“If one assumes -- as I do -- that in the future every home will become like a TV studio in which one is simultaneously writer, director and star of our own show… what is life? What is our existence except our own show? That home movie that we all live inside… it’s already started to some extent. It won’t be like ‘Crossroads’” -- his smooth features produce a startlingly wolfish smile -– “it’ll be more like ‘Eraserhead’."
JG Ballard, interviewed by Charles Shaar Murray, 1983
He would have been VERY disappointed with Love Island, wouldn't he?
ReplyDeleteBallard is the ultimate redundant mid-20th Century Pluto worshipper.
That previous comment of mine is a bit trollish, but what I mean to say is that reality television has tended to negate Ballard's ultra-jaundiced view of humanity. In his novels he tends to posit that when a social group becomes (voluntarily or involuntarily) socially isolated, then it will inevitably devolve into depravity and murderous atavism, whereas the example of reality TV shows tends to indicate that the devolution is far more likely to consist of mild bickering and the occasion bit of furtive bed-hopping.
ReplyDeleteSo Ballard, like William Golding before him, portrays humanity as far more prone to extremism than it actually is. This might have made sense in the second half of the 20th Century, but nowadays this kind of thinking is unhelpful, as most of the derangement in politics comes from the existential fear of extremism rather than extremism itself.