Gangster No.1 2000 - William Shakespeare - Niccolo Machiavelli - Socrates - John Stuart Mill - Cicero - Pliny the Younger - John Dryden - Horatio Lord Nelson - J G Ballard – Confucius - Cutthroat TV - Suzannah Lipscomb TV - Catching Britain's Killers: The Crimes that Changed Us TV -
The bird’s fucked. But Freddy’s still twitching. Nice to know. He tries to get up. Falls back. Hopeless. Tries again. Go on, son. No! He pulls himself along the pavement, trail of blood like a bleeding slug. Come on, Freddy! Two more yards. Gangster No.1 ***** 2000 staring Paul Bettany & Malcolm McDowell & David Thewlis & Saffron Burrows & Kenneth Cranham & Jamie Foreman & Eddie Marsan & Andrew Lincoln & Martin Wimbush & Sean Chapman et al, director Paul McGuigan, monologue in car
O sir, to wilful men
The injuries that they themselves procure
Must be their schoolmasters. William Shakespeare, The History of King Lear II ii 458, Regan
And here we must observe that men must either be flattered or crushed; for they will revenge themselves for slight wrongs, whilst for grave ones they cannot. The injury therefore that you do to a man should be such that you need not fear his revenge. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince chIII
One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him. Socrates
A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions, but by his inaction, and in either case, he is justly accountable to them for the injury. John Stuart Mill
It is better to receive than to do an injury. Cicero, Tusculanarum Disputationum V:19
A strong sense of injury often gives point to the expression of our feelings. Pliny the Younger, Epistles III:9
Forgiveness to the injured does belong;
But they ne’er pardon, who have done the wrong. John Dryden, 1631-1700, The Conquest of Granada
Let me alone: I have yet my legs and one arm. Tell the surgeon to make haste and his instruments. I know I must lose my right arm, so the sooner it’s off the better. Horatio Lord Nelson, after battle of Tenerife 1797
Do we see, in the car-crash, the portents of a nightmare marriage between technology, and our own sexuality? … Is there some deviant logic unfolding here, more powerful than that provided by reason? J G Ballard, Crash foreword
48,183. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. During our friendship he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident. Driven on a collision course towards the limousine of the film actress, his car jumped the rails of the London Airport flyover and plunged through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers. The crushed bodies of package tourists, like a haemorrhage in the sun, still lay across the vinyl seats when I pushed my way through the police engineers an hour later. ibid. p1
In his vision of a car-crash with the actress, Vaughan was obsessed by many wounds and impacts – by the dying chromium and collapsing bulkheads of their two cars meeting head-one in complex collisions endlessly repeated in slow-motion films, by the identical wounds inflicted on their bodies, by the image of windshield glass frosting around her face as she broke its tinted surface like a death-born Aphrodite, by the compound fractures of their thighs impacted against their handbrake mountings, and above all by the wounds to their genitalia, her uterus pierced by the heraldic beak of the manufacturer's medallion, his semen emptying across the luminescent dials that registered for ever the last temperature and fuel levels of the engine. ibid. p8
His exhausted face, with its scarred mouth, was lit by broken rainbows. I pulled the dented passenger door from its frame. Vaughan sat on the glass-covered seat, studying his own posture with a complacent gaze. His hands, palm upwards at his sides, were covered with blood from his injured knee-caps. He examined the vomit staining the lapels of his leather jacket, and reached forward to touch the globes of semen clinging to the instrument panel. ibid. p9
Through Vaughan I discovered the true significance of the automobile crash, the meaning of whiplash injuries and roll-over, the ecstasies of head-on collisions. ibid. p10
During the months that followed, Vaughan and I spent many hours driving along the express highways on the northern perimeter of the airport. On the calm summer evenings these fast boulevards became a zone of nightmare collisions. Listening to the police broadcasts on Vaughan’s radio, we moved from one accident to the next. ibid. pp10-11
Vaughan unfolded for me all his obsessions with the mysterious eroticism of wounds: the perverse logic of blood-soaked instrument panels, seat-belts smeared with excrement, sun-visors lined with brain tissue. ibid. p12
Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheeks of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse. ibid. p13
Thinking of Vaughan now, drowning in his own blood under the police arc-lights, I remember the countless imaginary disasters he described as we cruised together along the airport expressways. He dreamed of ambassadorial limousines crashing into jack-knifing butane tankers … bid. p13
I think now of the other crashes we visualized, absurd deaths of the wounded, maimed and distraught. ibid. p15
This pool of vomit with its clots of blood like liquid rubies, as viscous and discreet as everything produced by Catherine, still contains for me the essence of the erotic delirium of the car-crash, more exciting than her own rectal and vaginal mucus … ibid. p16
An uneasy euphoria carried me towards the hospital. I vomited across the steering wheel, half-conscious of a series of unpleasant features. ibid. p23
The flashing lances of afternoon light deflected from the chromium panel trim tore at my skin. The hard jazz of radiator grilles, the motion of cars moving towards London Airport along the sunlit oncoming lanes, the street furniture and route indicators – all these seemed threatening and super-real, as exciting as the accelerating pintables of a sinister amusement arcade released on to these highways. ibid. p49
The pressure of her thighs against the hot plastic formed a module of intense excitement. Already I guessed that she was well aware of this. By a terrifying paradox, a sexual act between us would be a way of taking her revenge on me. ibid. p72
To the north of the terminal buildings I could see the high deck of the flyover straddling the airport entrance tunnel, clogged with traffic that seemed about to re-enact a slow-motion dramatization of our crash. ibid. p72
In the lavatory of the casualty department I stood beside Vaughan at the urinal stalls. I looked down at his penis, wondering if this too was scarred. The glans, propped between his index and centre fingers, carried a sharp notch, like a canal for surplus semen or vinal mucus. What part of some crashing car had marked his penis, and in what marriage of his orgasm and a chromium instrument panel? ibid. p91
Above us, along the motorway embankment, the headlamps of the waiting traffic illuminated the evening sky like lanterns hung on the horizon. ibid. p92
I could imagine her sitting in the car of some middle-aged welfare officer, unaware of the conjunction formed by their own genitalia and the stylized instrument panel, a euclid of eroticism and fantasy that would be revealed for the first time within the car-crash, a fierce marriage pivoting on the fleshy points of her knees and pubis. ibid. p99
The crushed body of the sports car had turned her into a being of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its dying chromium and leaking engine-parts, all the deviant possibilities of her sex. ibid. p99
A sharp but not unpleasant smell rose from his white jeans, a blend of semen and engine coolant. ibid. p102
His photographs of sexual acts, of sections of automobile radiator grilles and instrument panels, conjunctions between elbow and chromium window-sill, vulva and instrument binnacle, summed up the possibilities of a new logic created by these multiplying artefacts, the codes of a new marriage of sensation and possibility. ibid. p106
As we drove along Western Avenue I wanted her body to embrace the compartment of the car. In my mind I pressed her moist vulva against every exposed panel and fascia, I crushed her breasts gently against the door pillars and quarter windows, moved her anus in a slow spiral against the vinyl seat covers, placed her small hands against the instrument dials and window-sills. ibid. pp112-113
We had entered an immense traffic jam. From the junction of the motorway and Western Avenue to the ascent ramp of the flyover the traffic lanes were packed with vehicles, windshields leaching out the molten colours of the sun setting above the western suburbs of London. ibid. p151
He would stop me at traffic lights and stare for minutes at the junction of a wiper-blade mounting and windshield assembly in the car park. ibid. pp169-170