St George & His Dragon
20 Years of This Is England
Today, Cinema Year Zero presents a new essay by Nikolai Phoya on This is England, situating Shane Meadows’ film between its social realist aesthetic and the historical context of white nationalism. Happy St. George’s.
Nikolai is a writer based in Greater Manchester, with essays and short stories on affinities.world and the T A P E Collective.
“What has happened before will happen again,” King Solomon tells his student.
“It’s like looking in the mirror,” Combo (Stephen Graham) tells Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), “twenty years ago, when I was fucking twelve.” In the tight space of the car they share, the camera barely fits the former’s wry face, where, etched in ink and bridging his brow, his warrior saint’s cross bobs in and out of view. This Is England (2006) was pulled heavily from Shane Meadows’ own childhood, where Combo’s white-nationalist vision of the future as a hallowed past is ultimately rejected by Shaun, the writer-director’s self-insert. Yet twenty years after the film’s premiere, Combo’s reflection has never been clearer.
After losing his father to the ten-week Falklands War, Shaun finds himself bullied, angry and listless in a Midlands town that was being stripped of its industry by a burgeoning neoliberal government. By setting this film in 1983, Meadows takes a snapshot of Britain’s political and cinematic landscape. Two television films released that same year—Alan Clarke’s Made In Britain and Mike Leigh’s Meantime—outlined, in differing ways, how easily that anger and listlessness metastasise into fascist ideology. From Leigh, Meadows borrows his ‘deviser’-director methodology, spending weeks of pre-production in actor-collaboration sessions, improvising and growing the characters and story from scratch. The developed chemistry among the actors leads to the first third of the film’s cosy, wholesome camaraderie as the skinhead gang takes Shaun in to help him cope.
But Combo’s fated arrival from prison reintroduces British New Wave’s ‘angry young men’ trope to a twenty-first century audience. Tony Richardson’s Look Back In Anger (1959, from John Osborne’s play) being the blueprint, the protagonist Jimmy (Richard Burton), despite his petulance and foibles, possesses enough virtue to defend his British Indian friend from the bigotry of their Midlands town. Believing a police officer to be responsible for revoking Kapoor’s licence, Jimmy discovers it was his own fellow marketplace vendors who are to blame. “You don’t want him here,” they profess at the pub. “You’ve seen his prices, son. We’ve got to eat.” This terror of the colonised was in opposition to Jimmy’s values, which the following generation of filmmakers found, however radical, insufficient. By the time we reach Meadows, Britain’s former colonies, without the supposedly guiding, Christian light of the empire, assume the form of a westward, Islamic dragon, “raping and pillaging,” according to the likes of Combo, the helpless damsel this country has become. Who else but Saint George and his “proud fucking warriors” could save her?
Clarke’s direction of David Leland’s script for Made In Britain warps Osborne and Richardson’s righteous indignation into something altogether repugnant. This angry young man has no backstory, no excuses. Clarke and Leland’s construction is barely a character, barely a man. Tim Roth initially plays Trevor as though his neo-Nazism is just another facet of youthful acting-out, of his need to be heard, which is a trait Western media commonly frames as a valid excuse for causing pain; a rite of passage white adolescents embark upon on their way to total liberal self-actualisation. The fact Trevor’s partner-in-crime is Errol (Terry Richards), his Black roommate at the assessment centre, almost further supports this idea he does not truly believe these things. That maybe Trevor can redeem himself. But near the story’s midpoint, in response to the superintendent’s bleak estimation of his past and future, Trevor lashes out for ten unbroken minutes of ranting: he explains, with Crusader logic, how sending the Pakistanis “back” would be a kindness rather than a cruelty, lest they all get a brick through their window, “and piss, and shit, and petrol,” because they “don’t even speak fucking English”; and when talking about Black people, he claims, “You lock up anything that frightens you … I hate you for putting me in here. Blacks in here are thick as shit with no brains—you know it. Admit it. I had to sit in school and watch these wankers add up on their fingers. I was held back. All the white kids were held back.” Blackness is, to him, Heidegger’s abyss: the groundless foundation of Being upon which the Western imagination flounders. The terror of becoming The Nothing, becoming The Death, that Blackness represents, powers his anger. The terror of the supposed Islamist horde from the eastern horizon powers his anger. Trevor’s final acts of freedom are bricking the window of the same Pakistani family who got him sent to the assessment centre in the first place, and getting Errol arrested for the van they stole together. There is no redemption for him. No hope.
Leigh’s process loses the didacticism of the British New Wave that Clarke had tapped into. In place of anger, the centripetal force around which his characters’ psyches orbit becomes shame. Besides the occasional anti-Thatcher graffiti, the characters of Meantime are too disenfranchised to assemble why they feel this loss of dignity. All they can do is steal it from others they deem lower. When the Black patron (Herbert Norville) in the pub takes up the offer of a pint, Mark (Phil Daniels), almost like a tic, blurts, “Piss off, you Black bastard. Nah, I’m only joking,” before buying him his lager. When Coxy (Gary Oldman) and Colin (Tim Roth) share an elevator with another Black man, Coxy, in the punning style of the film’s dialogue, says, “I’m all-white, you all-white?” and attempts another racist joke before being intimidated out of finishing it. These interactions are not the film’s focus, because the film, like the characters within it, has no focus, only the desperate fumble in that groundless dark for some foothold that can never be found.
Meadows borrows Leigh’s methods for character construction, and from Clarke, he maps the differing relationships his skinheads have between the West Indians and the South Asians. It is the brown boys in jacketed thobes who they siege, whose ball they plunder; the P-word with which they graffiti the underpass and Mr. Sandhu’s shop. Yet it is from Black people the gang derives their skinhead culture, a degree of appropriation that only happens when the originators are seen as nothing, as already socially dead. “How does metaphysics transform Nothing into Something so that it can dominate this Nothing?” Calvin Warren asks in Ontological Terror (2018). “Through Blackness—it gives a form for the formless, but a form that perplexes and threatens … Blackness is invented to absorb the terror of this Nothing, of the interruption of time and space, within modernity.” The skanking chords of Toots & the Maytals are the foundation of This Is England’s soundtrack, following the skinheads’ surreal shift from their Jamaican British roots to Neo-Nazism; from the gang’s cosy camaraderie in the film’s first third to the caustic resentments in its remaining runtime. As the gang unwinds with some weed in the film’s climax, Milky, the gang’s lone Black member, confronts Combo over this subculture’s burgeoning contradiction. Combo explains, honeyed and high, how the uncles who introduced Milky to the ska, the rocksteady, the fashion, are the same who introduced Combo himself. But as the conversation lingers on those uncles, on Milky’s loving family, the Nothingness that floundered Trevor, that flounders Western imagination, begins floundering Combo; hardens his gaze. All he can do at that point is beat Milky half to death. This Black man’s ability to give and receive love interrupts and disturbs Combo’s understanding of himself and the world. It is equal parts anger and terror.
It is this same dangerous concoction Nadine El-Nany observes in her book (B)ordering Britain (2020). She illustrates how migrants were constructed by the 2016 Leave campaign as “unjustly enriched and undeserving of access to territory and resources,” when the irony is, like everything else on this island, their venerated defender against the hordes is himself an import. Born in Turkey, buried in Palestine, Saint George still finds the pointed steel of his lance fed by Rupert Lowe’s lust for “widespread stop-and-searches”; by the Grenfell Tower disaster Simon Dudley laments has “stopped housebuilding of any tall buildings” because, ultimately, “everyone dies in the end.” The poplar wood of the Crusader Saint’s shield is reinforced by Reform UK’s policy to “withdraw from every treaty that prevents a full lockdown of the nation’s borders”; by the multi-partisan desire to “stop the boats.” The Labour government that ended fourteen years of Conservative rule has since increased the difficulty of English-language citizenship tests, decreased the jobs eligible for skilled worker visas, nearly halved the standard length of graduate visas, while doubling the qualifying period for permanent residence. At the National Front meeting Combo takes the gang to, we hear the spokesperson explain: “We’re not racists, we’re realists … People who work hard, pay their way—it don’t matter their ethnic background—I welcome with open arms. People who think we owe them a living, these are the people that need to go back.” His words hit like an ocean wave at the abyss within his audience, amplifying in its depths all their anger and terror, which have been given, for the first time, a direction toward a shore: “Send them back,” they crash and foam, “send them back.”
The Biblical book of Ecclesiastes attributed to King Solomon teaches the student to wrangle life’s meaninglessness, and the listlessness and anger it inspires, under the feared, coveted banner of God. Combo two-thousand years later, in the squalor of his gang’s squatted flat, points to the ground, to his heart, to his head, professing, “this is England, and this is England, and this is England.” The room is all slumped shoulders and curious eyes, any seeding dissent salted in his fervour. “And for what?” he then asks them. “What now?”