Thrillers today have seemingly no new ground to tread. If you attempt to imagine the most fearsome or twisted scenario, the most intensely action packed violence you can, odds are it has already been portrayed. Still, it’s hard to see the public, yet to tire from the continuous barrage of superhero movies, ever getting bored of watching these endless formulaic narratives. After all, Jurassic World and The Force Awakens – both sequels of a sort to movies made decades earlier – topped the charts for the highest grossing films last year. So what is it then about the most financially successful movies that really keeps people coming back?

Since its recent release, viewers have been widely speculating about the new J.J. Abrams produced 10 Cloverfield Lane. It’s message – and who’s to say that there absolutely has to be one – is entirely elusive. Any interpretation of the two monsters in the film – one being the actual beast and the other Goodman’s character – as allegorical is likely completely invented. But it’s often ambiguity and room for invention that captivate audiences much more than explicit moral or political judgments.

Josh Campbell and Matthew Stuecken wrote the film as parallel rather than sequential to Cloverfield (2008), in which a similar beast runs rampant through Manhattan, captured on personal cameras which act as the viewer’s only set of eyes. Beyond the monster takeover, which comprises only a small portion of the latter film, the two have little in common, at least in terms of plot.

10 Cloverfield Lane opens to Michelle being run off the road whilst dodging calls from her fiancé, voiced by Bradley Cooper, only to awaken to find herself chained up in an underground bunker built by Howard, an eccentric and short-tempered man, and his boyish neighbour, Emmett. The three exist peacefully, if a little tensely, in the bunker together for an unspecified amount of time – though the close-up shots of the deterioration of Michelle’s nail polish seem to suggest only a matter of weeks – until Emmett and Michelle make a terrifying discovery about Howard’s past. Michelle is then faced with the decision to remain with one monster in the bunker or face another unknown beast up above.

The film lacks the usual star-power that would drive many films up the billboard, and its casting is somewhat unexpected. Howard is played by John Goodman, best known for playing gruff characters, as the husband to Roseanne in the ‘90s sitcom of the same name, or as the Vietnam-obsessed Walter in The Big Lebowski. Here Goodman was brilliantly cast, arriving at something not unlike the villain in The Lovely Bones, who seems almost pitiably odd and shy until reaching a final, long-anticipated breaking point.

John Gallagher, Jr., who plays Emmett, is a rather anonymous actor in comparison to his co-stars, and he seems very purposefully to remain unremarkable. His relationship with Michelle looks in some senses like the early relationship between Glenn and Maggie in The Walking Dead, and Goodman’s character resembles the various incarnations of power-hungry leading men in the same series.

Michelle, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, takes her place amongst a new grade of strong female leads more commonly found in television. I would liken her most to Krysten Ritter’s broodingly moral character in the Netflix series Jessica Jones. As someone often put off by overly exaggerated action sequences, Michelle won me over only toward the end with her partial aside to the audience of exasperation and disbelief at facing yet another threat.

As for speculation about the film’s potential political connotations, I indulged myself perhaps much more than the actual content allows. While Howard’s status as a war veteran might more plausibly be read as an indictment of the U.S. system of mental health care for those returning from war, I am not alone, I think, in immediately associating Howard with the famous fear-monger with an ambiguous history of sexual assault and childlike vocabulary that is currently running amok in the U.S. presidential race.

The original Cloverfield called up images of the 9/11 attacks at a time when the daunting beasts of terrorism and financial recession seemed at their most insurmountable, reflected also in the much less optimistic ending of the first film. Where choice may have seemed absent from the public in 2008, in the current political situation, choice itself is the crisis. The film’s catchphrase declares that “Monsters come in many forms,” and the decision Michelle must make – between remaining with her captor in what seems like an immediately safe situation and braving the potentially toxic air outside – is not unlike the one testing voters in the United States currently. Americans today can either remain isolated within the ideologically regressive universe that Trump has invented or support those who want to find real solutions to the world’s problems as they actually are. Perhaps it is because people can relate to the gravity of having to make such a decision that 10 Cloverfield Lane has been so compelling to audiences across the United States.

“What do you think of this?” the message will read, and a Soundcloud link will shortly follow.

There are songs – hell, whole bands – that remind me of particular people because of the conversations I have had with them about these sounds. And it’s not just the sounds of the music, but the culture and society behind these creations, and the reason for them coming into being, that I find so exciting to talk about. When I listen to a song or read something fantastic, I often recommend it, to know that I, like the Beats or the Bloomsbury Group, am enveloping myself in a world where artistic ideas are shared. As a writer – someone who thinks about things and then writes, in the hope that people will too consider the same ideas – I couldn’t wish for anything less.

At the same time, I may well know that huge swaths of other people have previously read, or even are simultaneously reading, the same book I have relentlessly been pouring over for days, meticulously noting down all my favourite ideas and phrases. To some extent, my emotions for any one piece of art are hardly unique. The logical side of me is aware that these pieces of art, sent out into the public sphere, are shared amongst us all. But my very personal reaction to one work or another can often stop me from wanting to share it at all. There are thoughts and feelings that can be conjured up by a song or piece of writing that I would never dare enunciate to anyone, lest they be left with a stumbling mishmash of “love” and “wow” without any eloquent talk on the matter.

But this inelegant enunciation of thoughts is hardly the danger. The danger, when it comes to sharing your taste in art, is surely one that may sound feeble: to impart a love for a particular writer, band, filmmaker or artist is to share with another person what moves you most. Thus surely to make yourself most vulnerable. When these great works really are great – when they move you to tears or leave you gazing in awe at a canvas – these creations become stirrers of emotions that could never come about through an art-less existence. This is why we herald “culture” so.

And this sharing may well be good. When revisited, a song reminiscent of happy times with loved ones will only bring joy; at worst, a wistfulness for a time passed.

But associating a tangible human being, who can be found, loved and ultimately lost, with a piece of art that will always remain in its same form, is surely dangerous if the human relationship could change over time. Once you make a mixtape for your significant other or you go to every gig of one particular band with a friend, this music is not your own anymore. Whilst that time lasts, the thrill of connecting real human experience with an ethereal art form is like nothing else. But once a human relationship ends, the music is never quite the same again.

To lose a song, for example, to feel like it is not just yours but tainted with the memory of someone who you no longer wish to remember, feels like a betrayal of sorts. A song is only a combination of waves, after all, but to attach a real-life anecdote with an ethereal entity, to attach a person or an experience, means you will never be able to see the song as the single entity you once did. You may never be able to enjoy a song for its pure musicality, as it will be context that is overriding.

It’s almost worst with words: a lyric from a song or a quotation from a poem. Whenever you see the same phrase – in any context – unavoidable connections will form.

Ultimately, I will always want to share my cultural pursuits and joys with those around me. What good is a book if you can’t discuss it? It’s the incessant associations that I’ll have to limit. And those are hardly a fault of the art itself.

It burst from the ooze and the mud of the delta, went through permutations, became electrified and then emerged once more on a Friday night in Manchester. No, I’m not referring to human civilisation, but blues music. Progressives have often slammed blues music, calling it outdated and primeval. It has even been called, god forbid, three chord simplicity. But I would argue it is high time that people accepted this simple fact – blues will not die.

Matt and Phred’s Jazz Club in the Northern Quarter hosted Franny Eubank’s Blues Band last Friday – and yes, they could definitely play. As my friend finished her pizza and we were having a chat; the band did their soundcheck, playing a jam for a few minutes to check that the amps were all in sync. All very relaxed, all very informal. But even just for the sound check, we couldn’t help but say to each other – shit. These guys are good.

The set showcased the virtuosity of the musicians. The bass drove many of the songs in an irresistible proto-funk groove, as perhaps best exemplified by their performance of Albert King’s ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’. The moment that unmistakeable classic riff came through the speakers, we knew it was going to be a good gig. The slide guitar also made an appearance, providing heartrending and powerful solos to a top quality rendition of Elmore James’ classic ‘It Hurts Me Too’. The guitarist then changed back to standard tuning to help provide low guitar lines to support the bass, and also to provide yet more captivating solos; so captivating that I couldn’t resist saying, ‘I wish I could play like that…’ Yet all of this felt inferior again to the impossibly cool lead singer; singing in deep dulcet tones these lyrics which have been sung so many times before, but giving them new power. Never before have the clichéd words of Muddy Waters’ ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ sounded so good – and he knew it, swaggering round the stage in a suit, black hat and black sunglasses; while often hunched over the microphone to give another blasting harmonica solo. The Chicago blues had never sounded quite so alive, quite so relevant.

There was nothing to fault, and everything to praise. The drinks weren’t excessively expensive – although with a fiver entry, I couldn’t call it a cheap night – the food was delicious, but most of all; this fantastic venue kept this often maligned genre alive. And so this gig was a case in point – the blues will never die as long as people this talented are here to play it.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes second-hand books so wonderful. Maybe it’s because they’re cheap, and anyone who loves reading can tell you that when you’re burning through three books a week it can get really expensive. Some claim it’s the smell, which is why you get people walking into a shop, inhaling so deeply their chests almost pop open, rolling their eyes with an indescribable ecstasy. Other’s claim old and dusty books heat up a room, making it more comfortable. I’ll accept that books are beautiful, especially older ones, there’s something deeply satisfying about old, creased spines with titles emblazoned on them in gold lettering. I’ll even be the first to admit that a shelf full of books makes a room, but these books should really be dog-eared, every single one having been either read or waiting to be read, not simply put up for the show of it. The thing is books are not incense sticks or furniture. Books are meant to be read, and maybe that’s what makes second hand books so enticing, the mysterious histories that led to that book being in your hands.

Firstly it’s the idea that you’re not the only one who’s read that book. When you buy a brand new novel, still hot from the printing press, it’s like it’s just you and the author muttering to each other in a darkened room. Yet when you hold a second hand book, you feel united to everyone else who read it, all shouting together at once. It’s even better when you find pencil notes scratched into the margins. They raise funny points, or interesting observations you never thought would occur to you. Of course sometimes they’re nonsense observations, sometimes they’re even illegible and sometimes, if you’re really lucky, they’ll have nothing to do with the book at all.

The absolute best kinds of annotations are the random ones covering a shopping list, an address or a random reminder to buy someone a present. They offer you a glimpse of the people who owned this book before you. Alongside the story printed on the pages themselves, you are introduced to a string of other stories, the stories surrounding the reading of the book. Maybe someone was reading it just before they proposed to the love of their life, maybe it was a present given to them by their father just before they headed off to university for the first time, or maybe this very book inspired a novelist to pen their own work, a work you might read yourself in a few years’ time. Lots of people may have held that book on a train, walking the streets or eating their breakfast, and now you’re holding it too. You’ve entered into a wider community of seemingly unconnected people, all reading this one little book.

Okay, this is all fairly speculative, and you can never be sure the book you’re holding has this whole history to it. It’s entirely possible one person was given it as an unwanted present, it sat on their shelf for countless years and then they gave it to a charity shop during a clean out one day. Even with this, there’s a history. It’s an old copy, a little slice of that particular novels publication history. Take those bound versions of The Complete Works of Charles Dickens. They’re unfamiliar when compared to the Wordsworth Classics paperbacks with their strange drawings on the front, they hark back to a time when books were collectors’ items, when you bought an entire set and people had the same copy for years, sometimes even generations.

Even second hand paperbacks have a certain charm to them with their yellowed pages and slightly scuffed covers, reminding us of the project to mass produce literature. My favourite print of any book is the orange Penguin classics with nothing on the cover but the title in thick black script. They’re so elegant, so aesthetically pleasing and admittedly, when the row of orange covers is lined up on a bookshelf it looks fantastic. The book exists just as the book, free of shiny photographs of equally shiny celebrities promoting the latest television adaptation. There’s no spoilers printed on the back, no critics’ reviews shouting in your face about how much you’ll love the story. No, instead they focus just on the title and the author, they let you make your own decisions and holding something like that, you really know you’re reading a novel, not a companion piece to a blockbuster movie.

Getting a new novel is always exciting, but never dismiss a second hand book. They’re smart, they’re enticing and they’re always different, and what’s more, you never know what you’re going to find.

FIVE STARS

Wheatley’s High Rise is a fast-paced dystopian thriller, using dark wit and farce to forward a pessimistic view of human nature. Evident from many of Ballard’s other novels, he regarded humanity as quite uncivilised. Given the right circumstances, all our bourgeois morality and manners – all that ‘self-indulgent toilet training’ as he called it – will simply slip away to reveal our true, inner selves. Behind the façade lies barbaric violence, animalistic ritual, and behaviour determined by the ‘logic’ of primal urges, all of which are realised in the tower complex. Cinema has a habit of using Brutalist architecture to realise dystopian fantasies, think A Clockwork Orange or Total Recall. But for Ballard, the building itself is responsible for the transformation into primalism. It reconditions its inhabitants in the new patterns of behaviour necessary to survive. Those that can adapt, will live and thrive. Those that cannot become another of the building’s many victims – martyrs on the path to the new order.

Wheatley’s film brings bags of style to Ballard’s substance. The cinematography is a treat for the eye throughout. Montage, the splicing together of quick shots traversing time, space, and sometimes reality, is cleverly used. Accompanied by Mansell’s soundtrack, it maintains a fast-paced intensity, mirroring the high rise’s rapid descent into anarchy. One sequence is particularly commendable, a stabbing viewed from the vantage point of a kaleidoscope, which stands out stylistically in a film already drenched with violence. High Rise also offers some commendable performances; Irons shines as the enigmatic Royal, Miller dazzles as the social-climber Melville, and Evans steals the show as the brutish Wilder. Hiddleston plays Laing, the middle-man seeking anonymity – who finds it when he adapts and thrives. Though cast slightly against type, as we’re far more used to seeing Hiddleston as a suave soph­istocrat, there’s nothing jarring in his performance.

But for me, Wheatley never makes convincing the necessity of the new tribalism. The viewer finds it hard to empathise with the onset of a ‘logic more powerful than reason’. The start of discontent in the high rise is quite unexpected, happening suddenly over a game of squash. Unable to demonstrate that adapting was necessary to survival in the tower, Wheatley makes it seem more a competition over better parties than the inevitable collapse of social etiquette. This makes the final third a confusing orgy of drunkenness, sex and violence – rather than tribal logic fulfilled as Ballard intended. So does Wheatley prioritise style over substance? Perhaps. At times I was even bored by their anarchic behaviour, feeling disconnected from their primordial logic.

Is there a message amongst all this carnage? With the film ripe for speculation, enthusiastic viewers have plenty of ammo to try and decipher its ‘message’. Is this social comment? Wheatley portrays the warring floors as having a strong class dynamic. Wilder and the lower-floors find themselves in conflict with the building’s upper-floor aristocrats for electricity, alcohol, and the allegiance of the middle-floors. Indeed, it’s the inequality and rigid hierarchy which set in motion the dissolving of normal morality. But come the end all floors come to resemble a single survivalist class, tribal and barbaric. Or perhaps the high rise represents different layers of the human psyche? Borrowing from Freudian psychoanalysis, Ballard himself suggested the upper floors were the moralising superego, and the lower floors the id, man’s primal desires. In this interpretation the middle floors act as the ego, the mediator between the two. Laing’s job as a physiologist is no coincidence, and the parallels to Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing are obvious. But audiences searching for a political message in Ballard’s dystopian vision will be disappointed. Like all good art, High Rise is ambiguous and open to interpretation.

The film rides the wave of the Brutalist revival. Wheatley’s found the perfect time to make High Rise, at the peak of the reappraisal of Brutal post-war architecture, now admired for its haunting concrete beauty and brutal functionality. In fact High Rise’s whole visual aesthetic speak volumes about contemporary nostalgia for the post-war era. Tindesley’s production design brings the high modernist tower to life with elegance. The fourteenth floor supermarket was designed from scratch, with all products given a minimalist chic by graphic designers Eaton and Hickson. It’s been such a success it has already gained a cult following online, just check Facebook’s bulging group The Brutalism Appreciation Society. Effortless style is one of the film’s major achievements, feeding our nostalgic appetites for post-war modernism. The current tendency is to view pre-neoliberal Britain enviously as a time of optimism and prolonged economic growth. Now regarded as a ‘golden age’, the social democratic era (1945-79) is admired for its percieved collectivism  and inclusivity. These values chime loudly in the context of our post-recession pessimism. Everything from our politics to our fashion seem to be trying to claw back this lost era of certainty, scrambling to rediscover its principles.

But is there a tension to be discerned between Wheatley and Ballard here? Safely separated by historical difference, Wheatley’s film views the 1970s as classy and cool. Yet Ballard was writing at a time of widespread disillusionment with the post-war world. The stifling bureaucracy, the feigned solidarity and persisting inequality, the self-important and dominating urban architecture – Ballard was writing in opposition to these realities when setting the dystopia in a ‘near future’.

But any adaptation of 40 years is bound to have its differences, and for me Wheatley and Ballard coexisted peacefully, despite the film not demonstrating the necessity of the new ‘logic more powerful than reason’. All in all, High Rise is a visually pleasing film which explores Ballard’s complex human themes with style and wit; and what more could one ask?

As we collapse into the vac, so we come to the end of our foray into the modern definition of art. We began with Naomi Gee’s ruthless analysis of ‘the selfie’ and then, in the following weeks, turned our attention to carpets, Kardashians, and The X Factor. We have scrutinised various aspects of modern life and considered their position on the contemporary artistic landscape.

In many ways, our feature ‘Is This Art?’ could itself be an example of art in today’s society. On a weekly basis, we have taken a particular aspect of modern life and considered its position on the contemporary artistic landscape. We have uncovered artistic meaning and profundity hidden within many aspects of today’s world. Through this process of uncovering, questioning and analysing, we have felt something of what it means to be an artist. We have stared into the void and found truth.

But what is art without an audience? We have shared our weekly findings with the Cherwell readership in a bid to make known the artistic truth we have dredged from the deep oceans of modern life. We have published these findings in the hope that our readers will take up our artistic mission; there is still plenty to discover. Cherwell Art and Books believe that the artistic scene is crying out in desperation for originality, for democratisation. We say the time has come for the artistic conversation to flow into the public sphere. In this way our feature, ‘Is This Art?’ is a beacon of encouragement; do you think this is art? What is art? Are you art? Thus, ‘Is This Art?’ represents the pressing need for artistic inclusion and democratic involvement.

I personally have become aware of a fundamental truth during this process of artistic consideration: anything at all can be art if you want it to be. There is meaning and beauty in every household object, television series and social media outlet. I say it is time that we step forward into a new era of postmodernism, and give the artistic power to the people.