Ratcatcher

A film can have a strong narrative hook without having an assertive narrative focus, and this might partly be predicated on the degree to which the film concentrates on internalised moods over external conditions. In Ratcatcher, the film has this initial hook as central character James and his mate Ryan Quinn play in the canal, and James dunks Ryan’s head under the water. In an elliptical moment, we know the boy has drowned. But this isn’t a murder; it is an accident – an event that needn’t be investigated but needs to be understood. An investigation would turn that narrative hook into narrative assertion, but the accidental nature of the deed and the burgeoning awareness that James realises he is responsible, if not quite guilty, allows director Lynne Ramsay to explore the milieu over any notion of a crime.

Set in mid-1970s Glasgow, during a bin strike and in a part of the city where increasing numbers of people are being relocated to better housing on the outskirts, Ratcatcher has a weak narrative centre, all the better to explore a richly textured environment. Many of the images don’t propel the story; they hold it in abeyance, lingering over details that allow us to understand James’ sensibility through what he sees over what he thinks, and in turn what others see also. It is partly why the film’s shocks and events are contained within sensitivity over being revealed by insensitivity. If the film is an inverted thriller, it is important to acknowledge what that inversion entails. Before the film’s title comes onto the screen, we see a boy who turns out to be Ryan playing inside a curtain before, out of frame, his mother administers a slap that is all the more shocking for the hand’s entrance into the frame, and the slow-motion image shifts to normal motion as the slap comes in. A little later, Ramsay shows us a long shot through an upstairs window as we see James and Ryan down below at the canal. She then cuts abruptly from this tranquil shot of observation to a hard cut that also utilises the frame. We see a pair of arms entering the shot and pushing Ryan into the water. That combination of the cut from the window to the canal, and the close-up that shows us only part of James’ body as he pushes Ryan, is central to the film’s sensitive account of the insensitive. Ratcatcher insists on relative narrative weakness all the better to bring out its tactile fragility.

Ramsay may have said, ‘‘To be honest, I was trying to go into the psychology of the scenes, going into why we’re shooting this way, why we’re looking at it that way, trying to get under the skin of it a bit, inside the boy’s head.’’ (Indiewire) But it is more that the film is epidermal rather than psychological: it offers the skin of the film, to invoke the title of Laura U Marks’ book of that name. It is close to what Jennifer Barker argues for in The Tactile Eye and that Bridget Cowlishaw insists on seeing in it when she says Barker ‘’explores the contact zone between film and viewer, where we as viewers are not afforded a distant—penetrating or clinical gaze but are pushed ‘too close to comfort’ to the film’s surface. This proximity to what Barker calls the film’s skin, where we lack orientation and visual control over the film space, is unsettling and, ultimately, envelopes us emotionally in the film. We [...] do not see a film with emotional distance but feel it.’’ (Southwest Journal of Cultures)

Ramsay’s approach to this question isn’t always one of closeness but often its opposite, distance, yet retaining an empathic gaze, whatever the proximity. We see it when Ryan is dead and his parents are moving away, the mother and father trying to put a wardrobe in the back of the removal van. He leaves her taking most of the weight as he begins to put it into the vehicle, and she loses her grip as it smashes to the ground. The image is a medium long shot and the consideration is there in the moment even before we then cut back to James and the mother passing on the other side of the street: James’ mum rushes over to help after Ryan’s mum blames her husband for Ryan’s death, and she is seen crying on the pavement, Ramsay understands the proximity of compassion, which needn’t always be based on the close up, but more on the disintegration of the shots’ purposefulness and turning them into units of care. After James goes into the Quinns’ house, after Mrs Quinn offers him the sandals she had bought Ryan just before he died, James guiltily rushes up the stairs and collides with Mr Quinn as another item gets smashed. After picking the sandals up, James comes back down the stairs, and the film cuts to Mr Quinn’s tearful face as his eyes look up at nothing in particular, though the shot might invoke just a little Carl Dreyer’s famous film of suffering, The Passion of the Joan of Arc. But whether seeing the Quinns on the other side of the street, or Mr Quinn in close-up, the empathy is similar.

Perhaps the notion of the haptic gaze needn’t be based on invoking touch either in active hapticity or in a close-up that all but brushes up against the skin, but in a defamiliarisation that allows for a re-familiarising compassion. Looking at Ratcatcher and the haptic, David Trotter notes that ‘‘Aloïs Riegl borrowed the term from physiology in order to delineate a way of looking in which the eyes function to some extent like organs of touch. Optical visuality (vision as ordinarily understood) depends on a degree of separation between the viewing subject and the object viewed. Haptic looking, by contrast, tends by Marks’s account to ‘move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth.’’’ (‘Lynn Ramsay’s Ratcatcher: Towards a Theory of Haptic Narrative’) But rather than proposing Ramsay wants to invoke touch, instead, we believe she manages to arrive at the touching. Yet the film’s hapticity allows it to be so without the film becoming sentimental. We can agree with Trotter when he says, ‘’familiarity is the world taken in one piece at a time. Familiarity is life lived in extreme close-up, by means of a racking of focus which never allows one plane to settle into coherent relation with another. Familiarity is all texture.’’ But like Terence Davies with Distant Voices Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, and Malick in moments in Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Tree of Life, Ramsay creates what we might call a pathetic texture, or a texture of pathos, giving to events a sense of presence and loss simultaneously. This isn’t about the camera’s distance or closeness to things, but the distance the details have from the immediacy of narrative function and purpose.

To understand Ramsay’s distance from narrative, and closeness to feelings, we can think of the three canal drowning scenes: the first unequivocal tragedy, the second a near tragedy that James’s father George averts by saving a boy from drowning, and the third, which becomes ambiguous as it looks like James takes his own life. Ramsay spent a lot of money creating the canal, unable to find one that would be clean enough and available enough for her needs. ‘‘I never normally work with sets. I like to get the feeling that you’re in the real place. That always makes me feel much more comfortable as well. ‘‘There was quite a lot of set work in Ratcatcher, mainly because the canals are so polluted that there was no way we could go near them. The kind of canals we could use were far too pretty and didn’t look like the canals in inner cities.’’ So Ramsay decided ‘‘to build a canal on a very low budget[…] We started digging and we wanted to go deep but there was toxic waste underground so it cost 10,000 pounds to remove that. The whole thing became a bit of a large-scale event. It gave us loads of freedom in the end, though!’’ (Indiewire) When your set involves three incidents, it can seem far from a waste of money to get it right.

It also gives to the film its gravitational centre, its depth, so to speak. It isn’t only in three key incidents that it shows its importance. There is also the moment when the group of boys a little older than James threaten to throw him in the water, the boys throw in the canal the glasses of a young woman they have all been sleeping with, Margaret Anne, and late in the film the canal is again of importance as we see Jamie trying to receive the glasses after he has become very attached to her. Ramsay views the canal as necessary to the story’s instigation, but then allows it to return in various manifestations. Often a film’s instigative incident needn’t have any repercussive effect. It is there to set the story in motion; it isn’t there to provoke a permeating feeling, even when it might be predicated upon emotion. We note this is in the title character’s husband’s death in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, as it leads her to pursue a singing career across the states with her son in tow. And too when the boys who set off on a quest to find the body of a boy run over by a train in Stand By Me. And also in Up in the Air, for example, as a Human Resources figure who loves travelling, gets told he should lay off workers by conference call instead of in person. He finds this too impersonal, and there are hints of a crisis. These are all effective films, and far from works that only create an opening inciting moment all the better to proceed with the mayhem, where the death or kidnapping of a loved one leads to numerous bodies piling up (Commando, Braveheart, Taken). But they don’t create, like Ratcatcher, a mise en scene which constantly doubles back on itself and insists on an ever-expanding circle of feeling that comes so strongly from this mise en scene. The images don’t resonate; they formulate, as they are pressed into telling their story effectively. Ramsay gathers them to tell her story affectively, using the haptic aspect to give texture to the place that, in turn, will give us an idea of the environment Jamie is coming out of. It is one where people get pushed into canals, where someone’s glasses are removed and thrown away so that they can no longer see clearly; one where George can be beaten up at night after a few drinks too many, and is seen sentimentally hugging a kitten. It is where a teenage girl, Margaret Anne seeks affection and finds sex but no love when she allows the various kids her age to take her one by one. It is where a mum slaps her son for wrapping himself in a net curtain, and where the central character will find new half-built homes on the outskirts of the city and urinate in a toilet that has still to be fitted, as we watch the pee spreading over the new floors. Not all these scenes are set around the canal, but many are, and what might seem an indulgence in another film, as much of the budget goes on one set, is far from that in this Instance.

There is a risk in so much miserabilism that Ramsay has fallen into one of the standard narratives of Scottish culture: Looking at Clydesidism (which is often conflated with miserablism), Eleanor Yule notes: ‘‘The urban wastelands and down-at-heel domestic settings, which dominate the trope, are box-ready in Scotland’s central belt, which is also conveniently located close to broadcast production bases, saving on travel and overnight expenses.’’ She reckons, ‘‘Miserabilism’s “realist” aesthetic also requires less ‘stage craft’, often favouring available light and documentary style camerawork, which makes filming schedules shorter and also harder to see that the film is a construction.’’ (The National) Practically, one could say Ramsay hasn’t fallen into Clydeside Miserablism because she built an expensive set, proving that if Miserabalism is predicated on doing things on the cheap, Ratcatcher isn’t Miserabalist. But that would be too easy an answer, just as it would be facile too to insist that usually the central characters in Clydesidism are late or post-industrial men, and, since in Ratcatcher the father’s role isn’t central, this isn’t an example of it.

Ramsay resists the trope by incorporating many aspects of Miserablism anfd then insisting not on the cliches central to such films (dirty stairwells; demotic language, stabbings, casual cruelty and teen gangs, all of which are presentf), but on giving to them a texture they never before quite possessed. When Trotter speaks of mess and hapticity, he reckons "that mess exacerbates that renewal by enforcing upon us sight and touch, sight-as-touch. It shows us matter radically: that is, not for the first time, but again(and again) through the displacements worked by spillage, tearing, fragmentation, decay.’’ But what the haptic can do with mess and other elements associated with a Clydeside Misereablist aesthetic, is renew objects, removing from them their instantaneous prejudice and giving them back their physical complexity. If Clydesidism is one of Scotland’s foremost narratives, as Yule observes, then Ramsay keeps the Clydesidism but removes much of its narrative expectation. George’s beating doesn’t lead to revenge, just as the scars we see on the actor Tommy Flanagan’s face (from an incident in his life during his twenties) aren’t explained away. They are part of the film’s fabric as it seeks a weave that is as much textural as textual, determined to find a variation on Muriel Spark’s ‘’transfiguration of the common place’’; Siegfried Kracauer’s redemption of physical reality.

One could argue this is exactly what plot does: it takes elements of the world and shapes them into the elements of a narrative. However, the risk is that because the story is the thing, the image becomes a secondary aspect there to serve a primary purpose. Ramsay proposes the image initself can become primary and narrative secondary without eradicating story altogether – a potential problem in a purely haptic cinema that so concentrates on things that no shape can form around them. Most of Marks’ examples come from experimental film as she says, ‘‘filmmakers have been exploring the relationship between perception and embodiment for years, offering a mimetic alternative to the mainstream narrativization of experience.’’ She sees in her work a debt to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘‘for thinking an open system, always ready to make connections where they are most productive rather than most expected.’ (The Skin of the Film) She may attend to a few films that play with narrative possibilities (Atom Egoyan’s Calendar and Elia Suleiman’s Chronicle of a Disappearance) but this isn’t quite where the book’s focus happens to be. Ramsay wishes to keep narrative absolutely central to the film’s tactility.

Ratcatcher insists the story still matters because otherwise the emotions it seeks might be tempered by the objects it lingers over. Instead, these objects often carry the weight of emotional heft, literally so with the wardrobe that collapses on the street as Mrs Quinn can’t quite carry the load. Those glasses that Margaret Anne has to do without after the boys throw them in the canal, we see later as James tries to retrieve them. He fails, in a perfect encapsulation of the object’s affective capacity. If James had fished them out just after the boys threw them in, this would be touching but not quite moving, and if he did manage to lift them out of the water much later, givng them to Margaret Anne, this might be too close to the sentimental. In both instances, they would have served plot but been contained by a weakened or overly heightened emotion. Instead, James tries and fails, as though Ramsay wanted the object to retain its status as an object of feeling, as the glasses remain yet another thing lost to the murk of the canal. Of course, the viewer wishes James could have fished out those glasses, and Ramsay is interested enough in story for us to urge him on in the attempt. But here events needn’t come to anything narratively because the priority is that they come to something as things in the world that have been captured on screen. Ramsay insists that narrative contains them but does not control them, and it gives to the work a contemplative presence that insists subjectivity – the vague and guilty conscience of a young boy – meets with the objectivity of things as they are over those storytelling insist they must become. Ratcatcher may bring to mind a number of films about young people trying to grasp the magnitude of their situation (Germany Year Zero, The 400 Blows, Kes and Rosetta, the latter made the same year as Ramsay’s film). But few before it have managed to capture the indifference of the world around the youthful characters with quite such a fabric of feeling.