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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Content warning: Mass murder; Anti-Asian racism; Anti-Blackness.

Idi Amin: Lion of Africa was a self-published (through the British arm of US company AuthorHouse) biography of the former Ugandan dictator, written by Manzoor Moghal. The book sought to challenge the dominant perceptions in the Anglophone world of Amin, who ruled Uganda between 1971 and 1979 – during which time Amnesty International estimated his regime killed between 100,000 and 500,000 people – as a fool or a monster.1 Moghal himself knew Amin personally: he was a Ugandan Asian, and a prominent figure in community politics and local government there prior to Amin’s expulsion of the country’s Asian community in 1972, and who after relocating to the British city of Leicester, eventually became prominently involved in community and race relations organisations there.

The book begins with a introduction explaining Moghal’s desire to provide a different account of Amin’s rise to power, followed by a scene-setting prologue of Moghal’s own escape from Uganda with his wife and children in 1972, after learning Amin had placed him on a hitlist.2 It then takes the reader through Amin’s ascent from captain to commander of the Ugandan Army shortly after independence, consolidating his own power base while Prime Minister Milton Obote dismantled the country’s nascent democracy, and ramped up persecution of the country’s small but economically relatively prosperous South Asian diasporic community. The book relates how Amin exploited a worsening rift between Uganda and Britain to seize power himself while Obote was attending a Commonwealth summit, with covert British support, ostensibly on the precept of normalising the political situation in the country, but instead consolidated his power.

Lion of Africa explains how Amin cannily ramped up pressure on the Asian community, and after a further fallout with Britain, announced their expulsion. Throughout the book, Moghal seeks to set out the complex ethnic dynamics and worsening cronyism operating in post-independence Ugandan politics, but also his own personal proximity to Amin and other key political figures, especially during the negotiations between Amin and the Asian community’s leaders. He concludes with a final chapter in which he reflects upon Amin as a politician and personality, as he knew him, including a final meeting between the author and his subject in Saudi Arabia in 1984, after Amin had been deposed.

My own interest in Lion of Africa is less in the insights it provides into Amin than it does into Moghal, a fascinating figure in his own right, in the way he connects the histories of post-colonial Uganda and ethnic conflict with those of multicultural and multifaith politics in Britain in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. He is someone I first came across when he was a contributor to a 2012 episode of the BBC Radio 4 panel programme The Reunion on the subject of ‘Ugandan Asians’, which I have previously written about for this newsletter. In this current post, I want to set the story Moghal tells in Lion of Africa within the broader context of his own life and career, and the wider narratives he has related about Uganda, Amin, and the Ugandan Asian diaspora over the past three decades.

Manzoor Moghal, from Masaka to Leicester

Manzoor Moghal migrated from India to Uganda as an infant and, after returning to Pakistan to complete his higher education, became a successful businessman in the Ugandan city of Masaka, as well as a member of its municipal council. He also represented the Asian community as a delegate in meetings with the national government. Although he had initially intended to move to Canada, Moghal and his family settled in Leicester after expulsion. From the 1980s onwards, he became an influential figure locally and nationally, serving as chairman of the city’s Federation of Muslim Organisations and of Leicestershire County Council’s Race Relations Committee – being awarded an MBE in 2001 for his contribution to race relations in the city – as well as vice-chairman of the Ugandan Evacuees Association. He also unsuccessfully stood for election as the Social Democratic Party candidate for Bradford West in the 1987 General Election, a campaign that he said was marred by intimidation against potential Muslim voters by the local Labour Party.

Moghal has frequently contributed to public discourse on the Ugandan Asian experience, being regularly sought since the 1980s for comment for the local and national press, as well as the BBC, as part of broader reporting and reflections upon the community’s history in Leicester and Britain more widely, particularly during anniversaries of expulsion, including the aforementioned 2012 episode of The Reunion. Moreover, he has contributed as an interviewee to oral history projects such as the Heritage Lottery Foundation-funded ‘East to West’ project, marking 50 years since expulsion, administered by interfaith charity Faith Matters.

Lion of Uganda was apparently based upon an unpublished memoir Moghal had written during the late 1970s, revised for publication with aid of his son Arif, and Manzoor’s assistant Radikha Madhani.3 Madhani would subsequently work for Jonathan Ashworth, the Labour MP for Leicester South. It was the first of three books Moghal would publish with AuthorHouse, with two more appearing in 2019: Commentaries: Politics Religion Terror, a compilation of articles he had written on these topics for newspapers including the Daily Mail and the Leicester Mercury; and Public Speaking: How to Master It.

Amin, Uganda, and the British

Central to Moghal’s thesis was that the rot set in under Obote rather than Amin. He characterised Obote’s rule as built upon courting and then violently betraying Uganda’s different African ethnic communities, as well as exploiting its religious divisions. He detailed how Obote initially forged an alliance with the Bagandans, the largest ethnic group in the country, originally backing their King Mutese II for the ceremonial role of President, before violently deposing him in a military assault on his Kampala palace in 1966, as part of his own consolidation of dictatorial power over the country. The tragedy of Ugandan politics, from Moghal’s perspective, was the way talented politicians like Benedicto Kiwanuka, independent Uganda’s first Chief Minister, and Francis Walugembe, mayor of Masaka, were marginalised and persecuted, to be replaced by cronies of Obote, and later Amin.4

Moghal’s approach to Amin himself, however, was marked by a refusal to moralise, and a barely concealed fascination with what he saw as the dictator’s ‘little-understood African intelligence’.5 As he put it in the book’s introduction:

Idi Amin was a uniquely fascinating character, always big news not only in Uganda and Britain but all the over the world. He made headlines everywhere, continually shocking and absorbing people with his words and actions and even more with the things he was said to do in private. He rose through his animal instincts and had no boundaries and no fears of repercussions for any act he deemed necessary or politic.6

Later in the Lion of Africa, Moghal compared Amin to Hitler, whom Amin admired, in a manner that stressed their shared importance, and political skill, rather than awfulness. He reflected:

[Amin] will not be remembered kindly. Estimates of numbers killed by his regime vary between 100,000 and 500,000. The damage he did to Uganda and her neighbours is barely quantifiable. But by his actions he immortalised himself: he will not be forgotten.7

Equally, despite having nearly fallen foul of Amin’s murderousness (which cost several of his close associates their life), Moghal was willing to meet with him in 1984, characterising Amin’s manner on the occasion as initially cautious but increasingly gregarious and concilliatory.8 Moghal insisted at the end of Lion of Uganda that he held no resentment towards Amin, nor did he take any pleasure in hearing of his death in 2003.9

Moghal was, by contrast, scathing in his account of Britain’s conduct throughout. He accused them of having conspired with their African allies before 1962 to demonise the Asian community for the unequal distribution of the fruits of late colonial development. He attributed their support for Amin’s coup against Obote for their humiliation at Obote’s public denunciation of their lack of action over oppressive white minority rule in South Africa and Rhodesia.10 He also felt that they had grossly underestimated Amin, whom they subsequently lampooned ‘in order to camouflage their own shortcomings in their dealings with this man who had outwitted them at every turn.’11 Moghal deemed the British refusal to honour a promise of a loan to Uganda, after Amin increasingly aligned with Arab states against the West, as the trigger for the expulsion of the Asians, whom Britain then only belatedly, reluctantly, and partially accommodated.12

Moghal and the Asian community

Lion of Africa portrays the Asian position in Uganda as having been deeply precarious from the outset, even before the worsening of anti-Asian sentiment under Obote. Moghal described how their hopes of an improved situation under Amin were swiftly dashed by the new ruler and his coterie also publicly criticising the community for a lack of economic and social integration.13 He detailed how Amin called an Asian conference in December 1971, only to then make a closing statement in which he accused them of siphoning off money from economy, not paying taxes, refusing to rent premises to Africans, and refusing to let their daughters marry Africans. According to Moghal, this backfired by encouraging greater unity and resolve among the Asian community, and the following month, Amin invited Asian leaders to his home in Entebbe and behaved much more cordially, in order to alleviate their concerns. Yet this too was only a brief reprieve, and later that year he would announce the expulsion order, accusing the Asian minority of economic warfare against Uganda.14

Moghal characterised the Asian community’s own reluctance to take up Ugandan citizenship after 1962 as understandable given the short initial timeframe for them to apply to do so, their justified fears over anti-Asian sentiment, especially under Obote, who prevented existing applications from being processed. At the same time, he judged their faith that Britain would continue to act as their protector post-independence as naïve, as illustrated by the 1968 Immigration Act that pre-emptively inhibited their ability to move there. He pushed back against portrayals of Ugandan Asians as uniformly privileged, and against the idea of a uniform Ugandan Asian community at all, given the religious and ethnic divisions within it that he claimed led different sections of it to try to advance their own position, at the expense of others.15

Throughout these events, Lion of Africa depicts Moghal himself as an integral and farsighted figure in the major historical events it describes, personally familiar with leading Ugandan politicians, integrally involved in the high-level summits between Amin and the Asian community leaders, and aware prior to expulsion that they were living on borrowed time. The book contains multiple photographs from Moghal’s own personal archive of him fulfilling his official roles, including alongside Amin. As Moghal put it in the book’s introduction:

I lived through those times and those upheavals in Uganda, and it was as [Amin] rose to power that I had first had contact and meetings with him and also those around him who fell in his wake. This is a unique insight and telling of his story from someone who heard and saw the physical smashing of his way to power both by tanks and shells and by the brutal murders of opponents in the streets of Kampala.16

Moghal’s social standing and ethnicity afford him a privileged insider/outsider role in the book: he was not of Africa, but deeply familiar with it, and well-placed to explain Uganda’s complex ethnic politics to others. However brutal Amin was, it was a mark of Moghal’s importance that the dictator tried to have him killed, as much as it was that he then hosted him while in exile a decade later. It confirmed a status that Moghal would subsequently take a great deal of time to rebuild in a British context.

While prone to othering and even primitivising Amin and the Ugandans, especially in describing political violence and corruption, Moghal nonetheless had a strong sympathy with them vis-à-vis the British, taking vicarious satisfaction in their humiliating their former colonial masters, even when the Ugandan Asians were the unfortunate collateral in these confrontations. Perhaps in this regard his retrospective identification with Amin was strengthened by the latter being a Muslim, and by the climate of Islamophobia that existed in Britain in the 2000s, although Moghal himself was also a fierce critic of anti-Western strands of fundamentalist Islam. Yet perhaps it also owed something to the elite racism that Moghal witnessed in Britain after moving there. In his later interview for the ‘East-West’ project in 2023, he recalled an encounter with a middle-aged white woman at a public meeting in Leicester in the early 1980s on the subject of international aid:

After the Asian [community] leaders had spoken, she turned towards me and said in a low voice that Asians always spoke in a poor and ungrammatical English. My name was announced to come up to the stage and speak. I spoke extempore about politics in Britain and the poor developing countries and the need for international aid to help them. After I had finished my speech, I returned to my chair, and as I sat down, my neighbour the white woman who had earlier spoken to me was looking at me with her mouth open in amazement. She had not expected that any person not of her colour could speak English so well, in a place like Leicester.

Lion of Africa decried the worsening cronyism in Ugandan politics, and portrayed this as inherently connected with anti-Asian racism: Moghal’s position in Ugandan politics, the Asian position in Uganda, was one of merit; on the other side was the politics of resentment and unearned patronage. Likewise, Moghal insisted on his own merit as an advocate for his communities – Ugandan Asians, South Asians, Muslims, the developing world – in Britain. In this regard, Amin functioned in Moghal’s telling as an unlikely kindred spirit: a poor outsider who rose by his skill and cunning to rule Uganda, albeit viciously and ultimately ruinously, and who likewise had the capacity to astonish and outfox a complacently supremacist white British elite.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Content warning: Animal death; Descriptions of violence against animals.

In October 2021, BBC Wales screened the documentary Foot and Mouth – The Killing Fields in Wales. Twenty years on, the programme reflected on how the 2001 outbreak of the disease in the UK – which the government eventually succeeded in bringing under control only after the culling of six million farm animals – impacted upon rural life and politics within Wales. It takes its audience through the initial discovery of the disease at an abattoir in Essex, subsequently traced back to a farm in Northumbria, to its detection in Anglesey and ensuing appearance on the Welsh mainland. As the UK government’s initial response proved inadequate, the culling operation expanded to include the entire stock of animals on farms adjacent to those where the disease had been found, even if there was no evidence as yet that those animals were not completely healthy.

The Killing Fields in Wales explored this process both through the perspective of Welsh farmers who were affected by the culling and of the scientists, veterinarians, and politicians tasked with planning and delivering the policy. These included Labour politician Carwyn Jones, the then 33-year-old Welsh Minister for Agriculture and Rural Affairs, who would later serve as Wales’s First Minister from 2009 to 2018.

The need to dispose of culled animals at a more rapid pace and on a greater scale prompted Jones and his team to settle on a plan of deploying the Army to bury them en masse in the Epynt Valley – a move that provoked fierce opposition from the local community, culminating in violent clashes between protestors and police. When the initial proposal to inter the animals deep in the ground proved unsafe, contrary to the Welsh government’s earlier claims, it instead opted to dispose of the carcasses on huge pyres visible across the valley. The documentary concluded with the disease having been finally brought under control, but farmers still bearing the psychological scars of the episode some two decades later.

Genre and memory

The Killing Fields in Wales told its story through a combination of archival and contemporary audiovisual material. The former included BBC news coverage, as well as footage from the media libraries of Imperial College London, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, and stock media companies Getty and Shutterstock. It also comprised home videos recorded by farmers at the time themselves, on handheld cameras often provided by news companies for the purpose, as their own staff were not allowed on the farms because of the risk of cross-contamination.

The result was a record of the event that mixed the official with the intimate. The archive television coverage carried an air of authority, impartiality, and yet also familiarity in the recognisable reporters and politicians of the early 2000s; the visuals, from news graphics to modes of on-site reporting root the viewer in the telescape of that period. The relatively poor-quality handheld camera footage and amateur narration likewise serves to evoke the viewer’s own memories of contemporary domestic video recordings, and therefore further encourage their identification both with the farmers and period of history on display.

The documentary also included (uncredited) unseen voiceover narration, providing an overarching account that helps evoke a sense of chronology and historicity alongside the contemporaneity of the footage. It utilised stock music (as well as snippets of late 1990s/early 2000s rock songs by the likes of Radiohead) to subtly prompt emotional responses and a vague sense of period. Perhaps most crucially, it made extensive use of contemporary interviews with the same people who appeared in the archival videos.

The local cast of interviewees included farmers like Richard Rogers, Ann Morgan, and Gary Holloway; Anglesey veterinarian Meurig Evans, who identified the first case on the island; Nigel Picken, a long-distance lorry driver from Montgomeryshire employed to help carry out the cull; and Kate Nicholson, a chip shop owner who participated in the Epynt protests. Other interviewees represented the state and political response to the crisis: former UK Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Nick Brown; the aforementioned Carywn Jones; Kirsty Williams, the then Liberal Democrat Member of the Senedd for Brecon and Radnorshire, the constituency within which the Epynt Valley lies; Welsh epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, who helped originate the mass culling policy; and Major Sean Walker, who was involved in overseeing the proposed mass burial operation.

This approach further established a dialogue between past and present, highlighting the continued contemporary weight and significance of the events of two decades earlier in a particularly personalised manner. The interviewees were generally shot in close-up, often with the backdrop out of focus; at times their own words were presented non-digetically, continuing to play over the soundtrack while they were shown instead communicating wordlessly through facial expression and physical gestures. These partial abstractions of interviewees from place and voices from bodies invite the viewer into an emotional time-space that operates between past and present, an immediate but nonchronological here-and-now. The usage of these techniques also extended to political interviewees as well, in a manner that is both humanising and subtly undermining of hierarchy.

Being made in 2021, The Killing Fields in Wales interpreted the memory of the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak through two particularly interlinked frames. The first of these was the COVID pandemic that had necessitated the shutdown of much of the UK’s physical public realm in the Spring of 2020 with recurring implementation of similar public health measures over the ensuing 12 months. The theme of an epidemic, albeit one among animals rather than humans, and the accompanying visual motifs of biosecurity wear, disinfecting stations, and medical equipment could hardly not spark such memories in the contemporary audience, but the documentary’s narration was none-too-subtle in drawing the parallels either, as evident from the very outset:

In 2001, Wales was in the grip of a hidden virus that brought the country to its knees.

The virus closed schools, brought tourism to a standstill, and cancelled major sporting events.

It locked down the countryside, and forced thousands to self-isolate.

The treatment of foot-and-mouth as harbinger of COVID, especially in its technological implications, was consequently reinforced through the documentary’s segment on Neil Ferguson, whose computer-based epidemiological modelling it identified as a precursor to his role in anticipating the scale of COVID’s spread and informing the resulting government policy of enforced social distancing. The programme also made mention of Wales having hosted the first-ever online livestock auction in 2001 due to restrictions on animal transportation and on human travel between sites of animal storage – nodding to the centrality of video calls to economic activity during COVID.

The idea of a Welsh experience of, and a specifically Welsh state response to, foot-and-mouth, similarly gained salience from the political changes that occurred since 2001, including the strengthening of Welsh devolution in that time. The focus on Carwyn Jones’ role during the outbreak, for example, was retroactively encouraged in part by his later becoming the country’s long-serving First Minister. Moreover, the emphasis on a particular Welsh approach to the disease again had heightened resonance given the experience of COVID, when public heath’s status as a devolved issue meant the decisions taken by Jones’s successor, Mark Drakeford, and his government had had a far greater bearing on Welsh people’s day-to-day lives.

Humans, animals, death, emotions, and the life-cycle

While not depicting the animal killings themselves, the documentary captured the horror of the cull and its scale through juxtaposing (archival and contemporary) footage of apparently healthy farm animals with that of the bodies of the culled ones, or of conspicuously empty fields and barns. The section on Anne Morgan, for example, opened with her helping a ewe deliver a new lamb in the present day, before later explaining to camera ‘Each Spring, just the same as in 2001, is always a time of thinking what good things lie ahead. Because Spring is new life.’ She then recounted the horror of learning in Spring 2001 that the vaguely possible presence of foot-and-mouth on her farm required the slaughter of her entire stock. The documentary next incorporated a home video of her barn filled with dead animals, over which she had then narrated ‘This is the shed where they were born, roughly five weeks ago. This was our main lambing shed; now it’s just a morgue.’

At other times, the violence carried out against the animals took on an almost absurdist turn, in images of carcasses being disposed of using crude industrial methods, whether being shunted or loaded by farm machinery or tumbling from flaming pyres. This was also the case with Nigel Picken’s at times slightly detached recollection of his participation in the cull. He explained:

Money talks, doesn’t it? And the government threw money at it, and we were taking it…gimme gimme gimme, really. Nobody wants to do it, but somebody’s got to do it, so…it was the same with the killing of these beasts, really.

Yet there was also an understatedly caring side to his description of the work. Gary Holloway, the farmer whose animals he was exterminating, was a close acquaintance: ‘We were drinking buddies, yes. I grew up with Gary.’ Holloway himself remarked:

He did say, ‘I hope you don’t mind that I’m actually here doing it,’ and I said no, like I said, I’d rather see someone familiar on the farm who would actually keep an eye on things for you.

Picken described the work itself very matter-of-factly:

There was four of us there, and I didn’t want them to think I was shirking my responsibility, or you know…shying away from the work. So I was really getting stuck in, so they christened me the Grim Reaper [laughs]…which I wasn’t sure about at the time. Looking back, I could say why they done it, because it looked like I was enjoying it.

Yet this too was balanced with a more sincerely empathetic recollection: ‘I wanted to get it done for Gary so he wouldn’t have to witness his own stock being slaughtered.’ This was followed with a present-day shot of some cows, and a further bittersweet anecdote from Picken:

The very last cow to be slaughtered…he went into the corral, and the marksman stood in front of him, with a shotgun, like this [mimes aiming a shotgun], and the cow turned to the right, so we walk round to face him again [again mimes aiming shotgun], lifted up his rifle, and the cow turned to the right…and he had to chase the cow about four times before he…before he managed to shoot it. [laughing slightly] It was almost as if the cow knew what was going on [looks away wistfully].

In the main though, The Killing Fields in Wales was more dedicated to exploring human rather than animal suffering. The interviews with middle-aged, mostly male farmers, interspersed with home videos of their younger selves (which in some cases they were themselves watching back), evoked a stoic rural masculinity. The documentary’s overarching metanarrative was that then they had then been ill-equipped to express the suffering they were going through, but now they were facilitated in hesitatingly communicating that trauma, at times seemingly choking back more openly emotional responses. This was nonetheless also presented in a way very much in keeping with the melodramatic conventions of historical documentary in the age of reality television.1 The occasional usage of their testimony non-digetically while they were themselves shown not speaking likewise stood as metaphor for the challenge of verbalising what they went through.

In this way, the programme broadly characterised foot-and-mouth disease’s principal victims as the farmers individually and collectively, and by extension the rural communities they inhabited. Rarely did it tease out or challenge this anthropocentrism, although there was some implicit contrast between the farmers’ slightly different perspectives of events. Anne Morgan said of the slaughter of her own stock:

I felt I had a duty to my animals to stay there. You couldn’t just distance yourself from it. You heard it, you felt it, you saw it.

Sheep are killed. We can’t get away from that…but they’re never killed in such an environment. They just caught it, killed it, and threw it on the floor.

Similarly, Richard Rogers’ farmhand at the time, Sean Roberts, recalled that ‘Me and Rick had the- the worst job of all. We had to catch the little…young, pretty, white fluffy lambs…introduce them to [vet] Meurig [Evans], so he could get at the heart.’ Evans continued, ‘He was passing them to me and holding them up for me to inject, you know. It’s abhorrent to kill a young animal like that.’

Gary Holloway, by contrast, accepted an invitation for he and his family to visit a friend while the cull was carried out on his farm, ‘so we didn’t have to hear’ – though he afterwards recalled feeling compelled to watch ‘me animals’ burning on the pyre erected for the purpose. Later in the programme, he concluded:

People think foot-and-mouth was something that happened to the animals. Actually, it was about the human beings, and how it affected them. At the time, it was, ‘Oh it don’t matter. They’ll get over it.’ Not yet we haven’t.

Generally, human and animal life on the farm were subtly conveyed as in harmonious hierarchy, the reproduction of animals underpinning the equally organic reproduction of a way of life, both within one’s own life-course and between generations. As Anne Morgan said of her own animals:

I’d inherited the flock from my father, and grandfather; they were sheep that were born at [the Anglesey village of] Penmynydd, and it was years of our own breed, cos we never bought in other sheep.

The foot-and-mouth outbreak and ensuing cull instead disrupted this order of things. The documentary introduced Richard Rogers as both a recent college graduate who had just taken over the family farm in 2001, when ‘I was on a steep learning curve in terms of my career…I was young and enthusiastic’, and as a middle-aged farmer in 2021, reflecting upon that period with greater maturity and wisdom, but also a sense of black irony in knowing what came next. Gary Holloway’s son Tom, eight years old at the time of the outbreak, ruminated twenty years later:

When you’re that age growing up, pretty much the whole farm is kind of your own, sort of, like…miniature petting zoo. Growing up on a farm was really quite an idyllic childhood. When foot-and-mouth hit the farm, it was sort of a…brutal and very quick sort of pivot in my, sort of…day-to-day life.

He soon afterwards teared up at the memory of seeing the pyre burning upon returning home once the cull was finished. This was followed by a harrowing reminiscence by Picken about the pyre, that ‘a lot of the beasts were in calf, and the heat just…well the, you know, you could see the young calves being…dropping out.’ The interweaving of these accounts implied that for a young child to experience such an ordeal, and for a cow to die with her unborn calves at the point she was supposed to be bringing them into the world, were equally unnatural. Gary Holloway recalled trying to protect his son from the full scale of what was taking place; this was followed by footage of him in 2001 answering a question about whether he would like Tom to become a farmer, to which he replied, ‘No. Certainly going to steer him away from it…not after what we’ve been through.’

Present throughout these recollections was the notion that farming as labour, farms as businesses, were about something more than crude economics; they involved a worth that could not be realised through transaction, achieved only through the passing of time, and through inheritance. This was the system of meaning the cull intruded upon. The narrator explained:

As the number of animals being killed rose, so did the cost of compensation offered to farmers. Every animal’s value was calculated…but no amount of money could make up for the loss of animals farmed on that land for generations.

The politics of place, and the place of the state

The Killing Fields of Wales portrayed the foot-and-mouth outbreaks through geographies of proximity and seclusion, whose norms fully manifested only through their surprise interruption. It depicted an almost creeping integration and intensification of flows of farm animals and animal products as the prelude to the events of 2001: the frequent sale of livestock from one part of the UK in other parts of the country; their eventual conversion into food at abattoirs a long way from points of origin; and the ensuing importance of selling that food in international markets such as those of the EU, in adherence with accompanying food standards.

Yet the documentary therefore illustrated that when foot-and-mouth broke out, the speed and breadth of its spread was seemingly almost beyond the capacity of humans to anticipate and intervene. As Gareth Wynn Jones, a hill farmer from North Wales, explained: ‘I didn’t worry about foot-and-mouth because it was a long way away from us. You thought, well, this might not affect us. They’ll get it under control quickly.’ The epidemic disabused farmers of this sense of safety through distance, just as it brought those processes of circulation to a sudden halt. Now the presence of a highly contagious virus meant farms were almost always too close to the trajectory of the disease, and to each other.

Having conveyed the implication that modern industrial farming methods and their scales of operation had exceeded human comprehension, and that foot-and-mouth was a kind of reckoning for that, the documentary also captured a sense that the resulting forced isolation of farmers was an equally unnatural state of affairs. Gary Holloway, for example, described he and his family being unable to leave their farm while there was the risk of the disease spreading to their animals as ‘surreal’. Again, this was a story with obvious parallels with COVID, from its suspected zoonotic roots amid questionable safety standards to the sudden heavy constriction of all movement. Foot-and-mouth also involved an isolation that was not only physical but societal, in the way farmers’ and rural communities’ experience of it and the harsh conditions it imposed were only ever partly if at all visible to everyone else, help fuelling the feelings of repression and resentment many of the interviewees expressed in 2021.

The documentary did, however, construct a Welsh community of experience through its depiction of farmers identified as from different parts of the country, with distinctive regional accents, and a nod to bilingualism in a home video of Richard Rogers speaking in Welsh. The notion of a specific Welsh experience of a virus originating in Northumberland via Essex and of a cull ordered by the Westminster government might seem apt for a Wales-versus-England opposition. Yet The Killing Fields in Wales swiftly steered away from that framing about a third of the way in, at which point the narrator noted that ‘it wasn’t just decisions in London impacting upon Welsh farmers’, for ‘In 2001, there was a new devolved Welsh government, with some control over Welsh affairs.’

A different antagonism was therefore set up, between Welsh farmers on the one hand, and the Welsh government on the other. The documentary’s narration emphasised the experiential, social, and geographic divide between the two. The then newly appointed Welsh Minister for Rural Affairs Carwyn Jones was ‘an inexperienced former barrister with no background in farming’, managing ‘the day-to-day crisis’ with ‘an army of civil servants based in Cardiff’. Jones himself remarked during his interview:

Let’s remember that not three-and-a-half years beforehand there’d been a vote in a referendum where almost half the people of Wales had decided they didn’t want devolution at all. Anything we did, people expected us to fail.

Politicians’ lack of legitimacy, whether they were located in England or Wales, with people in the Welsh countryside was a continuing thread that reached its apotheosis with Jones’s advocacy of mass burial of culled animals in the Epynt. The memory of this decision and the fierce opposition to it was placed in the context of remembrance of an earlier local injustice, the 1939 Epynt clearances, when with war looming in Europe, the War Office forcibly removed over 50 local farms from their land, which it requisitioned for the purpose of establishing the new Sennybridge Training Area in their stead. Local MP Kirsty Williams recalled trying to persuade a seemingly blasé Jones about the inadvisability of his plan, explaining (against a visual backdrop of black and white photographs of local farmers taken at that earlier time):

There are people who live in this community whose families were dispossessed of their land…who had farmed on the Epynt, and the state had come along and cleared them off. Of all the places, where a government could come again, and try and impose on a community…those shadows of what had happened on the Epynt in the past I think certainly had a psychological bearing for some of the community.

The ensuing protests, at which Jones was confronted and criticised, possessed a carnivalesque quality, with participants dressed in hazmat suits, and carrying props such as a coffin bearing the epitaph ‘RIP Epynt’, and placards bearing mocking statements such as ‘EPYNT SPRING WATER AVAILABLE SOON WITH ROAST LAMB FLAVOUR’. These practices mirrored the dark absurdity of the cull and animal disposal themselves.

Despite, or perhaps because, of his extensive presence both as an interviewee and in archive news film, Jones rather came across increasingly as the documentary’s villain. His own soundbites, such as ‘I do remember thinking, if you get this wrong, you’re finished, and you’re thirty-three’, or ‘You know if you make friends in politics, you’re not doing the job properly’ chimed with its presentation of him as ruthless, career-focused, and slippery, a specifically Welsh avatar for New Labour’s approach to government. Moreover, it presented a recurring theme of presenting Jones then making public claims of being in control that he disavowed in his present-day interview, or as to the safety and efficacy of his carcass disposal plan that local common sense rejected and seemed subsequently vindicated in doing so.

Yet while implicitly disenchanted with politicians, whose past statements and actions swiftly betrayed the absence of the conviction and comprehension they affected, the documentary portrayed other forms of professional expertise involved in combating foot-and-mouth far more positively. As arbitrary as the culling policy seemed to the farmers interviewed, and as horrific as the accounts and images it produced were, The Killing Fields in Wales did not disavow precisely the type of abstracting epidemiological modelling practiced by Neil Ferguson which had underpinned it, presenting this rather as leading-edge scientific work. It was also sympathetic to veterinarians making difficult choices on the ground, as with Meurig Evans, whose decision to order the cull of farm animals across a large swathe of Anglesey Richard Rogers recalled equanimously and congenially, and whose own interview emphasised the gravitas and solemnity of his response to the situation.

Therefore, while Anne Morgan remarked at the documentary’s finale that ‘I will distrust the whole system till the end of my days’, the programme itself did not embrace such indiscriminate scepticism. Slightly beforehand, Carwyn Jones told his interviewer:

Epynt was absolutely key, unpleasant as it was for everybody, that’s what got rid of the disease. If we’d let it run through the countryside, we wouldn’t have farmers. They’d have been wiped out.

Against the images of burning animal pyres, the narration endorsed this idea that the decisions taken had been brutal but necessary, claiming: ‘The industrial scale destruction of over 60,000 culled livestock brought foot-and-mouth under control, and was a turning point in the epidemic.’ Coming in the wake of COVID, The Killing Fields in Wales’s conclusion seemed to be that the errors and dishonesties of the political class, particularly in a crisis, were near inevitable. Yet the intrusive power of the state when guided by medical knowledge had to be given the prerogative regardless, even to the point of infringing upon private enterprise and personal freedoms and inflicting unpleasant psychological side effects. In an age of ill-advised resistance to public health measures such as lockdowns, protective wear, and vaccines, a loosely directed, knee-jerk, wholesale antiestablishmentarian cynicism when faced with a disease like foot-and-mouth may have seemed an ultimately unaffordable indulgence.

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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Postman Pat: Special Delivery Service was first screened on CBeebies for three series in 2008, 2013, and 2016–17, with each series comprising 26 episodes of around 15 minutes in running length. It is the most recent televisual instalment at present of a programme whose very first series was first shown on BBC One in 1981. Written by John Cunliffe and directed by Ivor Wood, the original Postman Pat was a stop-motion animated programme about its eponymous postman Pat Clifton doing his rounds, accompanied by his cat Jess, in the fictional village of Greendale, which Cunliffe had based upon his own experiences of living in rural Cumbria. Postman Pat had been periodically updated with new characters and expanded settings during the 1990s and 2000s, without Cunliffe’s involvement.

In these newer iterations, original characters such as postmistress Mrs Goggins, farmers Alf and Dorothy Thompson, vicar the Reverend Timms, doctor Sarah Gilbertson and handyman Ted Glen, as well as schoolchildren Sarah Gilbertson, Charlie Pringle, Lucy Selby, and Bill Thompson, were appended with new additions: Pat’s wife Sara and son Julian, teacher Jeff Pringle, the retired Major Forbes, and police officer Arthur Selby in the second series, which broadcast in 1997; and then from the third series, screened in 2004, train driver Ajay and café owner Meera Bains, and their children Nikhil and Nisha, with veterinarian Amy Wrigglesworth joining from series five in 2007. The mid-2000s series also saw older characters such as the elderly Granny Dryden, verger Rebecca Hubbard, farmers Peter Fogg and George Lancaster, and mobile shop owner Sam Waldron, as well as Major Forbes, all being written out of the programme. Orchard farmer Julia Pottage and her twin children Katy and Tom, and teacher Jeff Pringle, would also not feature again after series five.

In Postman Pat: Special Delivery Service, Pat still lives with Sara and Julian in Greendale, but he now works for the Special Delivery Service, whose local centre is in the nearby town of Pencaster. The centre is run by a new character, Ben Taylor; his wife Lauren has taken over as Greendale’s teacher, and their daughter Lizzy attends the school with the other children. Other new characters are mobile shop operator Michael Lam, and from the third series, lighthouse keeper Chris Beacon.

Virtually every episode begins with Ben ringing Pat and instructing him to come to the mail centre to undertake a highly distinctive delivery on behalf of one of the other regular characters. His trademark red van has now been supplemented with a range of other specialist vehicles, including a larger van, a helicopter, a jeep, and a motorcycle with side-cart, to match the broader range of deliveries he is charged with. The formulaic plots usually surround an unforeseen event holding Pat up, and threatening to stop the delivery occurring on time. However, a combination of his own problem-solving ability and help from his friends always enables Pat to complete the task satisfactorily, each episode concluding with Pat signing off by stating, with both thumbs up, ‘Special Delivery Service: Mission accomplished!’

SDS and the transformation of the postal sector

There was notable thematic shifts between the first and second series of Postman Pat alone, the latter coming as it did a decade and a half after the former, and without Cunliffe’s involvement. Simultaneously, there has been a stylistic continuity, with Cosgrave Hall – the long-established animation studio that BBC has commissioned to make Postman Pat since the 2000s – retaining the likenesses of Wood’s characters and usage of stop-motion.

Yet what is particularly striking about the Special Delivery Service series, compared to their predecessors, and especially that very first iconic series, is the difference in Pat’s work. Those earliest episodes focused entirely on their main character at work, wholly separate from his off-screen personal life (hinted at by references to ‘the wife’), albeit in a role that embeds him within his rural community and involves extensive sociable interaction. That work itself is depicted as socially valuable, given the importance of the letters and parcels he delivers to their recipients, but utterly routine in nature, occasional (usually weather-related) mishaps aside.

Special Delivery Service, by contrast, reflected two major shifts that had occurred since the outset of the twenty-first century. Under New Labour (and subsequently the Coalition government), Britain’s postal services underwent a process of incremental privatisation and marketisation, including the differentiation of the ‘Royal Mail’ brand from the ‘Post Office’ one, and then the end of its monopoly on postal deliveries. SDS likewise functions as a distinguishing occupational identity for Pat, connecting him to the Pencaster mail centre, and involving far less interaction with Mrs Goggins and Greendale’s own Post Office. Secondly, with the rising advent of the internet, the volume of letters being handled by the postal services declined, in contrast to the increasing delivery of goods being ordered online, as highlighted in a 2008 government-commissioned review of the sector. Pat’s shift to standalone deliveries of big-ticket items with particular rationales behind them likewise reflected this change.

Keeping on time

Timeliness is another major theme of this work. Most episodes begin with Pat at home with Sara and Julian when Ben contacts him on his mobile phone, their interactions typically a variation or not on: ‘I’ve got an unusual one for you today, Pat; how soon can you get here?’; ‘We’re on our way!’. Pat is then tracked during his delivery by Ben back at the postal centre. Occasionally this focus on being on time is commented on, slightly tongue-in-cheek. In ‘Pat’s Special Delivery: A Super Magnet’, for example, Ben commends Pat for getting to the centre in thirty seconds’ less time than the day before. The possibility of Pat being constantly on-call potentially conflicting with his personal life is far less frequently commented on, save with the notable exception of ‘Postman Pat and the Seaside Special’, where a sudden call interrupts Pat’s planned family outing:

BEN: I’ve got an urgent delivery.
PAT: Oh, but I’m just off to the seaside.
BEN: I know, I’m really sorry, Pat; I’d do it myself but we’re really…busy.
PAT: Don’t worry, Ben, I’m on my way.

Subsequently he has to reassure Julian that he will be at the station on time to make the trip. And indeed this anxiety over whether Pat will indeed be on time, except for his deliveries, with disappointment looming for other named characters if he is not, is the dominant emotional underpinning of his adventures, albeit with reassurance through repetition that he will overcome whatever obstacles have inevitably beset him and get there just in time, to the gratification of the intended recipient(s) of his delivery.

Difficult deliveries and agile work

The deliveries always threatening to go wrong is an outcome in many ways of their diversity, the un-routine nature of his work (the routinisation comes instead through the standardised narrative structure). Sometimes Pat is charged with delivering animals, such as a cow or a beehive to the Thompsons’ farm, or fruit bats or duck eggs to Amy. At other times it is advanced, often improbable, technology, such as robots, a super magnet, a disco machine, a solar-powered karaoke machine, and a weather machine. With both of these types of delivery, there is a high propensity for chaos, arising from the animals’ own independence of mind, or the machinery’s capacity for malfunctioning.

Such high-hazard transportation work in real life requires different forms of specialisation. Pat, however, brings a resilience and ingenuity to the role that enables him to correct setbacks, including ones resulting from his own carelessness, and make his deliveries after all. He does so with the aid of a broad range of available vehicles that augment his capacity to do this breadth of work, though this too often still requires him to make adaptations to them or overcome their own breakdowns.

The point is that Pat is an agile worker – sometimes quite literally performing somersaults and stunts in his efforts to get his deliveries through. In the episode ‘Pat’s Special Delivery: A Surprise’, Ben plans to award Pat with the ‘SDS gold star’, explaining ‘Pat’s the best of the best…he’s never been late with a delivery’. When Ben and Pat’s other friends attempt, however, to keep Pat occupied while they organise a surprise party at which to award him the star, the postman predictably overcomes whatever delays they arrange. Though still a decidedly communal figure, Pat is not an ordinary employee, nor a standard representative of public service, as had been the case in those early 1980s episodes. He is, rather, a remarkably resourceful and adaptive embodiment of a world of work in which punctuality in the face of unpredictability, aided by technological solutions rather than professional specialisation, is the guarantor of societal good.

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Katie Morag ran for two seasons on CBeebies and CBBC between 2013 and 2015, being adapted from Scottish author Mairi Hedderwick’s series of children’s books published between 1984 and 2007. The programme centres on its eponymous child hero, Katie Morag McColl (Cherry Campbell), who lives on the fictional Hebridean island of Struay. Her parents Isobel (Gail Watson) and Peter (Kenneth Harvey) run the local Post Office and shop, while her maternal grandmother ‘Grannie Island’ (Annie Louise Ross) has a nearby farm, and her paternal grandmother ‘Granma Mainland’ (Barbara Rafferty) is a regular visitor. The show also includes an eclectic and eccentric wider cast of recurring characters, including amiable but hapless family friend and odd jobber Neilly Beag (Angus Peter Campbell) and well-meaning gossip Jeannie Baxter (Anna Hepburn).

The episodes are mostly self-contained, featuring voiceover narrative from Katie Morag herself, offering a child’s eye view of island life. Her own adventures intertwine with those of her adult relatives and other members of the local community, whom she well-meaningly, though frequently haphazardly, tries to help. They generally conclude with Katie Morag reflecting on the lessons of the episode, before she flashes a light out across the island to Grannie Island’s croft to say goodnight (her grandmother flashing a light back). There are also a subset of episodes in the first series titled ‘Grannie Island’s Ceilidh’, in which she attends social gatherings hosted by her grandmother featuring music and dancing, before one of the grown-ups tells a story about an episode from Struay’s past (their narrative accompanying still illustrations in Hedderwick’s own watercolour style).

There are though broader story arcs that carry across the episodes, including Isobel McColl’s pregnancy and the arrival of Katie Morag’s and younger brother Liam’s new baby sister, Flora Anne, and the budding romance between Granma Mainland and Neilly Beag, with the first series culminating with their wedding. Whereas the stories in the first series were a standard fifteen minutes in running time, those in the second were more varied in length, with some specifically made for screening on CBBC rather than CBeebies, because of their more mature themes. The second series finale has the McColls facing the prospect of having to leave Struay for Glasgow, which Katie Morag cunningly intervenes to prevent.

Island life and community

Each episode begins with Katie Morag telling the viewers, ‘I suppose [Struay’s] quite wee, but it’s ginormous to me!’, in a voiceover accompanied by a map of the fictional island – and this scalar paradox is integral to the way island life is depicted. On the one hand, Struay clearly is small. A limited number of inhabitants regularly feature who embody its tight-knit community, associated with particular (often occupational) roles. Katie Morag can roam the island freely without parental supervision because of the relative proximity of places like Grannie Island’s farm, but also the familiarity of all of the island’s adults, ‘who look out for me when I’m having my adventures’. However, the viewer also gets a strong sense of the space and possibilities that Struay’s rural landscape – mostly filmed on the real Hebridean island of Lewis – holds for a young child as she explores it.

Struay’s Gaelicness, and thereby its distinctiveness even from Scotland as a whole, is also heavily emphasised throughout the series. This includes its soundtrack by Donald Shaw, as well as events like Grannie Island’s ceilidhs, the island show in ‘Katie Morag and the Two Grandmothers’, or the shinty match against neighbouring Coll (the real island Hedderwick based Struay on) in ‘Katie Morag and the Big Shinty Match’. Characters also frequently use Gaelic words, with Katie Morag often translating these phrases for the show’s young viewers in ways that help render them culturally relatable, explaining for example that ‘Grannie Island doesn’t call them parties; she calls them ceilidhs’, or that a shinty stick is called a ‘caman’ (and a ball is called ‘a ball’).

The programme also highlights differences between island and mainland life. The contrast is embodied in the characters of Grannie Island and Granma Mainland: the former is decidedly unpretentious and plain speaking, with a matching appearance of cropped hair, dungarees and wellies; the latter is glamourous, with a penchant for jewellery and beauty products. However, the difference in personalities does not amount to much by the way of tension between them, and Grandma Mainland after all soon settles in Struay with Neilly Beag. Yet while mainlanders are generally depicted as welcome on he island, we also get a sense of the tensions arising from its popularity with tourists, as when Mrs Baxter complains about one party of visitors buying all the bananas in the McColls’ shop in ‘Katie Morag and the Big Picture’:

A whole box of bananas? How many are they planning to eat? It’ll be one of those fancy mainland diets, no doubt. As if they couldn’t have brought their own bananas from one of those ‘super shops’ on the mainland. Oh, I’ll be glad when summer’s over!

Ritual, tradition, and modernity

Routine and history are integral to this vision of life. The major local events are recurring in nature, as with the annual shinty match with Coll, emphasised by Peter McColl reading through a scrapbook detailing previous encounters. Characters often refer back to events from a century or more ago as possessing contemporary relevance, particularly in the stories told at the ceilidhs. Objects too are often vested with a significance arising from their being passed down between generations. In ‘Grannie Island’s Ceilidh – Stone Soup’, Isobel tells a story about a young man named Calum who had come to the island during a potato blight and pretending to make a stone using just a stone, convinced all the islanders to give what ingredients they had to garnish it, enabling him to make a large pot of soup that the whole island partook of. She reveals that the stone, which she is holding, was eventually inherited by Grannie Island, as Calum was her great-great-great-grandfather.1

Nonetheless, while the islanders are history-conscious and sometimes stuck in their ways, the programme’s position on social, cultural, and technological change is more nuanced. Continuity and modernity can sometimes appear in confrontation with each other – often embedded in the differences between island and mainland life – but thatthere is space for the latter if the former can also be accommodated. This is particularly the case for gender roles, with the programme’s most important character other than Katie Morag being Grannie Island, a far from conventionally feminine matriarchal figure constantly shown performing manual farm labour. Stories about Struay’s past also show women diverging from expected gender roles, such as in ‘Grannie Island’s Celidh – Hugh Handy’, which features a girl becoming a boat-builder’s apprentice, or Grannie Island telling Katie Morag about Mrs Baxter saving a boy from drowning when she was younger in ‘Katie Morag and the Struay Star’.

‘Katie Morag and the Brochan Bus’, meanwhile, explores the more challenging impacts of modernisation. The construction of a new pier has been welcomed by many in Struay, but has negatively impacted Neilly Beag, who formerly earned much of his income by bringing visitors ashore from the ferry in his rowing boat. Inspired by Katie Morag’s love of his traditional porridge (‘brochan’) he buys a trailer to sell it from, but initially struggles to attract customers because his insistence on making it in exactly the same way as has been made in his family for generations, meaning no variations in the recipe or additional seasoning except salt. However, Granma Mainland persuades him to see the value of being receptive to change and ‘the Brochan Bus’ becomes extremely popular, with Neilly Beag telling one customer that ‘we are at the cutting edge of porridge technology’. Katie Morag ruminates at the end:

Granma Mainland says people have been eating porridge in Struay for the last thousand years, and will be eating it for the next thousand, but sometimes you have to give the old ways a tweak just to keep them fresh…‘New ways and old ways,’ as Grannie Island says, ‘there’s plenty of room for them all.’

The Post Office, transport, and communication

Though not always foregrounded in individual episodes’ plots, the McColls’ Post Office and shop functions as an integral hub of island life, linking it in tandem with maritime travel services to the world beyond Struay. It is here that visitors and locals alike can receive letters and packages from the mainland and elsewhere, and buy their essentials. It is also therefore an important site of more informal communication, where customers and the McColls exchange important local information. Grannie Island’s friend ‘the Lady Author’, describes it as ‘the most important building on the island’ in the ‘Hugh Handy’ episode. This also makes it a pressure point too in the supply of goods and tourists from the mainland, evident in the very first episode, ‘Katy Morag Delivers the Mail’, in which Katie Morag tries unsuccessfully to help out her overworked parents amid the weekly arrival of a boatload of parcels, or in Mrs Baxter’s complaint (mentioned above) about them being out of bananas.

This comes fully to the fore in the half-hour long final episode, ‘Katie Morag and the Worst Day Ever’. The McColls face the prospect of having to give up their home and Post Office and leave Struay because the Cavendishes (Cal Macaninch and Shauna Macdonald), who own the premises but live in Edinburgh, want to stop renting it to them and move in themselves. When they arrive, Katie Morag deliberately takes Mrs Cavendish on a nightmarish tour of the island (in which she is bitten by midges, defecated on by seagulls, and finally falls into a bog). The close attention she and her husband receive from the well-meaning locals as a result prompts her to depart in disgust with Mr Cavendish in tow. The McColls can stay in Struay after all, to Katie Morag’s delight.

The Cavendishes are presented not merely as tourists but colonial settlers who intend to use their economic power to dispossess the locals. Mrs Cavendish has an especially patronising view of Struay, being primarily interested in its picturesque landscape and only able to see its residents and their customs as at best quaint. What particularly galls the McColls and others is her intention to convert the building into a gallery, illustrating her blasé view that local preferences are out of step with the digital age:

ISOBEL: What about the Post Office?
MRS CAVENDISH: Everybody uses email these days. And anyway, the island needs a gallery.
ISOBEL: It needs a shop.
MRS CAVENDISH: I’m sure we’ll sell little souvenirs and knick-knacks. Anyway, you can buy all your little essentials online. That’s what I do.

Despite Katie Morag’s best efforts to deter her from moving to Struay, Mrs Cavendish is ostensibly even more determined to stay, if only out of sheer dogged spite towards the child. The real breaking point, however, is the speed with which her disastrous day becomes local common knowledge and results in unsolicited assistance from her would-be neighbours. She derogatorily describes the island as a ‘goldfish bowl’ as she departs. After celebrating with her family and their friends, Katie Morag reflects:

And then I got to thinking about how strange people are. I showed Mrs Cavendish all the worst things about the island, but she still wanted to move here. Then she saw the best things: how people look out for each other, and always try to help, no matter who they are. I suppose it’s like Grannie Island says, ‘it takes all types to make the world’. I’m just glad Mrs Cavendish is the type who doesn’t like Struay, and I’m the type who absolutely loves it.

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Spoiler alert: This analysis of the novel The Maltese Falcon and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.

Content warning: Murder; Homophobia; Sexual assault.

In San Francisco, Sam Spade runs a private detective agency with his partner, Miles Archer, assisted by their dutiful secretary Effie Perrine. Spade dislikes Archer, and has secretly been conducting an affair with his wife, Iva. One day, a beautiful young woman by the name of Miss Wonderley arrives in their office, and asks them to investigate a man named Floyd Thursby, who she claims has run off with her younger sister. Archer is shot dead in the process of tailing Thursby, who is found dead later the same night. Spade is subsequently visited by Lieutenant Dundy, with whom Spade shares a deep mutual antipathy, and Sergeant Tom Polhouse, whom he is on much friendlier terms with. He is also the unwelcome and regretting object of Iva’s renewed attentions.

Spade visits Miss Wonderley, who reveals her real name to be Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and that her original story about Thursby and her sister was an invention; Thursby was a business associate of hers whom she had travelled over to San Francisco from Hong Kong, but then become wary of, and is fearful that his murder means she too is at risk. Spade is frustrated by her recalcitrance with information, but agrees to work for her, encouraged by Effie’s own instinctive liking for Brigid. He is then visited, and held up, at his office by the effeminate ‘Levantine’ Joel Cairo, who informs Spade that he is searching for a valuable statuette that he believes is in Brigid’s possession, and which he offers to pay Spade to help him reattain. Spade also subsequently finds himself being tailed across town by a mysterious young man.

Caught between his growing frustration with Brigid’s lack of transparency, and his growing sexual attraction towards her, Spade holds a meeting with her and Cairo, at which Brigid implies that a certain ‘G’ was responsible for Thursby’s killing. The meeting culminates in Brigid striking Cairo, just as Dundy and Polhouse have arrived to interrogate Spade further about the details of Archer’s and Thursby’s deaths. Spade manages to fend off the police, though not without goading Dundy into striking him; when they and Cairo have left, he and Brigid make love for the first time.

The following day, Spade confronts the young man tailing him, and also encounters Cairo, before asking Effie to put Brigid up with her and her mother for the time being to help keep her safe. He then receives a call at his office from the ‘G’ mentioned by Brigid, Sidney Gutman, whom he goes to visit – being let in by Wilmer, the young man who had been tailing him. The garrulous and outwardly charming Gutman tries to strike a deal with Spade to acquire the statuette, but his refusal to provide Spade with more details about it prompts the detective to leave angrily, warning Gutman that he will have to talk to him sooner or later. He returns to his office to learn from Effie that Brigid did not come to stay with her as instructed.

Spade is subsequently invited to again visit Gutman, who explains that the statuette was made in the sixteenth century from gold and jewels by the wealthy Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, as tribute to the King of Spain for granting them Malta as their fiefdom. However, the statuette was stolen by pirates and subsequently made its way around Europe, at some point being coated in black enamel to conceal its true value. It was rediscovered in 1911 by Greek antiques dealer Charilaos Konstantinides, from whom Gutman later extracted the truth about the falcon, but who was then murdered when the statuette was stolen from his shop in Constantinople. Gutman learned that the falcon was now in the hands of a Russian general, Kedimov, and sent two agents – Brigid and Cairo – to get hold of it, only for Brigid to subsequently disappear with the statuette.

Gutman again begins bartering with Spade for his assistance in retrieving the falcon, but the detective realises he has been drugged, and stumbles to the floor, receiving a kick to the head from Wilmer as he lays there. After awakening from the assault, Spade uncovers that Brigid had been awaiting the arrival of a boat from Hong Kong, La Paloma, which has gone up in flames shortly after arriving in San Francisco. Spade is also summoned to visit the District Attorney, who irritates him with his wild theories as to the reasons for Archer’s and Thursby’s murders. Back at his office, La Paloma’s captain, Jacobi, arrives and passes him a package, which turns out to be the falcon, before expiring from a series of shots through the chest he had received on the way there. Just then Effie receives a call from Brigid, who is at Gutman’s hotel, the Alexandria, and sounds like she is in trouble.

Spade deposits the statuette for safety and arrives at the Alexandria, where he finds Gutman’s daughter, Rhea, who has apparently been drugged. In her stupor, she provides him with an address in Burlingame where he can find Brigid, but when he travels there, it proves to be a false lead. He returns to his home in San Francisco to find Brigid waiting there for him, but upon their entering his apartment, Gutman, Cairo, and Wilmer are also there awaiting them, after having failed to locate the falcon themselves. Gutman offers to buy the falcon for an initial payment of $10,000, which Spade agrees to, but states that they will need a fall guy to take the rap for the murders, persuading Gutman and Cairo to hand the police Wilmer (despite Gutman’s stated fatherly fondness for the young gunman, and Cairo’s own attraction to him).

Spade sends for Effie Perrine, who brings them the falcon. However, when Gutman carves off some of the enamel, it turns out to be lead inside. Gutman and Cairo reckon that Kedimov has duped them, and they agree to return to Constantinople to seek out the real falcon there. In the commotion, they realise that Wilmer has escaped. Spade insists on retaining a thousand dollars from the original $10,000 Gutman had presented him with, to cover his trouble and expenses. Once they have left, he calls the police and sends them after Gutman and Cairo.

Spade then coerces Brigid into revealing the truth about how she had played him and the other men against each other in obtaining and keeping the falcon, including that it was she rather than Thursby who shot Archer. Despite her pleading with him that they are in love, which Spade acknowledges, he hands her over to Polhouse and Dundy, along with the forged statuette and the thousand-dollar bill, which he claims Gutman tried to bribe him with. They inform him that they have also arrested Cairo, but that Wilmer had killed Gutman before they got there. The following day, Spade returns to the office, to find Effie cold towards him for his treatment of Brigid. Iva arrives, and Spade glumly tells Effie to send her in.

A perilous moral and legal order

The 1920s San Francisco of The Maltese Falcon is one in which truth and meaning are frequently obscure. The narrative sticks persistently to Spade: we are not privy to events and encounters between other characters when he is not present, though occasional gaps mean he is sometimes privy to events we are not. But that narrative is also in the third person, in contrast to the stories and novels centred on author Dashiell Hammett’s principal literary creation until that point, the nameless Continental Op, who narrates his own adventures. There is no available interiority to Spade or any other character: we are never directly informed what they are thinking or feeling, save in adverbial form, when Hammett describes how they speak, act, or look.

This fragmentation of meaning is related to a mixed economy of detection, law, and enforcement. Spade, as a private detective, operates on behalf of private clients, and himself: it is in this capacity that he seeks to discern what has happened and determine what will, to use the threat and actuality of force. He maintains individual relationships with other professionals in the same or related fields, such as his partner Miles Archer, or Luke who works as the house detective for The Belvedere hotel at which Cairo is staying, or lawyer Sid Wise, collaboration rooted in business partnership, mutual interest, and provider-client exchange respectively, reliant on strategic discretion and divulgence.

There is also the presence of public law, of the agents of the state whose actions are rather geared towards the identification and punishment of criminals. Spade maintains the same types of transactional, sometimes friendly, sometimes adversarial relationships with them as he does with private professionals, and this individual level is indeed how we encounter police officers Dundy and Polhaus, contemptuous of and frustratedly sympathetic towards Spade respectively, or the ambitious and conceited District Attorney Bryan. And yet they also possess a superior, collective authority that Spade is compelled to acknowledge and negotiate, and ultimately pay fealty to.

There are also multiple external threats to Spade and his world, located in the American West but inextricably linked, as a port city, to the wider world. This commences with the identification of Thursby’s gun, which kills Miles, as a Webley, from England, and continues with the arrivals of characters and objects from Hong Kong and Constantinople. Outsiderdom is often associated with the implication of same-sex desire, in contrast to the masculine, philandering Spade: with the effeminate and almost explicitly gay Joel Cairo – to whom we are introduced with Effie Perrine’s observation that “This guy is queer” – or the New Yorker Wilmer, whose sexuality Spade frequently makes mocking insinuations about, but whose combination of that with violent threat unnerves him.1

Narrative and authority

In the context of this fragmented, perilous moral and legal order, truth is inherently subjective. Spade seems to grasp this more acutely than other characters. He is less concerned with the actual veracity of what he says or what others say, as if that could ever be meaningfully independently verified; rather, it is the capacity for any account of events to persuade others that they are true when it matters. Hearing second-hand from his lawyer Iva Archer’s alibi for the night of her husband’s death, Spade responds: “I think that’s an alright spread. It seems to click with most of the known facts. It ought to hold.”2 He is on occasion explicitly willing to lie to Brigid; equally, he routinely expresses his own disbelief of her claims, but usually without moral judgement.

Narrative, and the ability to weave one effectively, is an integral source of power for Spade, as is having access to information obscure to others with which to furnish it, and being able to discredit the narratives of others. After Spade learns from Cairo about the existence of the falcon, and Brigid dallies in telling him what she knows, he asserts:

But I don’t see what you’ve got to gain by covering up now. It’s coming out bit by bit anyhow. There’s a lot of it I don’t know, but there’s some of it I do, and some more that I can guess at, and, give me another day like this, I’ll soon be knowing things about it that you don’t know.3

Equally, he seems to lose his temper when Gutman refuses initially to reveal what he knows about the falcon, warning him: “I told that punk of yours that you’d have to talk to me before you got through. I’ll tell you now that you’ll do your talking today or you are through.”4 His ability to force others to tell him what they know, to overlay and adjust their accounts, is the source of his authority, as at the end when he extracts Brigid’s account from her, but corrects her claim that it was Thursby who killed Archer, rather than her.

Yet there are also limits to Spade’s narrative authority. He fiercely resents being incorporated into the speculative narratives of others, which would fix him as a perpetrator, as with Dundy’s allegations that he may have been behind Thursby’s or Archer’s deaths. He is equally scornful of DA Bryan’s theories and insinuations as to the reasons behind the murders, batting away the DA’s efforts to make him reveal details about the identity of his client and the reasons for their engaging him. Yet ultimately, despite his frustration at ‘being called things by every crackpot on the city payroll’, it is also there that the final power to determine what and is not true lies, however unconvincing or fabricated that truth might appear to him.5 As he explains exasperatedly to Gutman about the need for a fall-guy to take the rap for the murders, regardless of what actually happened:

At one time or another I’ve had to tell everybody from the Supreme Court down to go to hell, and I’ve got away with it. I got away with it because I never let myself forget that a day of reckoning was coming. I never forget that when the day of reckoning comes I want to be all set to march into headquarters pushing a victim in front of me, saying : ‘Here, you chumps, is your criminal.’ As long as I can do that I can put my thumb to my nose and wriggle my fingers at all the laws in the book.6

The meanings of money

In the context of private practice, in the absence of reliable truth, at the tail-end of an era of laissez-faire economic policy overseen by successive Republican presidents, money serves as an arbiter of which narratives might momentarily persuade, as to whom might be determined guilty or innocent. When Brigid reveals in her second meeting with Spade that the original explanation she had provided him and Archer with for requiring their services was a false one, the detective is neither surprised nor condemnatory:

“Oh, that,” Spade said lightly. “We didn’t exactly believe your story.”
“Then — ?” Perplexity was added to the misery and fright in her eyes.
“We believed your two hundred dollars.”
“You mean — ?” She seemed to not know what he meant.
“I mean that you paid us more than if you’d been telling the truth,” he explained blandly, “and enough more to make it all right.”7

This transactional approach to honesty and loyalty continues to govern Spade’s conduct. As he encounters firstly Cairo and then Gutman, each offers him potentially larger sums for his services in attaining the falcon, and the question of whether he is actually in the employ or acting as representative of Brigid O’Shaughnessy, or the others, or himself, is repeatedly brought to the fore. Yet those two men are equally unreliable potential employers: Cairo holds Spade up at gunpoint after initially offering him money to help retrieve the falcon, while Gutman drugs him – both believing they could potentially cut him out entirely.

Given this association of money with dishonesty, the unreliability of payment within transactional relationships ungoverned by morals, which might serve as metaphor for American capitalism on the eve of the Wall Street crash, the falcon itself promises something different. Made from intrinsically valuable gold and jewels, it seemingly embodies Old World wealth, physically tangible and forged from hierarchies of nobility and monarchy, in contrast with the apparently less tangible, more abstract New World currency of paper money and IOUs. Yet the very existence of the falcon motivates the pattern of double-crossing, and ultimately the statuette turns out to be a forgery, the fortune Gutman insists its possession guarantees, the future profits on its sale he seeks to entice Spade with, all prove illusory.

Spade is less openly enthused by the prospect of riches and yet money seems a more reliable motivator for his continued involvement in the affair, along with a detective’s natural curiosity for solving the puzzle of intertwined culprits he is presented with, than any legal, moral, or maybe even romantic imperative. Yet the final chapters render it clearer to the reader that monetary value is itself standing in for something else. After Gutman supplies him with a $10,000 down payment for the falcon, Spade seeks to retrospectively haggle over this amount, asserting “I ought to have twenty,” sceptical as he is of the promise of further future payments; however, when Gutman insists that is all he can provide at that moment, he accepts this without rancour.8

Then, when Gutman falsely claims that $1,000 has disappeared from the envelope, which Brigid had been minding, Spade orders her to disrobe in the bathroom to prove she did not take it, an act of violation that she unsuccessfully warns him will “be killing something” between them.9 However, he makes little ado over returning the envelope of money to Gutman after the falcon proves to be a fake, and even the $1,000 he had demanded as a token payment – perhaps symbolically significantly the same amount he had searched Brigid for – he turns over unprompted to the police as evidence after deciding to turn in Brigid. Money, we might conclude, matters to Spade only as a signifier of his own value as a man and professional, a marker of his superior wits.

The search for a code to live by

In the first half of the novel, Spade tells Brigid the story of a case he once worked on, in which a real estate agent from Tacoma, named Charles Flitcraft, had suddenly vanished several years previously, and Spade was employed by the man’s wife to investigate a reported sighting in Spokane. It was Flitcraft, now renamed Charles Pierce, remarried, and running a lucrative car business. It turned out that he had abandoned his existing, well-ordered life after nearly being hit by a falling beam as he walked past a construction site, his narrow survival of a chance accident opening his eyes to the complete randomness of the world around him. Yet in time Flitcraft simply drifted back towards a familiar routine, a similar line of business, a marriage to a woman not dissimilar to his first wife.

I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.10

The story is illustrative of Spade’s acceptance of the inherently arbitrary and chaotic nature of life, but also his belief in man’s – and it is very much man’s, given the seeming inability of both Mrs Flitcraft and Brigid to fully grasp the moral of the tale – capacity to find or impose a degree of order within it.

At the end, with his own liberty and perhaps life at risk, and Brigid pleading with him not to hand her to the police if he truly loves her, Spade tries to lay out his reasons for doing just that in a kind of balance sheet. He had to do something about the murder of his partner, regardless of what he thought of him. Letting people get away with killing detectives was bad for business for all detectives. As a detective it was his rationale to catch criminals. He could not be sure he would not be arrested, perhaps sentenced to death for murder, if he did not give her to the police as the culprit instead. He could not be sure even if they both got away with it that she would not turn him into the police, nor her kill him because of what he had on her. He did not like even the possibility that she had played him. He concludes:

All those on one side. Maybe some of them are unimportant. I won’t argue about that. But look at the number of them. Now on the other side we’ve got what? All we’ve got is the fact that maybe you love me and maybe I love you.11

When Brigid asks him if it would have made a difference if the falcon had been real and he’d received his payout, he protests “Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be”, but concedes, “Well, a lot of money would have been at least one more item on the other side of the scales.”12 This hedging of bets between and weighing up of different possible codes to live by, professional, moral, survivalist, chivalric, and economic, comprise a desperate grasp for autonomy and authority amid the possible meaningless of all of them. It pales in response to Brigid’s insistence that only one thing matters, whether he truly loves her, when he indeed does and he resents how it undermines his sense of control. “I won’t play sap for you,” he defies her; he will not fill the shoes of lesser, now dead men.13

Yet his foresaking of Brigid, and his evasion of the law, pointedly does not fully restore his control, does not revert his situation to a prior setting with which he is at ease. He is firstly shaken by Effie’s moral disapproval of his decision, regardless of his own rationalisation of it in terms he thinks will resonate with her, such as on account of Brigid killing Archer. The novel concludes with the coming to pass of his own version of the Flitcraft parable, in the return of Iva, marking his inability to overcome his circumstances and avoid his fate, because ultimately those are vaster than him and yet also the aggregated, unforeseen consequences of his own actions. He cannot escape the ramifications of his lustful womanising and ruthless betrayals; he would not play sap for Brigid, but cannot extricate himself from an earlier doomed romance.

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Spoiler alert: This analysis of the film Peggy Sue Got Married and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.

It is 1985, and Peggy Sue Kelcher-Bodell (Kathleen Turner) is nervously readying herself to attend her 25ᵗʰ high school reunion, in the company of daughter Beth (Helen Hunt), rather than husband Charlie Bodell (Nicolas Cage), a once aspiring musician turned appliance store owner. Peggy Sue had been with Charlie since high school, having fallen pregnant with Beth before graduation, but is now separated from and preparing to divorce him following his repeated infidelities. At the reunion, she reconnects with old schoolmates, including married couple Maddy (Joan Allen) and Arthur Nagle (Wil Shriner), Carol Heath (Catherine Hicks), Carol’s former boyfriend Walter Getz (Jim Carrey), and school nerd turned wealthy inventor Richard Norvik (Barry Miller). Richard is voted homecoming king and Peggy Sue queen, but the latter becomes disorientated when she sees Charlie arrive, and passes out.

When Peggy Sue awakens, she finds herself back at her old high school, but in 1960, her senior year, having apparently momentarily lost consciousness while giving blood. Unsure of what has happened, and whether she is dreaming or has perhaps died, she nonetheless pleasantly accepts her temporary return to adolescent life, particularly living once more in her childhood home, and spending time with her then substantially younger parents, Evelyn (Barbara Harris) and Jack Kelcher (Don Murray), and sister Nancy (Sophia Coppola). She also finds herself, more ambivalently, back in a relationship with Charlie: re-attracted once again to the budding teenage musician and romantic she fell in love with, but also wary of the disappointment of her subsequent marriage to him.

Trying to make sense of her apparent trip back in time, Peggy Sue seeks Richard’s advice, hoping his prodigious scientific intellect can help her resolve the predicament and travel forward to 1985. Meanwhile, frustrated after a still virgin Charlie nervously spurns her sexual advances, she instead seeks out and sleeps with classmate Michael Fitzsimmons (Kevin J. O’Connor), a brooding loner with literary aspirations on whom she had always secretly harboured a crush. When at a subsequent date at a bar, he tells her of his desire to take him with her to Utah so he can engage in a polygamous relationship, she declines. She then sees Charlie singing on-stage with an otherwise all-Black R ‘n’ B group, and is impressed; unfortunately for Charlie, a music agent there to see him perform is not, and declines to sign him.

Disappointed by this rejection, Charlie spurns Peggy Sue’s efforts to reconcile the following day, and she herself then turns down a marriage proposal from Richard. She instead travels on her 18ᵗʰ birthday to visit her beloved – and, in 1985, long-deceased – grandparents, Elizabeth (Maureen O’Sullivan) and Barney Alvorg (Leon Ames). She confides to them her story of having travelled back in time; Elizabeth being a psychic, they believe her. Barney takes Peggy Sue with him to a meeting at his secretive lodge, where the members perform a ritual designed to send her back to the future. However, she is surreptitiously smuggled out of there by Charlie, desperate to make amends. He presents her with a locket, which 25 years on she will wear with pictures of their two children inside. Against the backdrop of a storm, they make love, which would result, as it originally did, in her pregnancy with Beth.

Peggy Sue subsequently wakes up in 1985 once more, in hospital, where she is informed that she had collapsed at the reunion with a heart arrhythmia and been fortunate to survive. Charlie, remorseful of his philandering, has been at her bedside the whole time. Nonetheless, Charlie’s anecdotal mention of a volume of writing by Michael Fitzsimmons, coyly dedicated to her and their night of passion, suggests her journey back to 1960 truly had happened. Peggy Sue’s own affections for Charlie likewise revived, she invites him round to dinner.

Reunion and midlife crisis

For participants, high school reunions usually involve forms of self-presentation that straddle the line between an attempted authentic performance of one’s adult identity and yet also conformity to one’s former classmates’ expectations of what they would be like as adults, based on their recollection of them as teenagers.1 We might see it, with a nod to Victor Turner, as a liminal ritual in which present-day socioeconomic positions are partly suspended and the roles of teenagers temporarily partly re-adopted, the vestiges of the past revived, fostering a sense of generationally-based communitas.2 At the same time, however, that ritual brings with it the ghosts of old hierarchies and cliques, mingling and interacting uneasily with, unable to more than temporarily upend, contemporary social and economic ones.

Peggy Sue, having married her high school sweetheart, is assumed by her old classmates to have fulfilled their expectations of whom she would become, and has to repeatedly disrupt those assumptions by telling people who ask after Charlie that they are getting divorced, with a mixture of embarrassment and dismay. Richard, meanwhile, is of a recognised higher socioeconomic status than his fellow alumni, and yet is also compelled to engage in the pretence of camaraderie with those insincerely respectful former peers who once bullied him for the very qualities that brought about his adulthood success – an illusion momentarily disrupted by one former classmate berating him for inventing the machine that put him out of business. Their elections as homecoming queen and king encapsulate their paradoxical positions.

For Peggy Sue, and for Charlie, the reunion comes at a point of heavily gendered midlife crisis. The former has built a life around a relationship that has now seemingly fallen apart. The disappointment in her life is presented less as with the institution of marriage itself, or indeed anything beyond it, so much as with whom she married, and inasmuch has Peggy Sue has additional regrets it would appear to be not pursuing alternative romantic opportunities. For Charlie, he has had to give up his ambition of a music career to provide for his wife and children, instead settling for inheriting his father’s business, and with it his womanising. He seeks solace from the loss of his adolescence, and his adolescent dreams, by pursuing younger women.

Replaying the past, reliving adolescence

Peggy Sue’s return to 1960, experienced in 1985 perhaps symbolically as arrhythmia – a disruption of ordinary temporal patterns – is a fuller realisation of the school reunion’s ritual re-enactments, a genuine displacement of the present for immersion in the past, to engage her fully adult mind in a role-playing activity only she is conscious of. Trying to make sense of her situation, Richard explains to her his ‘burrito’ theory of time: that time may indeed form a wrap, the present reaching around to touch the past, and that people choose what is contained within.

Peggy Sue’s time burrito does indeed contain a combination of ingredients. In a manner she had been unable to at the reunion, too weighed down by the intrusive realities of life-as-is, back in 1960 she relishes playing at life-as-was, engaging nostalgically in teenage activities, socialising with her old girlfriends, spending time with her family as they were, affectionately and knowingly. She pursues opportunities she had not previously taken, most notably her sexual encounter with Michael.

She also seeks, though not wholeheartedly, to avoid remaking the mistakes she believes herself to have had made, to not fall for and marry Charlie again. And yet as Peggy Sue relives her adolescence, so she sees a side to him she previously had not, or had at least forgotten. She finds herself semi-reluctantly falling back into the very course of action she had forsworn, triggering her return to the present, but now having re-evaluated her husband and their life together, and likely to reconcile with him.

Underpinning this combination of circularity and fatalism is an absence of genuine intergenerational conflict. The dizzy spell Peggy Sue is believed by the school nurse and her friends to have suffered when she wakes up in 1960 is an apt metaphor for the uncertain world of teenage life she finds herself back in, with its precocious but enormous emotions, the weight and drama attached to its various rites and routines. Yet the adults in her life respond to this with a combination of gentle concern and sympathetic indulgence. Generation connects rather than divides people across time in Peggy Sue Got Married, most fully realised as Peggy Sue both basks in the company of her long-departed grandparents, while also looking forward to being reunited with her daughter, whom she had named after her grandmother.

Reimagining 1960

The world Peggy Sue revisits is largely one of contented conformity, a suburban America of the 1950s, even if the choice of 1960 as a year hints at its significance as a hinge point in both her and American life. It is an almost entirely white, middle-class world, marked by conventional gender roles and relationships, depicted humorously. Evelyn Kelcher contemplates voting Democrat but does not disclose this to her husband, and has to be encouraged by Peggy Sue to sit and eat breakfast with the rest of the family instead of standing around waiting on them. Barney Alvorg tells his granddaughter, ‘It’s your grandma’s strudel that’s kept this family together’. The film’s adolescent characters mostly aspire to a version of this, Maddy revealing at one point that she envisions Peggy Sue, Carol, and herself married to their high school boyfriends, living in close proximity to one another, having regular barbecues.

The teenage popular culture they engage within is likewise period- and age-specific but hardly distinctive nor challenging in character and ethos. The music of the era is ubiquitous, including in the Buddy Holly song which gave the film its title and plays over the opening credits, and in Charlie’s doo-wop affectations, styling himself after Dion DeMucci (and his vocal group with his friends after the Belmonts). Yet it is also music that, while pregnant with adolescent emotion, lacks any air of danger or rebellion; the only hint otherwise being Charlie’s subsequent performing on stage with a Black backing group, which helps stimulate Peggy Sue’s reappraisal of him.

Michael Fitzsimmons is the only exception to this. Whereas Charlie and his friends watch sitcom The Honeymooners, drink beer, and drive cars, Michael reads Jack Kerouac, smokes marijuana, and rides a motorcycle – earning his denunciation by Peggy Sue’s nemesis, Terry (Glenn Withrow), as a ‘beatnik commie’. This transgressive quality is partly what attracts Peggy Sue to him, and yet his vision of a life different from that of their parents – living with Peggy Sue and another wife, their working on a farm to support him while he writes – is nonetheless strikingly conventional in its underpinning expectations of male sexual gratification and unseen female labour.

This conventional nostalgia for a decidedly pre-sixties America, one that existed before the Kennedy presidency, hippiedom, sexual revolution, civil rights movement and protest, was a common feature of representations in popular culture and politics by the time Reagan was in the White House, and increasingly recognised as right-coded.3 In Peggy Sue Got Married, it is a world that seems comfortingly close at hand from the perspective of the 1980s, in keeping with the time-as-burrito theory, and the intergenerational ties that bind characters together across overlapping lifespans.

Peggy Sue’s impending divorce from Charlie seems a likely rupture from this, at a point when the divorce rate in America had reached a new peak, in contrast with the post-war low of a quarter-century earlier. Yet back in 1985, she is able to reapply, in the film’s very last line, the wisdom of companionate domesticity embodied by her grandmother: ‘Charlie, I would like to invite you to dinner at home, on Sunday, with your kids. I will make a strudel.’

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Content warning: Slavery; Ethnic cleansing of indigenous Americans; Violence against children.

Spoiler alert: This analysis of the film The Devil and Daniel Webster and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.

The Devil and Daniel Webster commences in the small New Hampshire town of Cross Corners in 1840. Jabez Stone (James Craig) is a simple and plain-speaking young farmer, who lives with his adoring wife Mary (Anne Shirley) and God-fearing widow mother (Jane Darwell). He and several other local farmers are badly in debt to moneylender Miser Stevens (John Qualen). They put their hope in the (real-life nineteenth-century politician) Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster (Edward Arnold), a champion of the poor farmers’ cause, and a longstanding friend of Mary’s family. Jabez is also approached by the other farmers about joining them in forming a grange, a fraternal organisation to protect themselves against exploitation.

However, a series of misfortunes prompts Jabez to declare his willingness to sell his soul to the devil for financial gain. Immediately, Mr Scratch (Walter Huston) appears and introduces himself to Jabez, explaining that he can promise him seven years of good fortune in exchange for his soul. Jabez signs the contract, and Scratch burns the date ‘7 April 1847’, when he will come to collect his debt, into a nearby tree. He reveals to Jabez that there is a hoard of gold coins, formerly belonging to Hessian soldiers, buried beneath his barn.

Jabez initially puts his newfound riches to good cause, paying off his debt to Stevens, and acquiring new equipment for his own farm, and grain for his farmer friends. When Webster comes to Cross Corners, himself dogged by Scratch’s efforts to tempt and mislead him, Jabez gives a rousing speech on his behalf. Mary later becomes pregnant, and Jabez, mindful of his looming fate, seeks to cut down the tree. Scratch appears and warns him against breaching his contract. He sends a storm which ruins the land of all the other farmers except Jabez, who offers to employ his now destitute friends to help harvest his own crops, on what turn out to be extremely poor terms.

Mary gives birth to a boy, whom they name Daniel, after Webster, who is also to be the child’s godfather. However, Scratch sends his beautiful minion Belle (Simone Simon) to serve as maid to the family, and Jabez becomes besotted with her, driving a wedge between Mary and himself. Belle spoils young Daniel (Lindy Wade), who becomes spiteful and cruel, including to his own mother. Jabez, meanwhile, is ever more consumed by greed and conspicuous display of his wealth, building a huge mansion for himself, while Mary and Ma Stone remain estranged from him in the old farmhouse. In desperation, Mary visits Daniel Webster and persuades him to investigate the situation.

Jabez holds a ball at his mansion, but none of his old friends and associates come, except for Miser Stevens, who subsequently dies after dancing with Belle; it turns out he too was in hock to Scratch, who has come for his soul. Scratch offers Jabez a deal: he will let him keep his soul, in exchange for that of his son. Instead Jabez, remorseful and ashamed of his conduct, turns to Webster for his help. Webster argues that, as an American, Jabez is entitled to a fair trial. Scratch accedes to this request, but subsequently summons a jury of men notorious for treachery and other gross misdeeds, including the pirate William Kidd, and Benedict Arnold, who had defected to fight for the British during the War. Presiding over the trial is Justice John Hathorne (H. B. Warner), who had been an infamous magistrate during the Salem witch trials of the 1690s.

The case seems hopeless, but Webster gives a stirring defence of Jabez, appealing to the jurors to remember how they too had been tempted by the devil into the betrayal of their country and the sacrifice of their freedom. The jury decides in Jabez’s favour, the foreman tearing up the contract, and Webster ejects Scratch, who warns the Senator that he will never make President. When morning comes, Jabez’s mansion has mysteriously burned down, and he, his family, Webster, and the other farmers with whom he is now also reconciled, sit down to breakfast. The film finishes with Scratch, flicking through his book of potential clients, before pointing mischievously at the viewer.

The Stones, farming, and New England

The Stone family epitomise a vision of an authentic America rooted in antebellum New England, an historical version of the nation as white pioneers, in an era of westward expansion, but untainted by association with slavery. Jabez is focused above all on sustaining his farm as a living entity. He baulks at the prospect of having to present Miser Stevens with a bag of seed as a means of payment, explaining to his wife ‘To me, seed isn’t a thing to pay debts with. It’s alive, more alive than anything.’ He is concerned with social as well as agricultural reproduction, desiring of a male heir whom the farm might be passed down to as it was to him.

This type of agrarian masculinity is complemented by the almost angel-like Mary: always good natured, utterly selfless, refusing to judge Jabez even as his character changes for the worse. Ma Stone, meanwhile, functions as the family’s conscience, but also grounds her religiosity in fiercely local terms. ‘I never did care much for Job, even if he is scripture,’ she tells Mary. ‘Took on too much. Of course I don’t want to malign the man, but he always sounded to me like he come from Massachusetts.’ The family name itself suggests plainness and durability. Jabez’s forename, meanwhile, recalls a figure from The Books of Chronicles:

And Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, Oh that thou wouldest bless me indeed, and enlarge my coast, and that thine hand might be with me, and that thou wouldest keep me from evil, that it may not grieve me! And God granted him that which he requested.1

The Stones stand in for a broader republican social and political vision: a preindustrial nation of individual, independent farming families, tilling the modest plot of land that providence has granted them with. The morality of this way of life is deliberately contrasted with the usury practiced by Stevens, which would render autonomous American men as perennial debtors, but also with Jabez’s later pursuit of accumulation and accompanying reduction of other farmers into wage earners. Held up as an alternative to these forms of domination is the neighbourly, egalitarian model of the grange, whereby the risks arising from economic change are shouldered collectively.

The devil, wealth, and contract law

The world the Stones inhabit, however, is one that is rapidly changing, where the growth of commerce destabilises traditional social, economic, and legal relations. During the Antebellum period, the practice of contract law increasingly shifted away from notions of fairness in agreements towards an emphasis on the liberty of individuals to enter into contracts on terms they agreed and their responsibility to honour those terms. This was accepted as necessary to promote economic progress, even if it reinforced and widened inequalities between contracting parties.2

Jabez does not enter into the contractual agreement with Mr Scratch on an equitable basis; it is an agreement with a malign and powerful figure driven by desperation, and yet it is binding. It is diabolical, being a device intended to bring about man’s ruination through temptation; to use the promise of relief from suffering to inflict more suffering in the long run; to compel him to sacrifice that which he has that is of immeasurable material value in exchange for that which he does not have but the worth of which can be quantified. And Jabez’s contract with the devil, and Miser Stevens’s too, are what lead them to set the terms of subsequent contracts that likewise coerce men to cede that which is alive or inalienable – their crop or livestock, their freedom to labour on their own lands rather than another man’s – in return for money.

The gold that Mr Scratch presents to Jabez belonged to the Hessians, the German auxiliaries who served on the British side in the Revolutionary War, and were popularly detested on the American side as barbaric mercenaries. The foreignness and rootlessness of sources of temptation is also encapsulated by Belle, who stands for woman’s capacity to destroy men through their lust just as Mary stands for their capacity to save them through love. At one point, she sits with Jabez and his friends as they gamble on a Sunday morning (while Ma Stone and Mary are at Church); when one of the players asks her if she is French, she laughingly replies ‘I’m not anything’.3

Later, however, when Daniel Webster appeals to Mr Scratch that ‘Mr Stone is an American citizen, and an American citizen cannot be forced into the service of a foreign prince’, Scratch insists on his own legitimate claim to Americanness:

When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on the deck. Am I not still spoken of in every church in New England? [Chuckles] It’s true, the North claims me for a Southerner, and the South for a Northerner, but I’m neither. Tell the truth, Mr Webster, though I don’t like to boast of it, my name is older in the country than yours.

The speech nods at the original sins baked into American nationhood, and how they have now been visited upon Jabez Stone: swindled out of that which was his like the indigenous Americans; treated as the property of another like enslaved Africans. Yet while it references these evils, it presents them as all the more salient for being inflicted upon a white New England small farmer, that which epitomises the ideal, republican America.

Daniel Webster and American history

Webster seeks to break poor farmers from their shackles by advocating for special protections in a forthcoming bankruptcy bill. We hear Jabez Stone and other farmers reading out the words of his speech with admiring wonder:

The insolvent farmers cannot even come to the seat of their Government to present their cases to Congress – so great is their fear that some creditor will arrest them in some intervening state. We talk much and talk warmly of political liberty, but who can enjoy political liberty if he is deprived permanently of personal liberty? To those unfortunate individuals doomed to the everlasting bondage of debt, what is it that we have free institutions of Government? And if the final vote shall leave thousands of our fellow citizens and their families in hopeless distress, can we – members of the Government – go to our beds with a clear conscience, can we, without self-reproach, supplicate the Almighty mercy to forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors?

As the farmers note, Webster is himself a New Hampshire-born farmer. He is also a lawyer as well as a lawmaker. This combination is a significant one: as a politician, he is a representative of the perceived authentic historical America, and he is an advocate for them – both collectively in Congress, and individually when he represents Jabez in his trial. He is also a father-figure, to Jabez and Mary, but also to his young godson and namesake, who undergoes a change in behaviour after being spanked by Webster for being cruel to animals – an act, it is implied, Jabez himself had been too distracted to administer. Mr Scratch seeks likewise to lure him from the path of righteousness, trying to dissuade him from making his speech with the prophetic warning that he will never make President if he does – but to no avail.

In its claiming of Webster as an historical and mythological figure, The Devil and Daniel Webster reinterprets American politico-legal history from a New Deal-era perspective. That is, it pits him against the changing economic order of the mid-nineteenth century, a lack of legal opposition to which was justified as being in line with the intentions of the country’s founders, as part of the wider development of the developing doctrine of legal classicism.4 Webster stands in the film for the recognition of the limits to economic liberty and importance of state intervention for preserving the rights and freedoms of individuals.

Later in the film, explaining to young Daniel why he does not hurry his horses more, Webster says:

They are good old friends of mine. I call ‘em Constitution and Bill of Rights, the most dependable pair for long journeys. I’ve got one called Missouri Compromise, too, and then there’s a Supreme Court – fine, dignified horse, though you do have to push him now and then.5

The references paint Webster as a unifier with an organic vision of the American political settlement, but also typify the way progressives of the 1930s and 1940s drew upon the constitutional order to legitimise a quite radical change in approach to government.6 He is above all a patriot, with a holistic and historical view of the nation, who speaks glowingly of westward expansion and normatively of settler colonialism – at one point he says of Jabez and himself, ‘If two New Hampshire men aren’t a match for the devil, we’d better give this country back to the Indians’ – as well as disparagingly of parochialism and secessionism.

Jabez’s trial and national redemption

Mr Scratch’s remarks about the inherent Americanness of himself and the evils he represents are a powerful rejoinder to Webster’s optimistic patriotism, enhanced by Walter Huston’s mischievously charismatic performance.7 When Webster demands Jabez have a trial with an American jury, Mr Scratch obliges; as he says of them, ‘Dastard, liar, traitor, knave – Americans all.’ In what is clearly a sham proceedings, rigged against the defendant, whom he is not even permitted to cross-examine, Webster must appeal directly to the conscience, experience, and empathy of the twelve wretched jurors. He begins by recognising their very Americanness:

Oh, what a heritage you were born to share! Gentlemen of the jury, I envy you! For you were there at the birth of a mighty Union. It was given to you to hear those first cries of pain – and to behold the shining babe that was born of blood and tears.

He says that Jabez, like them, had rebelled against his fate, found himself at a crossroads and taken a wrong turn, but had realised his mistake and ought to have an opportunity to right it. He speaks of the loss of their souls to the devil as the loss of their freedom, which was born of the struggle to settle America and build a nation there – ‘we have planted freedom here in this earth like wheat’. He urges them to take Jabez’s side against their shared oppressor.

Let Jabez Stone keep his soul – this soul which doesn’t belong to him alone, which belongs to his son, his family, his country. Gentlemen of the jury – don’t let this country go to the devil! Free Jabez Stone! God save the United States and the men who have made her free!

This is the vision of America with which Webster wins the case, in which individual liberty is both related to and subsumed by the freedom and welfare of the collective, in which the economic bonds of contract are cast aside for the spiritual bonds of a national community. It is rendered tangible in the antebellum New England town romanticised in the film, and in the grange that Jabez belatedly agrees to join, a precursor for the America and the New Deal of a century later.

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Dear Friends,

We have had two visitors to our railway. One of these, “City of Truro”, is a very famous engine. We were sorry when we had to say goodbye to him.

The other visitor was different. “I do not believe”, writes the Fat Controller, “that all diesels are troublesome, but this one upset our engines and made Duck very unhappy”.

The Author1

Thus begins Duck and the Diesel Engine, the 13th entry in the Reverend Wilbert Awdry’s Railway Series of children’s books about talking engines, and one that marked a shift to a slightly darker tone than present in earlier volumes. Its hero, Duck, had been introduced two volumes earlier, in 1956’s Percy the Small Engine: an earnest, hard-working tank engine, formerly of the (pre-nationalised) Great Western Railway (GWR) and unendingly proud of it, brought in by the Fat Controller to help out on the main line.

Its villain, simply named Diesel, was introduced by Awdry at the behest of the series’ editor, Eric Marriott, who wanted the books to better reflect the present reality of British Railways’ rapid rollout of diesel engines. Awdry, who disliked diesel engines, acceded but in doing so made the first diesel engine to appear the The Railway Series its greatest villain, whom he would never include again in any of his subsequent books (although subsequent diesels that appeared in the series were not uniformly bad).2

Duck and the Diesel Engine opens with ‘Domeless Engines’, in which the famous City of Truro – the real-life GWR locomotive that in 1904 reportedly became the first engine to reach 100mph – visits the railway, and strikes up a friendship with Duck. Gordon, the largest and proudest engine on the railway, is disgruntled by the attention received by City of Truro, and makes a disparaging remark about him not having a dome. However, when Gordon himself seeks to break the 100mph barrier, a strong wind blows of his own dome, much to his embarrassment (and Duck’s amusement).

In ‘Pop Goes the Diesel’, Diesel is brought to the railway on a trial by the Fat Controller. His flattering manner impresses the other mainline engines, Gordon, James, and Henry, but not Duck, who is suspicious of the newcomer’s motives and affronted by his braggadocio. He is therefore gratified when Diesel makes a fool of himself by trying and failing to shunt some dilapidated, disused trucks. Diesel’s anger is exacerbated by the other trucks tauntingly singing a mocking parody of ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ about him.

Diesel blames Duck for his humiliation and takes revenge in ‘Dirty Work’. He tells the trucks, in mock confidence, about rude nicknames he claims Duck gave Gordon, James, and Henry. As Diesel had intended, the trucks promptly use the nicknames to taunt the engines and attribute them to Duck. Duck subsequently finds the three engines blockading his entrance to the shed as they confront him with the allegation that he had been besmirching them. The Fat Controller intervenes and asks Duck about the claims, which he denies; he then defuses the situation by sending Duck to go and work for a little while at another station, much to Diesel’s delight.

The book’s closing story, ‘A Close Shave’, sees Duck working at the other station with the kindly engine Edward. Having helped a goods train to the top of the hill, he is returning only to find that the tail end of trucks has broken away and are now dementedly chasing him back down the line. Duck slows down to impede the trucks’ progress and narrowly avoids collision with another train, but instead crashes into a barber’s shop that has been set up at the end of a siding. The angry barber lathers Duck’s face for disrupting his business, but the Fat Controller arrives to explain that Duck’s bravery had prevented a worse accident. He informs Duck that the truth of Diesel’s character had been outed after he told lies about Henry, prompting the Fat Controller to send him away. The story and book finishes with Duck being triumphantly welcomed home by the other engines.

Heritage and modernity in The Railway Series

As a keen railway enthusiast, Awdry was always a stickler for technical accuracy, and frequently drew on real incidents for story ideas. As the 1950s progressed, however, this rooting of his worldbuilding extended further, into contemporary place and time. In collaboration with his brother George, he developed a fictional island, Sodor, near Man, as the location for the stories. Its relationship with the mainland was developed through the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Sodor in 1953’s Gordon the Big Engine, and by the engines travelling over to England in 1957’s Eight Famous Engines. The periodisation of the books began in earnest with 1948’s James the Red Engine, Awdry’s preface to which had noted:

We are nationalised now, but the same engines still work the Region. I am glad, too, to tell you that the Fat Director, who understands our friends’ ways, is still in charge, but is now the Fat Controller.3

However, this contemporaneity carried seeds of representing a technological world that was passing. In 1952’s Toby the Tram Engine, the eponymous character is brought to the railway by the Fat Controller after his own tramline is closed down – mirroring the closures of Britain’s last remaining tramlines during that period. In 1954’s Edward the Blue Engine, a steam traction engine named Trevor is saved from scrap – the first time this threat of an engine’s destruction was seriously raised in the books – and put to work in the vicarage orchard.

Awdry was, by his own description, ‘out of sympathy with British Railways’ nationalization and felt that anything that could be done to preserve an independent railway was worthy of support’.4 He became involved with the Tallylyn narrow gauge railway in Wales, which with decades of declining fortunes behind it had evaded nationalisation in 1948 but seemed destined to close until it was taken over by a preservation society that ran it successfully as a tourist attraction. This provided the inspiration for 1955’s Four Little Engines, which introduced a similar independent narrow-gauge railway (and the engines operating on it) running on Sodor and intersecting with the Fat Controller’s railway.5

This was in contrast with the primary impulse at the British Transport Commission, British Railways’ parent organisation. Its 1955 report, Modernisation and Re-equipment of Britain’s Railways, stressed the need for overdue capital investment in British Railways to enable it to attract the necessary traffic for it to attain self-sufficiency, and bolster the broader economy. This meant that:

…steam must be replaced as a form of motive power, electric or diesel traction being rapidly introduced as may be most suitable in the light of the development of the Plan over the years; this will involve the electrification of large mileages of route, and the introduction of several thousand electric or diesel locomotives.6

Great Westernisation versus dieselisation

GWR in Duck and the Diesel Engine signifies heritage and tradition, but not unproductivity. We might rather read it as embodying a discarded modernity. There is the pride in past achievement, but that is in City of Truro’s achievement of a speed record that remained impressive over half a century later. “He went 100 miles an hour before you were drawn or thought of',” Duck tells Gordon.7 There is a celebration of an independent regional identity rather than centralisation, borne out in Duck’s conversation with City of Truro:

“I see you are one of Us.”
“I try to teach them Our ways,” said Duck modestly.
“All ship-shape and Swindon fashion. That’s right.”8

This is efficiency as epitomised by a famous business brand, rather than a state-based one. At the start of ‘Pop Goes the Diesel’, Duck’s hard work ensures everything on the line runs ‘like clockwork’, but his manner grates with the other engines:

“There are two ways of doing things,” Duck told them, “the Great Western way, or the wrong way. I’m Great Western and…”
“Don’t we know it!” they groaned.9

Duck is in one sense an outsider on Sodor, a relatively recently arrived mainlander who strives to improve the operation of the local railway by importing and imposing his own professional culture into a more idiosyncratic world and onto more truculent engines. Yet he also stands for values that that railway and those engines at their best also epitomise – a kind of steam universalism.

Diesel, by contrast, stands in for a very different, far more unwelcome type of modernity, and outsider. His very name implies he is standing in for diesels as a whole. Whereas the other engines’ speech patterns and anthropomorphisation are based on the mechanical repetitive rhythm of steam propulsion, Diesel is described as having an ‘oily voice’, that he uses especially when falsely flattering others, associating his particular fuel type with untrustworthiness.10

The Fat Controller emphasises from the outset the conditionality of Diesel’s place in the order of things in Sodor, and Duck’s far more established place, introducing Diesel by stating: “I have agreed to give him a trial. He needs to learn. Please teach him, Duck.”11 But Diesel subsequently tells Duck:

“Your worthy Sir Topham Hatt thinks I need to learn. He is mistaken. We Diesels don’t need to learn. We know everything. We come to a yard and improve it. We are revolutionary.”12

The implication that Diesel is an alien agitator, a harbinger of alleged advancement based upon an uncritical veneration of the new and disregard for the natural order of things, emblemises familiar xenophobic right-wing tropes about socialism and associates them with British Railways’ own state-driven railway modernisation programme. As is virtually always the case in The Railway Series, pride leads to a fall and Diesel’s claims to unlimited expertise are thrown into sharp relief by the exposure of his context-specific ignorance as he tried to shunt the wrong trucks.

Conspiracy, mob justice, and martyrdom

Diesel being subsequently taunted by the trucks – truly the lowliest of all orders on Sodor – affronts Duck, who had previously passed up the opportunity to intervene and prevent Diesel’s humiliation, but who nonetheless extends his solidarity to Diesel rather than tolerate the subversion of the status of engines over trucks. As Henry puts it: “We engines have our differences; but we never talk about them to trucks”.13 Diesel, however, who has no such moral code, does exactly the opposite: fraternising with the trucks with the purpose of breaking the other engines’ sense of solidarity with Duck. When asked by the Fat Controller about the other engines’ allegations that he had made the trucks laugh at them, Duck meaningfully responds, “No steam engine would ever be so mean as that.”14

Diesel successfully manipulates Gordon, James, and Henry into a form of industrial mob justice, using their combined presence to effectively block Duck from his place of work and residence. In doing so, they act on misinformation given additional salience by their own status consciousness and simmering resentment of Duck’s perceived sense of superiority. Duck is therefore effectively martyred, in keeping with the heavily Christianised worldview that infused Awdry’s writings: sent into reluctant exile as apparent punishment for a wrongdoing he did not commit, at the apparent behest of the Godlike Fat Controller; the real wrongdoer, Diesel, temporarily victorious in this act of unwarranted revenge.

Yet as is already strongly hinted, the Fat Controller’s omniscience persists; he distrusts Diesel, and disbelieves the accusations against Duck:

“Now Diesel, you heard what Duck said.”
“I can’t understand it Sir. To think that Duck of all engines…I’m dreadfully grieved Sir; but know nothing.”
“I see.” Diesel squirmed and hoped he didn’t.15

Duck’s return is seemingly preordained by his own act of willing bravery in the face of another nightmarish occurrence, the trucks showing their own seeming autonomy of movement and agency to break free of a goods train to chase him instead. The Fat Controller thereafter though also confirms what had been strongly implied, that he did not believe Diesel, and when Diesel revealed his true character by telling lies about Henry as well, “…I sent him packing.” Duck, he promises, will be “coming home” to the Yard; upon his arrival after being mended, ‘there was a really rousing welcome for Duck the Great Western Engine’.16

It is a fitting finale and final line, not just completing Duck’s moral arc of righteousness, unjust persecution, self-sacrifice, and recuperation, but also reaffirming his rightful position at the heart of Sodor’s in-group of engines, and legitimising his identity and values as integral to that community. All of this is rendered possible by his counter-positioning with Diesel, the full outsider who through his deeds and eventual expulsion ultimately reinforces Duck’s belonging, the malign actor whose lack of morality showcases the strength and hegemony on Sodor of his rival’s principles.

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Content warning: Cancer; Death; PTSD; Violence.

Spoiler alert: This analysis of the film First Blood and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.

Adapted from David Morell’s novel of the same name, First Blood was the first in what became the ‘Rambo’ franchise of films. Green Beret and Vietnam veteran John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) visits the home of the only other surviving member of his unit, Delmar Barry, only to find out that Barry has died from cancer caused by exposure to Agent Orange during the conflict. Rambo subsequently travels to the small town of Hope, Washington. There, he immediately catches the hostile attention of Sheriff Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy), who sees him as an undesirable vagrant, and transports him out of town; when Rambo defiantly tries to immediately return to Hope, Teasle arrests him.

At the police station, Rambo is taunted and brutalised by Teasle’s men, particularly the sadistic senior officer Art Galt (Jack Starrett), causing him to experience flashbacks to being tortured in Vietnam. He overpowers the policemen guarding him and escapes from the station, stealing a motorcycle and heading for the local woods. The furious Teasle leads a search party to track Rambo down, including helicopter surveillance featuring a vengeful Galt. When Galt spies Rambo, he ignores Teasle’s orders and tries to shoot to kill him; Rambo is wounded in trying to escape, but throws a rock that cracks the helicopter windshield, leading to Galt falling out to his death.

Rambo tries to intimate to Teasle that Galt’s death was an accident, but Teasle and his deputies open fire. Rambo flees but, as they give chase, he subsequently subdues them all with a series of booby traps and ambushes, before holding Teasle himself at knifepoint, warning him to end his pursuit, and then escaping further into the woods. Instead, the town’s police are joined by Washington State Patrol and the National Guard in an increasingly largescale manhunt. At this point, Teasle is visited by Rambo’s former commanding officer, Colonel Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna), who seeks futilely to warn him of his former charge’s vast resourcefulness and lethality. At Teasle’s behest, Trautman makes radio contact with Rambo and unsuccessfully tries to persuade him to hand himself in. Rambo is clearly moved to hear from Trautman, but refuses to heed his request.

The National Guard subsequently corner Rambo at an abandoned mine and instead of heeding Teasle’s order to await his arrival, fire a rocket launcher at it, destroying the mine and seemingly killing Rambo. However, he survives the blast and manages to dig himself out from being trapped underground, before hijacking a military truck and again making his way back to Hope. Once there, Rambo unleashes a wave of destruction, destroying a gas station and cutting the town’s power supplies. Teasle tries to stake Rambo out from the police station roof, but Rambo breaks into the building and shoots and wounds the Sheriff, only refraining from killing him due to Trautman’s intercession. Rambo then breaks down in front of his former commander, sobbingly recounting his traumatic experiences in Vietnam and subsequent alienation and neglect as a veteran back in the US. Trautman comforts Rambo, and accompanies him as he is taken into federal custody.

Rambo, Trautman, and Vietnam

As a character, Rambo in First Blood combines an almost childlike innocence with a ruthless capacity for violence, his motivations partly masked by Stallone’s often passive portrayal. There is a certain boyish naivete to the way he first introduces himself to his former comrade’s widow at the start of the film, disregarding her insistence that Barry is not there, excitedly chattering on as he presents her with a photo of the two of them and the remainder of their unit. The revelation of his death is clearly shattering and leaves him psychologically adrift.

Rambo routinely responds to the police’s hounding of him by expressing a sense of hurt and self-pity at being picked upon. ‘Why are you pushing me?…I didn’t do anything,’ he asks Teasle as he tries to escort him out of Hope. ‘It’s not my fault. I don’t want any more hurt,’ he later tells the search party in vain after Galt’s death. Such protestations alternate with Rambo stubbornly defying authority, and responding to violence by escalating it. He states the logic of his conduct in his radio call with Trautman, doggedly insisting that ‘They drew first blood’.

Trautman takes a barely concealed paternalistic and professional pride in Rambo’s one-man war, in his capacity for survival and destruction beyond the ken of the civilian authorities. He introduces himself to Teasle with the announcement that ‘God didn’t create Rambo. It was me.’ He subsequently expands: ‘I recruited him, trained him and commanded him for three years in Vietnam. He belongs to me.’ The relationship between Trautman and Rambo, as both men (and others) view it blurs the lines between father/son, maker/machine, and officer/soldier.

Yet it is apparent that Trautman’s Vietnam is not quite Rambo’s. Rambo’s flashbacks to his military service prompt him to equate the dehumanising treatment inflicted upon him as a prisoner of war with that he receives from the police in Hope. This leads him to readopt the same methods of survival and pursuit of victory here that he did there. As Trautman puts it:

He’s the best with a gun, a knife, and his bare hands. He was trained to ignore pain and the weather, and to eat things a goat would puke up. In Vietnam his job was to get rid of enemy personnel, to kill them. Winning by attrition. And Rambo was the best!

But if the exercise of self-reliance, ingenuity, and retributive violence provide Rambo with a comfort zone, it is not one he has chosen for himself. He cannot get over either the violence he experienced in Vietnam, nor the loss of the camaraderie and esteem he had there. As he tells Trautman in his monologue at the end of the film:

Nothing is over! Nothing! You can’t just switch it off! It wasn’t my war. You asked me, I didn’t ask you!…Civilian life means nothing to me. There we had a code of honor. You watch my back, I watch yours. Here there’s nothing!…There I flew helicopters, drove tanks, had equipment worth millions. Here I can’t even work parking!

He subsequently recounts the death of one of his fellow soldiers, dismembered by a booby-trapped shoe shine box, in blow-by-blow detail, and with a frenzied emotion that makes clear that the brutality he witnessed there remains very much a live experience for him. ‘I can’t get it out of my head. It’s seven years ago. I see it every day.’ The war has trapped Rambo in an arrested adolescence, incapable of moving beyond the structures of close fraternal bonding and clearly defined (but legitimate) hierarchies of military service, while also ensuring none of his comrades would get to grow old.

Teasle, policing, and the civilian order

The subsequent evolution from First Blood into a whole ‘Rambo’ franchise invites a teleological reading of the film as being entirely about Rambo, entirely on the side of him against the police, on the side of the Vietnam veteran against a callous society. Yet that would be an oversimplification. It is more meaningful to see it as a clash between two right-wing visions of America, with their overlaps as well as contrasts. One of them is epitomised by Rambo, an authentic version of America that cannot be realised in America any more, who would subsequently find his wild frontier again in Vietnam and Afghanistan in the film’s sequels. But the other, the conservative America of small towns, of productivity, respectability, and conformity, is Teasle’s world. And he is almost as much First Blood’s protagonist as Rambo is.

Not that we are invited to sympathise with him; at least, not at first. Aided by Dennehy’s sneering countenance, the viewer is inclined to share Rambo’s consternation that Teasle is running him out of town just for wanting to stop for something to eat. Yet a shift certainly comes with Galt’s death, when one of the younger (and more humane) deputies, Mitch Rodgers (David Caruso) expresses bemusement as to why they are pursuing a man who, they have just discovered, is a Green Beret and war hero. Teasle responds furiously: ‘That’s Art Galt, boy! We were friends when your mother was still wiping your nose!’ Galt’s awfulness in life, apparent to the audience, does not render us unempathetic to Teasle’s emotional and vengeful response to his death.

In the scene that follows, as Rambo turns from hunted to hunter, we find ourselves in the company of Teasle and his deputies, unsure as to where Rambo is, sharing in their fear and suspense as he violently ambushes them one-by-one, resembling the stalking, psychotic killer in a slasher flick, until only Teasle is left unmaimed. This initiates a partial transferral of our identification towards the sheriff that persists as the film proceeds.

It is increasingly clear by this point that Teasle has an ethos, again not initially a particularly sympathetic one, but that also motivates him as clearly as Rambo’s own moral code does him. As he explains when Rambo asks why he is driving him out of Hope:

We don’t want people like you here in our town. Drifters. Before you know it there’s a whole pile of people like you. That’s why! Besides, you wouldn’t like it here, it’s a quiet place. Some would even call it boring. But we like it that way. I get paid to keep it like that. Boring.

As much as Rambo is compelled to reject infringement on his autonomy by illegitimate authority, so Teasle is to ensure his own unitary authority is uninhibited by illegitimate challenges to it. He is not party to Galt’s brutal treatment of Rambo in the cells, and when subsequently confronted with it as the cause of Rambo’s escape and Galt’s subsequent death, he refuses to brook the validity of either:

If one of the deputy sheriffs goes too far, the prisoner comes to me! If he’s right, I kick the deputy sheriff’s ass! I’m the law! And that’s how it should be. If you trample on the law, there’s hell to pay!

Yet Teasle’s status as the epitome of the law is already clearly fraying, first and foremost in the face of the chaos wrought by Rambo, but also from the arrival of the Washington State Police and the National Guard, and then by the military in the form of Trautman. The latter’s belittling of Teasle and his men’s capability to deal with a superior form of expertise clearly rankles with the sheriff, who nonetheless seeks to maintain an uneasy but effective collaboration with the Colonel. This is a product of Teasle’s own relentless though embattled professionalism, which also prompts his dismay when the National Guardsmen – whom Teasle subsequently derides as ‘a bunch of weekend warriors’ – apparently kill Rambo and blow up the mine rather than waiting on his arrival and order.

Trautman repeatedly chastises Teasle for his incomprehension and underestimation of Rambo, but is guilty of the same shortcoming in his dealings with Teasle. ‘But you’re a civilian,’ Trautman tells him, when Teasle remains frustrated by his own failure to bring Rambo to justice. ‘You’re going back to your wife and your house. You don’t have to make sense out of all this.’ Yet when Rambo returns alive and lays siege to Hope, Trautman unsuccessfully pleads with Teasle to recognise the mounting evidence that he is outmatched, only to be told: ‘It’s my job, Trautman, it’s my town! I’m not giving it up to you, Rambo, or anyone else!’

First Blood, then, is a film above all about a clash between two men who cannot and will not back down in the face of each other’s intransigence, precisely because their respective codes embody wider social worlds and worldviews that are both comparable and incompatible. It captures latent contradictions inherent in the conservative American political coalition so dominant in the era of the Reagan presidency, between overseas military adventurism and domestic prosperity and orderliness, the former only capable of coexisting with the latter only as long as it could be concealed or held at arm’s length, as long as the war never comes home.

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Content warning: Death.

Spoiler alert: This analysis of the film Falling in Love Again and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.

Falling in Love Again tells the story of a middle-aged couple, Harry (Elliott Gould) and Sue Lewis, née Wellington (Susannah York), who live in Los Angeles with their teenage children, Hilary (Bonnie Paul) and Donnie (Tony O’Dell). Harry and Sue’s marriage is strained: while she runs the department store they own together, he feels ineffectual, regretting his failed career aspiration to become an architect, and continually yearning for his own adolescence in wartime New York. The family are planning to drive back across the country for Harry to attend his school reunion.

The majority of the film intersperses the preparations for and the road trip itself with Harry’s flashbacks to life in the Bronx in 1944, narrated through his interior monologue. Seventeen-year-old Harry, then nicknamed ‘Pompadour’ (played in the flashback by Stuart Paul), lives with his Jewish American parents (Robert Hackman and Kaye Ballard) and spends most of his time loitering the neighbourhood with his friends Joey ‘The Idiot’ Kestenbaum (Anthony Casertano), Moishe ‘Meatloaf’ Leibowitz (Dan Davies), Stan ‘The Con’ Mecker (Steven Paul), and Frank ‘Como’ Cucelli (Martin Katzoff).

While visiting his father, a tailor, at work, Pompadour sees and becomes infatuated with the factory owner’s daughter, Sue Wellington (Michelle Pfeiffer). His friends contrive to introduce the two of them and the chemistry is evident, but her wealthy parents (Herbert Rudley and Marion McCargo) are set on her marrying her fiancé, the well-heeled and athletic Alan Childs (Todd Hepler), who is contemptuous of both Pompadour and Sue’s friendship with him. Pompadour meanwhile receives an education in seduction from Cheryl ‘The Queen of Tar Beach’ Herman (Cathy Tolbert), an attractive married woman whom he and the other neighbourhood boys persistently spy on and lust over.

Seeking to impress the civically and patriotically minded Sue, who volunteers in her own spare time as a nurse, Pompadour and his friends organise a huge neighbourhood scrap drive to support the war effort. The plan succeeds, and Sue chooses him over Alan. After Como enlists in the Army and is subsequently killed in action, Sue suggests she and Pompadour marry to prevent him being called up when he turns eighteen. However, the union is opposed by their parents because of their different social and ethnic backgrounds, as well as their youth.

Back in the present day, Harry struggles to change a tyre in a downpour, and becoming frustrated with Sue’s instructions, criticises her for being too controlling, to which she retorts by accusing him of being a dreamer. Harry storms off but recalls how their parents’ hostility had nearly driven them apart before, only for Sue to realise the effort he had gone to to woo her in the first instance, causing them to reconcile. The memory prompts Harry to return to Sue and the children and embarrassedly put the row behind them.

The family eventually arrive in New York, with Harry delighted to be back, reminiscing in their hotel room about his and Sue’s wedding, a happy neighbourhood occasion bankrolled through Stan the Con’s illicit enterprises. Yet back in the present, Harry’s and Sue’s efforts to make love that evening prove lacklustre. Harry decides to revisit his old neighbourhood, but is depressed by the extent of its physical decay and social change. He is propositioned by a sex worker and accompanies her, unknowingly being watched by Sue who has come to find him. When he returns to the hotel, she confronts him about the incident and the two argue again.

Harry attends his reunion without Sue, with all of his old friends and acquaintances there, save for the deceased Como, and Stan, who is in prison. At first Harry boasts about the extent of his and Sue’s continued romantic attachment, but then speaks increasingly honestly of her professional success and his own feelings of inadequacy. Meanwhile, Sue finds Harry’s latest architectural sketches, a passion she thought he had long since abandoned. Realising that he is still the man she fell in love with, she travels to the reunion and interrupts Harry’s confession. They embrace and leave together. The film ends with the two of them sitting outside discussing their plans for renovating the store.

Reunion and reminiscence

Harry’s flashbacks to the 1940s are heavily stylised. Framing devices such as black and white photos around the Lewis family home becoming colourised moving pictures, the exaggerated boyish goofiness of Pompadour and his friends, the usage of period music, and Harry’s voiceover, all serve to give these scenes a strongly dreamlike quality. Late adolescence is characterised as a separate social world, combining autonomy and self-organisation with the absence of real adult responsibility, though occasionally the gang play at the latter (with tragic consequences in the case of Como).

What is really notable here is that writer-director Steven Paul, who also played Stan the Con, was in his late teens and early twenties when he wrote and made the film, based on the memoirs of his father, Hank.1 He turned this initial treatment into a script with the help of the Jewish Canadian writer Ted Allan, and co-star Susannah York. The outcome of this intergenerational collaboration is a film that really does feel like a young man conjuring up a youth he has no direct recollection of, a romanticisation of the past that comes from bringing to life stories he had learned second-hand.

The reunion itself is the propulsive device within the plot. It gives purpose and narrative logic to Harry’s remembering, indulging his dwelling in the past but also offering the promise of its reconnection with the present, of those memories’ and Harry’s own relevance. It also compels Harry and Sue to, over the course of their journey together, face up to the problems in their marriage. The event, when it finally comes, is an anti-climax, in which Harry’s continuing childish braggadocio emphasises the disjuncture between whom he was and where his life now is, the self-delusion in his self-presentation. Harry departs from the reunion when he comes to terms with the part of the past that really matters in his present and future: his wife.

Gender and nostalgia

Harry is not only childish; he is emasculated, he is impotent. His nostalgia is an evasion of his unconvincing performance as an adult man: his irrelevance in his supposed working partnership with his wife; his emotional and sexual failings as a husband; his inconsistency as a male adult role model for his children. This very gendered failure is epitomised by his career trajectory: from aspiring architect, who dreamt of building things, remaking the world around him, to flailing department store co-owner, in the world of fashion and sales where his wife is in the ascendancy. There is a class element here too, a trajectory from production to consumption: Harry’s father once made clothes, and now Harry helps sell them.

Sue is a central actor within Harry’s flashbacks, even if we view her actions principally from his perspective. Yet Sue in the present, practical and oriented towards the here-and-now, has little appetite for sentimental reminiscences. She is mildly dismissive of Harry’s nostalgia, indulging him by travelling along with him to New York for the reunion, but also occasionally deflating his romanticising of his former friends (such as by commenting on Stan’s criminality) and reminding him that things might not be as he remembered them. There is little sense that she identifies as having been part of that milieu, integral to it as she is in Harry’s reminiscences; that she realises when he is dreaming about the past, he is also dreaming about their own adolescent romance.

The breakdown of Harry’s and Sue’s relationship is essentially a product of their being out of time with each other. He has chosen to mostly absent himself from the present, to dwell primarily in the past. She barely seems to remember at all, to reject it in exclusive favour of the rigours of the present, of work and parenting, and in losing sight of whom Harry was, also loses sight of whom he is now. It is only when she discovers his recent architectural drawings that she can reconnect Harry past and present, to remember the Harry of her adolescence and see that essence of him in her middle-aged husband, to recognise and embrace his dreaming about the future.

Time and geography

It is striking to compare Falling in Love Again with a later cycle of reunion films made in the 1990s, which I have previously written about here for the newsletter. These too centre primarily on reunions as opportunities for physical acts of return, although with a slightly different logic. Beautiful Girls (1996), Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997), and Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) all focus on young adults returning to the suburbs and small towns they grew up in from the more vibrant cities where they now live and work. Falling in Love Again is also about a journey across space as well as time, but with a very different logic to its geography.

The film counterposes two versions of America. One is the New York of the war years: a world of tightknit communities built around ethnic identities and densely populated neighbourhoods. The other is the Los Angeles of the 1970s: an affluent, physically sprawling, built around cars and nuclear families, in the state formerly governed by Ronald Reagan, who would end 1980 as President, and usher in the end of the New Deal order ascendant in those war years. Though the film is based around a road trip, specifically to allow for the build-up of tension between Harry and Sue within a confined space, but between those scenes and the flashbacks, we get scant if any sense of the America that exists between these two cities, heightening the contrast between them.

Nostalgia as a term originally referred to homesickness rather than a yearning for an earlier period.2 Harry’s desire is to go back in both time and space, and acts as if he believes doing the latter will mean the former as well. He bemoans the spread-out nature of LA as antithetical to community formation and lionises the Bronx of his youth, despite Sue’s warnings that it may no longer be as it was. Of course, the New York he does return to is that which during the 1970s came to be popularly associated with urban decay, racialised ideas around crime, and fiscal crisis – in many ways, a harbinger of the backlash against the New Deal order that Reagan rode into power.3 After his demoralising visit to his old neighbourhood, Harry’s dreaming about the past ends; he is left to face up to the state of his life and marriage in the here and now.

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Content warning: Racism; Rape; Lynching.

Spoiler alert: This analysis of the film The Sun Shines Bright and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.

Set in late-nineteenth century Kentucky, The Sun Shines Bright focuses on the escapades of Billy Priest (Charles Winninger), the presiding judge in Fairfield County. A somewhat shambolic figure, Priest spends much of his time in the company of his Black servant Jeff Poindexter (Stepin Fetchit), who is equally hapless, and of his former comrades with whom he fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War, including Dr Lewt Lake (Russell Simpson), German-born department store owner Herman Felsburg (Ludwig Stössel), Sheriff Andy Redcliffe (Mitchell Lewis), dogcatcher Jimmy Bagby (Paul Hurst), and backwoodsman Feeney (Francis Ford). Priest is standing for re-election as judge against pompous prosecutor Horace K. Maydew (Milburn Stone), but two interlinked scandals threaten to derail his campaign.

The first of these concerns Dr Lake’s adoptive daughter, schoolteacher Lucy Lee (Arleen Whelan). Lucy’s real parentage is the town’s open secret – her father was the deceased son of Confederate General Fairfield, and her mother a prostitute – but the General (James Kirkwood) refuses to acknowledge her, despite Judge Priest’s pleading. Lucy’s would-be suitor, wayward returnee Ashby Corwin (John Russell), challenges stablemaster Buck Ramsey (Grant Withers) to a bullwhip fight for consistently making innuendo about Lucy’s heritage; the fight is broken up by the Judge, who sends Ramsey away to his home in the neighbouring Tornado District, before confirming to Ashby that the rumours about Lucy are true and that he risks further humiliating her through his actions.

Shortly afterwards, a sick woman (Dorothy Jordan) arrives back at the town and collapses, with Ashby coming to her aid and bringing her to Dr Lake. The woman, it turns out, is Lucy’s mother, who is dying; after setting eyes on Lucy, she is content and asks to be taken back to the house of her former employer, brothel madam Mallie Cramp (Eve March). Mallie herself then seeks out Judge Priest to ask for his help in arranging the funeral. The Judge agrees, despite knowing that his association with the affair will damage his reputation ahead of the election. Lucy realises that the dying woman is her mother.

The second scandal arises when the Judge hears a case involving an elderly Black man, Pleasant Woodford (Ernest Whitman), and his banjo-playing nephew U.S. Grant Woodford (Elzie Emanuel), who is failing to support him. Recognising ‘Uncle Plez’ as the man who carried home the body of Ashby’s father Bainbridge from the Battle of Chickamauga, Judge Priest helps out by instructing U.S. to head to the Tornado District, where he can find work curing tobacco. However, U.S. is subsequently arrested while there for allegedly raping a white girl. Judge Priest severely doubts the veracity of the case against him but is determined he will face a fair trial. When a mob led by Buck Ramsey and the girl’s father, Rufe Ramseur (Trevor Bardette), turn up at the jailhouse determined to lynch U.S., the Judge calmly but bravely refuses to let them do so and persuades them to return home.

Subsequently, while the Judge and the others are attending a temperance dance, one of the Sheriff’s deputies arrives in a carriage with a handcuffed Buck Ramsey, who has been identified by the rape victim as her real attacker, alongside him. When Ramseur also shows up and attempts to shoot him, Ramsey escapes in the chaos by stealing Dr Lake’s carriage with Lucy inside it. However, Feeney shoots Ramsey dead, and Ashby rides in to rescue Lucy. Thereafter, the Judge and his friends participate in the funeral procession for Lucy’s mother, despite the mockery of some bystanders, with Judge Priest himself giving the eulogy. During the service, General Fairfield arrives and takes his seat alongside Lucy, signalling his acknowledgement of her at last as his granddaughter.

At the election, Mayhew holds a slender lead over Judge Priest in the vote count, but then the men of Tornado District turn up and, grateful to the Judge for having saved them from their own misguided anger, vote unanimously for him. With the votes now absolutely level, the Judge posts the deciding ballot for himself, securing re-election. The film concludes with a military procession marching past the Judge’s house playing ‘Dixie’, before Uncle Plez and U.S. lead a rendition by the town’s Black inhabitants of ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ in his honour, moving the Judge to tears.

Race and the social order

The Sun Shines Bright was John Ford’s second adaptation of the Judge Priest stories written by the Kentuckian author and columnist Irvin S. Cobb, following nearly two decades after 1934’s Judge Priest. The society in which The Sun Shines Bright is set exists specifically in relation to the memory of the Civil War. Priest and his comrades’ status as veterans is integral to their continuing group identity, humorously but affectionately encapsulated in the way Priest’s friends flock to the courthouse when they hear US playing ‘Dixie’, or their continued uniformed reunions.

It emerges at one of these reunions that the United States flag that they are flying alongside the Confederate one was captured from a local meeting of Union veterans, but the incident produces no rancour: their leader, Jody Habersham (Henry O’Neill), arrives and politely explains that their own meeting cannot begin without a flag and asks if he can borrow theirs, and Judge Priest gladly volunteers to act as a colour guard and accompany Habersham to the meeting with the flag. A great show is made of the harmony that exists within the community between the two sides now, the source of the conflict entirely untouched upon, even as Fairfield’s associational culture remains organised around having fought in it, and upon which side.

This is also a society clearly organised around race. Black residents of Fairfield occupy subordinate and submissive roles. Judge Priest regularly chastises Jeff for his ineffectiveness and routinely addresses him and other Black men with the infantilising ‘Boy’. Ford’s decision to recast Stepin Fetchit as Jeff, the role he had also played in Judge Priest was a controversial one, given the actor’s association with outdated representations of Black fecklessness for white people’s amusement.1 There is certainly a strong element of he and other Black characters being deployed for comic relief here.

However, The Sun Shines Bright also routinely depicts interracial relations as affectionate and organic. The labour Black residents of Fairfield provide, particularly that of performing music, functions as a kind of spiritual balm for the white society they serve. It is strongly implied, for example, that Pleasant Woodford would have originally been a house slave of the Corwins, whom he is still a servant to. Yet there is also a moral and familial element to the work he performs for them, from personally bearing Bainbridge’s corpse ‘with these two arms’, to chastising Ashby for appearing drunk in public; he is ‘Uncle Plez’ not only to his nephew, U.S., but to the whole town.

Gender and the social order

Fairfield’s is a gendered, and classed, as well as racial order. This is rooted in part in the martial identities dating back to the war, which binds Judge Priest and his friends together as men. It also centres on the preservation of white women’s honour and purity, and the organisation of heterosociality around ritual encounters such as the temperance dance. Yet the film is utterly committed to sending up this faux-gentility, such as in the way the dance’s host Aurora Ratchitt (Jane Darwell) tells a succession of debutantes ‘you’re the prettiest girl at the party’, or the Judge and his friends’ mock horror at having to drink lemonade rather than alcoholic beverages.

The tensions in this order are epitomised by Lucy Lee, for whom Dr Lake and his friends serve as a surrogate, paternalistic family to. Yet they do so because of the scandalous circumstances of her conception that left her an orphan. She also symbolises female professional empowerment in her role as a schoolteacher, but the all-Black makeup of her wards and their intense familiarity with her – though only depicted fleetingly – and her evident discomfort at the temperance dance serve to reinforce the tenuousness of her position. Paradoxically, it is this perennial challenge to her respectability that compels Ashby to step us as a man, from his brawl with Buck Ramsey to his escorting her to the ball.

The film is especially critical of the ostracisation faced by another type of working woman. Association with a brothel madam like Mallie Cramp, or a prostitute such as Lucy Lee’s mother, is potentially ruinous for professional men like Judge Priest and Dr Lake, yet their sense of duty to their professions overrides any calculation of the consequences. The appearance of Mallie and her staff in fine funereal attire upon a carriage with the coffin, and their receipt of the scorn of some passers-by, likewise demonstrate both the affluence that sex work brings to her and the impossibility of buying a social status equivalent to it. The connection between race and gender in this social structure (and the film’s sympathy with the lower orders within it) is typified by the funeral itself taking place in a Black church, with its congregants providing hymnal accompaniment.

The danger inherent in this state of affairs is best encapsulated by the episode with U.S. and the lynch mob. It is the patriarchal urge to protect white female purity from violation by Black male sexuality that compels the men of Tornado District to follow a course of action they must be dissuaded from for both US’s and their own good. The fact the mob is led by Buck Ramsey, who we have already seen impugn the reputation of another young white woman, Lucy Lee, is a clear caveat to the genuineness and advisability of this course of action. And so it subsequently turns out that Ramsey had whipped up racial hatred to conceal his own guilt for the crime. When Rufe Ramseur turns up at the temperance dance with just his son and wronged daughter to try and avenge the crime by identifying and shooting Ramsey, the film tacitly condones this apparently more legitimate patriarchal impulse.

Judge Priest’s jurisprudence

I want to conclude this piece with some reflections on the figure of Judge Priest himself, since it is my interest in American cultural representations of judges and jurisprudence that drew The Sun Shines Bright to my interest.

The first thing to say about him is he above all a comic figure, played broadly by Charles Winninger in the main. He is also nakedly political, the re-election campaign being an integral sublot to the film, and is forever in electioneering mode, always taking opportunities to distribute cards reminding people to vote for him. Yet the farcical nature of his conduct dispels any hint of genuine corruption: the insincerity of his insincerity being the mark of his actual sincerity. He is also deeply humane and pragmatic, and willing to take risks with his reputation and career to help the neediest. He is nostalgic about old Kentucky and the Civil War, and sentimental about the society he serves, in all of its parts.

This places him in marked contrast with his electoral opponent, Horace K. Maydew; the rivalry and close contest between the two men standing in for the broader political divisions that have shaped America’s recent past and will also determine his future. Judge Priest is a Democrat, obliged to pursue the votes of those whose allegiances and inclinations are anathema to his own, from Unionist veterans to teetotallers. Mayhew, whom he derisively describes as a ‘Carpetbagger’, seems to stand for the unstoppable force of apparent progress, convinced of the inevitability of his victory. Yet his prurience and his commitment to rationality and reform are accompanied by a disdain for the people the Judge is kindliest to.

This is illustrated in the courthouse scene, in which the Judge routinely cuts an absurd figure. He arrives late with Jeff, the two men blaming each other for their tardiness, and then reminisces with Pleasant Woodford about the Civil War before inviting U.S. to play a tune on his banjo, and finally hands U.S. some of his campaign cards to distribute in the Tornado District – a sequence of actions that attract Maydew’s mockery and scorn in turn. Nonetheless, he helps resolve in practical fashion the situation facing Pleasant and his nephew, where the overly litigious Maydew had sought a punitive legal solution.

Judge Priest’s approach to justice is also borne out in the scenes relating to the rape of Rufe Ramseur’s daughter. When U.S. is arrested, the Judge assures him, ‘Boy, you’ll have a fair trial. Race, creed, or color; justice will be done in my courtroom.’ Yet this is not really an evocation of principles of impartiality and due process. He subsequently tells Andy Radcliffe, ‘Get your men together, go out there and find the right man…and stop chasing children around.’ He is convinced of U.S.’s innocence, which is connected to his seeing him as childlike, which is connected to his race – the very thing that had made him guilty in the eyes of the lynch mob.

It is this belief that U.S. has committed no crime, his imperative to protect the most vulnerable, and his personal and professional bravery, rather than a commitment to the rule of law in an abstract sense, that motivates the Judge to take his one-man stand in front of the jailhouse. Likewise, the film rejects mob justice for the prejudices that drive it, the deleterious effects it has on the reasoning of those who participate in it, and the visible terror it causes among the Black people whom are its likely targets, rather than for breaching formal rules about who delivers justice, and how. When Buck Ramsey is identified as the real culprit, not only is Judge Priest’s instinct vindicated, but also Ramsey’s impending extra-judicial execution, the Judge subsequently remarking to Feeney, ‘Good shooting, comrade…saves a trial.’

The theological underpinnings of this jurisprudence, hinted at by the very name ‘Judge Priest’, are fully realised in the funeral scene. An event commemorating the life and marking the death of a woman marginalised for the line of work she fell into, held in a space of worship normally occupied for those marginalised for their race. This double lowliness is nonetheless set into relief by the Judge’s eulogy, in which he quotes from the Gospel of John, and the story of the woman taken in adultery, whom the law of Moses would have condemned to death, but of whom Jesus replied ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’

It is not for the Judge, nor indeed anyone in this film, to enduringly transform the social hierarchy that exists in Fairfield. Rather, it is to preside over these inversionary rituals, whether in court or in church, in which all are temporarily equal before judgement, and to offer kindness, protection, and mercy to the most vulnerable, miserable, and reviled.

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Released in late January 1991, Jesus Jones’s second album Doubt entered the UK charts at No. 1. It completed a momentous 12 months for the band, who comprised vocalist, guitarist, and main songwriter Mike Edwards, guitarist Jerry De Borg, bassist Al Doughty, keyboardist Iain Baker, and drummer Simon ‘Gen’ Matthews. Their debut album Liquidizer had been released by independent label Food in the autumn of 1989. Its fusion of guitar rock with sampling and dance beats epitomised a convergence between previously discrete genres that was very much of its moment. Liquidizer brought Jesus Jones critical acclaim, but not yet the kind of commercial success Edwards had hoped for: the three singles released from it had all narrowly missed out on the UK Top 40, and the album itself stalled just outside the Top 30.

As Edwards himself subsequently recalled, he was able to use the downtime during the band’s extensive gigging around the time of Liquidizer’s, abetted by advances in music technology that rendered it more portable, to craft a new set of songs, of which at least some were built around electronic elements rather than grafting them onto pre-written analogue instrumentals. They were also unabashedly more melodically and sonically straightforward in their appeal, with new singles ‘Real Real Real’, ‘Right Here Right Now’, and ‘International Bright Young Thing’ achieving peak positions of 19, 31, and 7 in the UK charts respectively during 1990. Jesus Jones were also proving equally popular overseas, having in February that year become one of the first bands to tour Romania after the overthrow of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu just two months earlier, and with ‘Real Real Real’ getting to No. 4 and ‘Right Here Right Now’ to No. 2 in the US Billboard Hot 100.

Doubt itself opens with the brief, pleading, driving ‘Trust Me’, before ‘Who? Where? Why?’ combines psychedelic guitar with samples of African chants, a pulsating beat, and Edwards’ wondering vocal. Then comes ‘International Bright Young Thing’, which maintains the psychedelic feel, but with a groovier bass and guitar line, and an anthemic chorus. ‘I’m Burning’ builds more slowly, its medium tempo underpinned by a slightly more insistent, pulsing beat. ‘Right Here Right Now’ swells with a sense both of its own import and of the significance of the contemporary moment it describes – more on that below – Edwards’s wide-eyed, plaintively delivered lyrics accompanied by fanfare-like synths. Side A closes with the darker, staccato ‘Nothing to Hold Me’, featuring Edwards rapping in a laconic, detached manner about a relationship turned sour.

Side B begins with ‘Real Real Real’, its cooing opening vocals giving way to another mid-tempo, swinging song, its catchy chorus built around the repetition of its title refrain. ‘Welcome Back Victoria’ is built around an acoustic guitar, with Edwards sensing and warning against an impending spirit of reaction, while ‘Two and Two’ is a more straight-ahead fast-paced rock song, in which he denounces other people’s certainties. The penultimate ‘Stripped’ is an industrial track, with squalling electronics and guitar, and Edwards howling the song’s title. Closer ‘Blissed’ is much quieter, with ambient electronica and sampled birdsong, and Edwards’ suitably spaced-out vocal and lyrics.

Optimism at the end of history

Discussing the album on a podcast some 32 years later, Edwards spoke of his strong belief that music should capture the moment in which it was made. The song on Doubt that encapsulated this most was ‘Right Here Right Now’, its title epitomising this sense of present-ness. Edwards was a fan of Prince’s ‘Sign o’ the Times’ and wanted to write an updated equivalent for the contemporary moment. Yet whereas that song commented on AIDS, gang violence, narcotics, poverty, and infanticide, ‘Right Here Right Now’ was concerned with the apparently far more positive developments of the end of the Cold War and the collapse of repressive communist regimes across Eastern Europe. It was even originally based around a sample from ‘Sign o’ the Times’, and although the sample itself was dropped for legal reasons, ‘Right Here Right Now’ still directly referenced the title of the Prince song in its lyrics.

Indeed, this sense of the political import of the moment and its significance to popular culture is evident throughout the song, from its very opening:

A woman on the radio talks about revolution
When it’s already passed her by
Bob Dylan didn’t have this to sing about
You know it feels good to be alive

It has frequently been assumed that the ‘woman on the radio’ is Tracey Chapman, whose song ‘Talking about a Revolution’ – which she famously performed at Wembley to mark Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday – was released just two years earlier. I have not come across an admission of this by the band themselves, but given the choice of words, the proximity of the two releases, and Edwards’ frequent outspokenness about their peers, it seems highly likely.

This, ‘Right Here Right Now’ tells us, is the moment, is the revolution, not the ones Dylan in the 1960s or Chapman in the late 1980s almost sought to usher into existence, but the one that had now come to pass. Edwards had, as he sings in the song’s second verse, ‘…seen the decade in, when it seemed the world could change/At the blink of an eye’. This was the watershed, ‘watching the world wake up from history’ as the chorus so famously has it, echoing Francis Fukuyama’s notion that the historical process, as we had come to understand it, came to and end with the conclusion of the Cold War, the ultimate victory of liberal democracy over all other models of polity.1 Of course, this all rather misses the point that the critiques of the existing order and demands for change that Dylan, Prince, and Chapman all made were directed against liberal democracies, and particularly that of the Cold War’s victor, the United States, with its severe inequalities, especially racial ones, that had widened over the 1980s.

Equally integral to ‘Right Here Right Now’ is the significance of Edwards being there to document this moment. ‘I was alive and I waited, waited, I was alive and I waited for this’, he sings. In the song’s video, projections of contemporary news footage wash over him; he is given significance as witness to it. It is an affirmation of his generation: not ‘Your sons and your daughters’ whom Dylan had sung about in ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’; but rather those sons’ and daughters’ sons and daughters, who are there to see the real revolution and to make culture bound up with that moment. As he would also demand on ‘Blissed’, ‘…I expect so much more from today/Than just a time between tomorrow and yesterday’ – a call for an extended, weightier present.

Reaction and hardship

Yet, in their heartfelt optimism, ‘Right Here Right Now’ and ‘Blissed’ are one extreme end of a spectrum on Doubt, the most hopeful expressions of a worldview that is rather darker elsewhere. ‘Welcome Back Victoria’ is about the threat of the dead hand of the past, of reversion and return, of time that goes in circles rather than passing thresholds, in which ‘the pendulum swings back’. Edwards rails against the desire to ‘cover up what you don’t understand’, against ‘double standards’.

Margaret Thatcher, deposed as Prime Minister merely two months before Doubt was released, had often famously harked back to Victorian values, and while she generally in referencing to these meant economic values of self-reliance and hard work rather than policing of sexuality, her government had also exhibited reactionary tendencies in that regard too, not least with the passing of Section 28. Edwards, by contrast, was as he sang, ‘a child of the sixties’, a decade that in the year of Doubt’s recording was denounced by Norman Tebbit, that especially socially conservative stalwart of the Thatcher governments, as marked by an ‘insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naïve, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy’.2

‘Two and Two’ persists with this theme, its chorus lambasting the moral certainty of those for whom ‘Two and two always equals four/And life is simple when you’re sure’. Here Edwards’ lyrics at least obliquely reference themes of selfishness, inequality, and unfairness, though not necessarily in a material sense, denouncing those for whom ‘The world’s on someone else’s shoulders’, while decrying the notion that ‘The weak shall inherit the Earth – that’s absurd!’ This in turn sets up ‘Stripped’, ‘Right Here Right Now’s’ antithesis, in which the weight of the moment threatens to become overwhelming: ‘Too much, too much/Let all in, don’t let it all pass you by’. Inspired by their trip to post-revolution Bucharest, and based upon the band’s interpreter’s description of the situation there, its brutal refrain capturing and universalising the social Darwinist ethos of the post-Cold War world:

Everyone is hungry
Everyone needs to know
At the end of it all, you’ve got to get what you want
Or you’ll have nothing else to show

The uncertain present

One of Doubt’s paradoxes is that it is at its most optimistic when considering the multiple possibilities of the moment and most scathing when it rails against binaries and moral certainty; and yet it is elsewhere, and perhaps above all, at least quantitatively, preoccupied with the impossibility of maintaining one’s identity and authenticity. As Edwards subsequently reflected, the album’s very title reflected his own uncertainty that he could produce songs capable of bringing and sustaining commercial success. The early 1990s was a period where bands on independent labels, mixing elements of dance and rock, proved capable of breaching the UK Top 10 singles charts, and Doubt is deeply cognisant of what was at stake.

At times on the album, Edwards seems to be trying to convince himself and others of that which he is deeply unsure of. ‘Trust me, trust me, trust me’, he sings on the opener, a message contradicted by the desperation in his vocal and the repetition of his request. ‘Who am I? Where am I? And why do I feel this way?’, he asks on ‘Who? Where? Why?’, revisiting this theme later on ‘Real Real Real’:

Real, real, real
Do you feel real?
And if so, I’d like to know
How to feel real real
Do you feel real?

The circularity and reproduction inherent in these lyrics, and mirrored in the music, is paradigmatic of Doubt’s postmodernity, deconstructing both the identity of the vocalist and the reality he seems to inhabit.

Again, there is the connection here between the personal and the geopolitical. Jesus Jones becoming big not just in Britain, but also the US, the former Eastern Bloc, and Japan, fitted into a broader story of globalisation. As Edwards sings on ‘International Bright Young Thing’:

Pleeeeeeeease introduce yourself
Let’s shock the world with what we know
Squeeeeeeeze the world
‘Til it’s small enough to join us heel to toe

That sense of the world getting smaller, of the collapsing of different geographic scales into each other is also evoked by the video for the song, with its succession of shots of a spinning globe and footage of different landmarks, while members of the band pogo in and out of view. The constant cycling between the words ‘here’, ‘there’ ‘nowhere’, ‘somewhere’, and ‘anywhere’ in this and other songs encapsulates an absence of set place. Yet this is not a negative, at least not wholly, as framed by Edwards, as liberating as it is bewildering: ‘When I thought I came from nowhere/I came from everywhere instead’.

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

The Three Railway Engines began life in 1942 as a single story about an anthropomorphised engine called Edward, told by its author, the Reverend Wilbert Awdry, to entertain his poorly infant son, Christopher. Christopher enjoyed it, and so his father came up with two more stories, involving two other engines, Gordon and Henry. Awdry was compelled to write the stories down to meet his son’s expectation of fidelity to their details as first told to him, and Wilbert’s wife Margaret thought them good enough to encourage him to try publishing them. Eventually the Leicester-based publisher Edward Ward bought the stories for a fee of £25. Ward decided he wanted to sell them as a single volume of four stories and commissioned Awdry to write an additional story that tied the previous three together, and so the first Railway Series book was published in 1945.1

The book opens with ‘Edward’s Day Out’, which tells the story of an engine named Edward who is picked on by other engines in his shed for being smaller than the others. However, Edward is given a chance to pull a train of coaches and despite being delayed by a missing guard, does well enough that he is promised he can go out again the following day. The second story, ‘Edward and Gordon’, begins with Edward being spoken to condescendingly by a larger engine called Gordon, whom he subsequently sees sulkily pulling a train of trucks while Edward is shunting. Gordon then gets stuck on a hill and Edward is needed to help push him up to the summit. Gordon does not so much as say thank you, but Edward is promised a new coat of paint.

‘The Sad Story of Henry’ sees its eponymous engine character enter a tunnel while pulling a train and refuse to come out of it, for fear the rain would spoil his green paint. At the request of the ‘Fat Director’, who is aboard the train, the other passengers try to pull and then push him out of the tunnel, and then another approaching engine is tasked with pushing him out, but all to no avail. By way of punishment, the rails are removed, and Henry is bricked up in the tunnel.

The fourth and final story that Edmund Ward had specially commissioned Awdry to add is ‘Edward, Gordon and Henry’ and begins with Henry still trapped in the tunnel. Gordon, who is passing with the Express and takes pleasure in taunting Henry as he passes, suddenly suffers a burst safety valve. Edward is called upon to pull the train instead, but lacks the strength to do so. Gordon suggests letting Henry try, and so the Fat Director has the wall knocked down and an apologetic Henry successfully pulls the Express with Edward, before the two help Gordon back to the shed. The story and book ends with the three engines as good friends.

The book was crudely illustrated by the inexperienced William Middleton, based upon the Reverend Awdry’s initial rudimentary drawings. Middleton did a poor job of drawing the engines’ faces, as well as making a number of technical errors. Reginald C. Dalby, recruited to illustrate subsequent Railway Series books, was tasked with redoing Middleton’s illustrations for a new edition of The Three Railway Engines, and his illustrations have been used for all subsequent editions of the book.2

Animating engines

What I find particularly fascinating about The Three Railway Engines is that it is both an integral component of the canon Awdry would develop over the next 25 volumes, and a wholly fledgling piece of semi-accidental, ad hoc worldbuilding that nonetheless set the parameters he thereafter worked within. It is quite literally an act of incarnation, in which he made choices as to how to furnish these machines with spirit, personality, and agency. What did it mean to an Anglican curate for these trains to be alive, possessive of spirit? How did an ardent railway enthusiast square that with his own extensive familiarity with how engines actually worked?

In the first instance, what makes the engines clearly alive is that they express basic emotions in response to their circumstances as engines. In ‘Edward’s Day Out’, ‘Edward had not been out in a long time. He began to feel sad’.3 The other engines are ‘very cross’ when he goes out and they are left behind.4 Edward is ‘tired and happy’ after his sojourn.5 Awdry’s reimagining of the circular smokebox door at the front of a locomotive as a face was an effective visual means of communicating these emotions in a manner readily recognisable to children. This was the case even for Middleton’s mediocre illustrations, and more so in those of Dalby who, while not expert in the technical aspects of drawing engines, was adept at giving them childlike facial expressions.

The engines also express themselves verbally, their modes of speech often identified with the onomatopoeic descriptors of locomotive noises. Their dialogue likewise has the basic, repetitive, rhythmic flow of trains in motion, which is integral to the book’s appeal to young children:

“I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t do it,” puffed Gordon.

“I will do it, I will do it, I will do it,” puffed Edward.

“I can’t do it, I will do it, I can’t do it, I will do it, I can’t do it, I will do it,” they puffed together.6

The sound of the engine, of the Reverend Awdry’s stories, is a basic sonic exemplar of what being alive is, as something akin to being a machine in operation.

Then there is the question of motion and agency. In ‘Edward’s Day Out’, for example, Edward is able to leave the shed because ‘…the fireman lit the fire and made a nice lot of steam. The the driver pulled the lever, and Edward puffed away’.7 The engine’s freedom to move is the gift of railway workers. Yet we also learn that Edward is gentle in approaching the coaches, and is credited with working hard. Gordon, by contrast, is accused by of not trying when he gets stuck on a hill in ‘Edward and Gordon’, while Henry can simply refuse to come out of the tunnel in ‘The Sad Story of Henry’. Mobility is a product of human-engine collaboration, immobility of engines not cooperating, and both are invested with a deep moral meaning.

Developing a taxonomy

This conceptualisation of the relationship between humans and engines would be further fleshed out in later books, but certain aspects are already evident here. Firstly there is something of a parent-child dynamic between them, with drivers and firemen delimiting the scope of engines’ behaviour, facilitating their freedom or denouncing their disobedience. However, the railway staff are also dependent upon these sentient forms of transportation who have an apparent degree of agency in whether or not to move, rendering the relationship more like that between humans and beasts of burden or riding animals. This also hints at another parallel in the human-engine dynamic, between management and labour. Viewing the latter relationship as approximate to parent and child or human and animal implies a steep but benevolent hierarchy that obscures the greater dependence of management on labour than vice versa.

Yet ironically, the most senior character in the book, the Fat Director (subsequently renamed the Fat Controller once the railways had been nationalised) is not yet the kindly but firm authority figure he would later evolve into. He is rather a figure of fun, who appears in the third story as a passenger on Henry’s train and who instructs the other passengers to try and pull and then push Henry out of the tunnel but does not join in, he claims, because his doctor has forbidden him from doing so.

The subcategorisation within the engine characters, such as the distinction between tender and tank engines which would become so important in Troublesome Engines some five years later, as I have written about here, is not yet a factor: the only engines in The Three Railway Engines are tender engines. But there is still an imputed hierarchy based on size, overturned when Edward is taken out of the shed, and later when Gordon’s safety valve bursts and the Fat Director blames it on his size: ‘I never liked these big engines – always going wrong.’8

A final component of the taxonomy in The Three Railway Engines is the rolling stock, animated in a far more limited way than the engines, and nowhere near as developed as would be the case in later books. The coaches, for example, are not individualised and explicitly gendered as in later books, where they are named and personified as work wives attacked to particular engines. Nonetheless, they are alive, possessing the ability to speak and feel:

“Be careful, Edward,” said the coaches, “don't bump and bang us like the other engines do.” So Edward came up to the coaches, very, very gently, and the shunter fastened the coupling.

“Thank you, Edward,” said the coaches. “That was kind, we are glad you are taking us today.”9

Trucks are also sentient and communicative, but clearly of a lower status and less meriting of consideration:

Edward liked shunting. It was fun playing with trucks. He would come up quietly and give them a pull.

“Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!” screamed the trucks. “Whatever is happening?”

Then he would stop and the silly trucks would go bump into each other. “Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!” they cried again.10

Gordon, meanwhile, views pulling goods trains as demeaning, and subsequently blames the trucks, who ‘hold an engine back so’, when he gets stuck on the hill.11 This comes across here as simply an excuse, whereas in later books it becomes clear that trucks can maliciously pull engines back or push them forwards.

A Christian moral world

We also see in The Three Railway Engines the initial construction of a Christian moral world in which virtue is always rewarded and sin punished, but not without the possibility of redemption. This would become the familiar formula of The Railway Series books, but it is worth noting that its initiation was at least partly an accident, in that while much of this was present in the narrative arcs of the individual stories, it was Ward’s decision to compile the stories into a single volume (and ask Awdry to write a fourth story for it) that gave a more systematic, all-encompassing quality to this worldview.

So, in ‘Edward’s Day Out’, Edward is bullied but then taken out of the shed (unlike the other engines who are now jealous of him), is both considerate and hard-working and is rewarded with the promise of being taken out of the shed again – work and its repetition being its own reward! In ‘Edward and Gordon’, Gordon is too proud and gets his comeuppance when he gets stuck on a hill, and then too stubborn to work hard to get over the hill; Edward works hard to the point of exhaustion to help Gordon over the hill, and while does not receive any gratitude from still too-proud Gordon, but is promised a new coat of paint by his driver. In ‘The Sad Story of Henry’, Henry’s vanity is the source of his downfall, which it is indicated (by use of the present tense) is the lasting, justified state of affairs:

So they gave it up. They told Henry, “We shall leave you there for always and always and always.”

They took up the old rails, built a wall in front of him, and cut a new tunnel.

Now Henry can’t get out, and he watches the trains rushing through the new tunnel. He is very sad because no one will ever see his lovely green paint with red stripes again.

But I think he deserved it, don’t you?12

‘Edward, Gordon and Henry’ draws these elements together and builds upon them. Gordon continues to be proud and to mock Henry in his predicament whenever he passes, but it is on one occasion when he is about to do this that his safety valve bursts. Yet Gordon’s offhand suggestion, after Edward cannot pull the Express, that Henry be given the opportunity instead, leads to the latter’s redemption. We are told at the beginning of that story that it was specifically the Fat Director who had had Henry shut up in the tunnel, and it is he who takes up Gordon’s suggestion and asks Henry to help pull the train. Henry and Edward work hard in combination, and when the Fat Director offers Henry a new coat of paint as reward, he chooses blue with red stripes to be like Edward, and subsequently continues to take pride in his appearance – but not so much as to prevent him from doing his work.

The takeaway message of The Three Railway Engines, and indeed of the other entries in the first half of the series (prior to their taking a somewhat darker tone as the threat of dieselisation and the end of steam came into their purview), was that this is a fundamentally providential world, in which good and bad deeds result in fairly swift and wholly just consequences, but in which also no one is irredeemable. This is in part the direct consequence of the engines’ choices and actions, but equally is facilitated and guaranteed by the kindness and authority of adult humans – initially in the personhood of the engines’ drivers and firemen, and then in the nascent higher authority of the Fat Director, who would come to universalise these rules in the running of the railway.

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Content warnings: Transphobia; Child loss; Death.

Spoiler alert: This analysis of the documentary film Next Goal Wins and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece for the One Take section of this newsletter about Next Goal Wins, the Taika Waititi-directed comedy based on the true story of the low-ranking American Samoan men’s football team, and its pursuit of a long-awaited victory:

That film is itself a loose adaptation of an earlier documentary film of the same name, made by Britons Mike Brett and Steve Jamison and released in 2014, which I will be analysing here. Its opening credits comprise footage of the goals from and newspaper headlines about American Samoa’s infamous, world-record international defeat, 31-0 to Australia in 2001. The documentary then switches to the then present-day, with American Samoa still the lowest ranked side in international football, and its current men’s team’s preparations for the football tournament at the 2011 Pacific Games in New Caledonia.

Next Goal Wins introduces the audience to several members of the American Samoan team as they combine training with work and studying. These include the veteran goalkeeper Nicky Salapu, who had played in that 31-0 defeat and has returned from Seattle to join the team again, and young defender Jaiyah Saelua, who is faʻafafine, a third gender present in American Samoan society. We also meet members of the team’s coaching staff, including Ace Lalogafuafua and US-born Larry Mana'o, as well as the head of Football Federation American Samoa (FFAS), Tavita Taumua.

The Pacific Games tournament goes terribly for the American Samoans, who lose all five of their games, conceding 26 goals and scoring none, returning home dishevelled. At this point, the football association seeks outside help, asking the United States Soccer Federation (USSF) to assist it in recruiting a foreign coach ahead of the start of qualifying for the first round of Oceania Football Confederation qualifications for the 2014 World Cup. Their call is answered by Dutch-born, US-based coach Thomas Rongen.

Rongen is demanding to the point of being confrontational, including clashing with Taumua at one point. Yet he succeeds in motivating the players to raise their levels, and in turn develops a strong appreciation of them, their dedication to the game, and American Samoan life and culture more generally. The team is also bolstered by Salapu and others once again returning from the US, as well as new call-ups of American-based players of American Samoan heritage.

The American Samoan team arrive in neighbouring Samoa for the qualifiers. It begins well with the elusive victory they had yearned for, going 2-0 up against Tonga and then holding out for the win despite a late Tongan goal. They also go a goal up against Cook Islands, but concede an own goal and the match finishes in a 1-1 draw. This sets up a dramatic group finale with Samoa, with the winner to go through to the next round of qualifying. With the scores tied at 0-0 late on, American Samoa hit the post; Samoa counterattack and score the winner. The film ends with fond farewells as Rongen returns to the US, along with the American-based players, but the general mood in the party is one of pride at the improvement the team has made, and optimism about its future.

The documentary structure

I only learned of the existence of the documentary Next Goal Wins after seeing the feature film adaptation. I watched the former, therefore, somewhat through the prism of the latter, gleaning from this viewing experience just what was exaggerated and embellished in Waititi’s version. This of course reflects a subconscious presumption on my part, which I had to consciously correct myself on, that what I was watching was somehow an objective rendering of the events as they occurred. A fairly unstylised production like this, with no overarching narration, invites the viewer to assume they are being presented with a window on reality.

Yet it is no such thing: it is a production by British documentary-makers, albeit with the buy-in of the FFAS and the American Samoan team, filmed during two extended visits to the country. It combines fly-on-the-wall filming of the players, as they train and prepare for matches and as they go about their lives outside of football, with match footage, interviews with different players, coaches, and officials, and on-screen captions. Nonetheless, there is a clear broader narrative sweep to this presentation of American Samoan football over a three-month period: a repetition of humiliating defeats, presented with a mixture of humour and pathos; the arrival of an unlikely outsider who helps them transform their fortunes; a surprise success; and an ultimately heroic defeat in which they are moral victors. This is the stuff of many a sports film.

With this comes individual trajectories, which the participants themselves have agency in presenting. Salapu, haunted by his having been in goal for the 31-0 defeat, to the point of continually replaying the match on his PlayStation, finally gains redemption through his part in the team’s change of fortunes. Rongen does not come across here as the broken man in need of rescuing that he is portrayed as in the feature film, but is motivated in part by his own personal tragedy, the loss of his teenage daughter in a car accident some years earlier. He is augmented, if not transformed, by his experiences in American Samoa.

Jaiyah Saelua, meanwhile, presents her own experience as a faʻafafine in American Samoa and men’s football positively. There is none of the jeopardy present in her arc in the feature film, in which she experiences transphobia, including initially from Rongen, and struggles with taking hormone blockers while trying to maintain her performance on the pitch. This difference highlights the greater visibility and negative salience of trans rights issues in the West over the decade since the documentary was made, which the 2023 version used Saelua’s story to comment on.

Depicting American Samoa

Another distinction between the documentary and the feature film, perhaps reflecting the fact that the latter was made by a Pasifika filmmaker, is that the former is less closely focused on American Samoan culture per se. There are frequent clips of the players engaging in traditional dances in training and ahead of matches, as well as a number of scenes of their attending church services. Interviewees frequently reference how much American Samoans value family and love their country. Yet the deeper meanings of those rituals and ideas, conveyed comically but affectionately through intimate dialogue between characters in the 2023 version, is less accessible here.

By contrast, the hardships of American Samoan life are far more explicitly dealt with in the documentary. Along with shots capturing the beauty of the island, particularly when Rongen and Lalogafuafua embark upon a mountain trek, there is also reflection on the 2009 tsunami that killed an estimated 149 American Samoans, and footage of the destruction it caused, including to the football team’s playing facilities. Moreover, the documentary also deals with the lack of economic opportunities in the territory, and the way young islanders are frequently compelled to move overseas in search of better paid work, including joining the US Army. There is a contrast too here with the feature film, which riffs far more light-heartedly on Taumua holding multiple jobs (without explaining why that might be), for example.

This connects to another integral component of American Samoan society as depicted in the documentary, which is the importance of its diaspora, primarily as located in the US. Again, in contrast to the relative insularity of island life shown in the feature film, the documentary stresses the extent to which American Samoans’ lives are often transpacific. This is where their patriotism and pride in playing for their countries most resonates, with players like Salapu and Ramin Ott utterly determined to travel back for international matches despite scant prospect of success. Rawlston Masaniai, a biracial American-born footballer who is recruited by Rongen and qualifies to play for American Samoa by descent, also stresses his strong Pacific islander identity and pride in playing for the land of his grandfather’s birth.

American Samoa’s place in the world

These touches of cultural specificity aside, the American Samoan team is therefore able to stand in for more universal narratives about football, and sport more broadly. It offers the possibility that the underdog, the weakest, can by dint of their strength of character and virtue, overcome apparently far stronger opponents. Related to this, Next Goal Wins also tells a story of devotion to playing the game for the love of it, rather than financial gain.

Yet conversely, this narrative is also the product of deep global inequalities within sport and more broadly, in which American Samoa and other Oceanian states – some of which have not even gained the figment of flag independence – remain rooted to the bottom of the FIFA rankings of international teams. Sport offers the fantasy of all outcomes being possible once the game begins, despite the odds being stacked by dint of the same inequalities of wealth and power that structure international relations more generally.

This is manifest in American Samoa’s need for outside intervention. There is a brief scene early on in the documentary where a local sports psychologist comes into the changing room to give a motivational talk, and its is clearly bunkum (the players’ bemused facial reactions to it shown for humorous effect) – a poor imitation of actual (American) expertise. The ineffectiveness of internal efforts to bring about an improvement in performances are what prompts FFAS to turn to its bigger brother, USAF, to supplement what it lacks domestically.

What it gets is Thomas Rongen, who as the documentary presents it, brings the additional organisational and motivational skills necessary to translate the desire of the players to do well into victory on the pitch. In many ways, it is through Rongen that we see the universally appealing qualities of American Samoan team, and of American Samoa more generally. Their religiosity, for example, comes through most strongly when Rongen, a self-identified atheist, is deeply moved during a church service. In this way, the documentary tacitly reiterates tropes of white saviourism, and to a degree of the Westerner re-finding themselves in a postcolonial society, which the feature film more clearly mocks and subverts.

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Content warnings: Suicide; Violence; Flashing images (in video).

Two-and-a-half years after forming in 1987, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine – a pairing of South Londoners Jim ‘Jim Bob’ Morrison and Les ‘Fruitbat’ Carter – released their debut album, 101 Damnations, on independent label Big Cat Records in January 1990. It begins with ‘The Road to Domestos’: a short recording of a choir singing the hymn ‘Love Divine, All Loves Excelling’, ending with machine gun fire. Then comes the dramatic A Wonderful Life-inspired, suicide-themed ‘Every Time a Church Bell Rings’, followed by the pulsating ‘Twenty-Four Minutes to Tulse Hill’, in which Jim Bob delivers an absurdist, scattergun narration of a train journey through South London.

Track four is ‘An All American National Sport’, a first-person account of a homeless man subjected to a horrific and senseless arson attack. The fifth song, ‘Sheriff Fatman’ (see below), is one of the band’s signature songs, about a monstrous slum landlord; released as a single two months earlier, it would give them their first UK Top 40 hit on reissue in 1991. Side one concludes with the waltzing ‘Taking of Peckham 123’, detailing the experience of violence and crime in a high rise block of flats.

Side two commences with a surging instrumental, ‘Crimestoppers A’ Go Go’, while ‘Good Grief Charlie Brown’ is about Jim Bob’s parents’ divorce, sung almost as a dialogue with his father. ‘Midnight on the Murder Mile’ is a surreal account of being assaulted while walking home to Crystal Palace. The penultimate ‘A Perfect Day to Drop the Bomb’ furiously and paranoidly links urban violence with nuclear warfare. The album’s closer, ‘G. I. Blues’, drops the tempo significantly, sung from the perspective of an emaciated, traumatised veteran; it builds to a rousing finale, before concluding with ‘Dixie’ played on a fairground organ.

The Carter USM style

Carter USM’s fusion of cheap electropop and squalling guitar sounds something like an unlikely fusion of Soft Cell with The Clash. The pace on several of the songs is frenetic throughout (‘Twenty-Four Minutes to Tulse Hill’, ‘Midnight on the Murder Mile’); occasionally there is a slower build-up to a more furious crescendo, as with ‘Every Time a Church Bell Rings’ and ‘An All American National Sport’. The centrepieces of each side – ‘Sheriff Fatman’ and ‘Good Grief Charlie Brown’ – are musically upbeat pop songs that belie their darker lyrical themes. The pace only sustainedly drops on each side’s closer, ‘The Taking of Peckham 123’ and ‘G.I. Blues’.

Combined with this is an element that is much more of its time: the use of samples. Sampling had become widespread in hip-hop and dance music during the 1980s, and towards the end of the decade Carter USM and indie peers such as Pop Will Eat Itself and Jesus Jones had began to integrate it into guitar rock as well. Carter USM’s approach was decidedly low budget and opportunistic, using excerpts of older songs and film soundtracks, as well as recording sound from real-life settings (such as station announcements on ‘Twenty-Four Minutes to Tulse Hill’). These were used not to build songs around, so much as to densify the sonic collage, fleshing out the album’s aural evocation of a chaotic, disorientating urban and media environment.

This was very much of a piece with the album’s lyrical style. I will discuss their thematic dimensions, and more specifically their twin fixations of South London life and American popular culture, further below. To comment firstly on form, however, Jim Bob’s freeform wordplay relied on extensive usage of puns (including the album title and many of the song titles too), composition of lists, and surreal analogies. There is a lineage in approach that can be traced back to Elvis Costello and further to Bob Dylan, whose ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ Jim Bob directly quotes on ‘Twenty-Four Minutes to Tulse Hill’.

Yet there is also a shift. Costello frequently acknowledged his own debts to musical predecessors – such as openly conceding that his song ‘Pump It Up’ also imitated ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ – and regularly directly covered their songs and recorded new music with them, a modernist project of canon-building and musical progress. On the far more postmodern 101 Damnations, quotation is both more explicit and yet fundamentally empties those references – and the world they inhabit here – of positive value.

South London nightmares

That world is to a large degree a nightmarish vision of South London at the tail end of Thatcherism, epitomised in punning titles about districts like Tulse Hill and Peckham. These played on song and film titles respectively (namely Gene Pitney’s 1963 hit ‘Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa’, and 1974 crime drama The Taking of Pelham One Two Three). Two years after 101 Damnations, the band would have their only UK top ten hit with ‘The Only Living Boy in New Cross’, which similarly adapted the title of Simon & Garfunkel’s 1970 song ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’. In 1994, historian Roy Porter, himself originally from New Cross, wrote about what had become of that district in the preface to his book London: A Social History:

New Cross Road, which once wore an air of faded early Victorian elegance, is now a ceaseless roar of lorries hurtling down to the Channel ports. The big houses near the Marquis of Granby pub, once admired, are slums, squats or boarded-up, like many of the shops. Dossers and drunks litter the gardens, and some students of mine were mugged there last year. South London has gained a mean name for drug-dealing, racial violence, gangland crime and contract killing.1

101 Damnations shares these principal concerns with economic, physical, and social decline, amid the shrinkage of both the city’s industrial economy and the fraying of Britain’s social safety net. On the final verse of ‘Every Time a Church Bell Rings’, Jim Bob’s narrator frames his own suicidal inclinations in the context of unemployment and poverty:

The TV repossessed, and so
I tune in to the radio
Where the DJ’s playing the same old songs
To whistle while you’re signing on

‘An All American National Sport’, meanwhile, opens with the lines ‘I unpacked my troubles from an old Safeway’s bag/Underneath Cardboard City lights’, sarcastically using an optimistic First World War marching song to capture the peripatetic experience of homelessness, and conflating the Carboard City encampment that grew up in Waterloo during the 1980s with Charlie Chaplin’s 1931 film about a tramp. ‘Sheriff Fatman’ embodies the housing crisis in the monstrous figure of its titular character, ‘At six-foot-six and a hundred tonnes/The undisputed king of the slums’. While evoking earlier criminal landlords such as Nicholas van Hoogstraten and Peter Rachman, the song also locates him squarely in the context of the current urban and political environment:

Fatman’s got something to sell
To the capital’s homeless
And a Crossroads Motel2
For the no fixed aboders

Carter USM also explicitly link the absence of social and housing security with that of personal security, against a real-life backdrop of rising rates of violent crime. Violence in this set of songs is spontaneous, ubiquitous, and often motiveless, its victims particularly vulnerable, its perpetrators obscure or surreal. ‘These two characters’, who supply the homeless narrator of ‘An All American National Sport’ with food and cigarettes, turn on him in the song’s terrifying finale:

And those two scumbags had come back
With some matches and some petrol
Set fire to my bed and left me burning…
In Hell!

Similarly, ‘The Taking of Peckham 123’ addresses the resident of a block of flats, remarking ‘And the hands that do the dishes feel as soft as your face/As they rob you of your pension and they ransack your place’. In ‘Midnight on the Murder Mile’, about a notorious stretch of road between West Norwood and Crystal Palace, the narrator is ‘stitched up by the Boys Brigade, and I was beaten to a pulp’.

America, consumerism, religion, and disillusionment

Carter USM’s lyrics paint a picture of South London life via a mediascape that is overwhelmingly American in origin. The joke often lies in namechecking local place names and everyday life in pastiches of popular cultural texts from the other side of the Atlantic, at once familiar and yet exotic. Tulse Hill transplanted for Tulsa (and a train ride for a road trip). Jim Bob using the Peanuts cartoon character Charlie Brown as autobiographical vehicle for exploring his own childhood experiences. These citations signal excitement, progress, emotion, and above all the promise of fulfilment through consumption. Yet juxtaposing them with lyrical accounts of contemporary South London, delivered in a perpetually sneering vocal style, makes it clear that those promises are hollow, made already broken.

Moreover, American popular culture is directly implicated in the structural and kinetic violence 101 Damnations is centrally concerned with. It also connects the overseas military adventurism of the Cold War with the deteriorating living conditions of the neoliberal city, a shared legacy of Thatcherism and Reaganomics. This is especially evident in the album’s final two songs. ‘A Perfect Day to Drop the Bomb’ cribs the famed refrain from New York hip-hop act Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 track, ‘The Message’: ‘Don’t push me cos I’m close to the edge/I’m trying not to lose my head’. The next verse concludes with the words: ‘Say, “War”/Everybody say, “Radiation”/Murder, inner city deprivation’.

The last song, ‘G. I. Blues’, takes its title from the 1960 Elvis Presley film of the same name, in which Presley played an American soldier serving in West Germany, shortly after he had himself finished his national service there. Yet the lyrics are based on 1978’s The Deer Hunter, and its depiction of physically and psychologically Vietnam War veterans; the youthful ‘blues’ of frustrated adolescent musical and romantic ambitions now a euphemism for PTSD. Its repeated closing refrain, mimicking ‘Dixie’, urges Bob Hope and Ronald Reagan, among others, to ‘Look away’. This highlights the historical and contemporary connections between American popular culture and militarism, Dixie having been a popular American Civil War anthem, while Hope regularly performed for serving American troops during his career, including in Vietnam, and hawkish President Ronald Reagan was previously a Hollywood actor.

There is a conjunction here with another common reference point on 101 Damnations, that of formal Christianity. The title of hymnal opener ‘Road to Domestos’ takes the site of the Apostle Paul’s conversion, and replaces the ancient Syrian city with a popular brand of domestic bleach. On ‘Every Time a Church Bell Rings’, the ringing bell and angel gaining wings signifies another suicide, while ‘Good Grief Charlie Brown’ concludes with Jim Bob reciting marriage vows, having detailed the breakup of his parents’ marriage. Both ‘The Taking of Peckham 123’ and ‘Midnight on the Murder Mile’ imagine victims of violence encountering Jesus on the threshold of death, the latter via public telephone:

Long distance information3, get me Jesus on the line
I need communion, confirmation, and absolution for my crimes
I need a character witness, Jesus, I think I’m about to die
I saw my whole life pass before me when the night bus passed me by

As with consumerism and American popular culture, religious rituals are invoked on 101 Damnations only to be emptied of their power to promise something better; recurring at different points in the lifecycle, but with no genuine prospect of redemption for the album’s cast of sinners and sinned against, not for South London.

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Content warnings: Homophobia; Homophobic violence; HIV and AIDS.

Spoiler alert: This analysis of the film Pride and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.

Based on historical events, Pride commences with the 1984 Gay Pride march in London, at which viewers are introduced to several characters (mostly based on real-life figures): outgoing Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer); his more reserved best friend Mike Jackson (Joseph Gilgun); feisty Steph Chambers (Faye Marsay); suburban student, Joe ‘Bromley’ Cooper (George McKay), who hides his sexuality from his family; and slightly older couple Gethin Roberts (Andrew Scott) and Jonathan Blake (Dominic West). Under Mark’s leadership, they form the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) group out of sympathy for mineworkers who have commenced an all-out strike against planned pit closures, and whom they see as a fellow oppressed group.

LGSM begin raising money to support miners and their families in the Welsh village of Onllwyn, in Dulais. Upon first visiting Onllwyn, they receive an initially cautious but eventually hugely warm welcome. Some of the striking miners, union leader Dai Donovan (Paddy Considine), and women’s support group members like Hefina Headon (Imelda Staunton) and Siân James (Jessica Gunning) in turn visit the LGSM members in London for a fundraising concert (see below). Despite LGSM’s continued efforts and visits, the strike fails, and the miners eventually return to work.

Back in London, Gethin is the victim of a homophobic attack, Joe’s family discover the truth about his sexuality, and Mark becomes temporarily estranged from the rest of the group after discovering he is HIV positive. Nonetheless, the film ends on an upbeat note, with the Onllwyn miners returning to London to participate in the 1985 Pride march in a show of solidarity with the gay community. A postscript notifies viewers about the subsequent fates of the characters, including Mark’s death two years later from AIDS-related pneumonia.

Depicting communities

As with Made in Dagenham, which I recently covered for this section of the newsletter, Pride centred on an ensemble cast. The closest it has to a protagonist is Mark Ashton, but Schnetzer was not one of the film’s better-known actors at the time and billed below far more established character actors such as Imelda Staunton and Bill Nighy (as retired miner Cliff Barry). Unlike Made in Dagenham, however, which presents a uniform community existing in essentially benevolent national conditions, Pride depicts an intolerant and divided 1980s Britain.

The gay community in the film are tightknit outsiders, defiant in the face of persistent hostility. They are geographically diverse in origin – Mark from Northern Ireland, Mike from Accrington, Gethin from Rhyl – but now reside in rundown inner London: a world of stripped-down bedsits and nightclubs, striking haircuts, and leather clothing, accompanied by an electropop-laden soundtrack. They subtly or overtly defy normative gender roles: the men are either flamboyant or gentle, the women militant.

Onllwyn’s mining community, by contrast, is traditional, homogeneous, and intimate; geographically rooted within a village context, mobilised by a crisis to establish institutions to safeguard its welfare, within which its natural leaders assume positions of authority. Yet again, in this historical context, the struggle against social and economic oblivion constitutes a harsh new reality.

Sexuality and class

Pride for the most part treats sexuality and class as mutually distinctive, comparable categories. Thus, the gay community in Pride is portrayed as an unclassed subculture: with a few exceptions, its members’ occupations and socioeconomic statuses are not indicated. Their lifestyles are rather defined by an absence of paid work, and participation instead in both political activism and hedonistic leisure. By contrast, the Onllwyn community were defined entirely by occupation and socioeconomic status, although its heteronormativity is destabilised by the strike and encounter with LGSM. The village’s women are shown taking on increasingly public leadership roles, while Cliff quietly reveals towards the end of the film that he is himself gay.

Pride therefore takes a pluralistic view of society as composed of distinct communities displaying intra- and inter-group solidarity against common adversaries. It also somewhat elides over the causes of the miners’ strike and the reasons LGSM supported it. Ashton’s real-life background in the Young Communist League, for example, was omitted from the film. Rather, when explaining why he thinks the gay community should support the miners, he reels off a list of ‘who hates the miners’: Thatcher, the police, the tabloid press. By focusing merely on its authoritarian approach to ‘enemies within’ as common denominator, the film avoids exploring Thatcherism’s complementary and contradictory economically liberal and socially conservative elements.

The mining community’s attitude to their gay allies, meanwhile, is depicted as wary, then intrigued, and finally wholly accepting. The only significant characters depicted as homophobic in the film are Cliff’s sister-in-law Maureen Barry (Lisa Palfrey) – who affects a respectability that sets her apart from the rest of the community – and her two sons, and Joe’s middle-class family. For the most part, the threats to both the gay and mining communities are anonymous or scarcely seen, but ominously present: Thatcher, through a series of televised clips shown throughout the film; the police; Gethin’s assailant; and AIDS, the implications of which are increasingly emphasised during the second half of the film.

An optimistic denouement

The film’s historical context was unpromising for a happy ending, given continuing contemporary hostile public attitudes to homosexuality, rising numbers of deaths from AIDS, and Section 28 (which banned local authorities from ‘promotion of sexuality), as well as of course the miners’ defeat. There could be no remaking of the nation in the present or near future according to the depicted communities’ values. Nonetheless, the film manages to end on an upbeat note for two reasons. Firstly, it relegates the end of the miners’ strike to a relatively brief scene in which Joe and Mark watch the miners returning to work, before thereafter focusing on the LGSM members’ lives. The strike is in truth somewhat peripheral to Pride’s primary focus on gay and lesbian support for and acceptance by the miners.

Culminating with a Pride march led by LGSM and miners, the film ultimately celebrates the indefatigability of communal spirit in adversity and offers an optimistic conclusion that signals to the audience that they live in a more enlightened era. Pride’s conclusion intersperses shots of its principal characters with written postscript. This includes telling viewers that National Union of Mineworkers’ support helped enshrine gay and lesbian rights in Labour manifestos from 1985 – offering a promise of more liberal future political leadership. In the contemporary context, of rapid recent growth in acceptance of gay rights and legalisation of gay marriage, a narrative of national progress could be presented and presumed. The film could also demonise Thatcher without addressing her economic legacy for Onllwyn or Britain.

The contrasting implications of AIDS for LGSM members are also treated in line with the film’s dominant ideological logics. The postscript notes that Jonathan, the second ever person in the UK to be diagnosed as HIV-positive, recently celebrated his 65^th birthday. By contrast, it forewarns of Mark’s death at the age of 27. This offers a final moment of poignancy, without distracting from Mark’s evident joy and triumph on-screen. Audience understanding of Jonathan’s and Mark’s very different fates is underpinned by knowledge of continuing advancements in HIV and AIDS treatment. Pride extracts pathos from its depiction of the epidemic while chronologically bounding it as something people died from (rather than lived with) within that period.

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Content warnings: Suicide; Domestic violence.

Spoiler alert: This analysis of the film Made in Dagenham and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.

Based on real events that occurred in 1968, Made in Dagenham introduces its audience to an intergenerational group of women sewing machinists at Ford’s Dagenham factory on the outskirts of London. They include Rita O’Grady (Sally Hawkins), whose husband Eddie (Daniel Mays) also works for Ford; middle-aged Connie (Geraldine James), married to traumatised RAF veteran George (Roger Lloyd Pack), and the younger Brenda (Andrea Riseborough) and Sandra (Jaime Winstone). The apparently contented suburban working-class community presented is disrupted by a dispute over the machinists’ pay under Ford’s new grading system, which they feel underestimates the skill that their work involves, on the basis of their gender.

With neither Ford nor their union’s senior officials taking their complaint seriously, Rita leads her co-workers out on strike and begins advocating for women’s equal pay, with their demonstrations capturing national media attention. Though Eddie and the other male workers are initially supportive, the strike leads to car production ceasing and their being temporarily laid off. The resulting financial hardship and Rita’s newfound fame placed strain on their marriage, while tragedy also strikes Connie when George commits suicide. The standoff over the wage dispute is ultimately resolved when employment secretary Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson) intervenes, securing the women an immediate pay rise and promising equal pay legislation, duly introduced in 1970.

Portraying community

Though Sally Hawkins, fresh from her acclaimed performance in Mike Leigh’s Happy Go Lucky, received top billing among the cast of Made in Dagenham, it featured several other notable actors (including the aforementioned Richardson). Her character in the film is likewise a first among equals, a budding communal figurehead rather than sole protagonist. Her community is relatively affluent, but still engaged in working-class collective forms of leisure. The conflict at the heart of the movie divides this community. It is essentially between female factory workers and male management, but the position of working-class men in the dispute is ambiguous. The union leadership patronise the women strikers, while the support of male factory workers cools as the strike goes on.

Gender relations within the working class are represented in microcosm by Rita and Eddie: a companionate marriage of two working parents, but with the latter taking the former slightly for granted. This is encapsulated by an exchange between them as Rita gets ready to head off for a union conference, against Eddie’s will (depicted in the clip above). When Eddie protests that he is a good husband because he has never cheated on or struck his wife, Rita retorts that this was no less than ought to be expected from him and relates it to the strike: ‘It ain’t about us gettin’ special treatment...It’s been about fairness.’ Eddie subsequently follows Rita to the conference for a reconciliation; again, this scene has a wider symbolism, coinciding with the union delegates opting to back the sewing machinists’ cause.

Uniting across class and gender lines

In addition, the strikers succeeded in attaining solidarity with women from other classes. Rita strikes up a friendship with Lisa (Rosamund Pike), the wife of one of the managers at Ford (Rupert Graves), and whose son attends the same school as Lisa’s. The two share a sense of being degraded because of gender sex that transcends class boundaries. Lisa encourages Rita to persist with the strike, explaining that despite having a first-class honours degree, she is treated like a fool by her husband.

Barbara Castle, meanwhile, is also shown throughout the film as sympathetic to the striking women. She relates their situation to her own when passionately defending the justness of equal pay to her sceptical undersecretaries, whom she then accuses of having chauvinistically patronised her as well. Castle’s introduction of equal pay legislation is not only a gesture of female solidarity, but also of national rapprochement, on women’s terms.

In her earlier speech at the union conference, Rita unites the women’s cause with that of both the working class and of the country. Recalling the story of the late George’s war service, she queries: ‘When did we, in this country, start bein’ happy, to do nothin’? On what day did we decide we had no duty to fairness no more?’ Calling for equal pay for women, she tells delegates, ‘We are the working classes. The men and the women. We are the furnace which fires the world and without us no-body earns tuppence ha’penny!’ Met with rapturous applause, Rita’s speech reframes the battle for equal pay not as divisive but rather a cause to unify around, comparing it to the Second World War itself.

Nostalgia and deindustrialisation

The conflation of nationhood with a romanticised working class and their wartime role is implicitly underpinned by the uniform whiteness of the film’s cast, which was also the tacit racial base of the post-war social contract. Made in Dagenham’s popular cultural references likewise evoke both era and the social background of its characters. Its soundtrack features a combination of 1960s soul, reggae, and beat groups, while the muted décor of the O’Gradies’ apartment evokes modest contemporary working-class consumption.

Fittingly, the film’s most threatening villain, Robert Tooley (Richard Schiff), is not British, but an American – a senior Ford official sent over to deal with the strike, sharp and ruthless where his British subordinates are incompetent and stubborn. He threatens Castle that continued industrial unrest would convince Ford to move its car manufacturing operations elsewhere – a harbinger of deindustrialisation amid globalisation, and forewarning of the fragility of the bases of British social democracy.

Yet it is a threat not realised within the film itself: Castle calls his bluff, accedes to the sewing machinists’ demands, and harmony is restored. A postscript notifies the audience about the passing of the 1970 Equal Pay Act; the ensuing final scene shows male and female Ford workers cycling to the factory, deliberately mirroring a similar scene at the start of the film.

Made in Dagenham is on the one hand an optimistic narrative of progress: assumed victory in the fight for women’s equality implies a better, enlightened present. On the other, it also presents its working-class community and their national social contract as timeless, having ridden through the crises that the film manifests. In doing so, it simultaneously denies the reality of the post-Thatcherite settlement, including a shrunken, deunionised manufacturing class.

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Content warnings: Alcoholism; Death; Bereavement; Child abuse.

Spoiler alert: This analysis of the film Saving Mr. Banks and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.

Saving Mr. Banks depicts the strained relationship between P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson), author of the Mary Poppins book series, on the one hand, and Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) and his colleagues at Disney Studios on the other. It is also about P. L. Travers’ own relationship with her father, Travers Goff (Colin Farrell), who died when she was a child.

In 1961, the financially struggling, London-based author is convinced by her long-suffering publisher Diarmuid Russell (Ronan Vibert) to accept Disney’s invitation to travel to Los Angeles and collaborate in the cinematic adaptation of her Mary Poppins stories. Travers remains deeply sceptical about the project and repeatedly clashes with screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and song-writing brothers Richard M. (Jason Schwartzman) and Robert B. (B. J. Novak) Sherman. She is nonetheless gradually won over by her kindly chauffer Ralph (Paul Giamatti) and by Walt Disney himself, and his creative vision. However, her mood is soured by the proposed inclusion of an animated sequence in the film, which she had been explicitly promised would not occur; she refuses to go ahead with the adaptation, and returns to London.

The relaying of these events intersects with scenes from P. L. Travers’ childhood in early twentieth-century Australia. Aged seven, the author, real name Helen Goff (Annie Rose Buckley), moves with her parents and younger sister to Allora in Queensland. Travers Goff is a loving father with a penchant for imaginative play, but struggles with the strains of his job as a bank manager, and with worsening alcoholism, placing great strain on Helen’s mother, Margaret (Ruth Wilson). Helen is left heartbroken when her father subsequently succumbs to tuberculosis.

Back in the 1960s, Walt Disney learns following P. L. Travers’ departure about her earlier life, and realises that her fastidiousness about details in the Mary Poppins film owes to how her books draw on her own experiences. This includes her having based the character of George Banks, father of the two children Mary Poppins is nanny to, on her own father. He travels over to London and persuades her that he can bring her stories to life on screen in a manner befitting the original material. When the film is finished, Disney does not invite P. L. Travers to its premiere in Los Angeles, fearing what her public reaction to it might be; but she shows up at the event anyway, watches the film for the first time, and is visibly moved.

The adaptation process

This is a film about the making of a film, and more specifically about adaptation from book to film. It sets out a contest over a piece of intellectual property, in which the legal power lies with P. L. Travers and the commercial power with Disney and his company. Yet while this balance of forces is the basis of Saving Mr. Banks’ central scenario, the question of whether the film will or will not be made, we already know that the answer is in the affirmative. Rather, the film’s meditation is on who morally owns a story and its subject matter: the author, or their readers?

We come to understand just how and why P. L. Travers sets so much store by the fixed nature of her characters and stories as she created them and insists on fidelity to those, even as it manifests in her most unreasonable behaviour. Yet her cynicism is not justified: Disney and his staff are not blasphemers, but in spirit faithful interpreters and proselytisers. They are on the side of the children who make up her stories’ existing and potential audience, epitomised by Walt Disney’s longstanding promise to his own daughters to make a Mary Poppins film. Cinema is a medium principally for deepening and extending her stories’ connection.

The literature-cinema relationship stands for a range of other connected apparent oppositions. Literature connotes Britain, which connotes the past, the Edwardian London being reconjured in the Mary Poppins film, which P. L. Travers is seemingly a relic of. Cinema means America, which means the present and future, the sunlit Los Angeles of the 1960s and its tourist attractions, including Disneyland itself. P. L. Travers sees this world as anathema to what she and her books stand for, telling Disney’s filmmaking team that ‘unlike yourself, Mary Poppins is the very enemy of whimsy and sentiment’, deriding their script as ‘flim-flam’, lacking in ‘reality’ and ‘gravitas’. The challenge for Walt Disney is to persuade her of his sincerity, and of the worthiness of America and cinema as heir to Britain’s literary heritage.

Authorhood, autobiography, and trauma

However, there is a third space and time at play here, which is Allora, Queensland, in the 1900s. It is a world that climatically is far closer to California than Britain, and whose semi-rural settler-colonial promise is akin to that which the American West would have held at the same time. P. L. Travers speaks of Mary Poppins and the rest of her cast of characters as if they were living, breathing inhabitants of a present reality, but ‘P. L. Travers’ is herself an invention of Australian Helen Goff. This diminishes the gap between her and the alleged American pretension she is so critical of, particularly once Walt Disney learns the truth.

Saving Mr. Banks does this not to expose P. L. Travers as a hypocrite, nor to reject the notion of authenticity entirely. Rather, it does so to break down the gap between fiction and reality, to offer the former as a light shone upon the latter. We realise as the film progresses the extent of the autobiographical elements of her writing. If P. L. Travers closely resembles Mary Poppins in her cultivated propriety and etiquette, it is because she based both her authorly persona and most famous creation on her mother’s sister, Helen Morehead (Rachel Griffiths), who came to stay with the Goff family when Travers Goff fell ill. She is particularly concerned that, whatever his failings, Mr Banks is never depicted as cruel, because he embodies her own father.

The film’s split-time structure captures the traumatic nature of these childhood experiences. It suggests that P. L. Travers continues to live them, to witness her father’s alcoholism and death, as she wrangles with Walt Disney and his staff and the adaptation process. Her writing demonstrates a yearning to redeem not life itself, but the people she has loved and set disappointed hopes by. She tells the Sherman brothers that Mary Poppins ‘doesn’t sugar coat the darkness in the world that these children will eventually, inevitably come to know’. This is in contrast with her own Aunt Helen, who had promised her when she arrived at the Goff family home in Allora that she would help restore her father back to health.

The Disney mythos

Walt Disney changes P. L. Travers’s mind about both himself and the film by confiding in her with a difficult memory from his own childhood: of his hard-headed businessman father making him deliver newspapers in severe winter conditions in Kansas City, under threat of corporal punishment. It is a story very different from the artifice she perceives and resents in California, an American version of the realness she values. Yet he tells it to her to stress the need for both of them to break the cycle of remembering their pasts in that way. ‘Now we all have our sad tales, but don’t you want to finish the story? Let it all go and have a life that isn’t dictated by the past?’

For Walt Disney, the beauty of fantasy is not escapism but the opportunity for salvation, to transform the world in the future rather than conceal its past, as he implies that she has done. His studio’s adaptation of her work, with its added musical numbers and animated sequences, can offer the catharsis she craves.

In movie houses all over the world, in the eyes and heads of my kids and other kids, and mothers and fathers for generations to come, George Banks will be honoured. George Banks will be redeemed. George Banks, and all that he stands for, will be saved. Now maybe not in life, but in imagination. Because that’s what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instil hope again and again and again.

This speech thus identifies the continuity between their craft, across the respective media they work in. Walt Disney’s new understanding with P. L. Travers establishes American culture as a legitimate successor to Britain’s, and cinema as a legitimate successor to literature.

Walt Disney Pictures did not initiate the making of Saving Mr. Banks, which originated with Australian producer Ian Collie in the early 2000s. It only came to the studio – which had hitherto steered clear of making films representing its own famous, divisive founder – once it was already scripted, leaving Disney with the choice of killing the production or overseeing it, and opting for the latter. Nonetheless, it ought to be seen as part of a more reflective turn from Disney over the past decade or so. The company has reasserted its sense of ownership over its own canon through a sequence of live-action remakes of animated films, and more recently through its centenary celebrations, which strongly informed the production of its 2023 animated movie Wish, as I have written about elsewhere.

Saving Mr. Banks is a particularly explicit example of this tendency. It is a film about making a film, conscious of the multiple layers of mythmaking that this entails and that it is engaged in. Yet it does so not for the purpose of simply deconstructing the filmmaking process, or Disney’s canon, but rather finding warmth and value, and renewed purpose, in revisiting them.

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Please note: This analysis of the film A Family Affair and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.

Made by MGM, A Family Affair focuses on the tribulations of James K. Hardy (Lionel Barrymore), a district judge based in the fictional Midwestern town of Carvel. Judge Hardy lives with his wife Emily (Spring Byington), sister-in-law Milly (Sara Haden), and teenage son Andy (Mickey Rooney). He has two adult daughters as well: returning college student Marion (Cecilia Parker), and eldest child Joan (Jill Haydon). The Judge’s problems begin when he places a temporary injunction on plans to build an aqueduct, which will transport water from Carvel to a growing nearby city, so that he can ensure its propriety before work on it begins.

This decision incurs the wrath of contractor Hoyt Wells (Selmer Jackson), and of local newspaper The Carvel Star and its publisher Frank Redmond (Charley Grapewin). The newspaper quickly turns local public opinion against Hardy for blocking so lucrative a project. Wells and Redmond also seek to blackmail Judge Hardy, conspiring to block his re-nomination as district judge. They later threaten to publish allegations about a roadhouse tryst involving Joan, which has led to her estrangement from her husband, Bill Martin (Allen Vincent), whose child she is secretly pregnant with. At the same time, Judge Hardy also faces fierce objection from Marion, whose fiancée Wayne Trent (Eric Linden) is employed to work on the aqueduct as a civil engineer.

Judge Hardy, however, successfully convinces Bill of Joan’s fidelity, and to attend the nomination meeting with him, at which Bill publicly denies rumours of their impending divorce. The Judge then reveals that the aqueduct project has been facilitated by an enabling act that would allow the neighbouring city to commandeer as much of Carvel’s river and surrounding valleys as it demands, resulting in the town’s inevitable ruin; and that he has therefore had the act struck down as unconstitutional. A Family Affair ends with Hardy being subsequently renominated as district judge by universal acclaim, before being reunited with his watching family. He also promises Wayne that a new enabling act will be passed, allowing an aqueduct to be built, but this time making sure Carvel gets ‘a square deal’.

Championing classical jurisprudence

Judge Hardy embodies certain classical ideas about jurisprudence that had long been dominant in the American legal system, including emphases on abstract, universal concepts, on broad public interest over faction, and on due process. These were ideas that came increasingly under attack during the interwar period, in the face of the challenges of regulating an increasingly complex economic and the clear existence of competing interests within them that judges themselves were hardly detached from.1 Yet A Family Affair ultimately serves as a re-endorsement of classical jurisprudence and its modern relevance.

Hardy stubbornly insists throughout the film, on thoroughly investigating the aqueduct project even when the man who initially brought the injunction he granted is persuaded by Hoyt Wells to drop it. He downplays his own agency in taking this decision, insisting that it is ‘The Law’ that demands it. Yet, at the same time, he also vigorously insists on his right to decide what the law means, citing his unblemished record (the Supreme Court having never reversed any of his decisions) and the sanctity of his office. He rejects challenges to this authority from not just private interests and actors, but also apparent expressions of the local general will.

As the film progresses, however, the audience are increasingly shown the virtuousness that underpins the Judge’s curmudgeonly procedural puritanism. This comes through in particular in his discussions with his children. When Andy bluntly asks his father, ‘Are you right or wrong?’, Judge Hardy refers him to a book passage that turns out to be his oath of office, a near sacred statement of commitment that nodded to both God and patriotism. And indeed, providence bears out his faith in his course of action, as the rottenness of the aqueduct project is eventually revealed through it.

Politics, commerce, and small town life

While Carvel, a picturesque town of 25,000 inhabitants, was intended to stand in for Middle America, Family Affair does not represent it particularly closely or warmly. Most of the film’s action, prior to the denouement, occurs in the Judge’s home or office, at a remove from broader public space. Inasmuch as we are given a concrete sense of what Carvel is like, it is through its turning against Hardy after his years of service, standing in for the fickleness and tyranny of majority opinion.

This corruption of the small town ideal owes to the film’s antagonists, Wells and Richmond. While they frequently ventriloquise Carvel’s collective aspirations of economic progress, Wells in particular is simultaneously an insider and outsider figure, who links Carvel to the anonymous neighbouring metropolis. He and Richmond are also shown to be manipulating the local judicial nomination process, accompanied by ominous references to the ‘political machine’ – a term that carried particular connotations with high-profile municipal malpractice in cities like New York.2

A Family Affair’s ambiguous relationship with politics is encapsulated by its climax at the renomination meeting, demonstrating both the vibrancy of the democratic process, and its potential manipulation by Wells, Richmond, and their henchmen. The ensuing revelations about the aqueduct project demonstrate how the intersection between legislation, big business, and urbanisation can rob ordinary, small-town Americans of their livelihoods. Yet in this process of truth-telling, Judge Hardy is also able to make clear the conflict between small towns’ and big cities’ interests, and between those of economic and political elites and the broader public. In doing so, he exhibits the capacity of the virtuous public servant to win out through democratic politics, and for government to be recaptured to work on the people’s behalf.

Restoring benign patriarchy

James Hardy’s position as local judge is intertwined with and partly mirrored by his role as family patriarch. As in his professional life, he must apply long-cherished principles in order to guide his offspring in a seemingly rapidly changing world. A Family Affair at times explicitly humorously makes the point that good judging is tantamount to good parenting, in a manner that reinforces its more subtle articulation throughout the film. At the same time time, the Hardy household is the principal conduit through which the Judge is plugged into Carvel’s social life, and also promises a retreat from its political struggles.

However, the proximity of the Hardies’ private lives to Carvel’s public sphere also menaces their wellbeing. Joan’s and Bill’s marriage is wrecked in its less salubrious locales, for example, and the local press’s interest threatens to destroy her reputation. The film is heavily concerned more generally with drastic economic and cultural change eroding America’s societal and moral fabric. Much of this is framed through the comparison and relationship between generations. Judge Hardy’s conflict in the film with Marion raises questions of the wisdom of his faith in timeless values like patience and duty, when these can no longer deliver his children the peace and security that he and Emily have enjoyed.

Yet when those values win out in A Family Affair’s finale, they not only alleviate the Judge’s professional difficulties, but also his family’s various personal crises. Through helping his father-in-law to expose the aqueduct project, Bill is reunited with Joan and their unborn child. The Judge’s final assurance to Wayne that the aqueduct project would proceed on a sounder basis also answers Marion’s earlier challenge to him. Through steadfast application of classical jurisprudence, he enables the family unit to be reintegrated and reproduced, and for conventional gender roles within it to be restored.

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.

Spoiler alert: This analysis of the film A Family Affair and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.

Passport to Pimlico, with its famed scenario of an inner London neighbourhood suddenly finding itself independent from the rest of Britain, is today remembered as a canonical British film. It is also generally regarded as representative of a wider canonical subgenre of ‘Ealing comedies’, made at Ealing Studios during the 1940s and 1950s, with their subtle, situation-centred humour, wryly drawn characters, and whimsical scenarios.

This is a characterisation that some scholars have challenged. Most notably, as I wrote about in this earlier post, the film critic Charles Barr rejected the Ealing comedy category as the best framework for understanding the films included in it. Rather, he split them within two broader tendencies in Ealing’s post-war output: the gentler mainstream, epitomised by the films written by Passport to Pimlico’s scriptwriter, T. E. B. Clarke; and the more acerbic, unsentimental films made by the likes of Scottish-American director Alexander Mackendrick. Barr interpreted Passport as embodying Clarke’s work: a fantasy in which characters respond to harsh post-war realities by retreating into a safer world of remembered wartime unity.1

I want to push back somewhat against both these readings. Having looked through files relating to the film’s production in the British Film Institute’s ‘T. E. B. Clarke collection’, I found a much more zealous edge in Clarke’s early iterations of the story, which were subsequently softened as it was developed into the film itself. In this post, I want to trace the evolution of the film’s ideological inclinations, and their relationship to the broader industrial and socio-political context in which it was made.

Ealing Studios

Film production had taken place at Ealing in West London since the early twentieth century. The current studios were built there in 1931, with Michael Balcon taking over as studio head in 1938, following a difficult spell at MGM’s British subsidiary studio. Under Balcon, Ealing geared towards a sustainable roster of good-quality, commercially viable productions, facilitated by a distribution deal with the Rank Organisation. This enabled the studio to survive for a time amid declining conditions in the British film industry, with the Ealing team continuing to make and release films until 1958 (its studios having been sold to the BBC three years earlier).

Balcon wanted to make films that provided a positive representation of Britain as a bastion of liberal democracy, community, and fairness.2 He fostered a working environment in which talented, in-demand staff sacrificed the higher salaries they could have gained elsewhere for the promise of greater security, opportunities for career development, and the maintenance of their artistic integrity. Film production at Ealing was remarkably collective, with decisions made through ‘round table’ discussions in which all creative staff could contribute ideas to films they were not directly involved in – though Balcon remained the key gatekeeper within this system.3

Under Balcon, Ealing’s wartime films had focused heavily on the representing collective service and sacrifices the conflict entailed, and these conventions remained strong into peacetime. From the late 1940s, Ealing became well known for comedies such as Passport to Pimlico (1949), Whisky Galore! (1949), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man In The White Suit (1951), and The Ladykillers (1955). Yet Ealing also turned out numerous critically and commercially successful dramas during this period as well, including It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) and The Blue Lamp (1950), made by many of the same creative personnel as who worked on the comedies.

Passport to Pimlico

Passport is set in the fictional neighbourhood of Miramont Place in Pimlico, in central London. There is an atmosphere of ill-tempered lethargy evident amongst the local populace at the start of the film, with the community having become stagnant, and its members’ lives unfulfilled. When local policeman Ted Spiller (Philip Stainton) goes to inform local shopkeeper and former air raid warden Arthur Pemberton (Stanley Holloway) of the forthcoming detonation of a nearby unexploded bomb, he remarks, ‘It seems funny, Arthur, having to come and tell you about a bomb.’

According to the film’s shooting script, Arthur is ‘the local “character”, and nearly everyone likes and respects him’.4 His current pet project, we learn, is to turn the local bombsite into a communal swimming pool and play area. He runs the shop with his wife, Connie (Betty Warren), described in the shooting script as ‘A country woman [who] finds her escape from the drabness of Pimlico in cultivating pot plants of all kinds’, and young adult daughter, Shirley (Barbara Murray).5

The Pembertons’ neighbours, meanwhile, are frustrated in their daily routines by rationing and bureaucracy, and through pursuing aspirations that seem beyond their reach. Fishmonger’s assistant Molly Reed (Jane Hylton) visits the shop of Edie Randall (Hermione Baddeley) to buy a dress, but is thwarted because she does not have enough coupons to do so. Then Edie is herself irked when PC Spiller informs her that she will have to ‘take a walk’ because of the detonation. She retorts, ‘I suppose they couldn’t make it early closing day…wouldn’t upset trade enough.’

Molly’s and Edie’s dissatisfaction is also a product of their yearning to be something that they are not (in ways that are heavily gendered). The film’s script described Molly as ‘a would be glamorous girl…who is no longer herself’.6 It characterised Edie as ‘a woman in the early forties who makes pathetic attempts to keep abreast of modern styles, but it seems a pity that she tries, for she hasn’t the taste to see that smartness cannot be acquired by a slavish adoption of “What is being worn” without any consideration for the age or figure of the wearer’.7

Similarly, the local bank manager, Mr Wix, is berated early on in Passport by a representative of head office, for an excessive display of autonomy in his handling of his branch. The script said of the incident that ‘Wix dreams of being an important person in the world of finance, but lacks the guts even to put up a show against his own immediate superior when reprimanded, as now, for exceeding his very limited powers’.8

The local council meets to discuss what to do with the bombsite, once the remaining bomb has been destroyed. Most of those at the meeting, including Wix, vote against Arthur’s lido idea. Yet as pompous council leader Mr Bassett (Arthur Howard) draws up the advert to sell the land instead, local children accidentally set the unexploded bomb off. When the adults arrive to make sure the children are unharmed, Arthur accidentally falls into the bomb crater, and before he can be lifted out, thinks he sees some gold coins. He and Shirley re-enter the pit that night and find treasure, along with a manuscript.

At the subsequent inquest, medieval historian Professor Hatton-Jones (Margaret Rutherford) reveals that according to the manuscript, the unearthed treasure and the land around it belonged to Charles the Bold, the last Duke of Burgundy, who secretly resided there after being assumed killed in battle at Nancy in 1477. Miramont Place is therefore Burgundian territory and the treasure belongs to the community in trust.

The significance of the situation dawns upon residents like Wix and Edie, who realise that they can now run their businesses as they see fit, without outside intervention. Yet the downside of this is that black marketeers also rush in to take advantage of the lack of regulation. The government, represented by civil servants Straker (Naunton Wayne) and Gregg (Basil Radford), seal off the enclave. Aided by the arrival of the Duke’s contemporary successor, Sébastien de Charolais (Paul Dupuis), the residents form a privy council – in line with historical Burgundian custom – comprising Arthur, Edie, Ted, and Wix, to govern the territory in the interim.

The government’s heavy-handed, officious manner, and disagreement over what should be done with the treasure, frustrates and alienates the Pimlico-Burgundians. The situation deteriorates, and supplies of water and electricity to Miramont Place are cut off. The residents respond by evacuating their children, and imposing a stricter internal rationing regime, including communal eating.

Determined that the treasure should be used for the rejuvenation of the district rather than simply handed over to the government, a greater sense of purpose and togetherness emerges amongst the new Burgundians. In Wix’s own words, he and Arthur have overcome ‘our early differences, and today in Burgundy we are absolutely unanimous in our resolve to keep our treasure’. Other characters such as Molly likewise find contentment in new official roles in Burgundy’s governance.

When a sortie to turn the water back on accidentally results in their food store being flooded, it seems that the Burgundians will be forced to cede. Yet an impromptu donation of food by sympathetic onlookers spirals into a huge citywide scheme to supply the residents of Miramont Place. Meanwhile the Privy Council progress both with the construction of Arthur’s lido scheme, while negotiating from their stronger position with the British government.

Eventually Wix comes up with a solution regarding the treasure, which will remain in trust of the residents of Miramont Place, who in turn loan it to the British government. The neighbourhood is finally reintegrated back into Britain on its own terms, symbolising the victory of its values. Passport concludes with a banquet by the lido, at which Ted distributes new ration books, remarking to Connie that ‘I never thought anybody would be pleased to see these things again’. She responds, ‘You never know you’re well off till you aren’t.’

Earlier iterations

In his 1974 autobiography, Clarke claimed to have derived his inspiration for Passport to Pimlico from a wartime incident, when Princess Juliana of the Netherlands was due to give birth in exile in Canada. As the expected child could only potentially accede to the Dutch throne if born in the Netherlands, the Canadian government agreed to temporarily make her maternity ward Dutch territory. According to Clarke, he subsequently researched this aspect of international law and found it had once been quite common practice.

Clarke sought out an ideal expired state that could theoretically have held such an enclave in Britain, and settled on Burgundy, on account of the rumours and uncertainties surrounding Charles the Bold’s death. Satisfied, following discussion with director Henry Cornelius, that this scenario had great comic possibilities, they pushed ahead with the project.9

This may well have been how Clarke settled on this particular plot device, but the first outline he produced of Passport to Pimlico in 1947 seemed little concerned with opportunities for humour. In this version, the protagonist was called ‘Councillor Jack Hulbert’. At a council meeting, Hulbert calls for a youth centre to be built on the local bombsite, rather than a factory.

He points out that they have a shocking record here of juvenile delinquency and accidents involving children, simply because the youth of the neighbourhood have nowhere but the streets and the bomb ruins in which to play…Outside in the area under discussion children are fighting, kicking tin cans around, risking their lives in ruin-climbing expeditions, flinging mud at passing cars, and indulging in orgies of destruction.10

Following the bomb’s explosion, and the revelation about the area being Burgundian territory, Hulbert continues to strive for the creation of the youth centre, but is blocked by the area’s more ‘commercially-minded’ inhabitants. These include his opponents on the council, who open ‘gambling hells and [sell] whisky…at all hours of the day and night’. At a new borough election following the resolution of the crisis, ‘Hulbert and his supporters are returned, the knaves of the old council are out’. The film was to end with ‘a final shot of the Youth Centre in successful existence – the Union Jack flying at one end of it, the standard of Burgundy at the other’.11

The second treatment introduces the now renamed Pemberton: ‘When we learn that he used to be the chief air raid warden and that he now sits on the Pimlico Borough Council, we ought to get the feeling that we half-knew these things already, so obvious a choice does he seem for either function’.12 At the council meeting, he rallies against the fact that there is ‘No green space of any kind’ in this ward, and after the bomb goes off, ‘instinctively reassumes his old blitz-time authority’.13

Later on, when a cosmetics manufacturer named Crowley persuades Bassett to let him take advantage of the lack of restrictions in the new Burgundy to build a factory on the bombsite, Pemberton and his daughter are indignant. She tells Bassett, ‘I don’t see the Council have any right to sell that land without consulting the people who were born in the neighbourhood. It’s our property, and we can find plenty of better uses for it than handing it over to the Black Market’.14 Mr Pemberton subsequently leads an angry crowd of residents to the site, frightening Bassett and Crowley away.

We get some sense of the transition between these early versions of Passport to Pimlico and the finished film from a collated set of notes on different versions of the script from 1948. It is not clear who had written what, but it is evident from them that Clarke’s story evolved through the collective process of feeding back on film projects as they developed. One comment, for example, stated: ‘I feel now that Arthur’s insistency on the swimming pool idea should be more personal, more his pride in his model and less of the priggish emphasis on the communal and social welfare scheme.’15

Throughlines

The whimsically comical aspect of Passport to Pimlico seems to have been a subsequent appendage to the project, rather than there at its origin. It is worth remembering that the Ealing comedy did not really exist a subsection of the studio’s output at the point it was being made. The first film that might be classified as such, Hue & Cry – which Clarke had also scripted – was only released in 1947, the same year as Clarke also began developing Passport. However, Passport’s release was followed shortly by two more comedies, Whisky Galore! (in June 1949) and A Run for Your Money (in November), suggesting its original story may have been filtered through a new zeitgeist at the studio that Clarke was himself integral in developing.

It is very much in keeping with this interpretation that the first person asked to play Arthur Pemberton was not Stanley Holloway, but Jack Warner, whose acting style was avuncular but much less broad.16 Warner had already played tough but kindly Corporal Horsfall in Ealing’s 1946 prisoner-of-war drama The Captive Heart, and although his next few roles in films made by the studio were against type as either more cynical or downright treacherous figures, he would again channel Horsfall in his career-defining role, as PC George Dixon in The Blue Lamp (also written by Clarke). It makes sense to read Pemberton, as initially conceived, as part of a continuum between Horsfall and Dixon.

This relates to the fact that Pemberton was a more explicitly political figure from the outset in the earlier versions of Passport to Pimlico. In these, he was a councillor from the outset, rather than simply someone who rose to the position of ‘Prime Minister of Burgundy’ as part of the film’s transformative fantasy. This aspect was deliberately toned down in the final film, along with his motivation to build the swimming pool (previously a youth centre) as an explicitly social democratic, anti-capitalistic endeavour.

It is also evident that Passport to Pimlico in its earlier iterations was also more explicit about the radicality of its vision of democracy. This is not one in which the political face of capital, as typified in the film itself by Wix, can be brought into a broad coalition to serve in the communal interest. It is one in which they are all voted off of the council in the original outline, or chased away by a crowd led by Pemberton in the first script.

This is not to suggest that it was simply progressive aspects of Passport’s initial design that were watered down in the finished film. Those older versions were also more explicitly concerned with juvenile delinquency, in a way that also typified a law-and-order, paternalistic liberalism evident in later dramas like The Blue Lamp. This may seem to bear out Barr’s charge that Clarke’s comic and drama films ought to be banded together as part of a benevolent, daydreamlike Ealing mainstream. Yet I counter that Passport to Pimlico also had a more overtly ideological core, which engaged seriously with questions of political change as vehicle for social transformation, even if the conventions of film as a medium and comedy as a genre ultimately partly masked that.

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