Against the Hollywood grain: Trainspotting and Brassed Off!
104.2Abstract (summary)
Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between a revival and a death throe. For a case in point, consider the cinema of regional quirk. As America's homogenizing commercialism colonizes the global film scene, occasional voices of dissent emerge from works that present a distinctly local habitation within the frame. Their flicker of lively difference is especially touching, fragile, and affirmative in the cinema of English-speaking countries. These are the cultures which -- to hijack Winston Churchill's apercu -- are separated from the United States by a common language. THE case is especially interesting in Britain. True, most of the country's debate about its national identity centres upon assimilation into the new European Union: the currency, the uber-parliament, the threat of new industrial standards for such cultural essentials as beer and condoms. But in cinema the struggle for integrity is not against the French or German pressures (subtitles guard against that). It is against Hollywood. The recent cinematic rediscovery of Jane Austen and Shakespeare shows Britain valiantly deploying its cultural heritage against us studios. Britain's classic literature weighs in heavily against the sense and sensibility of Tom Cruise and Arnie Schwarzenegger. But two recent films about the unemployed class, by their determined politics, suggest a more pertinent alternative to the colonization by Hollywood: regional realism. At first view Mark Herman's Brassed Off! is a comfy, old-fashioned sort of film. In 1992, in the Yorkshire mining town of Grimley (the accent is on the "Grim"), the miners' brass band overcomes various obstacles to win the national championship. Sparking the otherwise all-male band is a pretty blonde surveyor, Gloria (Tara Fitzgerald), who returns to her home town and blows its flugel. This is the kind of film that would have come out of the Ealing Studios in the 1950s and 1960s. A village of eccentrics, united for a common cause, triumph both romantically and in their community mission. Thirty years ago it would have starred Alec Guinness or Alistair Sim as the band leader (and perhaps as two or three instrumentalists and the mine owner as well), with Shirley Eaton or Kay Kendall on the flugel. For political import in this diverting lark, one might have claimed its implicit celebration of English eccentricity. But making an independent film today requires too much money and creative will to allow only an implicit politic, not to mention one of such comfortable sentiment. The world is too much with us these days, getting and monopolizing, homogenizing and spending. So the familiar character comedy of Brassed Off! is openly packaged as an anti-Tory polemic. The old bottle is dusted off to serve a new whine. It opens with a few sardonic definitions, such as "Tory" ("colloq. or derog. ... e.g., Margaret Thatcher"), "Redundancy" ("frequently British"), and "Colliery" ("a coal mine, or pit, one of many closed by the Tories"). The first shot is a line of dancing lights in the darkness. This is revealed to be light-helmeted miners at work in the dark. In redefining the initial impression of lightness as a sombre labour, this sequence encapsulates the film. The first sight gag suggests that the community is not as close as it might seem. Two women gossip over a fence. The long shot reveals that they are separated by another yard, in which a middle-aged man quips about how easy it is to get used to unemployment. The musicians are anxious about the threatened closure of their mine. But to their conductor, Danny (Peter Postlethwaite, a craggy woebegone chap who is becoming as ubiquitous as Gerard Depardieu), "It's music that matters." He assumes that his 100-year-old band's success will survive the closure of the pit and the bankruptcy of his players. But while he leads his band to a victory in the regional semi-finals, the miners vote to accept a redundancy offer, effectively closing the pit. Of course, if there's no pit, there will be no band. Danny collapses with lung disease and is hospitalized. The idea of a brass band conductor coughing up coal dust is a strong metaphor, almost metaphysical in its conjunction of idealized music and cold, coal reality. But it turns maudlin when the band serenades him with "Danny Boy," calculated to leave not a dry leg in the house. IN contrast to Danny's simple idealism, his son Phillip (Stephen Tompkinson) struggles with a complex of real problems. He is struggling with the pounds 12,000 debt he incurred during the strike of 1984, for which he was briefly jailed. While his principles leave him opposed to the redundancy offer, his financial position and his wife compel him to sell out. He is torn between his duties to his father/band and the needs of his family. While he plays, he is dispossessed of his household, and his wife takes the children and leaves him.
Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between a revival and a death throe. For a case in point, consider the cinema of regional quirk. As America's homogenizing commercialism colonizes the global film scene, occasional voices of dissent emerge from works that present a distinctly local habitation within the frame. Their flicker of lively difference is especially touching, fragile, and affirmative in the cinema of English-speaking countries. These are the cultures which -- to hijack Winston Churchill's apercu -- are separated from the United States by a common language. THE case is especially interesting in Britain. True, most of the country's debate about its national identity centres upon assimilation into the new European Union: the currency, the uber-parliament, the threat of new industrial standards for such cultural essentials as beer and condoms. But in cinema the struggle for integrity is not against the French or German pressures (subtitles guard against that). It is against Hollywood. The recent cinematic rediscovery of Jane Austen and Shakespeare shows Britain valiantly deploying its cultural heritage against us studios. Britain's classic literature weighs in heavily against the sense and sensibility of Tom Cruise and Arnie Schwarzenegger. But two recent films about the unemployed class, by their determined politics, suggest a more pertinent alternative to the colonization by Hollywood: regional realism. At first view Mark Herman's Brassed Off! is a comfy, old-fashioned sort of film. In 1992, in the Yorkshire mining town of Grimley (the accent is on the "Grim"), the miners' brass band overcomes various obstacles to win the national championship. Sparking the otherwise all-male band is a pretty blonde surveyor, Gloria (Tara Fitzgerald), who returns to her home town and blows its flugel. This is the kind of film that would have come out of the Ealing Studios in the 1950s and 1960s. A village of eccentrics, united for a common cause, triumph both romantically and in their community mission. Thirty years ago it would have starred Alec Guinness or Alistair Sim as the band leader (and perhaps as two or three instrumentalists and the mine owner as well), with Shirley Eaton or Kay Kendall on the flugel. For political import in this diverting lark, one might have claimed its implicit celebration of English eccentricity. But making an independent film today requires too much money and creative will to allow only an implicit politic, not to mention one of such comfortable sentiment. The world is too much with us these days, getting and monopolizing, homogenizing and spending. So the familiar character comedy of Brassed Off! is openly packaged as an anti-Tory polemic. The old bottle is dusted off to serve a new whine. It opens with a few sardonic definitions, such as "Tory" ("colloq. or derog. ... e.g., Margaret Thatcher"), "Redundancy" ("frequently British"), and "Colliery" ("a coal mine, or pit, one of many closed by the Tories"). The first shot is a line of dancing lights in the darkness. This is revealed to be light-helmeted miners at work in the dark. In redefining the initial impression of lightness as a sombre labour, this sequence encapsulates the film. The first sight gag suggests that the community is not as close as it might seem. Two women gossip over a fence. The long shot reveals that they are separated by another yard, in which a middle-aged man quips about how easy it is to get used to unemployment. The musicians are anxious about the threatened closure of their mine. But to their conductor, Danny (Peter Postlethwaite, a craggy woebegone chap who is becoming as ubiquitous as Gerard Depardieu), "It's music that matters." He assumes that his 100-year-old band's success will survive the closure of the pit and the bankruptcy of his players. But while he leads his band to a victory in the regional semi-finals, the miners vote to accept a redundancy offer, effectively closing the pit. Of course, if there's no pit, there will be no band. Danny collapses with lung disease and is hospitalized. The idea of a brass band conductor coughing up coal dust is a strong metaphor, almost metaphysical in its conjunction of idealized music and cold, coal reality. But it turns maudlin when the band serenades him with "Danny Boy," calculated to leave not a dry leg in the house. IN contrast to Danny's simple idealism, his son Phillip (Stephen Tompkinson) struggles with a complex of real problems. He is struggling with the pounds 12,000 debt he incurred during the strike of 1984, for which he was briefly jailed. While his principles leave him opposed to the redundancy offer, his financial position and his wife compel him to sell out. He is torn between his duties to his father/band and the needs of his family. While he plays, he is dispossessed of his household, and his wife takes the children and leaves him. His self-loathing soon leads to a public crack-up; on one of his side-gigs as Mr Chuckles the clown, during a church children's festival, he curses the Tories and rails at God for taking John Lennon and young mineworkers "while Margaret bloody Thatcher lives." Mr Chuckles exits the scene as "Coco the Scab." When the despondent clown attempts to hang himself on the mine scaffolding, Danny is shocked into a reevaluation of his single-minded passion for music. Meanwhile, the film's romance is thrown off the rails when flugeller Gloria is found to be working for the British Coal Board, writing a report on the mine's economic viability. Her childhood sweetheart, Andy Barrow (Ewan McGregor), fails to oppose her banishment from the band. Andy is a clear-eyed sceptic who predicts the four-to-one vote in favour of a payoff and is convinced that the government had decided to close the mine two years before Gloria was assigned to write her report. When the young surveyor learns how she has been used strictly for cosmetic purposes ("Coal is history"), she quits her job and funds the despairing band's trip to the national finals at Albert Hall. Danny escapes from the hospital to hear his band win the nationals (with their rousing "William Tell Overture"). But he refuses to accept the trophy. Instead, he lectures the packed hall on how Thatcherism has destroyed an entire industry, communities, people's lives, all in the hollow name of progress. When his passionate profanity plays Albert Hall, the sobered audience gives him a standing ovation. Danny has learned that music -- like any obsessive ambition -- does not matter as much as caring for people. He takes his band out on the town and then, as their bus passes the parliament buildings, he leads them in "Land of Hope and Bloody Glory." THE film's last image is a closeup of Danny, doomed but enlightened. His political awakening does not reject music but turns it to stronger use. He has discovered a new objective for his art. He can use music to make a political statement. Earlier, Danny's band music played over unheard debate at the mining company and the women's anti-closure demonstration. The music was detached from the social reality. But by film's end, Danny has learned to use the music as a political weapon; it gives him the platform to state his political position. To this end, the substitute conductor, Harry (Jim Carter), directs the winning performance like a sweating boxer, concluding with his clenched fists raised defiantly. In conducting the band, Harry recovers the fighting passion that he knew during the strike of '84. The recital, like the film, uses entertainment devices to get out a political statement. In the closing titles the film states that since 1984 the Tory government in Britain has closed 140 pits, at the cost of 25,000 jobs. The film has fleshed out those statistics with cameos of individual pain. Andy Barrow represents the hopeless young, measuring out his life in losing pool games and numbing pints. For the Albert Hall appearance he has to rouse himself miraculously to win his horn back from the pool shark who has dominated him. Phillip's wife is humiliated when she can't pay for all her groceries. But the cashier not only lets her owe 6op till next week, she slips her a fiver in the register chit. This is business with a human face. The women's bond is not just economic: both have husbands in the band. The brass band truly is the force of harmony and community when all other social bonds and responsibilities seem to be crumbling under Thatcherism. As the ride paradoxically suggests, the brass band is the community that effectively counters the larger forces that brass off the afflicted workers. (As if to suggest the more indelicate synonym for the rifle, the opening credits colour-highlight the letters "p" and "f.") When Danny makes his politically charged Albert Hall speech, director Mark Herman turns his genre film away from its traditional sentimental comforts and drives it home as polemic. The anger and indignation behind this film make it quite unlike the Hollywood romances and Ealing comedies to which its plot invites comparison. When the dialogue is studded with "summats" and "I'll say ta-ra, then," its colloquial difference is another affirmation of political individuation and populism, both threatened by bottom-line politics and the transatlantic box office. The film tweaks its regional assertiveness in the sign on the band's chartered bus: "Paris, London, Berlin and Grimley, but mainly Grimley." IN contrast to the sentimental compromises of Brassed Off! consider the violent and raging indecorum of Trainspotting, arguably the year's most uncompromising vision of the alienated underclass. This film, which Danny Boyle directs from John Hodge's adaptation of the Irvine Welsh novel, makes bad taste an ethical imperative. Trainspotting is an explosive representation of the death-in-life of young heroin addicts in Edinburgh (even though the Volcano disco it shows is actually in Glasgow). It's framed by a Howlish recitation of middle-class values: "Get a life, get a job, get a career, get a family," that the narrator, Renton (Ewan McGregor again, as ubiquitous as Postlethwaite), eschews: "I chose not to choose life. ... There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you have heroin?" At the end Renton reforms: "I'm going straight and choosing life. ... I'm going to be just like you." He converts to a real estate agent, flogging "beautifully converted Victorian townhouses." This happy ending is less assuring than it seems. We can't be comfortable being Renton's models, because he is one corrupt, unsteady bloke. Several energies distinguish Trainspotting. It exudes a nervy, physical energy in its rock soundtrack, jump-cuts, floor-level camera movement, and an editing style as twitchy as its subject addicts. It eschews the usual judgmental horror of the heroin experience. For one thing, the film dares to admit the ecstasy that the drug provides. "What they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn't do it." Two of Renton's mates have no interest in hard drug use, at least when we first meet them. Begbie (Robert Carlyle) is a vicious psychopath of frightening righteousness, while Tommy (Kevin McKidd) achieves his high through spirited sex with his girlfriend (an activity the couple videotapes for future reference). But when Tommy's partner leaves him, he turns to heroin, and his downward spiral is far more self-destructive than that of the longtime addicts. Suffering from AIDS, he finally dies infected by the excrement from the same kitten his girlfriend wouldn't accept from him. Paradoxically, Renton and the experienced junkies show more survival instinct, a strength in their weakness. Nonetheless, the film's tone darkens and slows significantly when a baby dies from neglect in a crack house. As the film provides Renton's perspective, it embraces a hero (not to say heroin) and attitude that we would normally reject. It is to McGregor's credit that he retains our sympathetic identification, despite his various betrayals of friends and his horrific lifestyle. In the service of this subjectivity, the film combines a punk-rock score with surreal images, some scatological, most hilarious. In these ways the film expresses an essential individualism. Although the vernacular was supposedly toned down for the London audience, it is still deliberately obscure, especially some of Begbie's profane rants. The pervasive black humour confirms the film's disrespect for any form of convention. To emphasize this rejection of all codes of conduct, Renton is a nonviolent version of Begbie's impulsiveness. While Begbie is capable of moralistic platitudes, Renton has avoided being conditioned. So he is able to abruptly interrupt his careful plan to go cold turkey in order to indulge in one more fix. He impulsively steals the video of Tommy having sex with his girlfriend and doesn't intervene when the tape's disappearance causes the couple's breakup, leaving his friend an emotional wreck. Even after Renton has reformed, he blandly "tests" a batch of heroin, then shoots up again, just to irritate Begbie. On one whim he steals his crew's ill-gotten money and on another leaves a share for his most hapless friend, Spud (Ewen Brenner). Renton's final conversion seems yet another whim, of dubious commitment. His self-destructiveness is likely to leap forth again like Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) and Begbie from the estate agent's closet. In an odd way, the film affirms its own peculiar Scottishness. It denies by parody Hollywood's favourite Scot, Sean Connery's James Bond. Sick Boy is a veritable trainspotter on the subject; that is, he is obsessed with trivial information about the Bond films. In one scene, Sick Boy and Renton do Connery impressions in a park as they take air-gun potshots at a pitbull, eventually provoking the animal to attack its master. As Renton points out, knowing a lot about Sean Connery is hardly an adequate substitute for moral fibre. But neither is the subject of the other's "trainspotting" -- the culture of heroin. In embracing heroin and rejecting the Hollywood Scot, the film asserts the heroism of the outlaw: "We would've injected Vitamin C if only they'd made it illegal." In one speech Renton specifically takes off on a famous Thatcher quote: "There was no such thing as society. And even if there was, I most certainly had nothing to do with it." When clean Tommy expresses his view that the gorgeous countryside should make one proud of Scotland, Renton expresses his disgust for both countryside and country: "We can't even find a decent culture to be colonized by." There is an inverse national pride in Renton's degradation. For these heroes, illegality is an antidote to conventional cultural values. In their Abbey Road album parody, they stride across the street to close a drug deal. In the obligatory Edinburgh Festival scene, the lads sit frozen in a dark bar -- until an ingenuous American tourist comes in, and Renton and the boys mug him in the toilet. Trainspotting is a genuinely mischievous film, radical in its values and style, fresh in its energy. It celebrates a dialect and a scene that we don't get in Hollywood films -- or anywhere else. As such, it is further proof that film is most alive and well when it is a personal and cultural expression. In fact, it is hardiest far from the madding crowd-pleasers. Of course, that can also be said for some recent American films. Decades from now, American cinema will be admired not for the nadir of Dante's Peak, Independence Day, Twister, and The Lost World -- those films of specious effects -- but for the quiet, independent voices from the regions: Lone Star, Fargo, Grosse Point Blank. The British have again reminded us that the best way to resist Hollywood's colonization is to make small, personal, eccentric films that speak local truths in off-beat voices. BUT will regionally distinctive films continue to find financers and audiences in the face of mass-market conformism? Will the current vitality in the British cinema survive in robust opposition to box-office Americana? Or will it prove to be only the last, fading gasp of difference before it too is Engulfed and Devoured? My vote goes to Renton -- the unreformed version.
Word count: 2663
Copyright Queen's quarterly Summer 1997
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