THE FUTURE IS PAST, the PRESENT CANNOT BE FIXED: KEN LOACH and the CRISIS Chapter Author(S): Martin Hall
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Edinburgh University Press Chapter Title: THE FUTURE IS PAST, THE PRESENT CANNOT BE FIXED: KEN LOACH AND THE CRISIS Chapter Author(s): Martin Hall Book Title: Cinema of Crisis Book Subtitle: Film and Contemporary Europe Book Editor(s): Thomas Austin, Angelos Koutsourakis Published by: Edinburgh University Press. (2020) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv136c4d8.14 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cinema of Crisis This content downloaded from 95.183.184.51 on Fri, 07 Aug 2020 09:33:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 8. THE FUTURE IS PAST, THE PRESENT CANNOT BE FIXED: KEN LOACH AND THE CRISIS Martin Hall As the contemporary version of the crisis brought on by the fi nancial crash of 2008 reaches its second decade, the cinema of Ken Loach presents something of a conundrum for the politically radical spectator. Since his return to frequent feature fi lm production as the Cold War began to end in 1990, his work has predominantly been focused in two areas: the everyday struggle for existence in the contemporary world: for example, Riff-Raff (1991), Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), Sweet Sixteen (2001), It’s a Free World (2007) and I, Daniel Blake (2016); and the historical, revolutionary struggles of working people against capitalism and imperialism, such as Land and Freedom (1995), Carla’s Song (1996) and The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006). There have also been documentaries made for television, notably The Flickering Flame (1996) and Spirit of ’45 (2013). In this chapter, the defeatism of the British left since the 1980s and the posi- tions taken by its reformist wing following that period, one in which Francis Fukuyama (1992) pronounced ‘the end of history’, will be posited as a seam running through Loach’s contemporary cinema. A binary is set up by Loach’s fi lms during this period: a Gramscian War of Manoeuvre is represented in the revolutionary time of the historical fi lms, but in the contemporary period texts, there is no complementary War of Position, which is the form that the struggle takes in order to fi ght the hegemony of bourgeois culture; instead, we have a working class that is atomised and ground down, with any victories presented being on an individual level.1 Moreover, as the neoliberal model has lurched 136 This content downloaded from 95.183.184.51 on Fri, 07 Aug 2020 09:33:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 66351_Austin351_Austin & KKoutsouriakis.inddoutsouriakis.indd 113636 116/05/206/05/20 110:230:23 AAMM KEN LOACH AND THE CRISIS further into crisis since 2008, and as social movements attempting to combat neoliberalism have risen since the Seattle World Trade Organization protests of 1999, no change in Loach’s cinema can be discerned. In order to ascertain why this might be, Alain Badiou’s work on the constitution of the subject will be used to suggest that what is missing from Loach’s worldview is faith in what Badiou calls ‘the Idea of Communism’, which he situates as one ‘related to the destiny of generic humanity’ (2009a: 79). We may more commonly refer to this as a grand narrative. Through this analysis, a case will be made that the fi lms of the director considered to be the most left-wing in Britain show no faith in a contemporary transformative paradigm. Moreover, Mark Fisher’s concept of ‘capitalist realism’ will be of use in specifying exactly what relationship Loach’s contemporary subjects have to the present, a cinematic time that is haunted by the ghosts of the past and of lost futures. Fisher suggests that late capitalism is infused with ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (2009: 2). Furthermore, borrowing Derrida’s neologism of hauntology, Fisher writes at length in a later volume (2014) of the various ways in which con- temporary popular culture is haunted by what might have been. This untimely position is represented by a number of Loach’s subjects in his fi lms set in the present. For Badiou, the time of the subject is the future anterior, which he considers to be ‘what supports belief’ (2006: 418) in the subject; what will have been. The gap between these two conceptions of the future corresponds to the differing positions taken by Loach in his historical and contemporary fi lms: his historical subjects are fi xed by choices, and anterior refl ection cannot bring those struggles into the present. Much has been made in popular discourse and in the social democratic imagination of the ways in which the various twentieth-century revolutions and attempts at anti-capitalist societies failed. There is an anterior infl ection to this, seen from our contemporary situation: the revolution will not have taken place; instead, we get 1989 and the supposed ‘end of history’. It must be stated at this stage that capitalist realism does have antecedents and can perhaps be seen as a recurring thread throughout the crisis, and, indeed, before it. At a moment when the fi rst creaks in the social democratic post-war consensus and the Keynesian model were yet to be felt, Theodor Adorno, in a 1964 conversation with Ernst Bloch on utopian longing, stated that ‘what people have lost subjectively in regard to consciousness is very simply the capa- bility to imagine the totality as something that could be completely different’ (cited in Bloch 1988: 3–4). Adorno’s proto-postmodernism hints at a problem with the future conception of ‘the end of history’; namely, that perhaps we have been here before, suggesting that the teleological stasis of late capitalism is less determined than Fukuyama, postmodernism and even Fisher would have 137 This content downloaded from 95.183.184.51 on Fri, 07 Aug 2020 09:33:00 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 66351_Austin351_Austin & KKoutsouriakis.inddoutsouriakis.indd 113737 116/05/206/05/20 110:230:23 AAMM MARTIN HALL us believe. Economically, the consensus would grind to a halt and force a reac- tion after Richard Nixon’s unpegging of the US dollar from gold in 1971 and the subsequent breaking up of the Bretton Woods system that had been set up in 1944. Following that, the Yom Kippur War and the oil crisis brought about by the oil embargo of October 1973 saw a dramatic rise in the price of oil and attempts to freeze wages by the British government. The reaction was the beginning of the neoliberal era, though few were calling it that then. What is the case is that the attempt to recalibrate the relationship between labour and capital in favour of the latter was set in motion at that point, after the relative gains of the working class in the West in the previous sixty years or so. Loach, of course, was working during the beginning of the collapse of the post-war consensus. In the early to mid-1970s he made one feature fi lm, Family Life (1971), and one major television series for the BBC, Days of Hope (1975). The binary this chapter is setting up can be seen coming into view during this period, which suggests that the tendency outlined in the previous paragraph was in genesis here. Family Life is a fairly typical social realist fi lm about a young woman being forced into an abortion, while Days of Hope concentrates on the period from the middle of the First World War to the General Strike of 1926, seen through the lens of one family. Jacob Leigh (2002: 91–113) is of the view that the radicalism of the series2 – and of much of Loach’s work during the late 1960s and early 1970s – can be attributed to the infl uence of screen- writer Jim Allen, whose revolutionary politics permeate Loach’s television at this point. Allen would also work with Loach on a series of feature fi lms in the 1990s and will be returned to below, specifi cally in the discussion of Land and Freedom. For now, it is enough to suggest that a split between the revo- lutionary and the despairing subject can be seen in germ form at this stage in Loach’s career. In terms of Loach’s response to the most recent manifestation of the crisis from 2008 onwards, which was set in train by the collapse of the US subprime mortgage market and the consequent crisis of international banking, what is of note is the extent to which it can be argued that he presents a contemporary- set cinema that would like to fi x capitalism, but cannot reform it, never mind overturn it. We can suggest that this parallels to some degree the response from nominally social democrat governments in much of the West, which was to pump money into the economy via quantitative easing and to prop up the banking system via nationalisation; in other words the socialisation of debt in a world governed by the privatisation of profi t.