Resisting Realities
Belligerent Social Realism
Looking at a handful of specifically English films between the beginning of the seventies to the early nineties, we can see how the shake-up that Britain needed wasn’t a return to authority and traditional values; it needed a reassessment of those that had been tempered without being countered. It was as if the post-war consensus was never really consensual but chiefly a suspension of hostilities, with the working class winning some concessions but the establishment retaining many of their privileges. Much has been made of the post-war Labour government setting up the welfare state, nationalising major industries and creating the National Health Service. But the monarchy remained, the honours system continued, the House of Lords still stood, and public schools were protected. The consensus was that the working people were given more opportunities, but those with money and power needn’t lose out. Many of the characters in films like Meantime, Rude Boy, Bloody Kids and Babylon are living in the social housing that was built after the war, as Attlee’s government brought in regulations that allowed mass house building. Yet the Conservatives wished to protect the land. LR Murphy noted that “land ownership was a right as old as England. To deprive a man of the right to do as he wished with his own property, the Conservatives insisted, constituted a gross violation of English tradition and a subversion of natural justice.” (‘Rebuilding Britain’) However, the New Towns Act 1946 gave “…public corporation powers to compulsorily purchase land at current-use value. The unserviced land cost component for homes in Harlow and Milton Keynes was just 1% of housing costs at the time. Today, the price of land can easily be half the cost of buying a home.” (Guardian) What changed after this initial moment of egalitarianism? Patrick Collinson noted that Harold McMillan’s Conservative government brought in the “…1961 Land Compensation Act. Henceforth, landowners were to be paid the value of the land, including any “hope value”, when developed.” (Guardian)
This is not an article about land rights any more than it is an essay on schooling or housing but what we can say of the films we will be focusing upon is that these are characters who have been educated in comprehensive schools, are generally living in housing estates, and will have no connection with the landed gentry, who will literally be lording it over them. While these films that we will call examples of belligerent social realism aren’t exclusively about the working class, even the hints of middle-class status some characters possess show the most modest of achievements. The father in Family Life has worked hard to buy a two up and two down but his limited purview has left his two daughters alienated: one hardly wants to come for dinner; the other becomes increasingly mentally ill. In Meantime, Auntie Barbara lives in a two up two down as well, but personally, she is mainly down as her husband works all the time. Near the end of the film, she is sozzled and unhappy, looking as though the sacrifices she has made to live in the suburbs haven’t added up to much.
What the films consistently show are cramped lives, with the best one can hope for is alienated materialism, with Auntie Barbara or the parents in Family Life having made something of themselves — within a confinement that the films suggest might be an unreasonable trade-off. If the best one can hope to achieve is living in an anonymous suburban cul de sac while accepting the terms society imposes upon you, then maybe a little bit of resistance isn’t too much to ask since the rewards are hardly plentiful. The lords and ladies, the establishment politicians, the upper echelons of the state apparatus in the form of judges, lawyers, private school head teachers, think tank wonks and those living off old money and insisting the former glories are still present ones (the monarchy and the aristocracy) — all have very good material reasons to believe in the traditions and the ideology that perpetuates them. But if those in films who have worked hard and got on can only achieve a standard of living that allows them to look down on other members of their family, then that can be seen to reflect their lowly status, not exemplify their escape from it. Many of the establishment folk won’t be looking down on their families because they didn’t have to rise above them to get into positions of authority — they would all be part of an authoritative class. Despite apparent social mobility in the post-war years facilitated by Attlee’s Labour government, in 1964 “63 percent of Oxford and Cambridge entrants were privately educated.” Indeed, the number of students graduating in the UK at the end of Labour’s term in power was very small: “in 1950, 17,300 students were awarded undergraduate degrees at UK universities.” (The Middle Ages and the Movies) Auntie Barbara and Janice’s parents in Family Life will be very far not just from a private education and Oxbridge but university as well. They may see themselves as having moved far beyond the working class but would demographically still be representatives of it.
What most of the films express in one form or another is anger, and this may seem a valid response given the general brutality of the environments the characters find themselves in. This is most evident in Scum, where the borstal milieu turns on a twofold thuggery — the guards against the inmates and the inmates against each other. Just after one kid has been given a beating by the three boys who intimidate everyone else, one of the borstal wardens Mr Sands comes in and doesn’t commiserate with the boy but adds to the intimidation, yelling at the boy to tell him what happened. The boy keeps mum, aware that nothing good can come out of confession: the staff are no less sadistic than the bullies and perhaps even more loathsome. It is Sands we see peering through the glass house near the end of the film after another boy has been gang-raped and he looks on. He has no interest in intervening; just observing a prejudice he will insist upon: that here are animals due no respect even if there is an enormous difference between the boy who receives the abuse and those offering it. For Sands and many of the other wardens, officers and officials, the boys are all the same. They aren’t victims of a class war but the perpetuators rather than perpetrators of an aggression that needs to be knocked out of them by more aggression. The film proposes a tautological belief that defies the point of the institution in the first place. They are young criminals who deserve to be treated like young criminals and it could be argued that the wardens are more brutal than the inmates if we assume that the institute brutalises, and the wardens are more institutionalised than the boys in their care. They have been there much longer, and if the teenagers have become increasingly hardened in this environment over the space of a year or two, how much more hardened have most of the wardens become in the job over potentially decades? If the apparent purpose of a borstal is to reform people, then that surely shouldn’t be in the direction of making people tougher, crueller and more vindictive.
The film’s key line that would become famous is “I’m the daddy now”, after newcomer Carlin (Ray Winstone) takes out the prior head honcho, Pongo Banks. But this is a line many of those in authority could offer as well, the only difference is the greater apparent objectivity in the designation. While the inmates can vie for a position of authority amongst themselves, the guards will always be part of a hierarchy based less on prowess than conformity. There might be a lot wrong with seeing life as the law of the jungle but it might still be better than seeing it as the law of subservience, and it is in their terrible combination we may understand the attitude of the wardens and others within the professional borstal system. It is as though their kowtowing to authority will always be greater than the inmates because they have long since internalised the hierarchical order of things as a societal demand rather than as a social obligation. Many of the teenagers know that authority is worth little because they have been subject to its brutality, while the wardens and others professionally in the prison system see it as a way both to make a living and to take out their irritations on a group of kids who have almost no way to answer back.
The smartest kid in the place, Archer (Mick Ford) a vegetarian who goes around bare-footed because he won’t wear leather and gets pleasure from winding up the screws, gets into conversation with a warden after protecting another of his principles: that he is an atheist and doesn’t have to attend mass. “That’s a hefty sentence Mr Duke, one way or another in prisons,” he says and adds not only from a certain perspective are the wardens given far longer sentences than the prisoners as they serve their time in one penal place or another, it is a system that seems to impose more criminal acts on prisoners than criminals imposing these acts on society.
The lad proposes that the problem rests partly in its inability to create proper character building: that the system is so uselessly oppressive that people don’t get the opportunity to develop their own sense of right and wrong. If anything we might say it does the opposite. At the beginning of the film when Carlin arrives he gets slapped a couple of times by one of the wardens and later we see Pongo slapping the weakest boy in the place, the slaps resembling the earlier ones the officer has administered to Carlin. To build character in such an environment isn’t to wrestle with one’s conscience but to beat the life out of other people. To possess a conscience in such a place is a liability, which is all the more ironic since this is what it is supposed to generate. In such a place all they can do is harm themselves, harm others or damage property. There are plenty of instances in the film of the inmates harming each other, but there is near the end a suicide and a prison riot. Director Alan Clarke proposes that these are the options available in so oppressive an environment. It breeds resentment rather than develops character, or rather a character is built out of that resentment so that person becomes a seething, angry figure who will likely spend much of their life moving back and forth between prison and civilian life. Unable to take seriously a society that has treated them as irrevocably scum, they in turn regard the societal order with contempt.
What we see in Scum isn’t just the borstal system at work but allusively a society that doesn’t work. Few appear happy, as though not only does it fail to remove from the prisoners their violent impulses; it expands those impulses to officers as well. Almost everyone is itching for a fight: the prisoners to bully other inmates and gain higher status; the wardens determined to offload petty grievances on the inmates who have little chance of redress if they get slapped around by an officer. The closest we get to a civilised exchange between inmates and the authorities is Archer’s discussion with Mr Duke, but at the end of it Duke becomes irate as he says “I give you my fucking coffee and you think you can sit there and take the piss out of me.” Duke has a point, but it isn’t the film’s. From his perspective, he has been willing to sit down and chat with Archer while the other inmates are at mass, and even gives the lad some of his brew. But there Archer is, telling Duke he is institutionalised, his status lowly and working in a system that doesn’t do anybody any good. Archer is right and, in time, even the Thatcher government abolished the borstal system.
Scum is the most obviously oppressive of the eight films we are looking at here (Scum, Naked, Meantime, Rude Boy, Babylon, Bloody Kids, Family Life, and Made in Britain). But what they share is anger at a country that seems to be restricting not so much their freedom (though that as well), but their individuality, as though they sense a society trying to knock them into a shape that will really just homogenise them. Some are more aware of this process than others, and Johnny (David Thewlis) in Naked, Mark (Phil Daniels) in Meantime and Archer in Scum are resistant characters while Colin (Tim Roth) in Meantime, Janice (Sandy Ratcliffe) in Family Life and Gina McKee’s character in Naked are passive ones. Then there are the enraged, self-destructive or feckless, like Ewen Bremner’s brief role as a Scot in Naked, Roth’s racist, Trevor, in Made in Britain, and the lazily racist central character played by Ray Gange in Rude Boy. Though occasionally characters could be deemed sympathetic or blameless (most especially the passive figures) in most of the films, there is a tension between the authorities who are bullying and the characters who are obnoxious. When in Naked Johnny harangues a security guard who just wants to think of his future life retiring in an isolated cottage, Johnny is having none of it - the man’s optimism is misplaced even as Johnny takes advantage of the guard’s hospitality. It is a cold night out, Johnny has nowhere to stay and Brian allows him into the building even though it puts his job in jeopardy. Johnny’s ingratitude knows no limits. Johnny and the guard look across at the window of a flat where a depressed, alcoholic woman stands in front of it half-dressed, always alone. Johnny and Brian look on in the dark and the guard says, clearly fascinated, she is there every night. Johnny then crosses the street, knocks on her door and persuades her to invite him in and out of the cold. We might wonder if he does so less because he has great curiosity but a wish to make Brian unhappy. It isn’t enough that he has tried to destroy his future; he is also willing to destroy the one pleasure available to Brian on his night shift. After Johnny’s visit, will Brian’s voyeurism be quite the same again?
The films often have such belligerent and obnoxious figures at their centre we might wonder why they were made; what were the filmmakers seeking to expose or explore by showing Johnny as a borderline rapist, emotionally cruel and keen to spread his despair like a venereal disease, the sixteen-year-old Trevor in Made in Britain as an irredeemable racist who seems determined to enter the prison system no matter the help he receives from his social worker Harry and those in the detention centre trying their best to keep him out of deep incarceration. In Rude Boy, Ray is a roadie who doesn’t pull his weight, occasionally pulls a bird he treats badly, and increasingly slips into what looks like alcoholism. These characters and others are lost causes but if we are struggling to make sense of the films’ purpose, this may reside on overly traditional notions of character expectation, and an assumption that the societal is weak next to the characterisational: that a drama’s milieu is its backdrop; it isn’t foregrounded. Speaking of Naked, and the office building Brian guards, Leigh says, “…it wasn’t an abandoned building, it was a building up for let, it was an office space, it’s in Charlotte Street… the thing about the locations altering… location and being on location, and place is part of what making the film is about. The actual thing of place is as important as character and the atmosphere, everything is interrelated.” (Bfi) This is central to the threefold aspect of Leigh’s art. He works from improvisation to a script, then finds locations that can interact with the drama he is creating, and as a consequence allows the films to be absorbed by a socio-political milieu that makes sense of the characters’ actions and choices. Whether it is Johnny in Naked, or Mark in Meantime, these are characters who interact with their immediate environment and sense the socio-political situation, and Leigh casts David Thewlis and Phil Daniels well aware that these are actors who can convey disgust with a predicament that is greater than their own failure. By careful casting, Leigh avoids easy irony: the sort that would propose the characters’ failures are their own and they find justification in it through blaming the society in which they unhappily belong. But as with most of the films we are discussing, Leigh wishes to accept the terrible flaws in character and yet insist there are greater ones in the country at large. Clarke and his screenwriter David Leland may have called their film Made in Britain, but this applies to all the films under discussion. It is as if Leigh, Clark and others are saying that there is no point attacking individuals for failing to have initiative and drive when what matters is respect for an authority they cannot respect. Johnny, Mark and perhaps even Trevor have an instinctive understanding that though they are bright, their intelligence isn’t much wanted by the nation. That if they were a bit more stupid and a lot more docile, they would be more useful to the state and do better at school — and in society. As Leigh says of Johnny, “he's one of those kids teachers have turned away from because their intelligence is too unruly.” (Guardian)
The best way of looking at this is to see that the characters’ instincts are good but their behaviour less so — that they know their place in the social order is of little value and if intelligence were the important thing they wouldn’t be unemployed (Johnny, Mark) or incarcerated (Trevor, Archer). They understand this but they are angry over it too, and are often, consequently, self-destructive. Even Archer joins the riot near the end of Scum and receives a beating he is usually smart enough to avoid. We needn’t say he is wrong to join the others in protest — it is an important moment of solidarity after one of the inmates has taken his life. But what it makes clear is that intelligence isn’t enough. Even someone like Archer is drawn into accepting the system is so atrocious that he needs to protest. When earlier Archer says he uses his head, Mr Duke thinks he is just a smartarse and wonders what book he got that bit of wisdom from. Archer says from here as he points to his head. There is certainly nothing in the institution that would provide it. He is perhaps, like Johnny, Mark and even Trevor, a pedagogical solipsist, so wary of the education system that they try to produce a system of thought they can call their own. If Leigh is the master of creating the threefold alliance that shows an attentive relationship with actor, milieu and the socio-political, most of the other directors offer a variation of it. They accept the actors aren’t just there to be placed within a structural narrative that they conform to as we might expect from dramas predicated on inciting incidents, clear goals, heroic actions and villainous deeds, but that structure itself is part of the problem. It would be a failure of aesthetic integrity to assume that a story could be told without attending to the very individuality of the actor and the character they are playing. If mainstream cinema frequently gives the impression that the characters have agency and that the star gets to augment their persona, in Scum, Naked etc. the characters are much more restricted yet the actor more free, more able to feel the singularity of their character. As Thewlis says of playing Johnny, “I got dangerously close to the character.” (Guardian) Inevitably perhaps given the collaborative process: “What always happens is that I'll get an actor “, Leigh says, “to come along, and I'll say: 'I can't tell you what the film is going to be about, but we will collaborate on the creation of a character.' Some actors run a mile.” (Guardian) Ken Loach’s approach shares a few similarities with Leigh's but the most important element is the actor unaware of developments in the script so that they can live the character's predicament more vividly and closer to one's reality, where the future isn't given. As Loach says, “Preparation is really important for actors; they need to know who they are, where they're from, and the experiences up to the point that we make the film. We use improvisations, research, and so on. But when there's a surprise, that's the hardest thing to act. Even with brilliant actors, you'll get it once but the second time it's more difficult.” (Guardian) Mick Ford said “…Alan Clarke was the best director of young actors I've ever come across: he would sit beside the camera and watch you like a hawk — he didn't want a performance, he wanted you to just be the character.” (MovieFandom)
In each instance, we see directors who insist the actors have a say in the work while their characters have little say in the society in which they are subject. The directors offer a freedom that the characters are themselves unable to practise. If one might see many of the films under discussion as hopeless, Leigh, Loach and Clarke might claim they are hopeful from a different perspective, and that the films they are creating are part of that attempt. Family Life ends pessimistically but the film’s very existence is a form of exposure that is itself a certain type of optimism.
“How can you build character in a regime based on deprivation?” Archer says in Scum, and we could argue that this stretches beyond the borstal environment and incorporates the broader social conditions. The films were all made under Conservative governments and most under Thatcher, with Family Life coming out in 1971 when Edward Heath was Prime Minister, and Naked with John Major in Downing Street. But all the films were also coming out as conventional psychiatric methods were being contested by radical voices under the anti-psychiatry movement. In Britain, this included Aaron Esterson, David Cooper and most especially RD Laing, whose The Divided Self became a slow-burn bestseller. “By 1989, the year of his death, The Divided Self had sold 700,000 copies in the United Kingdom alone” (The Literary Encylopedia) Iain Ferguson noted “the ascendancy of the New Right in the 1980s, spearheaded by the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in the UK and Ronald Reagan as President in the USA, coupled with the return of an increasingly assertive biomedical psychiatry, led to a savage assault on the ideas of “anti-psychiatry.” (Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work) But before this shift, Laing’s work mattered, as though people’s mental well-being couldn’t easily be separated from their social circumstances. As Laing believed, “the group becomes a machine — and it is forgotten that it is a man-made machine in which the machine is the very men who make it. It is quite unlike a machine made by men, which can have an existence of its own. The group is men themselves arranging themselves in patterns, strata, assuming and assigning different powers, functions roles, rights, obligations and so on.” (Politics of Experience) Systems are often made by men to the detriment of the individuals themselves, and then out of this detrimental situation those within its power structures define it as reality. This is a reality, Mark, Johnny and Archer resist, and that Janice in Family Life tries to escape. If she is weaker than the other three characters it isn’t only or specifically that she is a woman; it is that she is more beholden than the others to the family structure in which she belongs. Her parents do want the best for her and no doubt love her; they don’t know how to do so, though, on terms other than their own. When Janice’s mother has a conversation with the therapist at an alternative clinic where Janice stays, the mother says how important it is to get back on an even keel. The therapist wonders if it is a question of getting back or moving forward, whether Janice should become an autonomous person rather than a dutiful daughter within the family. Her mother says, if “you feel, when she has had this therapy…I would be very willing to let her go and see what happens then.” The mother wishes to retain a hold over Janice that she no longer has over her other daughter, and though Janice’s sister is married with two kids, she shares something of Mark, Johnny and Archer’s resistance to the expected reality demanded of her when it comes to her parents. “Bloody pity you won’t let her stand on her own two feet”, the sister says but in Family Life standing on one’s own two feet means first of all standing up to parents who believe that they know what reality is and that Janice needs to learn what it is. That isn’t the approach taken by the analyst, who wants to comprehend what reality means to Janice. When the mother says to him “there must be more control over our younger generation”, the doctor says that “one of Janice’s feelings is that she is being controlled.” But we may notice the reason the mother wants greater control is because she is no longer succeeding quite as well as she might at passive coercion. She makes much of how upset she is as a mother who has done all she can for her child and there the girl is in hospital, as if the first attempt is to internalise guilt on the part of the other and, if that fails, to insist on control.
Loach is a well-known socialist, and yet Family Life is probably more Sartre than Marx if we think of a passage from Derek Cooper’s Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry, where Cooper distinguishes between Marxian and Sartrean alienation. Sartre “sought the ontological basis of alienation”, regarding Marx’s account secondary. Primary alienation was about self and other and Sartre speaks of existential haemorrhage. This is where, Cooper notes, “when I am regarded by another person there is an outward movement, ‘bleeding, from my inner-state of being-for-myself to an outer state of my being-for-the-other as an object in the world.” Thus the space the self occupies for oneself is quite distinct from the space one occupies for the other, as Cooper proposes the self is haemorrhaging, which would usually be reciprocal. “…This outflowing of myself is checked by my reciprocal objectification of the other so that his existence in turn under my regard, bleeds into the world of objects for me.” (Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry) Cooper sees that some people suffer a continuing haemorrhage and this leads them to see their existence as “an object in the geometrical systems of need of other members of the group. One has no space of one’s own.” This could well describe Janice, and we shouldn’t pretend that thoughts by Laing and Cooper would have been far from Family Life’s scriptwriter David Mercer’s thoughts. Years earlier his Play for Today In Two Minds was also influenced by Laing’s work. Loach, who directed both, has been interested chiefly in primary alienation as in most of his oeuvre he usually focuses on the social conditions over psychological states. But he is also well aware that it isn’t only work that alienates us from others, just as most of the films under discussion here acknowledge that any attempt to take on the given societal structure will need to resist the perceived reality of that structure. This is one shaped by those who are entitled to eschew the haemorrhaging, while others are left to bleed psychologically to death. It is what Archer, Johnny and Mark refuse to do, while Janice succumbs to parental influence as soft power, before by the end of the film the police are called and Janice is marched away by the cops after she seeks refuge at a male friend’s place. “Everything will be all right now”, the doctor says as he reckons Janice will be better off in hospital. It is hard-cop and soft doctor, but the conclusion we might take from the film is that Janice will increasingly become an object of the state, rather than a burgeoning subject resisting it.
Interestingly, both the father in Family Life and the warden Archer converses with in Scum, Mr Duke, is played by the same actor: Bill Dean. Dean was “…a tram driver, pipe fitter, insurance agent, ship's steward and docker by day, while playing the clubs as a stand-up comic at night” (Guardian), before becoming an actor. In both films he isn’t so much the voice of authority as a voice for authority: he encapsulates the sort of values belonging to someone who won't benefit much from the status quo. But they have found an acceptable and conformist place within it, one quite distinct from the path Dean himself obviously chose, with its precarity and later creativity. Yet he plays very well a man who conforms to a system where he won’t be one of its winners but will settle for a score draw, getting married and having kids in Family Life, working for years with the prison system in Scum. As he says in the former, speaking of his wife who married below her station and where clearly the sex life has been modest: “well you learn to live with these things don’t you.” In Scum, Archer says for a weekly wage Dean’s character has been locking up people for all his working life but he is not much freer than those who are incarcerated. The warden doesn’t take kindly to this astute lecturer from Archer, just as the father doesn’t like it when his older daughter says her husband is twice the man he is as he turns on his daughter when he thinks she is implying he isn’t a man. She says he isn’t quite the big man he thinks he is and he acknowledges he isn’t a big man but he is a responsible one.
In neither film, does Dean’s characters lose our sympathy even if we are more inclined to side with Archer and the older sister in the exchanges. We can see that he thinks he is doing his best but that he is doing so within a system that leaves him emasculated when he is made to realise the little power he has, that the modest gains he has made in his life aren’t valued by the younger generation. In a different, less repressive system he would be a better man, though he isn’t a bad one. Even when he attacks Janice it comes from a misguided sense of righteousness rather than sadism, and in the reform centre he is one of the few wardens who tries to be human. Yet each film shows someone who is the voice of convention at a time when these conventions are oppressing other people. He is a man who has always done the right thing but never really questioned what that might be except within the institutions of marriage and the penal system. It would be a stretch, so to speak, to say his life is more tragic than his daughter’s in Family Life, or the incarcerated in Scum, but we sense by the end of each film the best he could hope for would be to see his life as disappointing.
It might be the best anybody could hope for, in the films under discussion, once the characters’ anger subsides: that little will change because the youthful figures lack the political wherewithal to transform very much and the institutions they are up against are so powerful that only a World War and the threat of Fascism dented them. These are all characters that came out of that post-war consensus, but though gains were made by the working class, they were those of compromise rather than radical transformation. Industries were nationalised including telecommunications, gas, electricity and the railways. Council houses were built: according to Shelter, 4.4 million council homes were put up between 1945 and 1980. After Thatcher, the rental market shifted to private landlords: “the number of private renters has doubled in the last 20 years and now stands at 5.4 million. It has increased by a million – or 23 per cent – since 2010.” (Independent) Thatcher gave the impression she wanted to improve opportunities for the working class but it was instead opportunities for the opportunistic within the proletariat, people valuing ready cash over solidarity. This wasn’t just in the area of housing, where people very understandably from a personal point of view would buy if they got the chance, getting a council house at a huge discount. It was also evident in the divisions Thatcher’s policies insisted upon: by referring to the miners as the enemy within and pitching strikers against scabs; the police against the working population. A government report proposed that they needed to take on the various nationalised industries in a move towards their privatisation: “The only way to do this is to have a large, mobile squad of police who are equipped and prepared to uphold the law against the likes of the Saltley Coke-works mob.” (Guardian) The police weren’t there to uphold justice but to be politically engaged in this shift in government policy, and if necessary fight their own.
Not all the films under discussion were made during Thatcher’s rule, but we have noted they were all made during Conservative governments. The Tories were in power between 1970 and 1974, and then again between 1979 and 1997. They are often seen as the oldest surviving party in the world, and see themselves as the natural party of government, a notion borne out by the amount of time they have been in power since WWII. It may have looked like Britain was becoming a more egalitarian society when Labour came to govern in 1945 despite Conservative leader Winston Churchill’s war-time impact. But after six years Labour were out and the Tories in from 1951 to 1964. Though some important changes were made during those Labour years (nationalising major industries, social security, the NHS and council house building), much remained the same, and that most important of commodities, land, remained chiefly in aristocratic hands. “Research by Country Life magazine found that 36,000 members of the Country Land & Business Association, whose members are mainly individuals and estates, collectively own half of all rural land in England and Wales.” (Independent) The three Conservative leaders between 1951 and 1964 all went to Eton. Butskillism may have been "a term popularized in Great Britain during the 1950s, coined in The Economist by merging the names of two successive Chancellors of the Exchequer, Labour's Hugh Gaitskell (1950–1) and the Conservative R. A. Butler (1951–5). Both favoured a ‘mixed economy’, a strong welfare state, and Keynesian demand management designed to ensure full employment,” (Oxford Reference). But the fundamental status quo was less the mixed economy than the retention of underlying wealth and privilege.
This would be a reality that many of the characters in Naked, Meantime etc would be determined to resist but it was also one they were thoroughly removed from. There are often authority figures in the films but they are usually lower down on the social scale: police officers, wardens, schoolteachers, social workers: none of whom will likely own land, have gone to Eton or will end up with a title. Their purpose is to retain the status quo and whether someone does so with sympathy (Harry in Made in Britain), does so dutifully (Duke in Scum), brutally (the police in Babylon) or sadistically (the wardens in Scum; the bouncers in Rude Boy), it all seems to reflect a wider stasis. It is as though the reckless and often useless energy of the characters in these films lies within an instinctive knowledge that Britain is a country designed against their best interests, and rather than trying to transform it, aware of the futility of such a project, they rebel against it. No character is more self-destructively thus inclined than Trevor in Made in Britain, and we say this well aware that almost all the other characters in belligerent social realism (as its name testifies) are offering modes of mayhem. In Made in Britain, an officer explains with the aid of a diagram Trevor’s life. One that starts with trouble at school and ends with incarceration in prison. He presents it as an endless cycle and while he puts it well and offers Trevor an impressive lesson in what happens to those who think they can keep bucking the system only to find themselves ever more deeply imprisoned within it, the lesson is more for us than for Trevor. It is a great example of exposition, of the film aware that there is information the viewer may wish to have that the character already possesses. Often in film, this is the most laborious of tasks for the scriptwriter who writes it and the actor who delivers it, and there are plenty of amusing examples: the general explaining D-Day to John Wayne in The Longest Day, The ending of AI, or another astronaut telling the lead character in Interstellar what wormholes look like. Often we are left wondering how odd that leading characters who are so established in their profession seem so ignorant of important aspects of it, but in Made in Britain it works well partly because Trevor either knows or doesn’t care what will happen to him, and the officer’s purpose is less to offer words of cautionary wisdom than offer prophesying predictability. Trevor doesn’t know how the system works; the officer has seen how it works all so often and is giving Trevor a bit of advice on how to avoid getting caught in the cycle. First, he puts on the board the process that led Trevor to the assessment centre, and then he writes on it, prison, job, dole, thieving, and draws a circle between the four points. Trevor will end up in prison and because he is in prison won’t be able to get a decent job, so he will be on the dole, which will mean no money, which means he will steal, and that will lead him back to prison. Round and round he will go, but the superintendent says this doesn’t have to happen: all he has to do is conform and there might be a chance. Up until now, he has brought everything upon himself .
Yet we might wonder if he has; Trevor wasn’t born yesterday but he was born sixteen years earlier into a society that was shaping him from day one, day two and the days after as well. It was shaping everybody else too, but it would be naive to think that Trevor is solely responsible for his predicament just as it would be to think the Etonians Eden, Hume and McMillan were responsible for their esteemed lives. For Trevor to escape the cycle, the societal givens would need to change, not just Trevor’s behaviour, and we say this well aware that Trevor may be the most troublesome of the main characters under discussion. Mark in Meantime can be cruel, Johnny is insensitive to women and a misogynist, as well as a possible rapist, depending on how one reads an ambiguous opening scene. Ray Gange in Rude Boy is casually racist and Ray Winstone in Scum isn’t afraid of trouble. But Trevor in Made in Brtain is the most troublesome figure in belligerent social realism, the one where we need most clearly to comprehend the structuring principles behind the character’s life partly because the character himself has so few qualities we will find agreeable. It is halfway between an almost purely structural account we find in Clark's short film on Northern Ireland, Elephant, and the exploration of charismatic obnoxiousness evident in The Firm in these other Alan Clarke films. We have a central character unlike in Elephant, but he is racist, disloyal, and disrespectful and the only quality potentially that might be attractive is his intelligence. But we might even question that as this smart kid at school becomes increasingly nihilistic. Anybody who drags a black acquaintance into his crime spree, offering derogatory names along the way, and leaves the other kid carrying the can after the van they have stolen crashes and Trevor escapes, isn’t likely to appeal. And not does he become any more likeable when he turns up at his social worker’s door in the middle of the night and announces his various misdeeds. He also of course has a swastika above and between his eyebrows and has a yen for bricking Pakistanis’ houses.
Made in Britain is not the best film we are looking at here but it perhaps generates the most identificatory alienation alongside the most immediate of devices to remain with Trevor. It of course has Tim Roth, in his first leading role, and the cameraman was Chris Menges( Ken Loach’s regular cinematographer, though he didn’t shoot Family Life) who also shot Babylon, and Bloody Kids, who often stays close to Trevor as he goes about his destructive business. It is as if Clarke wanted to create the maximum amount of alienation from the character morally, and a high level of immediacy in the form, to create a work that might leave the viewer caught between disdain and dismay. This would be disdain at the character’s actions and dismay at the society that produced him: Trevor is after all as the title proposes, made in Britain. He is a product of his country, and the film suggests that rather than seeing Trevor as an aberration, better to see him as a symptom. That he seems so clearly an example of Thatcherite-era belligerence indicates he isn’t simply aberrant otherwise why can we so easily identify him as a product of his time? Equally, he isn’t only a symptom of the era, as though he has no control over his life, and we watch a character caught in a terrible predicament. He has options, laid out to him by the superintendent, and we’re aware that he is seen at school as bright. If he worked hard, conformed, and showed ambition he might be able to get one of those better-paying jobs that would allow him to escape the cycle predicted for him.
However, this is the sort of good life his social worker possesses, which doesn’t look so good at all. The family might be off on holiday abroad for two weeks (Harry lets Trevor in thinking it is the taxi for the airport) but what we see is a cramped apartment for a family of four, with the two kids sharing a small bedroom. It looks not very different from what Trevor has been looking at earlier through a shop window: an aspirational family of dummies with price tags hanging off the items they are holding, wearing or sitting on. Harry’s home looks like a slightly, shabbier, more lived-in equivalent. This is probably the best Trevor could aspire to and somehow it just isn’t enough, as though Trevor’s racial disgust is a reflection of a socio-political anger he doesn’t understand. When Trevor takes the black kid at the detention centre with him to smash in a Pakistani family’s window, Trevor and Errol are yelling racial slurs and we might wonder if the language they offer doesn’t have much to do with race but more with resentment, and that race is the representational form it takes. The film doesn’t present Errol yelling racist abuse as ironic. It is representationally misguided, as if both Errol and Trevor are daft enough to believe that the state of Britain can be blamed on immigration rather than a societal structure that hordes wealth. Recent reports note that “households with a White British head were approximately nine times as likely to be in the top quintile of total wealth (wealth above £865,400) as those of Black African ethnicity and 18 times as likely as those of Bangladeshi ethnicity.” (ONS) Meanwhile, Guy “…Shrubsole writes that the bulk of the population owns very little land or none at all. Those who own homes in England, in total, own only 5% of the country…while the aristocracy and gentry still own around 30% of England.” (Guardian)
Those more inclined to the right will see Trevor as an errant, idiotic teen; those given to a leftist outlook, that he is a symptom. But this isn’t Clarke having it both ways; like most of the films under discussion, he wants to note the understandable resistance to the unjust nature of the country, with an acceptance that this doesn’t mean characters will have a coherent and functional approach to that injustice. The right-wing take will be uselessly naive; the left-wing claim potentially so general that it ignores the specifics of character. Part of the dynamism of the films lies in characters who ask for no sympathy and a style that must contextualise their truculence. Speaking of Meantime, Mike Leigh said the film “…came out of wanting to say something about unemployment at a certain stage four years into Thatcher’s reign. (Guardian) In an interview with Pulp singer Jarvis Cocker, Leigh says he would for years after Meantime get letters saying how much of a lifeline the film was for many who found themselves on the dole, and Cocker would have been potentially one of those people, saying “…You can't help but feel marginalised when you're unemployed. We were a demographic group that absolutely no advertising was aimed at - basically we were the doley scumbags.” (Sunday Times) The representational reality was working against them and then there were filmmakers like those under discussion who insisted on showing people on screen without feeling the characters ought to be presented in a way that would make them other than they were. The point lay in representation; not political presentation that would say the situation is of their own making, nor that that they were simply victims of circumstance. Most of the films would probably echo Leigh’s claim as to why he wished to make films. Speaking of Room at the Top, “Now when I saw it, which was in a local cinema in north Salford, what was exciting about it was if you walked out of the cinema into the street, it was the same world as was in the pictures.” (Guardian)
Anybody watching the scene in Made in Britain where Errol is cursing immigrants and telling them to go back to the jungle and sees only irony, is failing to comprehend the purpose behind films that wish to show stunted lives, not stupid ones. If many of them are acting stupidly this isn’t the same thing as being stupid. Being stupid would indicate an idiocy within themselves; acting stupid is to recognise the stupidity of the society in which they are expected to conform. Though we shouldn’t underestimate the efforts made by the detention centre to reform Trevor’s character, nor Harry’s determination to keep Trevor out of jail, part of Trevor’s intelligence rests on seeing through the tokenistic. What would motivate Trevor to leave behind the mayhem is a good question and one that cannot begin to be answered by saying there is no point asking such questions with so deplorable an individual as Trevor. The more despicable the better, one might insist, as though the first principle of a functioning society can take its most dysfunctional members and find for them a purpose they can call their own.
This may be true as well of both Leo in Bloody Kids and the main character in Babylon, with Leo (Richard Thomas) getting stabbed in the former and Blue (Brinsley Forde) stabbing someone in the latter. But Leo is guiltier than Blue, with Leo arranging a stunt that goes wrong as he and a mate, Mike stage a fight outside a football game. Leo ends up in the hospital; Mike on the run. In Babylon, Blue stabs a racist neighbour in a moment of frustration rather than intention but both stabbings reflect an England failing, whether it is the feral kids or a country where racial tension seems to be a constant. While walking along the street at night, Blue is caught by the police after an extended chase in a back alley. They give him a beating and call him a golly, and we are well aware that crime prevention is of secondary importance to alleviating the cops' own grievances. It is a finely filmed scene that balances the excitement of the chase with the crepuscular light that gives the sequence a melancholic aspect.
Other scenes in Babylon capture London as a decaying city of boarded-up and disused buildings, a London in transition that would soon enough be gentrified and profit-rich. A studio flat near Ladbroke Grove could cost now well over £500,000; in Brixton, prices are cheaper but a three-bedroom maisonette will cost around £650,000. While areas of London have scrubbed up, people may seem to have been scrubbed out. It wasn’t that London like other capital cities of the time (New York most famously) didn’t need investment; it was the nature of that capital: private finance rather than public money. It exacerbated the poverty while alleviating the mess, eventually penalising people who would live in rundown and disused places. In 2012, yet another Tory government was in power and made squatting illegal as the utopian dreams of the 70s became the capitalist conformism of the 21st century. In the seventies, squatters had ideologies and hopes, most famously Frestonia, where residents created a manifesto and tried to create a country, determined to secede from the UK by creating the Free and Independent Republic of Frestonia. This was chaos seeking a solution but Thatcher was never going to tolerate people practising proper freedoms when she could co-opt the term to mean profit. When she talked about home ownership the operative term was ownership not home, and in time while many people in the country were struggling to find places to live, many internationals looked for places to invest. “figures revealed the estimated value of foreign-owned homes in the capital stands at £55.2 billion.There are 103,425 homes in the capital, including houses and flats, that are currently registered with an overseas correspondence address or to an overseas company. (Evening Standard) When we see the numerous disused buildings in Babylon and other films of the time, we might muse over their worth today. Unlike Kitchen Sink Realism, where most of the film were set in the north of England, most of the resisting realities films are London-based: Naked, Family Life, Rude Boy, Babylon, Meantime. When we look at the locations where they were filmed, they are no longer run down while many parts of the north still will be: the consequences of relying on private finance over public support. If places aren’t instantly financially viable, they will remain derelict and the people destitute. It is called market forces and whatever the dubiousness of such a claim when we have a term like corporate welfare to describe government investment in private firms, what is clear is that London became immensely profitable and thus many places transformed.
The only film conspicuously set elsewhere is Bloody Kids, in Southend (still the south of England), while Scum is set in Shenley, Hertfordshire, the same location as Family Life’s hospital setting. While Bloody Kids makes much of its locale; Scum and Family Life allow the setting to absorb the location: especially Scum, which creates an insular nightmare, a place with its own vindictive rules and where the outside world cannot intrude. But whether set in London or the outskirts, in a mental hospital or a reform centre, all the films suggest realities being made to the detriment of the film’s characters, and the film is usually sympathetic to these resistances — to see that whether it happens to be the passivity of Janice in Family Life, or the thuggishness of Trevor in Made in Britain, a reality is being made in their name that they must find a means to resist. No film makes this clearer than Family Life, explaining the paradoxes involved, and no film more than Naked finds a character who can articulate the need to counter established expectations. As one person says, in the hospital where Janice is staying, “when they think I am being bad, and I think I am being myself, and they say myself is crazy and destructive of myself…they don’t know who I am, the me they say I am destroying is them…I want to destroy them in me. I don’t want them in me.” She adds, “ if they say you are bad, the only way of being good is by agreeing that you are bad.” In Naked, Johnny says, that if there is a God he is a hateful God: “if God is good why is there evil in the world. Why is there pain and hate and greed and war?” “But if God is a nasty bastard, then you can say why is there good in the world, why is there love and hope and joy?” He insists that good allows evil to flourish and therefore, God is bad.”
In both instances we have paradox, but we might wonder if this is vital to most of the characters, even if few, for whatever reason, are in a position to articulate the complex contradictions of their lives. Mark in Meantime senses that Barbara wants to help out his brother; he also notes that the terms of this magnanimity isn’t unproblematic. Barbara wants Colin to decorate a spare bedroom and she will offer him some extra money on top of his dole. Perhaps Mark is jealous that Colin will get some dosh but from a certain perspective, she is exploiting her nephew, getting cheap cash-in-hand work. This doesn’t mean Barbara is necessarily taking advantage of Colin but she is implicitly taking advantage of a system that leaves many languishing as surplus labour and where she can pay him a much smaller sum than if she were to employ a professional painter and decorator. Someone more given to thinking through the intricacies of market forces might be able to explain to Barbara why she is exploiting Colin without attacking her for doing so, but Mark is a troubled character whose intelligence often manifests itself as insult. There is a paradox here too: Barbara wants to help Colin but the system helps her far more as she will get cheap labour and Colin will top up his dole. Yet this will do little to improve Colin’s life while it will do a little to improve Barbara’s, as she does up her suburban home, while Colin will go back to his high-rise family flat. Mark understands the dynamics of inequality better than Barbara and gets without ready articulation the paradox of a good deed that from another angle can be its opposite.
It is what happens when a system is misaligned, a central premise of Thatcherite self-improvement. This was never a motivational even playing field. While Thatcher cut taxes for the wealthy from 83 per per cent to 60 per cent and the lower rate from 33 per cent to 30, and again, in the late eighties, cutting the top rate to 40 per cent, while reducing the lower rate to 25 per cent, she also introduced the famously iniquitous poll tax. This left council tenants with two parents and two adult children potentially paying far more than a single person in a mansion. The logic lay in making people pay for the local services they used, but it looked an awful lot like punishing poorer people for being poor and rewarding the rich for their wealth.
Such information may seem irrelevant to an article that is chiefly interested in cinema, but these were films interested in those left behind, with only the occasional character suggesting upward mobility and usually on the periphery of the films. As Leigh says: “I make films that are about the spirit of the time rather than being about particular events.” (City AM) To understand the times is to understand an aspect of the political situation, though funnelled through character. Barbara’s husband in Meantime looks like he is making money and making out with someone at work, and Jeremy is an odious, abusive and exaggeratedly presented yuppie. He is a caricature, as though Leigh wanted to create a composite character out of the various self-interested and abusive traits he would see in the eighties entrepreneur. Incentives were generally not created for them but people higher up the social scale and a character like Mark can see that a few extra pounds in Colin’s pocket isn’t going to make much difference to his life chances. Those belong to people like his uncle-in-law. Leigh isn’t likely to play up the party political. “My film Meantime, which is about unemployment, made in the early 1980s, was criticised rather viciously from the hard Left, as I have been on occasion, because I didn’t lay it on the line. I didn’t bang drums and punch out messages.” (Solstice) But he doesn’t ignore it either. It becomes a manifestation of character as raw energy, and that might be the best way of describing most of the figures under discussion. While a thesis can offer dialectical reasoning as it comprehends the contradictions in a societal structure, individuals are often left with a residual rawness, one not easily explained but which can in various ways be dramatised. One may see in these works often the presence of Laing but also the presence of Louis Althusser, a complex Marxism that insists on acknowledging base and superstructure (the economic and the ideological), and, in the context of the latter, the precarious place of the self as a given. William Lewis says: “as Althusser understands them, whatever conceptions we have of the nature of human beings or about the proper function of the state are historically generated and serve to reproduce existing social relations. In other words, they are ideological. Apart from the necessity of human beings to engage in productive relations with other human beings and with their environment in order to produce their means of subsistence, there is no human nature or essence.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
This notion of human nature as essence can sometimes be understood less as an intellectual argument than as a dramatic choice. The genre like the Western or the war movie is more inclined to propose essence: that horse opera truism that “a man’s gotta to do what a man’s gotta do” packs a lot of presumptuous essentialism into one statement. The sort of characters we find in belligerent social realism are inessential in a twin sense: they are superfluous to the economy and aware that any identity they have is predicated on precarious philanthropy, on the idea that they exist courtesy of a job they may be forced into and a social system that judges them for their idleness. As Cocker says, weren't they seen as “doley scumbags”? Or as the Scottish novelist James Kelman explored brilliantly in 'Not Not while the Giro', “how in the name of christ can one possibly consider suicide when one’s giro arrives in two days....” The only sense of purpose resides in waiting for a cheque one hasn’t earned, and offered by a state that isn’t likely to treat you with much respect, as we see in the scene in Meantime where the dad and his two sons are signing on.
This might be why the aesthetic most of the films adopt is documentative, if one means no more than a mise en scene and camera work insisting that these are people made more by their circumstances than by any cinematographic free will. It makes sense that Menges shot several of the films: he started out working on World in Action, a British current affairs programme often looking at social issues. The purpose was to capture what was going on, and though Menges’s work for Stephen Frears on Bloody Kids can often look artificial as it pushes into almost a science fiction Southend, halfway between social realism and JG Ballard, the sense of location in all the films is paramount. It returns us to essentialism or otherwise as aesthetic choice: when a classic Western shows us empty landscapes this isn’t about the place but a mirror of the solitary soul, the Westerner in control of his destiny. What the films here want to do is both resist and retain reality, seeing it as a force upon the characters in the films’ attention to the material circumstances of their lives, and also one that must be resisted because the characters have so little say in society's creation. Whether adopting the long-lens in Family Life or often in Naked, the steadicam in Made in Britain, the early, plaintive shots of high-rises and incipient protest in Rude Boy, the films all acknowledge a reality has been filmed rather than a dramatic work staged. Describing the method he adopted working with Loach, Menges says "we wanted to light the space so that the light fell democratically but unostentatiously on everyone. Not only is it more pleasing that way, but the lighting isn't then saying, 'This is the leading actor in the scene or the film and these other actors aren't so important'. This is what we did on Kes, and it became a central tenet of how we worked.” (bfi) The society out of which the characters are coming may not be democratic, but the way they will be filmed will hint at its possibility.
It gives the films a contrary freedom and constraint, a sense in which the people need to free themselves from a constraining environment but with the filmmakers well aware that such a hope is limited by the striated layers of privilege and power that have nothing to do with the characters under scrutiny. When we look at the films now, we realise that rather than the deregulations of the market that would give greater opportunities to those who already had much of the wealth, what was required was a greater democratisation of people’s lives so that money could be redistributed to generate more scope for everyone. Instead, Thatcher’s reforms insisted these would be available to the comfortable, the conformist and the occasional wise upstart like Cocker who managed to make a decent buck out of harnessing the resentments no government had the will or the inclination to resolve. That resisted reality remains in abeyance, showing up occasionally and in diluted form in films of the last dozen years of austerity (I, Daniel Blake, Tyranosaur, Neds, Starred Up and a few others) but while we can look further back on a large number of films and see how they were resistant to the reality foisted up them, we might look on the last decade and a half and wonder why so few films have captured the years where capitalism in many ways collapsed. Yet money became concentrated more than ever in the hands of those who had little need of it, while those without could rely less and less on the basics being covered. We can look at Naked, Scum, Meantime etc, seeing films that were attending to their moment, and wonder how many more contemporary films have been semi-comatose, making films generically obliged and lifestyle choice friendly, to the detriment of what has been going on socially. The films of broadly the Thatcherite era wanted to make contact with what was going on; many a recent film appears instead turn a too-blind eye to the world around them, resisting reality in an altogether different direction. “There is room for all kinds of cinema, Mike Leigh claims, “so long as there is room for real life.” (The Byline Times). That can seem the most naive of statements or the most insistent of demands, but in these films it has been a pressing one.
© Tony McKibbin