Re-negotiating Concepts of Masculinity in Contemporary British Film
1 A rapid decline of traditional industries in Britain during the latter half of the twentieth century, together with the harsh political climate of Thatcherism, partly continued under Major and Blair, helped to reduce the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution to a mere post-industrial scrap heap. The British north was especially hard hit, mainly because of its narrow industrial base and consequential inflexibility for economic change. Brassed Off (dir. Mark Herman, 1996), The Full Monty (dir. Peter Cattaneo, 1997) and Billy Elliot (dir. Stephen Daldry, 2000) all pay tribute to the people and communities of Britain's former industrial heartland. They reflect and problematise the consequences of economic change and political misfortune. Moreover, they critically, albeit entertainingly comment on the changing social structures and the changing gender relations that were brought about by this economic decline. Men, once proud workers in heavy industries like coalmining or steel, suddenly found themselves without a job[1]Since the 1984/85 Miners Strike, there have been over 140 pit closures in Britain with over 250,000 jobs being lost. Another cornerstone of the northern English economy, the steel industry, has also been suffering enormous losses. Sheffield has always been, and still is today, strongly associated with its industrial base — the metal industries, notably steelmaking and cutlery. Today, Sheffield produces more steel than ever before. The numbers of people employed in the steel industry, however, have declined from 45,100 (or 16% of the total workforce) in 1971 to 4,700 (or 2.2% of the total workforce) in 1993. Between 1981 and 1987 alone, roughly 19,000 steel jobs were lost. Between 1979 and 1986 a total of nearly 71,000 people were made redundant in Sheffield, with almost 70% of the redundancies occurring in metal manufacture, metal goods and engineering (Pollard and Taylor/Evans/Fraser)., without hope and without a 'proper' role in society. The three films I am going to analyse in this paper[2]The order of analysis is not coincidental. I argue that, from Brassed Off via The Full Monty to Billy Elliot, one can discern a number of consecutive steps in the re-negotiation of concepts of masculinity in post-industrial Britain. all problematise this loss of traditional masculinity but, at the same time, they also suggest potential solutions.[3]Of course, the three films have already received quite substantial academic attention. In their contributions to British Cinema: Past and Present, Claire Monk, Julia Hallam and John Hill, for example, discuss Brassed Off and The Full Monty in the wider context of contemporary British cinema, their relation to the social realism of 1960s and 70s British filmmaking and their role in somewhat nostalgically re-imagining communities in the framework of Tony Blair's "New Britain" or "Cool Britannia."
2 Despite the fact that all three films make only tentative steps towards re-evaluating "stereotypical" concepts of masculinity, I would like to read them as examples of a successful deconstruction of gender stereotypes and as triggers for a cultural healing process of the trauma of social and cultural destabilisation caused by economic decline and a gradual realisation of what one might call "post-industrial masculinity."[4]This term is developed on the basis of R. W. Connell's (1995) procedural concept of masculinity. Connell does not aim at defining what is or might be considered masculine but rather focuses on the specific processes and relationships through which men (and women) conduct gendered lives. For Connell, masculinity is best viewed as "simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture" (71). Thus, post-industrial masculinity highlights the experience of male existence in the changing economic, social and cultural structure of traditional industrial nations at the end of the 20th century. The films confront their male protagonists with a radically changed environment (both with regard to their altered position in the labour market as well as with a variety of conflicts resulting from the loss of their role as breadwinners for their families) and thus set in motion a process of questioning their established identity as hard-working men.[5]Here, it is important to keep in mind the various connotations of the phrase "hard-working" and its lexical elements "hard/being tough/manly" and "working/being useful." What these films accomplish, then, is to create an awareness of the problematic nature of what it might mean to be a man in a society moving away from an economy of heavy industries and manual labour.
3 I will focus my analysis on two issues that are equally strongly discernible in all three examples, namely the problematic positioning of female characters in three predominantly male casts and second on the representation of the relationships between fathers and sons. It will become apparent in the ensuing discussion that in all three films, 1) it is precisely the women who, in various ways, provoke the male protagonists to move on from being passive and helpless bystanders of their situation; 2) the intense conflicts between the three fathers and their sons, all of whom equally challenge their father's values and self-understanding, eventually cause the fathers to rethink and re-evaluate their views and core beliefs. Hence, both the women and the younger generation of males help their husbands and fathers to accept the necessity to redefine and reposition themselves in their changed environment, as husbands, fathers and, consequently, as men.
4 I will focus on issues of gender for a number of reasons. First of all, these films are all touching on the relationships between the workplace and personal identity, especially with the workplace as a traditional marker of identification for men as men. This issue becomes especially vital in an economic environment that for hundreds of years has provided employment in heavy industries like coal-mining or steel where in traditional family configurations, it was mostly always the man that took the role of main breadwinner. Moreover, as Storry and Childs have argued:
The work ethic is very strong in the UK and for a majority of the British population their identity is shaped by the notion that they work. However, one of the main features of the working classes in 1980s and 1990s Britain is that the greater proportion of them than of either the middle or the upper classes is not working. Loss of work to a class which defines itself as working is traumatic [...]. (101)
Losing one's occupation has, and especially so for men, often also meant a loss or at least a threat to one's established identity.
5 What struck me as vital when watching these films for the first time, was the under-representation or even the complete lack of major female characters. All three films feature predominantly male casts. The female characters that appear are most often represented as "intruding" on the various groups of male characters and as posing a dangerous threat to the supposed stability of these groups. I am not suggesting that what we are dealing with here is a "war of the sexes" in an economically unfriendly environment where men are on the losing end, hopelessly clinging to a past long gone, and where women are the solely progressive force.[6]Heartfield has convincingly argued that especially the British case, rather than diagnosing a crisis of masculinity, should be more adequately viewed as a crisis of the working class. Nevertheless, the projection of the economic and political threat to a traditional and stereotypical identity of man as hardworking manual labourer onto the women forms the point of departure of the narrative in all three films.