k-punk
Spectres of Mark
Pleased to see that the sacred cow Mike Leigh got a long overdue slaying in the Sunday Times yesterday. Minette Marrin dared to break ranks with the near unanimous consensus and proclaim the obvious: that Leigh's films are intellectually lazy, stereotype-ridden, patronizing and simplistic.
Before I go on, I should say that I haven't yet seen Vera Drake. Well, I say I haven't seen it, but from what Martin wrote, it's clear that I <i>have</i> seen it - many times before. Leigh's films endlessly repeat the same gestures: grotesquely overacted mugging by most of the cast, with an off-the-shelf patented British Character Actor 'Great Acting' rendering of timorous fortitude by the lead; absurdly simplistic portrayal of class, with people divided into three types - heroic, would never complain us, even though we've only got a round of bread and dripping to last a family for a week, have to go to school with holes in our hobnailed boots and make our own entertainment rahnd the old pianner, Thoroughly Decent heartwarming, hardworking, hard done to salt of the earth folk; moustache-twirling Toff Villains that would be laughed off stage in pantomime; but worst of all, the very devils in Leigh's know your place cosmos, the <i>aspirant</i> working class, those who, grotesquely and appallingly, want more for themselves than to make do and mend. Almost all of the alleged comedy of Leigh's films is at the expense of this 'upstart' class. Witness Alison Steadman's 'classic' performance in the poisionous <i>Abigail's Party</i>, the alleged humour of which consists in the fact that, can you believe it, there are people out there who don't know what the protocols of middle class Taste are. It's so amusing isn't it, dear, when they get above themselves...
There really is no difference between Leigh's portrayal of the aspirant working class and racism. Steadman's yowling accent and barely 2 dimensional characterization is the class equivalent of blackface.
As for politics, Leigh's films are unfailingly anti-political in their British socialist, commonsense empiricist conviction that if only people were more Decent then everything would be alright. They are straightforward morality plays in the worst sense, in which any <i>structural</i> analysis of class is made impossible by a sensibility that is at once smug, resentful and sentimental.
Before I go on, I should say that I haven't yet seen Vera Drake. Well, I say I haven't seen it, but from what Martin wrote, it's clear that I <i>have</i> seen it - many times before. Leigh's films endlessly repeat the same gestures: grotesquely overacted mugging by most of the cast, with an off-the-shelf patented British Character Actor 'Great Acting' rendering of timorous fortitude by the lead; absurdly simplistic portrayal of class, with people divided into three types - heroic, would never complain us, even though we've only got a round of bread and dripping to last a family for a week, have to go to school with holes in our hobnailed boots and make our own entertainment rahnd the old pianner, Thoroughly Decent heartwarming, hardworking, hard done to salt of the earth folk; moustache-twirling Toff Villains that would be laughed off stage in pantomime; but worst of all, the very devils in Leigh's know your place cosmos, the <i>aspirant</i> working class, those who, grotesquely and appallingly, want more for themselves than to make do and mend. Almost all of the alleged comedy of Leigh's films is at the expense of this 'upstart' class. Witness Alison Steadman's 'classic' performance in the poisionous <i>Abigail's Party</i>, the alleged humour of which consists in the fact that, can you believe it, there are people out there who don't know what the protocols of middle class Taste are. It's so amusing isn't it, dear, when they get above themselves...
There really is no difference between Leigh's portrayal of the aspirant working class and racism. Steadman's yowling accent and barely 2 dimensional characterization is the class equivalent of blackface.
As for politics, Leigh's films are unfailingly anti-political in their British socialist, commonsense empiricist conviction that if only people were more Decent then everything would be alright. They are straightforward morality plays in the worst sense, in which any <i>structural</i> analysis of class is made impossible by a sensibility that is at once smug, resentful and sentimental.