Without knowing it, he had constructed a gigantic vertical zoo, its hundreds of cages stacked above each other. All the events of the past few months made sense if one realized that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned to open the doors.
High-Rise, the latest movie by director Ben Wheatley (you remember Wheatley; he directed the Doctor Who episodes “Deep Breath” and “Into the Dalek”) is scheduled for limited release this Friday. Of course I’m going to go see it (Tom Hiddleston, natch), so I was trying to decide if I should read the book it’s based on before or after seeing the movie. I tend to prefer whichever version of a story I experience first, and I have a bad habit of pointing out all the ways the movie is different from the book. Might be better to wait.
Then I found out the book’s author, J.G. Ballard, wrote the short story Chronopolis, which remains one of the best stories I’ve ever read. SO, off to the bookstore I went.
Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise is both more and less grounded in reality than Chronopolis. It has a similar theme (how technology “improves” everyone’s life to the point where humanity’s only purpose is to serve the technology), but High-Rise takes things much further. The book focuses on how modern comforts separate humans from each other, stripping away our ability to see anyone else as human. And then we see what’s left when those comforts are taken away.
Brief synopsis: A brand new high-rise has opened, with forty floors, room for two thousand tenants, and all the modern conveniences plus shopping, a small elementary school, and a couple of pools. The building starts to display design flaws soon after the last apartment is leased: power flickers out on whole floors at a time, elevators work slowly or not at all, garbage chutes clog and overflow. Inconveniences magnify the daily annoyances that build up when living so close to so many people, and the class divide between the wealthy executives at the top, well-to-do professionals in the middle floors, and blue-collar workers on the lowest levels just makes things worse. Shoving matches turn to riots, every available surface is graffitied and urinated on, pets are killed, women are assaulted, a wealthy jeweler falls from the top floor, and before you know it there are cannibals in the penthouse garden.
And don’t expect a realistic explanation for why all the residents stick around, because you’re not getting one.
That’s important to remember: the residents are not trapped inside. There’s no lock on the outer doors or police quarantine or anything like that. Most of the residents have jobs that they’re still going to (at least at first). And it’s not like the riots and the apartment raids start when people begin to starve, they develop out of the night-long cocktail parties that grow progressively crazier and crazier. No one ever has a “Dear God, what are we doing?!” moment of clarity, or flees the building with their family, or does anything at all that would let someone on the outside know what’s going on inside. None of it makes sense.
At the same time it’s all bizarrely rational, because Ballard has us inside the cesspool of the characters’ minds the entire time.
The justifications start out ordinary (We’ve paid so much for the lease, and we’ll never be able to sell the apartment if we leave.), progress to stubborn and vindictive (I’m not going to let those lower floor people drive me out/how dare those upper floor people think they’re good enough to live here and I’m not), and finally resemble the self-destructive urges of a mental illness, where everyone takes a kind of comfort in the stench of unwashed bodies and crap, and where the layers of graffiti and the growing piles of trash bags and unpaid bills all feel like an accomplishment.
Insane or not, a lot of what Ballard has to say about human psychology is disturbingly on target. Every way he has his characters react when they’re in isolated comfort and at the same time closely packed with thousands of other humans could apply equally well to what the internet is doing for us (and to us) today.
By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behavior, and left them free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses.
The movie trailers notwithstanding, the character we see the most of in the book isn’t Hiddleston’s Laing, it’s Wilder, a lower-level resident and television producer. Of the three characters who provide the viewpoints for the story, Wilder seems to be the only one with a concrete goal: climb to the top floor. And not just commandeering the elevators or pushing through barricades in the stairs, he wants to belong on the top floor. He’s determined to insert himself into the lives of the people on the floors above him, clawing his way into apartments and either making himself needed or making himself feared. Wilder grows more and more brutal the higher he climbs, covering himself in a warpaint of blood and lipstick, glorying in peeing anywhere he wants to because he can, even raping on a couple of occasions (not really a scene that requires a lot of trigger warnings; the female residents respond to the assaults with the same kind of detachment that everyone in the building feels for theft, beatings, and filth; an experience leached of any color, and quickly forgotten.)
The motivations of the other two main characters are more static. Royal, the architect of the building, wants to remain in place, consolidating his position of power as the top floor resident, and gathering a collection of servants and underlings. And Laing seems to want to become, to gradually turn into something that feels like his true self, stripped of any concern for what humanity or society would want him to be.
Despite their differences, all three human characters end the book, if not happy, then oddly satisfied with what the high rise has brought them to.
As long as you don’t spend the entire time screaming at the characters to just leave for God’s sake, the story is one hell of a ride. It’s all entertainingly absurd; thugs block the entrance to the school as retaliation for the kids of the lower levels peeing in the pools, the lower floors hijack the high-speed elevators when the upper floor residents keep letting their dogs pee anywhere below floor 10. There are running battles in the hallways, a Mad Tea Party in every cocktail party, and everyone’s pet dogs roam in a pack through a maze of stairways.
I’m honestly not sure how well the story will work as a film. It’s harder to show the interior landscape of people’s minds than it is to tell you about it, so most of the plot in the book might come across as needlessly crazy. The beautifully ugly images that Ballard creates (a ring of garbage creating a spreading stain around the building, power failures making bands of darkness that cut across the lighted building, Laing standing in the middle of a bare concrete reflecting pond like the surface of another world, the sunset stretching shadows across the deserted children’s playground in the top floor garden) should make for some gorgeous scenes. I understand that the filmmakers have added extra storylines to flesh out the basic plot of “two thousand people all lose their minds at the same time,” so when I do go see it I promise the changes they’ve made from the book won’t make me complain. Much. At least not right away.