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. In the west London suburb of Shepperton, Ballard’s children kept mice, purchased from a local pet shop. His concept of the “behavioural sink” chimed with despairing journalistic reports of “sink estates” and “sink schools” in 1970s Britain. 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. Calhoun’s “rat utopia” became a living hell.Ĭalhoun published the early results of his experiments in 1962 in the now-classic Scientific American article, “Population Density and Social Pathology”.
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. The result was a population explosion followed by pathological overcrowding, then extinction. Calhoun at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland.Ĭalhoun built a “rat city” in which everything a rat could need was provided, except space. It was a rodent and, in particular, the laboratory experiments performed on rats in the 1960s by ethologist John B. But the most influential example of “ pathological togetherness” lifted from the animal kingdom was not a bird. 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. 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.” 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. 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. “ The Human Time Bomb”, which first aired in February 1971, also links concerns about high-density housing to animal behaviour.
#MOUSE UTOPIA EXPERIMENT WAS RIGHT SERIES#
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”. 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. 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.īallard 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. 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. 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. Director Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise opened last Friday in cinemas around the country.
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