Wheatley's Progress: High-Rise (2015) and the Burden of Ballard

Adaptation Advance Access published August 9, 2016 Adaptation doi:10.1093/adaptation/apw032 FILM REVIEW Wheatley’s Progress: High-Rise (2015) and the Burden of Ballard KEVIN M. FLANAGAN* On March 9, 2016, Ben Wheatley tweeted an image of adaptor/screenwriter Amy Jump’s personal copy of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise (originally published 1975). Her torn and gutted 1985 Triad Panther paperback sits next to a pristine copy of the new 2016 Fourth Estate tiein release, a branded paratext complete with reproduction film poster. The material trace of Jump’s working copy exudes a powerful claim about the work of adaptation. To make a film from a novel is to gut, ransack, and reconstitute, and not to idolise and reproduce from a distance. Of course, distance is a critical part of Ballard’s novel. A phantasia on the autodestruction of an aspiringly utopian Brutalist megastructure—the high-rise in question is a self-contained space for living and leisure, complete with restaurants, swimming pools, gyms, and a well-provisioned shopping mall—Ballard’s book is antiseptic in its presentation of a place’s slow descent into primitive brutality. The once elect men and women of this building gradually seal themselves off from the outside world and proceed to party, raid, and flog themselves into oblivion. They are, and Ballard is careful on this point, at least entry-level middle class and almost all have some kind of white-collar job. The social scattering of the building happens along subtle lines, with the often younger professionals and their families on the lowest floors with the least resources, and the solidly and continuing rich nested at the top. The novel relies on a shifting narrative point of view that cycles between three men whose lives are tied to the fate of the tower block. Dialogue is in relatively short supply. Robert Laing (probably named after the rogue selfhood guru R.D. Laing), a well-chiselled medical lecturer, emerges as the building’s ‘ideal’ tenant insofar as he falls into a limited version of the primitive tribalism that overtakes the residents (he ends the book in a protective mélange between himself and two women, one of whom is his sister). Anthony Royal, the scheme’s architect and the building’s resident mythic genius, sits atop the structure, staking his claim by manipulating the gangs on the floors below, in the process gathering together a mostly elite retinue that remains supplied with servants until the end. Richard Wilder, a documentarian who lives on the lower floors, is Royal’s foil. Contra Royal’s lithe, graceful agedness, he is a strong, brutal lower-middle class professional who embraces the new savagery and eventually claws his way up to the top *School of Arts and Sciences, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh. E-mail: kmf50@pitt.edu. © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Page 1 of 5 Downloaded from http://adaptation.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Pittsburgh on August 10, 2016 High-Rise. Dir. Ben Wheatley. Perf. Tom Hiddleston, Sienna Miller, Jeremy Irons. Recorded Picture Company, 2015. PAGE 2 OF 5 KEVIN M. FLANAGAN Downloaded from http://adaptation.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Pittsburgh on August 10, 2016 of the building and kills Royal, before embracing his fate with a coterie of communal women, including his estranged wife Helen, whom he barely recognises by the end. The strictly class-defined situation is toppled, but the high-rise’s fate remains uncertain, and the next tower over is nearing completion, with a similarly construed group of tenants about to move in… Jump and Wheatley make a number of tough choices in setting up a film version of this novel. Ballard relies on a kind of reflective interiority that is hard to maintain outside of continuous voice-over. Thus, the film adds sufficient dialogue to furbish the plot. While Ballard is content to let his situation unravel thanks to invisible forces of mechanistic conditioning and zeitgeist, the film posits that concrete motivation (pun partially intended) is often necessary. The film’s Laing (a star turn from Tom Hiddleston, whose performance suits the movie perfectly) has recently lost his sister, so his partnering with women, both Charlotte (Sienna Miller) and Wilder’s wife Helen (Elisabeth Moss), is at least partially reframed as a recapturing of familial closeness, a move that also lets the film sidestep the implied incest of the novel. Laing’s ‘ideal’ resident status, which in the novel is more a model of negotiating his class position against his behaviour, is literalised in the film thanks to sequences that imply his physical closeness to the building. Laing’s most savage moment has him go to the decaying supermarket and fight for a can of grey paint, a contested prize that causes him to nearly beat a man to death. Upon securing it, he retreats to his apartment and covers the walls and his own body with this concrete-grey. As befits a film produced by frequent David Cronenberg collaborator Jeremy Thomas, man and structure merge into a hybrid whole. Where the film shines is in its visual evocation of conflict. Recently, in a special issue of Critical Quarterly dedicated to Ben Wheatley, Ballard, and High-Rise, I argued that Wheatley’s films negotiate tensions between romantic and modernist visual regimes, often mobilising contested imagery to suggest complex struggle (Flanagan 16–22). High-Rise maintains aspects of this career-long arc, differently configured. Most of Wheatley’s previous films are set outside of urban space. High-Rise is both the most concentrated embodiment of the presumptive urbanist future—the titular building is a megastructure, a space that can completely tend to human social and housing needs in one concentrated space—and the revelation of its limits, insofar as these tower blocks are constructed on the outskirts of the city, in a kind of no man’s land (Banham; Whiteley 287). Most of the men and women in Wheatley and Jump’s High-Rise cannot attain the rural/pastoral spaces of the English landscape, the very landscapes on which Wheatley’s other features so extensively rely. For the tower’s lower orders, life is drab, slab, mauve, and decidedly indoors, with brief excursions to their unscenic balconies. Royal and his rich associates, by contrast, have an enclosed garden on the building’s roof, which contains manicured-yet-natural green spaces associated with Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716–1783) and the English gardening tradition of the eighteenth century. Royal’s younger wife Ann (Keeley Hawes), who grew up with aristocratic privilege, rides around this space on a horse, almost in caricature of the residual memory of the habitus of the ruling class. In High-Rise, violence erupts in part because of access. Wilder’s transgression is as much his achievement of this natural sphere as it is his murdering of Royal. Wheatley’s Progress PAGE 3 OF 5 Downloaded from http://adaptation.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Pittsburgh on August 10, 2016 Wheatley proudly wears his influences on his sleeve. His Twitter feed is full of 2000 A.D. covers and references to cult auteurs like John Boorman and John Carpenter. His High-Rise is, perhaps inevitably, awash in intertextual connections and genre resonances in a way that Ballard’s book is not. Roger Luckhurst has pointed out that it is one of several recent ‘tower horror’ films, a roster that includes Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011), The Raid (Gareth Evans, 2011) and, perhaps most resonantly, Dredd (Pete Travis, 2012) (Luckhurst 68). High-Rise and the Dredd of early 2000 A.D. comics come from some of the same cultural anxieties: overcrowding, the breakdown of social services like trash collection, and rampant crime (what, in the Thatcher era, would largely be framed as ‘mugging’, a coded term for working class and minority petty crime against the white middle class) (Hall). If Ballard’s intervention is squarely aimed at mid-1970s’ conveniences, then Wheatley and Co. are responding to a lot more. Luckhurst sees resonances with London’s recent housing bubble, while Toby Litt reads the film’s obsession with glass and reflective surfaces as ‘a very 1980s gambit, almost Bret Easton Ellis’ (Litt 100; Luckhurst). Kim Newman reminds of similarities to Cronenberg’s apartment-horror masterpiece Shivers (1974), which Ballard probably had not seen but Wheatley almost certainly has (Newman). I found correspondences to Roeg (Wheatley and Jump edit with the signature flashforward/flashback bursts that typify Don’t Look Now [1973] or Bad Timing [1980]) and Ken Russell (particularly in the way the film repurposes classical music as a counterpoint to contemporary imagery—one will have a hard time forgetting a string quartet version of Abba’s ‘S.O.S.’). But, for a film so strongly about the waning promise of 1970s Britain, or the privatisation horrors of Thatcher, or the London real estate bubble of David Cameron and Boris Johnson, two of the strongest intertexts glance into Ballard’s immediate rear-view mirror. Most obvious is Donald Cammell and Roeg’s inordinately resonate Performance (1968), whose bohemian interiority signalled the height of 1960s neo-decadence, best exemplified in sequences between Royal and other top floor residents as they plot paranoid machinations in the architect’s flat, surrounded by the detritus of weeks of partying. Shag carpeting and cushions amidst swarms of empties. This trash typifies the other nod, as High-Rise, to use Evan Calder Williams’ term, is roundly ‘salvagepunk’ in its sifting of waste and ruins out of which the new order can be born, and Wheatley’s film ends with an image straight out of the prophetic ur-text of this movement, The Bed Sitting Room (Richard Lester, 1969) (Williams 19). By film’s end, Toby (Louis Suc), the illegitimate son of Charlotte and Royal, sits atop the building, on a throne made of salvaged metal, using make-shift machinery to listen a radio broadcast of Thatcher. In Lester’s film, the bomb reduces Britain to a rubbish heap, and the unlucky survivors make something new out of the old. In Wheatley’s film, Toby, or the obsessive Steele (Reece Shearsmith), successfully navigates the breakdown of the tower and creates his own, private worlds out of the anonymous hallways of garbage. That Steele entombs TV announcer Cosgrove (Peter Ferdinando) in the broken husk of a television set fits the end-game of High-Rise, but it also directly points to the key image of The Bed Sitting Room, in which the last representative of the BBC (Frank Thornton) wanders the wastes and continues to read the news by sticking his head into the shell of TV, as if to maintain one of the anchoring traditions of British media culture at a time when both Britain and the media have been wiped out. PAGE 4 OF 5 KEVIN M. FLANAGAN REFERENCES A Field in England. Dir. Ben Wheatley. Rook Films/Film4, 2013. Attack the Block. Dir. Joe Cornish. Sony Pictures, 2011. Bad Timing. Dir. Nicolas Roeg. Rank Organization, 1980. Ballard, J.G. High-Rise. New York: Liveright/Norton, 2012. Banham, Reyner. Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. The Bed Sitting Room. Dir. Richard Lester. United Artists, 1969. Don’t Look Now. Dir. Nicolas Roeg. British Lion, 1973. Downloaded from http://adaptation.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Pittsburgh on August 10, 2016 To date, High-Rise’s reception amongst reviewers and critics is mixed leaning towards positive. Kim Newman peels back the layers to find value in the choice to set the film squarely in the 1970s, nostalgia and all (he offers particular praise for the supporting players, who approximate ‘70s sit-com’ performance affections). Kate Muir of the Times praised the continued relevance of the material, noting in her five-star review that ‘rarely is a period film so of the moment’. Henry K. Miller’s Sight & Sound review offers measured criticisms: ‘All in all, the most interesting departures from Ballard are made too fitfully, and the least welcome too boldly.’ Video Watchdog editor Tim Lucas expresses more direct disappointment when he argues that ‘At no time does the material remind us, as Ballard does, how our interactions with the rest of the world decide how presentably we live from day to day, how easily our standards of living can deteriorate if we have only to please ourselves - into not making the bed, not changing our clothes for days or weeks at a time, and the psychological cost that comes with such self-neglect.’ Put another way, the film does not adequately deal with the interior struggles that come with the larger situational changes. Wheatley and Jump deserve some lamentably offered criticism, and plenty of due praise. The film inevitably condenses material, and the most missed bits of Ballard are the subtle, often rumoured, micro-aggressions that illustrate the road to ruin. Had the film been about an hour longer, these scattered premonitions might have been attainable. Barbarism is not achieved with a bang, but rather with the accumulated elbowing battles while waiting for a wonky lift, or the squabbles the come from chronically limited stock in the supermarket, or the long lines at the liquor store. Yet, the film turns a weakness into a boon. The descent to bare survival is visualised in the film thanks to montage, which cuts between parties, binges, and battered bodies. Sightseers (2012, notable for its cross-cutting between locales) and A Field in England (2013, unforgettable for the mad accumulation of its hallucinatory digital images) have aptly shown what Wheatley and Jump can do with editing. Wheatley and director of photography Laurie Rose achieve some of the best images during montage sequences that condense time, and some of the most exhilarating moments feel like unearthed footage from Ken Russell’s psychedelic rock opera of The Who’s Tommy (1975). Sadly, some of the best imagery in the film is gone in a flash. Perhaps High-Rise is best regarded outside of the Ballard mystique. The burden of influence attached to Ballard is high: as prophet of Shepperton and chronicler of the banal, he is singular. Wheatley’s film opens the premise up to a profitable cultural jumble as channelled through the mind of a budding, collaborating, and still expanding auteur. His High-Rise looks back at brutalism and the anxieties of the 1970s as a usefully cracked cypher for a lot of what ails us. Wheatley’s Progress PAGE 5 OF 5 Downloaded from http://adaptation.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Pittsburgh on August 10, 2016 Dredd. Dir. Pete Travis. Lionsgate, 2012. Flanagan, Kevin M. “Green and Pleasant Land?: Ben Wheatley’s British Cinema between Romanticism and Modernism.” Special Issue: Ben Wheatley, J.G. Ballard, and High-Rise. Critical Quarterly 58.1 (2016):16–22. Hall, Stuart, et al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London: Macmillan, 1978. Litt, Toby. “Sourcedness.” Special Issue: Ben Wheatley, J.G. Ballard, and High-Rise. Critical Quarterly 58.1 (2016):96–101. Lucas, Tim. Mise en Abyme: Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise. VideoWatchBlog. 29 Apr. 2016. 12 May 2016. http://videowatchdog.blogspot.com/2016/04/mise-en-abyme-ben-wheatleys-high-rise.html. Luckhurst, Roger. “High-Rise 1975/2015.” Special Issue: Ben Wheatley, J.G. Ballard, and High-Rise. Critical Quarterly 58.1 (2016):63–69. Miller, Henry K. “High-Rise.” Sight & Sound 26.4 (2016):64–65. Muir, Kate. “The Big Film: High-Rise.” The Times. 18 Mar. 2016. 12 May 2016. http://www.thetimes. co.uk/tto/arts/film/reviews/article4715658.ece. Newman, Kim. “Film Review: High-Rise.” The Kim Newman Website. 14 Mar. 2016. 12 May 2016. https://johnnyalucard.com/2016/03/14/film-review-high-rise/. Performance. Dirs. Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg. Warner Brothers, 1968/1970. The Raid. Dir. Gareth Evans. Sony Pictures Classics, 2011. Shivers. Dir. David Cronenberg. Cinepix Film Properties, 1974. Sightseers. Dir. Ben Wheatley. StudioCanal, 2012. Tommy. Dir. Ken Russell. Columbia Pictures, 1975. Williams, Evan C. Combined and Uneven Apocalypse: Luciferian Marxism. Ropley, Hants: Zero Publishing, 2010. Wheatley, Ben. “The Copy of High-Rise Amy Jump Used to Write the Script and the Film Edition.” 9 Mar. 2016, 12:58. Tweet. Whiteley, Nigel. Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.