High-Rise
More JG Ballard weirdness, but this is much more “political” than Crash. It’s almost too on the nose. I’m sure the book doesn’t end like that, or maybe it does…
A coroner moves into a new high rise after his sister died. He wants a fresh start, a new life. After sunbathing naked, he quickly mingles with the neighbours, and the allegory is apparent.
The lower levels are packed with middle class louts, people with a lot of kids, a lot of debt, but no consciousness their standing is just lower, they are intrinsically less valuable than the upper classes. They can have their big Che Guevara posters, mock the TV people and the actresses all they want, as long as they stay in their lane.
The dividing line between the lower classes (where the building is a regular apartment block) and the upper classes (where the apartments are staggered for sunshine at the expense of privacy for the lower levels) is our protagonist. He is a specialised professional, someone with means but still dependent on a salary, the upper middle class as they say.
On his level there are several other maladjusted people, like the guy that married above his condition and spends his time hall monitoring other people while his wife fucks other men. There is another important character, the single woman with seemingly no job or skills, “raising” a kid through nannies and babysitters, raising suspicion of who is the kid’s father bankrolling her.
On the rarefied upper levels, there are several twits, each more old fashioned as the other. The funniest is the old aristocrat, but there’s also the finance dude, the TV anchor, the popular actress, and of course, the intermediary that deals with the lower classes on behalf of the Architect. Said Architect is the classic ideas man that doesn’t personally touch any non-abstract concept.
The parties on the building are very hardcore, even kids’ birthday parties, mostly because the parents are permanently chain smoking and drinking inhuman amounts of wine and spirits, all the freaking time. After constant infrastructure disinvestment, the lower classes are shunned from the pool, even though they pay through the nose anyway. A revolt emerges and it’s Bedlam out there.
Lawlessness takes over the building, trash piles up, but ironically, the social order remains pretty much intact. There are slightly more orgies than before, but to be honest, it’s a mere difference in intensity than in kind.
The lower class louts are manhandled eventually, by bringing about the brunt of the force into particular rabble rousers, and balkanising the different group. Our protagonist is almost defenestrated, but everyone recognises his clinical detachment and consciousness of his place make him a survivor, perfectly adaptable to life under any regime.
There’s a parallel subplot with our protagonist and some upper class twit he was teaching. Since he was a complete boob, he decided to take him down a peg by pretending he was dying of brain cancer, to see if he would get pulled back to Earth. Instead, the guy goes on a bender and kill himself, which leads our protagonist to despair and mindless bricolage fury.
Only fucking women can restore his sanity, and he does it admirably (by their own admission). It’s not very sexy: the first one keeps reminding him of his dead sister and they get interrupted by her kid; the second one is nine months pregnant.
The final speech by the architect about the problem with the plan was too much commingling of classes is pretty repellent (par for the course, for a Royal), but the lower class dude hits our protagonist with some truth bombs too. This is no leftist critique of capitalism, that’s for sure.
This film is very much plot driven, so it helps to have a gigantic cast of talent doing what they do best. Dozens of UK actors, from bit parts like the landlady from Spaced, Reece Shearsmith, or Jill Valentine, to larger roles like James Purefoy as aristo, Keeley Hawes as even more aristo, and Sienna Miller as the mysterious single mum upstairs.
The visuals are intense, and the dialogue is very sharp and sarcastic. Memorable scenes with quotes for the ages, like when the actress strolls in riding a white steed and proclaims, to general cheers:
OK, who in here wants to fuck me up the arse?
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.