Money Money Money Money... MONEY

Being incredibly selfish, it is no surprise that John Self often turns the conversation of the narrative back to him. There is almost never a paragraph that does not refer back to the pains and successes of being John Self. He is often asserting his own face on the accomplishments of other, while denying he had an active part in his own failures. John Self's narrative voice is aggressive and confident, while also being cynical and self-conscious. On page 67 John Self is describing a tabloid he was reading after he returned from New York to London saying, "The other morning I opened my tabloid to find that, during my brief absence, the whole of England had been scalded by tumult and mutiny" In that one line, not even the whole sentence, John Self claimed the tabloid to be his, not any old tabloid or magazine, not a named tabloid, it was John Self's. Through very specific word choice he is taking credit for the publication of new, which he was completely uninformed of. He also is asserting that it was his leaving that drove the country to shit. He later goes on to explain that the problem of unemployment in England was the problem and says "I know how you feel. I haven't got that much to do all day myself. I sit here defencelessly, my mind full of earache and riot." While being completely full of himself, he then steps back to level with the rest of society in order to make himself seem more human. He undercuts the problem by twisting the meaning of "unemployment" by equating it with boredom and laziness, which are two things that John Self can identify with.

Money: director's commentary

From the start of the novel it is clear to the reader that the main character and narrator, John Self, is engaging in a conversation with the reader. It appears that John Self and the reader have a personal relationship, but it is not clear how this relationship works. The reader only know that John Self is comfortable explaining his inner thoughts to them. It is difficult to relate to John Self as the reader because of the fact that I don't feel like myself, I feel like I am put in the position of a character that I am unfamiliar with. Money feels like a movie with the director's commentary. You watch a movie and become involved in the story, but at the same time you have the creator of the story giving you the motivation and meaning behind the scenes. That is how I perceive John Self as a narrator. He lives his life like a movie, and in his book gives the commentary with it. As the reader it is difficult to adjust to the style, but it seems that as the reader once I have adjusted I will be able to become more involved with the story and characters.

Crash the film.

David Cronenberg's film adaptation of Crash was extremely disappointing and awkward. The novel presented the scenery, subjects, and characters through microscopic descriptions that then open up to reveal the whole image. This aspect of the novel did not transfer on film. I failed to feel the intense majesty that came with Ballard's description. Another thing that did not transfer at all was the internal conflict James was experiencing. It seemed to almost have been written out of the story all together. The characters, with maybe the exception of Helen Remmington, seemed to be all in with Vaughn and their messed up fantasies, whereas in the book I felt a lot more resistance from both James and Catherine.

The question of Vaughn's existence is an interesting debate within this novel. I have found myself questioning James Ballard's statements about the scars on Vaughn's body. Ballard more often than not describes the scars on Vaughn's body in extraordinary detail, but Vaughn would have needed to be completely naked for Ballard to know what his scars look like. Ballard describes "His hard stomach was marked by a fretwork of scars. On his right hip the scars formed a mould waiting for my fingertips" (149). No where did it say that Vaughn was not wearing a shirt. One could argue that this is Ballard merely fantasizing about Vaughn's scarred body, however his descriptions are consistent whenever he is describing them. Ballard also describes them to the reader in absolutes. When these lines are read there is no question that this is not what Vaughn's body looks like. This makes me believe that because Ballard claims to know everything about Vaughn's body and past injuries Ballard may be conjuring him up. I then have to question Ballard's knowledge of Vaughn's mind and personality, but that does not seem to work as well as the physical descriptions.

In Her Angles

He watched her as she bounced her leg against the wall of the M16 bus. He watched her heel tap the floor for a brief moment, only to spring back up again, bending her foot almost perpendicular to her toes. Not a perfect right angle. Somewhere between 180 and 90 degrees. He watched as her foot, shaped sweetly into the tiny ballet flat, as it created the most interesting angles against the floor if the bus. How they would grow from nothing, expanding and demonstrating larger areas. But they only lasted a moment before her foot fell into the empty space, closing the gap. Following the lines of her heel, up to her knee and onto her hip, he realized the many beautiful and skewed lines her body displayed sitting on the bench-style seat of the bus. How her calf and thigh met at her knee to form a perfect 90-degree angle, and her thigh met with her torso making another almost perfect angle. There was so much beauty in her geometry.  

XXX

Ballard has been intriguing me in this part of the reading with his descriptions of the normal goings on around him. He uses the people that make up the background of the story to casually reveal the taboo side of all man. At the start of chapter 17 when Vaughan, James, and Catherine were approaching an accident on the road Ballard describes the amount of people who were gathering to watch the scene saying, "the spectators leaned elbow to elbow on the metal rail" (152) watching from above. Ballard describes a seemingly simple event, but the fact that all of these people are stopping to leisurely watch as car accident victims are scraped off the road reveals that most people are at least fascinated by violence. Later in the chapter when the onlookers are leaving the scene Ballard is describing the aftermath of the event; "A burly man in a truck-driver's drivers jacket helped his wife up the embankment, a hand on her buttocks. This perverse sexuality filled the air..." (157). By placing those seemingly normal people in the same psychological realm as Vaughan, someone who in society would be considered a sexual deviant, Ballard is making the reader question his/her own sexual fantasies.

The scene at the carwash was also very interesting when thinking about character development in the novel. Vaughan from the start was a very demanding character, he took over the topic of the first sentence but didn't even appear in the novel until halfway in. He stormed into James' life, turned it on his head, and then had sex with his wife in the backseat of his own car while he was driving! That's wild, and James liked it. And Catherine, who had first been unfaithful to James, then reaffirmed herself to him, is now back to cheating on him in front of him. These characters seems to be using a much different level of reasoning than what is commonly accepted.

Considering Catherine

Catherine has been an intriguing character for me from the beginning; she was the one that really made me believe that they very well could be in some different made up world because her reactions to events were so outlandish and calm. However, she has been developing into a much more typical wifely character. She is accompanied in her new attitude by her secretary. Catherine's new reactions to James' decisions seem much more realistic now, but after seeing her in the beginning, she only seems to be much more complicated. James describes how his wife has become much more concerned with his sexual behavior despite the fact that she takes part in the same types of sexual experiences. She has even become a more loyal wife; James explains how she has rededicated herself to their marriage, while he is off screwing his scarred (both physically and emotionally) doctor.

The relationship between James and Dr. Helen Remington also interests me quite a bit. James seems to have predicted this new side of her before they even officially met. Upon reading his ideas about her int he earlier chapters of the book I wrote them off as his twisted visions of humanity projected on another damaged person. However, the sole fact that she was willing and able to get into a car with him to leave the impound lot makes her, and in turn all humans, seem much more intrigued with violence, death, and sex.

Do the characters come off as specific characteristics blown out of proportion, which is suggested of all satire in the Menippean Style essay, or do they seem like dynamic, round, and complex?