I finally caught up with High Rise. It’s been my most anticipated film for ages, as I’m a huge fan of J.G. Ballard. It lived up to expectations! I knew the film would be true to the spirit of the novel almost instantaneously – its depiction of the novel’s famous dog-eating opening line adapted the line’s understated misanthropic shock perfectly from text to cinema.
The film was a lot funnier than the novel, but it made it work. It’s not too surprising. Ben Wheatley’s films tend to be very darkly humorous.
When Laing met the architect and described his blueprint, it was the most delighfully Ballardian line, like something right out of The Atrocity Exhibition. Wish I could remember it verbatim, but it was something like “the unconscious diagram of a new form of psychopathology.”
Ballard’s got this peculiar kind of distance in his writing. His protagonists are mostly super disaffected doctors, and his characters tend to behave in totally bizarre ways for the sake of whatever metaphor he’s going for. It’s kind of fun to see film adaptations of his work that really engage with this. Things like this are more easily glossed over in text than they are when you’re presented with a bunch of cold, dead-eyed actors mumbling at each other. Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash also faced this dilemma. I thought both films did an admirable job of allowing this weirdness to kind of guide their tone in unique ways. It’s hard to think of any other films that feel quite like Crash or High Rise.
I’d definitely recommend this thing, even if you’ve never heard of Ballard. But for god’s sake, go read some Ballard! High Rise is actually a great starting point. I’d also recommend The Crystal World and The Atrocity Exhibition. Be warned, that latter one is VERY bonkers and upsetting and abstract. Its penultimate chapter is called “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” and its last chapter is called “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race.”