Englishness on Film
Looking at the Films of Leigh, Hogg and Sanders
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“The act of union has not been an act of union of literary cultures and, for the reasons I mentioned before, there are very strong reasons for that. Imagination has a specific quality tied to landscape and locale, to community, to neighbourhoods”. So Ian McEwan reckoned when speaking to Alex Salmond at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2012, with McEwan saying “…he believed separate national literary cultures in the British Isles had survived the act of union between England and Scotland three centuries ago.” (Guardian) McEwan may be right when he says that imagination is tied to specific communities and neighbourhoods; yet, when we think of certain British filmmakers, the term 'British' appears applicable. Ken Loach is as happy filming in Glasgow (for Sweet Sixteen, My Name is Joe and others), as he is in Manchester (Raining Stones), Newcastle (I, Daniel Blake), London (Riff-Raff) or South Yorkshire (Kes), and Danny Boyle can film as readily in Scotland (Shallow Grave; Trainspotting) as in England (The Millions, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later). However, what we wish to focus on are three filmmakers who seem to us specifically English in their sensibility: Mike Leigh, Joanna Hogg and Jon Sanders. Their work may be quite different from each other’s, and Leigh and Hogg are more important filmmakers than Sanders, but they all share an awkward, fussy relationship with life, one that shows that while Englishness is many things, one of its components is inarticulacy.
Such a claim might seem odd when England has such an astonishing literary tradition, and in Shakespeare has a writer who is more synonymous with literary art and craft than any other. But there is in these directors’ works an awareness that wit and wisdom, if evident at all, contains a greater hesitancy. What isn’t always easy to discern is whether this is a consequence of class or an escape into it: are the characters fumbling for language because they don’t know in which register they belong, or because class allows for articulation at all? In different ways, Leigh, Hogg and Sanders are directors of silence, even if, in especially Leigh and Sanders’ work, there is much talk. But the problem lies in self-expression, as if a certain type of Englishness denies and defies expressiveness. If we propose that this might rest on class, it is consistent with George Orwell’s claim that class possesses metaphysical properties, and not merely materialistic ones, partly because he sees such class elements as anachronistic. “They do not exactly correspond to economic distinctions, and what is essentially an industrial and capitalist country is haunted by the ghost of a caste system.” (‘The English Class System’) Imagine a class system that is metaphysically evident but, at the same time, denies an ontological dimension, and we might be getting at an aspect of this inarticulacy.
Metaphysics and ontology are big words, philosophical words, and so we need to be careful how we use them, and be aware too that their usage might seem antithetical to an Englishness that likes words to be plain and simple. Why not abstract instead of metaphysical, some might say; why not personal rather than ontological, another might insist. But abstract seems too general a way to describe a class system that, no matter the mixed-race nature of the modern UK, appears one of the most astute approaches to understanding subtle gradations in wealth and expectation, culture and education.
We will use metaphysical in this context chiefly to understand how characters find themselves placed in the social system, and ontological to show how characters seek an expression beyond it. This might not quite be metaphysical in the sense of Plato’s Forms, Spinoza’s infinite, perfect and timeless world, or Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, but it seems more than an ideology, more than a societal hierarchy that reflects the given society, and yet needn’t be a fixed condition. When young internationals from Switzerland, Pakistan, Germany, Kenya, Hong Kong, India and Singapore were interviewed, they were surprised by the importance of certain markers: council housing versus private housing, comprehensives versus private schools, the importance of accent and the sense of cliquishness. As one person interviewed said, he “realised that there was a different sense of entitlement between those who were privately educated and those who were not.” (Vice) Another reckoned, “whenever I talk to British people here about the Indian culture or history, they seem quite fascinated with the Indian caste system. We no longer use it in Indian politics or academia; our society is more complex than that. However, British people’s fascination of the Indian caste system seems to signal the parallels they see with the British social class system.” (Vice)
It can even, or more especially, cover the supermarket where someone shops. As the columnist Alan Coren once quipped: “The only purpose of Sainsbury's is to keep the riff-raff out of Waitrose.” (Times) Coren went to Oxford; so did his son and daughter, Giles and Victoria, who are also columnists. The kids probably shop in Waitrose. If the English class system seems more than ideological, it rests on its density, the way it incorporates so many aspects of one’s life that it takes on an inevitability, not merely functioning as an expectation. As for ontology, let us see it through “…Sartre’s claim that consciousness belongs to a different ontological category from that of the physical world.” (The Oxford Companion to Philosophy) That might not be a new thought, but what it allows Sartre to do is give to consciousness a quality of freedom hitherto denied it. As Sartre says, “human reality is not something which exists first in order afterwards to lack this or that; it exists first as lack [manque]…human reality emerges as a presence in the world and is apprehended by itself as its own lack. In its coming into existence, human reality grasps itself as an incomplete being.” (Being and Nothingness, Philosophy of Jean Paul-Sartre) Here we have the formula for the famous claim of being and nothingness, and why choice is so important and constant. We are always choosing existence in the face of this lack, and this leads to the question of responsibility. We will have more to say about that later, but what matters for the moment is the fixity of the English system and the choices that one faces — and where, if one cannot conquer this system, one can at least question it, and one’s place within it.
An anecdote may be useful here, as Joanna Hogg discusses her work in television, aware that she really wanted to start making her own films. She was directing an EastEnders Easter special. ‘’It wasn’t like a regular episode, it was an hour long or something, which we shot in Wales and where one of the characters was explored in greater depth. During this production, which had a lot of positive things about it, I remember being on set and thinking, wouldn’t it be great if I could be working on something that I had written, that was about personal ideas and feelings?” (TakeOneCinema) Hogg, by our reckoning, needed to move from the metaphysical replication of the class system that soap operas like Eastenders represent, towards an expressive mode that would create an ontological question around what Englishness happens to be. Speaking of her first film, Unrelated, Hogg said: “It's much more about finding an emotional truth and that isn't an autobiographical approach. There is imagination at play. With Unrelated there are a lot of things in there that I've never experienced in my life. But they come from something that's very real and truthful.” (EyeForFilm)
This truthfulness, cinematically, comes out of the space generated between the metaphysical and the ontological as we are choosing to couch it; that the metaphysical is the continuation of a class system that for all its contradictions appears coherent — and gains this coherence through the television shows, newspapers, educational and art institutions — and the ontological, which tries to create a space that opens up an inquiry into these assumptions. Understandably, much of this is a question of form. When asked about her style, Hogg says, “It was very much not possible in television. Without wishing to sound reactionary, I started trying out ideas I wasn’t allowed to use working on conventional television series because I was always forced to be succinct and not linger on a shot too long and had to move the camera—all those things we see in television. I found it very frustrating because there would always be an executive producer looking over my shoulder and saying: ‘Well, you know we need to cut away from that quicker.’” (Film Comment) If the cinema we are addressing insists on countering the metaphysics of class and searches out the ontological aspect of identity, a style contrary to the televisual is important, just as the relationship with dialogue is no less so. While the long take allows for the spaces to be filmed with greater attention to what exists within them, this is no less valid for the conversations that take place within this spatial extension. EastEnders moves at a clip as space is a setting, and dialogue is exposition, but Hogg asks what happens when spaces become interrogated, and dialogue becomes hesitant? A question opens up, and the metaphysics of class becomes exposed as characters can no longer live happily within it.
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But let us start with Mike Leigh, High Hopes and Cyril. A motorbike courier in London, Cyril lives in a compact council flat with his partner, a tree surgeon. They seem to be living a happy and contained life, but Leigh manages to convey through Cyril what this containment means, and shows how far it is from contentment. Cyril is a member of the melancholy left, someone who smokes dope off a Lenin for Beginners’ Book, visits Marx’s grave in Highgate, and doesn’t want kids: “they’re out of date families, ain’t no use anymore.” He loves his partner Shirley, but why replicate a bourgeois structure? “Two’s company, you know what I mean?” He has been talking about how dysfunctional families happen to be, and we may wonder if this is a present political problem, specific to working-class life, or if Englishness contains an inarticulate force that Cyril fights against, but can’t quite counter. There are plenty of moments in the film where Cyril seems despondently caught in sullen silence, a state that isn’t quite chosen but repressively evident. Near the end of the film, in a typical Leigh family set-piece that is bound to go wrong, Cyril and his partner are invited round to his sister and brother-in-law’s place. It is a party for their mother, and each family member is supposed to make an effort: the daughter is anxiously determined that all will have a good time, yet what she chiefly conveys is the neurosis evident in every area of her life.
Like Cynthia in Secrets and Lies, Mary in Another Year, and Beverly in Abigail’s Party, Aubrey in Life is Sweet, Valerie is one of Leigh’s grotesques, a person so uncomfortable in her skin that she performs an identity she can’t sustain, in attire she can’t seem to see as self-caricatural. Whether exercising, going shopping or at the family meal, she dresses like she’s been told what to wear, but wouldn’t quite know who told her. She is a fashion victim, but with the operative word victim, and we might wonder in this later scene with the family, whether she is wearing the shoulder pads and the pillbox hat after meeting the posh neighbour at her mother’s gentrified street earlier in the film. This might be late-eighties fashionable, but while the odious neighbour wears the style with aplomb, Valerie dresses like she is taking a stab at fashion, a habilemental coup de grace. In Leigh’s world, better to dress down, with Cyril and Shirley making an effort for the birthday, but refusing to make a fool of themselves as a consequence. Most of the time, they wear what is comfortable; Valerie dresses in a way that is inclined to make others uncomfortable. Michael Coveney’s comment about Beverly in Abigail’s Party applies even more to Valerie here. ”Beverly is undoubtedly a monster. But she is also a deeply sad and vulnerable monster… The whole point about Beverly is that she is childless, and there is a sense in which that grotesque exterior carapace is a mask of inner desolation.” (The World According to Mike Leigh)
While one may trace this inner desolation to the numerous women in Leigh’s films who don’t have children, it is a much broader problem than that: this inner desolation might find a representative problem like childlessness (Barbara in Meantime, Valerie here, Monica in Secrets and Lies). However, it is there too in Johnny in Naked, Mark in Meantime and various other unemployed and disaffected characters in Leigh’s work. Cyril is close to these figures, just as Shirley might seem closer to the yearning women wishing for a child — a point the pair of them discuss on a couple of occasions in High Hopes. Yet there appears to be an ontological emptiness that no representation could quite fix, no child, no job, no simple change in government policy. If Orwell is right that England is haunted by a caste system, one way of looking at Leigh’s characters is to see so many of them possessed by a class unconsciousness they can’t quite comprehend and cannot quite escape. This helps explain the two poles of Leigh’s figures, and the energy they contain or expel — the comatose and the caricatural: characters who usually refuse to play the game or play it so broadly they become an exaggerated exemplification of their social milieu. In this sense, there is little difference between the posh couple next door to the mother and Valerie and her husband. The upper-class couple dress for the opera, sip rosé, and get flushed after a bit of hanky-panky; Valerie decorates her house with reckless taste while her husband is described by Cyril and Shirley as the ‘jerk in the Merc’. Leigh offers characters who aren’t simply reflective of their class but are trapped within its expectations. If Cyril and others refuse their role in a class warfare where almost everybody ends up a victim, we might call them class pacifists. These are people who would prefer not to enter the fray, a Bartleby-like preference not to, even if society won’t easily leave them alone. We may read Cyril’s reluctance to have kids as a refusal to replicate the caste system - resistant to bringing more people into the world who are expected to perform a crude, social role.
Many have seen High Hopes as anti-Thatcherite: Jonathan Rosenbaum speaks of “the horrors of Thatcherism” (JR) and Andrew Pulver reckoned High Hopes was one of the films “that defined the Thatcher era.” (Guardian) There were plenty of works in the late eighties showing England’s despair: Empire State, Sammy and Rose Get Laid, Last of England and indeed High Hopes. But no more so than a decade earlier: with Scum, Bloody Kids, Rude Boy, and Radio On offering English desolation. Obviously, politics makes a difference, but the sort of transformation demanded to allow the ontological to impose itself on the metaphysical would be so much greater than the intervention of a given politician, even one so neo-liberally insistent as Thatcher. Many of the problems found in 1980s Leigh films like Meantime and High Hopes are still present in Another Year, made at the end of thirteen years of Labour governments. True, politics is less present in the newer film, but the despondency is still evident, and we may decide this is a problem for some of the characters, or part of a broader problem that remains in English society. Ostensibly, Tom and Gerri are a happy couple who have done nicely enough for themselves. They live in a decent part of London, in the sort of house that the mum and the posh neighbours occupy in High Hopes, but they are neither usurpers taking over, nor people who have been left behind. In High Hopes, the posh husband Rupert says, “What made this country great is a place for everyone and everyone in his place.” If the comment seems so off the mark, it isn’t because he doesn’t have a point, as he exemplifies Orwell’s, but because he has to deal with neighbours far lower down the social scale. Gentrification means people aren’t any longer in their place, and this is partly why the wife says to the mother that she should think of moving on — better if a professional couple moved in. But Tom and Gerri do seem to be where they would wish to be, and there is nothing to indicate the neighbours would be very different from them. The locations aren’t so far apart (Kenilworth Road in the Bow and St Margaret’s Road in Wandsworth), but it is twenty years later. While property prices have hardly settled, it seems social mobility has. Tom and Gerri have been in the house for years, and his employment as a geologist and hers as a counsellor are the sort of solid jobs that will have allowed them to earn a decent wage for decades, and they would have bought when prices weren’t ten times their salaries. Leigh’s interest in class seems to have waned as well — though Gerri’s friend Mary feels a little insecure, there isn’t in Another Year the messy class divides seen in Meantime, High Hopes and Secrets and Lies. We could see this as a retreat from the political, but one always needs to keep in mind the thrust of Leigh’s work and the purpose behind this essay. This is that class isn’t the first principle. It is the metaphysical feature through which English society is viewed; while the ontological is the principle is still deeper, one that says that not everybody needs to accept their place.
It is partly why Leigh offers so many belligerent and neurotic characters in his work — the Johnnys and Marks; the Valeries and the Beverlys. The belligerent are often politically purposeful in their resistance, while the neurotics are hysterical manifestations of hyperbolic class dynamics. They aren’t always women (Aubrey in Life is Sweet isn’t), and some might have seen misogyny in Leigh’s work if they were. Nevertheless, it is a rough divide: men are more inclined to resistance; women are more likely to be neurotically compliant. Yet on first impressions, Tom and Gerri aren’t part of this class aspect. As the film arcs towards unhappiness and moves towards winter, we see it enveloping their world when Tom and Gerri head up north for his sister-in-law’s funeral. By now, we are in the middle of winter, and yet it is more than the weather that indicates a frosty world. Just as Leigh has, for much of the film, offered us a neurotic in Mary, now he offers us a belligerent in his brother’s son, Carl. Yet there is nothing political, it seems in Carl’s perspective. That he more or less misses the funeral, and yet blames everybody else, suggests a young man who is making a mess of his life without any help from political machinations and state forces.
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Again, we ought to be wary of seeing this as Leigh’s retreat from politics. The director’s political position has been well-known and consistent over decades, a socialism not far removed from Corbyn’s: “I have a lot of time for Jeremy Corbyn. I’ve come out and defended him and I will defend him. His heart’s in the right place. I think his morals are impeccable and so are his politics.” (TheNationalNews) It is more that there is a search in Leigh’s work for a voice that isn’t fundamentally political, but personal, one where an individual gets to speak on their terms, moments that get behind the cliches and the commonplaces, the social insecurities and the political positioning. Near the end of High Hopes, the grandmother manages to speak to Cyril after spending most of the film saying nothing, locked inside herself and her past. And, too, Cyril and his partner get to talk about their hopes and disappointments in a way that means they might just have that kid. In Another Year, it isn’t the couple at the centre, but the peripheral characters who have this conversation, Mary and Tom’s brother Ronnie, and part of the chat is over Mary’s childlessness. Mary asks Ronnie if his son is married, and he replies he doesn’t know; while he asks if she has kids, and she says, “no…unfortunately.” There is Ronnie, estranged from his son, and Mary, without any kids of her own, and the film conveys a symmetrical sadness without quite claiming these are people who are bonding. If EM Forster so famously suggested “only connect”, it could be the motto in Mike Leigh’s work.
This, though, wouldn’t be a facile affiliation but a complex excavation of feeling that allows for its tenuous possibility. Leigh’s films offer a morass of situations and a mosaic of characters, and his genius rests on our never quite knowing where the connections will be. After all, Ronnie isn’t introduced into Another Year until two-thirds of the way through the film, and it looks like Mary has been excised from it after making a bit of a scene at Tom and Gerri’s, when she treats their son Joe’s new girlfriend with disdain. But there she is, calling round when Tom and Gerri are out, and Ronnie is alone in the house. Yet something has changed; Mary isn’t all talk and no questioning; her previous monologues have been replaced by reflection and what seems like a degree of honest self-appraisal. However, we might wonder if there has always been something wrong in her relationship with Gerri, an asymmetrical friendship, with tolerance on Gerri’s part, meeting a needy admiration on Mary’s. Shortly before the end of the film, Mary says how much she misses Gerri. Gerri gives her a hug and suggests a counsellor after Geri tells her, “This is my family, Mary. You have to understand that.” Gerri’s tone is considerate but also intolerant and admonishing, a Gerri-knows-best, while the discussion between Mary and Ronnie shows two people in pain, neither capable of optimism, but there appears to be communion in their despair. Gerri isn’t a bad person, but she might be bad for Mary, and may have been for years. When Joe and his girlfriend arrive, Gerri informs them by body language that Mary is there, and after Tom and Joe disappear into the kitchen, the girlfriend jokes that she feels like hanging herself now that Mary is around.
It is a cruel gesture, but wasn’t Mary obnoxious to her last time? Perhaps, but when an unhappy person treats one badly when we are happy, we may wonder if mockery is any kind of answer, and Leigh’s film seems ambivalent on this, and ambivalent on Tom and Gerri too. They do seem to be one of Leigh’s kind couples (like Cyril and Shirley in High Hopes; Andy and Wendy in Life is Sweet), but just because they are good people, that doesn’t mean they are always good for others. Just as Mary is the friend that Gerri tolerates, so Tom has one too — an old university mate who has turned to drink and fat, and who rails against the young, and his job in the employment office up in Derby, where he lives. These are friendships that are important for Mary and Ken, but you do wonder whether Tom and Gerri feel these are burdensome people they can’t shake.
Tom and Gerri are wonderfully English, if we accept what Robert Colls says about the English in an essay by Paul Laity. “For centuries, he believes, the English retained a ‘human vision of themselves’, more in touch with their landscape than with the central authority of the state. They have regarded themselves as a temperate and gentle people – tendencies encouraged by a climate and topography without extremes, and by insularity, which meant that society remained unmilitarised and wars were always fought ‘over there’.” (London Review of Books) But if they are temperate and gentle people, that doesn’t mean they make the best of friends, and the subtext to Leigh’s film could be that the finest of English values, ostensibly, might not be ideal for individuals who need an ontological relationship with others, and not a metaphysical one with community, conviviality and hospitality. When Tom proposes that Ken could retire, Gerri wonders if it would be that easy, asking what Ken would do with his time. He lifts up his glass and says: “eat, drink, be merry”. It comes after Tom and Gerri have cooked up a lovely meal, but it clearly isn’t enough, and we might wonder what would be for a man who is lonely, has a thing for Mary that isn’t reciprocated, and is in a job he doesn’t much like.
It would be a facile and enormous generalisation to say this is an English problem. Aren’t people lost, lonely and desperate all over the world? True, but that isn’t Leigh’s problem, which is consistently associated with English questions, even if they are contained by this broader ontology we have been insisting upon. “Part of the fundamental philosophy of my films is that everybody is interesting, and, as in real life, every character is three-dimensional and rounded and at the centre of his or her universe….” (Leigh on Leigh) But what happens when that individual three-dimensionality meets with a one-dimensional value like Rupert’s, who says a place for everyone and everyone in their place? It becomes one-dimensional patriotism, a notion of the nation that says that Britain’s greatness lies in its ability to treat people differently, and thus paradoxically all the same. Everybody has their place in the class system, which means they are all part of a national unity, even if this is based on hierarchy rather than equality, on class stratification over functional coherence. Instead of seeing a post-office worker and a lawyer, a teacher and a banker, as all serving different purposes within society, what matters most is where you find yourself on this hierarchy, rather than how you are placed on the grid. As Orwell says, “There is no question about the inequality of wealth in England. It is greater than in any European country and you have only to look down the nearest street to see it.” Orwell adds, “economically, England is certainly two nations, if not three or four. But at the same time the vast majority of the people feel themselves to be a single nation and are conscious of resembling one another more than they resemble foreigners. Patriotism is usually stronger than class-hatred and always stronger than any kind of nationalism.” (‘England Your England’)
It is this resistance to nationalism and desire for a kind of internationalism that Cyril seeks in High Hopes as he sees the optimistic in Marx and the pessimistic in the Thatcherite England in which he is living. Yet that is just a particularly glaring political manifestation of Leigh’s examination of class resistance in England. More often, it takes the form of general dysfunction, as though since England is a hierarchical rather than a functional society, one based on status and not usefulness, better to escape the hierarchy into uselessness. It is partly why Mark in Meantime refuses to help his brother decorate his sister’s house: this isn’t them doing her a favour — it is them playing the role of poor relation. It doesn’t mean there aren’t functional characters in Leigh’s work who are happy (like Tom and Gerri), but one reason we may be wary of taking such characters at face value rests on Leigh often showing people as more resistant or more neurotic than that, which in Leigh’s work is sometimes the same thing. One may admire the general qualities Tom and Gerri possess and in another film, in another country, they would be clearly good, effective and engaging people. But in Leigh’s world, we might question their decency, since they are living in an indecent country.
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By analogy, we might think of Zizek’s contrarian argument over David Lynch’s A Straight Story. Zizek sees Lynch’s film as his most straightforward, devoid of the mind-bending narrative gymnastics to be found in Lost Highway and others, and this thus, of course, makes it Lynch’s strangest film. By another filmmaker, it would be a straight story, but since we are in Lynch-land, we mustn’t fall into such an easy assumption. Equally, with Leigh, a world where Englishness is a metaphysical value oppressing those who exist under it, anybody not reflecting, in their nervous system, some manifestation of this insidious class system, might be deemed heedless. Tom and Gerri aren’t quite these people, but interestingly, Leigh doesn’t open his film on them, but on a character who won’t appear again— a woman who turns up for a counselling session and sees life as hopeless, communication a waste of time and therapy unlikely to be of any use either. Leigh says that “without that scene, the first thing you the audience would see is Tom and Gerri going to their allotment, it’s all comfortable and everything is nice and cozy. What I do is before you have time to blink, I plunge you headlong into this core, this center, this furnace of pain and suffering and this poor woman’s desire for a decent night’s sleep. This poor woman has no warmth or humour or perception of her situation. She’s just completely negative…” (Interview Magazine) She is far from alone, with Ken, Carl, Mary, and, too, the grieving Ronnie, all later adding to the despair. If Leigh manages to convince us that his central couple are happy, he is more than keen to register the miserable periphery.
How can we not assume this is English unhappiness when Leigh has no interest in filming anywhere else? “People say my films are about characters, and they are, but they’re about place and environment, always. And because we develop the action always in the location, it’s an organic and integrated process.” (Vulture Magazine) If we see despair, we cannot separate it from the places in which he films, and, of course, why Leigh has always been resistant to working with American actors. “My late producer, Simon Channing Williams, dead for about 10 years, would come back from meetings with potential backers, Americans, and say: ‘They don’t care that there’s no script, they don’t care that you can’t say what it’s about, but they will insist on the name, meaning an American movie star.’ And we’d walk away.” (Guardian) There is clearly American distress, too, but that wouldn’t be Leigh’s business. By our reckoning, Leigh’s films are vitally about the release from this Englishness into selfhood, and if he happened to start with an American in the first place, part of this particular job would already be done. By carefully attending to locale, by insisting on local idiom, by showing the specifics of body language, Leigh builds up a world of Englishness the characters cannot easily escape, and that Leigh will, by the end, usually accept they cannot avoid — they are, after all, English.
This is why it is important we don’t see the metaphysical and the ontological as an either/or. It is instead that the latter is a possibility inside the former. If Englishness wasn’t centrally what Leigh’s films were about, it wouldn’t matter so much where they were set, or where the actors he used were from. He is interested, however, in people escaping from the limitations of their lives, where they manage to get beyond the idioms of their existence and arrive at an articulation of, or at least a reflection on, their predicament. While the idioms are usually deflective, the eschewal of them becomes reflective. When Gerri asks Ken about his house, he says “same old, same old”, just as when the mother in Life is Sweet says, “I’m up to here with the lot of you”, we know that language is doing its job as general communication; it hasn’t been set to work generating specific articulation. Ken is doing the social thing, even if it is clear that the house is a mess and Ken’s life likewise. The mother in Life is Sweet has an anorexic daughter and tries to make light of the difficulties, without at all undermining the life of her offspring.
Interviewing Leigh, Zoe Williams asks him about “Britishness, his long fascination with the minute differences in class and outlook that become cavernous when characters are juxtaposed” and Leigh replies: “My work is rooted here, in our culture, but that’s not what it’s primarily about. It’s about humanity.” (Guardian) Williams is too general in her claim, even if there is occasionally a Scot in his work — Monica in Secrets and Lies, the young couple on the streets in Naked — and Leigh is perhaps too determined to see the generally human in his work. But if we are right that his films are an escape from the limiting qualities of Englishness and the determination to find a quality greater than class conformity, his claim makes sense. When speaking of Mary in Another Year, Leigh says, “Mary is a victim of many things, but mostly the received propaganda that a woman has to be sexy, a woman has to be gorgeous, and it stitched her up for life. She is not liberated, everything that has happened to her is a function of that misguided, received notion.” (Film Comment) Though Leigh’s brilliance often rests on the specific characterisational problems he explores within the broader rubric of English class, we can also say that just as Leigh is right to see Mary as a character caught in a self-image she can’t escape, so more generally are his characters caught by this nebulous yet very powerful thing, Englishness, as they seek self-definition. Mary may be someone who cannot be a happy woman as she ages, however gracefully in some ways (she dresses well, remains slim and hasn’t let ‘herself go’ as Ken has), since she is probably constantly aware of the relative dis-grace of the very ageing process. Yet she also possesses a very English notion of decorum. She is self-deprecatory, apologetic, prudish and prurient, hardly exclusively English traits, but their combination often tells us something about English culture, from Carry On films to Benny Hill, from Bertie Wooster to Hugh Grant. Leigh may be right to point out what he sees as Mary’s singular problem, but nobody would say Leigh’s work is about the ageing process, no matter if Amy Raphael says “how we age and change fascinates you endlessly” and Leigh replies, “yeah. Absolutely.” Yet, surely a lot less than the question of Englishness?
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There are probably more differences than similarities if we choose to compare Leigh and Hogg’s work, though Fiona Underhill notes: “Hogg works in a loose, improvisational style, similar to Mike Leigh; instead of a screenplay, she works from a “document” that is more of an outline for the actors.” (JumpCut) Whatever the similarity of approach, more important for us is that they are both astutely preoccupied with the question of being English. Whether filming on the Isles of Scilly (Archipelago), Tuscany (Unrelated), a late modernist house that was soon to be demolished (Exhibition), or a flat that Hogg herself once lived in recreated in a studio (Souvenir I and II), her work always has, at its centre, what it means to be English, and how one might try and escape its dictates. Julien Allen notes that “Archipelago deals openly with questions of class, but it is not about class. Like all three of Hogg's features to date, it is about how people draw from their physical environment while striving for a better understanding of their lives.” (Reverse Shot) This isn’t too different from Leigh’s problem. Neither Leigh nor Hogg’s films are about class as social progress. Yet they cannot be comprehended without this awareness, just as this awareness, by the audience, of class is met by the characters’ understanding of its limitations. This doesn’t mean characters will transcend class, which is partly why it has a metaphysical property, but it can be understood as a dimension of self, and not an all-encompassing value. To understand it and find a way to resolve it are not the same thing, as we find Edward (Tom Hiddleston) in Archipelago trying through the course of the film (and before the story starts) to escape the assumptions behind his privilege. During one of the many awkward scenes, Edward proposes to the other family members that the cook, Rose, they have hired for this familial retreat, join them for dinner. After the others think differently, by way of compromise, Edward takes the dishes from the table to the kitchen. In a carefully angled long take, Hogg shows the mother Patricia and sister Cynthia in the foreground on the left hand side of the frame, and Edward and Rose on the right in the kitchen. Patricia and Cynthia joke quietly about the mess Edward gets himself into trying to be a decent fellow, while Edward wonders if he is doing the right thing, asking Rose: “Would you rather I wasn’t here?”, as he tries to help with the washing up. “The poor girl just wants her bloody wages”, Cynthia assumes.
We may watch the scene sympathetic to Edward’s attempt, but aware too that, whatever Cynthia and Patricia’s condescension, they have a point. If Edward thinks he can transcend the class system by doing the washing up, he is as naive as his mother and sister are smug. Hogg manages to contain within this one shot, the impasse of a class dynamic that is greater than any of the four characters involved in the exchange, no matter if we might admire Edward’s effort, and find Cynthia and Patricia insufferably entitled. Class is a complex thing, the film proposes, and maybe the best one can do is make war or peace with it; to move towards revolutionary consciousness, or aesthetic awareness. A few helpful gestures aren’t likely to make much difference. What Edward seems to wish to do is to fit in, to find a place for himself in this world that doesn’t assume that everyone has a given place. There may be an enormous difference between Valerie in High Hopes and Cynthia here, but what they have in common is a sense of superiority, no matter if Leigh’s Valerie is hopelessly stranded in class obliviousness, as she wishes to keep up with whichever Joneses she can come across, and that Cynthia is as disrespectful towards her brother as Valerie is towards hers, even if clearly much more comfortably upper middle-class than Valerie is comfortably middle-class. Edward and Cyril want change; Valerie and Cynthia reckon society is exactly where they would wish it to be — no matter if Valerie thinks she might be able to make her way up just a little this greasy class pole, while Cynthia assumes the pole is so greasy nobody should or could climb it.
If Cyril in High Hopes is, at least in theory, revolutionary, Edward is philanthropic, someone who decides to devote his life to decent causes. He has already, at the start of the film, made the decision to do voluntary work in Africa, but this feels an act of desperation as much as conviction: as if he doesn’t really know what to do with his life. Near the conclusion, he is talking to the artist who gives his mother art lessons. The artist says, after Edward thinks he is making the wrong decision, going to Africa, “By the conviction of your reality that you, you believe in, you make others believe it…there’s no one hidden track that is there waiting for you.” The comment comes after Edward says, “Maybe I could write, I could write, maybe…” Here is a man adrift, but there is little sense that society is adrift, and while we don’t want to get lost in comparing and contrasting High Hopes and Archipelago, the films can usefully help us comprehend aspects of a class system, one that is unequivocal, but where reactions to it can be quite distinct. Ostensibly, Edward is a nicer man than Cyril. Cyril can be sarky, cynical and aloof; Edward is helpful, sincere and curious. They both, no doubt, wish for a better world, but Cyril is materially stuck in his; Edward is caught more in psychic confusion. There is clearly enough money for Edward to loaf around, but he will hardly feel okay with himself in doing so. Dropping out of his job in the city has probably left him with plenty of money, since he doesn’t look like a spendthrift, and the family is far from poor.
However, both Edward and Cyril are stuck in Englishness; an odd phrase, perhaps: to be stuck in a national mindset. It sounds like a variation of someone trapped in their masculinity, or in their femininity, as Leigh believes Mary to be, and maybe it is: a view of themselves and the world that seems inviolable. Yet are we arriving too hastily at a contradiction; aren’t Edward and Cyril looking to escape their circumstances? That may be so, but if we keep in mind the difference between the materiality Orwell sees and the immaterial aspect of people’s lives, as an officer, for example, is socially valued more than a wealthier businessman, then both Cyril and Edward are aware of their place. Cyril is bolshy and belligerent, as he asks his mum’s neighbour if he wants a fat lip, while Edward is apologetic and deferential to Rose. When she asks in the kitchen one morning what he has planned that day, he says she doesn’t have to make his breakfast, as he says: “I’ll do, I, le…I’ll ge…I’ll get a….” as he finds the cereal. She tells him with a laugh, it is her job, as though here is this young man single-handedly (or two-handedly as he notes he has two hands, one for the bowl; one for the cereal), trying to transform the class system. But while we may admire his efforts, the humour for Rose and for the viewer comes from the upper middle-class Englishness he so obviously displays, meeting the equality he seeks. It is as if Hogg and Hiddleston know that the humour is inevitable: that, when moral aspiration meets social inculcation, the latter will win out. Hogg’s background is vaguely aristocratic, and Hiddleston’s is firmly militaristic. “We know Hogg grew up in an upper-class family with aristocratic ties. She is also the daughter of the vice chairman of a large insurance company. As a teenager, Hogg attended the expensive West Heath Boarding School, where she was classmates with Tilda Swinton and a class above Diana Spencer, future Princess of Wales.” (The Seventh Row) “Should one be seeking further aristocratic flourishes, it might be noted that the associate producer on The Souvenir is her cousin the Baronet of Belfield.” (Guardian) As for Hiddleston, “Tom’s great-grandfather Reginald Maxwell Servaes had a long and distinguished military career. Born in Lancashire in 1893, Reginald was a midshipman in the Royal Navy aboard HMS Indefatigable in 1911. The ship would later be sunk during the Battle of Jutland in 1916”. (Find My Past) There is a working class and Scottish side to Hiddleston, as well, but that is not at all what comes through in his persona, and if Hogg’s first two features had cast James McAvoy rather than Hiddleston they would be quite different works. The social comedy in Hogg’s oeuvre isn’t the point, though; it serves the difficulties involved in trying to escape class confinement. However, the work’s importance rests on the determination to do so — to say there is more to a self than the role society insists one performs. “The thing is, class is just one discourse. All the other discourses we touched upon just now, those I relate to, in that they are part of my everyday life. But that one, this idea of class… it’s not so interesting to me, actually. I feel there are other people working that out for my films.” “But really,” Hogg says, “I don’t think about it that much when I’m conceiving or making them. Of course, I’m aware of that discourse, but it’s not something I aim for.” (Senses of Cinema)
Hogg seeks instead penetration within delineation, a way of exposing class and revealing the self. It is partly what the artist tries to explain to Edward at the end of Archipelago. He was taken aside by a teacher who told him that he didn’t think he should go to art school; that he wasn’t tough enough. His gift, such as it was, might not have survived the potentially harsh environment, and yet his ego may have wished to prove the teacher wrong. However, is the ego not still that social side? The artist wishes not to prove himself, but express himself, and finds his path without going to art college. “Being tough is holding your course in some way”, he says. “I had something I wanted to do, deeply wanted to do.” How do we make ourselves without others making us? To exaggerate our freedom is to deny the limitations placed upon it; to claim there is no freedom is to accept those limitations and to arrive at bad faith. Here we are close to the core of our problem. If Orwell is the metaphysician of class, his French contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre is the ontologist of human relations, the thinker in the 20th-century most interested in the increments of choice, without seeing such choosing as a religious decision, a la Pascal and the famous Wager. The choices are usually ethical, psychological and aesthetic, and it is these that interest Hogg as well. For our purposes, let us see bad faith as the class choice, the imperative placed upon us by our social circumstances. This can be anything from a born-to-lead mentality, because someone went to Eton and Oxbridge, to a person accepting they ought to become a menial worker, since that is what others in their family do as well.
6
It returns us to a place for everyone and everyone in their place, and to a remark by Sir Humphry Wakefield, who, in a TV programme about the aristocratic and the commoner, claimed, in general, to be elitist. “I think the quality climbs up the tree of life. In general, high things in the tree of life have quality, have skills, and they get wonderful degrees at university. And they marry each other, and that gets them better again[ ...] I want parents and grandparents who've had hands-on success, running their battles well, and proving they're wonderful. Because one is the subject of one's genes, and I like the idea of them being successful genes, and winning through to successful puppies.” (The National) When the ‘commoners’ say there have been first-generation geniuses, Sir Humphry is having none of it. He insists when the commoners tackle him on this, that there are very few first-generation geniuses indeed. It wouldn’t have taken much to contradict the baron, even if the common people are put a bit on the spot, having not spent many years preoccupied with gene pools, unlike Sir Humphry. But he is a real-life equivalent of Mike Leigh’s fictional Rupert. Humphry may believe what he says, but he would, wouldn’t he? He is part of an aristocratic family, and insists this is fundamental to success. Yet what about a commoner who agrees with him; they won’t be functioning off the same level of self-interest the Baronet offers, and if anything, will be practising self-deprecation as they accept their lowly place in the world. Yet this will remain bad faith; they will tell us they are born to do menial tasks as the wealthy are born to become successful, and assume there is no point trying to better themselves because this is their place in life.
This is why we have been claiming class is a metaphysical system that is divorced from reality, but can nevertheless serve as a version of it. If everybody does what they are told, knows their place and won’t rock the boat, Britannia rules the waves. That many people coming from humble backgrounds succeed when given half a chance may, from a certain perspective, improve the country, but that depends on whose perspective counts. If someone wishes to see England remain a green and pleasant land where most of that land is owned by the brilliant few, these rising success stories aren’t success stories at all, but signs of degeneration. Whether someone comes from the elite or from relative poverty, bad faith at both ends can be practised as the people with the money, and the people without, accept this is their place. A person who doesn’t try to change their predicament may even potentially claim that to do so would be worse than futile: it would be damaging. In the Humphry argument, they would be weakening the great fibre of the country that needs to retain its elite system of ‘betters’. From a Sartrean perspective, this of course abdicates taking responsibility for one’s choice: society is what it is, and as a member of it, one accepts one’s place within it. However, no matter how restrictive the English class system is, how resolutely it remains in place, plenty of people, especially in the post-war years, have, from poor stock, made that stock rise, including numerous post-war actors like Richard Burton, Stanley Baker, Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay. Such examples may not prove that the class system is very flexible, but it does show it isn’t impregnable. Baker was the son of a coal miner who “at his peak…earned £120,000 for each film he made, at a time when the average house cost just £3,000.” (Imdb)
However, while taking advantage of opportunities may be an example of this choice, and a very materially evident one, this isn’t chiefly what interests us. Mike Leigh’s characters rarely move up a class, and if they do, they are not often happy, or presented well. Valerie in High Hopes and Barbara in Meantime may be living in private housing in suburbia, while other members of their family are council tenants, but Leigh doesn’t see much of a victory there. Hogg’s characters are already usually doing so well for themselves, or coming from such wealth and comfort, that the sort of choice that could lead Finney, Baker and others to serious money isn’t the question. But what might be, especially if it can incorporate such socially disparate filmmakers as Leigh and Hogg, is how characters can find for themselves a place of resistance, a variation perhaps of Gide’s claim, offered by Costica Bradatan, on the herd mentality, “…the real value of an author consists in his revolutionary force, or more exactly … in his quality of opposition. A great artist is of necessity a ‘nonconformist’ and he must swim against the current of his day.” (Aeon)
The issue is really how one escapes the metaphysical expectation, the idea that society is so structured that people feel they are constrained by imperatives they can’t countenance. From a Sartrean angle, this acceptance would be a failure of choice, yet paradoxically, we might wonder if there is more potential resistance in Cyril in High Hopes, happy in his council flat, or in Edward in Archipelago, wondering what his role in life should be and feeling potentially more purposeful helping out in the kitchen than filling his pockets working in the city. While we can admire Finney and Baker for escaping working-class confines and achieving financial security potentially for generations, proving that class needn’t be necessarily incarcerating, from another perspective, they can be seen as exemplars of the metaphysical problem, rather than a solution to the ontological one. Moving through the class system illustrates individual choice as material gain, but if we are right to see the metaphysical as a system that is unchanging in its nature and only the ontological registering a proper shift in perspective, then what Leigh and Hogg’s films examine, and that the wealth and fame of various stars do not, is the presence of the metaphysics of class, and the difficulties involved in living within it and defying it for oneself. This is an individuality quite different from personal success, and surely from a certain point of view, Cyril and Edward are more resistant than Baker, who was given a knighthood shortly before he died, and Burton, a CBE. This made him a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a prepositional mouthful as clumsy, some might think, as the system it supports. Working class success can show that the system isn’t fixed, pun intended, but it may just be allowing enough malleability so that it needn’t be changed, no matter frequent talk about the abolition of Britain’s House of Lords — the only second chamber in the world larger than the first in a bicameral system, and an unelected house at that.
Yet it isn’t enough that the characters might resist the sort of honours that Baker and Burton accepted. This would leave us inside character and representation, when what is interesting about Leigh and Hogg is their aesthetic, no matter if Leigh’s often seems chaotic, and Hogg’s is controlled. Leigh’s shot choices don’t seem arbitrary, of course, and he often speaks about the importance of the technical aspects, his work with production designer Alison Chitty, and his cinematographer Dick Pope. There is an important long-take when Cynthia in Secrets and Lies meets up with her adopted daughter, and the colour arc used in Another Year. Yet there is also frequent close-ups to register emotion, and non-diegetic music to emphasise feeling. Hogg’s work is often more resistant to such character identification, brilliantly exemplified in a scene from Unrelated. Here, a father is balling out his Old Etonian almost-grown-up-yet-still-immature son (Hiddleston), who has been involved in crashing a friend’s car. The conversation takes place inside the villa, but the camera remains outside, next to the swimming pool, and Hogg offers a few close-ups of the other characters who can’t help but hear the roaring argument. It is the type of sequence that counters fundamentally the sort of soap opera dynamics that assumes conflict has a form: shot/ counter shot, and a few reaction shots thrown in. There are amusing compilation clips online showing Eastenders conflicts and, though Hogg wouldn’t have directed any of them, she did direct that Eastenders special, Dot’s Story, which wasn’t quite Hogg, but wasn’t quite Eastenders either. It has flashbacks, a bit more reflection and shots are held longer than usual. But Hogg was a veteran of TV and knew well its expectations, saying: “having endlessly explored camera movement in my TV days, I wanted to create a more contemplative cinema. I like to give the audience time to explore the frame and become intimate with it.” (Bafta.Org)
In both Leigh and Hogg, their work invites inquiry: it asks us to see the character shaped by a form that goes beyond them, and in turn expects us perhaps to see beyond the situations that shape the characters. Just as society is formed by structures that help determine action, so film gives form to characterisational possibilities. In the scene from Unrelated, Hogg doesn’t offer a standard argument; all the better to leave us identifying with the specifics of character, she asks us to see the pool, the house in the background, the argument taking place within it. If Eastenders so often wishes to find the most active and predictable way to film an argument, and leaves us oblivious not just to the form, but the broader social context as the events usually happen with the confines of Albert Square (though Hogg’s special took the show to Wales), then Hogg appears to muse over what it means to film a conflict from the most aloof position possible. Though the scene in Unrelated concerns most fundamentally the film’s central character, Anna (Kathryn Worth), who lets slip the nature of the accident, and will be ostracised by the youths she has previously been hanging out with, nobody watching the clip out of context will assume Anna is especially vital to the scene. As the father yells at his son, saying “you’re a young adult now for fuck’s sake”, the camera looks on, leaving the viewer to muse over the low mood in this high-class environment. If Hogg and Leigh’s films were just about characters finding a way to escape their class origins, or becoming belligerent about English mores, this wouldn’t be very challenging, and wouldn’t demand an examination of the metaphysical and the ontological as we have been couching it. Those very fine angry young men films of the late fifties and early sixties, from This Sporting Life to A Kind of Loving, Look Back in Anger to A Room at the Top, seem to be exploring northern lives over the delineation of class divisions, as though the political and the social matter more than the minutiae of class. Like Loach’s English films, Alan Clarke’s work, and also Terrence Davies’ Liverpool films, any extended filmography of Englishness would include them.
Yet both Leigh and Hogg examine Englishness with a forensic focus, one that proposes escape isn’t possible; that all one can hope to do is acknowledge the relative choice to hand. It may take the form of anger, beseechment, breakdown or acceptance in Leigh’s work; dismay, desperation, drive or desire in Hogg’s. In Leigh’s films, there are plenty of angry young men, especially Johnny (David Thewlis) in Naked, but also Cyril and others too, and yet we look at the films and notice how much more implicated the characters are in social structures than in the Kitchen Sink films. One senses the young men in the earlier ones will settle down without much difficulty; In Leigh’s films, the nervous system would have to settle down as well, and that isn’t only, or especially, a male problem. Valerie and Cynthia in High Hopes and Secrets and Lies, the bulimic daughter in Life is Sweet, and Mary, in Another Year, also have this reaction to a system where class meets nerves. Hogg offers it as well, but in a different manifestation. It is the difference between hyperbole and litotes, and partly why Leigh has often been accused of caricature, which Hogg’s work escapes. Leigh has defended himself against such claims frequently, saying, for example, “…it comes from a way of looking at movies which is more about looking in terms of movie language than it is about looking at films in terms of people and the world out there.“ (RogerEbert) He thinks people have expectations of cinematic drama that cannot countenance the behaviour he shows.
Yet there seems no doubt Leigh is drawn to exaggeration, as Hogg is not. He often manages brilliantly, messily, to show the close alliance between the nervous system and the class system, while Hogg is more inclined to show a catatonic acceptance, an inert body language, where body movements are minimal, careful and conscious. Hogg reckons, “The most interesting thing to me [is] body language and how people interact on screen. It’s like a dance” (Seventh Row). In Leigh’s work, it is more a scrum; a social free-for-all where he often utilises the set-piece situation to bring out tensions that are there in the individual’s body language, but which then enter language and event: the barbecue in Secrets and Lies, the birthday party in High Hopes, the restaurant disaster in Life is Sweet. There are set pieces of sorts in Hogg’s films as well, and often focused on meals: the one already mentioned in Archipelago, but another even more awkward restaurant visit in the same film; the friends coming round in Souvenir, and telling the central character Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) her partner has a drug problem. But there is also the shouting match we have discussed in Unrelated, the moment in Exhibition where the estate agents are asked to take their shoes off, the scene in Souvenir 2 when the central character breaks a piece of pottery her mum has made — a scene fraught with emotion, more fragile than the broken object. Hogg’s characters are usually understated, and if not, as in the Unrelated scene, she finds a form to contain the overreaction. Leigh has no such interest in subtlety and seeks the maximum emotional commotion, pushing everything into text that Hogg insists remains subtextual. It is the difference between English expression and English repression: the vulgarity of Beryl Cook, Viz and Carry On isn’t too far away from Leigh’s vision; while Hogg’s is closer to the Englishness of Bloomsbury, Pinter and Hockney’s double portraits, most famously ‘Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy’.
7
However, their final purpose seems similar: to escape the confines of an English identity that doesn’t let one be oneself. If this sounds like a useless truism, it contains within it a tautological difficulty — to claim that I am what I am means first of all finding a way out of the assumption that being English is what somebody is, and that everything follows from such a claim. How, instead, to become oneself? Writing in 2005, Andy Beckett noted, “…the feverish popularity of beach huts, and of knobbly local potatoes at farmers’ markets, the rebranding of fish and chips and sausages and mash as restaurant dishes, the transformation of peeling old resorts such as Whitstable and Hastings into locations for second homes and fashion shoots, even the status of the name Jack.” (Guardian) To claim in such a context that one is English is the opposite of the tautological, but at the same time a revelation of insistent belonging. Leigh and Hogg wonder what goes beyond this national instinct, and also what is contained by it. Both Leigh and Hogg’s characters may often feel that they aren’t happy with their underprivileged or overprivileged lot, but they are products of their environment that different forms of awkwardness insist on revealing, and where the characters seek individuation as best they can.
It is this attempt at individuation that seems missing from Sanders’ work, even though his films are as English as Leigh’s and Hogg’s. He is also a director given to improvisation. “We make films without permission,” he says. “We do what we bloody well want. And that’s what we want to do.” (Brigg) Yet for all the freedom evident in this low-budget director’s work, there is also something cramped, crabby and hemmed in as well — as though the English sensibility cannot quite get past the improvisatory and budgetary freedom it allows itself. It isn’t television, but it can feel like it, containing a soap opera sense of rhythm and a situation comedy’s sense of discomfort. Sanders tends not to push towards the dramatic car crash of soap, nor the set-piece laugh of the comedic, and the film’s aesthetic is, of course, much more deliberate than even the best comedy shows like Fawlty Towers and Yes, Minister. It isn’t looking for the conflict or the laugh that TV soap and sitcoms are obligated to provide, and Sanders can thus be much freer in his form, as he often offers long takes and shows characters at proximate distances from each other. But equally, it doesn’t quite achieve the individuating aspect that Leigh and Hogg insist upon. It sounds like all we are saying is that films by Sanders like Back to the Garden, A Change in the Weather and A Clever Woman are neither one thing nor another: neither conforming to TV expectation, nor achieving ontological significance. But that is too harsh even if more than a little true. If we include Sanders alongside Leigh and Hogg, it isn’t only to show up his mediocrity next to the other directors, nor to draw the three of them together because they are all given to improvisation. There is in his work an Englishness we aren’t quite going to find in those TV shows, nor in any number of films: the type of thing David Sims notes in Hogg’s work: “suffused with the kind of English tension Hogg specializes in — awkward pauses and benign sounding chitchat that tiptoes around deeper, darker feelings.” (The Atlantic)
Soap operas and sitcoms don’t often allow for such moments. The tension is usually aggressive, not awkward in soaps, and the laughs sitcoms seek are too big for the low-key embarrassment that Sims discusses. Yet Sanders’ work is full of this awkwardness: as if social interaction, even between people who are intimately associated, is always trying to find a way of alleviating this tension. If we claim that Leigh and Hogg do so by finding an individuating significance that Sanders’ films lack, then, nevertheless, his work does at least register the tension without relying on overt drama or humour to alleviate it. We can think of similar scenes in Back to the Garden and A Change in the Weather. In the first, long-married couple Jack (Bob Goody) and Julia (Anna Mottram ), are chatting while Julia cuts his hair. The scene is both direct and sub-textual, a discussion about Jack’s amorous life, as if two friends were talking about assignations rather than a conversation between a husband and wife. We might think that this is Julia trying to make small talk, even if by most people’s reckoning it would be big talk indeed. However, it is small talk if we accept this is stuff they have discussed numerous times before. “I thought she was going to be one of your girlfriends on the last tour”, Julia says, of someone who will be joining them for a stay at a still-grieving friend’s house. “You can get the blokes in if you want”, Jack says. “I’ve always said it.” It seems Jack, a theatre director, likes company when he is touring, and why shouldn’t Julia have a man about the house while he is away? What Julia doesn’t know is that this woman, whom she thought was going to be one of Jack’s girlfriends, is someone he has fallen in love with, though the feelings aren’t mutual. We can read in certain expressions on Jack’s face that there is more to Stella than just a fling, and we can see what Julia can’t, even if the film hasn’t given us advance knowledge of Jack’s feelings. The scene takes place less than a third of the way through the film, and the previous scenes have focused chiefly on the feelings of another character, the grieving friend who is the house owner. Julia can’t see the expression on his face because there is no suggestion that they are facing a mirror, though we can’t say for sure since the shot is a single take with no counter-shot.
Sanders sets up an awkward encounter that needn’t be deemed so by Julia, but is clearly so for Jack. We are well aware that this discussion has taken place before, and we can assume this isn’t the first time Julia has cut Jack’s long hair. In some ways, we might wonder if these are characters who have escaped the limits of Englishness, if we return to Orwell and his remark that “millions of English people willingly accept as their national emblem the bulldog, an animal noted for its obstinacy, ugliness, and impenetrable stupidity. They have a remarkable readiness to admit that foreigners are more ‘clever’ than themselves, and yet they feel that it would be an outrage against the laws of God and Nature for England to be ruled by foreigners.” (‘The English People’) Sanders’ characters would be unlikely to own bulldogs, would probably see themselves as no less bright than their European neighbours, and wouldn’t much care who ran the country as long as the authorities didn’t interfere in their liberal lifestyle. As Leslie Felperin noted when reviewing A Change in the Weather: these are “…highly educated, haute bourgeois Brits and Europeans with cultural capital to spare, endlessly fascinated with examining themselves, their relationships, their art.” (Guardian)
The director would seem more interested in artistic types than English stereotypes: not just in Back to the Garden, but in A Change to the Weather and A Clever Woman as well. In A Change of the Weather, the same actors are back, playing a couple, the husband adulterous and a theatre director. In A Clever Woman, two daughters discuss their late mother: they are performance artists, and the mother was a philandering actress. Sanders’ characters are bohemian types and also part of a post-sixties sense of taking responsibility for their bodies and what they may choose to do with them. Though Sanders often presents or alludes to long-suffering partners who accept the husband or wife’s adulterous ways, there is also the assumption that this is what people do: personal morality or love might hold someone back, but the social order needn’t. Thus, it would be hard to claim Sanders’ characters are repressed, as in different ways Leigh’s and Hogg’s sometimes are. But there is in many of the exchanges a suppression of self that might appear initially hard to locate, since expression is evident and repression far from necessary. We can think of a scene early in A Change in the Weather. Lydia (Mottram) and Dan (Goody) discuss the play they are working on in the south of France locale they have chosen, where they’re spending a week working on it. During an interview process that dissolves a little life and art, Lydia gets a bit irate over a question concerning gifts, and their approach to them reflects differences and perhaps degrees of love. There they are discussing this moment and other things, with Dan in the bath and Lydia with a towel around her, standing there with her arms crossed. Here, we do have a mirror, and Sanders uses it well to create a counter-shot without cutting. When Lydia initially turns from the mirror, we see her unreflected and Dan’s double, before the film pans to Lydia, and Dan is all but out of the frame. Clearly, Sanders is a director who cares about what he is doing and wishes to find a style that will convey freedom in the performance, one that is matched by a creative freedom on the part of the characters. But for all their liberal leanings, their philandering ways, and the films’ bohemian trappings, we might wonder if Englishness sits more deeply in them than the bohemianism they convey.
Near the end of A Change in the Weather, at a rustic dining table, Lydia says she is leaving him, and Dan falls apart. He conveys well not the desolation of a man in shock, but someone whose expectations aren’t being met. Lydia isn’t supposed to leave; that isn’t how things work. One could see this as just a standard misogynist of a given age belonging to a certain generation, someone who thinks hypocritically that affairs are okay for him but the spouse should be there for life. Yet the hypocrisy and misogyny seem weak next to the expectation, as though at the core of Dan’s personality isn’t male entitlement, nor even vulnerability or loneliness, but a set of values that are no longer evident. When Lydia tells Dan she doesn’t love him anymore and they should split up, he reacts like a bad actor. However, this isn’t because Bob Goody is poor, but because the response is weak. What makes it seem so is that he doesn’t appear devastated, but disappointed. Devastation would suggest a collapse of one’s centre, but disappointment a peripheral failure. Lydia has deeply disappointed him; her refusal to live up to his expectation as a wife who ought never to desert her husband leaves him utterly bewildered. Thus, it wouldn’t be fair to say that Goody gives a poor performance, that he plays the role without much conviction. Sanders captures well that the conviction, such as it is, lies outside Dan’s interior domain and belongs to the societal. It is a variation of our earlier remarks about English society and how unimportant it happens to be from a certain perspective that egalitarianism be practised. If everyone has their place, then for Dan, Lydia must remain his wife. He would maybe claim that, like Jack’s comments to Julia, he’d be happy if she would take the odd man of her own, which may or may not be true, but what she mustn’t do is leave the man she has been with for many years. Her role is as the dutiful wife, though with both words clearly operative; nevertheless, the wife is the paramount one. “I couldn’t exist without you”, he says, adding, “you can’t, you can’t leave me…”, as he insists, rather than admits, that he can’t be alone. “That’s why we’ve been together for all these years, because I can’t be alone. I need you; you have to be here. You know that. You have to be here.” It sounds somewhere between a cry of despair and a complaint made to a company that has sent him a faulty item.
A similar scene takes place in Back to the Garden, but with Julia dutiful and self-sacrificial as she refuses to be by the end of A Change in the Weather. We have seen that Jack is in love with another woman, and his usual philandering ways have this time led to a long-term infatuation that Julia senses. Julia tells him, as they sit on a bench in the fading light, that he is unhappy, and if it is better, they part to allow him to become happier. “If being with me is making you unhappy, I am not going to hold on to you”, she says, her hand on his knee. It is a single shot based on the one preceding it. He has been watching the woman he adores helping one of the others on a tightrope laid out in the garden, as we realise when the film cuts to Jack looking on. In the background of this counter shot is Julia, sitting in the house, and Jack moves to the garden bench, looking longingly at his adored object. Julia then enters the frame, looks offscreen at the woman, and sits next to Jack, and says she is willing to let him go. It shows Sanders with a sense of craft and a feel for visual understatement. In another filmmaker’s work, it might show possibilities beyond the world in which the characters are caught: the sort of long takes in Tarkovsky at his most elevated, and Jancso at his most political. But we must remember that this isn’t an option in Englishness as we have couched it; that the best one can do is resist the expectations placed upon the individual, and to fight for self-definition within that.
8
England’s most spiritual filmmakers may have been Powell and Pressburger, yet the films have too facetious or artificial a tone: from the idea of a monochrome, legalistic heaven in A Matter of Life and Death, to the studio stylistics of Black Narcissus. England’s most political director is Ken Loach, who is a resolute realist when it comes to political action, someone who makes films all over the UK and Ireland, but remains committed to a positivist politics of improved circumstances. He isn’t concerned with a metaphysics of power, as Jancso and, in a different way, his fellow Hungarian Bela Tarr happen to be. There seems to be no such thing as the English soul as we might think of the Russian soul, or even the Celtic or Scandinavian soul. And this might seem odd, considering England gave us both the metaphysical poets and a key component of Romanticism. But Samuel Johnson coined the former term dismissively, saying “the metaphysical poets were men of learning...The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.” (Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, vol. 1) The English Romantic poets were, of course, part of a broader European movement, but it is as though, for good and ill, they never entered the consciousness of the English, unlike German Romanticism for the Germans, which has often been associated with its Nazi appropriation. This is evident when Bronte Wells says, “It is through researching and analyzing the how and why the Nazis appropriated Romanticism that allows academics to study the influences from the past in the development of National Socialism, while accounting for the frame that the Nazis used to read the Romantics and the purpose for the way that Romantic literature was framed within Nazi-Germany.” (‘The Third Reich and the Appropriation of Romanticism’)
We are unlikely to find blame for Brexit residing at all in Coleridge and Keats, though we may find it just a little in poets of the first World War, with Charlie Connelly reckoning “Rupert Brooke was almost the perfect poster boy for glorious death in the service of the nation” (The New European) Also, whether we like it or not, Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ might have helped it along as well. We can think of lines like Brooke’s effortlessly well-known “If I should die, think only this of me:/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England.” Or Blake’s “And was the holy Lamb of God/On England's pleasant pastures seen?/And did the countenance divine/Shine forth upon our clouded hills?” As Jason Whittaker says, “whether patriotic or ironic, a shared feature of all 'Jerusalem’ allusions tends to be a sense that everyone knows what it is about as an archetype of Englishness.” (Prospect)
Let us not get caught up in history, but allow for a smidgen of it to understand the sort of work under discussion, and add just a little philosophy. Plato, for example, reckoned the state is infused with a soul that resembles that of an individual person, while Nietzsche was often interested in the soul of particular nations, and didn’t think too highly of the English one, such as it was. “[J. S] Mill is accused of mediocrity and lack of psychological subtlety, and these failings seem to Nietzsche characteristic of the whole of the English way of life, with its good-natured bad taste, its comfortable laissez-faire, its small-minded aspirations and seeming inability to face the starkest issue.” (‘Nietzsche’s Views on the English and His Concept of a European Community’) What Nietzsche would have seen was a utilitarian soul, where individuality is secondary to a general notion of happiness. But while we might disagree with Nietzsche on the insignificance of the happiness and well-being of the many, we may wonder if this utilitarian happiness is predicated on a system that leaves the English soul an oxymoron. Our claim needn’t be so harsh, and we insist only that the English soul as a national, as opposed to an individual characteristic, is a contradiction in terms.
The English offer, generally, instead, as we have insisted upon, a metaphysics of class rather than that of soul, and one has to reject this class assumption as the basis of one’s identity to find an existence beyond it. England has no shortage of great poets, novelists, painters, musicians, sculptors and playwrights: Blake, Turner, Lawrence, Benjamin Britten, Henry Moore and Harold Pinter. Here was a cockney (Blake), a working-class Yorkshireman (Moore), a gay man (Britten) and the son of a semi-literate miner (Lawrence). Turner was the son of a barber and his mother was from a family of butchers. Leigh, of course, made a film about Turner, Mr Turner, and was deemed to play up the working class aspect of Turner’s life over the middle-class reality. According to the right-wing critic Dominic Green, Leigh wanted to offer an “anachronistic class war”. “Turner came from London's "middling sort," the precursor of the future middle class. His mother's family lived on the rent of several properties. The men of his father's family were respectable artisans and small traders” Green says. “He became a rich man through his acute reading of the market and the game of patronage. Turner was a harbinger of the modern middle class—and not, as Mike Leigh suggests, the modern proletariat.” (New Republic) Leigh may well have exaggerated the proletarian aspect of Turner’s life, but either way would have been consistent with Leigh’s interest in class turbulence. Rather than being a warrior for the working class, Leigh has always been a director preoccupied with the delineation of its fault lines. What interests the director isn’t people getting on or not, but being themselves, as though the jerky body language of so many of his characters is a reflection of people being pulled in various directions. It is as if class is determined to shape, but the self is often determined to shape itself. Turner would be yet another example of this interest in Leigh’s oeuvre.
Looking at but three filmmakers, someone might think the data pool is too small. What about Ken Russell, Derek Jarman, Tony Richardson, Mike Hodges, Lindsay Anderson, Peter Watkins, Peter Greenaway, Stephen Frears and Sally Potter, for example? But most of those named have become Anglo-American in their filmmaking, or European in their interests and funding sources. One could argue for an alternative trio of Anderson, Russell and Jarman, playing up an absurd, mocking Englishness that would have a little in common with Leigh, though nothing in common with Hogg — no matter if Jarman and Hogg have shared a muse in Tilda Swinton. The Englishness we present is but one of several, perhaps many. As Anthony Barnett says, “Englishness" may be a "construct," to use the latest jargon, a notion invented in opposition to others — the un-English. Arguments about whether Mrs. Thatcher is truly English or not, take the form of whether it is "un-English" to be socialist or to love making money, or "more English" to be reasonable than to be intolerant.” “These are arguments about who we are…yet the fact that we can have such disagreements also means that there is no simple, singular criterion: no unchanging essence of the nation.” (Open Democracy)
This might seem like a contradiction too far — that we have been arguing for an essence of Englishness and, at the same time, we are concluding that it can take various forms. Maybe our distinction between a metaphysical generalisation and ontological individuation can help us here. There are many films and filmmakers that fall into the metaphysical assumption, one that seems not at all to question Englishness at its core, but only allows for the occasional tweaks at the edges. Film-wise, we would include The King’s Speech, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love, Actually, Young Victoria, The Queen, The Remains of the Day, Darkest Hour, and Pride and Prejudice. But it wouldn’t only be films about privilege and comfort. Billy Elliot, Little Voice, and The Full Monty would be included. These are films that don’t create the individual voices that allow Englishness to be pluralised. There might appear to be an enormous difference between The King’s Speech and Billy Elliot, but they are both works that present a unified Englishness, despite the different classes evident. Indeed, this is the very point: that Englishness may be diverse socio-economically, but unified by class assumption. It became so embedded in English life that it even had a hymn reflecting it: Cecil Alexander’s All Things Bright and Beautiful, with its lines, “The rich man in his castle/The poor man at his gate/He made them, high or lowly/And ordered their estate.” Here is a sentiment not far removed from the Baronet of Wakefield’s, and while Sir Humphry got to air his comments briefly on television, Alexander’s lines worked their way into childhood minds from Penzance to Berwick-Upon-Tweed, and for well over a century. It is a sentiment that says we are all unequal in God’s eyes, and what can seem more metaphysically absolute as a class statement than that? In Leigh and Hogg’s work, we see that such a metaphysical claim seems weak, or rather that it weakens those who are expected to live under its rubric. In Sanders’ films, the presence of Englishness as we have been defining it is no less strong, but the weakness appears less of an ontological problem, and perhaps why, though his films are careful, cineliterate and always intelligent, they lack a quality of fret and inquiry that Leigh and Hogg’s films insist upon. The latter two seem to want something more from England, and the characters must escape metaphysical assumption to get it, or accept these limitations with sadness and sometimes despair. What could alleviate that despair is another question, and would require the deepest of excavatory revolutions in a country that doesn’t do that sort of thing.
© Tony McKibbin