High-Rise

“It’s almost as if these aren’t the people who really live here.”

Helen Wilder says this to Laing after he rescues her from a hostile 17th-floor accountant berating her for letting her children loose. This enigmatic line refers to the transformation underway: The supposedly civil bourgeois residents begin showing their latent aggression. The high-rise elicits this hidden aggression with its hostile, hierarchical design.

“Sadly, they had little chance of success, precisely because their opponents were people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, 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.”

Wilder is pessimistic about the prospects for a lower-floor rebellion. Despite the socioeconomic homogeneity of the residents, the building nonetheless becomes stratified according to the classic three economic classes. The middle-class core of the building—comprised by the 11th through the 34th floors—is home to people like the Steeles who, like a new species of human, thrive amid hostile technological environments. These bourgeois residents have a better chance of defending the status quo of the high-rise than the lower-floor residents do of overthrowing it.

“The high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly ‘free’ psychopathology.”

This reference to the psychiatrist R. D. Laing (on whom the Laing of High-Rise is based) shows the influence of R. D. Laing’s so-called antipsychiatry theories on J. G. Ballard. Laing believed that psychiatry overpathologized mental illness and that, with the right supervision, mental illness could be an avenue toward freedom in a hostile world. The outsize psychological impact the high-rise has on the residents is informed by Laing’s theory that environment—not biological or social factors—was the primary cause of mental illness.

“Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator. For the first time since we were three years old what we do makes absolutely no difference.”

Eleanor Powell identifies the absurdity that defines the residents’ childish violence. The violence is more a product of acting irresponsibly than it is about being malicious. Within the isolating, meaningless structure of the high-rise, togetherness can only be based on something absurd—assaulting an empty elevator.

“Or was there some other impulse at work—a need to shut away, most of all from oneself, any realization of what was actually happening in the high-rise, so that events there could follow their own logic and get even more out of hand?”

The residents pretend as though they don’t encourage the disintegration of the high-rise, because this process is about indulging repressed impulses. Any sort of self-awareness would halt this process. Wilder’s documentary would introduce a type of self-awareness, a removed, analytical perspective that would paralyze residents like Laing in self-consciousness.

“Voices rose in anger above the singing of the cash registers. Meanwhile, as these scuffles took place, a line of women customers sat under the driers in the hairdressing salon, calmly reading their magazines. The two cashiers on evening duty at the bank impassively counted out their bank-notes.”

The juxtaposition of chaos and calm defines the high-rise. As the building pushes the residents into accepting increasingly chaotic events, they become increasingly adept at maintaining normalcy alongside chaos. The studied nonchalance of the cashiers and women in the salon evokes images of soldiers smoking next to the bodies of their compatriots.

“Royal detested this orthodoxy of the intelligent. Visiting his neighbours’ apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee-pot, by the well-modulated colour schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design. In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape. Royal would have given anything for one vulgar mantelpiece ornament, one less than snow-white lavatory bowl, one hint of hope. Thank God that they were at last breaking out of this fur-lined prison.”

The imagery in this passage expresses the dual nature of high-rise life. The residents see freedom in their impeccably decorated interiors and cleanliness; however, this “orthodoxy of the intelligent” is in fact imprisoning. Like King Midas, their touch imprisons them in a gilded cage, fatally isolating them from the basic necessities of life (because everything Midas touched turned to gold, he died of hunger). The residents’ hunger is of a more existential sort: Their gilded cages isolate them from the visceral pleasure found playing in the dirt.

“Standing on his balcony, Royal listened to the ascending music and laughter as he waited for the two young women to dress. Far below him, a car drove along the access road to the nearby high-rise, its three occupants looking up at the hundreds of crowded balconies. Anyone seeing this ship of lights would take for granted that the two thousand people on board lived together in a state of corporate euphoria.”

The first stage of partying resembles more a raucous office party than something more sinister; the phrase “corporate euphoria” connotes that such people even party in a professional way. The imagery of this passage establishes the insular nature of the building: Its normal outward appearance—the ship of lights, the laughter, and music—gives a false sense of what’s inside. This illusion allows the residents to pursue their repressed impulses without fear that an outsider will burst their bubble.

“‘A low crime-rate, doctor,’ she told him amiably, ‘is a sure sign of social deprivation.’”

This unofficial slogan of the high-rise expresses the belief underpinning its disintegration: There’s more pleasure in transgression than there is in good behavior. Moreover, Eleanor suggests that this collective transgression and violence becomes a social glue that rescues the residents from the isolation imposed by the high-rise’s cell-like structure.

“The damp concrete, like the surface of an enormous mould, curved away on all sides, smooth and bland, but in some way as menacing as the contours of some deep reductive psychosis. The absence of any kind of rigid rectilinear structure summed up for Laing all the hazards of the world beyond the high-rise.”

The last time Laing tries to leave the high-rise, he finds himself drawn to the empty basin of the development’s artificial lake. The psychogeography of the lake contrasts with that of the high-rise: The curving, ovular lines of the basin connote the wild nature of the unconscious. In contrast, the rectilinear high-rise connotes civilization, order, and by extension consciousness. This rigidity gives Laing a structure against which to rebel—he finds freedom in constraint.

“They were dressed in miniature paratroopers’ camouflage suits and tin helmets—the wrong outfit, Wilder reflected, in the light of what had been taking place in the high-rise. The correct combat costume was stockbroker’s pin-stripe, briefcase and homburg.”

Wilder finds his sons playing soldier in his dilapidated apartment. As Laing notes in another passage, the high-rise is designed for war; however, as Wilder remarks, this war is suburban, not military. In order to remain authentic, the high-rise professionals need to show up to battle dressed in their work outfits. Only by marking these costumes with conflict can they exorcize the conformity that imprisons them.

“He was about to break the glass, but the sight of his penis calmed him, a white club hanging in the darkness. He would have liked to dress it in some way, perhaps with a hair-ribbon tied in a floral bow.”

The further Wilder ascends, the more infantile he becomes. His incongruous desire to dress up his penis indicates his increasingly childlike fascination with his genitals, which become a point of pride for him. This fascination reflects the growing phallocentrism of the high-rise’s social structure, a structure that increasingly revolves around male sexual desire.

“The sound of himself speaking, however coarsely, introduced a discordant element. He resented speaking to Charlotte or to anyone else, as if words introduced the wrong set of meanings into everything.”

The disintegration of the high-rise results in a loss of identity and a loss of language. The loss of language coincides with the final regression to an animal, childlike state of mind in which only grunts have meaning. Speaking breaks the spell of this regression just like an outsider suddenly entering the high-rise would. Language is too sophisticated for the unconscious realm the residents make of the high-rise.

“Strangely enough, Royal reflected, they would soon be back where they had begun, each tenant isolated within his own apartment.”

The disintegration of the high-rise comes full circle: Whereas the violence first brought the residents together, the danger now pushes them back into isolation. Nonetheless, a transformation has occurred: The residents no longer hide their territoriality behind a civilized veneer, instead indulging it in its most primal form—defending space for survival.

“Royal was certain that she had not only forgotten the identity of her husband, but of all men, including himself.”

The rampant sexual assault that follows the initial stage of building-wide partying divides the men from the women. As a defense, the women become numb to assault and distance themselves from men. This collective dissociation foreshadows that the women will eventually organize to protect themselves from the feral, violent men.

“Without asking him, Mrs Wilder had laundered his white jacket, washing out the bloodstains which had given him not merely his sense of authority, but his whole unseated role within the high-rise.         Had she done this deliberately, knowing that it would emasculate him?”

Even in servitude Helen Wilder rebels against the man who has made himself her master—Royal. Royal treated the bloodstains on his safari jacket as war paint that secured his status in a building riven with conflict. Helen’s destruction of this war paint ensures Royal’s fall from power, as he’s replaced first by the vicious Pangbourne and then by the women’s commune.

“Standing outside the door, he listened to the distant sounds, almost an electronic parody of a child’s crying. They moved through the apartments at the far end of the floor, metallic and remote, the sounds of the beasts of his private zoo.”

The sound Royal has tried to ignore for weeks is the sound of women speaking Pangbourne’s new language, based on his recordings of infants’ birth cries. This language marks the emergence of a new form of life based on a fusion of technology and biology. Royal, the symbolic zookeeper of the increasingly animalistic high-rise, finds that his animals have finally turned against him.

“The gynaecologist was the man for their hour. No zoo would survive for long with Pangbourne as its keeper, but he would provide a node of violence and cruelty that would keep alive in others the will to survive.”

As the high-rise nears its final matriarchal order, it’s fitting that its final male leader is a gynecologist named Pangbourne. Pangbourne’s short reign of cruelty exorcizes the last of the deviant impulses from the residents, freeing the women to start a new social order based on security, not unfettered indulgence. Such indulgence is inherently unsustainable, as indicated by the many casualties.

“The run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways. Laing pondered this—sometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.”

Laing’s enigmatic statement alludes to the ahistorical timelessness that characterizes high-rise life. The mix of the derelict and the new, the primal and the futuristic creates an environment that is neither past, present, nor future but a hyperreal fusion of the three: a place outside of time. In this self-contained world, symbolized by the isolated location of the high-rise, meaningful narratives play off each other in a never-ending process of recombination.

“He enjoyed watching Steele at work, obsessed with these expressions of mindless violence. Each one brought them a step closer to the ultimate goal of the high-rise, a realm where their most deviant impulses were free at last to exercise themselves in any way they wished. At this point physical violence would cease at last.”

Despite fearing Steele for his macabre crimes, Laing welcomes him for accelerating the disintegration of the high-rise. By enacting some of the most taboo things imaginable—mutilating corpses and staging them in tableaux, Steele exorcizes the last of their collective rebelliousness. With no more taboos, there is no meaning to transgression, allowing the residents to finally escape their reactive rebellion against the rules of their parents and society.

“Laing knew that he was far happier now than ever before, despite all the hazards of his life, the likelihood that he would die at any time from hunger or assault. He was satisfied by his self-reliance, his ability to cope with the tasks of survival—foraging, keeping his wits about him, guarding his two women from any marauder who might want to use them for similar purposes. Above all, he was pleased with his good sense in giving rein to those impulses that involved him with Eleanor and his sister, perversities created by the limitless possibilities of the high-rise.”

Of all the residents, Laing is the one who finds the greatest freedom in the high-rise. Its dangerous, neo-barbaric lifestyle introduces the primary pleasure of survival into his life, making it more meaningful than it was when the building cared for his every need. Moreover, in the high-rise Laing is free to pursue his taboo impulses, leaving him feeling that he has explored more of himself.

“Dimly recognizing this wild old man of the observation roof, Wilder stopped on the stairs. He was unsure whether Royal had come to play with him or to reprimand him. From Royal’s nervous posture, and his destitute appearance, Wilder guessed that he had been hiding somewhere, but not as part of a game.”

When the final Freudian confrontation between Wilder and Royal occurs, it lacks the significance that Wilder anticipated. Royal no longer seems uncannily aware of his symbolic role: Instead, he appears as a frightened old man. While Wilder still plays the part of the child, wondering whether his father is mad at him, the father-son conflict has lost the meaning it formerly had—he barely recognizes Royal. This event, built up in Wilder’s mind as some ultimate confrontation, ends up unfolding in an almost random, inconsequential way.

“Looking over his shoulder, if only to confirm that his escape was blocked, he could see the stately figure of the children’s-story writer seated in the open window of the penthouse like a queen in her pavilion. In a last moment of hope he thought that perhaps she would read him a story.”

In a perverse spin on the Oedipal drama, Wilder is killed by motherly figures after he kills his father figure. The brief mention of the children’s-story writer—the leader of the women’s commune—shows that she has assumed the position of the most powerful person in the building. Caught up in his Oedipal drama, Wilder couldn’t see that the growing group of women wasn’t the motherly presence of his drama but something altogether different. This gives the women the cover to plan and execute their takeover of the building.