subjects in an almost essay-like form. Another comparison might be to some of the works of Peter Greenaway and his obsessive digressions off into recounting lists and made-up stories.

Weiss keeps very much to the late 1960s period when J.G. Ballard was writing, even when it comes to using cars of the era, and does nothing to update the references in any way. Similarly, Weiss keeps to the same mass media images that Ballard obsessively wove into his text – throughout we have clips of Marilyn Monroe, footage from the Vietnam War, of John F. Kennedy speaking and from the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. Weiss does not balk at using disturbing imagery, including scenes of Vietnam War wounded or a plastic surgery being conducted.

The film is divided into chapter with very Ballard-esque titles – The Geometry of Her Face as a Diagram of Murder or where Victor Slezak assigns students essay topics like The Sex Deaths of Che Guevara. Other scenes delve into the same territory as Crash (sections of which did appear in the book) with Victor Slezak leading students on discussions of celebrity and vehicle crashes, concerning what he refers to as ‘conceptual auto disaster’ and even discusses the eroticism of such and similarity between people killed in car crashes and sexual positions. Weiss take it even further than Cronenberg did and include actual film footage of real car crash victims, along with pure Ballard-esque lines like “It is hard to tell if the pictures are of Karen Novotny in intercourse or an auto fatality.” Weiss certainly taps the surreal topography of Ballard’s work in many scenes – the connection between body parts of celebrities and architecture, or cuts between Vietnam War burn victims and plastic surgery.

On the other hand, I don’t feel that the film is that successful an adaptation of the book. (There may be another whole debate that could be had as to even whether The Atrocity Exhibition is a book that is capable of being adapted to film). Weiss takes fragments and images from the book and combines them into a loose narrative. However, I don’t think that these emerge with quite the same effect that J.G. Ballard intended them to. There is not the same shock sense of a blurring and collapse of lines between celebrity, media, landscape, politics and a disturbed frame of mind. What we get are images, sometimes surreal juxtapositions, sometimes just film footage, but with little uniting concept behind it all. It feels more like a work of free association that loosely adapts fragments cherry picked from the book. There is less the sense you have in the book of an apocalyptic breakdown of society and the media than of simply one man having gone down an obsessive rabbit hole until his thoughts have become chaotic and he is grasping at connections that make obscure sense.

Furthermore, a good deal of the book centres around celebrities – the famous Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan? chapter, or the image of the protagonist on a journey with a Marilyn Monroe whose face is radiation-burned. In the film, Marilyn Monroe is reduced to Anna Junavder with her hair dyed blonde and short-cropped and with a burn scar on her face who occasionally turns up, but the greater significance of what Ballard intended Monroe to be in these scenes is absent. In terms of Ronald Reagan, we get a brief scene with someone having sex in a car in the midst of a wasteland where the woman is wearing a photographic blow-up of Reagan’s face over her face but this is merely a surreal effect in contrast to Ballard’s attack on the mendacity of Reagan’s image.

Elsewhere, J.G. Ballard was purportedly involved in Hammer’s prehistoric drama When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), although receives no credit on the finished film. Ballard’s work gained major attention with Steven Spielberg’s high profile but crucially non-genre adaptation of Empire of the Sun (1987). There was also David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash (1996), a film that caused considerable controversy over its depiction of a small group of people who are sexually aroused by car crashes, and Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of High-Rise (2015). There have been several other Ballard film adaptations with the Portuguese Low Flying Aircraft (2002) and the British tv adaptation of Home (2003), although these were not widely seen.

Trailer here