Elizabeth Sandifer

new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction

The brutalist architecture that High-Rise does not critique has many fathers (and essentially no mothers), but its Anthony Royal figure is no doubt Le Corbusier, the pseudonym of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, whose 1923 manifesto Vers Une Architecture (first published in English as Towards a New Architecture, but these days called simply Toward an Architecture) laid out the principles of a new, sleek modernist style, and whose Unité d’Habitation design, used as the blueprint for several 1950s housing projects, defined the specifically brutalist style with its use of rough (or, in French, brut) concrete.

As an architect, Le Corbusier is a giant. Whatever crimes may be laid at the feet of the movement he spawned (and there are many), his actual buildings were iconoclastic and compelling, and remain striking to this day. But it is in many ways as a polemicist that he really shines. Modernism produced no shortage of manifestos, but any list of the great ones that excludes Vers Une Architecture is simply off its head. It is a work of masterful provocation, full of taunting and grandiose slogans. The most famous of these, and thus, given the nature of Le Corbusier’s impact, the most important is his declaration about a third of the way into the book that “a house is a machine for living in.” Ballard echoes it, almost certainly consciously, in the first chapter of High-Rise when he describes the building as “a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation. Its staff of air-conditioning conduits, elevators, garbage-disposal chutes and electrical-switching systems provided a never-failing supply of care and attention,” a litany that echoes Corbusier’s next sentence, “Baths, sun, hot water, cold water, controlled temperature, food conservation, hygiene, beauty through proportion.”

But the Ballard quote quietly embeds the critique of Le Corbusier when it notes the distinction between serving the collective residents of the building and the isolated individual. At first glance, this is counterintuitive. Even before his turn towards the harsh greys of raw concrete, Corbusier’s aesthetic had a clear austerity to it that’s implicit in the cold inhumanity of the word “machine.” (Note Ballard’s subsequent use of it to describe how people like Laing “thrived like an advanced species of machine” in the high-rise, and for that matter Corbusier’s own praise for men who are “intelligent, coolheaded, and calm” and in touch with their “mechanical side.”) Indeed, the declaration comes in the course of a three-part essay in which he admires the construction of ocean liners, airplanes, and automobiles, praising the uniform principles of their design across multiple manufacturers, their forms standardized by the needs of the clearly stated problem they solve. The statement “a house is a machine for living in” is, for Le Corbusier, essentially equivalent to the observation that the form of an airplane is not that of “a bird or a dragonfly, but a machine for flying.” He praises at length the long and uniform promenades of ocean liners, describing them as “pure, crisp, clear, clean.”…

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outrage at the fact that anyone’s life can be so pathetically limited

Going into directing High-Rise, which would see him working with the highest budget of his career, Ben Wheatley directed a pair of episodes of Doctor Who on the logic that working fast and on the tight budget of television would be, as he put it, “like a boot camp” that would leave him “fighting fit to go into High-Rise.” But the choice of Doctor Who was fitting in another regard, in that one of the closest existing things to an adaptation of High-Rise prior to the Wheatley-Jump film was the 1987 Doctor Who serial Paradise Towers.

Like Wheatley’s two episodes, which served as the first two stories for Peter Capaldi’s incarnation of Doctor Who and as the first two stories for newly installed executive producer Brian Minchin, Paradise Towers was one of the opening stories for both Sylvester McCoy’s iteration of the character and script editor (at the time essentially one of two people filling the role now filled by the executive producers) Andrew Cartmel. And indeed, Wheatley watched Paradise Towers in preparation for High-Rise, although his conclusion was that it “more like an amalgam of A Clockwork Orange and other stuff” than an adaptation of High-Rise.

This is not entirely fair of Wheatley. Certainly it’s clear that High-Rise was a major influence on Paradise Towers, a story set in a crumbling modernist tower block that has fallen to anarchy, with gangs roaming the hallways, cannibalistic residents, a triad of factions within the building, a focus on climbing the tower, and a key scene set at a swimming pool. Certainly Stephen Wyatt, the writer of the story, makes no secret of the inspiration. Still, Wheatley’s right that it’s not an adaptation per se. Given that a key part of what High-Rise does is its “science fiction without futurity” approach, moving the concept to a more traditionally science fiction setting in which the tower block is on an alien world and has homicidal cleaning robots fundamentally changes things. Adding a figure like Doctor Who that combines Wilder’s insurrectionary tendencies with an aristocratic bearing shifts the mix even more.

But perhaps the biggest change is simply that there’s no character in Paradise Towers who even remotely resembles Ballard/Laing. Although the extremes of the class structure are retained through the Royal-equivalent Great Architect Kroagnon, the actual tenants of Paradise Towers – the cannibalistic Rezzies or the girl gang Kangs – are all clearly working class, and the conflict between the two groups is more generational than economic. Entirely absent from Wyatt’s tale, however, is the hyper-adapted middle class that serves as Ballard’s primary focus. On the whole, however, this decision is relatively on-point. The modernist high-rise, at least in the UK context in which Ballard and Wyatt were writing, was always aimed at the poor, seen as a smaller-footprinted alternative to the sprawling terraced housing in which poor people had previously been housed. More to the point, in the twelve years between High-Rise and Paradise Towers it became increasingly clear that that utopian rhetoric with which the terraces’ demolition and replacement had been justified was falling rather short of the reality.…

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ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures

As the precise center of the hypercube, Ballard’s novel is even more tightly bound into 1975 than the Wheatley-Jump film. Lacking the externalizing vantage point of futurity, Ballard cannot look at what the brutalist tower blocks became, and is forced instead to extrapolate out from what they are. Which is, of course, Ballard’s basic job description. He’s a science fiction writer by trade. His first four novels imagined apocalyptic scenarios, starting with The Wind From Nowhere, in which the world is destroyed by constant hurricane-force winds, and subsequently The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World, which feature flood, drought, and weird crystalline growths appearing on everything. But starting with his alarmingly experimental 1970 novel The Atrocity Exhibition, a series of reveries in which human bodies, mediated culture, and material carnage of the 1960s blend together into one of the most unsettling psychic landscapes of the 1970s (no mean feat given the decade), his career took a different track.

This resulted in a series of three books of which High-Rise was the culmination. These novels were still science fiction, but of an unusual sort in which there are no imaginative technologies or futuristic conceits. Instead they are all set in the present day of the 1970s, with Ballard taking the technologies and social structures of his time and twisting them to their most suggestively violent excesses. And so in Crash the automobile becomes a source of infinite perversions, in Concrete Island the median of a highway becomes an inescapable island, and in High-Rise, well, you know.

But it would be a mistake to read Ballard as particularly concerned with any of these technologies per se. Wheatley has proclaimed that “it’s important that the film isn’t seen as a critique of Brutalist architecture,” a goal he’s not entirely successful at, but it’s absolutely true of the novel. Ballard famously described his approach to science fiction as rejecting the notion of outer space in favor of what he called inner space, “an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge.” In this regard, High-Rise is no more a critique of brutalist architecture than The Drowned World is of water.

This is not to say that the building, or indeed brutalist modernism, are irrelevant to Ballard’s project. High-Rise has its own architecture, composed according to a structural logic that provides much of the book’s actual energy and momentum as it moves towards its conclusion. The book cycles among three viewpoint characters – Laing, Wilder, and Royal – in increasingly shorter stretches, starting with three consecutive chapters for each character, then a second pass with two, and finally a third pass through with single chapters for each character, with Royal’s final chapter further fragmenting so that Wilder breaks into it at the end, and a final Laing chapter as befitting his eventual ascension within the building.…

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a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences

High-Rise is an arch film, its thematic building blocks routinely presented explicitly in dialogue. In an early and particularly gleeful instance Tom Hiddleston lectures, “as you can see, the facial mask simply slips off the skull” while literally stripping the flesh off a cadaver’s skull, a statement of theme and demonstration of method all in one. This is, of course, a Ballard thing; the assimilation of his characteristically declarative style into a cinematic language for which it is not an entirely natural fit.

A second example, from when Hiddleston’s character, Robert Laing, is first meeting the High-Rise’s architect Anthony Royal (a name contrasting with the similarly symbolic Richard Wilder, the film’s primary working class character): looking at a blueprint of the building, he proclaims, “it looks like the unconscious diagram of some kind of psychic event.” It’s as Ballardian a sentiment as has ever been expressed, and indeed a more or less direct quote from the novel. As with the casual declaration of the thin line between society and barbarism, this is a statement of both theme and method – in this case a restatement of the basic and underlying premise of psychogeography, namely that exterior landscape shapes internal experience. In High-Rise this is framed primarily in terms of architecture, and specifically in a critique of brutalist modernism and its utopian project. The principle applies more broadly, of course, but all in good time.

This is, of course, a temporally bounded concern, restricted to the mid-seventies milieu in which Ballard wrote the original novel. As director Ben Wheatley puts it, “if you’re trying to develop a film of High-Rise in 1978, it makes sense to set it further in the future, because the book is probably set in ’82 or ’83. But then that thinking goes on and on, and eventually you get too far away from the book, and more importantly from the technology. You get into the world of social media, and then the story about the isolation of the tower doesn’t work any more.” The fact that the high-rise is a spatial prison is made explicit in the film in a sequence where Laing attempts to leave the building to go to work only to be seized by agoraphobia and sent rushing back, but it is essential to realize that in fact the building’s residents are imprisoned in both space and time – the circumstances in which their slide to barbarism takes place tightly constrained to the London Docklands, 1975. It is, in other words, not merely a tower block but a tower hyper-block, which is, in point of fact, what Royal’s blueprint most obviously resembles.

The ironic effect of demarcating a fourth dimension of this prison is to increase the number of adjoining spaces, just as extending a square into the third dimension increases the number of walls. This question of neighboring spaces is explicit in the film’s closing moments, as Laing, finishing up the dog, looks over at the second high-rise in the complex, awaiting its descent, “ready to welcome its residents into this new world with open arms.”…

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