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Dis­cov­er the rad­i­cal ener­gy of this unset­tling psychodrama

13 Sep 2022

Words by Anton Bitel

A woman in a red coat and dark hair stands amidst medical personnel in surgical masks, against a dark background with bright lighting.
A woman in a red coat and dark hair stands amidst medical personnel in surgical masks, against a dark background with bright lighting.
Jonathan Weiss offers an uncon­ven­tion­al and dis­turb­ing adap­ta­tion of J.G Bal­lard’s unadapt­able’ work of exper­i­men­tal fiction.

In 1970, J.G. Ballard’s The Atroc­i­ty Exhi­bi­tion was first pub­lished by Jonathan Cape in the UK. This anti-nov­el has had a com­pli­cat­ed pub­li­ca­tion his­to­ry: all 15 of the (linked) sto­ries that make up its chap­ters had already been pub­lished sep­a­rate­ly over the pre­vi­ous four years; in Amer­i­ca, Dou­ble­day & Com­pa­ny pulled their sched­uled 1970 pub­li­ca­tion and destroyed all their print­ed copies over fears of law­suits from celebri­ties named in the sto­ries. It was then pub­lished in the US in 1972 by Grove Press under a dif­fer­ent title, Love and Napalm: Export USA. A revised, anno­tat­ed, illus­trat­ed and expand­ed edi­tion (four extra sto­ries) was pub­lished by Re/​Search in 1990, and has since become the stan­dard version.

Most impor­tant­ly, with its frag­ment­ed form, its Pro­tean char­ac­ters, its deep-seat­ed ambi­gu­i­ty and its non-nar­ra­tive struc­ture, The Atroc­i­ty Exhi­bi­tion was deemed unfilmable. Adapt­ing with Michael Kir­by (who also plays Dr Nathan in the film, and died of can­cer before the post-pro­duc­tion was com­plete) and work­ing from a microbud­get, Jonathan Weiss took up the chal­lenge – and while it is the director/co-writer’s first and only film, it is a dizzy­ing­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed puz­zle box of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry angst, as elu­sive and impen­e­tra­ble as a human­i­ty dri­ven in mad­den­ing cir­cles by its own post­mod­ern condition. 

The fol­low­ing film was cre­at­ed by Dr Travis of our insti­tu­tion,” says a voiceover at the begin­ning of Weiss’ fea­ture. He referred to it as The Atroc­i­ty Exhi­bi­tion. It is the only trace remain­ing of his tenure with us. His present where­abouts are unknown, and there is some doubt as to whether he is even still alive. The film con­sti­tutes a remark­able doc­u­ment of his men­tal break­down. He used both his col­leagues from the insti­tute, as well as patients, as actors in his psy­chodra­mas, while play­ing him­self in var­i­ous incarnations.” 

In oth­er words, Weiss’ film also pur­ports to be Travis’ film, and view­ers will quick­ly find them­selves utter­ly con­fused as to where the bound­aries between them lie, and indeed whether Dr Nathan’s search for the long-absent Travis, and his cho­rus-like com­men­tary on the nature and inter­pre­ta­tion of Travis’ film, con­sti­tute a part of the film-with­in-a-film, or are tak­ing place beyond it.

In a sense it does not mat­ter: for Weiss and Travis are equal­ly tak­ing incom­pre­hen­si­ble events of the last few decades — the vio­lent deaths of icon­ic celebri­ties, the out­rages of the Viet­nam war, the fear of nuclear oblit­er­a­tion and the exis­ten­tial dread of space trav­el — that have come to haunt the col­lec­tive uncon­scious as per­verse psy­chopatholo­gies, and are then, just as equal­ly, recon­sti­tut­ing them as both alter­na­tive real­i­ty and out­sider art.

A man sitting on the floor, engrossed in reading a tablet. The room is cluttered with papers and artwork on the walls.

Travis — whose name keeps alter­ing in the film, but always begins with the let­ter T’ — restages gen­er­alised trau­mas in his film in an attempt to give them a form that he can per­son­al­ly under­stand, much as Dr Nathan seeks an expla­na­tion for Travis’ rene­gade behav­iour (and much as Bal­lard wrote his book as a response to the sud­den and inex­plic­a­ble death of his first wife Mary from pneumonia). 

This is a film, or films, about the quest for mean­ing in an irra­tional, indeed insane world — and hav­ing picked and mixed from Ballard’s already dif­fi­cult col­lec­tion, hav­ing decon­struct­ed and atom­ised what he sees being medi­at­ed around him, and hav­ing inter­wo­ven archival and fic­tive footage, Weiss invites view­ers to pick up — and apart — the pieces and to reassem­ble them after their own hermeneu­tic incli­na­tion. No two view­ers are like­ly to see this film in the same way.

What are you look­ing for?”, asks Karen Novot­ny (Anna Juvan­der), Travis’ mod­el, muse, lead actress and lover whose appear­ance and hair­style rad­i­cal­ly change through­out the film. I’m look­ing for the real one. A real one. A right one. The real one anchors, The rest risks van­ish­ing”, replies Travis, seat­ed on the floor of his apart­ment as he sorts through pho­tographs spread out in front of him – much as we too are sift­ing for truth in the film’s assort­ed images. 

Travis’ obses­sions with World War III, with wounds and plas­tic surgery, with the sui­cide of Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe and the assas­si­na­tion of J.F. Kennedy, with car acci­dents (also fetishised in Ballard’s 1973 nov­el Crash, adapt­ed to film by David Cro­nen­berg in 1996), with astro­nauts, with ther­monu­clear apoc­a­lypse, all rep­re­sent ancient anx­i­eties trans­formed into more con­tem­po­rary icons and archetypes.

What the patient is react­ing against”, observes Dr Nathan, is sim­ply the phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy of the uni­verse.” At least with­in the film(-within-the-film), Travis appears to be occu­py­ing a uni­verse dif­fer­ent from our own, where the Viet­nam War (which end­ed in 1975) still rages on, even as footage of the Space Shut­tle Chal­lenger dis­as­ter (in 1985) already exists. 

This spa­tiotem­po­ral dis­junc­tion is most clear­ly reflect­ed in Travis’ apart­ment, whose inte­ri­ors keep chang­ing, even as copies of Time and Newsweek mag­a­zines can be found on dis­play there that have not, as Travis points out, been pub­lished yet.” Of course, this alter­na­tive uni­verse might be no less a con­struct of Travis’ film than it is of Weiss’ – but the point is that it mir­rors aspects of our own world through an unusu­al chrono­tope, as though real­i­ty had been recon­fig­ured as a dream.

Accom­pa­nied by J.G. Foe­tus’ Thirlwell’s score of sam­ples and musique con­crète, and shot in Acad­e­my ratio to accen­tu­ate a claus­tro­pho­bic per­spec­tive that col­laps­es recent his­to­ry and the world at large into one man’s art­ful­ly para­noid psy­chodra­ma, The Atroc­i­ty Exhi­bi­tion plays like a kalei­do­scope of imagery and ideas whose mean­ing is ever in flux. This, nat­u­ral­ly, ensures that mul­ti­ple view­ings may well be required, but will also be repaid in full. 

The Atroc­i­ty Exhi­bi­tion is released on Blu-ray, 12 Sep­tem­ber, 2022, by Screenbound.

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