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The upwardly mobile professionals who have moved into this new high-rise are drawn to it because of the detachment and anonymity it offers. It's a world separate from exterior social reality. Freed from the struggle for food and shelter, unconstrained by wider social obligations or inherited moral frameworks, people such as these in modern societies, says Ballard, are able to explore their own desires and obsessions to an unprecedented degree. With his image of these residents inside the carefully designed hi-tech high-rise regressing into a savage infantilism, he highlights two seemingly contradictory trends that are such defining features of today's consumer capitalism: on the one hand increasing order, rational expediency, homogeneity, control; and on the other, the thirst for entertainment and excitement, pornographic stimulation, excessive consumption, mediatized violence, spectacle, the fantastical appearance of unlimited choice and possibility for the primary, desiring self. It's a central theme in Ballard's investigation into the psychic confusion of the modern world. The interplay that occurs between violence and boredom, madness and passivity, sensation and blandness; locating these dramas in the shopping mall atriums, airports, business parks, and apartment blocks that form the familiar backdrop of our lives.Reading some of Ben Wheatley's recent interviews and from pictures that appeared online from the set, it's clear his film version of High-Rise is placed firmly, and with some relish, in the mid-1970s of the book's original publication. One hopes the sideburns and Ford Cortinas won't act as a nostalgic buffer, softening the power of the book's unsettling vision. The great writer of the present and the near-future would seem potentially ill-served by a retro period piece. But questions of adaptation aside—and Wheatley is a talented filmmaker who will surely serve up something that more than justifies the price of a ticket—a new stimulation of interest in Ballard is to be welcomed. Too often classified as a bleak dystopian, his dark fables are driven by a powerful moral instinct and a passionate urge to engage with the world as it is. His role, he would say cheerfully and without any shred of sanctimony, was to be the man standing at the roadside with a sign reading, "Dangerous bends ahead. Slow down." In the vagueness of life as it passes, it is very difficult to accurately gauge how personal and societal norms are shifting. We could do worse at this time of "inner migration," as he called it, the "opting out of reality" made available to us by rapidly evolving technologies that push us ever deeper into our own heads, than to stop and take a look at what Ballard had to say.It won't change the world, but the rich feast of his imagination may offer nourishment, and even some guidance, for the road ahead.*"Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings."ON MOTHERBOARD: These Could Be The First Things Aliens Hear from Earth