commissioned by The Sunday Times – November 1991

At Mosport, a motor racing track in the South Ontario flatlands, film director David Cronenberg is about to try to put as much space as possible between himself and his fellow men. He had been up at five, loading his pale grey Formula Junior Cooper into its trailer. Now, unshaven, clad in faded blue shorts and a Daytona International Speedway cap, the director is enjoying his hobby. He checks the wheel nuts with a torque wrench, chats about the Cooper rear engine revolution and confesses that the stewards have their eye on him. “Two weeks ago I had two crashes and a spin off here. This means you’re being observed – they want to see I’m not running amok.”

Imperturbable and little given to emotional display, Cronenberg is a man who has probably never even walked amok. An unsympathetic inspector of his oeuvre might conjure up an image of a director whose acquaintanceship with the abyss is so terrifying, whose depravity is so considerable that women and children must be sequestered until the spittle-flecked, staring-eyed fellow is hunted down. Was it not in Shivers, after all, that the turd- shaped parasite, capable of infecting its hosts with uncontrollable sex mania, oozed along the bottom of the bath into the vagina of the unsuspecting bather? And did not the demonstration of laser-like extra-sensory mind-invasion in Scanners cause the head of the volunteer to swell, redden, boil, burst and splatter before our very eyes? How about that moment in The Fly when Jeff Goldblum’s half man half household pest character throws up on a doughnut in order to make it slip down so squishy? And Videodrome, wasn’t that the one where a glistening slit opens up in the guy’s stomach and he sticks a pornographic video cassette in it?

Now Cronenberg’s reputation, recently verging on the respectable after the mainstream success of the Jeremy Irons movie Dead Ringers, may head back down the tubes again – a location many feel to be the proper destination for the source material ofNaked Lunch, the Cronenberg movie to be released in this country in March.

William Burroughs’ notorious novel presents a film-maker with considerable problems. Naked Lunch was published in Britain in 1964, after it had been declared obscene in America. It detonated the most extreme reactions in its critics. One of the most eminent, George Steiner, described it as an “array of nauseating images, rhetoric, theatrical asides and soft-core filth. It leaves one numb, and perhaps afraid. It seeks to sicken…, making the imagination vomit.”

The book certainly contains an abundance of episodes that many have found emetic. The most disturbing is probably the scene in which Mary and Mark both sodomise Johnny (Mary straps on a greased dildo for this task) then lead him to a gallows for further diversion: “Johnny sees the gallows and sags with a great ‘Ohhhhhhhhhhh!’ his chin pulling down towards his cock, his legs bending at the knees. Sperm spurts, arching almost vertical in front of his face. Mark and Mary…push Johnny forward onto the gallows platform covered with moldy jockstraps and sweat shirts. Mark is adjusting the noose. After Mark breaks Johnny’s neck, Johnny’s cock springs up and Mary guides it in her cunt… She bites away Johnny’s lips and nose and sucks out his eyes with a pop… Now she lunches on his prick.” Few lunches have been more naked. Few texts declare more stridently their resistance to being filmed.

Cronenberg retires to the shade of the empty trailer and starts spraying Windex on the visor of his white crash helmet. He polishes the plastic with a clean rag. The conversation turns to scriptwriting. “Leonard Cohen said he would wake up in the morning to see whether he was in a state of grace. If he wasn’t he’d go back to bed. Certain things can’t be pushed – with me directing is more driven but scriptwriting isn’t. It keeps me off the streets, out of the depths.”

Out on the track a deafening roar signals the start of the afternoon heats. Cronenberg rubs busily at a grease spot. What does he mean by ‘the depths’? When my father died my mother said to me ‘You have to look into the abyss and know it’s there. Then you have to ignore it’, that’s the project.” Did he look? “Oh yes. I’ve been there. I know it. The abyss is empty, it’s personal. If you don’t acknowledge it you’re living an illusory life.” There aren’t unpleasant things in it? “Bosch populates the abyss – his creatures aren’t there before him. There’s not a creature that’s stalking you, it’s just waiting patiently. If it was predatory then you could joust with it, have a relationship with it. It’s death that stalks you, the finality, it makes everything else absurd. It makes reality untenable. You can bypass this or acknowledge it on Sundays. But not the rest of the week! I gotta put my suit on.” He reaches for his bright orange flame-proof one-piece.

As the cars line up in the entry lane for the big race, Cronenberg takes up pole position. Behind him is a line of vintage racers: an MG, a Lotus, a Porsche, even a Volvo saloon. The drivers, all enthusiasts rather than professionals, are lounging around in twos and threes, chatting and joking. Only Cronenberg is seated in his car, very still, white helmet enveloping his head, hands gripping the steering wheel. No fidgeting.

The Cooper quickly gets ahead and over eight laps develops this into a 200 metre lead at the finishing line. The drivers mill around off-track, doing the post-mortem. The winner smiles calmly and drives back to the trailer.

Martin Scorsese was so convinced that Cronenberg would be a dangerous weirdo that he expressed profound unease at the prospect of meeting him. After the event he told Cronenberg he looked like a Beverly Hills gynaecologist. Certainly as the director strolls around in sneakers and shorts, he resembles less a past-master of perversion than a lawyer on the way to the beach. His wavy hair, light brown streaked with grey, falls from its centre parting onto the black frames of the round-lensed spectacles which dominate his clean-cut features. The appearance is earnest, cerebral, with a dash of postgraduate. No visible sign of the screenwriter who, in Dead Ringers, proposed the notion that people have an inner beauty, so why were competitions not held for Best Spleen or Most Perfect Kidney?

A camera panning round the walls of the compact two-room office suite housing David Cronenberg Productions in uptown Toronto might start off by holding for a moment on a framed drawing mounted midway between the director’s desk and the adjacent room. The drawing appears to have been cut from a medical textbook, and depicts a detailed cross-section of a womb and vaginal passage. The legend beneath the illustration reads ‘Section 33: Anomalies of the Female Urinogenital System. Fig 999 – Trifurcate Uterus.’ At the top of the vagina are three cervixes leading into three separate compartments of the uterus. This exotic deformity was to be found inside Claire Niveau, the prized patient of the gynaecological Mantle twins in Dead Ringers. The drawing was given to Cronenberg as a birthday present.

The camera would continue to pan, taking in tidy computer tables and inoffensive filing cabinets before alighting on the desk occupied by Sandra Tucker, Cronenberg’s personal assistant. If the director’s doctor/lawyer image is slightly compromised by the length of his hair, then Tucker’s neat coiffure, spectacles and smart but staid outfit quickly restore the balance, establishing a neat visual incongruity that speaks volumes about the contradictions in Cronenberg himself.

While he may not look or act like a wild man, Cronenberg is resigned to being treated as one by ‘the money’. “Home Box Office asked to meet me and I said ‘No, my work is extreme’ and they said ‘Don’t worry, we don’t have the same censorship practices as the networks’ so I took them some stuff and said ‘This is extreme, you know’ and they said ‘Don’t worry’ again, so I showed it and then they said ‘This is extreme!’ I probably shouldn’t bother.”

David Cronenberg likes looking into bodies. Their surfaces are not enough; to really get into them you have to get into them. His own body is no exception. In the 60’s he fell off his motorcycle during a race and separated his shoulder. “The surgeon said I had to have a shoulder pin. It was a nail and a screw in chrome cobalt, very exotic and shiny. Later on this thing started to unscrew inside me and they said ‘It’s starting to migrate out!’ They asked if I wanted to have an anaesthetic and I said ‘Have you seen any of my movies?'”

It’s not hard to see what moved Scorsese to make his gynaecologist gag – Cronenberg talks soberly about his films, his critics, problems of finance and the aesthetics of lighting for video as opposed to film. He smiles, makes good jokes and frequently alludes to European ‘art-house’ directors whose work has no discernible affinity with the gruesome horror on which his own reputation is founded. His speech is calm, considered and invariably lucid. Clearly his intellect rarely misses a beat, but does David Cronenberg have an emotional life? Earlier at the CBC studios in Toronto there had been a brief glimpse of a less tranquil soul.

The director is informed by the telephonist that Jeremy Thomas, the producer of Naked Lunch, has been trying to contact him. “I thought you were on set so I didn’t call you,” the young woman says. Cronenberg bristles, raises his voice. “Look – don’t think! Don’t assume! If there’s a call I want to know about it!” He turns and marches away. Moments later, in his office, he breaks off from recalling his enjoyment of Chaucer at university to confide regretfully “You just saw me get as annoyed as I ever get.”

Ron Sanders is the Editor on Naked Lunch. He met Cronenberg through their mutual passion for motorcycles and cars and became a permanent member of Cronenberg’s production team. He has seen the director in a variety of trying situations. “Professionally he’s extremely calm. If he’s angry on set he’ll go very quiet. One night on Dead Ringers he called me to the set. He’d been in conflict with Jeremy Irons and he wanted somebody there he knew well. He’s so controlled, he wanted somebody to complain to.”

The theme of emotional containment is taken up by Norman Snyder, co-writer of Dead Ringers. “Like other strong personalities David sometimes feels uncomfortable competing with strong personalities. He likes to control his emotions. He doesn’t go to parties and he detests bars. For someone in a collaborative profession he’s pretty reclusive.”

Cronenberg comes from an artistic, middle-class family: his mother was an accompanist for the National Ballet of Canada and his father was a writer. During the Depression Cronenberg Senior ran ‘The Professor’s Bookstore’ in Toronto. The store later went bankrupt and the stock was stacked up against the walls and corridors of the family home. The young Cronenberg read his way through piles of novels, emerging in his teens with a keen appreciation of Henry Miller and Nabokov that led him on to Joyce, Beckett and then the Beat writers.

It was at this time that he first encountered both Naked Lunch and the burgeoning alternative culture of the 60’s. Despite the exoticism of his film imagery, psychedelic drugs did not play a significant part in shaping his vision. “I can remember us getting very excited about Aldous Huxley. We ground up Morning Glory seeds and filtered them through our socks! It made you puke your guts out. I did one LSD trip – it was great but it was also scarey enough not to do it again. It showed me reality was illusory, it’s just one possibility out of many, and that stayed with me. But I didn’t really have trouble finding the depths, I never have. I had access to those things without any trouble, the drugs were done out of interest not necessity.”

48 years old, married, with two children, Cronenberg does not welcome questions about his family life or visits to his home by photographers. Fair enough. But these mild stipulations become teasingly obstructive when their source volunteers so little regarding his attitudes to sex, intimacy and women, issues that are vitally important in the context of the extraordinary novel upon which Cronenberg’s next film is based.

In 1966 the American obscenity ruling on Naked Lunch was overturned on appeal. One of the two dissenting Justices was, nevertheless, moved to put on record that the book was “a revolting miasma of unrelieved perversion and disease…It is…literary sewage.”

One of the most remarkable novels of the 20th century,Naked Lunch, like the work of Francis Bacon, is violently ugly yet has an irresistible power. Depending on which side the reader falls, the novel is either a brutally honest reflection of the moral vacuity and subsequent bestiality of much of humankind or it is a shapeless excuse for some of the most lurid and repellent scenes of homoeroticism, drug addiction and generally deviant behaviour ever committed to prose.

The book presents tremendous problems to a film-maker. Ron Sanders read it many years ago but found it all “a bit odd. It was a drug-crazed homosexual hallucination.” He was urged to read it again. “I just thought ‘How can he possibly make it?'”

Riotously funny and dense in extraordinary incident, the novel features characters and set pieces that are beyond the pale both of filmic practicability and mainstream good taste. Willy the Disk, for example, “…has a round, disk mouth lined with sensitive, erectile black hairs. He is blind from shooting in the eyeball, his nose and palate eaten away sniffing H, his body a mass of scar tissue hard and dry as wood. He can only eat the shit now with that mouth, sometimes sways out on a long tube of ectoplasm, feeling for the silent frequency of junk.”

Another denizen of the black circus is A.J., a malevolently inventive practical joker “who put the piranha fish in Lady Sutton-Smith’s swimming pool, and dosed the punch with a mixture of Yage, Hashish and Yohimbine during a Fourth of July reception at the U.S. Embassy, precipitating an orgy. Ten prominent citizens – American, of course – died of shame.”

When Sanders was presented with Cronenberg’s adaptation he was immediately impressed. “It was brilliant! He’s transformed it into a story about writers – it’s about a writer’s life and angst, and the writing process. I look forward to the fun and scandal – I don’t have to take the heat!”

Behind Burroughs’ nightmarish imagery lies a puritanical disgust with the moral failure of America allied to the cold Venusian eye of a writer who has been a complete outsider since his mid-teens when a schoolmate’s father remarked “That boy looks like a sheep-killing dog.” There is, however, one constituency whose objections to his work cannot be readily discounted. Apart from the homophobics, narcophobics and lovers of the well structured narrative novel, Burroughs manages to give great offence to women.

Throughout his work the author develops, with complete seriousness, the notion of women as literally an alien species and speculates on how males might be cloned in some way or reproduced ex utero. He has asserted “Women are a perfect curse…I think they were a basic mistake.”

Women are not overly impressed with Burroughs’ solutions to the problems of sexual duality. Some female (and male) critics have detected in the films of David Cronenberg a comparable anxiety about their reproductive capacities. Particularly unforgiving is the Australian feminist writer Barbara Creed, who takes as her starting point a classic quotation from Freud : “Probably no male human being is spared the terrifying shock of threatened castration at the sight of the female genitals.”

It’s probably phallocentric but not inaccurate to say that Creed, in her essay ‘Phallic Panic: Male Hysteria and Dead Ringers‘, lets Cronenberg have it with both barrels. She asserts that his films “particularly Dead Ringers, appear to be unusually obsessed…with the connection between woman, womb and the grotesque.” Its triple-cervixed heroine is another of Cronenberg’s monstrous female freaks, examples of which are easily adduced: in Rabid the heroine grows a penis in her armpit; in The Brood her womb is attached to the outside of her body; in The Fly she dreams of giving birth to a giant maggot. Significantly, Cronenberg himself plays the gynaecologist in the latter nightmare scene.

Cronenberg himself feels the feminists are barking up the wrong tree. “The misogyny attack annoys me, but no more than any militant prepackaged approach annoys me. It’s very distorting. I don’t like people who have a rigid construct of beliefs and ideas.” Norman Snyder supports his colleague. “We haven’t, thank God, come to laws about how to live your life. Feminists have an unfortunate predisposition to censorship. David isn’t obliged to live his life like they say! If you’re looking for a twisted, tormented soul, it doesn’t exist. He’s one of the most psychologically sound human beings I know.” Cronenberg insists on his innocence. “When I look at my work I can see I’m as hard on men as I am on women. It’s obvious that what I’m making is films about the human condition.”

The human condition asserts itself poignantly during the filming of an episode of Scales of Justice, a TV true-life crime series that Cronenberg is shooting as a pre-Naked Lunch warm up. The script reconstructs an armed robbery and the complicated court case that followed it.

One evening in Toronto in 1983, eighteen year old Barbara Turnbull was working the cash register at Becker’s convenience store. Four black kids came in. One had a gun. Maybe he got angry, maybe his thumb slipped on the single action hammer. The bullet smashed her spine at the neck, like a feather dart, she would later say. At the hospital they put her head in a spiked clamp; she could move neither up nor down nor left nor right. Barbara was paralysed from the neck down, probably for the rest of her life.

The corridor of the CBC studio in Scarborough, north Toronto, is conveniently similar to the offices of the Toronto Star, the paper on which Barbara Turnbull now works. Cronenberg’s crew is packed into off-camera nooks and crannies so that a long tracking shot past a line of desks can be run through. The subject of the shot, a woman in a wheelchair, controls the chair by movements of her head. She must run the length of the corridor, finishing with a sharp inswinging turn that will bring chair and driver up against a word processor placed on a mock-up of Turnbull’s work desk. The desk has been jacked up to a better height with little piles of lath under each leg.

Cronenberg murmurs “Action!”, the dolly tracks backwards and the wheelchair hums past the ranks of extras playing secretaries and journalists. The camera clears the end of the corridor and the wheelchair arcs round, hitting the marks nicely but moving at such a clip that it ploughs into the desk and knocks it right off the lath supports. The crew freezes. A palpable discomfort fogs the air. Cronenberg strides up to the toppled desk and announces “Okay – your licence is gone!” All eyes, discreetly, shift to the occupant of the chair. Barbara Turnbull, playing herself, grins ruefully. Relieved laughter ripples round the set.

The director is so equable, so reasonable, that it is difficult to see him as the man who will ride hip-deep into the horrors of Naked Lunch. Can it be that behind the thoughtful, measured demeanour of the family man and solicitous director of disabled actresses there seethes a Freudian repository of misogynist disgust? Is it possible that the man is harbouring at some unconscious level intentions that are radically at odds with the canons of gynaecology? Perhaps there are clues to be found in the conservative traditions of Canada, in particular the staid and orderly cultural centre of Ontario, known in the 1880’s as ‘Toronto the Good’.

Just an hour’s flight from New York City, Toronto has little of its eruptive, energising edge. The avenues are bright and clean and right in the centre of the city the east-west streets are lined with the leafy front yards of comfortable town houses. Peter Ustinov called it ‘New York run by the Swiss’, while a colleague of Einstein’s, the physicist Leopold Infeld, remarked “It must be good to die in Toronto. The transition between life and death would be continuous, painless and scarcely noticeable in this silent town.”

Norman Snyder recalls with a smile that when Cronenberg was a hitch-hiking student he chose, unlike those trudging the hippy trail to India, to spend his time in Denmark. The Scandinavian connection makes sense, he now feels. “Canada is very like those countries. It’s cold, people spend a lot of time indoors in the winter, and they have intense psychological relationships. Canadians are reserved and stand-offish, wary of one another. They think ‘You don’t want to get too close to your fellow man because God knows what monsters are going to come out.'”

If David Cronenberg’s unconscious contains the disgusted reactions identified by Barbara Creed and other critics, does this mean he is a barely reconstructed psychopath who wants to cut up women or is he an artist with unusual access to some of the most profound fears that men have? What does it mean to contain forces that women find violently offensive in their implications?

Cronenberg’s vision is primitive. It touches upon a deeply buried view of the body as a metaphor for things that happen in the mind – a place where anger becomes a vile tumescent growth and uncontrollable sexual desire is the result of a parasitic infestation. That the vehicles for these somatic disruptions are often women has disturbed those who look beyond the story-telling. Yet the psychoanalytic criticism directed towards Cronenberg’s work often omits to acknowledge that the ‘primitive’ vision is articulated in increasingly sophisticated terms that deliver highly compelling cinema. The films address issues of mortality, addiction and the ethics of science that demand a comparable level of attention.

Whether the anarchic and riotous flesh of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch has proved immune to the encoding of messages of unease and disapproval remains to be seen. Whatever the verdict it seems likely that David Cronenberg will continue to make films that speak to men about men and to women about…men.

This is only to be expected from a film-maker prone to saying things like “You take the most beautiful woman in the world, and you cut her open – is she as beautiful on the inside?”

transmitted on BBC Radio 4 in 1997

DG: J.G. Ballard writes about the collisions between people and a world transformed by technology. In the 1970s he wrote the novel ‘Crash’, recently filmed by David Cronenberg, in which his protagonists derived erotic satisfaction from car crashes. Other works, such as ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, ‘High Rise’ and most recently ‘Cocaine Nights’, explore a territory in which the self is splintered and invaded by a myth-ridden mediascape that has eclipsed the real world.

Jim Ballard; many of the characters in your books seem to be able to thrive in circumstances that most people would find fairly destabilizing, to say the least, and these circumstances appear to be futuristic extensions of things that are already going on in our current experience. Do you think that you might have therefore laid out a blueprint for personality types that could thrive in the 21st Century?
JGB: Of course some people over the years have suggested that mental illness is a kind of adaptation to the sort of circumstances that will arise in the future. As we move towards a more and more psychotic landscape, the psychotic traits are signs of a kind of Darwinian adaptation. After all, my grandparents, were they able to visit this country today, Western Europe or the United States for that matter, would find it an extraordinary place; I mean a landscape of sensation, dominated by the mass media, who’re selling everything on the strength of… eroticism, violence, and, in terms of advertising, huge claims to a sort of mythic wonderland of possibility that buying the latest refrigerator or electric toothbrush will usher you into. My grandparents would have thought this place absolutely mad, and they might well think that someone as disturbed as some of the characters in my fiction were rather sensible in the way they behaved.

So a conventional psychoanalytic view would be that we can adjust, we must be well adjusted, and the psychopath is not well adjusted. So are we leaving behind the notion of being well adjusted?
Well the psychopath may not be well adjusted to a society such as existed, say, 30 or 40 years ago, but there are periods of history, and we’ve passed through quite a number of them and are still doing so where the psychopath is highly adjusted to whatever is going on around him, and look at the Second World War; look at the former Yugoslavia today. Psychopaths roved both these sort of nightmare terrains and were probably the best adapted of all. I mean the sane and cautious and quotes ‘well adjusted’ were the people who sadly were unable to cope.

I mean, another conventional view of the genesis of psychopathy would lay the originating incidence at the door of the family. But you don’t seem to write about that much, you seem to think we have a pathogenic media culture that is as powerful if not more powerful than anything your parents could do to you.
I think that’s true, I mean I take the view that… the environment today is itself so filled with pressures of every conceivable kind – the pressures to conform, the pressures to amuse oneself, the pressures to find oneself – and the constant bombardment of everyday life by advertising, the media landscape, together represent a continuing kind of challenge to one’s sanity. And, of course, many of my characters are wilting under the pressure; they don’t want to buy any more refrigerators or electric toothbrushes, they want to find some truth about themselves, so they embark, generally speaking in my fiction, on some sort of voyage of discovery.

If you look at a book of mine like ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, there you have this psychiatrist who’s having a mental breakdown, who is obsessed with what he sees as the great tragedies of the mid-20th Century, above all the assassination of Kennedy, and he sets up a whole series of psychodramas in which Kennedy is, as it were, assassinated again, Marilyn Monroe commits suicide again, and so on. But as he himself says, he wants to kill Kennedy, but in a way that makes sense. He’s trying to re-mythologise these terrible tragedies in order to lay them to rest. And outwardly some of his behaviour in ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ might seem very bizarre, but in fact it’s all logically constructed. They’re constructing their own logical alternative universe to what they see as a sort of poisoned realm. Which is a fair description of the world today, still.

So, by that token, in ‘Crash’, the people who seek that great physical intimacy with automobiles and parts of automobiles are embarked on a sort of healing process.
Absolutely. Absolutely. They’re faced with a conundrum that faces almost all the characters in my fiction; sensation rules our world, and a sort of perverse logic is operating which thrives on violence, and to some extent, a lesser extent I think, sex. The media landscape is saturated with images of violence and sexuality, desperately trying to extract a sort of flicker, a galvanic response from the sort of dead frog’s leg of the human spirit, and my characters are trying to sort of establish a more meaningful sort of psychological circuitry, that at present is completely overwhelmed by our sort of perverse entertainment landscape.

You’ve spoken about predictive mythologies, as distinct from mythologies that were shaped in the distant past, and that our aids to living in a rather unchanging present; I suspect you think that the present is changing so fast that the old conceptions of mythology are no longer useful. Predictive mythologies are those which you have said equip us to live in the future. If you’re not bound to be psychopathic, if you don’t tend to be hysterical, what predictive mythologies, or strategies if you like, can you conceive of that would help get people through this media informational avalanche that seems to induce such tremendous stress?
Well, the 20th Century has been a huge manufacturer of what I call predictive mythologies. I mean one of the greatest is the notion of space travel; the idea that one day mankind will leave this planet and move outwards into the solar system, colonizing other planets, and then beyond the solar system into the universe as a whole. I would say that that dream of colonization of space has rather faded now because the problems of moving large populations out into space are so… well, they’re virtually insuperable. That’s I think one of the greatest predictive mythologies of the 20th Century, the notion of space travel, but there’ve been others.

The others, the sort of classic Wellsian, I suppose, dream of a society perfected by science, it’s the dream one saw laid out in Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, countless novels and films, the notion that science, sensibly applied to social problems, will solve most of them, and that we can all live in a kind of Corbusier world where tensions are defused by enlightened social legislation, and so on. That’s another great predictive mythology. Hasn’t really worked out; human beings perhaps haven’t evolved sufficiently to be able to enjoy living in high rise blocks or something like Corbusier’s radiant city seems much too regimented. We seem to need a certain element of sort of street level chaos in our lives. We aren’t as enlightened as we’d like to be; but that’s another great predictive mythology.

Another is that vision of the better life which advertising has been trying to convince us of for the last sixty, seventy years: Buy the latest model Buick, move into the right style of ranch home, make sure your wife is dressed in the latest high street fashions – and life will seem better. It’s complete mythology, as complete as anything the ancient Greeks came up with. And it’s extremely potent, only most people half believe it. In fact you can say today that we live entirely on a whole system of predictive mythologies that actually are all we have to give our lives any meaning.

There’s the predictive mythology of the obsolete body: there is a vocal cyber -community who say that technology allows us now a digitised electro-space, or something like that, where we can communicate more freely than ever before. Do you buy into that one? What about the internet?
I am extremely impressed by the internet. I think it’s a whole series of private universes that are paraded across the screen in an absolutely riveting way. It’s a form of self-publishing that is obviously just in it’s infancy now.

Virtual reality is something slightly different. I mean I take for granted that eventually virtual reality systems will be available to us which create a simulated reality that is more convincing than that which our central nervous systems create. I mean one must remember the brain is itself a virtual reality machine, the illusion we have of the real world, of factories and streets and office blocks and other people talking to us is itself a virtual reality simulation generated by our brains.

I think when the first true virtual reality systems become available, and contain more visual information and are more visually convincing than ordinary reality, the temptation for the human race will be to enter this virtual reality system and close the door behind it. I mean, I think there’s a danger there because one will really be able to enter into a fantasy world which, unlike all fantasies in the past, would be more convincing than everyday reality.

In two hundred years’ time it may be possible to author your own virtual reality, but there may come a point at which the social will simply collapse in favour of highly individualized, designed virtual worlds?
I think that probably will happen, and it creates all sorts of moral dilemmas. I mean when people enter their virtual reality world, where they can play games with their own psychopathologies, where if they want to they can assume the role of any character in history, or any imaginary character, if they want one day be a Nobel Prize winning physicist, and the next day play a concentration camp commandant, they’ll be able to step beyond the sort of conventional bounds of morality alogether; I mean one would be morally free to play with one’s own psychopathology as a game. That’s rather dangerous, putting it mildly.

I mean to some extent that happens today, I mean, sort of, one can watch violent films on one’s own TV set, read pretty psychotic novels, and briefly enter into the world of ‘Die Hard 3’ or novels of William Burroughs or the Marquis De Sade, but generally one switches off and turns the last page and returns to the business of making one’s supper. But I mean I can imagine a virtual reality world so rich that one scarcely bothers to leave it, except for sort of basic necessities.

I imagine it will come and will pose a vast challenge to society as we know it.

When we talk like this, highly speculatively, these things may not come about but nevertheless, they seem to be fascinating things to talk about, and here we are talking about them at the end of the 20th Century – why are they so fascinating? It may be that we don’t get virtual reality that’s as good as the real thing, but it’s certainly compelling to think about. Why is that?
Of course we already do get a kind of virtual reality that is superior to the real thing – the average cinema screen contains more units of visual information than our eyes perceive in ordinary reality, that’s why the big screen is so much more gripping than the small TV screen.

Why are we fascinated by the prospect of virtual reality systems and talk about them? Well, they offer such a challenge to our perception of what a sort of sane life in a sane society is. I think people do perceive now that there is a radical, a whole series even, of radical alternatives to the present world. They look back on the 20th Century and they see it as a period of gigantic advances, and yet they see it as exhibiting deep flaws. Not just its great world wars, and its violent and often psychopathic entertainment culture, but that there’s something missing from the world that we all inhabit. I think most people realise the gods have died, we’ve lost our faith in the far future, and that we’re living in a commodified world where everything has a price tag; a world filled with dreams that money can buy, but dreams that soon pall.

I think people perceive that life is probably meaningless, that we’re an accident of fate biologically, and that societies that we inhabit, far from being social structures that reflect deep, enduring needs, are in fact gimcrack, almost extemporised sets of rules that someone in charge of a lifeboat might impose on survivors sitting around him; so many biscuits per day and half a pint of water. And that society’s just a set of opportunistic conventions that we accept in order to facilitate ordinary life, just as we accept that we drive in this country on the left side of the road; and we all that that doesn’t reflect some deep pre-existing meaning within our lives.

I think most people realise that for all its complexity contemporary society is an artificial construct that can be moved offstage at a moment’s notice, as people find at times of war, as I found during the Second World War as a child in Shanghai. You reality is just a stage set that can be pushed aside, and a very different set of rules can then apply.

I mean, given the hollowness of existence, I think people are beginning to wonder what does life really offer us in terms of its possibilities. Some people reach out to bizarre cults, others move into drugs, but these are all rather desperate remedies and I don’t think they touch the truth.

You’re talking about a difficulty of being social, but you move across and almost talk about the difficulty of being, period. As if the 20th Century saw, amongst other things, the peak of the social, and its decline, and that we’ve run out of strategies, and that some of our most alluring options seem to be recreational psychopathology in cyberspace.
Well, I think that puts it very neatly, and that’s what I fear. I mean, what do we see at the end of the 20th Century? We see the churches empty, in the West that is, and people in the most advanced societies, in Western Europe and the United States, moving more and more into gated communities, where security is the dominant concern. And that’s in many ways to be deplored, I mean if you think of what society invests in the training of its leading professionals, its doctors, architects, lawyers and so on, for them then to opt out and move into a gated community where they exist behind huge arrays of electronic padlocks, and have no interaction with the rest of society in their social hours, is a deplorable state of affairs. I think the way in which the gated community is springing up all over the world now is an ominous sign. It’s a sign that something is deeply wrong with the societies that have evolved at the end of the 20th Century – people aren’t moving into gated communities simply to avoid muggers and housebreakers, they’re moving into gated communities to get away from other people. Even people like themselves, that’s the curious thing. Because inside most gated communities there’s very little social life; people are happy to enter their executive houses and stay there.

In your recent book, ‘Cocaine Nights’, the book takes place in a community off the Costa Del Sol; you introduce the figure of Bobby Crawford, tennis coach, who’s a psychopath by just about anybody’s definition.
Well of course Crawford is in many ways a benevolent psychopath who is trying to revive this moribund community.

Could you read us an excerpt?
Yes, I think, as the psychiatrist in the book remarks:
“In a sense, Crawford may be the saviour of the entire Costa Del Sol, and even the wider world beyond that. You’ve been to Gibraltar? One of the last outposts of small-scale greed, openly dedicated to corruption; no wonder the Brussels bureauocrats are trying to close it down.

Our governments are preparing for a future without work, and that includes the petty criminals. Leisure societies lie ahead of us like those you see on this coast. People will still work – or rather, some people will still work, but only for a decade of their lives. They will retire in their late thirties, with fifty years of idleness in front of them.

A billion balconies facing the sun; still, it means a final goodbye to wars and ideologies. But how do you energize people, give them some sense of community? A world lying on its back is vulnerable to any cunning predator.

Politics are a pastime for a professional caste and fail to excite the rest of us. Religious belief demands a vast effort of imaginative and emotional commitment, difficult to muster if you’re still groggy from last night’s sleeping pill.

Only one thing is left which can rouse people, threaten them directly and force them to act together: crime. Crime and transgressive behaviour. By which I mean all activities which aren’t necessarily illegal, but provoke us and tap our need for strong emotion, quicken the nervous system and jump the synapses, deadened by leisure and inaction.”

The book takes place in a gated community, also an echo of the idea of a sort of gated self, which is propagated by the entertainment culture. The entertainment culture sells increasingly virtualized, isolated experiences, rather more cheaply than the real estate involved in the gated community, much more widely available, and you end up with, you know, the gated community of me.
Absolutely. I think it’s a return to the self in a way, and an awareness, a rather terrifying awareness that self is probably without meaning. That’s the fearful prospect a little further down the road, that people will accept that their lives are meaningless and that everything else is a fiction designed to assuage, you know, the sort of desperate anxiety of a meaningless world.

That’s a frightening terminus to disembark onto.

Jim Ballard, thank you very much.