Book Review

Death Drive: There Are No Accidents

by Stephen Bayley

     In 1965, Kenneth Anger published his notorious classic Hollywood Babylon. It was an easy-to-read, rumor-mongering book about the seamier side of movie star glamour. One thing that stood out was its combination of black and white photographs side by side with the text; they were integrated in such a way that reading it felt at times like the writing was an integral part of a film reel. Death Drive: There Are No Accidents by Stephen Bayley has a similar effect.

     While both books are about the cult of celebrity, they both deal with their subject matter in different ways. Anger’s book was a sleaze-fest and more or less a work of fiction, giving the audience a heavy dose of the vicious gossip they want to hear. Bayley’s book, which makes reference to Hollywood Babylon in the chapter on Jayne Mansfield, focuses on a more precise part of the public’s fascination with the famous: the cult of celebrity car crashes. Bayley also treats the death-by-car-wreck theme in a different way. His writing style is plain, descriptive, and factual without much embellishment, literary license, or interpretation.

     The introduction does not give too much information. Bayley explains his vague criteria for which victims he chose to write about. All of them were part of the glamorous elite and people with some kind of irony attached to their deaths. All are highly sexualized and regarded as icons of style. Then the concept of Carl Jung’s “synchronicity” is explained in reference to the book’s title. All coincidences have a purpose, Bayley believes, but he leaves the audience hanging and does not thoroughly examine this theme in the book.

     Each chapter is laid out according to a repetitive formula. The first page has a pixelated portrait of the subject. Mixed with the text are photos or advertisements for the cars each celebrity crashed, and then at the end, or close to it, a picture of the car after it had been wrecked. The photography is of high quality and each appears to be a work of art. The writing is equally formulaic. Some details of each person’s life are given including their major accomplishments. Precisely detailed descriptions of each car’s design and mechanics comes next, followed by the details of the crash that killed each celebrity. The mechanical descriptions can be dull if you are not an automobile enthusiast and they are written with detail that leaves nothing to the imagination, almost like the descriptions of genitalia you might find in the letters section of Penthouse magazine. These descriptions are so redundant they have the same effect you might get from being stuck in a room with someone who can’t stop flicking a light switch on and off because they have obsessive-compulsive disorder. The crash details are brief and seem almost trivial. Bayley gives the impression he does not want to sound morbid, sadistic, or gross so he downplays the gore. Some of the chapters discuss ironies or conspiracy theories related to the each subject. Conspiracy theories were abundant regarding the deaths of James Dean and Princess Grace of Monaco, probably because some people could not handle the cognitive dissonance when such glamorous people died in such mundane circumstances. Some interesting ironies are the fact that James Dean filmed a public service announcement about driving safety before getting killed in a high-speed crash. The American war hero General George S. Patton suffered a fatal head injury in a low-speed fender bender with a truck manned by a stoned driver who wasn’t paying attention. Then there were a number of professional race car drivers that died due to routine mechanical failures or skidding during the rain on ordinary roads.

     The conclusion is a short neo-Romantic essay in which the author longs for the days of the mid-20th century when automobiling signified individuality, power, and freedom. Now mass produced cars no longer look stylish and have become an economic and environmental liability as well as an impediment to traveling efficiently. Cars have become a nuisance, especially for people living in cities. The use of cars for the pursuit of freedom and luxury may have failed in the end but it was the dream people were chasing that made automobiles exciting.

     The writing in Death Drive is not great. Its style is limp and often boring. The interaction between the photos and the text is what makes it unique and the design of the book appears to be its main purpose. The design draws attention to itself as design and the physical quality of the book makes it feel more like a functional art object than a literary work. It is good for a single read but it does not go far enough to truly be memorable.

Bayley, Stephen. Death Drive: There Are No Accidents. Circa Press, London: 2018.