Episode 82: High-Rise, the novel & the film

What if a 15 minute city met Lord of the Flies, The Purge, and Hotel California? Well, you'd get something like J.G. Ballard's High-Rise.

⚠️ Spoilers lie ahead.

Links:

https://www.amazon.com/High-Rise-Novel-J-G-Ballard/dp/0871404028

https://tubitv.com/movies/500900/high-rise

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel)

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/j-g-ballards-high-rise-feared-skyscraper-living/

Need more? You can visit the website at: https://consaracytheories.com/ or my own site at: https://saracausey.com/. Don't forget to check out the blog at: https://consaracytheories.com/blog. 

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Transcript

 Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

High Rise, JG Ballard, dystopian novel, 15 minute city, predictive sci-fi, film adaptation, Robert Lang, Anthony Royal, social chaos, human nature, incest, morphine addiction, power failures, garbage piles, cannibalism.

(This summary says a lot in and of itself!)

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be talking about JG Ballard's novel high rise. It was published in 1975 and I have to admit, I was not familiar with it. I actually stumbled upon this by accident, because somebody online, and I don't remember where. I don't remember if it was somebody on Reddit or somebody on YouTube, but this guy was talking about how he thought that high rise predicted the idea of a 15 minute city, and he was scared that the way people behave in the high rise novel is the way that people would behave inside a 15 minute city. And I thought, Ooh, I'll have to put that on the list to check out. As you know, I love dystopian, predictive sci fi. It's my favorite kind of sci fi novel or film. I was able to find a copy, a pretty banged up used copy, to be honest with you, for about two or $3 I tried to find it at the local library, and struck out. So I just went online and found a copy that looks like it's been road hard, and put up wet spoilers about, I will be talking about the novel, and to a lesser degree, the film. There was a film adaptation that was made back in 2015 and even though it has some pretty good actors and actresses in it look I didn't really care for it as a standalone film, and I didn't care for it as an adaptation of the novel either, so I frankly don't recommend it. Nevertheless, spoilers lie ahead. If you're still with me, choose a frosty beverage of choice, and we will saddle up and take this odd, creepy, disturbing, dystopian little ride. As of this recording, the film adaptation is free to watch on Tubi. I give you my standard disclaimer there. They don't consult me with what they add and what they subtract. And to be is pretty notorious for things being here, today, gone tomorrow. So by the time this hits the airwaves, I have no idea if it will still be available. If it's not available to watch for free and you have to pay a few dollars for it. I mean, I don't tell you what to do, but I don't think I personally would have paid a plug nickel for it, because I just didn't, I didn't care for it. Now, if you are interested in seeing Tom Hiddleston, mostly naked, you will get to see that, I don't know, two or three times in this film. Um, you know that might be about the only positive I can really say for the film adaptation. Just being honest, the novel for me is like, what if a 15 minute city met Lord of the Flies, the purge, and then the eagle song, the Hotel California, in my mind, that's high rise. And really, any of those individual things that I just mentioned could be, and probably should be, their very own podcast episodes. I know that the purge became like a series, with each one seeming to get more and more outlandish, but that's not a bad topic in general for us to explore one day. Is human nature such that people need some sort of purge night in order for there to be law and order and for people to generally get along and not have upsets for all the rest of the year? Do humans require a purge. That's a very creepy and disturbing to even think about. Well, you're going to get that and more if you pick up a copy of high rise. Before I get into some general comments of mine about the novel, I want to go over quickly to Wikipedia, just so I can read a little blurb to you. High rise is a 1975 novel by British writer J G Ballard. The story describes the disintegration of a luxury high rise building as its affluent residents gradually descend into violent chaos, as with Ballard's previous novels, crash and concrete Island High Rise inquires into the ways in which modern, social and technological landscapes could alter the human psyche in provocative and hitherto unexplored ways. It was adapted into a film of the same name in 2015 by director Ben Wheatley. End quote. One of the main characters in the novel, as well as in the film, is this man named Robert Lang. He's the one in the film adaptation that's played by Tom Hiddleston, so this guy is a medical doctor, although he really doesn't have like, a clinic and a medical practice as such. He works at a medical school as a teacher. He's recently been through a divorce, and he moves into this apartment that's only. The high rise itself is somewhere on the outskirts of London, and it's only recently been put up like there's still this idea of a new car smell, if you will. And he winds up on the 25th floor of this big, grandiose luxury high rise. It's not lost on me, especially as we delve into exactly how this place completely falls the fuck apart. There's no polite way to say it. This is just really insane, the things that go on there. It's not lost on me that Lang is just slightly above the middle, because this luxury high rise has 40 floors and 1000 apartments, and so Lang is just just a few floors above the midpoint of this building. Now, why are we saying that it is somehow like a 15 minute city? Well, I want to read a quick passage from the very first page of the very first chapter, which is titled critical mass. And this will also set the stage for the dystopia. Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Lang reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. I'm going to butt in here and just say three months. It doesn't take this place very long at all to devolve into hell on earth. Now that everything had returned to normal, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning, no point beyond which their lives had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension, with its 40 floors and 1000 apartments, its supermarket and swimming pools, bank and junior school, all in effect abandoned in the sky. The high rise offered more than enough opportunities for violence and confrontation. End, quote, yeah, so this place is, in so many ways, self contained. There's a beauty parlor, there are multiple swimming pools, there's a gymnasium. The architect has even put in this like Sculpture Garden place, playground slash Sculpture Garden place for kids and adults to be able to feel like they're getting some fresh air outside of the high rise. There's the supermarket, there's the bank, there's a movie theater, and one of the things that we see as the plot progresses is that the residents of this high rise leave less and less often. It's almost like the building itself becomes a character itself. I'm thinking of Adrian lines film Fatal Attraction and how in an interview, I once heard him talking about how he wanted to make the telephone its own separate character in Fatal Attraction, because that's one of the primary ways that Glenn Close's character goes after Michael Douglas's character. The phone rings in that flippin movie all the time, and every time, as a member of the audience, you cringe, because you're like, what's about to happen? Is he about to get found out? Is she about to threaten his life? Is she about to tell his wife what's what's getting ready to happen? So Adrian line really wanted to make the telephone its own sinister character. I think you see the same thing happening in Ballard's novel, as well as the film. It's like the high rise just takes on its own character. It's like this vortex that has sucked the residents in, and even though they're in a toxic waste dump, they don't want to leave. One thing I will say that I think the film captures well, is in the beginning stages of the movie, they show the people that work leaving, and it's like everybody leaves together, like they're herd animals, and then everybody comes back together, like herd animals. Whereas you think about in a normal complex of apartments or condos or even just a neighborhood of houses, you're going to have some variety. Some people might have to be at work at eight o'clock, some at nine. Some might work the night shift, some might work second shift, some might work from home, etc. There's going to be a variety of people leaving and coming home at different times, but one of the things we see in the film that I think really captures the type of herd mentality that takes over in high rise is this idea of we all leave at the same time. We all come home at the same time. The people that stay home stay within the high rise, and they don't even leave. But it eventually gets to the point where it's like nobody's leaving. So you have this place that has all of these amenities, a supermarket, a bank, restaurants, a beauty parlor, swimming pools, a gym, its own school, the kids don't even have to leave. It has some sort of high speed state of the art elevator system. And of course, the people on the top floors have the very best elevator system, the Riff Raff down at the bottom, well, if they need to go somewhere on one. Of the top floors, they just have to wait. But all the rest of us that are breathing in the rarefied air, we have all the best amenities. And so over the course of time, although not long, right? Because we have Lang telling us, over the past three months, everything went to hell, these tenants become less and less willing to leave. In fact, they start giving up on their jobs. Lang begins going to the medical school to teach less and less often, until finally, he's not even going at all. There's a character that's left out of the movie. I'm not really sure why, but one of the important characters in the novel is Robert Lang's own sister. His sister's name is Alice, and she's married to a husband that's involved in publishing, and they live in a larger apartment that is 343, floors below Robert Lang. Why am I bringing this up? Well, it's going to become relevant, and unfortunately, it's relevant in a rather ghoulish way. Not long after Robert Lang moves in, the final tenant moves in, so the building at that point is considered completed, and in fact, there are other buildings in the area there's like, the way that it's described in the film is it's almost like a hand that's open with its fingers curving upward. There's going to be like these five high rises surrounding a lake in the center. So again, it conjures up images of a 15 minute city, like you're not going to really have to go anywhere, because anything that you would quote need, anything that the overlords believe that you need, will be right in this self contained little area. And we'll solve the housing crisis, because instead of looking at things on the horizontal, we'll just put people way up on the vertical, and somehow it'll all work out right. Of course, always yes. So not long after the building becomes completely full, it descends into chaos, and it happens pretty fast. Even early on, when Lang has only been there for just a few days, there's parties like one of the first things that happens is a bottle of liquor or a bottle of champagne, something like that, landing on his balcony and busting into several pieces, and it's sort of like it's morning. Who's partying? Why somebody having a drunken party? Did it go on all night and it's still going on? Or did it just now start like but this happens all over the building, not just on lower floors or upper floors. It turns into a real sex drugs and rock and roll party atmosphere. And as the conditions inside the building degenerate, so do these orgies. I mean, it really goes from being like a party with some drinking to people being drunk, people taking mind altering drugs, everybody in the building all having sex with each other the movie theater, instead of showing just normal things that a movie theater would show, it becomes a triple X theater, and some of the people in the high rise are given over to making amateur pornography to be shown in this triple X theater.

It's pretty crazy. One of the things that sort of kicks off the drama there are, like, a series of power failures, and they start off being rather minor and like a little bit inconvenient, but then they just last longer and longer. And there's also trouble with people being able to get water, like turning on the taps, but then nothing coming out. So that makes it difficult or impossible to bathe. Garbage starts to pile up. They have these garbage chutes, but everybody accuses somebody else of clogging the garbage chute. So finally, it's like they all collectively say, Fuck it, and they just start leaving garbage everywhere, all over the apartments, all over the hallway, all over the stairwell, all over the lobby. One of the things that I think is also portrayed somewhat well, not as well in the novel as it is in the film, but somewhat well in the film, is the degeneration of hygiene. This is something that's really emphasized in the novel, this idea of people just wearing the same tattered rags of clothes over and over again, not bathing stinking. I mean, he gets into some fairly graphic descriptions about people's body odor, their bad breath, the smell of their genitalia. I mean, it's, it's pretty rank. This book is not for the faint of heart. The movie is pretty gross and pretty rank, in my opinion, but man, however gross and nasty the movie is, honestly, the book is 10 times worse and more graphic. So this high rise has been designed by an architect named Anthony royal, and he's played in the film. Own by Jeremy Irons, who I like. I think Jeremy Irons is a great actor, but based on the description of Anthony royal in the novel, I was actually picturing somebody like an older Rutger Hauer, you know, because he's got very light hair and he's all the time walking around in a white Safari jacket. So sort of picturing an older version of Rutger Hauer, not Jeremy Irons, but he, of course, lives on floor 40 at the very top of the building, in a penthouse. He has all the nicest amenities, all of the nicest possessions. He's married to this woman that's considerably younger, and in the course of the degeneration of the building, another woman moves in with them, and they begin to have, like a three way relationship. But everybody knows what's going on and everybody's cool with it. In fact, one night, Royals wife sees him, I mean, just openly sees him having sex with this other woman that he's not married to, and she's completely fine with it. There are multiple attempts made by multiple people to move out, but they never do it. This is what reminded me of, the Hotel California. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. It gets to the point where people are sitting in their own filth. They don't care that they can't bathe. They don't care that there's garbage everywhere. They don't care that people are all having crazy, orgiastic unsafe sex and taking drugs. They just stay like, there's the I feel like the way that it's done with Anthony Royal and his wife and their concubine is really well done, because they all pack these suitcases. We gotta go. We gotta go. And then they just don't at first, it's well, we'll go first thing in the morning. It's too late now. We can't get a taxi to come out here, so we'll go first thing in the morning. And then they don't. And finally, they just unpack their suitcases and say, the hell with it. We know we're not leaving. We're going to stand our ground and stay here. When the food runs out, because you can't shop in the supermarket anymore, there's been looting and rioting, so the supermarket gets cleaned out of any actual edible food stuffs. So you know what's coming. You know what's coming. They're going to all start eating the pets. Then when there's no pets left, you know what's coming next. After that, they're going to start cannibalizing each other. One of the characters is given to just murder for the joy of murder, and he arranges corpses in these weird tableaus, like he'll make pieces of art with corpses. It's very creepy. I mean, there's so many like nasty things here. It's almost difficult for me to remember all the nastiness. The swimming pools, of course, get very nasty, and basically turn into, initially, it's almost like a trash heap slash sewer. But as time goes on, it also becomes a place where people start to leave corpses. And in fact, you know, I said there was going to be spoilers. So here we go. Spoiler alert. After Anthony royal is murdered, Robert Lang takes his body to the shallow end of one of the swimming pools to just lay in this nasty, rank, gross swamp water with all of the other corpses. Another of the main characters is a man named Richard Wilder who works in television. And he decides early on that he wants to make a documentary film about the high rise, and especially as the high rise disintegrates into sex, drugs, rock and roll, violence, you have people trying to raid so called Enemy floors and commit vandalism. There's graffiti everywhere. People are stealing from one another. People are wife swapping, etc. He wants to make a documentary about all of this. However, I would say, as the reader of the novel and the watcher of the film, I think on some level, you know, like this documentary is never going to see the light of day, like he may have some fantasy that he's going to document all of this marauding and vandalism and rape and murder, that documentary is never, ever going to see the light of day. There are many creepy parts in this book, really too many to mention. I mean, it's barely over 200 pages, and it's just chock full of like kind of moments. It really is. One of the things that traumatized me is that Robert's Sister Alice, moves in with him, and then also another woman named Eleanor moves in with the two of them. So in the same way that on the top floor, you have royal in this weird three way with his wife and another woman, and everybody's just. Apparently cool with it. You have Robert in a three way relationship with another woman and his own sister. I mean, it's made clear in the novel, and maybe this is one of the reasons why that character was written out in the film. I don't know, but it's made clear in the novel that they are in an adult relationship with one another there. There is incest going on. And so Lang, being a doctor, he has hidden his medical bag under some like floor boards in the apartment, so that he has something that he can barter with if he needs to. And he has a pretty good stash of morphine hidden under the floorboards, and he decides that he's going to start dosing these two women with morphine. He wants to make them docile. He wants to make them compliant, which they're pretty docile already anyway, because they're starved. He wants to make them fairly docile and compliant and get them hooked. His intention, he's very clear in the novel. His intention is to get them hooked on the morphine so that they will be dependent on Him. He will be like the puppet master controlling these two women, and he will be like their god because he's giving them morphine. So creepy, so gross. Whenever I finished the novel, I was like, Oh, I just Woo. I want to take a shower. I like dystopian, predictive sci fi, but this was not like watching HG Wells things to come, or Stanley Kubrick's doctor, Strange Love. I mean, after I read the novel, I just wanted to go take a shower with bleach. And then same thing with the movie. Even though the movie is not very good, in my opinion, I didn't, didn't care for it, and would not recommend it. It too is grotesque, but it's one of those things where even though the film adaptation is grotesque, it's not as grotesque and graphic as the novel. So here's an important conspiracy theory flavored question, is JG Ballard predicting a 15 minute city, and if so, is the descent into chaos and dog eat dog cannibalism, incest, drug abuse, etc, is that the natural development? Because it doesn't even take long in the novel, as soon as the last tenant moves in. It goes from, you know, slight, what we might call in modern vernacular, microaggressions, to Full Tilt orgies and cannibalism and murdering people's dogs and eating them and drowning people in the swimming pool. Shit gets real, real, real fast. I want to go now to the LA Review of Books, where they talk about high rise, both the film and the novel. When Ballard followed with high rise, he had already written two stories that highlighted the sheer scale of future cities in an overpopulated world and the potentially appalling consequences for daily life. The concentration city in early work from 1957 described a future American city of nearly infinite size that just makes me want to break out into hives. I'm sorry, as a country mouse, I'm like, Oh no, this mega city of unspecified billions is subject to periodic structural collapses that can squash half a million people like flies in a concertina and undergoes constant redevelopment, carving miles square gaps in the urban fabric. Millennium took the fear of density to the opposite extreme. Within it, the Malthusian pressure of population on food requires the British government to halt the outward growth of London in order to preserve every scrap of farmland, forcing the internal colonization of the city. Londoners literally live in closets, on stairway landings and in partition cubicles where squi Five square meters Say that five times fast, five square meters is enough floor space for a double the streets are so thronged with pedestrians that compact into a lock that holds everyone immobile. In one case, trapping the protagonist ward with 70,000 others into a jam that did not clear for two days. Google n grams suggests that the word gridlock also dates to around 1962 John B Calhoun's notorious experiments with overcrowded rats, which he popularized in Scientific American also in 1962 under the title population density and Social Pathology, put too many rats in too small a box and watched them turn nasty. Social critics immediately projected the findings from rodents to people, forgetting that rats lack government laws, religious codes and other cultural paraphernalia that reduced the pathologies of human societies. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, I'm thinking suddenly I could do, oh, probably more than one episode about the writings of Anton LaVey and how the rumor mill has been for more than a few years that he was involved in intelligence work. We certainly see that with someone like Aleister Crowley, that. Definitely needs to be its own episode that Aleister Crowley was involved in intelligence work. We know certainly that Michael Aquino was, I mean, he was very overtly in the military and was in the psychological warfare department. This is known, even though I've had people in here. Think theory, it's like, no, really it's not. You can look it up. You can see him in his military uniform, you can go read his book mind war. But I'm thinking about how Anton Levay sometimes would say that human beings, even though they walk on two legs, sometimes they're a lot less kind than their four legged counterparts. So I don't know that if you're putting too many people in too small a space, that they wouldn't turn nasty just because there's a government, there's laws, there's religion, there's culture, right? Okay, sure, the problems created by high rise warehouses for the poor, such as the Pruitt ego project in St Louis, were common fodder for social theorists in the 1970s because these projects were heavily populated by African Americans. The critique of such projects often drew on Calhoun's dubious science to reinforce the racism of population. Bomb rhetoric, Ballard grabbed onto these indictments, transposed them to middle class Britain and narrated apocalypse in a high rise test tube. Ballard's takeaway for high rise was the inevitability of a downward spiral, a sort of broken windows theory of crime taken to extremes. Richard Wilder, a hot headed documentary filmmaker from the lower floors who turns thuggish agitator and then beastial Avenger, draws the connection directly referencing the psychological pressures of high rise life as a reason for social chaos and his own descent into madness. The film carefully sticks to the 1975 setting of the novel. I will butt in and say, yes, the general setting, I mean, the high rise as it's pictured in the film, is very much in league with the way that I pictured it in my mind as I was reading the novel. However, it does divert from the actual plot. And as I said, however grotesque you may find the film to be, believe me when I tell you the novel is grosser, I'm gonna skip down just a little bit. However, the film also suggests a stronger science fiction connection when Anthony royal says that he wants to colonize the sky. Ballard made more of this describing the tower as both a small vertical city, its 2000 inhabitants, boxed up into the sky and as a spaceship. End quote. So there's some good food for thought. Does this predict a 15 minute city? And if so, would a 15 minute city with all of these people in a confined, corralled area degenerate into violence and lawlessness. Is that just human nature we see? HG Wells asking us a similar question. I think, in things to come, this idea that once man has conquered his own world, he's going to look for other worlds to conquer. That's just who human beings are, ipso facto by human nature, Everything or Nothing. What's it going to be so I think it's a similar question. Is it human nature that people in these small, confined spaces are going to go apeshit crazy and start killing each other, going into some kind of Lord of the Flies situation, where anything goes, Top Dog rules. Or is that just propaganda? Is this part of some Population Bomb theory is is it based in faulty junk science that says the world is overpopulated and some of you peons need to not be here anymore. Judge for yourself. Judge for yourself. As I've said before, I don't really recommend the film. I don't think it's super great, which is just my opinion, but the novel, I think, is worth your time. Just be prepared that it's going to give you the heebie jeebies, and you're going to want to take a shower when you're done, stay a little bit crazy and I will see you in the next episode.

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