PROOF Contents List of Figures viii Acknowledgements x Notes on Contributors xi Introduction – ‘an anthropology of ourselves’ Vs ‘the incomprehensibility of the real’: Making the Case for British Social Realism 1 David Tucker 1 Tragedy, Ethics and History in Contemporary British Social Realist Film 17 Paul Dave 2 Staging the Contemporary: Politics and Practice in Post-War Social Realist Theatre 57 Stephen Lacey 3 Bad Teeth: British Social Realism in Fiction 81 Rod Mengham 4 ‘this/is not a metaphor’: The Possibility of Social Realism in British Poetry 103 Keston Sutherland 5 Re-presenting Reality, Recovering the Social: The Poetics and Politics of Social Realism and Visual Art 132 Gillian Whiteley 6 Small Screens and Big Voices: Televisual Social Realism and the Popular 172 Dave Rolinson Index 212 vii May 14, 2011 12:52 MAC/TUCK Page-vii 9780230_242456_01_prexii PROOF 1 Tragedy, Ethics and History in Contemporary British Social Realist Film Paul Dave For some, social realism in British cinema is a problematic tradition, one that is politically limited and aesthetically conservative. Boring, pious, out of date. ‘Miserabilist’ is the term often used in critical discourses to convey a combined impression of a political and aesthetic dead-end (Thorpe 2005). Certainly, many critics have been worried about exam- ples of the form from the 1990s and early 2000s – such as Brassed Off (1996), The Full Monty (1997), and Billy Elliot (2000). Paul Marris, for instance, argues that The Full Monty and Billy Elliot are ‘Ealing in the North’ – conservative, backward looking elegies, steeped in masculinist ideologies of the past (Marris 2001, p. 49). For others, whilst recognizing the problems with the tradition, there remains a sense that significant social realist films are still being produced.1 For example, Samantha Lay views social realism as an open and evolving tradition, and still ‘an important part of British film culture’ (Lay 2007, p. 231). John Hill isolates what he sees as a more specific and worrying ten- dency that he tracks back to the New Wave of the late 1950s, early 1960s. This is the ‘narrowing down of social space’ in the representation of working class life, and its increasing identification ‘in domestic and familial terms’ (Hill 2000, p. 251). This dynamic is also noted by Lay, Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment, who all point to diminishing associations of social realism with belief in progressive social change.2 It seems that social realism’s drive towards ‘social extension’ (Williams 1974, p.63) and its association with authenticity ‘where this is identi- fied with the most extreme of social conditions’ has, in recent times, led to an increased focus on dysfunctions of the individual or family in areas where precisely the social is in jeopardy, giving us, typically, underclass dramas taking place in some infra-social space (Hill 2000, 17 May 14, 2011 7:20 MAC/TUCK Page-17 9780230_242456_03_cha01 PROOF 18 British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940 p. 253). However, rather than viewing this as a process whereby the connections between the domestic and familial on the one hand, and the ‘larger social context’ of ‘neighbourhood, work, politics’ are lost, one might equally see it as part of a necessary re-focusing, in the context of neoliberalism, on the crisis of the social (ibid.). This is perhaps something that needs emphasizing: that in the neoliberal moment of capitalist fundamentalism, working class expe- rience registers head-on the impact of what Raymond Williams called the ‘defaulting’ of the capitalist order with regard to its older, post-war social contract (Williams 2007, p. 97). Part of this process involves pre- cisely the reconfiguration of the connections between all classes and the stricken social sphere. I have attempted elsewhere to relate these devel- opments to formal and generic shifts in contemporary British cinema.3 Here, using the same contextual framework of neoliberalism, I want to consider contemporary shifts in social realism in terms of what might be considered one of social realism’s tributary sources – the tragic form. In 1979, on the edge of the neoliberal storm, Williams spoke per- cipiently of a mutation in the tragic form in which ‘an inability to communicate’ becomes central: People still assemble or are assembled, meet or collide. A given col- lectivity is in this way taken for granted. But it is a collectivity that is only negatively marked. A common condition is suspected, inti- mated, glanced at, but never grasped. The means of sociality and of positive relationship are fundamentally discounted, but not as actual isolation; merely as effective isolation within what is still unavoidable physical presence. (Williams 2007, p. 101) After noting this distressing attenuation of the ‘means of sociality’ in which co-presence becomes a negative, brute, proximity rather than a positive mutuality, Williams goes on to characterize this form in terms of a kind of ‘wry’ rather than ‘desperate’ apocalypticism – as a kind of pleasure to be had in the anticipation of inevitable disaster (ibid., p. 102). He also adds that it offers ‘a reliable condition of remain- ing indefinitely inside just such a society’ (ibid.). This combination of a weakened social, with its disproportionate impact on the working class on the one hand, and the amused or exhilarated sense of an end amidst the wreckage on the other, accompanied by a deep reluctance to muster resources that can reach beyond such an impasse, represents a phenomenon which I have discussed elsewhere in ‘underclass’ social May 14, 2011 7:20 MAC/TUCK Page-18 9780230_242456_03_cha01 PROOF Contemporary British Social Realist Film 19 realist film under the rubric of a contemporary ‘urban pastoral’ (Dave 2006, p. 84). Trainspotting (1996) would be a good example. Much in underclass films such as Trainspotting belongs to what Imogen Tyler refers to as ‘the dirty ontology of class struggle in Britain’, visible for instance in the taxonomies of class abjection and contempt evoked by terms such as ‘chav’ (Tyler cited in Biressi and Nunn 2009, p. 109). Such attitudes and representations indicate important changes in class rela- tionships. However, they are not the whole story. Another aspect of this crisis of the social, as refracted through recent social realist filmmaking, has been the attempt to explore the dynamics of what might be called the ethics of solidarity, an ethics capable of reviving the social. It will be argued here that such an attempt has an important role to play in the complex and mutable relationship between left politics and social realist cinema. That is to say, there is a necessary political dimension to this interest in the ethical. As Terry Eagleton argues, it is a mistake on some parts of the left to insist on a rigid gap between the ethi- cal and the political (see Eagleton 2009b, pp. 299–300). It is in this domain that some fascinating recent work in British social realist film has been done. For instance, a social and ethical narrative underlies a number of Shane Meadows’ films, in which a process of social con- traction meets a limit and the resources of a counter-movement are sensed. Meadows’ interest in social realism is crossed with an interest in popular genres, particularly the gangster film with its dependence on a tragic motif of the suffering human body (see for instance Dead Man’s Shoes (2004)). As I will argue below, this emphasis on the qualities of vulnerable corporeality directs our attention to an ethics capable of sustaining a sense of solidarity. As we will see, for Eagleton there is a cru- cial relationship between a properly ethical sense of our ‘species-being’ (Eagleton 2003a, p. 158), as effectively represented in images of human corporeality focused on the tragic scapegoat, and the potential to realize Williams’ ideal of a ‘common culture’ (Williams 1984, p. 318). The lat- ter’s account of the importance of a ‘common culture’ was inspired by the long history of the working class ethic of solidarity. First proposed over half a century ago, it remains, as Eagleton argues, an objective which, whilst apparently ‘quaintly residual’, nevertheless still lies ahead of us (Eagleton 2000, p. 122). History and ‘capitalist realism’ Looking forwards and backwards will be an important part of what fol- lows, for one of the propositions I would like to explore is that history May 14, 2011 7:20 MAC/TUCK Page-19 9780230_242456_03_cha01 PROOF 20 British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940 has an important relationship with social realist film. Now on one level this involves the uncontroversial assertion that social realist filmmaking represents a tradition, however interrupted and diverse, and also that this tradition retains a vital relationship with contemporary efforts. Take for example Marris’s comments on northern realism. As Marris says: ‘any new imaging of the North will be developed “in and against” the persist- ing tradition of northern realism’ (Marris 2001, p. 50). Likewise, as David Tucker argues in the present volume’s Introduction, if we want to avoid perpetuating shallow oppositions between realism and modernism in critical discussion of social realism, a historical grounding is crucial. The historical view of the form opens up often surprising and ‘significant trajectories of influence, of genealogy’. None of this, as I say, should be particularly controversial – even though it is notable, as Tucker says, that such approaches have been rare. Most importantly, the use of history in our approach to social real- ism – and film generally – needs to go beyond ad hoc,oftentoken contextualizations. And this need raises the more unfamiliar perspec- tive of the historical longue durée. Seen in such a light, for instance, the tradition of British social realism might be brought into contact with historical materialist preoccupations, and in this way help to con- struct challenging historical narratives and representations of the social informed by an interest in the development of capitalism and class cul- ture.