This Is England
[Sight and Sound, 2007]
In September 1985, the Clash released their first single since the sacking of founder, arranger and writer Mick Jones, two years before. Their glory days were well behind them, as they struggled to make sense of their punk ideals in a world gone cold. Out of desperation came a masterpiece, a haunting state-of-the-nation report – all the more impressive because it replaced anger with vulnerability.
“This Is England” was mid-paced, drenched not in distorted guitar but sighing synthesisers and clattering electro percussion. Backgrounded by sound FX of playground taunts and football chants, Joe Strummer sang of a blasted landscape: ‘on the catwalk jungle/ Somebody grabbed my arm/ A voice spoke so cold/ It masked the weapon in the palm’. The Sex Pistols might have sung of “No Feelings” but here was the reality: ‘this knife of Sheffield steel’.
Although it briefly made the Top 30, “This Is England” was too stark for the fizzy pop and post-Live Aid adult rock then saturating the airwaves; too different from the trademark Clash sound that was from another, more hopeful era. It was as though the group, and Joe Strummer in particular, had embodied all too successfully the song’s deep sense of hurt and defeat.
Set in the era of the Falklands War and Thatcherism triumphant, Shane Meadows’ new film is set in the same damaged place as the Clash’s swansong: the tribal activities of forgotten youth in ‘a land of a thousand stances’. At the same time, its title also echoes other, albeit very different, eighties state-of-the-nation broadsides like Alan Clarke’s “Made In Britain” (1982) and Derek Jarman’s “The Last Of England” (1987).
Despite its tough setting, “This Is England” offers neither brutal shock nor apocalyptic rant. Although set in the skinhead milieu sensationalised by “Made In Britain”, Meadows treats his characters as an insider, with full knowledge of their motivations and complexities. Made with tenderness, warmth and humour, it is a film not just about national identity and manhood, but also about early adolescence, that crucial moment in identity formation.
The opening collage 80′s events cut to Toots and The Maytals rollicking rude boy anthem “54 46 Was My Number” roots the viewer in time and place, However this is not the decade of bad pop-cult nostalgia, but a time of deadly struggle. Cut into the inevitable Rubik cubes and space invaders, there are images of Greenham women, Mrs. Thatcher, maimed soldiers. The government is at war, both with the Argentinians and its own enemies within.
The key element within the Tories’ internal struggle was the forcible restructuring of work and family under the aegis of radical free-market economics – as England became a provider of services rather than product. Sheffield steel, for instance, was no longer exported around the world. The unions were under attack: the idea that there was such a thing as society was being replaced by radical individualism. This was a class war under any other name.
Within this turmoil, whole swathes of England’s youth were left to fend for themselves. Their plight is embodied by the wan figure of 12-year-old Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), who reluctantly makes his way into the school playground on the last day of the summer term. He doesn’t have a good feeling about the day and his instinct is accurate. As he tries to sidle through the throng, his flared trousers are mocked by an older Two-Toner: sartorial correctness is all.
His antagonist does not realise that the trousers were given to Shaun by his father, killed in the Falklands conflict. The importance of this loss is reflected in Shaun’s bleak bedroom: in contrast to the stuffed consumer landscape of today’s teens, he has no iPod, no posters, no computer: just fading wallpaper picked at in boredom and frustration. A picture of his father stands by his bed. Without any heed, Shaun launches himself at the much larger boy.
The playground fight is a dramatic staple going right back to “Rebel Without A Cause”, and “This Is England” conforms to the teen template. There is the finite period of time – in this case, the summer holiday – during which the young hero faces serious choices for the first time: how to integrate with peers, how to detach from the parents, how to deal with the first major conflict of loyalty, that crux dilemma.
Beginning with the last day of school, “This Is England” even shares its opening location with Richard Linklater’s classic “Dazed and Confused” – itself a canny updating of “American Graffiti”, the granddaddy of all Teen Retro movies. However the disparately dressed urchins of Meadows’ seaside town are a world away from the mid-seventies Texan teens with their 8-tracks, cars, and stuffed bongs. This is not a feel-good culture.
The impact of New Right Power politics on England’s working-class youth was deep and dramatic. What adults rarely understand in regard to adolescent behaviour is that each period gets the teen nightmare it deserves, as the young replay society’s shortcomings at the adults whom they feel are responsible for the way the world is. Hence the headlines made by the affectless, brand-driven hyper-individualist teens of today.
With unerring accuracy, Meadows sets “This Is England” in 1983, the year that Time magazine ran a major cover feature on the country’s warring youth, called “The Tribes of Britain”. Heralded by a shot of a threatening, tense Mohican punk – all lairy look and torn clothes – Time’s seven-page article itemised and typified the sharply delineated players within Britain’s national theatre of violent discontent.
Using the language of urban anthropology originated by Tom Wolfe and then popularised by The Face and i-D, Spencer Davidson turned Britain’s youth into scary cartoon characters: Punks, Skinheads, Teddy Boys, Mods, Bikers, Trendies, Rock-A-Billies, Sloane Rangers and Soccer fans. These were, apparently, living exemplars of the savage tribalism that signalled ‘the foreshortening of a nation’s expectations and the growing alienation of its youth’.
In the late 1970′s, Punk had cut up post war youth styles in a living collage. If you went to a gig in 1976 or 1977, you’d see someone wearing brothel-creeper shoes (Teddy Boy), a Wemblex tab-collared shirt (Mod), a slimline 60′s Tonik jacket (Skinhead) or a battered leather jacket (Rocker), and huge, baggy trousers turned in at the ankle (Zoot Suiters). Many of these items had been sold in Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne’s shop at 430 Kings Road.
As Punk unravelled, many of Britain’s young returned to the source styles. Teds regrouped in force to batter the punks whom they thought were desecrating their sacred costume. Mods returned in a particularly lame retread of their 60′s heyday. As for their one-time cousins, well: ‘SKINS ARE BACK’, Sham 69′s Jimmy Pursey yelled at the Clash’s May 1977 show at London’s Rainbow, and there they were, transported from the late 60′s as if in a time machine.
However the second generation skins were more yoked to Far Right politics than their forebears: a connection made explicit in the figure of Nicky Crane[1], the National Front member who appared as the cover star of the “Sounds” compilation “Strength Thru Oi” – the phrase parodying a Nazi slogan. The link between skinheads and far right/ nationalist politics continues today, most obviously in the former Iron Curtain countries and the US.
In Nick Knight’s 1982 picture book “Skinhead”, Dick Hebdige went to talk to some skins in the East End. He found that behind the bravado of the ‘bootboy seer’ was ‘a boy who can’t see any future.’ He was ‘an anachronism, born out of time…Because the brutal fact is that big business no longer needs brute force (except perhaps as Exocet fodder) … the manual working class is on the way out. It’s had its day in countries like ours’.
The skinhead was the living product of the 80′s class war. If ‘muscle and mechanical skills’ were no longer required, then they would find another outlet. Hebdige acknowledged the skins’ retreat into ‘white ethnicity’, their far-right proclivities. He also observed that ‘subcultures are a mass of contradictions. Though they may be, at times, loosely allied to a particular kind of politics, that alliance is uneven and transitory. There are black skinheads and SWP (Socialist Worker’s Party) skinheads’.
This is contested ground and it is to Meadows’ credit that, in seeking – with the aid of Nick Knight’s book – to recreate the subculture of his youth, he tackles it head on. At the heart of the film is the conflict between Woody and Combo for Shaun’s soul: the two epitomise the poles of the skinhead ethos. This crux struggle is set within two wider issues: the attitudes and behaviour of youth during wartime, and the nature of masculinity and, indeed, fathering.
It’s Woody’s gang who provide Shaun’s first peer group. Wandering back from school, he encounters a lairy looking bunch in an underpass. They accost him and, in one of several beautifully observed scenes, Shaun’s prickliness dissolves as he realises that they are not out – like everybody else – to get him. Despite his appearance, Woody (Joe Gilgun) is spacey, kind and alert to any bullying behaviour. The gang take the lonely child to their heart.
The Initiation follows. Shaun is slowly styled as a skinhead and the inevitable conflict occurs as parental and peer values clash. When he arrives home with his head shorn, his mother Cynthia goes ballistic. With Shaun in tow, she beards the gang in their café: instead of greeting her with the abuse that you might expect, Woody and his girlfriend Lol are respectful and apologetic. Cynthia is reassured that her son is in good hands.
With that conflict safely negotiated, the stage is set for the next stage of Shaun’s journey, as Initiation is followed by Idyll. Dressed in a patchwork of crazy costumes, the gang head for open country. Freed from spatial restrictions, they revert to childhood. The day ends with a party, where different ages, races, and youth subcultures mix – quite literally in Shaun’s case, as he gets a kiss in the outside shed from New Romantic Smell (rhymes with Michelle).
‘It’s the best day of my life’, he exclaims, but a shadow is quickly cast. Woody’s party is invaded by an uninvited guest, Combo, fresh out of jail after three and a half years. The whole atmosphere of the film changes with the ex-con’s entrance as the newcomer subjects Milky – one of Woody’s gang, so called because he has brown skin – to a racist tirade. Nobody speaks up for him, and Combo seizes the moral advantage.
The next day he calls a meeting and delivers a lecture about national pride. ‘Two fucking world wars men have laid down their lives,’ he rants, ‘and for what? So we can stick our fucking flag in the ground and say this is England, this is England, this is England’. So there it is. National identity is tied in with war. But for Combo, ‘the proper fight’ is not to be found in several thousands of miles away, but on the doorstep: against the immigrants usurping the jobs of the 3½ million unemployed.
This begs the questions: what does war mean, and what does war do to non-combatants? Adolescence is the time that the young leave childhood and the family and go into the outside world. To some extent they soak up the values of that world like litmus paper, although of course there is room for individuation. If society is extolling combat, aggression and hatred, then they pick up and act on those qualities. War is nothing less than state-sanctioned violence, and the young are quick to notice.
This had been noted early in the history of Adolescence as a social concept. During the First World War, there had been an outbreak of juvenile delinquency that had been shocking to the authorities. Over twenty years later, the National Government was determined that this would not reoccur and placed especial focus on the study of youth – carried out by the social reporters of Mass Observation. Their conclusions are still relevant.
During the winter of 1941-2, Observers noted that many children and adolescents had ‘become sullen and aggressive. Fearful for the disintegration of their normal lives they are forming themselves into gangs, with a strong leader whose morals may be doubtful, but whose presence seems secure. Child delinquency is increasing. It was in just such a breeding ground of fear and insecurity that Hitler planted the seeds of Nazism, a philosophy for frightened, downtrodden, neglected people’.
To Combo’s miasma of violence and double talk, Zen master Woody has no riposte. However, he’s not going to sit around and hear this shit. As he walks out, the gang splits down the middle – with Shaun remaining behind. Combo has already paid the boy special attention and he seals the deal with an appeal to his vulnerability: ‘I know what it’s like to have people walk out on you, to have people just fucking leave’. The good father has gone.
Blind to the consequences of his choice, Shaun becomes the mascot of the new group. He follows Combo into a National Front meeting – held at an obscure country pub – and into terrorising Indian and Pakistani immigrants. It’s not as though Woody’s group were angels – the climax of their idyllic day out was the total destruction of empty houses – but under Combo’s leadership the violence is directed against people, not property, and is explicitly racist.
For Shaun, still half in childhood, it’s a jolly romp with his new mates. Adolescence loves action, and Combo provides it in spades. But the undercurrent of violence is getting stronger, and has to do with his new father’s own tortured psyche. Brilliantly played by Stephen Graham, Combo is a complex mixture of cunning, cleverness, manipulation and barely repressed fury. One moment he is all empathy, the next eye-popping, screaming rage.
Wilhelm Reich observed that one component of fascism was sexual frustration, and a key moment in Combo’s unravelling occurs when he tried to rekindle his brief romance with Lol. Alone of all the skins, she stands up to him. Quivering with disgust, her beautiful eyes wide, she derides his rosy memory of their one-night stand: ‘it was the worst night of my life’. Kicked right where it hurts, in his vulnerability, Combo shuts right down.
The final explosion of violence is as shattering as it is inevitable. Shaun’s new father is revealed as a psychotic bully, and, even worse, becomes the child, expecting the youngster to comfort him in his distress. Shaun has placed his love and faith in the wrong person. If Combo embodies all the toxicity of a country at war, then the concepts of nation, of struggle, of pride are nothing but dust. As Joe Strummer sang, ‘I see no glory and when will we be free’.
In setting the film in the POV of a twelve-year old – a weight perfectly carried by Thomas Turgoose, all prickly aggression and skin-popping discomfort – Meadows abstracts “This Is England” out of mere nostalgia. Although it is set in classic social realist territory, the film is amplified by lustrous colour and excellent editing (Chris Wyatt) into fantasy and, on occasion, arresting beauty.
The events are thus hyper-vivid, not time-locked – as the world is to the adolescent – and thus resonate with contemporary discourses around the crisis in masculinity and indeed the effect of the Wars in Iraq and Against Terrorism on young psyches. It may not have been Meadows’ concern, but the Thatcherite Eighties continue under many guises: radical individualism, nuclear deterrents, war as a motor of the economy, the working-class marginalised.
In particular, the scars caused the Falklands war persist. While preparing this article, I watched an excellent BBC1 Wales documentary in which Simon Weston – for many, the living symbol of that conflict – revisited some of his old comrades in the Welsh Guards. The difference between the swaggering youngsters and the mentally and physically scarred, if not broken middle-aged was heart-breaking. No aftercare, of course, just like today.
“This Is England” leaves its young hero bereft and alone. Just like Jimmy in “Quadrophrenia”, Shaun ends surrounded by the sea, confronted by both physical limit and emotional space – if not actual ego dissolution. Both have seen through the compulsions of their respective peer group, but what is left? How do you go forward? How do you deal with innocence lost? If you reject violence, what is it to be a man? What follows is the test of true character.
[1] As it happens, Crane was later discovered to be gay. Note also the assumption of skinhead styles by a subculture of gay men during the 1990′s – see Murray Healy, “Gay Skins: Class, Masculinity and Queer Appropriation” by Murray Healy (Cassell 1996).