Ken Loach's Fair Share of Home and Family Issues
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KEN LOACH’S FAIR SHARE OF HOME AND FAMILY ISSUES FROM CATHY COME HOME AND THE ANGELS’ SHARE TO SORRY, WE MISSED YOU ANDREA VELICH Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest Abstract: 84-year old Ken Loach is known today as one of the best British social realist film directors. In this essay, I shall try to prove that there is some stubborn consistency in his oeuvre, in the representation of the disenfranchised and basic social issues (like health, home and family) and their emotional strain on families as well as in the criticism of the Establishment for unemployment, poverty, sickness or addictions, from Cathy Come Home (1966) to his last film, Sorry, we missed you (2019). In the past few years, Ken Loach seems to have lost the optimism still present in The Angels’ Share (2012). Keywords: family, home, hope, Ken Loach, representation, social realism 1. Introduction Ken Loach was born in Nuneaton, England in 1936. After studying law at Oxford where he was president of the Dramatic Society, he worked in theatre and then in 1963 moved into television with the BBC (Shail 2002: 137). Loach, who is known today as one of the best British social realist film directors, has sustained a commitment to representing the disenfranchised and exploring controversial social, historical and political issues all through his career (Stollery 2001: 202). According to the IMDb (Internet Movie Database), Loach has never “succumbed to the siren call of Hollywood” and it is impossible to imagine his particular brand of British socialist realism translating well to that context. While studying law at St. Peter's College, Oxford, partly because of his working-class parents’ expectations, Loach was more interested in history, art and theatre, performing with a touring repertory company (Cooke 2005: 64). This led to television, where in alliance with producer Tony Garnett he produced a series of docudramas, most notably Cathy Come Home (1966), whose impact was so massive that it led directly to a change in the homeless laws (Ryan – Porton 1998: 22). Loach is famous for location shooting and working with unknown, semi-, or nonprofessional actors. He uses various techniques to generate remarkably ‘authentic’ performances (Ryan, Porton 1998: 23). These include casting people with similar life experiences to their characters, working in a range of dialects and languages, and capturing genuine surprise by revealing only part of the script to actors as shooting progresses (Hayward 2004: 6). This realist project also involves experiments with different narrative forms in order to dramatise conflicting political discourses and examine the typical consequences for groups and individuals of complex social determinants (Stollery 2001: 202). B.A.S. vol. XXVII, 2021 126 In his films, Loach focuses on the impact of the growing financial and social divide and its emotional strain on families. Ken Loach’s themes seemingly focus on very simple, every day issues like home and family, which he manages against social pressures from unemployment, low wages, poverty, homelessness, lack of health insurance or a social net, drug, alcohol or other addictions, crime and punishment. As, according to Samantha Lay (2002: 67), social problem films are more preoccupied with content issues than with the film style, more with the message than the medium, my essay focuses mostly on the message of the Loach films. It will discuss the representation of British working class home and family issues in Loach’s films and will examine how far the situation has (or has not) changed since the mid 1960s (since Cathy Come Home) to 2019 (Sorry, we missed you), when and how it affected Loach’s view and hope for a better future. Accordingly, this essay excludes highlighting or analysing films set outside Great Britain, addressing migration and racial issues, or foreign and international affairs, an equally important concern for Loach and his scriptwriters in Fatherland (1986), Hidden Agenda (1990), Land and Freedom (1995), Carla’s Song (1996) Bread and Roses (2000), Ae Fond Kiss (2004), The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006), A Free World (2009), Route Irish (2010) and Jimmy’s Hall (2014). 2. ”Home, Sweet Home” from Cathy Come Home (1966) to The Angels’ Share (2012) Loach started his career with directing films for the BBC television Wednesday Play series in 1964 (Cooke 2005: 66). Acclaim for Wednesday Plays and Cathy Come Home (1966) opened the door for Loach to feature films (Mello 2009: 176). During his theatrical and television training, Loach understood the importance of writers, and this resulted in his collaboration with various writer talents including Jim Allen, Nell Dunn and Trevor Griffiths and most recently with Paul Laverty (Shail 2002: 138). The British Kitchen Sink and New Wave were to be influential in television drama and film in the coming decades. They left a legacy which was kept alive by TV in the 1960s and 70s, re-emerging in some films produced by Channel 4 in the 1980s and 1990s (Hallam and Marshment 2000: 51). After the success of Cathy Come Home, watched by about 12 million people, roughly a quarter of the British population at the time, the feature debut of Loach was Poor Cow (1967) (Shail 2002: 138). Poor Cow followed a single mum’s housing and family struggles on the fringes of London. Carol White portrays a young working-class woman in the world of the 1960s permissive attitudes and economic necessity. According to Jacob Leigh (2002: 48), it bristles with stylistic eclecticism and Brechtian playfulness, combining location shooting, intertitles, handheld camera for a bungled robbery, and protagonist Joy’s voice-over, revealed at the end as part of a documentary-style interview. Kes (1969), more stylistically consistent than Poor Cow, has proved to be one the finest films in Loach’s oeuvre over time. The central tension of Kes is between imagination and social constraint. Billy, the protagonist of Kes, a lonely working class boy, finds happiness and liberation through discovering and training a kestrel, Kes. According to Stollery (2001: 203), Chris Menges’ cinematography in the semi-rural setting of Kes employs diffuse lighting rather than highlighting particular characters; slightly distanced camera placement and simple panning 127 THE BEAUTY OF MEDUSA – PARADOXES OF CULTURE movements allow actors relative freedom of movement, recalling François Truffaut’s films and Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). Kes may be the finest, however Family Life (1971) may be the most challenging film of Loach’s early period. It extends aspects of Kes’ observational style into a dissection of power and authority (Leigh 2002: 118). Family Life, influenced by countercultural psychiatrist R. D. Laing’s theories, tells the story of Janice, an unemployed nineteen-year-old, living at home with her parents. While her younger sister, Barbara is married and upwardly mobile, the protagonist Janice is a disappointment to her parents, and their well-intentioned criticisms are a feature of her family life. When she falls pregnant, the subsequent ‘voluntary’ abortion precipitates her mental decline, and, instead of finding a job and financial and social independence, she is stuck with her family and, with their help, enters the orbit of institutional psychiatry (Leigh 2002: 119). The drama of Family Life arises from competing discourses: the legacy of 1960s permissiveness, consequent tensions within a respectable, sexually conservative working-class family, and debates between liberals and conservative psychiatrists (Stollery 2001: 203). The film develops a systematic critical analysis of the formation and possible treatment of the illness. Creswell and Karimova (2017: 20) state that Loach presents what Erving Goffman (1961) called “the moral career of the mental patient” in both positive and negative ways. The message of Family Life, according to Papadopoulos (1999: 27), is basically that, since life in our society is repressive and exploiting, mental illness is one more form of protest which deserves our sympathy and solidarity. The psychiatric treatment of mental illnesses is also seen as a part of the brainwashing and mind-dulling apparatus of modern capitalism Family Life was the least commercially successful and the most controversial of Loach’s early films (Creswell, Karimova 2017: 20). These films and the depressed state of 1970s British film production prevented Loach from making another feature for nearly a decade. He therefore returned to television drama with the four part series, symbolically titled Days of Hope (1975), exploring the years leading to the 1926 General Strike (Hayward 2004: 133). Loach attempted to intervene directly into the ongoing political struggles through television documentaries on trade unions and the 1984-85 miners’ strike, but nervous broadcasters blocked or delayed their transmission (Leigh 2004: 122). In the 1970s and 1980s, Loach’s films were poorly distributed and his TV work in some cases were never broadcast (Leigh 2004: 122). The fourteen years of Tory rule had been disastrous for the British film industry, which no longer existed as something separate from television. Still, according to Robert Murphy (1992), a number of remarkable films emerged “out of the debris”. Rather than looking back with nostalgia to the golden age before Mrs Thatcher came to power, Loach “mellowed” into a humanist solidarity with the victims of what they saw as an increasingly unjust society (Murphy 1992). Loach made two low-budget feature films in the eighties – Looks and Smiles (1981) and Fatherland (1986) – but spent more of his time and energy directing television documentaries, not all of which (his series on trade union leadership, for example) were actually shown (Hayward 2004: 158). In Looks and Smiles, young adult Mick is on the dole, but has a supportive family, unlike his girlfriend Caren, whose parents have split up. Caren relies on Mick’s love alone, who should thus choose between poverty with Caren or an army career on his best friend’s recommendation.