Please note the following is adapted from my dissertation on the television play and its role in the development of the British film industry, from 2006.

1. MEANTIME (1983)

    Meantime was the first film Mike Leigh made with the newly established Channel Four, a creative partnership which would result in a further five feature films for cinematic distribution over the next fourteen years, as well as television projects The Short and Curlies (1987) and A Sense of History (1992). As Michael Coveney notes, the foundation of the new television channel, and the funding it provided for filmmaking, provided ideal conditions for success, and ‘Leigh rode his luck, and his resurgence, right through to Naked’ (Coveney, 1997:171).

    The film marked the start of a more explicit political concern in Leigh’s films, and is seen by some critics as the start of a ‘trilogy of 1980s political films’ (Coveney, 1997: 170), which would continue with Four Days in July (1985, Leigh’s final play for the BBC) and High Hopes (1988). Leigh’s politicisation, however, was less strident than that of directors such as Loach or Neil Jordan, and these films have been described as being ‘political in a subtle sense, not in a party political sense’ (Coveney, 1997: 171).

    Leigh had been concerned with the effects of recession, and of the Thatcher government, since the late 1970s, but Meantime was the first of his films to tackle the issue head on, studying the various effects of unemployment on both men and women, parents and (grown-up) children. The different characters cope (or, more accurately, fail to cope) with unemployed life. The two brothers Mark and Colin Pollack still live at home with their parents, dealing with this situation in radically disparate ways. While Mark is aggressive and short-tempered, sniping at his family on the rare occasions he is forced to spend time with them, Colin is essentially still a child. He shuffles around in a shapeless parka, breathing heavily and grunting monosyllabic answers when spoken to; there is an implication that he may be slightly mentally retarded.

    Colin is not the only ‘child’ in the film. The skinhead Coxy (‘one of the most eloquent visual metaphors for dead-end delinquency’ (Gilbey, 2002: 16)), having no real interests or occupations, spends his time hanging around in pubs or on street corners. He is full of anger, and his only method for interacting with people is to threaten them, even his so-called friends. This anger is frequently released in an outwardly jokey but ultimately aggressive and futile way; at one point he pretends to headbutt a lamp-post, and the last time we see him he is rolling around inside a metal bin, banging the sides with a stick. When visiting the home of Hayley (one of the few female characters) he jumps on furniture and throws ornaments around, resembling a hyperactive child more than a grown adult, indeed he indirectly refers to himself as a child, asking Colin if he is ‘playing out’. This childlike aspect of his character is further highlighted in a scene where cracks appear in this carefully constructed armour – Coxy and Colin encounter a black man in the lift of a council block, whom Coxy proceeds to racially abuse. However he gets more than he bargained for when the man reacts physically; the audience recognises the fear in Coxy’s face as he immediately backs down.

    The older generation deal with unemployment in different ways again. Mark and Colin’s father Frank, has grown to resent everyone and everything around him, appearing even to blame them for his current misfortune. He is the character most indicative of the crisis of masculinity which is found in many working-class films of the 1980s and 1990s; this arises from ‘the collapse of roles (such as wage-earner and head of the family) which historically reinforced a sense of male identity’ (Hill, 1999: 168). He resents his sons, particularly Mark, for their awareness of his inability to fulfil these roles. In one scene Frank and Mark are arguing about money and who ‘owns’ the family flat:

FRANK: You Want money, get out and earn it.
MARK: What, like you?
FRANK: I’ve done my stint mate, don’t you worry.
. . .
MARK: You don’t own this chair, don’t own this flat. Don’t own nothing.

Frank sees himself as being unemployed through no fault, whereas the attitude he takes towards Mark and Colin is that they are unemployed because they are lazy.

    Despite the negativity between the generations in the Pollack family, the relationship between Mark and Colin is much more ambiguous. Initially it appears that Colin is the more attached of the two, as he is constantly asking Mark where he’s going, whether he can come. However as the film develops there is evidence of a deeper tenderness in Mark’s behaviour towards Colin, as he prevents Colin from taking the decorating job at their aunt Barbara’s suburban home. Although this initially appears to have been motivated by jealousy (and this is what their parents believe), by the end of the film it is evident that Mark perceived the job offer to be made out of pity; the fact of it coming from within the family is irrelevant. Ryan Gilbey identifies this as a recurrent element in Leigh’s films, ‘family unity… forfeited for… honour’ (Gilbey, 2002: 16); as a result the film’s ending is not entirely pessimistic. The growing link between the two brothers is founded on ‘the importance of refusal… of the dignity of resistance’ (Medhurst, 1993: 9).

    Mark is representative of a recurrent character type, which Michael Coveney describes as ‘the articulate egomaniac, the critical motormouth, the dissident yelper… a character very close to Mike Leigh’s creative centre’ (Coveney, 1997: 22). In his idealism, his adherence to his principles, he prefigures the character of Johnny in Naked. Johnny is conceivably the type of person Mark could become ten years down the road – drifting and rootless, idealistic and yet disappointed with the state of modern society.

2. NAKED (1994)

    Naked is often described as Leigh’s breakthrough film, and it was particularly popular on the foreign festival success, receiving awards and nominations at Cannes and Toronto, as well as several film critics’ awards and nominations at the Independent Spirit Awards and the BAFTAs. Critics noted the film’s use of art-house conventions (Eaton, 1993: 33), suggesting that the emotional tone and attitude of the film belonged to this more European tradition (‘anguish and existential dread more characteristic of traditional art cinema’ (Hill, 1999: 171)).

    Despite these apparently more ‘European’ characteristics, the central concerns of the film are still very much the product of British society. The crisis of masculinity touched on in Meantime here returns with a vengeance, having evolved, in the central character of Johnny, into ‘bile and venom and a frighteningly inexhaustible bitterness’ (Medhurst, 1993: 7). However, whereas previous films centred this crisis around the male inability to fulfil the role of breadwinner, Naked reflects complex and changing male attitudes towards women. Claire Monk identifies this as being part of a post-feminist backlash, ‘a resurgence of masculinism and misogyny’ (Monk, 2000: 157), pointing to Naked, and Gary Oldman’s directorial debut Nil by Mouth (1997), as examples of this.

    Monk was not alone in her assessment of the film – and its director – as misogynistic, and it is not difficult to see why she reached this conclusion. Both Johnny and the other central male character Jeremy are sexually aggressive and violent – the opening scene shows Johnny apparently raping a woman in a dark Manchester backstreet. Although many critics seized upon Johnny as a villain, and accused Leigh of presenting him sympathetically, few paid due attention to the worse of the two, the yuppy landlord Jeremy. For, although Johnny is certainly unpleasant, he is capable of genuine affection and even tenderness, as seen in his relationship with his ex-girlfriend Louise. Jeremy, on the other hand, appears to have no human emotions other than the desire to hurt, both physically and emotionally, the woman he encounters. Having turned up, uninvited, at Louise and Sophie’s flat, he rapes Sophie, throws money at her, and even jokes, ‘I hope I haven’t given you AIDS, Sophie’. When Louise threatens him with a knife, he merely snorts contemptuously and walks out. In earlier scenes, he is seen dating various anonymous women – including a masseuse and a waitress – both of whom he verbally and/or physically abuses. Jeremy acquires women through wealth, ‘he adds economic abuse to the sexual kind’ (Medhurst, 1993: 10).

    The world of Naked is essentially a lonely one. Leigh called the accusations of misogyny ‘preposterous’, describing the film as ‘a lamentation on the way it is for a lot of women, and indeed a lot of men-women relationships’ (Leigh (DVD), 2002). However this lack of human interaction is not restricted to relations between the sexes; the men in the film don’t interact with each other any more than they do with women. Johnny encounters a young Scottish man, Archie, whose interaction with Johnny is marked alternately by aggression, or incomprehension at Johnny’s bizarre, yet often insightful, comments:

ARCHIE: Fuckin’ come on, cunt! Kick your fuckin’ head open! Eh?
JOHNNY: What’s it like being you?
ARCHIE: Eh?
JOHNNY: Bit hectic?
ARCHIE: Fuck off, poof!

Jeremy, on the other hand, is never seen in the company of another man until the film’s climax when he and Johnny meet in the flat. His attitude towards Johnny is similar to his behaviour towards the women, a mixture of contempt, disgust and amusement:

JEREMY: Who’s this?
LOUISE: It’s all right, he’s a friend of mine.
JEREMY: What extraordinary friends you have. He’s only got one sock on.
…..
JOHNNY: Are you the doctor?
JEREMY: You’re rather disgusting, aren’t you?

Unlike Jeremy, who hates everyone and delights in material possessions, Johnny is disappointed in society and in the way people behave. He is according to Leigh, ‘absolutely passionate about real values… a complete idealist’. His relationships with the women in the film are extremely complex; his relationship with Sophie boils over into violence and yet she still protests that she is in love with him. The relationship is ‘motivated… by Sophie’s own self-loathing and self-doubts… that stimulates something which is unacceptable in [Johnny], that it brings out the worst in him’ (Leigh (DVD), 2002).

    It is the relationship with Louise which redeems Johnny, and saves him from being merely a poorer, more articulate version of Jeremy. Johnny appears to project onto Louise his hopes for what society should be (for example his nostalgia for Manchester), and it is only with her that he allows himself to drop his guard. She is, apparently, the reason he comes to London, and despite the initial animosity between them, it is she that he returns to when he is in need of solace. As a result, despite its apparent fatalism, Naked continues the concern for family (of one kind of another) that characterises earlier works, and links it to Meantime and Leigh’s final television films.