The Films of Steven Spielberg by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461672821
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2013-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

The reality that Ballard invents in Empire of the Sun is a representation of World War II, different from the normal Euro/American perceptions, themselves partly created by cinema as history is rewritten by the victors in endless fictional replays. Jim’s illusions about war, and his gradual disillusionment, form the novel’s core, but a sense of unreality is at the heart of the book: a sense expressed in a nightmarish vision of bodies and death, which would not be out of place in a modern “visceral” horror movie.

The film adaptation of the novel avoids this sense of nightmare, replacing it with dreamlike surrealist sequences serving to show how attractive the war is to Jim, a great adventure, and thus avoiding the novel’s critical edge.

Although Empire is the closest Ballard has come to a conventional novel, it retains elements of the science fiction and horror which mark his other work. In the preface to Crash—at the time of writing the next film project of David Cronenberg, master of body horror and director of The Fly and Videodrome—Ballard claims that “science fiction represents the main literary tradition of the 20th century.” He attacks the mainstream modern novel, identifying its dominant characteristic as “its sense of individual isolation, its mood of introspection and alienation, a state of mind always assumed to be the hallmark of 20th century consciousness.”3

Ballard denies that this is a true picture of twentieth-century consciousness, suggesting instead that the real subject matter of the mainstream novel is a rationalization of guilt and estrangement. But, he claims: “if anything befits the 20th century it is optimism, the iconography of mass merchandising, naivete and a guilt free enjoyment of all the mind’s possibilities.”4

Ballard writes horrifically (in Crash he also writes pornographically) about the modem world as a warning to his readers. We have appropriated both the past and the future into our present, rewriting them, recreating them, trying out possible futures.

Towards the end of Empire of the Sun as print-text, the hero, Jim, walks out into the streets of Shanghai and sees three gigantic cinema screens endlessly replaying propaganda movies of battles fought and won in the Second World War. Cinema is one of the recurring motifs in the book. We first encounter Jim at the start of his war watching the same kinds of newsreels in the crypt of the Shanghai Anglican Cathedral. Such images pervade Jim’s dreams. References to films and cinema form a grotesque and ironic comment on the action in the novel; from the honor guard of fifty hunchbacks in medieval costume outside the cinema showing The Hunchback of Notre Dame, to the ironic giant poster showing the ransacking of Atlanta and Gable/Leigh from Gone with the Wind. Jim is imprisoned in an open-air cinema and his chauffeur is an actor in locally made films. Ballard’s style, indeed, reveals many cinematic techniques, from long, slow tracks through the streets of Shanghai, to dramatic cuts at the ends of chapters or sections.

The film makes some use of these references, at

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