kelley » Sat May 14, 2016 12:52 pm wrote:http://artforum.com/film/#entry59954
AS REAL ESTATE BECOMES A LIVING NIGHTMARE in cities like London, New York, and San Francisco, it seems a good time to revisit novelist J.G. Ballard’s fictional nightmare of real estate, High-Rise, recently made into a film by British director Ben Wheatley. A pitch-black social satire typical of its author, the 1975 source novel concerns a state-of-the-art, high-tech apartment building—all mod cons and then some—whose residents quickly slide into violent and sexual depravity, losing touch with the outside world, as its conveniences begin to malfunction.
Ballard was interested in situations where the thin veneer of “civilization” is stripped away from human relations, either by technological developments or natural disasters, revealing the ignoble savage within. As in his unclassifiable, technopornographic 1973 novel Crash, in which “the deviant technology of the car-crash provided the sanction for any perverse act,” the rigorously automated citadel of the high-rise, which “
y its very efficiency… took over the task of maintaining the social structure,” left its residents “free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses.” The high-rise was, as one of Ballard’s characters reflects, “a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly ‘free’ psychopathology.”
Like many literary authors who flirt with science fiction, Ballard was regarded as a prophet of dystopia, but it is not always acknowledged how prophetic he really was. Contemporary readers of High-Rise will come upon this passage, as accurate a description of ardent social-media users you’re likely to find in a mid-’70s text: “A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality… who felt… no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new kind of late-twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.” Pressing the point, one of the characters in the film delivers a line that doesn’t appear in the book: “We’re all bio-robots now. None of us can live without the equipment we surround ourselves with—cameras, cars, televisions, phones.”
Superficially, High-Rise can be seen as an adult version of William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies (made into a film in 1963), but Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) are also cornerstones of its architecture. Taking cues from the Spanish surrealist, Ballard and Wheatley depict the decadence and barbarism of the upper classes as they insulate themselves from the lower-floor residents and “what’s going on at street level,” as one penthouse partygoer contemptuously puts it in the film. There are also echoes of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) in the epic journey a lower-floor resident, coded as coarse and working class, makes to the very top of the high-rise to confront its architect and owner.
High-Rise is Wheatley’s fifth feature, and as with most of his films, its screenplay was written by his wife, Amy Jump, who stays fairly close to the novel, even if she occasionally puts certain characters’ thoughts into other characters’ mouths. The team is known for their mordant wit and mild surrealism, their most effective works to date being the truly shocking three-genre mashup Kill List (2011) and the dark Beckettian farce A Field in England (2013), which is set during the English Civil War and manages to be convincingly psychedelic despite being shot in black-and-white. The set and setting of High-Rise, as well as its tone, suit them well.
Wheatley lacks the cold, nearly inhuman artiness of Nicolas Roeg, slated to direct the film adaptation in the late ’70s, whose sensibility lies somewhere between Kubrick and Antonioni, but he is equipped and prepared to walk the razor-thin lines between humor and violence, prophecy and satire, realism and science fiction that Ballard traces in his novels. Ballard’s signature clinical distance, literally acquired in medical school and evident in his seemingly amoral descriptions of the increasingly appalling tableaux of the building’s degeneration, is honored by Wheatley in the film, leading to matter-of-fact plot points in my notes like “The morning after being raped by Wilder, Charlotte serves him a half-eaten can of dog food on the terrace.”
As with its budget and promotional push, the cast of High-Rise is a step up for Wheatley, though he still finds minor roles for some of his recurring actors. Of the stars, Tom Hiddleston brings his slightly effete, thin-lipped reserve to the role of Robert Laing, a medical school professor whose name is tellingly close to that of R.D. Laing, the unorthodox psychiatrist who theorized that psychotic episodes were legitimate human expressions and might be waystations to more enlightened states of being. Sienna Miller, here a dead ringer for Elizabeth Hurley in the Austin Powers cycle, plays Charlotte Melville, a vampy widow with a young son of mysterious provenance, who sleeps with Laing and other male residents of the building. Reprising his George Sanders–as–zombie role from Margin Call (2011), as a member of the urbane, moneyed undead who only inhabit stratospheric penthouse suites, Jeremy Irons is the building’s architect and “father,” Anthony Royal, whose name—like Laing and Richard Wilder, the story’s avenging id—is a bit too on the nose.
The prominent class-warfare theme of the novel would have made less sense to Americans in the ’70s. It is far more apposite today in a country that, despite its tediously ballyhooed Horatio Alger myth, is now commensurate with the UK in terms of (lack of) social mobility. US audiences will recognize in Irons’s unchecked arrogance and casual sociopathy the demeanor and attitudes of disgraced Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld, the model for the CEO in Margin Call. Toward the end of High-Rise, as the camera scans the concrete desert of the larger development where the building sits, Wheatley cuts in audio of a Margaret Thatcher speech, presumably from her late ’70s rise: “There is only one economic system in this world, and it is capitalism. Where there is state capitalism, there will never be political freedom.” The irony here is that the “freedom” so often lauded by Objectivist sock puppets like Alan Greenspan and Paul Ryan is truly realized in Ballard and Wheatley’s high-rise, a model of totally unregulated private capitalism where the law of the jungle prevails. Ayn Rand, to say nothing of Thatcher, would be proud. Perceptive viewers will detect the underlying message of the film, which couldn’t be more timely: Beware wealthy, self-satisfied men bearing skyscrapers; they will usher in a social system where only the richest and most brutal will survive. It’s gonna be yuge.
— Andrew Hultkrans
High-Rise opens in select theaters on Friday, May 13th.
Mmh, High Rise the novel came out in 1975 the same year that Shivers, the horror film about a ultra modern high rise being torn apart by the uncontrollable instincts of its residents being released by a parasite, came out. And we know Cronenberg was a fan of Ballard because he made his Crash novel that came out two years later into a film in the 90's. Wonder how much, if at all, the novel influenced Shivers the film during production? Of course, the high rise is just the modern haunted castle and a big well used sociological trope on social break downs. Nice to know at least Cronenberg or Ballard had anything to do with Sliver:
Shivers
Plot
Dr. Emil Hobbes is conducting unorthodox experiments with parasites for use in transplants. He believes that humanity has become over-rational and lost contact with its flesh and its instincts, so the effects of the organism he actually develops is a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease. Once implanted, it causes uncontrollable sexual desire in the host.
[b]Hobbes implants the parasites in his teen-aged mistress, who promiscuously spreads them throughout the ultra-modern apartment building outside Montreal where they live. Hobbes, unable to undo the damage he caused, kills his mistress and then commits suicide. The police are called and the crime looks to be open and shut.
As the story develops, one of Hobbes' sexual partners begins to feel ill and returns from work. Here we see the parasite emerge from its host and escape into the building where it emerges and attacks a number of people. The pace of the story quickens when the community's resident physician, Roger St. Luc uncovers some of the research that Hobbes had been working on. St. Luc encounters an elderly resident who has been attacked and burned by the parasite. St. Luc, along with his assistant and girlfriend, Nurse Forsythe, move the elderly residents to their room. They attempt to stop the parasite infestation before it overwhelms the city's population.
Instructing the elderly couple to wait and lock themselves in, St. Luc continues to the basement where the residents told him they had disposed of the parasite. St. Luc is attacked by a caretaker and manages to defeat the caretaker by bashing in his skull. Forsythe leaves the safety of the elderly residents' room and continues after St. Luc, where she is attacked, but is rescued by St. Luc. Meanwhile upstairs it is clear the parasite has spread the infection and more and more of the residents start to act out. The scene closes with the elderly couple's apartment broken into by the infected. Downstairs the security guard is infected and the auctioneer showing the apartment is slowly entrapping other unsuspecting guests.
St. Luc escapes to the parking garage and Forsythe is attacked by an infected resident. St. Luc appears to rescue her and get her to his car. However as they attempt to crash through the gate to the parking garage another car rams them. St. Luc helps Forsythe free and they escape to a remote area in the resident block. At this stage Forsythe starts to act out showing that she too has become infected.
St. Luc is forced to leave her and forge on to escape but at every turn he is trapped. Eventually he finds himself trapped in the swimming pool and he is attacked and eventually infected.
The closing scene is the residents happily exiting the residential block in their cars. The viewer is left to believe that Hobbes' plan to infect the world is underway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shivers_(film)
SliverCarly Norris (Sharon Stone) moves into an exclusive New York residential building, not long after the previous tenant, Naomi Singer, falls to her death from her balcony. She immediately crosses paths with other tenants including the handsome Zeke (William Baldwin).
Carly and Zeke soon start meeting quite often; Carly eventually agrees to go to the gym with Zeke, who begins to turn her on by grabbing her hips while exercising. After hanging out for a while, they end up having sex and begin a sexual relationship. Carly is also being romantically pursued by Jack (Tom Berenger), a novelist who is another resident of her building.
Two of Carly's neighbors (Keene Curtis, Polly Walker) die under suspicious circumstances. As she discovers more about Zeke and Jack, she begins to distrust both and also uncovers shocking secrets about other people who live around her. Carly eventually finds out that Jack killed Naomi because of his jealousy of Zeke. It is revealed that Zeke knew that Jack was the killer, but chose to ignore it because it would expose his other secret: he has surveillance cameras allowing him to spy on every apartment, including hers.
Although she is both curious about and disturbed by the cameras, she sees footage of Zeke having sex with Naomi, as well as the murder of Naomi by Jack. Carly eventually destroys Zeke's surveillance room and his video monitors, telling him to "get a life" before leaving him and the building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliver_(film)
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
