Re: construction Inevitable and voluntary – this is the death of a saturated post-industrial society. The choice of ways of their own death is great to the extreme: to be crushed by the metal thighs of a car, with the voluptuousness of splashing blood mixed with sperm, on the windshield, tucked into spider web cracks that form a kaleidoscopic stained glass window; drive yourself to madness, trying to find meaning in the incomprehensible, or become a guineastic rabbit in a scientific experiment, trying all the achievements of progress. The twentieth century ended with the triumph of new technologies and the resurrection of old ideas of the materialist dialectic of being. To understand the past century – is it possible? A century of irrationalism and chaos, an age of unbearable cruelty. Professor Travis, who works at the Center for Psychophysics and Bioethics with Dr. Nathan, is engaged in a detailed reconstruction of the most significant historical events of the century, simultaneously exploring their impact on the psychology of the layman. And what began as a mere scientific work will soon be out of the control of the persons involved.
For far from the most famous American actor Michael Kirby, who mainly worked on TV, the cause of his entire conscious creative existence since the late 70s (consider - from the very beginning of his career) was the adaptation of the cult novel by James Ballard "Exhibition of Cruelty", which at about the same time began to look at the famous producer Jeremy Thomas, who, however, was not able to realize the desired, despite the fact that he twice turned to ballardianism in "Autocatastrophe" and "Hightop" but the cherished opus magnum still escaped from him. In 2000, Kirby, two years before his death, writing his own script on the book, managed to enlist the support of the director-debutant Jonathan Weiss, and the film that eventually became the last for Michael Kirby, proved to be authentic to the novel itself, unquestioningly inheriting its non-linear structure and meticulously transferring to extragenre film text - ascetic in its cinematic syllable, although at the same time full of the hysteria of paranoidal schizophasia, born in the merchant and prestiatorial fetorism. In fact, the awareness of the present through a deep analysis of the past through philosophical reflection (Foucault, Hegel, Sartre and others, who played a large role in the formation of Ballard’s philosophical worldview) is one of the general ideas of the film, cementing its poststructuralist narrative, which crumbles into micro-sites of different trolling thicknesses. To some extent, the director allows himself to even more ironically over any conspiracy, the more often emphasizing the complex psychiatric discord of the main protagonist, and forcing him to doubt the reality of what is happening on the screen.
It should be noted that in contrast to the stagnant “High-Highlands”, “Exhibition of Cruelty” is more vague, which allowed the director Weiss to easily translate into the picture and pre-apocalyptic moods regarding the Third World (at the threshold of which society stands only now, and not during the late hour of the Cold War, when the novel was written), avoiding any subjectivity - Bud Gardner’s camera is intuitively detached and removed from direct interference with the narrative, editing glue is more of a pure functional nature than a specific urbanism, since it is not a hegeist of the city, since it is not a hegeist of the city, but a hege of its hegeism, but a hegeist of the city. After all, it is death and intrasocial decay that become the main exhibits of this world exhibition of cruelty. Weiss, like Ballard, is extremely pessimistic, describing the authenticity of the present not in a decadent manner, but in a degrading one. The inevitability of the collapse is so strong that Weiss’s “Exhibition of Cruelty” is perceived even as a larger epitaph of post-industrialism than the novel itself, since the director has already removed his film creation when the twentieth century became exactly what was the past century, while Ballard reimagined his present. But from the perspective of the future he didn't see, it turns out he was damn right. Weiss talks in the end about his contemporaries, who not only do not know why they live, but also do not tend to understand how to live. Consumption, consumerism, conformity, aggression and blindness - destruction is not creation, death can not be another form of being, technology will never become a substitute for man, the present is impossible without the past and the future, but the further, the more the devaluation of essential values occurs, the inner in man is leveled, he becomes a slave to external reactions, becomes a puppet. Its interior landscapes are a desert in ashes; its outer world is nothing.
Moreover, the power of the author’s worldview was so strong that the “Exhibition of Cruelty”, like all other screen adaptations of the outrageous Briton, is a little more than completely close to the body of the literary text: Weiss diligently works under Cronenberg, creating in the film a viscous atmosphere of elusive normality and deleting all postulates about catharsis and God, but completely not being carried away by the entertaining pathology of mutated physiology – the director works not as a pathologist in a prosectoral film, but as a social researcher, the paradox of which the authors are all the basic act of their disfunctional existence, as well as a deformity and deformity of the past, in this whole, but in which they are all the basis of the author’s of their inner life, in the existence, and the author’s. It is noteworthy that this postmodern novel by Ballard concreted the heroes of his past works, made in the genre of social utopias - "Car Accident", "Concrete Island", "High Heights", and the segment of the narrative dedicated to Vaughn, seems conceptually the most secondary against the background of Cronenberg's film, while further the author's reading is freed from corruptive influence, the film text is saturated with allusion, and the imagery becomes more abstract. By the end, Weiss creates a real horror of the unconscious, finally opening the door to a new reality where only novus homo mortuus.