space, time, light, all the essentials — reflections on j.g. ballard season (bbc four)¹

Like his admirer Jean Baudrillard,² Ballard has for a long time resembled a rogue AI, re-permutating the same few themes ad infinitum, occasionally adding a sprinkling of contemporary detail to freshen up a limited repertoire of fixations. Fixations, fixations. Appropriate, since, after all, Ballard’s obsession is… obsession.

In the BBC Four profile — nothing new here, the old man gamely and tirelessly going over his favourite riffs, once again — Ballard repeated one of his familiar, but still powerfully sobering observations. People often comment on how extreme his early life was, Ballard said. Yet, far from being extreme, that early life — beset by hunger, fear, war and the constant threat of death — is the default condition for most human beings on the planet, now and in every previous century. It is the comfortable life of the Western Suburbanite which is in every way the planetary exception.

Thus Home, BBC Four’s brilliant adaptation of Ballard’s short story “The Enormous Space”.³ Home is the kind of thing the BBC used to excel at: drama that was genuinely, unsettlingly weird without being insufferably, unwatchably experimental. Not that Home has much hope of appealing to popular taste stuck away on BBC Four, of course. A sign of the times.

Home revealed itself to be a perverse cousin of the suburban drop-out situation comedy, The Good Life or The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin spliced with Polanski’s Repulsion. (No surprise to see director Richard Curson-Smith name-checking Polanksi as an influence.) Anthony Sher was superbly, charmingly unhinged as Gerald Ballantyne, an accident victim who, instead of returning to work after his convalescence, decides to embark upon an experiment. “Decides” is no doubt too active a word; in every respect the typical Ballard character, Gerry discovers rather than initiates, finds himself drawn into a logic he is compelled to investigate. (In many ways a faithful Freudian, Ballard has no doubt that obsession always has/is a logic.)

The experiment, it turns out, has a simple premise. Gerry will stay indoors, indefinitely, living off the supplies of his well-stocked larder and freezer until… until what? Well, that is what the experiment will establish. Can he survive by “using his front door as a weapon”? What unfolds is the descent into the maelstrom Ballard has explored since High-Rise and Concrete Island, a quest to the outer edges of the human that follows a well-defined sequence, whose stages can be readily enumerated:

A letting go of the old identity. This is given up easily. Ballard’s twist on the disaster novel as far back as The Drowned World lay in the readiness of his characters to embrace rather than resist the new conditions which catastrophe had visited upon them. Ever since High-Rise, Ballard has seen characters going one-step further, actually initiating disaster as a revolt, not so much against conformity, as against air-conditioned comfort. Here, Gerry burns all his correspondence, his photographs, then his birth-certificate and — in the most sacrilegious act of all, which made mortified my Protestant soul — his money.

The loosening of the hold of civilisation [Bataille phase]. Ballard is endlessly rewriting Civilisation and its Discontents ⁴, and his fictions are attempts to imagine a libidinal utopia in which the pay-off between survival and repression spelled out by Freud’s mordant pessimism is somehow circumvented. The return to savagery, even the experiencing of raw hunger pangs, are eagerly savoured opportunities to relax civilisation’s impulse control and neutralising of affect. In Home, when Gerry’s conventional food supplies are running low, he turns first to the flowers in his garden and then to his neighbours’ pets. The scene in which Gerry’s neighbour questions him — in that middle-class ever-so-slightly-insinuating way — about the disappearance of his dog “Mr Fred” and his wife’s cat is a masterpiece of grisly comedy. “Perhaps they’ve eloped,” Sher gibbers, by then constantly on the edge of all-but illegible hysteria. Laughter, a strange, snorting, sniffling chortle that he can barely contain: it is that laughter which signals, more than anything else, that Gerald has left polite society, never to return.

The exploration of the transcendental beyond [Kant/Blake phase]. I mean transcendental in its strict Kantian sense, of course. Ballard likes to refer to this as his exploration of inner space, but I have always found this to be a profoundly misleading description. Much more than astronauts floating in empirical space, it is the “Outer” which Ballard’s suburban cosmonauts investigate: what they confront is time and space themselves, as preconditions of all perceptions and experiences, and what their explorations open up is an intensive zone beyond — outside — standard perceptual thresholds. Hence Home becomes an aberrant version of The Incredible Shrinking Man. Cut off from the world beyond his door — I refuse to call it the outside world — Gerry’s sense of space massively expands. “The rooms are getting bigger.” The attic becomes an antarctic “white world” of blank, freezer-burning vastness, the irruption of the transcendental outside into the empirical interior of the house, now a very cosmos, teeming with texture and previously unsuspected detail. “I feel like an explorer, or an astronaut.”

Curson-Smith’s use of the video-diary format gave the film a queasy intimacy and a suitably unheimlich relation to Pop TV now, something underscored by Gerry’s sign-off remarks about undertaking the “ultimate home makeover.” Yes, that’s one way to make the most of your space.

The man whose head expanded. “Are you on drugs, Gerald?”

And self-denial, starving, the withdrawal from company, it’s all very topical. I wonder — I hope — something Gerald-like is going on in David Blaine’s head right now.⁵