I am no fan of Martin Amis, but kudos for the truly incredible piece of confessional writing that is his 2011 intro to Ballard’s THE DROWNED WORLD, which goes: I don’t understand sf, I don’t understand Ballard, I don’t understand this novel, I don’t understand climate science, I don’t understand DeLillo (but I do have a crush on him), I don’t understand introductions, and I’m less than 100% on the placement of commas, but I do understand I get paid the same if I pad this out with long quotes, and I do understand spoilers – and to prove it I’ll end with a really big one:
Tag: jg ballard
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos 2017)
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), Yorgos Lanthimos’s tepidly comic but ultimately toothless mash-up of Ballard, Kubrick and Lynch, is not the relentlessly crawling pace that actually gives you time to watch not paint dry but Colin Farrell’s beard grow (and turn increasingly grey), nor is it Alicia Silverstone’s wise decision to quit the movie after a single scene because it required her to suck Colin Farrell’s fingers, nor is it the fact that I have finally managed to stay awake all the way through a film by Yorgos “no idea how to wrap up this story” Lanthimos, though this time ironically it could well have been the praying for sleep to come that kept me from napping, nor is it the fact that no deer, sacred or otherwise, were killed during the making of this film, no, the best thing about The Killing of a Sacred Deer is the immensely tall cameraman employed to do the long tracking-in and tracking-out shots, whose head you constantly fear is going to come a cropper on light fittings and door ways, thus adding a much-needed sense of danger and suspense as this never-seen lanky technician is the nearest thing to a character you could give a flying fuck about…
Ballard’s Cinema: Notes for a Retrospective – Track 12 (Joseph Losey 1967)
Frustrated at repeatedly missing out on the chance to film one of Ballard’s novels, Stanley Baker optioned a number of his short stories through his production company Oakhurst Productions, including ‘Track 12’ (1958). Of the intended anthology picture, only one, the 22-minite ‘Track 12’, was completed, shot by Joseph Losey from a script by Harold Pinter, during a break in production on Accident (Losey 1967).
Dirk Bogarde is chilling as the diffident biochemist, Sheringham, avenging his cuckolding by Baker’s robust Maxted. An unbilled Julie Christie was persuaded by Bogarde, who had worked with her on John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965), to provide the glimpsed fragments of Susan Sheringham’s face and body – and the overwhelming, screen-filling kissing lips of the film’s startling conclusion, an image that had a profound influence on David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983).
Christie would, of course, go on to co-star in Losey’s Palme d’Or-winning The Go-Between (1971), his fourth and final collaboration with Pinter; and Ballard later scripted the contemporary sequences that saved Pinter’s adaptation of John Fowles’s 1969 The French Lieutenant’s Woman, directed by Karel Reisz in 1981, from mere historical pictorialism.
Other films in the retrospective
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979)
Carry On Getting It Up (Gerald Thomas 1977)
The Drowned World (J. Lee Thompson 1974)
The Drowned World: The Director’s Cut (J. Lee Thompson 2015)
El Dorado (BBC 1992-93; 156 episodes)
Gale Force (Val Guest 1967)
Jodorowsky’s Burning World (Frank Pavich 2013)
Ballard’s Cinema: Notes for a Retrospective – Jodorowsky’s Burning World (Frank Pavich 2013)
Broadcaster David Frost and his partner Hazel Adair, perhaps best known as the creator of the long-running soap opera Crossroads (1964–88), bought the rights to adapt The Drought aka The Burning World (1964) in the late 1960s.
Frost knew little if anything about science fiction, but Adair was no stranger to the genre. She was the author of one of the first sf television shows, Stranger from Space (1951–53), and of an ultimately unproduced Doctor Who serial, Hexagora. However, despite her many television successes, the state of the British film industry at the end of the sixties meant her career as a film producer had rather ignominious results: some sex comedies, a horror movie and a lethargic international adventure movie.
It remains unclear whether it was Adair or Frost who commissioned Ballard to script the adaptation himself, and it is possible it was actually intended for television rather than film. There is no copy of the script or the contract in the Ballard archive at the British Library, and Ballard’s scattered interview comments do not give a very clear picture. (In 1979, Adair commissioned Ballard to adapt his 1974 Concrete Island, although this too went unproduced.)
George Harrison was one of several producers to approach Frost over the rights to The Drought only to be put off by his extremely high price. In a famous prank, Peter Cook ‘let slip’ during a television interview with Frost that he was partway through filming the novel with himself in the lead role. For half a minute, the usually unflappable Frost became extremely flappable. Bizarrely, this incident brought the novel to the attention of Dino De Laurentiis, who hired Alejandro Jodorowsky to direct it – a doomed project, the story of which is told in Frank Pavich’s celebrated documentary Jodorowsky’s Burning World (Pavich 2013).
Other films in the retrospective
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979)
Carry On Getting It Up (Gerald Thomas 1977)
The Drowned World (J. Lee Thompson 1974)
The Drowned World: The Director’s Cut (J. Lee Thompson 2015)
El Dorado (BBC 1992-93; 156 episodes)
Gale Force (Val Guest 1967)
Track 12 (Joseph Losey 1967)
Ballard’s Cinema: Notes for a Retrospective – Gale Force (Val Guest 1967)
The Wind from Nowhere (1961), Ballard’s debut novel, was hastily optioned prior to publication by Michael Carreras, who had recently parted company with his father’s Hammer Films in order to establish himself as a director and independent producer. Carreras initially intended it as a vehicle for Rod Taylor, but he ultimately turned down the role to star in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).
A chance meeting with Stanley Baker led to interest from Joseph Levine and Cy Endfield, who bought the option when Carreras let it lapse. They were, however, so deeply involved in the production of Zulu (1964) that they somehow forgot about it. Indeed, Baker was unaware their option had lapsed until it was announced that Gregory Peck would produce and star in a version directed by J. Lee Thompson. But it was scuppered by the prohibitive cost of the special effects sequences demanded by the Carl Foreman and James R. Webb’s script.
Producer Michael Klinger returned the project to the UK – one of two sf films he was to make in the late 1960s – and entrusted it to Val Guest, who would later also write and direct Hammer’s When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) from a treatment by Ballard. He also directed the Klinger-produced Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974), which would in turn lead to the unexpected sight gag at the end of Nicolas Roeg’s High Rise (1978).
Although Guest did not get on with Edward Judd, he nonetheless cast the star of his earlier weather-based sf movie, The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), as Maitland. Jane Merrow, who plays Susan Maitland, also appeared in the other British sf film in which you can tell the apocalypse is here because the weather has improved, Night of the Big Heat (Terence Fisher 1967).
Intriguingly, Judd, who was a couple of years younger than Ballard was also born in Shanghai, but there is no evidence they met each other there – or, indeed, Burt Kwouk, who was also resident there, and plays an unnamed soldier in the private army of millionaire Hardoon (Eric Portman).
Other films in the retrospective
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979)
Carry On Getting It Up (Gerald Thomas 1977)
The Drowned World (J. Lee Thompson 1974)
The Drowned World: The Director’s Cut (J. Lee Thompson 2015)
El Dorado (BBC 1992-93; 156 episodes)
Gale Force (Val Guest 1967)
Jodorowsky’s Burning World (Frank Pavich 2013)
Track 12 (Joseph Losey 1967)
Ballard’s Cinema: Notes for a Retrospective – El Dorado (BBC 1992-93; 156 episodes)
In the late 1980s, the BBC began to spin off and divest parts of the organisation, laying the groundwork for establishing autonomous but wholly owned cash-cow subsidiaries. Central to this plan was the transformation of BBC Enterprises into BBC Worldwide. In order to monetise the BBC brand, production reoriented to programming that could be sold overseas. One outcome was the three-times-a-week upmarket soap El Dorado, set in a not-too-precisely futuristic gated community and exclusive resort town on the Mediterranean.
Based on Ballard’s Vermilion Sands (1971), it began by interweaving plots and characters from his collection of linked stories into an unfolding, soap-opera structure featuring more typical character types and narrative arcs that expanded beyond Ballard’s focus on cutting edge and/or imaginary artforms.
After some teething problems and initially poor ratings, the series attracted a dedicated and growing audience, especially when changes to the production team led to a significant change of direction. Influenced probably as much by Dark Shadows (1966-71) as by the more recent Twin Peaks (1990-91), El Dorado took a decidedly weird turn.
Key to this was the altered ending of the arc derived from Ballard’s ‘Venus Smiles’ (1957), which concluded with the destruction of the statue the town commissioned from Lorraine Drexel (Kate O’Mara). Three months later, this thread was picked up, as the scrap metal, now being used in construction, starts to vibrate at a peculiar resonance, driving Hamilton (Christopher Cazenove) to visionary madness.
When Jonathan Powell, a staunch supporter of the show, was dismissed as Controller of the BBC1, it was clear the writing was on the wall. Producer Corinne Hollingworth took the unusual step – suggested by Robert Holmes, whom she knew from her Doctor Who days – of mashing up the series with elements of Ballard’s High Rise (1975) so as to kill everyone off before Powell’s replacement, Alan Yentob, could.
El Dorado was not a massively successful contribution to BBC Worldwide’s export drive, but it did achieve a measure of notoriety when Toronto’s CIVIC-TV cable channel broadcast the series with newly filmed hardcore inserts.
This screening will feature: episode one, in which El Dorado’s louche patriarch/architect, played by Peter Wyngarde, dies under mysterious circumstances; episode seventy-eight, for which Cazenove received his BAFTA nomination; and the terrifying series finale, in which a crash-landed astronaut washes ashore in the deserted resort and uncovers the archaic horror lying beneath.
Other films in the retrospective
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979)
Carry On Getting It Up (Gerald Thomas 1977)
The Drowned World (J. Lee Thompson 1974)
The Drowned World: The Director’s Cut (J. Lee Thompson 2015)
Gale Force (Val Guest 1967)
Jodorowsky’s Burning World (Frank Pavich 2013)
Track 12 (Joseph Losey 1967)
Ballard’s Cinema: Notes for a Retrospective – The Drowned World (J. Lee Thompson 1974; director’s cut 2017)
Thwarted in his attempt to produce and star in an adaptation of The Wind from Nowhere (1961), Stanley Baker optioned Ballard’s follow-up novel, The Drowned World (1962), before the ‘Seer of Shepperton’ had even completed a draft.
However, dogged by financial difficulties arising from his South African film projects, Baker was forced to abandon his plans to adapt it.
Some years later, a chance meeting led to Patrick McGoohan – who had co-starred with Baker in Cy Endfield’s gravel-pit noir Hell Drivers (1958) – persuading Lew Grade to finance the film, with Endfield directing. But when The Prisoner (1967-68) flopped, the TV mogul, who had yet to break into film production, dropped McGoohan from the project.
Grade offered Robert Shaw the lead, and replaced Endfield with J. Lee Thompson, who had until recently been attached to direct Gale Force (Guest 1967), as producer Michael Carreras had retitled The Wind from Nowhere.
While Grade got cold feet about branching out into film, Thompson’s enthusiasm for the project never waned. He tried to persuade Gregory Peck to become involved, but when he turned down the lead, Peck suggested it would be more suited to Charlton Heston – who only agreed to briefly reprise the role of Taylor in Beneath the Planet of the Apes (Post 1970) if producer Arthur P. Jacobs took on the now-lapsed option.
APJAC Productions hired Thompson to direct, then replaced him with John Guillermin, who insisted on relocating the story to New York. A week into shooting, Guillermin and Heston got into a now notorious on-set argument. Filming crashed to a halt. Jacobs backed his star over his director. Guillermin was fired, and Heston personally entreated Thompson to return to save the film.
Which, some suggest, was Heston’s intention in provoking Guillermin all along.
Not that things then proceeded smoothly.
The shoot became increasingly tempestuous as Thompson and Heston fought over their different visions for the film. Thompson accepted the change of setting – really he had no choice, since the expensive New York sets had already been constructed – but insisted on revising the end of the script so as to retain Ballard’s conclusion.
Heston, conscious of his titanic persona, and feeling that Thompson owed him, argued for a more heroic ending, The scenes he scripted acknowledge that, while he cannot save the world, his willingness to sacrifice his own life might bring respite and hope to the remaining survivors of the global climate upheaval.
To everyone’s surprise, Jacobs, irked by Heston, this time backed his director – until mediocre preview screenings changed his mind. Thompson begrudgingly shot Heston’s ending, but the film still performed poorly.
After Thompson’s death in 2002, reels containing footage from his original ending were discovered, enabling its reconstruction in accordance with his notes and those of his editor, Marjorie Fowler.
We are thrilled to present not just the original release version but also the UK premier of the newly-restored director’s cut.
Other films in the retrospective
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979)
Carry On Getting It Up (Gerald Thomas 1977)
El Dorado (BBC 1992-93; 156 episodes)
Gale Force (Val Guest 1967)
Jodorowsky’s Burning World (Frank Pavich 2013)
Track 12 (Joseph Losey 1967)
Ballard’s Cinema: Notes for a Retrospective – Carry On Getting It Up (Gerald Thomas 1977)
Following the disastrous performance of Carry on England (Thomas 1976), pulled from cinemas after just three days, producer Peter Rogers decided the long-running series of tepid sex comedies needed a change of direction if it was to survive.
For the 29th instalment, he turned to Jack Trevor Story, then enjoying all the notoriety a weekly Guardian column about his disastrous domestic and romantic entanglements could bring.
An occasional and peripheral figure in the British science fiction New Wave, Story rapidly produced a screenplay parodying Ballard’s High Rise (1975). Despite the scepticism of director Gerald Thomas, Rogers took the plunge, in the hope that they could cash in on the publicity for Nicolas Roeg’s official adaptation, then in production.
Kenneth Williams, in his 25th Carry On, is the only series regular to appear, albeit in little more than an extended cameo. He plays Queen, an effeminate architect presiding over a newly erected but already crumbling apartment building, while struggling to finance further ‘erections’. Elke Sommer, in her second Carry On, plays his perpetually aroused but sexually frustrated wife.
Rogers and Thomas turned to a pair of up-and-coming sex comedy stars for their leading men. Martin Shaw, so effective in LWT’s late-sixties Doctor in the House series, was ideal as the dishy doctor Prang, while Lewis Collins, briefly glimpsed in Norman Cohen’s Confessions of a Driving Instructor (1976), proved his perfect foil as the thuggish, proletarian Nobby. The two actors, however, soon fell out.
Suzanne Danielle, in a role reputedly intended for Mary Millington, plays the unnamed air hostess displaced from Prang’s bed when his sister – Judy Geeson in her second Carry On – appears. Other familiar faces in minor roles and an extended, if utterly innocuous, orgy scene, include Yute Stensgaard, Valerie Leon, Vicki Michelle, Carol Drinkwater and Koo Stark.
Carry On Getting It Up broke even in just one week, which was as long as it lasted in British cinemas before being withdrawn in the face of legal action – but not from the uncredited, and unpaid, Ballard.
Rather, Ernő Goldfinger, apparently unaware that Ballard’s Royal was partly based on him, took umbrage at being depicted as a poor architect and worse heterosexual.
Deciding not to risk a court case, Rogers suppressed the film, and immediately began work on Carry on Emmannuelle, with Kenneth Williams, a handful of series regulars and, in her first named role, Suzanne Danielle.
What – if anything – Ballard made of Carry On Getting It Up remains a mystery. We have been unable to trace any mention of it by him. We are, however, delighted to bring it back to the big screen for the first time since Morph debuted on the telly and Star Wars was a hit.
Other films in the retrospective
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979)
The Drowned World (J. Lee Thompson 1974)
The Drowned World: The Director’s Cut (J. Lee Thompson 2015)
El Dorado (BBC 1992-93; 156 episodes)
Gale Force (Val Guest 1967)
Jodorowsky’s Burning World (Frank Pavich 2013)
Track 12 (Joseph Losey 1967)
Ballard’s Cinema: Notes for a Retrospective – Apocalypse Now (Coppola 1979)
In January 1977, some nine months into a disastrous shoot, Francis Ford Coppola hired Ballard to script-doctor a key sequence and to help fashion the satisfactory dénouement that had thus far eluded John Milius, George Lucas and Coppola himself. Ensconced in the Philippines, Ballard eventually declared the de Marias rubber plantation sequence beyond salvaging. He was delighted when problems with the sound recording meant it was cut from the film, and in 2001 declined an invitation to see it restored at the Cannes premier of Apocalypse Now Redux.
Ballard was the first to suggest that the film should end with Willard (Harvey Keitel) not joining but killing Kurtz (Marlon Brando).
However, Coppola rejected Ballard’s suggestion that Willard then press on further up-river, deeper into a jungle that, under prolonged chemical bombardment, has begun to mutate into something pellucid with which he seems to merge.
Other films in the retrospective
Carry On Getting It Up (Gerald Thomas 1977)
The Drowned World (J. Lee Thompson 1974)
The Drowned World: The Director’s Cut (J. Lee Thompson 2015)
El Dorado (BBC 1992-93; 156 episodes)
Gale Force (Val Guest 1967)
Jodorowsky’s Burning World (Frank Pavich 2013)
Track 12 (Joseph Losey 1967)
The City in Fiction and Film, week 17: Ballard’s High-Rise, chapters 10-19
Last week, we spent some time discussing the layers of observation, performance and display going on in Le couple témoin, as the protagonists are monitored by psychosociological experimenters, watch by television audiences and reported on in current affairs shows. This built on the idea of media – and television in particular – being repeatedly connected to alienation in mid-twentieth-century culture. In All That Heaven Allows, the widow Cary is offered television as a replacement for social life and romance. In Fahrenheit 451, we noted was the role of television in alienating Montag not only from his wife (a microcosm of Bradbury’s broader point about the (anti)social role of television) but also from himself when he watches the coverage of the Mechanical Hound pursuing him:
He watched the scene, fascinated, not wanting to move. It seemed so remote and no part of him; it was a play apart and separate, wondrous to watch, not without its strange pleasure. … If he wished, he could linger here, in comfort, and follow the entire hunt on through its swift phases, down alleys across streets, over empty running avenues, crossing lots and playgrounds, with pauses here and there for the necessary commercials … and so on finally to this house with Faber and himself seated, drinking … Then, if he wished, Montag might rise, walk to the window, keep one eye on the TV screen, open the window, lean out, look back, and see himself dramatized described, made over, standing there, limned in the bright small television screen from outside, a drama to be watched objectively, knowing that in other parlours he was large as life, in full colour, dimensionally perfect! And if he kept his eyes peeled quickly he would see himself, an instant before oblivion, being punctured for the benefit of how many civilian parlour-sitters who had been wakened from sleep a few minutes ago by the frantic sirening of their living room walls to come watch the big game, the hunt, the one-man carnival.
Would he have time for a speech? As the Hound seized him, in view of ten or twenty or thirty million people, mightn’t he sum up his entire life in the last week in one single phrase or a word that would stay with them long after the Hound had turned, clenching him in the metal-plier jaws, and trotted off into darkness, while the camera remained stationary, watching the creature dwindle in the distance – a splendid fade-out!
…
With an effort, Montag reminded himself again that this was no fictional episode to be watched on his run to the river; it was in actuality his own chess-game he was witnessing, move by move. (172-4, 177)
This dissociation continues even when Montag has escaped: the hunt continues; the Hound tracks down someone else in Montag’s place, cameras carefully shooting it all so as to maintain the deception of the rogue fireman’s capture. It is as if a second Montag has detached from the first. He witnesses his fate as if he has been given access to an alternate world in which he did not make the river crossing.
Television and associated media play a role in High-Rise, too.
Like Montag, Laing experiences moments of dissociation. When the jeweller from the 40th floor takes his fatal plunge (suicide? murder? accident?), Laing is among those who crowd onto the balcony of a neighbouring apartment:
Pushed along the railing, Laing saw his own empty balcony fifteen feet away. In an absurd moment of panic, he wondered if he himself was the victim. (41)
In the first half of the novel we learn about Wilder’s plan to make a documentary about the building and the breakdown of society within it – which his wife, Helen, who seems fully aware of Ballard’s own imagery, shrugs off as just another prison documentary, like the one he has been film in his day job. By the mid-point of the novel, everyone it seems is filming their own acts of violence – ‘Every time someone gets beaten up about ten cameras are shooting away’ (90) – and showing their rushes to each other in the building’s move theatre.
Paul Crosland, the head of Laing’s clan, is also a television news anchor, and he continues to go into the studios to read the news, cataloguing disasters in calm and reassuring tones, never mentioning the similar catastrophe ripping through the building where he lives (96) – a departure from the teleprompter for which Laing continues to hope even as the novel draws to a close (151). When Crosland returns home, it is to stoke confrontations with other clans, emitting a blind and furious anger even though he ‘often … had no idea what he was arguing about’ (97). In those moments, unprotected by his makeup, Crosland’s outrage appears to Laing like that of ‘an announcer tricked for the first time into reading an item of bad news about himself’ (97). Such a dissolution of the distinction between public and private selves, between civilised and brutish behaviour, is linked to and articulated in relation to the electronic media that surround us in the city (just as the inhabitants of Alphaville in some way seem to live inside the Alpha 60 computer, which seems to be so thoroughly extended and distributed through the city as to be coterminous with it).
Even more mediatised is the drunken Eleanor Powell: ‘After a few cocktails she was hyper-animated, and flicked on and off like a confused TV monitor revealing glimpses of extraordinary programmes which Laing could only understand when he was drunk himself’ (96).
Soon, Laing can only watch the television with the sound turned down,
not out of boredom with these documentaries and situation comedies, but because they were meaningless. Even the commercial, with their concern for the realities of everyday life, were transmissions from another planet. Squatting among the plastic garbage-sacks, his furniture piled up behind him, Laing studied these lavish reconstructions of housewives cleaning their immaculate kitchens, deodorants spraying well-groomed armpits. Together they formed the elements of a mysterious domestic universe. (106-7)
When Wilder once more begins his ascent of the building, taking his cine-camera everywhere with him like some kind of protective fetish, he invites those he meets to take part in the television documentary he is making (or deluding himself he is making). On the lower-levels, people are eager to participate, voicing their many complaints, but the higher up he gets the more reluctant his potential interviewees become. Many of them are the kind of middle-class technocrats for whom being on television is nothing new, having previously appeared ‘as professional experts on various current-affairs programmes’ (115). Furthermore, ‘“Television is for watching, Wilder,” one of the women told him firmly, “not for appearing on.”’ (115). It is a curious kind of restraint amid all the chaos of the building, yet some proprieties, it seems, must be maintained. Soon, Wilder’s resolve to make the documentary begins to fade. Perhaps it is because, in some way, he has seen it all before – on television:
The decline of the apartment building reminded him of a slow-motion newsreel of a town in the Andes being carried down the mountain slopes to its death, the inhabitants still hanging out their washing in the disintegrating gardens, cooking in their kitchens as the walls were pulverized around them. (120)
On the top floor, Royal and his entourage dress formally for dinner at a pristine dining table, but even there the ‘theatricality of this contrived setting’ is obvious, ‘like a badly rehearsed and under-financed television commercial for a high-life product’ (132).
It is not just television, though.
The true light of the high-rise was the metallic flash of the polaroid camera, that intermittent radiation which recorded a moment of hoped-for violence for some later voyeuristic pleasure. What depraved species of electric flora would spring to life form the garbage-strewn carpets of the corridors in response to this new source of light? The floors were littered with the blackened negative strips, flakes falling from this internal sun. … Laing’s feet crackled among the polaroid negatives scattered about the corridor floor, each recording a long-forgotten act of violence. (109, 150)
The flash of the Polaroid cameras is picked up on by the flickering lights, recalling the flicker of the movie projector and of analogue televisions:
the lights began to flicker continuously like a fibrillating heart. … a broken mirror lay on the bed, the pieces flickering like the fragments of another world trying unsuccessfully to reconstitute itself. … [Steele] beckoned Laing forward into the stuttering light. … The lights continued to flicker with the harsh over-reality of an atrocity newsreel. … the lights flickered from the doorways of ransacked apartments, form overturned lamps lying on the floor and television screens brought back to a last intermittent life. … In an empty bedroom a cine-projector screened the last feet of a pornographic film on to the wall facing the bed. (110-11)
Wilder projects footage of himself ‘upon the walls and ceiling’ of the elevator lobby, watching the images ‘as if about to leap on to the backs of his own shadows and ride them like a troupe of beasts up the flues of the building’, while in Talbot’s apartment the ‘lurid caricatures’ of homophobic graffiti sprayed ‘on the walls glimmered in the torch-light like the priapic figures drawn by cave-dwellers’ (108). Some floors above, the ‘even light’ in Royal’s penthouse is ‘as dead as a time exposure in a police photography recording a crime’ (138).
The building is media-saturated. In the darkness, nothing remains hidden. Artificial light exposes it all. (Just as the audiotapes made by Pangbourne (83, 140), the gynecologist who never touches his patients, and by Wilder (129-30), unleash things otherwise hidden.)
The novel self-reflexively – but not unambiguously – attributes the breakdown of society in the building to the post-Freudian subjectivities produced by a culture of affluence, commodities and consumerism. Talbot notes that they are not witnessing a return to some ‘happy primitivism’ or ‘the noble savage’; rather, the residents, ‘outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet-training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection’, seem to ‘resent never having had a chance to become perverse’ (109).
There is certainly plentiful evidence of regression to infantile psychosexual behaviour in the novel.
Laing takes his older sister – who reminds him of his mother and used to look after him as a child – as a lover; although she has inherited something of their mother’s ‘shrewish manner’, which he dislikes, he nonetheless finds this echo reassuring (98-9). This breaking of the incest taboo has two purposes.
First, it recalls anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s argument that the cultural ban on incest is intended to promote social stability by favouring exogamy (sex/ marriage outside the group) over endogamy (sex/marriage within the group) and thus expanding the network of mutually dependent interrelationships. Ballard perhaps suggests, then, that with the alienation, isolation and disconnectedness of contemporary urban life, exogamy – engaging with others – might seem to become the greater threat; certainly exogamy is ill-suited to the inward-looking inhabitants of the building.
Second, the incest taboo returns us to the Freudianism that the novel denies but also has in spades. In the Oedipal complex, incestuous desire (the male infant for the mother, the female infant for the father) is the norm, and it must be defeated. The novel repeatedly plays on this. When Royal experiments with touching the passive Helen Wilder ‘she reacted, not by pushing his hand away, but by moving it to her waist and lightly holding it there as she would the straying hands of her children’ (135).
Wilder’s entire trajectory ends up being one of infantile regression. He feels the need to break free from his wife because by doing so ‘he would break away from the whole system of juvenile restraints he had been trying to shake off since his adolescence’ (118). She watches him like a mother ‘as he hunted in her purse for money … amused by her husband’s dependence on the fictions of this elaborate toy [the phallic camera] he takes everywhere with him’ (119). He likes the dark because in it he can ‘deliberately play on all [his] repressed instincts’ (120). He welcomes the building’s ‘forced conscription of the deviant strains of his character’ and the fact that ‘this free and degenerate behaviour became easier the higher he moved up the building’ (120). Mrs Hillman, in whose apartment Wilder stays, spends ‘all her time worrying about him, like an over-anxious mother fretting about a wayward child’ (124), but ‘No more ill-suited couple, Wilder decided, could have been cast to play mock-mother and mock-son’ (125). This mock-relationship leaves room for the possibility of a sexual relationship of the kind the incest taboo is intended to prevent: over the course of the evening spends with the Hillmans, Wilder ‘became more and more oafish …, deliberately coarsening himself like a delinquent youth fooling about with a besotted headmistress’ (126). (He also concocts a lie about Talbot ‘molesting a child in a swimming-pool changing room’, and the fact that everyone knows the accusation to be untrue somehow reinforces it (127) – so some taboos remain to be manipulated by the bullying Wilder.)
Having left the Hillmans behind him, Wilder is soon dominating another woman, who is anxious to avoid the exogamy this encounter involves:
She welcomed him as she would any marauding hunter. First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. (160)
Although this is described as ‘the synopsis of the ideal marriage’ (160), it is so only inasmuch as it recapitulates the complex feelings of interdependence and aggression as the mother-infant dyad is ruptured and the Oedipal struggle commences.
Ultimately, breaking the building’s taboo on using guns, Wilder kills Royal, the building’s patriarch, and finds himself on the roof surrounded by other – actual – children and the women who care for them. He immediately becomes completely infantile. Hoping to join the children, he wanders out towards the women:
In their bloodied hands they carried knives with narrow blades. Shy but happy now, Wilder tottered across the roof to meet his new mothers. (168)
Laing’s fate is not so clear-cut. The novel ends with him holed up in his apartment with Alice, his sister-lover-mother, and Eleanor Powell, who seems to be merging with her. He addresses them in the childish voice he used as a trainee doctor when talking to ‘the duller of his child patients’ (171), and believing himself to be in control he forages food and waits on them. He indulges them when they treat ‘him like two governesses in a rich man’s ménage, teasing a wayward and introspective child’ (172) – presumably he is both the rich man and the child – and sometimes he acts as if they really are in charge (this is so convincing that once a raiding party of women left him alone, assuming he was the prisoner of the two women). Laing likes the arrangements – even if he deludes himself as to its actual nature – because it represents ‘an intimate family circle, the first he had know since childhood’ (172).
We also looked at three passages to chart Laing’s progress (regress) – when he attempts to leave the building but turns back (101-4), the start of chapter seven when the building seems to become timeless and motionless (145-7), and when he find Eleanor feeding her cat with her own blood (151-3) – and asked basically the same questions of each: what imagery and ideas does Ballard use to describe the building and its residents? how does the world inside differ from the world outside? why does Laing find it impossible to leave and why in each subsequent passage does he seem happier despite (because of?) the further deterioration of his environment?
This notion of deterioration is important. Ballard’s novel is very specifically about that moment in the early 1970s, when decrying post-war Corbusier-spawned high-rise developments went from being merely a fashionable posture to received wisdom. Typically, what was conveniently forgotten – often for ideological reasons – was that for many people moving from slums to the new developments was headily utopian. Many people finally had enough bedrooms that they did not need to share, indoor plumbing, etc. While Aneurin Bevan’s brick-built housing was intended to last, many of the the prefabricated developments only had intended lives of a few decades, and soon began to deteriorate, not least because councils often failed properly to fund maintenance to post-war housing projects. That this was the fault of government did not get in the way of the residents themselves being being blamed for the disrepair into which the untended buildings inevitably fell. High-Rise was written when working class residents were being demonised as intoxicated, glue-sniffing, violent, criminal – as creatures incapable of not fouling their own nests. It was written when the extent of the corruption behind many housing schemes was being uncovered (as in the John Poulson case, which reached all the way up to Home Secretary Reginald Maudling – Peter Flannery’s Our Friends in the North (1996) dramatises a version of these events). Whether or not Ballard bought into this potent myth, nothing could have seemed more natural than to retell it but with a cast of middle class professionals, with yuppies avant la lettre.
In closing, we had a brief discussion about Taxi Driver (Scorsese 1976), focusing particularly on the ways in which it pretty much reduces New York to a demonised and perilous Times Square, bathed in a red light to make it infernal. This, too, fits in with a broader discourse, one that would lead to the purging of such urban spaces, ridding them of the diverse ethnic and sexual working class cultures that inhabited them in favour of redevelopment. The value of land and property on Manhattan was too high, and full of potential to become even higher, to be left to such people. There was money, and lots of it, to be made by criminalising them, driving them out, displacing them, and by thus reversing white-flight, by gentrification, by tourist-friendly Disneyfication.
We will pick up on this next week when we look at some blaxploitation and some LA Rebellion films as part of the background for thinking about Boyz N the Hood (Singleton 1991).
Recommended critical reading
AlSayyas, Nezar. Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real. London: Routledge, 2006. See chapter 7 “The Modernity of the Sophisticate and the Misfit: The City through Different Eyes.”
Baxter, Jeanette. J.G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: Continuum, 2009.
Colombino, Laura. “The House as SKIN: J. G. Ballard, Existentialism and Archigram’s Mini-Environments.” European Journal of English Studies 16.1 (2012): 21–31.
Delville, Michel. J.G. Ballard. Plymouth: Northcote, 1998.
Duff, Kim. Contemporary British Literature and Urban Space: After Thatcher. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 52–86
Gasiorek, Andrzej. J.G. Ballard. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
Grindrod, John. Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain. London: Old Street, 2013.
Groes, Sebastian. The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011. 67–93
Hansley, Lynsley. Estates: An Intimate History. London: Granta, 2008.
Matthews, Graham. “Consumerism’s Endgame: Violence and Community in J.G. Ballard’s Late Fiction.” Journal of Modern Literature 36.2 (2013): 122–39.
Mennel, Barbara. Cities and Cinema. London: Routledge, 2008. See chapter 8. “The City as Queer Playground.”
Siegel, Allen. “After the Sixties: Changing Paradigms in the Representation of Urban Space.” Screening the City. Ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice. London: Verso, 2003. 137–159.
Shiel, Mark. “A Nostalgia for Modernity: New York, Los Angeles, and American Cinema in the 1970s.” Screening the City. Ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice. London: Verso, 2003. 160 – 179.
Recommended reading
High-Rise is part of a thematic trilogy, including Ballard’s most challenging novel, Crash (1973), and Concrete Island (1974). Ballard’s ‘late fiction’ returns to similar material but relocated to gated suburban communities in Running Wild (1988), Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006).
1970s British novels of urban decay include Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Zoe Fairbairns’s Benefits (1979).
Recommended viewing
Ben Wheatley’s High Rise (2015) adapts Ballard’s novel.
Modern city living deranges or makes miserable in Repulsion (Polanski 1965), Shivers (Cronenberg 1975), Crash (Cronenberg 1996) and Happiness (Solondz 1998).
Films about the decay of urban centres include Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger 1969), Clockwork Orange (Kubrick 1971) and Dog Day Afternoon (Lumet 1975).
Mark Bould 