(Editor’s note: If you have the time/money, please help Scout finance his independent film “Stubborn Beast” in the wake of an investor dropping out last minute. Details at his GoFundMe.)
My friend Jim Gabriel died in 2023, and a curious thing happened. His many friends and fans were forced to center their grief as a wave of text online, as almost none of us lived near him. It’s a peculiar thing that happens now in the age of social media. There’s a sort of absence now in the grieving process because we meet so many people who come to mean so much to us, and we may never ever sit across from each other. I met him in person only once, at a party in Brooklyn in 2015, I think. His face beamed, joyous under the beard and the ubiquitous cap. He struggled with illness, he had money troubles, and he was like any of us. There were ups and downs, but Jim was always Jim, and he was thus always a pleasure.
His righteous anger at hypocrisy and the horrible lows of the American experiment were a small beacon in a fog. He was always so much fun to talk to and not just about the thing that brought us into each other’s orbit in the first place, some 15 years ago: movies. Jim went to bat for the obscure and the beloved alike: “The Right Stuff,” “Thief,” “Trainspotting,” “All That Jazz,” “Sherman’s March,” “Drugstore Cowboy.” But we bonded, as I must with my peers, about the stuff nobody liked. And it was, I have no trouble admitting, just Jim’s love of the movie “High-Rise” that got me to reconsider it.
For years after seeing it, I had this nagging feeling that the movie, which struck me as running on fumes by the end, when I went to a New York press screening, was maybe more than the sum of its parts, but I couldn’t see it. Jim could. He spoke about the innovations of screenwriter Amy Jump, the peculiarity of Ben Wheatley’s direction, the combined force of their quirky sensibility and love of hard human comedy, with author J.G. Ballard’s sleek prose and despairing vision of an anemic England entering the future with no idea what it meant or where physically that meant they were headed. I couldn’t see what Jim saw, but that Jim saw it was enough, and so for years my memory of it changed, improved, and then finally I watched it again. And again. And again.
And not only did I start to see its charming overreach as essential to its success, but I also felt like I was watching a movie with my pal, something I never got to do. Art can always be a bridge from the other side, if we allow ourselves ways of seeing. It’s a privilege to have this film to share with him, in his memory. And it’s made me love Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump even more.