Playroom (4): The Atrocity Exhibition

A short film: JG Ballard and the Motorcar (1970)

A film , a voice speaks, a car idles somewhere beyond the frame, and the room gathers into a single attention that is neither curiosity nor suspense. The surface is calm, the words are even, the image is the world that is already ours of motorways, underpasses, a showroom with polished panels, a test track where cones and chalk marks pretend to be geometry. The film does not ask us to admire the machine. It asks that we notice how it inhabits us. The car is not an object among objects. It is the skin that moves across another skin. Glass and enamel, chrome and tarmac, a hand on a steering wheel that has memorised the turn of the wrist before thought arrives. The voice sets the rule. There will be no drama saved by a climax. There will be attention that does not have any sort of conclusion.

The exhibition is ordinary. That is its atrocity. We watch bodies that sit and bodies that recline, a shoulder drawn forward by a seat belt, a profile caught between mirror and windscreen, the small change of light across the bonnet as a cloud shifts. The words move in brief units, discreet and cold. They name surfaces and injuries with no desire for metaphor. A collision is not a symbol. It is the way two planes decide to occupy one point. A bruise is the record a surface keeps when it has been pressed too hard to forget. The camera offers pictures as diagrams. A kerb is a vector. A guardrail is a sentence without a verb. The scene is both instruction and aftermath. The present is full of other times that have been rendered so exact that they do not require narration.

The car appears, then appears again, as if each appearance were adjusted by a few millimetres. Repetition is not rhetoric. It is the method by which the film teaches the eye to accept abstraction without relief. A roundabout is described with the patience of a radiologist. A lane marking is examined as if it were a scar. The light does not gild anything. It bleaches. A day with this light presses bodies against surfaces until the bodies accept the indifference of a showroom and the showroom accepts the trembling of a hand that tries to touch without making a choice. The voice remains level. The name of a road is neither memorial nor direction. The word "crash" is spoken as if it had been washed. In the wash it has lost its noise and kept its weight.

A figure stands near a bonnet and the bonnet is already a table. A figure leans against a door and the door is already a page. The film conducts these substitutions without a flourish. Everything is a writing surface and every surface is a place where the body leaves its faint text. Movement is the ink. The curve of a ramp is legible in the angle of a shoulder. The arc of a slip road is legible in the line of a thigh pressed against a seat. The camera does not insist on this reading. It permits the reading to happen by refusing the relief of commentary. The refusal is not a withholding of information. It is the maintenance of a climate in which objects can speak their own nouns.

Where there are names, they are the names of parts. Fender and axle, tread and hinge. A list is a way of keeping faith with what has been made. The list is also a way of preserving the distance that allows us to see at all. A list does not embrace anything. It lays them out. Between each item there is a blank that cannot be jumped. The blanks are the film’s true subject. They hold the body and the machine apart just long enough for the next alignment to be seen as an alignment rather than as fate. The word accident is emptied of moral commentary inside this procedure. Accident becomes the most honest aspect of design, an agreement that no plan holds forever, that every form is a pause in a field of collisions.

A showroom is lit with a care that makes denial easy. The floor is clean, the decals are precise, the reflections on paint are the only clouds that will ever cross this sky. The film unwraps this room of sales and dream and leaves the wrapper on the floor. The wrapper is the glint that suggests a future made of newness. The film lets the glint die on the tile. What remains are chairs and an anatomy of places where bodies will sit and adjust their weight until a life can just proceed without a comment. In these chairs slogans cannot hold anything. A person exists by sitting and by sitting accepts to be carried. This is the contract the car writes under the hand. The contract is binding so long as the body forgets the terms.

The voice offers fragments that resemble clinical notes and diary entries. The fragments accumulate and never arrive. Arrival would be an error. The road is a device to lengthen the moment before arrival. In the car one is spared the closing sentence. The car writes by omission. The motorway service station is the chapter where the narrative refuses to continue and therefore continues. Crisp packets on the floor, a plastic tray, a table polished too often, a number that glows above a hatch, these are the punctuations of a life that wishes to run on without break, a life that speaks in the grammar of lanes and merges and horizons of unending futures that have already arrived. The film accepts this grammar. It lets us hear the syntax of a week in the hum of a fan and the thin squeal of tyres that have been asked to remember too much of what is going to happen.

Photographs of wrecks are treated as if they had applied for asylum in a museum and been allowed to remain in the foyer. The camera passes them and does not pin them on the wall. It keeps them near the door, where the draft turns the pages with an indifferent hand. These photographs are not evidence in a case. They are not legal. They are not moral instruments either. They are a set of emblems for a liturgy that refuses consolation. A folded bonnet, a spidered windscreen, the stark vacancy where a headlamp should be, each is a gesture that has not yet been absorbed into habit. The film holds them at the edge of habit and then lets them drop back into the swamp of precarious violence and daily motion.

A body is seated in profile. The chin is high, then level. The mouth opens once and closes. No explanation follows. The car is the explanation. It contains speech by supplying its alternative. A driver is a person released from the demand to talk because motion already answers. The film respects this release. It does not hunt a confession. It does not police a thought. The greatest courtesy it pays to the occupant is the courtesy of anonymity. The occupant becomes a mannequin for the postures that the era requires, a model on which streets hang their expectations, a device that allows the city to express itself as a set of tolerances and margins.

There are landscapes. They are the landscapes that remain once representation has elected to make itself useful. A median strip with grass so stunted that the word grass ought to be reconsidered. A slip road that coils in a geometry too sure of itself to pass for nature. A flyover that casts a shadow on a fence and the shadow is almost consoling. Almost is the measure of relief permitted in this world. Beyond the fence the river remains, dull and immaculate. The river has agreed to carry the waste that gives the city an innocent face. The film looks at this agreement and says nothing. Its silence is a proper sound, as in apt. There is no new knowledge to be gained by outrage.

The text within the text returns to human figures, a neck brace, a surgical dressing, a bruise that spreads like a slow print. These are the stations of a journey that does not cross a map. The route is interior. The signs are pulses. The way a hand grasps after the accident will not be the way it grasped before. A handle, a rail, a button, each becomes a test. The car is present in these tests like a memory of pressure. The film reads this memory without pathos. There is no before worth idealising and no after worth condemning. There is only the clarity available when posture is measured by the world that shaped it.

At times the author steps into the frame, a man who has rehearsed plainness until plainness has become an instrument. He stands, speaks, walks, sits. The performance is modest, the modesty is a form of force. The body that speaks has already been thought by the cars that pass a few feet away. The sentences are given at the speed of a thoroughfare. They avoid the curve of a pleasing phrase. They arrive and stop. They are not interested in winning. They are satisfied with having been equal to the object. Equality is rare in films about machines. The usual emotions are worship and contempt. Equality is ethical. It allows a man to live among devices without enslaving himself beneath their promises and without pretending to purge them from his days.The exhibition contains a use for desire that does not inflame it. There are panels that gleam like thighs, chicanes that beckon with the lie of skill, a forecourt that could pass for a stage. The film permits these invitations and refuses to answer them. It does not forbid. It lets the theatre of metal and glass rehearse itself in front of us until the rehearsal reveals that the play is not meant to be seen. It is meant to be lived as the background to errands and quarrels, to naps in parking bays and to the small reconciliations that take place when music on the radio is better than it should be. The stage loses its confidence under this gaze. It retreats into function. Form remains, immaculate and cool, and form is content to have been looked at without being asked to climax.

Speed is present as a question rather than as an act. The camera shows us the instrument panel, the needle, the number. The number is abstract, a promise that something might happen if we allow it. The film recuses itself from that permission. It keeps to the low hum of an engine that is comfortable at a pace no one will write about. In this refusal the film lets the truth appear that speed is cheap when it is owned by the machine. The expensive thing is the attention that can hold still while the road insists on purpose. The film pays this expense. It gives us stillness without piety.

There are scenes where the city becomes almost pure signage. Arrow, chevron, lane closed, keep left, the alphabet of motion. Language is reduced to directive and warning, the two uses words are least equipped to bear for long. The reduction is not a failure. It is the economy that saves life. The film honours this economy and then places a face beside a sign to show what the reduction costs. A person does not belong in a world of signs and yet must live there. The body turns into an index that points, this way, not that, and in the pointing it is tired. The film records the tiredness without pity. The tiredness is the form of honesty proper to the epoch.

When the crash returns it returns as a diagram once more of vectors, masses, the grim smile of inevitability, a calculus that clears its throat and begins to read. The wreckage is neat. Oily prints mark the place where hands did what they could. The light is fair. A reporter would call this a scene, a bystander would call this an interruption. The film declines these names and keeps to the word event. An event is not to be owned. It is not to be improved by narration. It is to be carried a certain distance and then set down. The film carries it and sets it down.

Rooms follow, white and steel, where the exhibit continues as another kind of object. The patient is not the person who lived inside the car. The patient is the model on which technique practises its exact kindness. The kindness needs calm light and tools arranged like a sentence that will not admit an error. The film is loyal to these rooms. It will not turn them into a sanctuary. They are work. Work needs a climate that denies escalation. The word healing does not appear, or if it does it is spoken like a number on a dial. The patient will be discharged. The car will be written off. The city will claim them both.

A hand touches a model in a showroom. The touch is clear, without tremor, a test of how the panel meets the curve of a door, how the flank moves into the arch of the wheel. In that touch there is the whole instruction of the film. A hand that knows how to touch is equal to its time. Equality is never a triumph. It is the refusal to ask more of a surface than it can bear, and the refusal to attribute to a surface an intention it does not contain. The hand is seen, the door is seen, nothing more is demanded, the scene ends. The ending is not a closure. It is the respect that leaves the object unexhausted.

Night and the same roads persist, their white lines bright, their barriers gleaming, their exits discreet. The exhibition continues under sodium lamps. It is more dreamlike and less forgiving. Fatigue makes the cabin an operating theatre where one operator has been left alone with the hum of the apparatus. The film remains with the operator and with the hum. There is nothing to do but continue. Continuation is the form of mercy available to machines. They would like to run without event forever. The film does not criticise this. It notes it and allows us to understand that the mercy is not meant for us. We are the event that will arrive in the middle of their mercy.

Music is present, then absent. When present it supports the level of speaking. When absent it leaves a cavity in which noise can be heard, a fan, a tyre on a joint, a distant horn, the shiver of a panel as a lorry passes. These sounds are the holy office of the day. They keep the hour. The film listens with the patience of a room that has been emptied for a purpose that no one will declare. In that room any object can describe itself until description becomes a form of rest.

If there is a thought that repeats itself while the film repeats its corridors and bridges, it is that modern life has chosen a body for itself and that body is the car. Without grandeur, without shame, the car provides the measure for streets, the posture for work, the rhythm for speech, the distance for affection. The film does not mourn this choice. It provides the sobriety that allows the choice to be seen as a choice and not as nature. Nature remains beyond the embankment, a field that cannot yet be developed, a margin of weed and water, a sky that has not asked to be reflected in glass. The car borrows these and returns them altered. The film watches the borrowing and the return. It appears indifferent because it will not pretend to give back what cannot be restored.

The credits have no comment. The screen is once more a wall. We leave without the relief of having learned how to avoid anything. We have been spared the myth of mastery. We have been asked to match the calm that the film brought into the room. That calm is severe. It says there is no secret. There is only the fidelity that looks at what has been built for us and accepts to live among it without panic. One does not rush. One does not explain. One places a hand on a surface and waits for the surface to confirm that contact remains possible. Then one goes on.