This article contains SPOILERS in respect of the films A Taste of Honey and The L-Shaped Room.
I’m All Right Jack (1959, dir. John Boulting, starring Ian
Carmichael, Terry-Thomas, Peter Sellers, Liz Fraser, feat. Malcolm Muggeridge
as himself) - Supermac-era industrial relations satire; obvious/ mean-spirited
sometimes; Peter Sellers (as shop steward Fred Kite: “ah, Russia…! all them
cornfields… and ballet in the evenings!”) - redeems experience.
A Taste of Honey (1961, dir. Tony Richardson, written by
Shelagh Delaney, starring Rita Tushingham, Dora Bryan, Murray Melvin)
The L-Shaped Room (1962, dir. Bryan Forbes, adapted from the
novel by Lynne Reid Banks, starring Leslie Caron, Anthony Booth, Brock Peters,
Cicely Courtneidge)
These films - mirror images of
one another in some respects - dance around themes of gender, sexuality,
ethnicity, freedom, constraint more interestingly than do the ‘belligerent male
antihero’ films of the same era (your ‘Saturday Nights’ and your ‘Look Backs’).
At the start or towards the start,
each protagonist has ‘falls pregnant out of wedlock’ (as we used to say); each
film ends with a kind of rapprochement with the older generation; in the
middle, joy, struggle, love, heartbreak, a sense of running up against the
limits of an indifferent-to-intolerant social world (narrower limits in ‘Honey’,
somewhat looser limits in ‘Room’).
In the former film, a wholly
different and better kind of family life seems briefly possible for Jo and
Geoffrey (the gay chap Jo pals up with, after he pops in to and buy shoes at the
shop where she works, and who then redesigns her shabby half-derelict warehouse-like
flat for her, literally letting the light in). As Jo’s pregnancy
advances, Geoffrey visits the ante-natal clinic for her and collects leaflets
from a puzzled nurse; he cooks, she smokes (there's so much that we didn’t know back
then; if we knew, did we care?), they hang around doing fun kinds of nothing the way most young people do, bantering good naturedly about the anticipated happy event:
Geoffrey:
(serving pudding with a flourish) So
what you gonna call it?
Jo: The cake?
Geoffrey: No, not the cake. The baby.
(It’s
funnier in broad Mancunian.)
Geoffrey’s departure and Jo's good-for-nothing mum’s
re-appearance then figures as a kind of sudden foreclosure, defeat snatched
from the jaws of victory as sometimes happens in these sorts of films (one
reason why the people who don’t like them, don’t like them – yes, I’m talking
to you, Peter Bradshaw).
In ‘The L-Shaped Room’ by
contrast, the finale is promisingly both open-ended and, to a degree, self-referential
(Jane’s boyfriend Toby, who isn’t the baby’s dad by the way, is a writer; ‘The L-Shaped
Room’ is the title of a memoir that he writes, and leaves as a gift her; do we make our lives in the telling of them?).
This difference in mood may also be a
class difference with all that that implies in terms of money, cultural capital
and all the rest – while the unexamined life is not worth living, it's also true that, as Virginia Woolf
and others have pointed out (A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas), there have been and still are structural
differences, some relating to gender class and so on, in who gets access to the proper examination of
one’s life. (It's, like, your base and your superstructure, innit?) Guess what, it may also be, in some aspect, a difference
between Leave and Remain… and I’m not being
wholly facetious or anachronistic about that, I’m thinking of David Goodhart
and other theorists of the postwar imaginary… so you can buy me a drink sometime and ask me what I mean; be careful I don't try to read you my 1960s-set time travel story 'Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind' (feat. Vashti Bunyan, Rudi Deutschke). 
Being John Malkovich (1999, dir. Spike Jonze, written by Charlie Kaufman, starring John Cusack,
Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, John Malkovich) - Glorious late-1990s indie comedy; portals,
mind control, the dance of disappointment, the New Jersey turnpike, fin de
siècle sexual politics. Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich; what’s not to like?
The Commune (Kollektivet) (2016, dir. Thomas Vinterberg,
starring Fares Fares, Ulrich Thomsen, Trine Dyrholm) – Absorbing Aesopian dog/reflection story.
Mid-1970s Danish professional, don’t recklessly destabilise your nuclear family
(& underpinning Judaeo-Christian assumptions) by reaching for some
inchoate collectivist New Age ideal!
Every Day (2018, dir. Michael Sucsy, starring Angourie Rice,
Justice Smith, Debby Ryan) - Watchable,
unmemorable fantasy romance (premise: modern teenager doomed to daily, not
post-mortem, metempsychosis); like ‘Time Travellers’ Wife’ but less inherently silly; because ‘a Y.A.', less well-known.
-----------------
Red, White and Blake (2017, dir. and starring Will Franken) –
Set-up: canter thro’ Milton, Swedenborg, 1789; well-briefed, delivered in gonzo/
punk style… tidy! Reveal: sudden lurch to transphobia, Islamophobia, unconnected
alt-right talking points... sour taste, disappointment, worry.
If you wanted to read more about what’s good about this documentary – and also about the ‘yuk’ factor induced once it has, metaphorically speaking, had three or four too many G&Ts at the family wedding and thus progressed from telling embarrassing and somewhat racist jokes to sharing actual pro-Trump pro-Brexit so-called theories derived from the alt-right media via twitter; of course, ultra-Remainers can be almost as annoying (yes, you're objectively right about climate and about the Erasmus programme; just please stop sounding so damn liberal and entitled about it) – read Jason Whittaker’s review. (Jason’s Head of the School of English and Journalism at the University of Lincoln and he’s written or co-written various books about Blake, including one on ‘William Blake and the Digitial Humanities': he knows so much about these things).
I’m not meaning to say or imply, by the way, that Will Franken’s ‘alt-right’ (read his Index on Censorship piece, google him, make your own mind up). For my money I don’t think he is, I think he’s a talented stand-up comedian who knows plenty about William Blake and holds some horrible political views. So it goes. I do mean to imply, though, that it’s precisely this kind of contrarian minority-baiting right-wing shock-jock rubbish that helps to lay the cultural groundwork for fascism, helps to make it more thinkable and thereby more possible. This is, in other words, 'punching down' - an idiom which, like 'doubling down', has become vastly more popular in recent years, which tells you plenty about the zeitgest in and of itself. Let's level with ourselves here: this is a world in which Dark Money and Big Data are aiming to subvert the whole fallibly-democratic Operating System of the West and in which the too-rigid parameters of hegemonic late capitalism threaten to drive our whole civilisation to the brink of ecocide. If your gut-level response to such a word is "social justice warriors are annoying" or "women wearing the burka look like postboxes", then frankly there might be something wrong with you; you'd be well advised to have a think about how you're choosing to use your talents as a writer, film-maker, satirist or what have you. (Some of the great creators have had something wrong with them: Ezra Pound wasn't a very nice human being by all accounts and neither was Enid Blyton). When I talk about fascism, incidentally, I'm well aware that it’s 2019 - so we’re not talking goose-stepping Nazis or Mussolini-worshipping Miss Jean Brodie, no, we’re talking “networked, dispersed, entrepreneurial, crowd-funded, conniving gig-economy fascism” [Laurie Penny]. Weird, scary times...
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