You think you’re so clever and classless and free. The title of Carl Neville’s
Classless: Recent Essays on British Film (Zer0 Books) was always going to give you an
anniversary-appropriate earworm, not least because the other relevant historical use of “classless” – John Major’s announcement that, as of 1992, Britain was going to become a classless society – is less well-known outside the UK. But also this: Neville’s slim book about recent British film is really about the 90s, the decade that saw the gentrification or adoption of aspects of working-class culture by the middle classes (football, the funny-for-five-minutes ironic lad mag
loaded, the very use of the word
lad, even the media-managed emotional outpouring around Princess Diana’s death in 1997), all within a similar cultural and commercial boom as was seen in the 60s, when Britain – or some in it – also saw itself as transcending or outgrowing class. The first film that Neville discusses – Danny Boyle’s
Trainspotting – got this 90s-as-the-new-60s gloss and weightlessness: the opening chase sequence (above) with its nod to
A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles-like energy of the, er, lads. “A temporal elision of the bitter 70s and combative 80s,” Neville writes, of
Trainspotting and the Britpop years.
Reading
Trainspotting in class terms, Neville – author of the
Impostume blog – sees its middle-class Renton (Ewan McGregor) as slumming it in heroin addiction, which is a choice according to the film's famous early voice-over. Choice became a familiar neoliberal word in the 90s, when talk of "choices" in areas like education and health really meant less public ownership and the urge to privatise. Choose heroin: Renton’s usage might have seemed like a sarcastic reversal of that kind of language but Neville argues that it is in the same -- hard to avoid the pun -- vein. Heroin use, he writes, might have become epidemic in the post-industrial heartland of England and Scotland through the 1980s, but if you
choose it, “there are no reasons, no wider forces shape you”. Neoliberalism’s free agents are free to choose. For Renton, heroin addiction is like a gap year, something he can leave at any time, and there are shades, although Neville does not tease them out, of the dilettantish tourist in Boyle’s film of that quintessential late 90s gap year novel,
The Beach.
All this talk of neoliberalism reminds you that everything coming from the publisher
Zer0 Books sits more or less in the shadow of Mark Fisher’s
Capitalist Realism, an equally slim but more powerful book that appeared about this time last year. Accessible but intellectually rigorous, it had the energy and immediacy of internet argument – Fisher runs the
K-punk blog – transferred to the page. But I think Zer0 have opted for too much immediacy this time. By which I mean that Neville needs to have a word with his editor: the book is riddled with typos –
Mamma Mia is often spelt
Mama Mia etc – titles are sometimes not in italics but should be and other proofing lapses. And the argument is well-developed in some places – pieces on
Trainspotting and
The Queen – and less so in others. There are a lot of ideas, sometimes too condensed, meaning it’s a small book that deserved to grow bigger: the 90s Northern feelgood cycle – your
Full Montys, your
Billy Elliots, your
Brassed Offs – is only mentioned in passing while the rigorously class-conscious Ken Loach appears only as a predecessor of the era Neville discusses, meaning that films as valuable as
The Navigators and
Sweet Sixteen (where heroin is not a fun lifestyle choice) are missed too. I could also have done with some unpacking of the educational snobbery in
The History Boys – play and film – which seems pertinent in light of the reinstalment of Oxbridge privilege in British politics and culture. In the introduction, Neville does note that he's writing before the 2010 British election and -- presciently -- that "class as a political issue seems to be returning from exile". (As an aside,
this take-down of
The History Boys was bang-on.)
But it’s too easy to say what a book isn’t. Writing like this doesn’t happen nearly enough – or it happens online but not often in non-academic publishing (I think of J Hoberman’s interweaving of political history and film criticism in The Dream Life). Another way of talking about Classless is to say that studies of Trainspotting and The Queen could have grown into books of their own. The Queen is a fascinating case: a film about a major 90s event seen ten years on, when it had fully crystalised into mythology and when Stephen Frears and writer Peter Morgan were able to project back into 1997 the disillusionment about Tony Blair that had developed in the meantime. In The Queen, emotional outpourings and demonstrative funerals are seen as aspects of working-class culture, and Britain's institutions survive, post-1997, by co-opting them and minting a new myth of classlessness: “The Aristocracy needs to be less reserved, aloof, obsessed with decorum. It redeems itself by becoming more proletarian.” And Blair met them in the middle by becoming less Labour. Anyway, the media-assisted myth of classlessness masks the realities, as Neville writes in his introduction: “England is caught in an unresolved tension between its apparent modernity and the reality of its deeply embedded semi-feudal social relations.” But Neville’s opposition to Blair and his media-spun cult of the people’s princess, which he sees as reaching a kind of perverse climax with the death of reality TV star Jade Goody 12 years later, makes him seem unexpectedly nostalgic for the stiff-upper-lip reserve of the pre-Diana Royals. Writing about Frears but, you suspect, really himself, he says: “[As a staunch Republican] he can still be saddened by the sober, stoical, detached, controlled element of Englishness gradually yielding under the pressure of compulsive confessionalism and opinionism.”
Maybe the only way is out. Neville closes with comments on the best two British films of the past decade (I’d agree), Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (above) and Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (or “Jonathan Glazier” and “Lynn Ramsay” in Zer0’s spelling). Both films are set in Spain, the site of British working-class holidays rather than Mamma Mia’s middle-class Greece, but Sexy Beast in particular gets Spain not as a degraded tourist zone but as “a warm, emotive, physically expressive, unrestrained zone of rich libidinal and affective outpouring”. Or: it’s sensual, hot, dry, bright -- in every way, not Britain. Morvern Callar’s Spain is more complex, a place of transformation for a mysterious Scottish woman, offering both a relief from her grief and psychological freedom. Her escape from Britain is appropriately ambiguous.
9. Somewhere (Sofia Coppola)
