Plane crash video fetish
One of JG Ballard's greatest novels is Crash, a dark and magnificent tale of car crash fetishists. As a tribute to Ballard, a private pilot known as Crashman brought his fascination with airplane crashes online for the public to, er, enjoy. For years, Crashman has collected videos of plane crashes and edited them to music. In 2006, he uploaded the bulk of them to YouTube as an "experiment." The Ballardian blog has an essay by Crashman where he explains his fascination that may be less unique than one might think. From Ballardian:
Link to Ballardian, Link to buy Crash (Thanks, Mark Dery!)After I had made a few of the videos public, a collective audience began to slowly emerge. I began to receive feedback and criticism, sometimes constructive, often laudatory, and sometimes merely abusive. But these people were accustomed to horrible sights and events already, like a doctor or air crash investigator. How would a random, general audience feel and what would they say? I took the next step: in 2006 I uploaded most of the videos to YouTube.
I expected to be excoriated by this wider, larger general public as a ghoul, an exploiter of the suffering of others, and as it happened the word ’sick’ was freely applied to the videos as well as to myself. I considered this a compliment, as it mirrored the initial publishers’ response to Crash (’This author is beyond psychiatric help: do not publish’). But, and I had expected this too, neo-Ballardians began to show themselves, finding subtle excitements and even strange beauty in the videos, that uneasy, disquieting splendour inherent in the slow-motion breakup of a speeding aircraft.
the latest
latest episodes
You can fetishize anything.
From what I remember reading in the foreword of Crash the "Do not publish" comment was from a publisher's reader NOT the publisher.
@1, yeah, me, I fetishize sex
Kewl. Snuff vids on BoingBoing! Got any crush video links? Something with puppies or kittens? That'd be keeeeeewl.
I'm old enough to remember when watching people die in videos was akin to torturing small animals or raping your sister. Now it's a "fetishistic science project". We've come a long way.
From a John Waters interview on NPR where he listed the Ballard film as one of the best, saying: "Crash (1996); David Cronenberg, director: Not the 2005 Oscar-winning film by the same name but different subject. The NC-17 rated film was "about people who were sexually turned on by car accidents. It's a great movie. I used to play car accident as a child, so it spoke to me.... very arty. This was also either very well-reviewed or very hated by the critics. It caused a lot of controversy."
The Futurists are still alive and well, I see. And it's good to find beauty and affirmation in destruction.
And this link, to a NYTimes article on post-9/11 babies: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D04EEDB1E3DF932A25755C0A9649C8B63
So does this mean Star Wars is the Behind the Green Door of neo-Ballardian fetish porn?
Where is the PETA for humans?
One evening I just watched plane crash videos while listening to the Blue Mars space music stream. It was beautiful.
GhostLord Beaverbrook, I think it was an editor at a British publisher who sent him that note. (Editor= reader? Perhaps the distinction is immaterial....)
Citation follows: "Prophet With Honour"
David B. Livingstone on why J.G. Ballard is one of the most vital writers of the 20th century
"This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish!"
It was with these ironic words that an editor at J.G. Ballard’s publisher futilely urged the suppression of Crash over a quarter-century ago, a book which many have since come to see as a visionary masterpiece.
-----------------------------------------
I'm with Kyle here, and as for a PETA for humans? - I'm not sure there are any...
..........
Permit me to comment here with J.G. Ballard's Introduction to the 1995 edition of CRASH in its entirety:
Introduction to Crash
by J.G. Ballard (1995)
The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century — sex and paranoia.
Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves. Just as the past, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age, so in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present. We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.
In addition, I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.
In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction — conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. Freud’s classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of the dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality.
Given these transformations, what is the main task facing the writer? Can he, any longer, make use of the techniques and perspectives of the traditional 19th-century novel, with its linear narrative, its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting their domains within an ample time and space? Is his subject matter the sources of character and personality sunk deep in the past, the unhurried inspection of roots, the examination of the most subtle nuances of social behaviour and personal relationships? Has the writer still the moral authority to invent a self-sufficient and self-enclosed world, to preside over his characters like an examiner, knowing all the questions in advance? Can he leave out anything he prefers not to understand, including his own motives, prejudices and psychopathology?
I feel myself that the writer’s role, his authority and licence to act, have changed radically. I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options of and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts.
Crash is such a book, an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation, a kit of desperate measures only for use in an extreme crisis. Crash, of course, is not concerned with an imaginary disaster, however imminent, but with a pandemic cataclysm that kills of hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures millions. Do we see, in the car crash, a sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology? Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our own psychopathologies? Is this harnessing of our innate perversity conceivably of benefit to us? Is there some deviant logic unfolding more powerful than that provided by reason?
Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way.
Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.
– J.G. Ballard, Introduction to Crash, Vintage, 1995.
My one recurring dream is to look up at the sky, and see a plane flying low. It's not apparent from looking at it, but I know it will crash. And as soon as I think it, the plane arcs towards the ground and explodes in a ball of flames.
I'm waiting for the day that it happens in real life, and I know I'll feel like I caused it with my mind but IT WAS FATE ALL ALONG.
When I was seven I was playing with my sister in our front yard and saw a plane crash. One minute it was there and the next it just dropped. To this day whenever I see a plane flying in the sky I wonder whether I will see it crash.
Many years later I made a photograph about it.
I have had the same kinda recurring plane crash dreams since I was 10. In them, I see a BIG plane crash right in front of me but am powerless to stop it. Then I try to run up to the crash and help the survivors, in great fear and terror of the horrible things that I will see there, but impelled to go and help them anyway. These dreams are extremely stressful and usually wake me up, so I remember them.
But the dream always ends right there. This is exactly what interested me in Ballard and this boing catch-post in the first place...
Synchronicity? A variant of the common dreams of being naked in public or of flying oneself?? I don't know and can't even guess! Interesting to see that other people have had the same experiences and recurring dreams, though....