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as consumers then capitalism is going to have to tap
rather more darker strains in our characters, which is of
course what’s been happening for a while. If you look
at the way in which the more violent contact sports are
marketed – American Football, wrestling, boxing – and
of course the most violent entertainment culture of
all, the Hollywood film, all these have tapped into the
darker side of human nature in order to keep the juices
of appetites flowing. That is the risk.”
Or as Wilder Penrose says in Super-Cannes: “A
perverse sexual act can liberate the visionary self in
even the dullest soul. The consumer society hungers
for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive
the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that
will keep us ‘buying’? Psychopathy is the only engine
powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the
arts, sciences and industries of the world.”
Ballard makes the simile with politics – “Hitler
tapped into all kinds of psychopathic traits in the
German people, the race hatred in particular: Jews,
Gypsies, non-Germans, all ‘biological inferiors’. These
were very potent ideas that are probably carried in all
of us from our distant past when it made sense to fear
strangers because they were probably trying to steal
your cattle, kill you or rape your wife. Hitler tapped
those buried layers of psychopathy. It’s an example of
what could happen.”
With Super-Cannes we once again have all the cool
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
clarity of a writer who has never flinched from his
subject matter for the last 40 years. As our narrator,
Paul Sinclair, drives south to the French coast with his
doctor wife Jane, towards Eden-Olympia, their new
home, “hundreds of blue ovals trembled like damaged
retinas in the Provençal sun”. Ballard writes of the
flare of swimming pools on the hillside: “Ten thousand
years in the future, long after the Côte d’Azur
had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle
over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of
tritons and stylised fish, inexplicably hauled up the
mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of
a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary geometers.”
Thus we are in familiar unfamiliar territory,
in a world we think we know but which is perhaps
meaningful only retroactively.
Once again there is the Ballardian theme of morality
reduced to aesthetics, or as Paul Sinclair has it “Civility
and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia. By the
end of the afternoon all this tolerance and good behaviour
left me feeling deeply bored.” Sinclair is in a world
in which “A moral calculus that took thousands of years
to develop starts to wither from neglect, an adolescent
world where you define yourself by the kind of trainers
you wear.”
Super-Cannes takes off as a ‘why-dunnit’ when Paul
Sinclair learns that he and his wife have been housed
in a villa whose previous occupant, David Greenwood,
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