build high for happiness

such rich centers of possibilities and meanings

There is of course no other way this could end, which is fitting given that one of the (many) things Jerusalem is about is predestination. Moore’s vision of the world is closely related to the one we’ve been exhaustively exploring throughout this series. He does not actually use the word hypercube (and indeed envisions the structure in even higher dimensions), but it’s nevertheless clearly what’s going on. And though it would be wrong to describe it as a prison (he’s ultimately too optimistic for that), the multidimensional superstructure in which he places us is nevertheless utterly inescapable. As Moore imagines it, reality is a fixed solid existing in at least four dimensions, in which all events are fixed, and human consciousnesses simply experience their lives on endless repeat, passing through their allotted portion of the structure over and over again, experiencing the same unchanging lives each time.

This poses several problems, of which the loss of free will is only one, and a fairly minor one at that. Some are acknowledged by Moore, either within Jerusalem itself or in interviews, most notably the apparent loss of any moral perspective. Moore, being a monstrously intelligent man, anticipates these, emphasizing the sacredness of consciousness and the way that it imposes morality and aesthetics upon the world, and for the most part this works. Certainly there’s a flat truth to it: whatever the overall cosmological structure of reality (or even just history) may be, we are in the end pinned to linearly experienced consciousness, and in a way that means that our perception of morality is all-encompassing. Moore unfolds this with moving humanity, suggesting that we are ourselves harsher moral judges than any external force could ever be, but the point stands as a simple, stark description of how the world works: in the end, we are alone with our experience of it and left to make of that what we will.

Within the novel, of course, this is a cheat, albeit a fairly well-earned one. The narrative perspective shifts among two dozen or so characters in the course of the telling, but they are all in the end Moore’s perspective upon Moore’s world, a fact all but explicitly acknowledged by Moore’s blatant avatar within the work, an artist working on an installation about the working class Northampton neighborhood she lives in that consists of thirty-five works corresponding precisely to the novel’s thirty-five chapters. And the larger cosmology of the novel tacitly acknowledges this cheat: in fact there is an afterlife that one can retire to when one is tired of repeating one’s life, consisting of existence in the higher realm of Mansoul in which the four-dimensional solid of reality can be observed from above, and where the immortal souls appear to have free will and the ability to die. And there are several points where it’s noted that there’s a level above Mansoul on which the pattern repeats, occupied by a singular architect that Moore has been perfectly willing to suggest is him all along, typically via a long and deadpan interview routine in which he discusses the idea of simulationism before noting that the designer would probably incarnate himself in the simulation, and that most portrayals of God are of an older man with a long beard before trailing off pointedly.…

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wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public

Many roads lead here, but we are unmistakably off the map. Like High-Rise, Robert Eggers’s film is firmly rooted in both place and location: the edge of a New England forest during the Puritan era. This in turn situates it a mere step away from A Field in England. Other distant reflections will flicker through the trees as we progress. Make no mistake, however, Whatever this belongs to, it is not our comfortable hypercube, with its cool brutality. This is somewhere else. Somewhere the land is cursed. Where the crops wither, the hunts fail, and the beasts turn against their masters. Where the sky is as stark as the muddy, useless soil. And that’s outside of the forest. Within its canopies there are even more horrors to be had.

At the heart of this malaise is the eponymous witch, a fact that led to an easily dismissed but frustratingly widespread reading of the film as somehow concerned with validating Puritan anxieties. It is tempting to dismiss this by asking whether this logic applies to all horror movies, or to point out that for all the film commits completely to the presence of an actual witch straight out of New England folklore it also repeatedly undermines Puritan ideology at large. But the more important angle to take on this is simply that this fundamentally mistakes the film for being about the family at large, as opposed to what is clearly demonstrated by the opening shot, in which William being exiled from the plantation is depicted not in terms of his philosophical and religious defiance, but in terms of how it is experienced by Thomasin, his eldest daughter. This may be a story in which a bunch of Puritans confront their biggest cultural nightmare, but what the story’s about is female sexuality and agency.

In this regard its ending, in which Thomasin becomes a witch, levitating into the sky at a Sabbat cackling with ecstatic joy, is a surprisingly vivid match for High-Rise, which similarly resolves into a murderously utopian vision of matriarchy. This is derived from Ballard’s novel, but Jump expanded on it considerably in scripting the film as part of a larger and welcome revision away from Ballard’s fairly banal overuse of rape, making the ultimate dominion of the building by its female residents into a point in its own right instead of a glib culmination of Wilder and Laing’s psychosexual architecture. But it is here, fully liberated from the tower’s phallic shadow, that the idea finds its fully developed form.

Central to the film is the way in which Thomasin is trapped and essentially powerless. This is a subtle thing in a horror movie, in that everybody is trapped and essentially powerless. What’s only gradually made clear over the course of the film, however, is that unlike all the other characters, it’s not the witch and her blight that imprisons Thomasin: it’s all the other characters. Her mother is vindictive and suspicious, her father is a mediocrity willing to lie and let her take the blame, her younger brother is more powerful than her in terms of the family dynamic but still looks to her for physical comfort and, increasingly, with lust, and the twins don’t obey her (and are worshipping Satan in the form of a goat).…

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Wandering in open country is naturally depressing

A Field in England is a precise antipode to High-Rise, a fact acknowledged by Ben Wheatley, who has spoken about the way in which he is inclined to make one project a reaction against the previous one. But the thing about the alchemical union of opposites is that it works largely because of the similarities. Just as “up” and “down” presuppose movement in three-dimensional space and “left” and “right” presuppose neoliberal democracy, High-Rise and A Field in England presuppose a director doing sci-fi/fantasy inflected period pieces rooted in the psychogeographies of English spaces. In some understandings of conceptual space this is how the hypercubic prison works – through the systematic construction of axes bounded by opposites that, when multiplied sufficiently, create a territory that is at once infinite and contained.

This is in essence the problem that faces Whitehead, who winds his way through a recurrent series of at best gradual enlightenments in pursuit of no obvious goal or trajectory for escape. More to the point, his problem is heavily location-dependent, in both spatial and temporal senses. Spatially he is confined to the eponymous field, a setting we’ll unpick momentarily. Temporally, however, he is bound by the English Civil War. It has often been suggested that this event serves as the origin for the contemporary socio-political system, an argument that’s generally based on reading it as a transition between the established aristocracy of Charles I and the revolutionary fervor of the Puritans. This is an oversimplification in countless regards, not least that it misunderstands history as something with an origin as opposed to as a series of debts inherited and bloodily paid off from era to era. The English Civil War is certainly an instance of this, but it’s ridiculous to suggest that what emerged from it is somehow a sui generis origin as opposed to an if not inevitable at least entirely sensible consequence of what came before.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that Whitehead straddles both sides of this transition, or perhaps more accurately, is stepping over the divide himself.  His status as an alchemist clearly situates him in the world that is receding. But the arc of his slow ascension is clearly towards a measure of individual liberty and away from the crass and domineering tyranny offered by O’Neil, which affiliates him more with the Puritans. Like us, he’s trapped on the inexorable slide down history’s birth canal – just from a substantively different angle. Or, if you prefer something in keeping with ascension, headed up the chimney, an identity gone up in smoke.

This leaves location: a field in England. Central to this is its raw genericness. There are a lot of fields in England, another consequence of the way in which the whole of the island is the product of human development and intervention. And there were a lot of them in the Civil War; Alan Moore is fond of claiming one near Northampton as the place where it was won, although that was merely the first of three, and dialogue about Pembroke places this one during the second, a few years later.…

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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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