“Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer’s role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction, because it is already there.”
—JG Ballard
Adaptations are perhaps congenitally bound to disappoint, if only because there arguably cannot be two imaginations that are exactly alike. While the reader’s visualization of a novel tends to be subjectively expressionistic, driven as it is by the “mood” of the text rather than its descriptive qualities (however detailed they may be), cinema can hardly escape its literalizing and collectively mediated nature. Whose version of the book are we really experiencing when watching an adaptation for the big screen? Does comparing the finished cinematic product with its literary source material make any creative sense?
Whatever the answer, as far as this piece of writing is concerned, suffice it to say that the ways moving images have interacted with the work of James in 1965, sporadic but concerted attempts to bring Ballard to the screen began with Steven Spielberg’s rendition of the author’s autobiographical novel (1987), the least Ballardian filmmaker imaginable adapting the least Ballardian Ballard book (no matter the plainly evident impact of the real-life experiences it chronicled on the writer’s work). That mainstream consecration was followed by the of David Cronenberg’s recently restored 1996 adaptation of (which was less Ballardian than the director’s medium-length 1970 feature ); Jonathan Weiss’ brazen transposition of (2000), Ballard’s most daring experiment (at least formally); Solveig Nordlund’s reimagining of the short story (2002); and Ben Wheatley’s much-hyped but commercially disappointing take on (2015).
