RONAN BENNETT
One of our greatest writers for film and TV in context
When I wrote and defended my PhD at Queens University Belfast a whole chapter was dedicated to a comparative study of The Long Good Friday and Face as self-conscious critiques of Thatcherism and neo-liberal capitalism in context. This isn’t simply because these were the two greatest British crime films released between 1981 and 1998 (although they are) but because they are the most important, aesthetically and politically, both in opening out and unpackaging the themes and tropes of classical gangster movies from Hollywood and as socio-political critique (Chibnall and Murphy, 1999). In Britain, even more than the US, noir crime fiction was always the alter-ego of social realism and, at its best, had the theme of social alienation at its core (Broe, 2019; Friedman, 199; Worpole, 2008). Just as the structure, plot and pace of the crime movie rendered social realist literature and film accessible to a wider audience so noir crime places crime in a wider social and historical context of alienation, capitalism and wider social harm.
Central to the methodology of my thesis was the way that I drew on social theory, sociology research and criminology scholarship, each subject to Marxist critique, using the method of Hegel’s Logic, alongside literary and film criticism and theory (Pilling, 2015). Despite his Stalinism and underdeveloped theory of subjective agency, this owed a lot to Raymond Williams (Eagleton, 1976). For all my belief that there is a canon of excellence in art which can therefore never be clinically reduced to social analytical critique I was concerned, in my thesis, to establish points of contact between cultural output and sociological analysis and critique.
In the 1960s, for example, the proliferation of social realist literature and film that began with Allan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning had its compliment in a proliferation of “reflexive” sociological surveys particularly of “deviance” and youth subcultures that described the phenomenon of alienation without necessarily rooting it in political economy (Mungham and Pearson, 1976). This was important given the tendency of “Russian Marxism,” before the 1950s and particularly of Stalinism, to reduce Marxism to “economic determinism” or “a science of history” which took no regard as to how alienated layers make sense of their situation – or at least try to (Chibnall, 1985). Experiencing their exploitation and oppression in fragments, young working-class people from the 1950s struggled to create identities and sub-cultures in their alienated leisure time which provided a mechanism for self-expression and roles beyond those afforded to them by the capitalist labour process (Willis, 2000’ 2014).
While Arthur Seaton, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning aspired to physically escape from the “crap hole” that was his working-class community in decline, neo-tribes like the Teddy Boys, Mods, Skinheads and Punks created sub culture and identities that afforded them a measure of autonomy (Cohen,. 2011). However, as alienated consumption now compliments alienated production, the integration of these neo-tribes and sub-cultures back into the Spectacle would only be a matter of time. As Jimmy discovered, in Quadrophrenia, the Ace Face was still only a Bell Boy and having struggled “so hard to fit in,” he himself was ultimately let down by being a Mod.
Getting Carter
It is with Ted Lewis that Britain’s first authentic noir cycle was properly established as the alter-ego of “pure social realism” that was itself in the process of degeneration into youthsploitation and the fetish for identity. While Arthur Seaton was dragged back into an alienated working-class existence, selling his labour power as a commodity and ultimately “learning to labour,” and the Mods in Quadrophreniastill did “the dirty jobs” to pay for a few hours’ mock rebellion on the Brighton Seafront, so Jack Carter escaped from his “working class crap hole” in Scunthorpe (in the novel) or Newcastle (in the movie) by becoming an enforcer for an organised crime gang (Chibnall, 2007; Triplow, 2017). The escape, however, which also rendered him a class exile, was only partial both because Jack Carter, as a class exile, still works for somebody and that “somebody” is a grotesque caricature of all that is the worst under capitalism in the form of an organised criminal gang.
More to the point, in Get Carter,Jack is forced to “return home” to the “working class crap hole” he has escaped from the moment that his brother is murdered. He is immediately forced to confront the venal nature of the criminal organisation he works for and who obstruct his investigation into the murder at every turn. Ultimately, he discovers not only that his criminal associates murdered his brother but that they groomed and sexually abused his niece (who is actually his daughter) to create the pornography that is at the heart of their criminal activity.
In this way, Mike Hodges’ film version of Get Carter, at least, represents the ultimate expression of alienation in the commodification of sex and of sexual relations as an object or thing to be discarded once used. Capitalism in short, by turning everything into a commodity, puts all morality and human decency through the shredder and, if unchecked by socialist revolution, can only lead to barbarism in the end (Chibnall, 2007). Much like our present government this makes a travesty of the claim by traditional conservatism (steeped as it is in the Romantic tradition) that it stands for moral boundaries and order in society and politics in the tradition of Aristotle, Hobbes and Burke. Just as significant, Get Carter is the only novel and film to at least indicate the role which organised paedophilia has played in British capitalism and politics since the 1970s, other than Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty and my own Cursed Albion trilogy that begins with Jaded Jerusalem. Indeed, Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah, has described Britain as the most corrupt country in Europe.
Mike Hodges was far more socially radical than Ted Lewis who wrote the source novel of Get Carter and this accounts for divergent interpretations of the text in the tradition of Shakespeare and (more especially) the Russian Formalists who saw narrative as a site for intellectual debate (Steiner, 1984). That there is “more” to Get Carter than a Right-Wing law and order narrative such as Death Wish or Dirty Harry, in which an enraged bourgeois or “street cop” simply wages war on the underclass is evident from the novel’s setting, and that of the film, and the fact that both draw on social realist themes within working class space (Reiner, 2000). Police corruption is more evident in Ted Lewis novel but this is because Mike Hodges needed the cooperation of the Tyneside Constabulary to make his film (Chibnall, 2007). Of the two, Hodges’ movie is the more radical interpretation of the same story for reasons I shall elaborate.
In both the novel and the film, Carter’s brother isn’t capable of securing revenge for the abuse of his daughter and is mocked and murdered by her abusers and suffers a horrible death (Murphy, 1999). It is thus down to Carter to seek revenge for his murdered brother and abused niece (who is actually his daughter) by acting out his brother’s repressed violent urges. Like a character from Webster and Restoration tragedy he is also seeking justice from the grave. However, there are two interpretations of this which do not rest easily with each other (Murphy, 1999). Hodges’ film, for example, draws not only on Webster’s Revenger’s Tragedy but also on the Italian westerns of the (Marxist) Serge Leone by making the aroused Carter a surrogate for the revolutionary forces (i.e. the proletariat) who must overthrow capitalism to establish the foundation for a socialist society (Frayling, 2000).
Get Carter, however, while it was screened some three years after the 1968 General Strike in France was one year earlier than the mass confrontation between pickets and police at Saltly Gates that signalled an outbreak of open class warfare in Britain that lasted until the defeat of the miners in 1985 and which (sadly) we’ve not seen the likes of ever since (Becket and Hencke, 2009; Fine and Millar, 1985; Milne, 2004). Carter’s actions may have, under certain conditions, triggered a wider revolt on the part of the working class itself as the German Red Army Fraction tried (and failed) to do. Without that wider insurrection, however, informed by a revolutionary program, that fuses the class struggle with a conscious mandate for human emancipation, the guerrilla army paints itself into a corner and so does Jack Carter. Although the novel ends ambiguously with Carter lying wounded in the brickworks in Scunthorpe, the film offers closure with his death on Blackall’s “Terminal Beach (Chibnall, 200&).”
Law or Morality?
To live outside the law you must be honest
- Bob Dylan
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In conservative readings of Get Carter (in the traditional pre-Thatcher sense) Carter has to be punished, after he exacts revenge, because he, too, has broken the laws of society that are rooted in a social contract and exist to prevent “the war of all against all.” This is consistent with a reading of Get Carter, e.g. by Richard Murphy, as an update of Webster that retains its Restoration perspective (and that of a gentrified theatre) on the nature of law and the state (Murphy, 1999). In Murphy’s account Carter has to die because he has himself transgressed the law in extreme terms. This reminds us of the problematic Hollywood gangster cliché that crime must not be seen to pay. It does not sit well with the notion that, particularly since the 1980s, any semblance of a broken and corrupt criminal justice system being autonomous of the coercive state apparatus and anything other than an engine of class tyranny is as dead as (formal) British democracy itself (Hillyard and Percy-Smith, 1988). It also denies the fundamental need for the working-class movement to challenge and overturn the bourgeois state’s monopoly on the means of political violence in order to transform society,
Marxism, however, has its roots in the Romantic tradition and law and morality are two different things. Indeed, if there is a problem with Marx’s unfinished project beyond its failure to apply the same Hegelian vigour to the conquests of social analysis as to political economy it is that it has failed to recognise society’s need for moral boundaries, alongside social justice, and to demystify a body of ethics as may have been traditionally identified with Aristotle, Burke and others. That Carter, like the traditional gangster, has “broken the law” is of little consequence but what is important is that by serving the organised criminal gang he is part of a world of corruption that saw his own niece (or daughter) abused and his brother murdered. The movie opens with Carter and his criminal bosses, the Fletchers, watching a porn film while Sid Fletcher paws his uncomfortable looking trophy wife with whom Carter is in a secret relationship. It is inconceivable, therefore, that Carter doesn’t know that his employers are involved in organised sex abuse but he is aroused to violent action only when his own flesh and blood (as Philos) is involved. It is for this reason that Carter has to die, at the end of the film, because he is part of this world and its transgressions which claim him, at the very point that he discards his former life and Chekov’s shotgun into the North Sea. Even his killer, who we first see in the train carriage during the credit sequence, is called Jay, reminding us that he is an alter-ego of Jack Carter himself (Chibnall, 2007).
Working Class “Enterprise” and “Bad Business”
The money feels good in this life you know it well,
But some day a time might come both in Heaven and in Hell
- The Clash, Guns of Brixton
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If the reflexive sociologists established the relationship between alienation and deviance, albeit using the flawed methodology of Kante and Wittgenstein, then it was Dick Hobbes who fully explained how street gangs and organised crime organisations offer a parallel career structure for those whom capitalism, through alienation and exclusion, poverty and neglect, and absence of access to career opportunities or cultural capital have cast on the scrap-heap (Hobbs, 1994). Of course, as Red Ray points out in Ronan Bennett’s Face, the majority of gang members won’t earn any more than they would driving a van or working in Macdonalds, where their life expectancy might be longer, but there is always the window of opportunity for social advancement and durable myth that there is “big money to be made in this game,” that provides a ready flow of recruits. Gang membership also provides a measure of protection and builds a false sense of community through peer pressure as well as the kind of status that one wouldn’t get from serving in a fast-food joint. All of this is admirably represented in Ronan Bennett’s Top Boy
Ronan Bennett has worked in Hollywood and while he has a strong grasp of British social-realism he is also familiar with Hollywood tropes as they evolved from the classic gangster movies of the 1930s and 1940 (Freidrichs, 2014)s. The common root of both the classic gangster movie and the first cycle of film noir as described by Schraeder was, of course, in Black Mask magazine whose cultural and literary significance can never be underestimated (Shraeder, 1972). Once again, the tropes of the classic gangster movie are subject to various interpretations but I think that the anti-capitalist critique offered particularly by Howard Hawkes’ Scarface is the most enduring and important.one in my opinion. In a scenario that prefigures that of Top Boy completely the gangster comes from a disadvantaged background (in this case East Manhattan rather than Hackney) and rises to the top of the criminal pile by embracing the values of capitalism on disadvantaged terms. Ultimately, the gangster is punished by those values, however, and (like Jack Carter) for his moral transgression, such as when George Raft, in the railyard, is mocked by the exhortation that “the world is yours,” at the point of his death (Freidrichs, 2014).
In contrast to a more “corporate” gangster such as Harold Shand, in The Long Good Friday, the classical Hollywood gangsters of the 1930s and 40s were usually small fry hoodlums, like the real-life Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd or Nicholas Ray’s doomed lovers in They Live by Night. An important source of moral panic in the waging of the class war, these latter-day wild west outlaws were in fact on the margins both of mainstream capitalism and mainstream criminality. In his brilliant screen adaptation of Public Enemies for Director Michael Mann, Ronan lays bare both the fascist agenda of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and revisits his refusal to admit that organised crime exists. In another part of the narrative, however, the Mafia bosses themselves deride the crime spree of Dillinger, sensationalised as a moral panic in the press, by saying that they earn as much in a week as Dillinger would in his entire high-risk career. Indeed, the Mafia even collude in his downfall at which point, to paraphrase Howard Hawkes, the world is anything but Dillinger’s.
While criminality has always offered a parallel career structure under capitalism, organised crime was only able to merge with mainstream capitalism following a deepening and unprecedented social crisis and structural changes in the economy that were made possible by the historical defeat of the political working class. Throughout the 1970s, and the decade that began with Get Carter, this terrible future was being signalled in dystopian fiction but by the time that The Long Good Friday was being screened on general release (in 1981) this Thatcherite neo-liberal future was beginning to take shape (Chibnall and Murphy, 1999; Friedman, 1993; Hobbs, 1995).
In particular, the London Docklands Development Corporation was already poised to socially cleanse London’s East End and develop the world’s biggest financial sector in adversity both to the Greater London Council and the local working class whose communities were being destroyed (Hillyard and Percy-Smith, 1988). That Richard Allen’s Skinhead, who now became Suedehead, was part of this assault on the working class from which he was derived is, perhaps, significan (Hunt, 1998)t. However, the full-blown de-regulation of the financial markets could only be achieved through the crushing defeat of the working class and the fire-sale looting of publicly owned industries that followed it. From this point onwards, a dying capitalist system that no longer produced sufficient surplus value to sustain accumulation, switched from wealth production to wealth appropriation for reasons that Geoff Piling and Hilell Ticktin recognised (Pilling, 2015; Ticktin, no date). Since then, the system has been in an endemic state of crisis culminating in the crash of 2008 from which it can never recover (Kennedy, 1998).
All of this was a long time in the future when Harold Shand stood poised to develop docklands along the same basic lines as the London Docklands Development Corporation with the same inevitable result (Chibnall and Murphy, 1999). Indeed, the stay of execution afforded to capitalism by the crushing defeat of the working class may even have appeared as a triumph and this inversion of the real relationship between things was of course further amplified by the collapse of Stalinism and its bloc. However, the world had also changed since the days of Howard Hawkes; Scarface or Jimmy Cagney in White Heat. When Harold Shand confronts his nemesis, specifically in the form of the Irish Republican movement, and suffers his downfall, he isn’t only punished by the Thatcherite values he has embraced but the neo-liberal order he helped create. The inheritors of this dystopian order will not be Harold Shand, who deludes himself that he is a community champion, even a Robin Hood style “social bandit” or (as Red Ray says in Face) that he is “staunch.” It will be Jeff Hughes and Councillor Harris who had not a trace of sentimentality regarding the working-class communities they were destroying.
The parallel with the eventual demise of Dushane in Top Boy is significant.
Social Bandits?
To get their anti-capitalist narrative past the deeply conservative movie moguls who would later embrace the McCarthy witch hunts with such zeal the moral message that “crime doesn’t pay” was eventually used to screen out any more penetrating social critique. This was why the gangster movie had to evolve and mutate into the first phase of film noir, which drew in wider human and social themes beyond the narrow engagement with “crime.” However, even film noir came under pressure to move away from its initial focus on the political economy of corruption, once Parnell Thomas and Richard Nixon brought their McCarthyite circus to tinsel town. By the end of the decade, as Paul Schraeder tells us, film noir offerings were more likely to be dissertations on madness (that had little to do with alienation) than critiques of capitalism (Freidrichs, 2014). Great movie that it is this particularly applies to Hitchcock’s Psycho, based on the novel by Robert Bloch, exemplifies this point perfectly.
The idea of the “social bandit” is particularly identified with the scholarship of the historian Eric Hobsbawm and in a British (or English) context obviously begins with Robin Hood. This figure, who himself may or may not have derived from nobility and may or may not actually have existed, famously “robbed from the rich and gave to the poor” at a time when feudal social relations were going into crisis and, thus, about a hundred years before the Peasants Revolt. Hobsbawm’s idea is that the social bandit, while self-interested and a criminal, stands in as a surrogate for revolutionary forces that have yet to come into existence. The Japanese equivalent is the Ronin Samurai who no longer serve a master and who may act as champions of social justice, usually for money (Hobsbawm, 1972).
By the early 19th Century, when the radical movement had yet to give rise to Chartism, there were various outlaws in Britain, including London, who were projected as social bandits not least by the sensationalist journalism of news hacks like Daniel Dafoe. By the 1880s this same experience was being writ large, through the journalism of Mark Twain, in relation to the outlaws of the wild west, at a time when both Native Americans and tenant farmers were being squeezed out of existence by the railroad robber barons and landowners but when none of these oppressed social forces was actually in a position to overthrow capitalism. Most of the best westerns to emerge from the 1950s and 1960s, and particularly in the example of the Italian Westerns of Serge Leone, are about rural class warfare with the gunman (or gunmen) standing in as surrogates for a revolutionary proletariat (Frayling, 2000). This is also why many of the best crime films are also “urban westerns,” with this particularly applying to Get Carter (Chinall, 2007; Chibnall and Murphy, 1999).
Otto Freidrichs once wrote that while George Raft showed real life gangsters how to dress it was Humphrey Bogarte who taught them to snarl, and it is true that the idea of the “staunch” social bandit as community champion only started to feed back into alienated working-class communities in decline in the age of the Spectacle (De Bord, 2000). For a significant layer of the proletarian population of East Manhattan, George Raft could be projected as a community champion precisely because he was Italian, working class and mixed with gangsters in real life. This was despite the fact that such gangsters actually acted as parasites on the working-class communities in decline from which they were derived after a fashion admirably described by Dick Hobbs (Hobbs, 1994). The Krays were actually far less successful than the Richardson torture gang but they craved publicity, in a way that Charlie Richardson did not, and this was a big part of their downfall at a time when Scotland Yard functioned as little more than just another organised crime gang (Cox, Shirley and Short, 1977; Reiner, 2000). That said, how many films have been made about the Krays, whose criminal reign has long turned from moral panic to a sick form of nostalgia, but who are immortalised forever in the alienated realm of the Spectacle itself?
Inevitably, and as the example of George Raft exemplified, the idea of the social bandit gained its greatest resonance and traction either within ethnic minority communities of the advanced capitalist countries or in the global south. This has an immediate significance to Top Boy. In Columbia, Pablo Escobar projected himself as a social bandit, who even paid for free healthcare for the poor, despite his ruthlessness, and eventually fell foul of a “war on drugs” waged in the direct and deliberate interest of his rivals in the Cali Cartel. That Cartel in turn, like the Guadalajara Cartel in Mexico, owed its position to Operation Black Eagle and the wider Iran Contra conspiracy and the CIA facilitated the further Cali Cartel funded assassination program against Escobar and his organisation purely because of his links to the FARC.
Beyond The Long Good Friday: “Lad Culture” and Post-Modernism
When The Long Good Friday screened in 1981 the Thatcherite assault on the working class, public services, democracy and society at large was still in its infancy. By 1987, the financial deregulation of the City of London had taken place, the social cleansing of the East End was in full force and the looting of public services attendant on the actual political defeat of the working class had actually happened (Hillyard and Percy Smith, 1988: Hobbs, 1995). Big capital and organised crime had also started to merge as one, with revenues from the Brinks Mat robbery being laundered and invested via timeshare, first in corrupt property development in Westminster then in Docklands itself (Clarke, 2012). This paved the way for still more substantial dirty investments, particularly from Russian sources, that duly transformed Britain’s offshore banking system into the largest money laundering operation on the planet (Bullough, 2019; 2022).
This is the world that is presented in Empire State, the not-quite sequel to The Long Good Friday that unpackages certain anti-Thatcherite themes within the original (Chibnal and Murphy, 1999; Freidman, 1993). By now, the nature of capitalism’s new and further degenerate shape was becoming more evident and the film explores this through divisions in gangland itself. Unlike Harold Shand, Ray McNally’s old school gang boss has little stake in this brave new world and such creatures that are in it and is being marginalised and squeezed out in much the same way as the working-class community from which he was derived. This reminds us that, had the Krays emerged in their 1960s form, twenty years later, they would have been eaten alive and it may even be significant that the first biopic of the Krays, with the Kemp brothers, was also filmed at this time.
There is some great dialogue and some great performances in Empire State, not least from McNally, who went on to play Harry Perkins in Alan Plater’s screen adaptation of Chris Mullen’s A Very British Coup, without doubt the most important long form drama of the 1980s (with Edge of Darkness by Troy Kennedy Martin a significant runner up). While, in The Long Good Friday, Shand’s surrogate son covets Shand’s empire in an almost Freudian way, even trying to seduce his surrogate wife, his openly gay counterpart in Empire State wants no part of McNally’s world with its “bad language and violence, all the East End chat.” He even says that he wants McNally stuffed like something from a Victorian seaside arcade. The idea of reducing this battle between old and new villainy to a bare-knuckle fist fight is also interesting for all that, in the real docklands, the jeering repugnant retinue of coked up yuppies would more likely pay the homeless to fight each other than do the job themselves.
The fact of the matter remains, however, that Empire State just isn’t as good a film as The Long Good Friday, is less well plotted and layered and looks too much like the critique that it actually is. The absence of the storyline involving the IRA also robs the narrative of something, such as portraying the decline and fall of Shand’s criminal empire as the decline and fall of British Imperialism and British capitalism itself. In a very different way, Peter Van Greenaway’s important film, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, also opens out anti-Thatcherite themes in The Long Good Friday by having Michael Gambon’s villain represent the moral bankruptcy of Thatcherism and of a society where everything is commodified and for sale. Beautifully shot as it is, however, this is really more of an art movie than a crime film and while it exemplifies the possibility of merging genres and abolishing the distinction between the art house and the commercial, probably wanders too far from generic conventions to warrant too much focus in this essay (Chibnall and Murphy, 1999).
In the 1990s, prior to Face, the British crime thriller was in particularly poor shape. On the one hand, the graphic novel serialisation of Get Carter in Loaded Magazine paved the way for its DVD release, with the result that it was actually more commercially successful in the 1990s than when it was made. By now, however, and much like The Long Good Friday, Get Carter was being nostalgically framed for a “Lad” audience whose own alienation was articulated as “male identity in crisis” who saw, in movies about “cool” gangsters, a world where “men were still men and women were grateful for it (Chibnall, 2007).” Parallel to this, in the US, Quentin Tarantino in particular was making films that were a post-modern take on the noir crime movie in the sense that they accessed noir as a style source while stripping it of any meaningful ideological content.
Both male identity in crisis and post-modernism are strongly evident in the movies of Guy Ritchie. Here we find a “Mockneyland” parody of the dialogue of The Long Good Friday being deployed by an open Tory, inhabited by “staunch villain” stereotypes and tropes, but without either any meaningful ideological content or even a coherent plot. Of course, only anyone who’d never grown up on a council estate or experienced gang crime, whether as member or victim, could actually consider gangster’s “cool,” and from his vantage point in rural Gloucestershire, Ritchie fit this bill completely. There is no critique of capitalism just middle-class angst against traffic wardens.
Maybe Ritchie and Madonna got a parking ticket while shopping in Cheltenham
The movies of Nick Love are largely in a similar vein although, here, it is more likely to be the football hooligan or middle-class vigilante who waves the flag for masculinity. At least a movie like Outlaw acknowledges the magnitude of police corruption and tips a nod to anti-racism but this message is subsumed by the overall blokey-ness of the narrative. While Phil Davies’ ID provided an accurate sociological account of the 1990s football violence scene, in context, with fragments moving into organised crime (like the Zulus in Birmingham) or descending into fascism, its all a big, cocaine fuelled laugh in The Football Factory until the traveller kid gets shot dead in the toilet.
It would be unfair to argue that some kind of unbroken thread exists between these films and the “black pill” misogyny e.g. of the InSil Cult orAndrew Tate, simply because Nick Love and Vertigo Films rejected my Sweeney script. That said, and as Steve Chibnall points out, there are alarming points of contact here which simply cannot be ignored (Chibnall, 2007).
Social Bandits and Identity Politics
In the classic gangster movies of George Raft, and particularly Scarface, the ethnicity of the character provides an important subtext to the overall narrative. Punished by the capitalist values that they have embraced, as much as by the moral mantra that crime doesn’t pay, they could nonetheless project themselves as the social champions of the (usually declining) communities from which they themselves derive. That they actually parasite upon those communities is evident from the previously cited example of the Krays but likewise, when one comes to the media Spectacle that was Reggie Kray’s funeral, the myth of the gangster as community champion was also very much alive and well in the late 1990s.
Meanwhile, the retreat from engagement with class themes such as alienation, in the crime thriller, was sustained from an unusual quarter throughout the 1980s and 1990s and right up to the present. In both social analysis and Cultural-Criticism the pre-eminence of structuralist interpretations of “Marxism” not only refuted dialectics, a dynamic perspective both on history and human agency but also core class themes such as alienation (Clarke, Lovell and McDonnell, 1980). Indeed, as I’ve previously commented, the very existence of alienation was refuted by Althusser, Stuart Hall and their Stalinist and Structuralist ilk. According to this paradigm, factors other than political economy fed the superstructure meaning that forms of identity other than social class are not symptoms of alienation but rather as historically valid as class consciousness itself. This process of sorry degeneration later continued through post-structuralism to post-modernism, via Barthes and Foucoult, and its influence eventually extended from cultural criticism to cultural production itself. Before long, the working class and working-class issues had no more representation on film and TV, and no more of a voice than when Lindsey Anderson wrote Get Out and Push in 1959.
The retreat from class analysis and perspectives in cultural-criticism had its origins in Stalinism and its compliment in political practice even before the crushing working-class defeats of the mid-1980s. Althusser’s fetish for identity, for example, which would be amplified by the likes of Foucault, had its compliment in the pre-eminent position afforded to Antonio Gramsci and his “war of position” that was in essence an abandonment of class politics and transitional demands. In a UK context, the building of the broadest possible coalition against Thatcher began with the abandonment of working-class politics and ended with Martin Jacques and others arguing that Thatcher got some things right.
In fact, this retreat from the kind of working-class perspective and voice that had been prevalent, particularly in British television in the 1970s, had begun before post-modernism and identity were championed in Screen, or Stuart Hall was let loose to wage intellectual vandalism on the Open University. Permanence and force waslent to this by relentless threats to the BBC, both by the Thatcher government and Murdoch-Thatcher Axis that it faced privatisation if it didn’t become more ideologically compliant with neo-liberalism and its brave new world (Brandt, 1993).
Meanwhile, in America, the class critique implicit in the noir revival of the 1970s was undermined in another way. On the one hand the movies, particularly of Martin Scorsese, usually based in the East Side of Manhattan, continued in the noir tradition by showing us a side to American society that was unloved by mainstream Hollywood. That many of these films were masterpieces is not in dispute, especially when scripted by Schraeder, but they are also much more fixated on the Italian experience or the Catholic experience than that of the working-class against Capital. When Schraeder wrote Blue Collar, it wasn’t made by Scorsese but by Schraeder himself.
What applies to Scorsese also applies to Spike Lee and this is potentially more relevant to Ronan Bennett in Top Boy. Once again, Lee’s films provide a voice to a layer of society not merely unloved but effectively hidden by mainstream audiences and its worth reminding ourselves how “hidden” Britain’s black community was, even in British social realist drama, before the riots of 1981-82. The equivalent of this in the US were the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and it was in this context that Lee rose in the filmmaking firmament. However, just as a layer of Hip-Hop musicians, post the 1992 riots (and murder of Tupec) moved from political critique into “guns and bitches” so Lee’s films projected the black experience in a way that also undermined class perspective.
Indeed, in Do the Right Thing we find a curious scenario in which Malcolm X, before his conversion to Trotskyism, is presented as “more radical” than the “moderate” Martin Luther King, even though the latter was an authentic socialist who made the connection between poverty, social exclusion and racism. By contrast Elijah Mohammed of the Black Muslims eschewed affirmative action, trade unions or working-class struggle in favour of a kind of self help that actually promoted free market values on disadvantaged termswithin the black community itself. By the 1990s, when Spike Lee was making his films, Louis Farrukan was denouncing the welfare state and espousing a view of economics that was indistinguishable from that of Newt Gindrich.
Suffice to say that Lee’s biopic based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X ends the story before Malcolm joined the American SWP and denounced the Muslim Brotherhood completely. It also omits to mention that it was the Black Muslims who murdered Malcolm, because he broke with their reactionary sect and embraced socialism, and not the FBI. By contrast, the state wasinstrumental in the demise of authentic socialists like George Jackson, Huey P. Newton and Bobbie Seale, the latter both of the Black Panther Party, all of whom were authentic socialists or communists and that Spike Lee has significantly never made a film about any of them (Jackson, 1994; Newton, 2009).
The potential relevance of this to Ronan Bennett’s Top Boy ought to be evident.
The ultimate form of Gramsci’s war of position and the ultimate form of identity politics came when, by way of Roberto Fiore and Steve Bannon, it was embraced by the fascist Right. In this, the National Front’s Political Soldiers may have been premature but it was the shape of things to come. During the 1980s, Richard Allen refused to make Skinhead a National Front member because “Skinhead is a patriot not a political idiot.” Had fascism in the 1980s fully abandoned eugenic theories of racial supremacy, Hitler worship and holocaust denial, and had fascism moved mainstream through the political defeat of the labour movement, the war of position and identity politics, then this might have been a different story with Skinhead joining Reform UK, Britain First or the EDL.
As a sociological phenomenon, the skinhead cult or “neo-tribe” articulated a territorial defence of working-class communities that were in decline, and a caricatured defence of its values, just as skinhead attire represented a caricature of working-class dress (Mungham and Pearson, 1976). This “working class identity, however, as distinct from working class consciousness, merely represents an alienated “class against capital” rather than “a class for itself.” Under certain conditions, such as when fascist groups specifically courted skinheads and they specifically responded, this “working class identity politics” can also represent “a class against itself.”
Ergo, when the London Docklands Development Corporation began the social cleansing of the East End, Richard Allen’s Skinhead was the last person to defend working class communities from attack. Indeed, as Suedehead, he himself becomes a yuppie, working in the City of London, a barrow boy made good and one of a layerof “working class winners” within Margaret Thatcher’s stay-of-execution to the “death agony of capitalism.” Such a move, on Skinhead’s part, found him deprived of the means to articulate his masculinity through physicality at work and, former rapist that he is, he compensates for this by going “queer bashing” in his leisure time.
Since the financial crash of 2008, from which capitalism can never recover, and the capitulation of the Greek Syriza government to authority this new fascism has come fully out of the woodwork. Supported both financially and ideologically by Putin’s Russia, it has largely ditched eugenic theories of racial supremacy, Hitler worship, holocaust denials and more obvious manifestations of anti-Semitism in exchange for populist opposition to capitalist globalisation, conspiracy theories and the fetish for national cultural identity that is perceived to be under attack. Its many targets include Muslims and asylum seekers. Across Europe, including Britain but also Ronan Bennett’s home country of Ireland, this threat is bigger than at any point since the 1930s and a much bigger issue than that of “Irish neutrality” that Ronan has been promoting through his blogs.
Face in its Context
When genres run dry and descend into cliches and tropes they need to borrow from outside the usual conventions. Without social realism there would have been no authentic British noir cycle that began with Ted Lewis and Get Carter and without the crime retrospectives of Jake Arnott and David Peace class themes like alienation would not have been re-introduced into the front-line crime narratives of the 1990s as they were. Among the literary influences cited by David Peace in particular, we find Ted Lewis but also Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, George Orwell and JG Ballard. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series also draws from outside the narrow confines of the traditionally defined noir thriller to keep the genre alive.
A number of factors combine to make Face the most important crime film since The Long Good Friday and a welcome antidote to Lock Stock and Two Broken Barrels. Firstly, whileThe Long Good Friday critiqued Thatcherism in its infancy, Face introduces us to neo-liberalism in its fully formed and wretched glory, with relentless news reports about public service cuts, homeless on the street, a children’s care home under threat and Kurdish dissidents on the point of being deported. Everything is commodified and everything is up for sale or has its price, including any cliché you might have heard about “honour among thieves.” Later, a dying corrupt cop, who is Ray Winstone’s prospective son-in-law and who has set up all the robberies the team has carried out for years, reminds them that corruption doesn’t begin and end with the police but that “there are no public services…only money…and people who have it.”
One factor that immediately distances Face from almost every previous noir crime one could mention, with the possible exception of Trevor Preston’s Fox, is that the protagonist is a former left activist, probably in the Socialist Workers’ Party (whose posters we see in the opening sequence) and from an activist background, who has become a criminal only after the crushing defeats of the 1980s. Grunwicks, the miners’ strike and Wapping are all revisited either through motif or flashback but, as “Red Ray” tells his activist mother: “they won…we lost” and he has “moved on.” Later in the narrative his activist girlfriend Connie’s question, “moved on to what,” comes back to haunt and punish him.
We don’t know the circumstances by which Red Ray served his first prison sentence and became the de facto guardian of “Stevie,” a man with learning difficulties who owes something to John Steinbach’s Of Mice and Men. In reality eleven thousand miners were convicted and jailed during the strike of 1984-85, all of whom were political prisoners wrongly convicted by a “rule of law” transformed into a non-democratic engine of class despotism (Milne,2004). Being working class in the wasteland economy of the 1980s was barrier enough to any career advancement without the amplification of political blacklisting or a rap-sheet and crime the only viable career path. That said, Ray has retained enough from his activist youth to recognise that thieves are very often as “thick” as in the Paul Weller song, that “being staunch” is “bollocks” and that a life of crime is a mug’s game, as he tries to dissuade young Jason (Damon Albern of Blur) from following his path.
Before long members of the gang and Jason’s odious uncle Sammy all turn up dead as someone has stolen the proceeds of the Heathrow lock-up robbery for themselves. This is kind of evocative of the idea of the “Brinks Mat curse” as it existed before we fully understood Kenneth Noye’s role and the link to the Deep State paedophile ring in the UK. It is also there in Jake Arnott’s True Crime. In fact, the killer is Ray Winstone’s character, the “old time face” who has become Red Ray’s surrogate father since he embarked on a life of crime. This is signalled early by his suggestion that “July” (Phil Davies) be “topped” for “pulling a gun on the people he works with” or that Red Ray cheats Stevie out of his cut from the robbery. It’s also signified in motif by Ray Winstone wearing a Dalek tee-shirt. Ray, however, isn’t able to see this until the end of the first act where he is forced to kill both Ray Winstone’s character and the corrupt cop who was his “Thief’s Ponce,” who has set them up with most of the robberies they have carried out over several years.
In The Long Good Fridaythe corrupt cop, Parkie, worked for Harold Shand but this was actually already a reversal of the way things actually were, even in the late 1970s, when Flying Squad cops were setting up most of the armed robberies in London. In real life, the corrupt cops who covered up the Deep State paedophile ring, and Vishal Mehrotra’s murder, also helped Kenneth Noye set up the Brinks Mat robbery and protected him, throughout his criminal career, until they got him to murder Jill Dando a year after Face was screened. In Face, this world is in microcosm, with the money hidden in a locker in a divisional police station.
The robbery of the police station, in turn, provides one of the tensest moments I’ve ever seen in a crime film until July (Phil Davies) once more pulls his Remington pump action shotgun on both Red Ray and Stevie, the only other surviving members of the gang. After this final tilt of the Stetson to the Italian Westerns of Serge Leone and, in particular, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, it is July who is left to shoot it out with an armed police unit whose militarised appearance invokes an image of the near future while Red Ray and Stevie escape, albeit without the money.
Once again, this is Scarface and White Heat in microcosm, July has been punished by the Thatcherite values he has embraced (as has Ray Winstone’s character) and crime certainly hasn’t paid.
The final important departure of Face from the conventional crime movie despite its tight, Aristotelian and therefore classical narrative construction is the role of the women in the film as both a surrogate to a Greek Chorus and as self-reflective participants in the drama in a way that Shakespeare would have understood. In the very few critiques of Face that are actually worth reading this is usually projected as a feminist device, which it of course is, but perhaps deliberately underestimate what this says about class consciousness (Chibnall and Murphy, 1999).
In Face, Red Ray, the fallen revolutionary, represents working class “identity” ina community in decline, who has escaped up to a pointby becoming a class exile, a bit like Jack Carter but also Suedehead working in the City of London. It is Red Ray’s mother and his girlfriend, Connie, who ultimately save him, despite being sickened by seeing him in the presence of guns and low-life criminals like Sammy, with his “paw out like any other money grabbing capitalist.” Far from being primarily a feminist response to criminal machismo, as certain critics claim, this is actually an example of “class consciousness” in which both women recognise that crime is a dead end and that socialist revolution is the only answer. While this is implied in Get Carter, with which Britain’s first authentic noir cycle begins, it is in Face that it is rendered manifest.
City of God as precursor to Top Boy
The idea of class-conscious characters who serve as a counterweight to the gangster’s tragic trajectory has been replicated since the making of Face, most notably in the Brazilian crime masterpiece, City of God. Once again, this combines aspects of a crime drama, including suitably adapted tropes from Hollywood gangster movies and noir, to the impoverished Borrelas of Rio De Janeiro where crime offers even more of an alternative career path than in the sink estates of East and South London. From the outset however, we are introduced to a character called Rocket who aspires to be a filmmaker and who shuns the world of criminality that got his older brother killed. Nonetheless, Rocket is slowly drawn into the world of gangster Little Z and only later does Rocket discover that Little Z was responsible for his brother’s dead.
This is an important variation on the theme of Get Carter and reminds us how classic noir went “beyond crime and gangland” by introducing human and class themes from the wider social realist tradition. This was one of the important strengths of Stephen Knight’s recent offering, This Town and is also an important characteristic of Ronan Bennett’s writing.