Ken Loach's Riff-Raff
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CHAPTER 22 WORK, FAMILY, AND POLITICS: KEN LOACH’S RIFF-RAFF The working class has been a major subject of British art since the mid-1950s, when novelists such as John Braine and Alan Sillitoe, together with dramatists like John Osborne and Arnold Wesker, began treating anti-Establishment themes in a style that can be accurately characterized as “social realism.” Soon social realism crossed over into film, where it became known as “New Cinema,” a movement whose ethos or social commitment was borrowed from Italian neorealism, whose own techniques were modeled upon those of the French New Wave, and whose scripts were often adaptations of plays and novels by blue-collar writers. I’m thinking especially of Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top (1958), based on the novel by Braine, Tony Richardson’s Look Back in Anger (1959), from the play by Osborne, and Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), a version of the Sillitoe novel. Social-realist art in Britain was the product of the “Angry Young Men”—angry at a society that had educated them above their class origins yet had inevitably failed to provide sufficient opportunities for them in so small a country as England; and angry at a government that had improved the living and working conditions of the proletariat but had done nothing to remove class barriers, had in fact locked those barriers more firmly in place by giving the workers what they wanted, to a point. The United States produced its own class of angry young men during the 1930s, led by Clifford Odets and represented by the workers’ theatre movement, but American anger at the plight of the underclass (as opposed to the exclusively black underclass) has largely disappeared from art, primarily because, after World War II, our blue- collar workers became de facto members of the middle class as wages and standards of living rose; even those workers who haven’t benefited materially tend to identify with those who have. And our films reflect this state of affairs: with the possible exception of an occasional fiction film like Northern Lights (1979) or Matewan (1987) and the documentaries of Barbara Kopple, American workers tend to be featured in heroic, solidarity-promoting plots that will culminate in their common betterment (for example, Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront [1954] and Martin Ritt’s Norma Rae [1979]), or they find themselves successfully struggling to become their own boss, to run their own business and thus shed the title of mere “worker,” in such films as An American Romance (1944) and Mac (1992). British workers, by contrast, continue to be the subject of unsentimental, unglorified tales that depict their hostility toward the ruling-class Establishment, their disillusionment with the Welfare State, and often their own narrow-minded, 205 Chapter 22 cynical resistance to change, which is as much the result of a misplaced pride as it is of a moral poverty bred of isolation, hopelessness, and improvidence. These workers persist in being the subject of narrative, dramatic, and cinematic art for two simple reasons: a blooded working class continues to subsist in England and, like the blooded aristocracy in that country, it tenaciously defines itself by accent, occupation, and attitude; and British artists’ anger at the plight of the underclass— an anger that first expressed itself in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century under the banner of naturalism—has not subsided. Among film artists who are centrally interested in the working class, three men stand out: Mike Leigh, with such works as Bleak Moments (1971) and Meantime (1983); Terence Davies, best represented by the short “Death and Transfiguration” (1983) and Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988); and Ken Loach. Loach has been making socially conscious films, for television in addition to the big screen, since 1964. Among his television movies, three deserve mention: Up the Junction (1965), about the impoverishing effect of environment on character, set in the working-class district of London’s Clapham Junction; Cathy Come Home (1966), one of the first treatments of homelessness, via a young South London couple who live with their children in relative comfort until the husband has an accident that costs him first his job, then his house, and finally the company of his family; and The Gamekeeper (1979), about a South Yorkshire factory worker who changes his job but not his function when he becomes a game warden on an estate. Loach’s first feature as well as first film to be shown in the United States—though most of his work has never been distributed there, and even in England his movies are rarely accorded a wide release—was Poor Cow (1967), which examined the sexual mores of the urban poor. He followed Poor Cow with Kes (1969), which remains his biggest financial success and may be the best of all his feature films. Kes may be his best film because it eschews the political tendentiousness, if not downright socialist propaganda, of Loach at his worst, as in Family Life (1971), an attack on traditional behaviorist psychology as one of the instruments used by the ruling class to keep those beneath them in place, and in Hidden Agenda (1990), an exposé of the British intelligence service’s activities in Northern Ireland (not to mention the documentaries and semi-documentaries he has made for television about strikes by steelworkers and longshoremen, all of them angels locked in a battle with the demon of Management). Kes may also be Loach’s best picture because it strikingly juxtaposes a West- Midland boy’s tender training of a kestrel hawk against the oppressive circumstances in which he is forced to grow up; and because its tragicomedy, in the end, helps Kes to render the world complexly, even infinitely, and thereby to avoid preachiness. This film was made, not by the Ken Loach whose view of history “is that it is a class struggle,” but by the Loach who has said, “All I hope, when people see my films, is that they say, ‘Yes, that’s how things are.’ And if that’s how things are, then shouldn’t we try to change it? If that means I’m a political filmmaker, then so be it” (Malcolm, 20). The artist in Ken Loach resists the politicization of his work, then, while the 206.