I went to see High-Rise – the
Ben Wheatley movie of the JG Ballard novel, published in 1975 – anarchy and
social upheaval in a 4O floor, one thousand unit apartment block somewhere in
London. It’s as good a movie as anyone
has any right to expect, and an awful lot better than most of us Ballard fans
feared.
It would be pointless to claim it’s any kind of walking
movie but there is some interesting walking in it. The movie’s protagonist, Dr. Robert Laing, (I
think Ballard may have had trouble with character names) does a fair amount of
walking within the building. Laing is played by Tom Hiddleston of course, who beforehand struck me as an unlikely Ballardian hero but he's pretty great here.
In one dream sequence he half-walks, half-dances, with
a group of air hostesses (or whatever we’re supposed to call them these days).
He walks around his apartment. He walks around the supermarket. He walks across the car park – full of 1970s
cars (though not in the picture below) - which is pretty much the only
time we see him walking outside the building, as I recall.
And at a couple of points he walks in the rooftop
garden, which belongs to the top dog architect who designed the building, named
Royal – did I mention that I think Ballard may have had trouble with character
names?
Thanks to Mike Bonsall’s brilliantly obsessive concordance
of the works of Ballard I can tell you that the word “walked” appears 34 times
in the novel of High-Rise, “walk”
occurs 6 times, “walking” 3 times, “walking-stick” just once.
The high-rise of the novel is set in London, two miles east of the City, “along the river,” on the north side, which by my calculation
would place it somewhere around Limehouse.
The movie for all its temporal accuracy – everything
looks amazingly 1975 – is set in even more of a geographical no man’s land, and
it doesn’t come as a huge surprise to find that much of the film was shot in Northern
Ireland, for good solid tax reasons.
That walled roof garden that’s supposed to be 40
stories up in the air, even with some CGI work still looks very much like a real,
ground level garden, and yes it turns out to be the walled garden at Bangor
Castle.
Incidentally, Ballard’s old mucker Michael Moorcock
seems to have been mildly obsessed with the roof garden at Derry and Toms in
Kensington – which became Biba for a while (Biba closed in 1975!). It pops up more than once in the Jerry Cornelius
novels. I’m guessing that Wheatley is playfully alluding to that, but I wouldn't swear to it.
Ballard was supposedly inspired
by Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower in Notting Hill – 31 stories – 217 flats –
though for the purposes of High-Rise
the Balfron Tower constructed a few years earlier might be a better model. Goldfinger
actually did live there, just like Royal in High-Rise,
although by all accounts having Goldfinger for a neighbor would have been pretty
intimidating.
Jeremy Irons as Royal is considerably less scary.
But one thing both the Trellick and the Belfron had - in
common with a lot of other 1960s and 70s council blocks - was what we used to
call (if we hated them) deck access or (if we liked them) “streets in the sky.” The flats had front doors that opened into
shared external access corridors, along which people could, and had to walk, at
least somewhat like a real street.
Of course these decks might be haunted by roaming bad
elements, threatening passersby, banging on doors, settling fire to piles of
rubbish etc., but that’s how it is with street life. And that's how it is with High-Rise even though the building doesn’t
have external decks. The interior space is claustrophobic,
oppressive, cinematically under lit.
And afterwards coming out of the movie, it felt good
to be able to walk in the open air, in streets on the ground rather than
anywhere else.
And walking up
Sawtelle Boulevard I saw there’s been some kind of English, or more
specifically London, invasion. There are
apartment blocks, with names such as Camden Town, Soho Square, St John’s
Wood. Admittedly they’re fairly low-rise
and don’t look inherently threatening, but after the movie all apartment blocks
seem potentially sinister.
A look at the
developers’ website (it’s premierleagueinc.com - an English football reference - what’s
that about?) doesn’t do much to calm the nerves. Here you’ll find all kinds of greenwash, and
inert and empty language of the kind Ballard reveled in. They “strive for aesthetics and functionality.” They have “cutting edge design and
efficient use of space.” The units are “pre-wired
for today’s technological needs.” And so
on. I can’t help thinking that the
inhabitants will be sitting on their balconies roasting their dogs in no time at all.
