Ugh. Or you could look up the word (which most here probably know already) and stick to easily found summaries and discussions of OoF rather than subject yourself to reading a Niven & Pournelle novel (or, again thinking of most readers on here, forcing yourself through it again).
(To be clear, early hard-ish space opera Known Space Niven is fun, and a good smattering of that stuff is a great crash course in that era of that type of SF. After about Ringworld or its first sequel or so, though… Pournelle fucking ruined him as far as I’m concerned.)
An interesting series of posts inspired by High-Rise which discuss it and related subjects from a number of interesting angles: part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six, part seven. Part one discusses the structure and themes of the film, part two discusses the thematic differences between the film and the book, part three compares it to Doctor Who’s Paradise Towers, part four discusses the influence of Le Corbusier, part five compares the book to Ballard’s Crash, part six compares the film to Wheatley’s A Field in England, and part seven draws some connections to the film “The Witch”.
I think we covered this ground in the Starship Troopers discussion. I say yes, if you don’t like the author’s themes in a work, then why produce it at all? Write an original script, changing the work seems merely exploitative of it’s notoriety.
HIGH RISE wasn’t perfect, but I think it’s somewhat better than it got credit for. I think an important thing to bear in mind is that it’s Wheatley’s HIGH RISE and not Ballard’s. Both artists are coming at the material from different generations, and very different political outlooks. Ballard was writing HIGH RISE in a period which was still basically post-war boom times. He believed that more and more people would be absorbed into the middle-classes, and with this increased affluence and technological development would come and more opportunities for self-exploration. His attitude towards all this was extremely ambivalent - he often spoke in interviews (seemingly sincerely, although it’s difficult to tell) about the possible benefits of exploring “a benign psychopathology.” With this in mind, it isn’t clear that he’s presenting the high rise apocalypse in the novel as a necessarily bad thing - it can be seen as a welcome rupturing of the tedium and mendacity of middle class life, and a kind of psychological initiation for the book’s protagonist (which the apocalypse always basically was in his earlier novels.) Wheatley, on the other hand, grew up in Thatcherite Britain, in the hang-over of the post-war party. If you watch the film closely, I think it can be seen as a critique of Ballard’s generation - one of its big underlying themes is bad parenting. Wheatley’s thesis in HIGH RISE seems to be that the hedonism and self-absorption of the 70s generation basically created a ripe environment for the rise of the neo-liberals, and Thatcher’s Britain where, as in the high rise, there is no such thing as society. (I wrote a primer for HIGH RISE, looking at it in relation to Le Corbusier, Freud, and Cronenberg’s SHIVERS here and here.)
Or as mark kermode put it - a film with a vision of the past, as seen from the present, looking at the future. Or something like that.
[quote=“Trisaneldritch, post:25, topic:100075”]
I think an important thing to bear in mind is that it’s Wheatley’s HIGH RISE and not Ballard’s.[/quote]
It’s as much amy jump’s high-rise as it is wheatley’s and sadly her name isn’t mentioned here or in the review when she did such an extraordinary job adapting it.
There’s also a massive penis at one of the higher up’s orgy parties so there’s that. Something for everyone!
I don’t Noah why more people don’t study in Arcology in college. It always seems much more interesting to me than fields like Sociology and Psychology, plus you get to go sailing and work with animals.
If they ever think about doing an NC-17 version of this, they should bypass the Ballard book entirely and go straight to ‘The World Inside’, by Robert Silverberg.
If you haven’t already, I recommend reading the book first. The narration from each character’s perspective gives you a lot more insight into their extreme behaviors than you get from the film.
Seems to me that Ballard was trying to get at the idea that modern society makes up selfish and violent, and the more you buy into the underlying ideology, the more self and violent you can be prone to be.
Thanks, but I just watched it last night, so I might reverse that.
Very well made, often awesome acting, fascinating setups and visuals at many points. But my feelings and thoughts are mixed. I do appreciate the dismayed allegorical warning about Western society (if that’s what it is - - maybe it’s meant to be specific to Thatcher’s England, but then good luck funding that - - and btw, the snippet of Thatcher at the end rang false for me, tacked on). But, maybe it’s a matter of taste, as this kind of pomo coldness is already old for me. Silly me, I still want to care about at least one character, and even the doc and the pregnant woman and the bespectacled kid didn’t do that for me. And many of the tropes seem old too, Baudrillard’s simulacrum and such. Still, if this movie helps some see how callous and self- serving a rigid class system can make us, that seems like a good thing. In sum, a lot like how I felt about Crash, also without having read the biook.
Ah, thanks. That’s pretty much what the movie seems to be saying.
I am glad I watched it. Much of its spectacle has stuck with me, and I’m glad someone is still starving so mightily to convey that message. It does call for a strong stomach.
I think that Ballard was very much obsessed with the spectacle and what it’s done to human relationships. When everything is commodified, everything, people included, becomes a cheap spectacle that can easily be thrown away, and I think he spent his work trying to explicate this entire point.
Its been a little while since I read it and watched the film. What I remember was that the movie felt kind of opaque. It’s harder to understand the characters’ motivations and the social commentary isn’t as sharp. You know how it is—a theme that the author expounds upon at length is reduced to a single line of dialog for the sake of the film. If you liked the film, you’ll like the book, though the book is darker.
