The 'rat utopia' experiment behind JG Ballard's High-Rise

As High-Rise opens in British cinemas, we examine how Ballard’s novel reflected contemporary animal research and fears over urban overcrowding

John Calhoun with mice experiment.
John Calhoun’s 1970 experiment on mouse population growth and demise, a continuation of his work on rats Photograph: Wikimedia

Director Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise opened last Friday in cinemas around the country. The timely and already much discussed adaptation of JG Ballard’s 1975 novel traces the mechanical and social collapse of a new forty-storey luxury apartment block on the outskirts of London. The building serves as a microcosm for society, its floors stratified by class with the building’s architect, Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons in the film), at the top. Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), a physiologist who occupies a spartan flat about halfway up, observes the downward spiral with an air of clinical detachment.

Ballard wrote High-Rise at a time when the tabloid press was filled with real-life horror stories about London’s crumbling tower blocks and dystopian science fiction traded in sociopathic delinquency. Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, adapted by Stanley Kubrick in 1971, is one of the earliest and most famous examples of a genre that flourished in the 1970s. One grim episode of the then-popular BBC television series Doomwatch (think an ecological version of The X-Files for 1970s Britain) explores social breakdown, crime, and violence in a “compact urban unit”. “The Human Time Bomb”, which first aired in February 1971, also links concerns about high-density housing to animal behaviour.

Towards the end of the episode, head doomwatcher Dr Spencer Quist (John Paul) muses that chickens living in batteries do not become docile as expected. On the contrary, they become so aggressive that their beaks have to be cut off “to prevent them tearing each other to pieces.” For the episode’s writer, Doctor Who veteran Louis Marks, it was only a short, logical step from aggressive poultry to antisocial people. The episode, soon to be released on DVD for the first time, concludes with Quist calling for a Royal Commission on the “roots of violence in modern society.”

The factory-farmed broiler chicken was, in the early 1970s, as much a novel convenience of modern living as the concrete tower block, and feather pecking and cannibalism were real concerns. But the most influential example of “pathological togetherness” lifted from the animal kingdom was not a bird. It was a rodent and, in particular, the laboratory experiments performed on rats in the 1960s by ethologist John B. Calhoun at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

Calhoun built a “rat city” in which everything a rat could need was provided, except space. The result was a population explosion followed by pathological overcrowding, then extinction. Well before the rats reached the maximum possible density predicted by Calhoun, however, they began to display a range of “deviant” behaviours: mothers neglected their young; dominant males became unusually aggressive; subordinates withdrew psychologically; others became hypersexual; the living cannibalized the dead. Calhoun’s “rat utopia” became a living hell.

Calhoun published the early results of his experiments in 1962 in the now-classic Scientific American article, “Population Density and Social Pathology”. As historians Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams have shown, Calhoun’s rats circulated widely as “scientific evidence” of the dangers of urban overcrowding in human society. His concept of the “behavioural sink” chimed with despairing journalistic reports of “sink estates” and “sink schools” in 1970s Britain.

In the west London suburb of Shepperton, Ballard’s children kept mice, purchased from a local pet shop. As his daughter Fay vividly recalled at “Inner Space”, a recent symposium on Ballard at the British Library, the mice “multiplied quickly and then started to eat each other.” She could “still see the bitten headless torsos and separated heads lying in the sawdust.” The mice were kept in a glass box in the front room where the family watched TV and ate together, so her father would have seen them too. He also would have known about Calhoun’s experiments - gleaned from his subscription to New Scientist or from the bulging package of research papers he received each week from his close friend, the psychologist and computer scientist Chris Evans.

Ballard probably did not watch Doomwatch. He preferred American thrillers and detective serials such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Hawaii Five-O. Nor were Calhoun’s experiments, described in New Scientist in 1973 as among “the most widely quoted since Pavlov’s dogs first heard the dinner bell”, necessarily a direct influence on High-Rise. Tower blocks were in the air and Ballard had plenty of non-fictional human source material to draw on. Nevertheless, the particular resonance of Ballard’s novel with Calhoun’s research is striking. As a leading Cambridge psychiatrist put it in 1978, Ballard’s High-Rise “describes the human equivalent of Calhoun’s rat behavioural sink.”

While agricultural scientists studied chickens and other farm animals for economic reasons, behavioural scientists studied rats and other laboratory animals in order to learn, indirectly, about the human condition. Today it is perhaps worth thinking about Ballard’s High-Rise in relation to not only our love-hate relationship with brutalist architecture, but also the question of how we do in fact manage to live together - not as rats, mice, or battery chickens, but as people “marooned”, as Ballard described himself on Desert Island Discs, “on the British Isles.”