Daily Archives: Sunday, July 30, 2006

Abu Ghraib all in the Mind’s Eye – an American movie on release everywhereAdrin Neatrour, 7 June 04
Abu Ghraib all in the Mind’s Eye – an American movie on release everywhere.
Events at Abu Ghraib are represented by the US President as being anomalous out of the ordinary events – caused by a few bad people. The form taken by the abuse – photographed and videoed sexual torture, reveals deeper evolving processes endemic not only in US culture but also that of the UK.
Each culture will bring its own particular twisted psychic development to the perpetuation of atrocity. Atrocity is something that is prone to happen in war. Either because the combatants are stripped of normal restraints by the shock terror and degrading aspects of combat; or in territorial disputes the intensity of desire to intimidate conquer and occupy acts as a justifying disinhibitor; or war in its outcomes offers opportunities to those who win to take control and power of life and death over those delivered into their hands. In this latter instance war corresponds to situations in prisons labour camps or any sort of closed physically bound institution in which a powerful few exercise total power over those in their charge, and where the detained are dependent on cultural rather than legal protective mechanisms.
The form of abusive sexual humiliation and torture to which the Iraqi prisoners are/were subjected obviously is/was sanctioned by US high command – General Sanchez was aware of and approved the treatment of the Abu Ghraib inmates. And in the same way that the SS generals could give genocidal and murderous commands to their troops with the knowledge that the men were socially and culturally primed to execute the orders, so with like confidence American command could order and approve a prisoner regime that centred on the genitals of their prisoners. The pornographic admixture of sexual physical torture humiliation and degradation is now endemic to the mainstream American culture, accompanied by its validifying process, the objectification of the subjective through use of imagery in the form of video or photos.
Susan Sontag thinks that the pictorial has come to the fore because it rests on the use of images as repositories for memory: she says that major events ‘lay down tracks ‘ governing how important events are remembered, ‘The memory museum is now a visual one.’ I believe that the culturally engrained use of photo video and sound image effects a deeper part of the way in which we experience the world than memory alone. I think that replicated images effect the nature of our consciousness as we engage with the world. The use of replicated picture and sound imagery is central to how we experience the living of our lives: consciousness.
We are born into an immersion of manufactured images comprising both picture and sound, mostly idealised and continuously assimilated as part of our being. As we develop, a significant part of consciousness which determines and directs our psychic functioning is absorbed from this world of projections – sound and image – and our behaviour comes to mimic these forms. We start to live the movies we project in our heads. We experience the world as a projection of our internalised idealised sounds and images. And when we make our own mechanical or digital replications of the sound and visual images – video photographs sound tapes such as staged dialogues – an important part of their purpose is to be external validifiers of the inner experience. To give objectivity to the subjectivity.
The past 100 years or so have seen the USA increasingly subjected to a cosmic storm of moving image particles that penetrated first through the shield of public consciousness and then with the arrival of TV and video through the defences of the private domain. In a shifting deracinated melting pot culture, this total imagery, comprising from the 1930’s onwards moving picture and fluid sound, was increasingly taken up as a model for individual actions defining: pose – verbal cues – and attitude – all attributes relating to the individual’s identity. A central aspect of the movie video and music action imagery, that is critical to the provision of a psychic identity, is that everything in mechanically produced forms has a script: everything has a beginning middle end.
The notion quickly develops that if you, in your outer expression of subjectivity take on the outer symbolic signifiers assimilated from the moving image (sound and/or picture) experience, then your internal scripting can run the desired course. You can live the film that you shoot in your head. Desires material, desires carnal are the drivers of the internalised moving image life in a culture increasingly defined by desire. And what is it we most desire: control over destiny, the script. With the invasion of desires film was no longer restricted to something seen on a screen or monitor. We live with movies we project in our minds; complete scripted sequences with music and sound in which each individual is an actor/director. In those societies defined by the inflation of infinite multiplications of image, our consciousness seems to draw on two track perception: one track is switched to the movie channel where we live the script of our desires; the other track deals with actuality in which we have to live through the real with all its difficulties and frustrations.
Of course the movie channel’s ambition is to realise the movie completely. And using selective perception of the actual and intensified projection of desire, the conscious mind can experience the feeling of achieving the scripted outcome. Some groups are in particular structural positions to make real the movie: individuals with social power who can impose their movie on underlings; and socially isolated individuals. Both US society in particular and British society are defined in this respect by the relative social isolation of individuals. People who are alone or in small nuclear groupings are not subject to collective forms of psychic correction and containment of internalised movie fantasies.
The problem remains for consciousness that it is often aware that there is a lack of tangibility in its perceptions. At this point the culture has provided cheap and readily available forms of technology that allow easy mechanical replication of ‘experience’ to all. The digital camera and video are everywhere available to give objectivity to the subjectivity so that consciousness in its various psychic operations has objective tangible proof that the script works. Film and video, cheap digital images allow everyone access to proving that the movie is going OK and that it is going according to the script. Of course the images objectively captured have to cover short strips of action or truncated sequences evidencing simple gratifications; longer scripts involving more subtle play are difficult. The realm of sex is perfect for photography and video. It’s a contained bounded realm, an activity that can be treated as discrete to power and gratification, and the pay offs-hard-ons, ejaculations, grunts and groans, simple role play/acting involving parameters of dominance/subjection and allied posturing – are easily captured objective proof on tape disc or film, of the individuals power to realise the objects of their desire. They objectify that we’re having fun in our movie.
In the USA the sex/pornography industry is vast and in the fertile soil of American psychic needs has spread everywhere interpenetrating consciousness and legitimising and fixating carnal and sexual desire in all its forms. The question is why simple sex scripts should have taken such a dominant defining part of American consciousness. The prime social experience for many Americans seems to be powerlessness and isolation. Characterising features of social and economic experience are large corporations and small nuclear groups. Within the large corporation most people exist to sustain the projections of the bosses and managers; and the nuclear family grouping is too small to sustain a power/ status system as witness the interdependence of men and women and the separation of the generations.
There are strong forces at work, particularly in the USA but also in the UK promoting the heightened social isolation of individuals whilst at the same time projecting sound movie images celebrating individual power and control. But Hollywood projects mythical realms – Middle Earths, Normandy Beaches, Hogwarts. The porn industry advertises a real achievable realm that you can get your hands on and hard on and in which you can be king or queen for a day. A realm where the individual can play out the movie without interruption. In a society defined by social isolation carnal sex becomes an issue of power; power over the flesh, both of the self and others, and as such drifts naturally towards the domains of sadism masochism and torture. Sex mutates into a discrete power gratification zone. A zone which takes us straight to the action(sic) at Abu Ghraib. A familiar movie to the American participants who want to have fun and objectify their roles in so doing. © Adrin Neatrour

On yer bike, Che! by Tom Jennings

[film review published in Freedom, Vol. 65, No. 20, October 2004]On yer bike, Che! by Tom Jennings [published in Freedom, Vol. 65, No. 20, October 2004] 
 
Remember those 1960s t-shirts favoured by trendy-lefties? (recently dredged up by French Connection – so perhaps my title should be worded more strongly …). The iconic pop-art image of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara stood for the heroic struggle of the Cuban revolution, and Western middle class youth could affiliate (or pose) with the aspirations of the world’s poor to transcend oppression. Now, the more comprehensive commodification of The Motorcycle Diaries also encompasses the road movie, tourism brochure, coming of age story, and even documentary realism. Box-office success at multiplexes and art cinemas suggests that the resulting melange works, thanks in particular to Brazilian director Walter Salles (Central Station, 1998; also a producer of Rio ghetto blockbuster City of God, 2002) and cinematographer Eric Gautier. A frisson of dangerous glamour doubtless helped – the script being loosely based on some of Che’s memoirs (exceedingly turgid and self-important though those are), reinforced by heartthrob Gael Garcia Bernal (Y Tu Mama Tambien, 2001; Bad Education, 2004) as leading man. But whether or not viewers know or care about the political history, this subtle film still has interesting things to say – if you can stomach the shallow smugness and picture postcard beautification.
 
Twenty-somethings Ernesto and Alberto (Rodrigo de la Serna) take a year off their studies in the early 1950s, and leave their upper-middle class Argentinean families for an awfully big lads adventure round South America on a knackered Norton. The overwhelming landscapes they pass through echo aspects of their experience and growing awareness: the Pampas are as empty as their idle bourgeois morality; crossing the Andes shows the arbitrary majesty of nature (i.e. history); fertile valleys are populated with evicted peasants; a copper mine in the Atacama desert reflects the  impoverishment of industrial capitalism; and Incan traces (at Cusco and Machu Picchu) contrast with the mess of Lima, giving poignancy to notions of ‘civilized progress’. They randomly encounter and hear the stories of those who suffer and toil without their luxury of playful choice – recounted by local extras whose biographies are little different fifty years later – and whose dignity, passion and generosity belie their desperation, anger and pain.
 
The travelogue arrives at San Pablo leper colony in Amazonian Peru, where our heroes get their teeth into contributing to the lives of others for a change (not that big a change, but revolutions have to start somewhere …). They still occupy immensely privileged positions, of course, but the trials and tribulations so far – repeatedly crashing the bike, temporarily running out of pocket money, Che’s chronic asthma, the repercussions of adolescent scamming, drinking, womanising, and so on – begin to crystallise into something approaching adult maturity. Alberto gets a medical research job whereas Ernesto continues north in his search for a worthwhile life. The film ends with a sepia-toned montage of the ‘ordinary people’ in the film and a brief textual exposition of Che Guevara’s central role in Cuba before his CIA-sponsored assassination. There’s also footage of the real Alberto – now in his 80s, having been a pioneering health service mandarin in Cuba – musing on his formative years.
 
 
On yer bike, Che!
 
Some have lambasted The Motorcycle Diaries as facile soft-liberal populism – an insult to those it purports to sympathise with. The ‘historical’ barbarism the film mentions in passing is intensifying, right now, all over the world – especially in Latin America where widespread grass-roots resistance continues. The inspirational significance of today’s struggles in Mexico and Argentina (among others) lies partly in their rejection of both neoliberal economics and authoritarian government. But here there is no political analysis, no exploration of vanguard elitism, Stalinist personality cults, or charisma and celebrity in general – all salient to both Che’s and our situations. Because we may not otherwise give a toss about the personable (but basically tedious and narcissistic) protagonists, the patronising pedagogy before the credits reminds us that they later devoted themselves to alleviating the misery caused by Latin America’s ruling classes and their US backers. That they were disaffected members of those same classes, and ended up inflicting similar degrees of dictatorial damage (and, crucially, that those two facts might be connected) could have injected some welcome melodrama and irony – as well as overall depth – into the weak narrative.
 
But getting all that right would be a tall order – just to construct; never mind fund and distribute. Lacking the wit, conviction and industry clout required, the director’s strategy is more humble in intertwining biography, geography and history. His previous hit, Central Station, vividly portrayed a middle-aged ex-teacher as a bitter failure consigned to the lumpen-bourgeoisie, cynically exploiting the illiterate clients of her letter-writing service. She recovered faith in herself and humanity, almost inadvertently, by helping a destitute orphan find his family after a tortuous and sometimes surreal journey through the Brazilian hinterlands. The narrative arc succeeded because the characters could intuit each others’ dilemmas and thus negotiate their relationship socially, emotionally and cognitively. The aesthetics intensified and gave expressive counterpoint to their lived experience – thus allowing enchantment for the characters in the context of their culture (and for film viewers in theirs).
Central Station thus offered a nuanced account of class and its conflicts (albeit at the individual level), but The Motorcycle Diaries is less optimistic – documenting charitable sympathy rather than engaged empathy. The camera only reveals what the characters see – no violence, no police, no scenes of exploitation, not even any poor people until we’re halfway up the continent. Even then, no exploration of context, and scarce evidence that the lads have a clue about anything much. Their personal tastes and sensibilities are increasingly offended, to be sure, and their friendship is transformed – but that’s hardly a sound basis for a revolutionary programme. They even misunderstand their well-meaning efforts in the leper colony, where Che makes a first feeble soapbox speech and risks a dangerous swim to spend his birthday with the patients – whereas for the latter it was any old excuse for a party.
 
Salles effectively demonstrates (whether intentionally or not) the uncomprehending naiveté of romantic idealism among affluent youth. That’s his background too – with language, worldviews, social structure and culture evolving specifically to facilitate the performance of their functions in whatever systems of domination prevail. In this paradigm it’s almost impossible to conceive of the way that economic necessity, bodily suffering, social prejudice and political oppression fundamentally shape the vast majority of human existence throughout history. Instead life’s problems are perceived as exceptions to a benevolent rule, to be resolved in grand hysterical gestures and personal redemption (just like at the pictures). Little wonder that when the privileged few generalise their trivial ethics into political prescriptions for the multitude, breathtaking arrogance and presumption transpire along with baleful practical consequences. This filming of Che’s journal infinitesimally punctures such fatal illusions.
 
* ‘Che’ is Argentine slang for ‘pal’.
 
 
 
www.variant.org.uk
 
www.freedompress.org.uk
 
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Kill Bill 2 – directed by Quentin Tarantino – 2004 – USA

Uma Thurman – David Carradine
Kill Bill 2 – directed by Quentin Tarantino  – 2004 – USA
Uma Thurman – David Carradine
 
The cosmos is the source not only of all energy but also of course of the ultimate joke, if there’s anyone who can stick around long enough to laugh.
At the point where the world’s human society needs a certain relative sobriety as it knocks on the door of oblivion, the cosmos sends Dubya to jolly along the eschatological machinery.  On an average day, Dubya with his pinched face expressions depicting endless varieties of suburban bewilderment, hams through the force fed words cooked up by the back stage writing team.  As performance its par for the Pres part in an Austin Powers film romp about the White House, alternatively Bush would not have been out of place in Dr.Strangelove, in fact it sometimes looks like he studied the Peter Sellars performance in the Pres role and so perfected the craft of welding technology to stupidity.
And Tarantino? After watching KB 2, I see him as part of the same cosmic joke as George W.  It’s not really a question of whether it’s good or bad president or film (though I thought it was a boring ponderously scripted mono-paced film) but, of how comfortable you feel with sound of your own laughter.   In terms of plastic art KB 2 is true comic book homage to the culture that spawned the Dubya presidency. (Carradine towards the end of KB 2 gives one of his tedious talks, this one about Superman’s nature, to Beatrice which seems to almost send her asleep despite the fact she is being well paid to stay awake) Dubya culture has at its centre the core beliefs that: you kill people you don’t like or who don’t show respect and after you’ve killed them it’s like they never existed;  the sanctity of the family; the real belief that we don’t actually have bodies –  because the body is a source of limitation  embarrassment discomfort and dysfunction so it is better replaced by systems of circuitry, centrally programmed and held together by a tightly sutured integuments.
When the body is functioning correctly as a series of circuits it is as if it were without organs. The final element of the Dubya/ Tarantino  belief system is that: time is a sort of the black hole in the political subsystem without any real inconvenient reference flow like past present and future.  Time is something that is simply manipulated to foster credulity.  One outcome of this approach to time is that as a consequence consequentiality takes a particular direction like light in a dark star.  Other people’s actions against you will have consequences for them, but your actions against others have no consequences for you.
The Dubya and Tarentino belief system is as effective a shield as that possessed by any of the American super heroes in that it protects the user experiencing any effect whatsoever from the results of their own behaviour. At the more superficial level the belief system insulates the user from the anxiety of imagining that any enemy – to whom they are alerted – might be able to better them.  But the significance of the belief system is really at the psychic level so that the experiences such as of killing people, stomping on people’s eyeballs, being threatened with death, have absolutely no effect on one’s capacity to be a loving caring mommy, which is the most important thing you can be.  The reason for this is that body and brain are separate wiring systems, and within the brain the emotional and rational killing systems comprise different circuits and there is no interface or interfeed.
Occasionally there might be some bleed through as in KB 2 when Beatrice comes back home to Bill and BB.  However competently wired up individuals such as Beatrice can cope with this sort of minor stress by fixing gaze upon the darling faces of children.
Tarantino’s response to the current ideological need of the American political system is to deliver a mythological tale where the heroine is not a loner in the absolute sense of the term.  In the older myths the one (almost always a he) who was called upon to defend the homeland was an isolated psychic entity.
One who was apart from others and society through the experience of death and killing.  Even the good killer was something of a sociopath, made dirty by the experience of killing.  Killers were of few words.  The world of women and family, children was not the world of the hero who worked with death.
But this sort  mythic image seems increasingly out of kilter with the evolving needs of American imperium: an imperium in which both men and women are front line pawns.  A different sort of mythic wiring system needed to be designed so that the offered prospects of service to America, whatever its form, could offer the recruits a cognitive ideology that permitted them to enjoy both the killing and their families, without blinking.  Both worlds were OK, and in no wise essentially contradictory because it is a world without consequences for the right actors.  Also the children are in no wise effected as long as things look right.  So mummy can kill daddy, but as long as mommy’s well groomed and her hair’s nice the daughter doesn’t miss daddy.  General grooming, use of the right products and a finely tuned suburban fashion antennae are all part of the ideological kit, all part of the wiring.
That’s about it.  Tarentino is now busy constructing the myths required by the American empire to  bind the populace into the new wired up belief system that you can have everything at no real personal cost.  Tarentino might try to contend that KB 2 is simply a tongue in cheek strip of American Gothic, but the cosmic delivery system often works most effectively in joke mode, particularly when large numbers of people don’t get the joke: Bush for President!  Anyone?
I am sure that Tarantino et al had fun (another important ideological concept of the Empire) whilst making KB 2 but I think that as film maker he seems to have lost the flair  to do it.  The use of filmic patina  the black and white sequences only reinforces obvious function of these sequences to effect a retro ‘40s noir heroic reading.  His camera is also big into texture – skin plaster, wall, wood but my feeling is that this prominence of texture is no more than a device to give a real feel to the unreal.  The film plods through predictable locations stocked with predictable characters such as the psychopathic crazy loner, the old kung fu master with big stick to beat students. All the clichés are here – Bill himself as a latter day Charlie of angel fame -but both the shooting and the script are laborious overwrought and overdeliberate as they are in poorest examples of the Gothic revenge genre.
The lines handed out to Carradine in particular are the worst, mainly because he has a lot of them and his scripting reminded me of the loud mouthed self important flatulent producers that you meet at media parties: their only interest is themselves.  All the dialogue, Thurman’s VO included, had the same archeness of writing and delivery.  Somehow I imagined that at one time Tarentino was capable of deft use of words, but that was perhaps when he was telling stories, now he is peddling ideologies.
adrin neatrour 2nd May 2004

Natural Born Cultures by Tom Jennings

[essay review of Natural Born Killers, dir. Oliver Stone (1994), published in Here & Now, No. 16/17, pp.48-51, 1995]Natural Born Cultures by Tom Jennings
 
 
[essay review of Natural Born Killers, dir. Oliver Stone (1994), published in Here & Now, No. 16/17, pp.48-51, 1995]
 
 
 
The notion of culture has been a problem for radical politics. Socialists and Stalinists, the PC, ultra-lefts and liberals all tend to narrow the concept to elite producers, whose quality validates a status quo possessing the standards of taste to appreciate it. Anything else may be scorned as imperfect, less than fully human, to be ignored, transcended, or educated away. Radicals stand outside received culture, presenting alternatives of rationalist criticism, avant garde art, lifestyle posing, or simply a cynical distaste for popular pleasures. Such self-marginalisation coincides with the Left’s disarray, the right’s appropriation of public agendas, the resurgence of a purportedly mute, rebellious underclass, and rampant consumerism.
 
Marxist critics tend to discuss these phenomena in terms of their interests as leaders and theorists. Communist Party intellectuals affiliating to Media Studies and identity politics gave us the hilarious spectacle of filofax Lefties dissecting the corpse of authoritarian communism on behalf of a whole catalogues of oppressed groups. Careers were built in a democratic pluralism that finally, if surreptitiously, could admit its class-specific position. Blairism is the political consequence – tight-lipped censorious Christian snobs allied with respectable folk wishing to ‘better’ themselves and partake of expanded cultural markets. Liberals are outflanked on the right on social and moral issues, exposing fear and hatred for the vulgar, informal, spontaneous, dangerous, ambivalent passions of the masses.
More generally unable to come to terms with their absorption into elite hierarchies since the 1950s, and with interests opposed to substantial social change, ‘political practice’ has become political ‘good taste’ (how to be right-on) for bureaucrats, teachers, cultural ‘workers’ and scholars. The hidden agenda of leaving their privileged positions intact permeates the new cultural theory. Criticism of the functions of leaders, intellectuals and theorists may risk leaving the new middle classes bereft of progressive roles – so it is avoided.1
 
 
Common Creations 
Conversely, oppositional politics can be grounded in the experiences of ordinary people – the cultures that surround and suffuse our everyday lives and what we make of them. As practices producing meanings with emotional resonance in groups of people, culture expresses how we make sense of life, identify and position ourselves with respect to internal and external forces and to our material and social surroundings. Seen from below, the focus of culture shifts to hopes, fears, fantasies and expectations as much as beliefs and feelings about the past and present. Our inherently social nature is evident, from community and collectivity, language and discourse. The material basis of culture is clear from the sites of its operation – ‘oral’ cultures rooted in the structures of schools, workplaces, streets or communities, the elite institutions of the arts and academies, and the products of the mass culture entertainment industries.
 
The culture sold by capitalism may seem impoverished and imperialistic when compared to the diversity of human life and its persistent impulses for self-determination. Worse, the trajectory of media market development relies on military and security-led technological determinism, bringing corporate and state control and class-based hierarchies of choice.2 But global marketing is leading to such a saturation of mediated images, stories and symbols, that officially sanctioned public forums and channels of communication cannot connect with the masses’ expressions of feeling. This distrust of the forms of knowing, being or aspiration that experts and politicians trade in doesn’t inevitably lead us to cynicism, apathy, quietism or a celebration of consumerism.3
 
The importance of culture lies in its open-endedness, its continual re-creation and reproduction within lived experience, where cultural materials are present at every level.4 Efforts to contain it within restricted discourses – to imprison culture in the imperialism of theory – mirror existing systems of control and oppression. These justify themselves in explaining the world via regimes of knowledge which themselves developed in support of coercive and exploitative structures and processes.
 
Irrespective of the intrinsic value of the cultural commodities we are immersed in, their use entails creating meanings and feelings that resound and echo in social networks, and that don’t map directly onto the supposed intentions of the producers or financiers. Not only may meanings produced oppose those intentions, but the very success of cultural products as commodities may depend on consumers creating excess meanings tailored to their desires. Possibilities for radical propaganda may open for those who accept their part in the culture and its aftermath,5 but not for those posing as distanced observers bemoaning the alien horrors of the cultures of others.
 
 
Big Screen Distraction 
Cinema films are the most expensive, elaborate and spectacular cultural commodities, and are the organising centre for much of our relationship with the mass media. Going to the cinema is a public, social act where we physically separate ourselves from the everyday world in dream-like or festive states, attracted by overwhelming sounds and images. At home special efforts are made to view films and videos on television, compared to the visual wallpaper of most TV output. Films live on thanks to the commodification of stars, symbols and spin-offs. But characters, elements of narratives or film styles may become markers of experience and identity, incorporated into everyday life like, say, soap operas, but with a special quality due to the strength of their impact. Film cults and fan hobbyism are extreme examples of this. But for millions of others not investing such immense personal significance, films are as prominent as sport or music, and are as thoroughly woven into social and cultural life.
 
Contemporary cinema is dominated by outrageously expensive Hollywood blockbusters which profit from merchandising and globalising hype. Smaller studios, independent producers and (usually government sponsored) non-US film industries break even on a combination of cinema attendance, video and television rights. Increasingly, as viewers become used to differentiated media, film producers minimise risk by combining styles and genres, appealing to multiple groups of viewers at once and playing havoc with established critical categories.6 So Natural Born Killers mixes conventions from action and crime thrillers, romances, road movies, documentary, melodrama and social satire; plus exploiting assorted avant garde film devices and state of the art computer graphic, video and television techniques.
 
 
Realism In Fantasy 
Engagement with films furnishes fantasy experiences for viewers that may enhance their own potential competence in understanding and embracing their own agency. Only to the extent, crucially, that they read into (and explode out of) the narratives salient elements of their own lives – and such processes, of course, the producers of cultural commodities have relatively little power over. The capacity of cultural products to inspire their audiences may have unequivocally negative effects, which conventional wisdom exaggerates and agonises over if it works contrary to or exposes accepted dominations (such as children assaulting each other as opposed to adults doing it). Ironically, the resulting censorship neutralises the power of cultural products to be used for those resistive strategies which would render policing and interpretation by experts as well as moral guardians redundant.7
 
Cinema’s attraction to new middle classes seeking cultural distinction has developed in tension with the vulgarities of Hollywood, especially in dealing with social conflict. Not so much the lifestyle dilemmas that a tradition of safe bourgeois film and television dramas has milked; but in the collective untidiness and mass tragedies of the lives of the oppressed. Social realism appeals to those insulated from it, but it’s difficult to sell the masses films about our suffering because it implies some kind of exotic uniqueness of the problem treated – as opposed to the everyday connotations, for us, of crime, exploitation, misery and drudgery.
 
Popular cinema narratives portraying the unpredictability of large scale social discord have to appeal to powerful groups in order to be financed and produced, but also need to convince a popular audience that the cards are not all stacked in advance, and that whatever levels of realism are employed have any integrity. In navigating this uneasy path, pleasure must still be afforded to viewers with agendas of hope, fear and expectation, and patterns of desires, likely to diverge wildly from the educated taste of the film makers.
 
The static cinematic viewpoint leaves watchers distanced from the seething film spectacles of diffuse and sublime social or community processes. Passively connected to events on-screen, one person’s voyeur can be someone else’s carer, and another’s gaoler. Treating one extreme of suffering as the be-all and end-all of a story is the classic strategy of ‘social realism’ genres of cultural production, with the intimate lives of a few standing as exemplars of the many. This resolution of systemic social and political conflict into a multitude of individual problems reproduces the discursive intersection of the middle class charitable gaze with the ministrations of a benevolent liberal State. Thus the film maker’s task, rendering onto the screen the chaos of the social world, helplessly follows a similar logic.
 
 
Crime and Punishment 
The enduring archetypal social issue is crime, where the cumulative weight of cultural material produced to try and explain what is wrong with society is conveniently funnelled into separate working class bodies. This fragmentation of collective reality – a narrowing of focus onto the ‘problem’ of the lone working class object – forces the development and resolution of processes into a rut of heroic voluntarism. Implacably opposing moral forces are divided arbitrarily and simplistically so that no-one can doubt where guilt lies – inside the bad individuals (as opposed to the more general intuition that institutions are far less trustworthy).
 
Given global, divisive and corporate barbarisms, it is ironic that the banality of a diametrically opposed evil is celebrated instead: that of the serial killer.8 Popular novel and film treatments have experimented with every conceivable fiction and media convention, even interrogating the cultural significance of the serial killer genre’s popularity itself. The disasters of capitalism have very definite purposes – in consolidating the power to profit – whereas the actions of serial killers seem utterly pointless in any social sense. Thus the nihilism of the political world is displaced into the moral vacuum of the ultimate criminals. Now, when Hollywood gloss meets TV soap, tabloid news sensationalism, social issue movie, MTV editing and video diary ‘realism’, the scoop has to be serial killers. And if we’re really supposed to think that Natural Born Killers is serious, then the director must be Oliver Stone.
 
 
Tablets of Stone 
Stone has consistently tried to achieve popular Hollywood expressions of contemporary history, abusing in cavalier fashion the conventions of social issue and social realism genres in his ‘state of the nation’ stories.9 But despite his avowed intention to radically criticise existing institutions, viewers are usually left mystified about the social and political scenario portrayed. Crippling liberties are also taken with the historical record, so precipitating fatalism about the prospects for effective political agency.
 
This is compounded by gross narrative oversimplification, supposedly in the interests of populism, but in practice going so far as to evacuate the complexity of situations down to a comic book shorthand. Viewers have to do their own work in transcending the indiscriminately childish patterns of motivation Stone’s characters have to operate with. But by that stage, such a large proportion of any recognisably social context has been eviscerated that few strategies remain for imagining how the fictional problematic might relate to our real lives.
 
 
Noddy and Big Ears Go Psycho 
Renewed child violence and copycat scares gave Natural Born Killers free hype – the calibre of ‘evidence’ being more laughable than usual (e.g. Panorama, BBC1, 27/2/95). Sure enough its characters seem indiscriminately deranged grown-up babies, even if their personalities and development are hidden from us. Backgrounds of horrific abuse and random misfortune would be convincing precursors of this killing spree only if the action took place inside the psychopaths’ vengeful unconscious fantasy-lives. In that case the moral – it was the telly wot did it – would be a provocative comment on media zombification. We could speculate on how destroying the tissues of community enhances, as it cuts adrift, violent infantile impulses which otherwise get woven back into intersubjective creative experience. But we learn nothing about how any real world phenomena are generated, overdetermined, conditioned, articulated and driven.
 
If the media bewitch us exactly so that we do remain ignorant, that can’t account for the desperation of liberals like Stone trying to recuperate disenchantment with the information age and its media, while striving to maintain coherent positions for themselves (where all those 60s gurus failed?). Worse, such familiar leftist elitism would concur with Natural Born Killers’ implicit argument that specifics don’t matter: of cultural connection, social context, or how viewers’ experiences are woven into our lives. Since the media turn it into a glossy celebrity distraction; it is, in effect, distracting us in precisely that way; and that’s all it does. Or has someone read too much Baudrillard?
 
The film’s main innovation is its constant background visual noise of distorted, agitated fragments of film, hand-held, home video, black and white TV, animation, pop video, computer simulation and other visual styles infesting walls, skies or any surface that holds still long enough. Now and again one of these techniques infiltrates the main action for sustained moments, profoundly enthralling and unsettling the viewer, forcing even closer attention. This breathtaking strategy of montage serves as multiple analogy: TV segmentation and random juxtaposition (channel-hopping, succession of images etc); the jumbled chaos of symbolic, social, and urban environments; and the crazy work of the id, here magically materialised. A mythical media junkie’s unconscious is filtered through the director’s ego and projected (cinematically and psychologically) within a cinema screen. Despite these layers of processing, artifice and distanciation, it is a marvellous metaphor for media saturated culture.
 
Action films are utterly (unwittingly) spoofed. The irony and subtlety of a Tarantino script is sacrificed for pompous seriousness, so the actors have no choice but to caricature infantility. Formal pyrotechnics replace pulp devices of affectionate banter and wry humour amidst humdrum horror. Clumsy, staged references to other films are paradoxically more comical amid the ad hoc existentialism and romantic fatalism which show no sign of the reflexiveness that might give them integrity. And in the prison riot, the police, media and governor’s decadence, the execution of the media pundit, and the outlaw woman’s bodily refusal of victimhood, middle class America’s nightmare of underclasses out of control comes into sharp focus.
 
As usual Stone can’t handle the complexities of politics plus media in the face of social forces beyond a superficial individual level. Like its woeful TV predecessor, Wild Palms, this film poses as a serious cultural object by neurotically hamming up the technological wizardry. It falsifies and trivialises the way the media deal with crime and violence, and is irrelevant to their real contemporary expressions. It is transparently parasitic on its cultural context – usually commercial products parade social conscience as niche marketing, not hiding behind it as a crusading principle.
 
Stone will convince those whose grasp of structures of power and capacity for agency in the world are as shallow, cynical and narcissistic as he is. Natural Born Killers and its ilk only have corrosive effects on those whose smugness and jaded tastes are relatively untouched by the material immediacy of 1990s impoverishment and brutalism. We can interpret it (and the panic-hype reception) as a display of intense hysterical anxiety by the elite middle classes at the predicament their ethics, technology and aesthetics are bringing their children to; and at the same time abject fear as they see their brave old world beginning to slip away, threatened with ease by the demons of their own creation. That they hate themselves so much, and know us so little ……
 
 
Blood From A Stone 
Stone’s films unwittingly reproduce the alienating social effects of the media and government operations he claims to want to change. This banal grandiosity contributes to their success as films – but in the ambivalent pleasures they evoke, we glimpse the tragically robust persistence of government-by-capitalism. More optimistically, his films demonstrate that conventional wisdom about possible paths to personal, social or political change (as expressed by the film maker or his leading characters) are definitely not going to be useful as such in our lives. They are the social and political opiates of the enemy – their weakness, not ours, and crying out to be travestied as such.
 
The cinema audience may use the power of film images to resonate with our fantasy lives – which is another way of saying, the exploration of possibilities, catalysts and raw materials for thought and intention, dream and action. And if we fantasise about what we don’t have, those in control fear what they may lose. Given their contemporary cinematic visions of the world and its people, their confidence seems to be at a surprisingly low ebb, balancing subversion and containment more hysterically than ever. Even if we can’t take that much heart from their discomfiture, surely we can at least take every opportunity to expose it publicly.
 

Notes
 
1. Main sources for the left on culture: Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction; Callinicos, A. (1989) Against Postmodernism; Featherstone, M. (1991) Consumer Culture & Postmodernism; Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism; McGuigan, J. (1992) Cultural Populism; Ross, A. (1989) No Respect; Szczelkun, S. (1993) Conspiracy of Good Taste. My contributions to Here & Now 11, 14 & 15 also cover some of this ground.
2. see Ian Tillium, ‘Technological Despotism’, Here & Now 15; and Bonnano, A. (1988) From Riot to Insurrection.
3. Some examples of pessimism, cynicism, quietism etc: Lash, S. & J. Urry (1994) Economies of Signs and Space; Poster, M. (Ed) (1988) Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings; Fiske, J. (1989) Understanding the Popular and Reading the Popular.
4. For culture and the grass-roots, I used: Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power; de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life; McGuigan (1992); Willis, P. (1990) Common Culture; and E.P. Thompson’s studies.
5. Sadly this seems to exclude most of the libertarian left.
6. Books on cinema I found useful are: Collins, J. et al (1993) Film Theory Goes to the Movies; Corrigan, T. (1991) A Cinema Without Walls; Kuhn, A. (1990) Alien Zone, Tasker, Y. (1993) Spectacular Bodies; Turner, G. (1993) Film as Social Practice.
7. Seen most clearly in exploitation genres like horror and porn. See for example Clover, C.J. (1992) Men, Women and Chainsaws; Newman, K. (1988) Nightmare Movies; Segal, L. & M. McIntosh (Eds) (1992) Sex Exposed; Williams, L.R. (1993) ‘Erotic Thrillers & Rude Women’, Sight & Sound, July, pp.l2-14.
8. see F. Dexter, Seriality Kills, Here & Now, Issue 12, and the ensuing debate in Here & Now, Issue 13.
9. including a Vietnam War trilogy – Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven and Earth; the parapolitics of JFK; a biopic of The Doors; gangster stories in Wall Street and the script for Scarface; and accounts of the media and US politics, from Salvador and Talk Radio to Wild Palms (TV series) and Natural Born Killers.
 
 
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ELEPHANT – Gus Van Sant – USA 2003ELEPHANT – Gus Van Sant – USA 2003
Elephant is a very dry film. Like a dream permeated by a mood of dryness. Movement down long corridors connecting dry people with dry space. Only once does moistness obtrude into the film(the group vomiting in the lavatories is an evacuation moistness) when we glimpse in a brief shower scene, a kiss shared between the killers. We can see that they are very wet. But we are not part of their wetness, its something we see as part of the ritual of the killers, their decision to shower, to become moist. But that’s it. The rest of the movie is dry as dry as the water in the drinking fountains located at strategic points in the long corridors of corporate America.
As befits a dry film the core of Elephant is its structure. Its structure takes the form of a number of long tracking shots – the film comprises of about 30 (? – didn’t count) long tracking takes mostly shot from behind an individual or group – as the camera follows its characters across the school campus and though the internal space of the school.
The formal structure issues from Van Sant’s perception of the shared cultural features of American psycho geography. The corridors, with their rooms off, linking specialised zoned spaces, such as refectory library sports hall, could be anywhere in America. This is America: whether you work for the City, Hospital, School, College Corporation or Government: this is the geography that constrains life. Its dry.
At first when thinking about the film I found it difficult to see beyond structure. It was all structure. I think that contained within the film’s structure is the idea of ‘re-enactment’ as ethos. Dramatised re-enactment is, after all, a form of ritual: sometimes empty of sometimes replete with emotive involvement. One ritual associated with serious crime is the staged re-enactment of the event by the police. This often involves retracing the victim’s passage to their fate. Police re-enactments are played by non professional actors(often police personnel) who are asked to take on the various roles required by the situation. Members of the public who believe that they might have been in the area traversed by a victim are asked to be present.
One justification (though by no means the only one) for these police simulations is to stimulate the public into recalling things they have forgotten. To jog memory. Typically these re-enactments are depersonalised walk throughs, dry runs, in which nothing hot takes place. The police video recording of these events does not run to music cues or spot effects. Of course the TV crime industry has picked up on these re-enactments and filled them out with hot material such as dialogue and music. Even though filled out, the sparse personal detail released about victims results more in audience sympathy than involvement. The viewing response remains one of detachment. The TV dramatisations retain the character of their police model a high level of detachment and impersonalisation. As the audience already know the outcome narrative tension is low but spacio temporal tension can be exploited. As with the police re-runs, the purported justification of TV recreations is to shake down viewer memory for information about the victim, perpetrator or the crime, etc. But the TV re-enactments also feel like they evoke a collective response to the event. These films are like machines that produce a mechanical reaction of collective horror. Elephant does not do this. In Elephant my response was to be reminded of the normality of the action. The re-enactment, the walk throughs the unending corridors and spaces produced an effect of depersonalised normalisation of the massacre. It didn’t trivialise or minimalise let alone desensitize. It reminded me that in this sort of environment this is the sort of thing that can happen. Even the music – such as the Beethoven Sonata – richly emotive and redolent of Western individual values is dislocated and removed from the events that unfold: the music is like the background to another movie and its emotional charge negated in the context of Elephants re-staged walk throughs. Elephant’s audience have to remember that familiar anaesthetised institutions ferment their own wide awake fantasies.
In structure the film works to richly suggestive effect. The long super real trance like tracking shots one of which opens the film, start exterior to the school and lead us into the school building and enable us to understand American culture as a psycho-geometric setting. The school’s box like interior which with its long connecting corridors and passage ways, cross junctions and 90* intersecting rooms, represent an institutionalised tunnel vision, an angular geometric experience like the rat mazes of psychology departments.
American psychogeography – Elephant’s tracking recreates the living – movement of the institutions of suburban American. From the interior, the vastness of the monolithic buildings controls angle of vision and at the same time excites movement which permits a person to enter a space similar to the one they have left. The environment engenders a continual molecular agitation as the rigidity of suburban sprawled space engulfs being. In the suburbs with their endless monotonous lines of evenly spaced boulevard lawn fronted housing, public space is mostly an interior organised grid that channels through a vast area. People shop, work or go to school/college in vast buildings whose vista is a straight line leading to a dead-end. Passage ways of unending interstitial corridors linking spacial zones.
Part of the justification of elephant’s structure is that these same vistas have a parallel existence in the virtual space time matrix of computer games. In these the psycho-geography of the suburbs is exploited to create the compulsive experiential movement imagery of the kill-or-be-killed game scenario. Replicated and intensified graphically, examples of this world typically comprise tracking shots down narrowing vistas, 90* intersections, zoned space, no-man’s land, enclosed chambers, narrow passageways. These architectural features are exploited for lurk zones, blind spots, misframing possibilities, both to reveal enemies and wild aggressive monsters and to mount ambushes and surprise attacks in which you the player kill or be killed.
The strongest point in Elephant is this layering of the real and the virtual as a movement experience. Its weakness seems to me that although beautifully shot with lots of young people catching the eye and a resonant emotive film score, it is a little thin. Rather dry. Its a bit dead. Like a beautifully lit shot track of a corpse on the slab in the morgue: the stainless steel glints; the marble purrs; and the body has a silky sheen. But the body would be more interesting if alive. Also I think Elephant deviates when it got slow-mo artsy – was Van Sant trying to hint at eternal recurrence a la Exterminating Angel. But what he does do is see something in the American way that few others either see or want to depict.     adrin neatrour Feb 2004

A Pair of Right Scares by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 65, No. 22, November 2004]A Pair of Right Scares by Tom Jennings
 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 65, No. 22, November 2004]
 
 
BBC2’s fascinating ‘The Power of Nightmares’ (2004) documentaries offer nothing new, argues Tom Jennings
 
Adam Curtis’ basic insight in The Power of Nightmares (PoN) is that similar moral philosophies – decrying the moral degeneracy of consumerism and the godless absolutism of State communism – underpin the politics of both neoconservatism (Bush, Reagan, Thatcher, etc) and radical Islam. Collaborating to repel the USSR from Afghanistan, each interpreted success – including the collapse of the Soviet bloc – as down to them. Their divergent fortunes since have turned them into protagonists in the ‘War on Terror’. Now that their promises of better lives are no longer believed, the political elites can only offer protection against evil – with society uniting in fear and sanctioning whatever measures are fantasised to ameliorate it. Not only the elusive WMDs, but also Al-Qaeda, don’t actually exist. Hot stuff for mainstream TV (if that’s any recommendation …).
 
The main strength of the series was its visual style and structure. Profoundly enriching a rather dry narrative by weaving together archive news footage with excerpts from popular culture, this editing technique parallels the form in which information is encountered and assimilated by ordinary people in the media age. Further, given that the ‘politics of fear’ require the routine exaggeration of threat, it was refreshing to hear it stressed that the propaganda must not be swallowed by the elites – and that it’s the leader’s job to persuade us of ‘great myths’ in order for society to survive (and, coincidentally, for the elites to flourish). So much for the ‘integrity’ of Bush, Blair and power politics in general.
 
In most respects, however, PoN was fatally selective, oversimplistic and tendentious. Clues were liberally (and literally) scattered thoughout in assertions about what ‘we’ do, ‘they’ think and ‘everyone’ believes – constantly generalising its narrow focus and universalising the positions of its comfortable Westerm middle class primary audience. This is bourgeois liberalism’s history as a ‘battle of big ideas’ at its cleverest and most interesting. But its ideology – like the forms of governance it inspires –  is constitutionally unable (in all senses) to acknowledge that the control and disposition of resources are central to political change. Thus neoconservatism is best seen as the political wing of neoliberalism, which demands that corporate market imperatives operate unhindered – whether this be in North America and Europe, the Latin dictatorships, the thin veneer of secular Islamic democracies or the modernised barbarisms in Saudi, Iran, China and Eastern Europe. A hell on earth of increasing poverty, misery and suffering for billions of human bodies is all that neoliberalism can deliver, along with lives wasted on trivial consumption in a shrinking proportion of ‘First World’ populations. The series merely reproduces an alternative nightmare of cynical reactionary pessimism.
 
 
A Pair of Right Scares 
Even in terms of ideas and idealism, PoN was dishonest. Many influential 20th century critiques of Western popular culture were ignored, from Freudianism to the Frankfurt School to Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism), as was the overwhelming  tradition of tasteful class-bound contempt for ‘the mass’ – felt by liberal elitists as much as marxist intellectuals and their Leninist dictatorships, along with adherents of other regressive fundamentalist religions. Its main claim to originality (in the title) requires amnesia towards thousands of years-worth of the political mobilisations of nightmares – the Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, witchhunts; Stalinism and McCarthyism; Nazism and racial essentialism; nationalism, myths of foreign contamination and cultural racism (or even primitivist ecology, political correctness and identity fundamentalism).
 
The emphasis on fantasy, lies and mystification was at least thought-provoking in terms of how they get away with it – not only in sidestepping popular resistance, but in engineering the appearance of collusion via voting and consumerism. Unfortunately, in cutting off the entire spectrum of critique, PoN spontaneously reproduces the commonplace institutional process of presenting an extremely narrow range of ‘loyal opposition’ as the only conceivable alternatives. Curtis’ previous BBC2 series, The Century of the Self (2003), was very enlightening on the history of PR and advertising  campaigns, and could hardly avoid some of the analysis of capitalism missing-in-action in PoN. Better still, the forthcoming feature-length The Corporation (Canada 2004, dirs. Jennifer Abbott & Mark Achbar – the latter responsible for the Chomsky documentary Manufacturing Consent) understands its subject as exhibiting all the traits characteristic of psychopathy if observed in individuals. Of course, even the best of liberal psychology is just as partial and compromised an interpretive tool as its philosophy – shown here in a voiceover musing that corporations “seek their narcissistic reflection” in fascism”. More pertinent is their commitment to it in practice – both in internal functioning and as by far the most conducive political environment. PoN could not make even this simple observation without exposing its bankrupt idealist premises.
 
Curtis insists that ‘ideas shape history’. Why then did he have to, so artfully and artificially, hermetically seal off these particular ideas from all their material, as well as ideological, context? On the surface, because he wants to present himself as so much more clever, liberal and knowledgeable than us poor mugs – and the BBC wouldn’t have gone for the more accurate title: ‘A pair of Right scares’.
 
 
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Crimson Gold – Directed by Jafar Panahi

Iran 2002

Script by KiarostamiCrimson Gold – Directed by Jafar Panahi
Iran 2002
Script by Kiarostami
The film opens with a revelation which encapsulates both the film’s structure structure and content: the opening credits – white on black – fade and the black shifts to one side to reveal we have been looking at the back of a shopkeeper who is being robbed. The camera remains at one fixed point throughout the long robbery sequence until at the end it tilts up as the robber Hussain calmly shoots himself. As it is at the end so it is at the beginning: both the film and Hussein travel the full circle,
The film is a continuous internal dialogue with Tehran as experienced through the cracked screen of Hussein’s motorbike. Crimson Gold depicts Tehran as a city that looks like ‘nowhere’ inhabited by people who don’t exist. Jafar Panahi and Kiarostami have a vision of Tehran as schizoid society unable to move, trapped in contradictions between repression and desire. And a society stalled by this conundrum is doomed to go round in circles going nowhere always on the same plane alwaays returning to where it began. In tune with this gyrating monotonous endless rhythm Hussein bikes round the highways of Tehran at night delivering pizza to the rich. The pizza itself, of course being round American style food delivered in plane square boxes. The Pizza is food that in itself contains opposing messages: the desired and the forbidden; to the poor it is just a meal; to the wealthy a social statement.
From a circle there can be no escape unless first you realise that you are in a circle. The performance of Hussein lies at the heart of Crimson Gold. It is performance of few words that grows in stature and nobility as inarticulately he moves foreward to irrevocably smash the circle – and at the same time within the temporal format of the film confirming its existence.
Hussein circles Tehran in his nightly work delivering food to the rich, and prowls round the wedding ring in the shop that he will never be able to afford. The night scenes are shot like affirmations of the idea of eternal recurrence. The eternity trap in which you will deliver Pizza for ever or until you die knocked off your motorbike. The Tehran streets unending necklaces of street lights; the dark citadels of the rich where the pizza is delivered. Hussein like the warrior he is, knows this terain as a familiar battlefield. Streets fast and dangerous and the experiences in the closed apartments batter against his seemingly imperturbable being. Each of the night deliveries made by Hussein opens up a crack in Iranian society casting momentary light on the dark disturbed regions of this culture experienced and filmed like an underworld. A dream like underworld.
And then there is day when the netherworld slips away and the dream ends. And Hussein still on the bike still looking through the crack in the screen is locked into his own contradiction. He has been set up to marry – an honourable marriage to his best friends sister whom he respects. But for Hussein there is something not right. He should not marry it will continue to drivew his life out of his control, perhaps he has seen too much. We don’t know and it doesn’t matter there is no reason for us to specifically understand. It is not our business nor is it the film’s business. The film’s business is that the unwanted business of the marriage is instinctively employed by Hussein to break the circle. The ring breaks the circle.
The wedding ring foreshadowed from the start of the film is not wanted: the bride to be does not want it, Hussein does not want it for itself. The ring is that gap between desired and forbidden and the unattainable. The ring is unattainable because of its grossly expensive price, forbidden also because it is part of a world in which the Husseins of this world simply do not exist.
The logic that Hussein comes to is to break the schizoid vicuous circle by having the ring. He undertakes an armed robbery to have the ring he desires, not for itself, but for its intrinsic value as something that he is not allowed to have. The robbery is amateur in conception and execution. For Hussein it is clear that it doesn’t matter whether this robbery is sucessful or unsucessful. What matters is to say no; what matters is that to take control. He is redeemed by his action. The robbery ends in fiasco: Hussein shoots himself. The film comes the full circle but the existential knot is cut.
The film is sometimes like a fusion between the style of Alphaville and the content Taxi Driver, but without the Taxi Driver’s self indulgence and fake Hollywood bravura – simply staying true to the situation of the individual in the dark recesses of city society.

A Low Down Dirty Lack of Shame, The Gutter Snipes Back, and Lost in La Manchesta, by Tom Jennings

[Reviews published in Variant, No. 19, February 2004; Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 7, April 2005; and Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 12, June 2007A Low Down Dirty Lack of Shame, The Gutter Snipes Back, and Lost in La Manchesta, by Tom Jennings
[published in Variant, No. 19, February 2004; Freedom magazine, Vol. 66, No. 7, April 2005; and Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 12, June 2007]

A Low Down Dirty Lack of Shame[Variant, No. 19, February 2004]

One of the most interesting aspects of Channel 4’s new drama series Shameless (2003), written by Paul Abbott, is its lack of explicit moral judgement – either on the part of the characters within the script, or in the structure and rhythm of the narrative and its logic and (partial) resolutions. This despite the fact that the scenario and subject matter seem almost obsessively to invite criticism of both the individual characters – their behaviour, choices and interactions; in fact their very being – and the collective attitudes, orientations and situations that accompany them. The result is a complicated balancing act between representation and caricature, honesty and romanticisation, comedy and tragedy, empathy and patronisation, celebration and pathos. For that matter, the chaotic and tumultuous existence of its main protagonists, the Gallagher family, is also a complicated balancing act – comprising six siblings aged three to twenty-one, living on a sink estate in a contemporary northern city, with a progressively absent, unemployed alcoholic father and whose mother has done a runner.
Friends, Neighbours, Fellow TravellersA corollary to the deliberate amoralism of Shameless is precisely the absence of feelings of shame exhibited by the characters, not only in their vulgar and uncouth manners, but in their responses to their apparently hopeless plights and prospects and their sense of responsibility or moral culpability for their situation. The title of the series is both ironic and apt: apt because the Gallaghers oscillate wildly between good intentions, indifference and hurtfulness towards loved ones, but there is little sign of the overweening feelings of self-worthlessness and self-disgust that characterise real shame; and ironic because accusations of shamelessness, for example made by ‘respectable’ neighbours, represent moral condemnation that tends (and intends) to render its targets beyond the pale of acceptable humanity. It reveals far more about the accusers, hinting at their deeper hidden shame and insecurity concerning their own lowly social status, and furthermore legitimises in their eyes the hostile actions and persecution by ‘the authorities’ that ultimately disrupt or preempt any meaningful sense of their own community.
The attitudes of the conservative, respectable and aspiring working class thus neatly dovetail with, for example, state initiatives concerning policing and welfare – demanding stringent monitoring, control and punishment, not only for transgression but for the offensive of their existence. Likewise, middle class charitability and much of socialism – from the Fabians, Eugenics and Leninism through to old and New Labour, has also comprehensively nurtured, articulated with, and fed upon such reactionary beliefs about the innate inferiority of the poor and the need to intervene and ‘do something about them’. Shameless thus invokes several conventional discourses relating to the nature and potential of working class people, only to then flout and undermine them – and in the process to question the social and political philosophies and programmes that, at root, depend on class-based ideologies of moral deficit and ethical inadequacy for their normative and pragmatic utility.
Family AffairsThe main tactic used to achieve this confrontation with accepted homilies, stereotypes and cliches about the degraded poor is a resolute refusal to centre the story around supposedly objective ‘problems’ or ‘issues’. The focus instead is the family’s determination to stay afloat together, and to maintain a sense (or illusion) of agency and hope. In the way are a multitude of obstacles and constraints, most of which are clearly shown to be overdetermined by a combination of historical shaping, situational reality and personal attributes. Any positive outcomes (such as they can be) always emerge from a deliberate (although usually not self-conscious) meshing of sociality, imagination and desire.
But this is no glib, easily or effortlessly achieved solidarity, and neither is it straightforwardly positive. Indeed the violence, abuse and humiliation the characters sometimes heap on each other, and the occasionally indiscriminate volatility of their anger, hatred and destructiveness, are intrinsically linked to their mutual affection, respect and active commitment to each other. This dense patchwork effect is reinforced by the contemporary setting of material which originated in Paul Abbott’s childhood and adolescence in the 1960s and 70s – which partly accounts for distinct residual tinges of nostalgia (as well as the absence of  the panoply of ‘child protection’ professionals which might be expected given current hypocrisies and hysterias). But although details of events, characters and storylines are massively condensed, jumbled up and redistributed, what shines through is a sense of trying to comprehend and deal with the apparently ineffable wash of life – from a point of view simultaneously of innocence and thoroughly streetwise worldweariness. The family members are at times so emotionally close as to feel part of each other, and at other times so distant in their thoughts and preoccupations as to be alien to each other even while under the same roof. The fascination with sexual antics  rings especially true from this perspective, in an environment where both emotional and physical overcrowding can make common knowledge – but only very partial understanding – of private passions and their effects and ramifications.
Clear and Present DangersDespite the all pervading conflicts and crises, the predominant styles of fictional representation of working class life in social realism are also refused. Gone is the tragic pessimism which can only be overcome by individual heroism or the painstaking work of diligent self-improvement. There is no pandering whatsoever to the notion that the family are an imminent threat to themselves or to (polite) society, which can only be averted or contained by the enlightened action of outside forces (the state, employers, experts, etc). Such institutions are recognised as only having the capacity to destroy both the Gallaghers’ fragile practical unity and their sense of who they are, as fully imbricated in each other’s lives rather than separate individuals with isolated needs. So Shameless replaces earnest negativity with exuberance, the yearning for passionate fulfilment, and outrageous comedy bordering on farce.
The price paid to avoid succumbing to the tragic vision may appear to be a trivialisation of the levels of drudgery, misery and suffering experienced by many people in similar positions. Furthermore the exoticisation of their pleasures and the general comic rendering skates over the more ominous manifestations of depression, envy, malice and hatred which regularly afflict those reared in emotionally and materially deprived and dysfunctional environments (clearly, what counts as dysfunctional is crucial here), where urgent necessity prevents distance or reflection. However, it should be clear, to anyone who cares to pay attention, that all of the characters in Shameless are deeply unhappy about many things for most of the time. The difference is that, since this is a mode of being which is entirely familiar and expected (‘it’s how life is’), there is no particular reason to dwell on or agonise over it. Personal or social catastrophe may often follow events within a family which can be attributed to individual psychology and conflict. But it is just as likely to be precipitated by more or less unpredictable externalities – particularly the intervention of state agencies, or activities resulting from crime and the pathologies of those outside one’s immediate social nexus. The sheer number and range of threats and their potential origins means that a pragmatic fatalism is the only sensible policy, if stultifying depression or reactive paranoia are to be avoided.
So, as with all the best television depictions of working class life, it is the emotional realism on this phenomenological level which will most strike a chord with viewers from similar backgrounds. But unlike virtually all other examples that I can recall, there is an overriding sense in Shameless that given the ongoing state of emergency, everyone knows that things will – and will have to change. And while all manner of disasters are just around the corner or are already beginning to unfold, the only strategy that makes sense to effect change for the better, irrespective of how desperate circumstances are, is to mobilise that single most important source of hope, imagination and practical agency which is embodied by the local social network where individual strengths and heroics only matter if they contribute to collective effort.
The Uses of EnchantmentAccounts of working class experience expressed in social realism in the arts, literature and media or in the social and human sciences often also mirror prevailing discourses of class, particularly by constructing a uniformity of ‘the masses’. This contrasts with the differentiation and distinctions found at higher levels of society which have the power to institute general programmes and solutions from above. Similarly the guardians of interpretation and taste (reviewers, critics, academics) try to force representations of lower class life into narrow and rigid categories, leading to a most unseemly disarray in newspaper and magazine reviews trying to categorise Shameless in terms of its genre status, quality and relationship to current politically sensitive issues. Seen through these lenses, the complexity and  diversity within and among the characters and the fecundity of their ensemble is lost – when it is precisely this differentiation, woven in practice into a wealth of meaning and possibility, which yields the promise of active, productive, collective self-organisation. As postmodern pastiche, and in wit and irreverence, comparisons with Roseanne or The Simpsons surely make sense; and in terms of affection and unapologetic self-criticism, The Royle Family, Till Death Us Do Part and Bread spring to mind. But the predictable, static and safe sitcom framework has been removed along with the fundamental appeal to respectability that all of the aforementioned series relied upon. With a level of explicitness entirely appropriate to its subjects, the proximity of horror and the sublime, and most of all its dynamic indeterminacy, Shameless is in a class of its own – in which optimistic reading it is anarchic in the best sense, rather than the worst.

The Gutter Snipes Back[Freedom magazine, Vol. 66, No. 7, April 2005]
The filthy fables of Paul Abbott’s Shameless trample over bourgeois morality. Tom Jennings tries to contain his laughter.
Channel 4’s comedy drama Shameless riotously restarted in a 2004 Christmas Special curtain-raiser to the second series. A north-west community defeats army quarantine and besiegement, after – in timely fashion for the festive season – a consignment of meat falls off the back of a lorry. With typically inspired symbolism, Paul Abbott1 pits the grandiose poisonous stupidity of official power against the informal ingenuity of ordinary folk, who rally when it transpires that the bonanza was deliberately contaminated in a disaster-contingency exercise. Various central characters – the Gallagher clan and their nearest and dearest – are instrumental in the imaginative ducking and diving that restores (dis)equilibrium on the (anti)utopian Chatsworth council estate. Rounding off this holy fantastical yarn – minus po-faced wise men pomp and circumstance – the new lover of pathetic patriarch Frank then goes into labour. As in all its storylines, Shameless’ gutter surrealism elevates a barful of lowest common denominators into both art and politics.
The narrative arc of the original series concerned the survival together of the six Gallagher siblings –  aged 3 to 21, with an increasingly absent, unemployed alcoholic father and long-gone mother. Despite their chaotic social situation, desperate finances and violently conflictual personal dynamics, they ward off dangers arising from their own self-destructive urges and mistakes, the hostility of local State agencies and malicious fellow residents, and the not inconsiderable inconveniences of pure misfortune. Throughout, social control mechanisms of pressures to respectability via the isolated nuclear unit are flouted with haphazard self-fashioned mutual care-giving full of warmth, generosity and spontaneity – which, while frequently fractious and abusive, has no truck with emotional blackmail, self-disgust or meanness of spirit. These themes mature in the new stories. Having established the Gallaghers as a viable entity with fluid and variable interconnections in their local environs – now beset by more and bigger threats – the question becomes, how will the family change?
This broader problematic deprives series two of so clear a unifying thread, and the uneven tenor of successive episodes veers wildly between melodrama, romance, personal dilemma and crime caper – with new characters and guilt-free secrets, lies, perversions and purposes parachuted in soap-operatically to add dysfunctional flavour. However, the immense wit and intelligence in the scripting consistently fashions satisfyingly unlikely scams and dodges, averting catastrophe with a remarkable social synergy where even the most feckless shine. The ensemble acting needs to be, and is, superb – enhanced with a postmodern bag of filmic tricks, styles and devices to complicate and distort perspective, manifesting the confused richness of subjective experience.
A closing chorus of ‘Jerusalem’, sung enthusiastically over a wide-angle aerial pan of the estate, sees the remaining friends and relatives contemplate with apprehension, love and goodwill the departure of eldest daughter Fiona and her boyfriend (de facto parent-figures-in-chief). The strong family brew of differentiated vulnerabilities gives its members the confidence to pursue their desires, and next year’s third run will hopefully enlarge on this theme with similarly sophisticated levels of integrity and self-deprecating affection. ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ is afforded further irony by the humiliation in the local pub of a bullying rotten-borough councillor. The prejudicial hatred crystallised in his bluff and bluster hastens his decisive rejection by a clientele (the public sphere of this ‘nation’) of irrevocably mixed background and colour – comparable to the diversity and complexity intrinsic to each of the Gallaghers and their collective identity. It will be fascinating to see if this righteous idealism can be followed up too.
As outrageous comic entertainment, Shameless foregrounds the positive potential inherent in the lives of the vulgar great unwashed, along with its cultural and situational basis in material conditions and social history. Romanticisation, sentimentality and patronisation are largely sidestepped in its hilarious scenarios because their resolutions depend on the interweaving of so many characters’ flaws, fuck-ups and unexpected capacities. However, the fragile civic balance forged by British working class extended family networks, neighbourhood mutual aid, irreverent expression and ‘creative accountancy’ has been systematically savaged by governments slavishly following the new ‘logic’ of capitalism, replacing jobs and welfare with drugs, guns and jails. The damage inflicted by our more troubled members as well as external ‘betters’ now often escalates far beyond the unfeasibly benign atmosphere on the Chatsworth.
Sure enough, Abbott condensed and exaggerated his own experiences among ten abandoned children in 1960s/70s Lancashire for grist to his mill. This accounts for the authenticity as well as the whiffs of nostalgia in absurdist escapism effectively melding satire and critique at a time when the criminalisation of lower-class anti-social behaviour blurs into War on Terror rhetoric. These days, refusing to conform to middle-class hypocrisy – offending sensibility or ‘quality of life’ (or merely hysterically inflated perceptions of threat) – attracts dehumanising, punitive reprisals from the State. Legitimising their assaults on flexible labour indiscipline as protection against yob culture, the real thugs profiting from neoliberal misery instead glorify selfish narcissism as the end-point of aspiration. That’s what I call shameless.
Meanwhile Shameless gives a very rare mainstream media portrayal of organic lower class communal solidarity, doing justice in depth and texture to what’s possible when individual action is valued principally for its contribution to collective effort – without pandering one iota to the bourgeois agendas reiterated in dramatic genres and, disastrously, in left-wing traditions.2 Soul-searching, preaching, laments and defeatism remain the preserve of documentary balance, liberal issue genres and social realism – which are only too eager to emphasise the depressing likelihood of tragedy rather than pleasurable farce. Preoccupied with the short-term demands of everyday life, Abbott’s characters articulate no explicit ideology – but then art (like ideas) can’t make history, though its material presence contributes to the stew of cultural resources nourishing political movement. Shameless has much to say – and, no doubt, “they know how to throw a party!”
Notes1. writer of many excellent television dramas, including Cracker, Clocking Off, Linda Green and State Of Play.
2. see my ‘A Low Down Dirty Lack of Shame’, Variant 19, 2004 (www.variant.org.uk) for a contrast with conventional representations of working class life.

Lost in La Manchesta[Freedom magazine, Vol. 68, No. 12, June 2007]
Shameless,  series 4,  Channel 4 (January-March 2007)
The occupational hazard in long-running drama series of cast members bailing out has helped spoil the fourth series of Paul Abbott’s Shameless chronicling the (mis)fortunes of the Manchester estate Gallaghers. Since the trauma of eldest daughter Fiona eloping at the end of series one, the scriptwriters have consistently failed to develop, deepen and enhance the story by depicting characters succumbing to depressingly realistic reasons for departure, and the repercussions for those remaining. Instead we’re served up ridiculously over-the-top soapy melodrama – witness neighbours Kev and Veronica banged up in Romania for orphan abduction. Such shenanigans shatter the suspension of disbelief and undermine the aim to counterpose the strength, complexity and resilience of the contemporary ‘underclass’ against the patronising poverty-traps laid by liberal handwringing, middle-class moral managerialism and New Labour police-state discipline and punishment.
In effect, the show’s ambition and refreshing originality are sacrificed on the short-term altar of trash TV for middle-class cool-Britannia youth. Pivotal events and actions in one episode are forgotten by the next, whereupon fashionably topical revelations parachute in to simulate narrative drive. Personality becomes so flattened that believably nuanced and sustained webs of relationships dissolve in short-term infantile whims – a kitchen-sink Dallas/Dynasty. So portraying the children’s prodigal mother as a vacuous narcissist with no redeeming features might be interesting with genuine depth or complexity in or surrounding her. Neither are the Maguires moving in next door more than grotesque caricatures of local gangsters, disallowing any exploration of venality affecting community dynamics; even the local Keystone coppers are characters in their own right (who gives a shit?). Worst of all, young Debbie grasses up the lodger out of selfish spite, imperilling the household despite hitherto holding it together. That her nearest and dearest hardly notice this betrayal, let alone care, epitomises a plot comprehensively lost.
                Fortunately many strengths persist through the blunders, as the Gallagher offspring fitfully flower in barren soil. As the pathetic anti-Don Juan at the centre of this joyfully perverted romance (as young Carl muses, sometimes “families fuck you up, but in a good way!”), Frank’s fatalism about the better management of capitalism offering his ilk any hope attracts Abbott’s most concentrated attention in booze-fuelled soliloquies – including appealing for improved conditons for the abandoned poor: “Make poverty history – cheaper drugs now!” The critique of pretension and old-fashioned defensive conservatism underlying his disillusionment later coalesce in a rant about council estate kids going to college, losing their accents and conviviality and “using long words”. Tellingly, while empathising with his position, his children refuse to be constrained either by it or respectable alternatives, and the unruly melange of sex and drugs and karaoke culminates in a rousing chorus of “Never forget where you’re coming from …” It’s just a shame that  Shameless parrots so many trivial pursuits in remaining an exception to both the real-world and media rule.

www.variant.org.uk
www.freedompress.org.uk
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Boxing Booth – Adrin Neatrour 1984

Sceened at Side Cinema 7 2 04

Directors commentsBoxing Booth – Adrin Neatrour 1984
Sceened at Side Cinema 7 2 04
Directors comments
A friend asked me guess the composer of a piece of music he was playing. It sounded contemporary and I thought it might be Arvo Part. In fact it was Beethoven, one of the last quartets he wrote. Viewing my film 20 years after making it brings home how time referenced films are. The look and the feel of what we see are frozen into time. Realised immediate archaism. There are perhaps a few exceptions: film being film everyone will have their list of exceptions. Not only does film comprise multiple indicators and signs of its era or year of production even; but its medium its style and its structure all connote specific temporal provenance. To exist as archive does not mean that old films lack relevance meaning or the immediacy of saying something to us now – independent of historical signification or nostalgic attraction. And this was the question I wanted to pose about my film.
When viewing Boxing Booth I tried to look exactly at what was on the screen. This was torture. The editing sometimes seemed awkward and lacking rhythm; the dialogue sometimes arch and self conscious. But although I cringed and hated this they were central to the integrity of the film which was a self portrait emeshed in a documentary about the old fairground Boxing Booth. This was me. And I wasn’t smooth and still ain’t – though I have learnt to mimic smoothness. This was me as was, bad cuts silly lines and all. It was me taking on the boxing booth to find pain as a means of atoning a failed relationship and a messy abortion. It was made as my gesture. I think the film archaic as it looks still holds to this intention of seeking out judgement as self chastisement.
There is another aspect that struck me on reviewing this film – how little I’ve changed. Not physically but rather in mind in the way I make films. I regard this as my first film because I made the discovery that I wanted the films I made to be a journey started without destination or certain outcome in mind. Boxing Booth was started with the idea that I would travel with the fair and when the time came take my turn. I did not know the outcome of the film when I started making it: I knew there was a situation in which the possibility of a film existed, but that possibility could only become actual if my entire being was concentrated into it and I had confidence in the momentary forces that could resolve into the imagery action and sounds of film. But the initial step was a act of faith: there was No film. No script. Only the chance of movement.
Looking at the film at this screening I also realised that it was important for me to have made a film about myself that incorporated physical revelation and attempted honesty. The taking of unadorned and often ugly self as subject matter gave self confidence to me as a film maker. It somehow meant that in the future, as long as I retained humility before all life, that I was the equal of the people with whom I worked to make film. No matter what the subject matter – death – pain – dishonesty – I had been there in my film. And there was confidence in having made that trip that gave me the internalised right to intrude. I don’t say that my intrusions should be accepted; often they have not been. But I was not afraid on making demands; I ask questions as an equal not as a child.

Dilemmas of a Bleeding Heart by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 3, February 2005]

Vera Drake vividly portrays the paradoxes of backstreet abortion without passing judgement, writes Tom JenningsDilemmas of a Bleeding Heart by Tom Jennings
 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 3, February 2005]
 
 
 
Vera Drake vividly portrays the paradoxes of backstreet abortion without passing judgement, writes Tom Jennings
 
Director Mike Leigh’s latest effort continues his career-long depiction of ordinary British people struggling with intolerable situations, examining the effects of mundane circumstances on personality, relationships and the strategies we fashion to cope. Much of his work illuminates troubling social issues in the fine grain of individual pain and intransigent immediate environments.1 Vera Drake likewise tackles head-on the implications of backstreet abortion – and even though the film (like Leigh) is emphatically pro-choice, it has been acclaimed equally by liberals, feminists and religious and conservative opponents.2 So it’s worth outlining first the broad contours of an approach able to sidestep easy categorisation and pat political prescription.
 
Early television work hilariously caricatured the grotesque aspirations of 1970s suburban new middle classes, puncturing the pretensions arising from their socio-economic (and other) insecurities.3 Leigh heightened the vicious comic effect via a tortuous scripting, improvisation and rehearsal process involving cast members endlessly exaggerating individual tics and stock phrases to the point of outrageous stereotype. Realism, naturalism and complexity in the acting seemed sacrificed to exploitative melodramatic excess – courting accusations ever since of misanthropically ridiculing hapless victims (especially lower class characters, given the long and continuing history of contempt reserved for us in most UK mainstream and ‘alternative’ comedy).
 
But, despite posing considerable dangers for his progressive and humanistic intentions, Leigh’s method developed into a unique cinematic technique reflecting more generally on the hopelessness and despair inherent in contemporary society.4 Stories of abject damaged souls juggle personal inadequacy, social fragility and economic necessity. Emphasising complicated class positions and mobility (rather than the traditional ‘kitchen sink’ industrial working class), Leigh hints that we are all fucked-up and stuck – money, status and power merely altering the parameters of complacency used to avoid acknowledging it. Nevertheless, the most cruelly lampooned working class characters often have more potential – for empathy and generosity and as catalysts of change. Precariously balancing destructiveness towards self and others with small victories and revelations, room to manoeuvre is carved out – thanks to social networks that facilitate a loosening of the external repression of conformism and the internal repression which forges rigid and defensive patterns of behaviour and expression. The drama is always harrowing, though, and Vera Drake is that in spades.
 
 
A Low Vera
 
Diverging from Leigh’s usual conventions in two important ways, the new film is not contemporary5 but set among the claustrophobic interiors, postwar privations and equally constricting social mores of 1950s North London. Also, the eponymous heroine (a powerful performance from Imelda Staunton) and her close-knit, devoted family6 have none of the visible flaws and conflicts that usually get hammed up. Vera seems perfectly happily adapted to her multiple social support roles: paid to clean middle class households; housewife; carer for bed-bound neighbours and relatives; … and backstreet abortionist. Narrative tension looms from the illegal and secretive nature of the latter; meanwhile all activities are conducted in the same brisk, cheery, routinised manner, with cliches and homilies many will recognise (e.g. the ubiquitous ‘nice cup of tea’). The arrest, trial and prison sentence of this selfless altruist is a personal tragedy mirroring those of various desperate pregnant clients she ‘helps out’ (because no one else will) – differing conspicuously from the daughter of one of her employers, who sails through the official rigmarole available to those able to pay.
 
The sequences depicting both classes of abortion scenarios are meticulously true to real-life experiences7 – and the staging, visual design and camerawork accurately evoke the general mood of ordinary daily life at the time. The film aims to propose, as minimally as possible, the grass-roots ethical quandary of unwanted pregnancy and the woman-centred communal knowledges and practices which have evolved, in all of recorded history, in response. The choice of period avoided unnecessary complications – such as the profiteering and otherwise corrupt conduct accompanying the involvement of feral medics and criminal organisations as demand skyrocketed through the 1950s and 60s.8 And the Drakes’ sheer humdrum respectability – almost to the point of the complete absence of anything resembling opinions or conscious reflection – undercuts all questions of ideology, religion and other moralising discourses which tend to saturate and conceal the immediate physical and emotional dilemma facing the women involved.
 
Vera’s dignity and equilibrium unravel when confronted with the gravity of her actions, with the film demonstrating that no solution can be found in simplistic moral terms. The suffering of women stripped of control over bodily reproduction will inevitably be exacerbated by the cruelty of organised coercion – therefore safe abortion is a pragmatic mortal necessity. However, neither glib permissiveness and liberal rights nor the moral fascisms of religion, State, political correctness or the cosy bulwark of respectable righteousness can wish away the trauma and anguish of decisions to terminate potential human life. In a current climate of reactionary clamour for certainty encouraged by diverse powerful political interests, these are both important messages. But Vera Drake also resonates strongly with Leigh’s underlying preoccupations – the contradictions between the surface cleanliness of conformity to social norms and expectations and the messy reality of people’s lives. The negotiation of these gaps and fractures flirts with frustration and farce in blending honesty and directness, spontaneous warmth, conviviality and generosity of spirit. Most of all, the chances of mobilising these resources in working through life’s quagmires increase the further down the slippery slope of class stratification you go – less encumbered with maintaining face, taste and superiority. But, crucially, only if the Drakes’ stultifying paralysis – suffocating debate and difference under a blanket of bourgeois decorum – is collectively resisted.
 
 
Notes 
1. such as bulimia (Life Is Sweet, 1990), adoption (Secrets And Lies, 1995), homelessness (Naked, 1993), and dementia (High Hopes, 1988).
 
2. including in fundamentalist America and Catholic Europe. Vera Drake is dedicated to Leigh’s midwife and GP parents.
 
3. notably Nuts In May (1976) and Abigail’s Party (1977).
 
4. also in Bleak Moments (1971), Meantime (1983), Career Girls (1997) and All Or Nothing (2002).
 
5. neither was the tedious turn-of-the-century Topsy-Turvy (1999) about operetta composers Gilbert & Sullivan.
 
6. loving husband Stan (Phil Davis), employed as a mechanic by his brother; upwardly-mobile tailor’s assistant son Sid (Daniel Mays); and painfully-shy factory worker daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly).
 
7. according to a friend who suffered both types shortly before abortion was legalised in 1967. However, Vera’s method – flushing the uterus with soapy water – is shown as relatively benign; but is actually just as agonising and life-threatening as knitting needles etc.
 
8. only suggested by procurer Joyce (Heather Craney) who, unbeknownst to Vera, charges clients two guineas for her services.
 
 
 
www.variant.org.uk
 
www.freedompress.org.uk
 
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk