> The basic theme of late modernist culture is impossibility (of society,
> knowledge, revolution, etc.), a theme in keeping with the age of the
> retreat of the Left. Mike Leigh's _High Hopes_ (1988) presents, with
> ironic detachment and identification, its structure of feelings, gendering
> them at the same time:
Hey, Mike Leigh! Cool!
FilmFour had a week of Mike Leigh films on recently. Yoshie, how about an analysis of the portrayal of the working class in this line up:
Meantime (1981)
High Hopes (1988)
Life is Sweet (1990)
Naked (1993)
Secrets and Lies (1996)
Particularly, look at a couple of themes:
a) Working class struggle: In Meantime, there is the pressure of the older brother to keep the younger brother from joining in with the skinheads - set to the backdrop of the early Thatcher years, with everyone one the dole. To me it is clear that the fucked up sexism of the working class family and the fucked up violence of Colin (the younger brother)'s skinhead friend Coxy are related - the recuperation of the working class as in a pile of shit, but at least in it together (as opposed to being sucked into the patronizing middle class society of Colin's aunt) is the filmed version of Keynesian stagnation.
In High Hopes, the stagnation is taken one step further - with Cyril's strangely idealistic cynicism (Suzi: 'we're working for the revolution', Cyril: 'well, you're wasting your time then').
And then on to Naked, where Johnny's rant about dialectics (but in a fatalistic sense, in a sense of dialectics as a narrative of history which constantly erases the present) with the security guard I think has to be read against the background of the fall of the Soviet Union, the failure of the promise that socialism is inevitable, and the anxiety of the erasure of working class self-valorisaiton. (I don't have the text here, unfortunately, because it would be great stuff to quote in full)
b) The relationship between working and working class identity - again, the dole queue of Meantime, the starkly posed choices (Cyril's dead end motorcycle courier job vs. Martin Burke's rich and pointless existence middle class existence) in High Hopes, the hopeless attempts of Andy to escape middle-classized work in Life is Sweet.
A key theme again and again in Mike Leigh's films is that life goes on - and the meditation is always about what the result of that is.
One of the things that Mike Leigh's films over the last 20 years have had to deal with is that 'working class' was precisely hinged on identity in 'working class politics'. 'Working class' was defined as a gritty, poor, shitty place - counter-posed to 'middle class' - hard vs. soft, and all that. Well, that working class identity is being erased pretty damn well in Britain at present - and it can now be re-incorporated in films such as 'Brassed Off' and 'The Full Monty' which praise the working class as a kind of authentic dinosaur (a bit like the farmers are valued).
Politics - from 'Class War' to the 'Socialist Worker' - which is focussed on how 'we're not middle class wankers' is more and more a posture in a society where the working class look, and think, like middle class wankers anyway.
'Working class'ness is not an obvious trait to the people I work with. I can walk around and point to people and say 'this one is working class' and 'this one isn't', but that doesn't make a bit of difference unless that distinction is somehow filled with meaning by the people themselves. Yes, we need a 'critical edge' - but in practice Terry Eagleton gives me as little useful critical edge as Jean Baudrillard does. Eagleton's insistance on the 'revolutionary times' which will sharpen people's ideological eyesight is little short of utopian in my eyes.
What does an anti-capitalist politics in a society where most people have a car, a job and a fucking big TV look like? I've got some ideas, but they look almost as little like 'traditional working class politics' as they look like a page out of Baudrillard.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx
NOTE: I do not speak for the HGMP or the MRC.