A Melbourne rugby reporter, Ben Davis, presents his live-to-air TV report on the night’s game. Behind him a Brisbane Broncos fan pretends to lick his ear. A few seconds later the phantom ear licker returns, grabbing Davis in a headlock and knocking him off camera. Davis recovers, attempts to restart his report and is then attacked by the ear licker and around 10 of his mates, who proceed to bash the hapless reporter — in full view of the still-rolling TV camera.
Unsurprisingly, a few days later Davis’s attackers were caught and arrested, having not bothered to hide their gurning mugs from the camera. I’ve watched the footage again and again, as it’s absolutely boggling, the sheer, brazen willingness of these men to perform for the lens, to not even bother to cloak their random acts of violence from a watching world.
Ballardian? Absolutely. Let me count the ways:
1) In High-Rise, the character Wilder records the breakdown of social life in the high-rise via his all-seeing cine-camera. Immune to the deaths of all those around him, his only thought is to capture the scene on film, ostensibly to record a documentary on the building, but really to fulfil the deep-seated need to record his own ‘personal biography’, a record of his ascent through the high-rise that would shame those who he feels are superior to him, ie, the professional classes who also populate the building, mainly media types — reporters, journalists, and so on. Wilder signals an extreme macho life-force, a callous, brutal and selfish masculinity that completely effaces any vestige of community that surrounds him. Elsewhere, Ballard describes the ‘true light’ of the high-rise as that of “…the metallic flash of the Polaroid camera, that intermittent radiation which recorded a moment of hoped-for violence for some later voyeuristic pleasure. What depraved species of electric flora would spring to life from the garbage-strewn carpets of the corridors in response to this new source of light?”
Mr Ballard, please, look no further: your ‘depraved species of electric flora’ has sprung forth from the cracks of the concrete and macadam right here in Melbourne.
2) In Cocaine Nights, Bobby Crawford advocates a social program of ‘crime as performance art’, mediated by home video cameras and ad hoc, mobile film clubs. When pressed as to why, Crawford responds, ‘There’s a kind of amnesia at work here — an amnesia of self. People literally forget who they are. The camera lens needs to be their memory.’ But Crawford is not simply interested in documentation; like any good film student, he knows that there is no such thing as an ‘objective’ documentary, that selection of angles, deployment of edits, and selection of scenes, right down to minute spatial and temporal data (ie, shooting at a certain time of day, in a certain place) in a documentary is as much a manipulation of reality as any fiction film.
Thus there is certainly an amnesia at work in this footage, an amnesia that absolves its participants of all responsibility, an amnesia that says if the cameras are rolling, then anything and anyone is fair game, that it’s all staged, we were joking, its only a game, a performance for the cameras but one that has real, violent — but ignored — consequences. My advice to these boys? Hire a lawyer familiar with Baudrillard, or Ballard. How else are you going to talk your way out of a charge of committing a brutal assault recorded on live television with thousands of viewers as witnesses? With ‘Ba(udri)llard’ as your lawyer, you might just be able to claim that ‘the assault on Ben Davis did not take place’…
(However, it may be that these bad boys are simply dishing out celebrity justice, Savage (re)Public style.)
3) But let’s step away from the camera angles for a minute. As the president of the Melbourne Psychogeographical Society recently remarked to me, from out of nowhere Kingdom Come has emerged as the Ballardian text par excellence as it applies to Australia, where our penchant for en masse flag waving, random and unexplained violence, blind prejudice, anti-intellectualism, minimal funding for the arts and unwavering sports obsession puts even England, and Ballard’s St George’s-flag-flapping hordes, to shame.
As far as Western societies go, Australia is still the WILD West, still new and unformed and built on a tradition of bloodshed that goes right back to the very birth of the nation, a psychic schism that still festers like an open sore. In many ways, Australia, despite affectations of worldliness and cosmopolitan charm in big Australian cities like Sydney and Melbourne, is like the suburb of Brooklands in Ballard’s Kingdom Come writ large: an isolated culture (just as Brooklands is sealed off from London by the motorway system, Australia, as a whole is sealed off from the Western world by distance) fuelled by media prejudice and hatred, blind loyalty to sport (and I’m not a hater of sports per se, just the culture that surrounds it; don’t forget the bozos in the YouTube footage are proudly displaying their team colours), and jingoistic thinking that is able to be tapped, diverted and funnelled into ‘us and them’ dichotomies as needed. The sense Ballard gives in Kingdom Come of sporting fans supporting consumerism rather than any notion of ‘team’ or ‘community’ is hyperrealised here in Australia. The big football teams in Melbourne, for example, all play out of the same two grounds; there’s no suburban specificity, no sense of individuality, just a differentiation predicated on sponsors’ logos. The dystopian cliche of a One World Government effacing all nations under a fascist regime finds full expression in the microcosm that is Australian football, in itself an expression of wider society. And consumerism begets violence, needs it to survive…
Worryingly, inner-city Melbourne appears increasingly lawless. Each day brings newspaper reports of gangs attacking passengers on trams, bashings of Sudanese refugees, drunk patrons of nightclubs targeted for muggings… The true sound of Australia is no longer ‘Advance Australia Fair’ but rather the sickening thud of a skull hitting the pavement. Well, that’s what you read in the papers anyway, and while I have never been one to trust the sensationalized Australian media for my eyes and ears on the world, my attitude changed once it started happening to me, having suffered three unprovoked attacks on the streets in the past couple of years.
But it’s as a cyclist that I’m especially vulnerable. The Melbourne sprawl, with its endless ribbons of freeways and dual carriageways, is among the world’s largest exurban conglomerates. It’s designed for cars to move quickly between long distances; our suburbs are built from the rubble of autogeddon. Cyclists flirt daily with death in such a system, dehumanised as ‘rats who have no place on the roads‘ and victimised for the crime of holding up a car for a few seconds when ill-thought-out and inadequate bike lanes suddenly vanish at intersections and high-traffic areas and we are forced to merge with drivers wielding their vehicles like weapons. The Australian media whips up this hatred, printing sensational articles about ‘lycra louts’ hogging the roads and holding up traffic, about how we don’t deserve to be on the roads, how we are all leeches as we don’t pay road taxes. Ballard’s vision of a ‘soft fascism’, smuggled through by the cloak of consumerism, or in this case, media reportage, is the Australian reality — and this media reportage is consumerism, cheer squads for the powerful car lobby who pay big bucks for advertisements in newspapers and whose constituency is the readers of these hateful articles.
Listening to the animated conversations around him, he was struck by the full extent of the antagonisms being expressed, the hostility directed at people who lived in other sections of the high-rise. The malicious humour, the eagerness to believe any piece of gossip and any tall story about the shiftlessness of the lower-floor tenants, or the arrogance of the upper-floor, had all the intensity of racial prejudice.
J.G. Ballard. High-Rise.
Reading those rants, and their awful spleen directed towards cyclists, I know now why, while on my bike, I’ve been deliberately run off the road and into the gutter by cars. Why I’ve had eggs thrown at me; why I’ve lost count of the times someone in a car load of P-plated hoons — safely ensconced within their ‘metallised dream’ — has leant out the window and yelled at me as they’ve sped by, apparently unconcerned that the Doppler effect means their carefully chosen witticism is rendered something like ‘ahhhhyaaffggghuuuuuuunnngggggkkk’. And why, just the other week, stopping at the lights in front of a pub, I had a baboon on the top balcony threaten to throw a bottle of beer at me, yelling “Get off the road cunt, you don’t deserve to be on the road you filth”.
When I read articles in the paper saying that cyclists don’t deserve to be on the roads as they’re a menace, don’t pay road taxes etc etc and then hear these rants used as ammunition against me, as bullets endangering my life, then I can only conclude that Australia is a nation easily manipulated by market forces. If these people weren’t out attacking cyclists and trying to run us off the road they’d be lynching black people. This is prejudice mostly fuelled by the media but also by the government with their non-committal approach to cycle safety, and ignorant people fall for it hook line and sinker. It’s a safe and sanctioned form of prejudice — a violence micro-managed in measured doses by a rabid press — whereas attacking people with a different skin colour will (sometimes) land you in the slammer.
In such an atmosphere, in such a climate, it’s OK to bash people for sport — even if you are being recorded live on national television. There was a recent documentary about a well-known surfie gang here in Australia, in which we see the boys’ home videos. One scene has stayed with me: the gang swarms all over a bus in peak hour, refusing to let it move, harassing the driver, who can only stare in a pathetic mix of terror and resignation at the thug holding the camera, helpless and trapped and harassed for the crime of going about his job. In Australia we glorify such people — Russell Crowe is making a film about this gang. They are Aussie heroes.
Within a few minutes the next attack will begin. Now that I am surrounded for the first time by all the members of my family it seems only fitting that a complete record should be made of this unique event. As I lie here – barely able to breathe, my mouth filled with blood and every tremor of my hands reflected in the attentive eye of the camera six feet away – I realize that there are many who will think my choice of subject a curious one. In all senses, this film will be the ultimate home-movie, and I only hope that whoever watches it will gain some idea of the immense affection I feel for my wife, and for my son and daughter, and of the affection that they, in their unique way, feel for me.
J.G. Ballard. ‘The Intensive Care Unit’.
To quote Virilio:
From now on everything passes through the image. The image has priority over the thing, the object, and sometimes even the physically-present being. Just as real time, instantaneousness, has priority over space. Therefore the image is invasive and ubiquitous. Its role is not to be in the domain of art, the military domain or the technical domain, it is to be everywhere, to be reality… I believe that there is a war of images… And I can tell you my feelings in another way: winning today, whether it’s a market or a fight, is merely not losing sight of yourself.
Paul Virilio. Interviewed in Block 14.
‘Not losing sight of yourself’ — a Ballardian message if ever there was one. But it’s easier said than done….
The Ben Davis bashing, the ‘bicycle wars’, the surfie gang run amok, this casual mayhem that sucks in innocent bystanders — all of it illustrates exactly how violence is deeply ingrained in Australian culture. It also illustrates something even more basic: the desire for ritual humiliation that seems to be the bedrock of Australian values. As does another disturbing incident that was all over the news, in which a gang of Melbourne youths filmed their attacks on homeless people and their sexual assault of a girl, before selling it as a DVD to their mates and uploading excerpts to YouTube. In his discussion of this incident, Stephen Smith makes some pertinent points that could readily apply to everything under discussion here:
…it appears that the public’s consumption of news media about the whole incident is part of a cycle of action and reaction. Here, it is the ‘bent’ turn of consumerism that is precisely the problem. For what lies on the other side of easy blame is a desensitisation to violence in our midst. After all, the most compelling aspect of the DVD is that its makers see it as a commercial product – a consumer item.
…
The group known as the Werribee 12 may not stand at the top end glamour of consumer culture. But at $5 a pop their DVD is just another mindless item for their mates to consume. Just as at Abu Ghraib – where US soldier Lynndie England was only the most direct perpetrator – we need to look further up the ‘chain of command’ in the case of this DVD from suburbia. We need to realise how violence has become part of consumerism. It seems that such measured doses of violence are now an inescapable part of our culture. In this respect we must face the possibility that consumerism has become what amounts to ‘soft fascism’. In this state we now enter a society that craves the image but at the cost of a loss of care and responsibility for the type of reality being represented.
I can’t really add to what Smith has written, except to note one final, disturbing Ballardian resonance: the number of David Cruises just waiting to step into the breach and funnel all that aggression into something far more apocalyptic. These low-talent hacks are waiting in the wings here in Australia, wringing their hands at the thought of revenge, and they appear to be spread over three tiers: 1) ex-TV stars unable to come to terms with a web 2.0 culture and the waning influence of traditional media, and desperate to reclaim their crown; 2) messianic, unrepentant ex-sports stars who’ve built post-sport media careers on a platform of on-camera spite, callousness and bullying; and 3) messianic, unrepentant shock jocks who’ve built their entire careers on a platform of on-air spite, callousness and bullying.
And all of them are looking to take their career to the next level: building their own little self-contained empires with themselves as dictator and lording it over a population of scum, all desperate for their five minutes of fame and all too ready to humiliate themselves and others before a camera to achieve it.
UPDATE: I have just got back from a bike ride, barely an hour after writing this, where, going 50km/h down a hill, I narrowly avoided the deliberately outstretched fist of a guy on the side of the road, as his mates stood by laughing. Unable to swerve to the right, where I would be crushed under the wheels of a speeding car, I managed to duck under this moron’s arm in time to avoid disaster.
Welcome to Melbourne.
..:: MORE INFO
Stephen Smith has written three outstanding articles on urban violence in Australia, two of them referencing and exploring Ballardian themes:
+Fear and Loathing in Cronulla
+ From Abu Ghraib to Werribee (it’s not that far)
+ It’s a mad world – the rise of middle class angst
..:: Plus
+ The Age newspaper: Savage attacks on innocent bystanders mystify experts
..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ Atrocity II
+ The Rats that Ate Mill Park
+ Kingdom Come: ‘Deeply Silly, Patronising’
+ More on Liddle and Ballard
+ The Drought: Water Vigilantes
The post Melborea Moronica: New ‘Depraved Species of Electric Flora’ Found Growing in Melbourne, Australia appeared first on Ballardian.
