PoMoCo & Eros-Lo-Volt go on an assonance safari!

Friday, cigarette #5
Cup-a-Joe, 2:35pm

Chris didn't think much of J. G. Ballard's Crash, and mostly I'm with him on it. I liked that Ballard asked the question, "Can eros survive in a hyper-technological world?" I didn't like that his answer was, "If by eros you mean something other than lots of stylized sex scenes, then no."

In his comments on my take on the Francisco Nava debacle, Broockman nailed conservatives for "finding something they personally can do absolutely nothing about (gay sex), yet can feel morally superior by blabbing about." It's true that the conservative movement's gay marriage hang-up might be coming from some strange and not very wholesome place in our hearts, but the question of eros-and-modernity-what's-up-with-that? is the front of the culture war that matters most (either that, or it's just the one that matters most to the college culture war). James Poulos is right on the money in calling today's hip intellectuals the "Eros Lo Volt! crowd." (Generation namers, take note.)

Insofar as Crash-the-movie was more than just another vehicle for James Spader to play a creepy yet attractive pervert (see also: Less than Zero, sex lies and videotape, and Secretary), it also failed as an attempt to explain Ballard's point that "what our children have to fear are not the cars on the freeways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths." Cronenberg certainly succeeded in making modern sex look like hell on wheels, but watching the movie I wanted more than that, and I feel like Ballard did, too. Take this, from "The Future of the Future" (published in Vogue in 1977):

Thus we may see ourselves at the turn of the century, each of us the star of a continuous television drama, soothed by the music of our own brain-waves, the centre of an infinite private universe. Will it occur to us, perhaps that there is still one unnecessary intruder in this personal paradise — other people? Thanks to the video-tape library, and the imminent wonders of holistic projection, their physical presence may soon no longer be essential to our lives.

Ballard is convinced that men need other people as much as they ever did but that old-fashioned ways of reminding ourselves of this sound silly and sentimental to modern ears and cannot hope to survive a head-to-head battle with slick and sexy technology. I wanted Crash to offer a postmodern eros as the solution; all I got was some postmodern pornography. (Chris: "This book uses the phrase 'natal cleft' on every page.")

Maybe the Anscombe Society's mission to apply the language of eros to everything (in Sherif Girgis's official statement on the Nava unpleasantness, he uses the phrase "distinctly unchaste" to mean "Dude, that wasn't cool") is the answer. If Crash proves that romance can't be erotic anymore, then maybe campus activism can! But I am skeptical.