Fear Is in the Detail

摘要

The five tower blocks in Ben Wheatley's recent film adaptation of J. G. Ballard's 1975 novel High-Rise have a profile that speaks of imminent threat: they start to tip over at their peak, like a wave in the moments before it breaks and drops. Though these towers never actually fall, everything they contain does-social order, morality, work ethic, the rule of day and night, the rule of law. The towers are also structures from which things frequently fall-bottles of cheap sparkling wine, eggs, ice cream, kitchen furniture, bodies. We learn of this initially through the eyes and ears of divorcee Dr. Laing, a detached narrator apparently typical of the dystopian genre. But his detachment is scientific. Ballard, who read widely in contemporary science, was well aware of the seminal work of ethnologist John B. Calhoun conducted some years earlier on overpopulation in rats. We find in Laing echoes of Calhoun's disturbingly passive observation of a descent into social pathology. "Laing leaned against the parapet, for the first time conscious of the immense distance to the ground below... At the same time he was aware that at any moment a meaningless act of violence might occur." Nothing is detached about Laing's acquaintance from the lower floors, Wilder, who "was constantly aware of the immense weight of concrete stacked above him, and the sense that his body was the focus of the lines of force running through the building, almost as if Anthony Royal [the architect] had deliberately designed his body to be held within their grip."