Transcript
Speaker: Welcome back to Deficit Photograph, Culture at the End of History. Today we have on with us Owen Hatherley, who is a writer and editor. who usually covers architecture, culture and politics.
Speaker: He is, and he can correct me if I'm wrong about this, the former culture editor at Tribune magazine and the author of several books, including The Alienation Effect, of How Central European Emigrate Has Transformed, The British 20th Century, 2025, and, to my mind, Veridful Work of Genius to Rival Nicholas Pevner's Buildings of England, Modern Buildings of Britain, 2022, which is a permanent spot on my coffee table. so that's high praise, I think.
Speaker: We're here today to talk about two films, which I was very pleased that Owen picked because they're two of my personal favorites. I think possibly to chase his battlement. Would you like to tell us the two films that you gave us in your shortlist and why you think they're evocative of both Gen X and possibly the end of history?
Speaker: Yeah, there's a sort of weird period between like the mid-90s and mid-2000s that is kind of roughly that in which I came of age. So I think about it a lot. And what we settled on was Patrick Keeler's two first two Robinson films.
Speaker: which kind of peripatetic, quite formal films based around a sort of fictionalised journey around London, then by around the rest of England by an unnamed narrator and a character called Robinson, who is variously identified as having been in a bickering sexual relationship with the narrator who is identified in the subsequent film, Robinson Ruins, as actually being German, and who teaches at the imaginary University of Barking, although exactly what he teaches has never quite made clear. And there are films by Patrick Keeler, who was a qualified architect who had worked...
Speaker: at the Greater London Council, I think at Camden Council in the seventy s and turned to film in the nineteen eighty s And the I guess they're kind of in that kind of essay film tradition, which you can kind of link to things like Chris Marker, Alan René, kind of early Agnes Fada, that kind of left bankrupt in Paris, but they very much take it in a direction which sheds its Frenchness, let's say.
Speaker: you mentioned that they kind of come out in, I think it's 94, but it's filmed. The first one, London, is comes out 94, but it's filmed in 92. And the second one comes out in 1997, but it's filmed in 1995. And this is kind of odd serendipity where each film comes out during the two major elections in the UK in the 90s. So in the like Yeah, although in different ways. Obviously, the first one is about partly about an election that had happened two years earlier, and the second comes out at the time of an election that's anticipated in the second film. It's kind of assumed that the British Conservative Party has finished in the second film, but it hasn't actually happened yet.
Speaker: hello Yeah, it's it's it's it's very odd in that sense. And it's the kind of period that I think people gloss over into the recent British political history, right? This kind of like late John Major period.
Speaker: This sort of interaction in between Thatcherism proper and maybe Thatcherism light. Yeah, and this it was the first example of that. And um major Major really, really fascinates me because John Major won the most votes of any prime minister in history in 1992.
Speaker: The most people who have come out and cast a ballot for particular party and a particular leader at a particular time ever... is major then. And the second is actually Clement Attlee in 1951, which he lost. So the British electoral system is weird.
Speaker: But this guy, it's extraordinary that he even lasted into the 20th century, let alone into the 1990s. He's this kind of entirely grey-faced man with sort of enormous glasses and a sort of adenoidal mode of speaking. And you could have imagined him in like the administration of like Lloyd George or Campbell Bannerman or something.
Speaker: He's quite literally the man on the bricks and on the bus in that sense. Yeah. I i mean, actually, he and he kind of tries to incarnate this like extreme kind of nothing-changing Englishness in very deliberate opposition to Thatcher. And Thatcher, you know, who, I mean, she he was her protégé in lots of ways, but Thatcher, despite her kind of, you know, Greengrocer's daughter shtick,
Speaker: deeply, deeply modern, late 20th century politician, incredibly media savvy, incredibly quick-witted, fantastic on television, you know, um a real, like, McLuhan kind of performer.
Speaker: And then you get this guy that's just almost sort deliberately kind of soporific in his speeches, massively unattractive, deeply unmodern And it's really, really fascinating that this that this happened. And I think that in the kind of one reason why he's interesting to talk about now is we kind of have someone like that again as Prime Minister in a way.
Speaker: Major actually constructed this persona. John Major, he was from like a kind of, um I think, theatrical family in Brixton, quite bohemian. Yeah, i was going to say, wasn't it the dad and acrobat? or Yeah, right. Ian Sinclair describes him somewhere as, you know, having been, like being an Angela Carter character, you know, kind of in the circus in Brixton, you know, really, really bohemian background. And so he, because the fact that he's not this English conservative publican, he can create that persona perfectly.
Speaker: And so actually, you know, it was ah it was a constructed thing that he did deliberately and it worked beautifully for what it was meant to do. but mean, there's so many sort of end of history resonances, like the the inability to change or this kind of like resolution of ideological struggle media as a sort of persona, right? Like the the the famous, start I think it's Saatchi and Saatchi advert that goes up, which is, you know, what can a conservative party do for working class boy from Brixton? They made him prime minister.
Speaker: I mean, working class is a stretch, but yeah. ah But that advert, right, like it it takes them it takes like a retic of ah the kernel of class struggle or class consciousness from Marxism and just completely deadens it. Yeah, absolutely. And resolves it into this kind of bland marketing thing.
Speaker: Yeah, he initially kind of made the mistake. but I mean, initially he he he does sound very well. And I think one of the crucial things he does is sort of draw the the venom of Thatcherism. He kind of stopped.
Speaker: You know, he when it comes to power, he he abolishes the poll tax, a hugely controversial kind of Friedmanite flat tax that Thatcher had brought in in her last years that had basically brought her down almost single-handedly. He gets rid of that.
Speaker: He starts to saying nice things about all the minorities that they've been kicking in the face. And, you know, he he has this kind of increasingly communitarian rhetoric. There's much more investment starts to be kind of produced for inner cities and so forth and and the arts. And then he makes a really big mistake after he actually wins his election of then going back to really kind of punitive, kind of cut at the end of that's right policies. He has this thing called back to basics. Yeah.
Speaker: where the Tory party starts speaking about Victorian values and starts opposing divorce, homosexuality, you know, a whole load of kind of football hooliganism, a whole load of things are kind parceled up into this thing that equals back to basics.
Speaker: And at this point, the press are quite sick of them. And so they bring out all the stories they've been sitting on about who the Tory party's front benches have been fucking. And my memory of this as ah you know as an adolescent is these constant media stories about these really grotesque-looking people. If you don't believe me, Google David Mellor to look at what this man looked like. And then you find out that they like to have sex in their Chelsea shirts or what have you. Like really put of specific, kind of ridiculous details of the sex lives of these people. And when I was 13, this was just in the news nonstop. So, yeah, that's the context.
Speaker: Oh, my God. Sorry, I got to mention I'm majoring for hours, and i'll try and stop in a moment. But London... empty from the 60s to the 80s. And everyone's forgotten about this. But the population of London by the early 80s is about 6 million.
Speaker: So for context, it's about 8 million at the start of World War II, and it's over 9 million now. So, you know, it undergoes this quite American-style kind of involution.
Speaker: And although that started to slightly change by 1992, in a very, very minor way, it's you see a city that's significantly depopulated, dilapidated, where its public transport doesn't work, it's not had a great deal of money spent on it. It's kind of falling kind of quite quietly into seemingly endless decline.
Speaker: And major is this kind of, you know... Edwardian figure seems to symbolise this. And he's doing this in this kind of way that's informed by, I think, Keillor's two touchstones as a filmmaker and as a thinker, which are not usually put together, to put it mildly, which are a kind of Parisian tradition of surrealism and the situationists, of the revolution of everyday life, which is quoted at the start of Robinson in Space.
Speaker: And along with that, a kind of high modernist architectural kind of lineage, you know, of sort of the constructivists in Le Corbusier, the London County Council, and particularly in Keillor's case, the kind of nineteen sixty s avant-garde, so brutalist architects, but also, you know, kind of cults like Archigram, the kind of, you know, paper architecture group Archigram, the critic Rainer Bannum, the kind of architect critic Cedric Price. These are kind of the things he's bringing in.
Speaker: And so he's kind of looking at all of this, having expected as a trained architect to that Britain in the 1990s is going to look like a place of extreme affluence, low working hours, you know, kind of avant-garde architecture, floating cities, flying cities, public housing, incredible public amenities, people, you know, you know like living this kind of wonderful urban life and constructing situations and so forth, and finds this kind of, you know, Victorian city that is sort of slowly dying.
Speaker: But yeah, that kind of particular argument that Britain should be understood as an anachronism, a country in decline, symbolised obviously by its ridiculous royal family, which features at regular intervals in London, almost kind of occupying the city.
Speaker: And you can connect that to Tom Nairn's book, The Enchanted Glass, which comes out few years before about Britain's sort of bizarre and Ruritanian monarchy and its connection to the mass media spectacom.
Speaker: So that's all quite conventional sort of, you know, kind of British Marxist intellectual ways of looking at what's happening. And what I really like about Robinson's space is it completely turns this on its head and basically tears the argument apart.
Speaker: And I think that's the the the films are seen as a continuum wrongly. They're actually a dialectic. I mean, in in the sense that if the first film is in some ways arguing for this kind of antiquarian Britain, this kind of decline of Britain, the second, you know, which is very focused on the sort of antique institutions of London, the royal family, the church, the literature, the second film is, yeah, the city of London, the second film is obsessed with like science parks and free ports. Right, right. And, you know, sort of like, I don't know, like vague sort of like industrial units in the West Midlands that are sort of exporting to China and Korea and no one knows about them.
Speaker: So the backstory to this, which i know i know Patrick a little bit, and and this has kind of come out partly through conversations, partly through things he said in interviews, and partly just through like chasing up the quotes in the films.
Speaker: The second film is massively informed by his reading of the work of Alan Maxence Wood. So Ellen Wood writes these two books kind around this point, actually, and which first they published, The Origin of Capitalism, which is now very famous for its very kind of condensed and kind of very kind of analytically clear argument about rural Britain specifically as being the birthplace of capitalism.
Speaker: And another book called The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, which kind of more explicitly an argument, actually, that all that you can say about Britain that seems like an anachronism, it's kind of urban depopulation, it's dilapidation, it's dominance by advertising, it's poor public space, It's sort of small and cramped, but nonetheless sort spacious single-family housing. That all of these things are not an example of an anachronism at all.
Speaker: In fact, the anachronism is the European urbanism of squares, apartment buildings, and so forth. Those are all pre-capitalist or non-capitalist things. They've come in from Renaissance absolutist planning. They've come in from feudal legacies. They've come in from the much longer influence of a kind of urban guilds and so forth.
Speaker: Whereas Britain is like this because it's the most capitalist country on earth with the possible exception of the United States. And that's why it is like it is. And Keillor reads this. And I think that is a big part of what then happens in this film, which is trying to find out where British capitalism actually is.
Speaker: So the first film is kind of like, here's a place that British capitalism is kind of, apart from the city of London, and its kind of new annex at Canary Wharf at the docks, it's kind of decided that the London sort of isn't really kind of Brasilia or something, it's place from which it governs, but it doesn't, it's not its real centre.
Speaker: the new industries, the new business parks, the new prisons, prisons feature constantly at Robinson in space. You know, that these are all happening somewhere out on the motorway, but they are happening. And if you live in London, so Robinson, but you know, your main character in both films, he lives in a council of flat in Stockwell.
Speaker: um which is incidentally about a mile and a half from the council flat in Camberwell where I'm speaking right now. um So, you know, these are my people. And he um you wouldn't know somewhere like that what's happening.
Speaker: What's happening, you know, off the what's happening in a business park in the West Midlands, what's happening in Teesport, know, in the port of Folkestone. in the kind of prisons on the outskirts of the M25. And so he basically kind of seeks out this new economy and finds... There was a a line which he once said about explaining the second film, which is finding out that actually, very much against his expectation, British capitalism works.
Speaker: It's horrible, but it works. And that's a landscape which I think is decreasingly kind of looked at now because of the fact that middle classes have in very large part left that landscape and returned to the cities in a lot of places.
Speaker: So it's kind of the place that you know today's gentrifiers have come from, I suppose. But that idea of like it works, but it's horrible, I think is really, really key.
Speaker: and And very of that moment, I would suspect, right? Because now the idea that these systems can actually function in such a way as to produce a livable life for people, whether in the UK or the US. s I think it's viewed with increasing skepticism. So there is something. Yeah.
Speaker: I'm interested in that because a lot of what we've spoken about on this show has to do with this, I suppose, relationship to the possibility of a better life in the early 90s and the late eighty s sort of.
Speaker: whether that's possible, how it's possible. And it is sort of funny that a lot of the films we've addressed have been very cynical about that possibility, right? They've been sort of of the tradition that it doesn't work and it's dehumanizing. Or the extent to which it does work is so deeply dehumanizing that you could never characterize it as working, right? Yeah. But I like your your way of of talking about how the filmmaker views it because you do get these weird moments in which globalization does seem to work, right? In Robinson and Space, for example, we're constantly treated to the distribution center, right? The massive Tesco distribution center, the Morrison's distribution center.
Speaker: These places that we see trucks going in and out of, these places that obviously quite literally allow social reproduction, in these you know far-off places that are not London, right? Or the ports, another phenomenal example from the film,
Speaker: If I may push us towards the prisons, just because I was very interested in this. So in the US, I mean, obviously, private prison discourse is quite popular. That's not really the right way to put it. But there's a lot of discussion about private prisons because they've become such a massive, massive part of our the economies of a lot of towns, frankly. If you live in a rural area, a private prison might be the best job you could possibly hope for.
Speaker: In the film, there's a mention of the Wackenhut Corporation, which is this U.S. sort of ah private security firm, somewhat famous. um Was it Orlando or Miami nightclub shooter from a few years ago?
Speaker: The sort of anti-LGBTQ shooter was actually a former Wackenhut security guard. So it's a very big American security company. Right. Is that a legacy of of Thatcherism? what What do you think exactly is going on with the attention to the prisons specifically? Because in the U.S. context, they would be addressed as a matter of job generation, frankly. like That's very often what they mean in our landscape. But I was curious what it means in that in in in Robinson in Space, for example. Yeah, I mean, I yeah i suppose it's you know it's the outcome of authoritarian populism of Thatcher is that it involved locking up a lot more people. like
Speaker: fit By European standards, Britain has very high levels of incarceration, not by American standards, but you know like as in many, many other things, it's perched right in the middle of the Atlantic.
Speaker: And there was generally... you know like Due to both the rising rates of incarceration and the fact that there was a huge amount of privatisation public estate going on, it was very, very natural for, you know, the British government at the time to look at what was happening in the US and and and import it, basically. And that's what happens. It happens also in private security firms. And, you know, it's um and the film kind of you know documents that more or less.
Speaker: It's interesting the first film in London, he's making out the UK to be this particular place that's particular in its culture and exotic. I think he even says it's so exotic, right? um And it's very much this kind of Nairn Anderson, you know, the sort of sympathetic bourgeois and aristocratic. It's very particular. And the second film, he's constantly sort of taking pops at Americanization. There's all these like shots of like vast science parks and business parks and that kind of like slightly bland 90s promo architecture.
Speaker: Not even just a American. I mean, I think that, if I remember rightly, the Nissan factory is in there. and There's like a Samsung factory, I think, at one point. And he mentions like a protest by some Korean democracy groups outside it. So, yeah, it's it's mainly America, but there's a sort of slight thing with East Asia starting to kind of come in there as well.
Speaker: but And there's an explicit ah theorization or or at least let's say observation of globalization, right? So there's a lot of discourse about the coal actually being dug up here is being exported to make steel in East Asia, whereas we're importing coal from the United States for these other things. So it It sort of shows you the shrinking physical space, for example, of coal production in the north, but then also talks about the continued need for coal and whatever domestic is sent out.
Speaker: Where ports come in on this is really interesting. mean, i I remember the first time I saw it being absolutely ecstatic that it had a long sequence in Southampton, which is where I grew up, which is a port on the South Coast, and because it never, ever fucking features in film.
Speaker: And the fact that it's in there, and not only is it in there, but he reads Baudelaire over some sequences of ships in Southampton and then mentions its university's, um you know, basically co-invention of modern fibre optics. I was just like, thank you.
Speaker: finally, you know, on the fucking map. But if you grew up in a port at this time, and I did, you were very, very conscious of the fact that many, many fewer people were working at the talks.
Speaker: um Not only are many, many fewer people working at the docks, you didn't see sailors. Like my dad talked, would you know, I've been talking about particular pubs in the city centre where you'd see where sailors would have gone in the 70s, right up until the 80s.
Speaker: And that's completely ceased. So, you know, you wouldn't know a lot of the time quite, I mean, in Southampton, the port is right in the centre of the city. So you see the containers at all times, but everyone's got to learn to unsee them in that of Channemayville city and city way. Everyone kind of acts as if they're not there, even though they're right there at all times.
Speaker: And that's partly because very few people work there. It's owned, I believe, by a consortium of Goldman Sachs and the the sovereign wealth fund Dubai. and it's And the sailors are no longer allowed to get off the boat. It's largely this Filipino crews on big container ships who, you know, they're not allowed to get off and hang out in the city and go to the pubs. It's not actually stop part of their contract.
Speaker: rather their contract specifically forbids it. So the kind of sea has sort of disappeared from a lot of these places. And so you think from that, oh, the port must be much less important. And one of the sort of germinal things for that film I've gathered from talking to Keela is him reading port statistics from 1995 and just finding that in terms of simple tonnage, British ports have never been so heavily used as they were at that point. Like enormous quantities of stuff coming in. And also because at that point,
Speaker: You know, industry had been downsized, but it hadn't been dismantled to the extent that people think it has. But it had been moved to other places a lot of the time. But, you know, in the kind of traditional heavy industry, you know, in the in the Northwest and the Northeast and West London and and and and West Midlands, that had largely disappeared. But there's loads of other, loads of stuff is being made. It's being made by tiny amount of people.
Speaker: And so everyone, because of that, and because of the fact that not only is does nobody know, or very few people know anyone that's working and in that in that sector anymore, they also don't see it because it's no longer in an urban area. It's in a business park somewhere outside Reddick.
Speaker: This huge part of the British economy is just sort of completely invisible. And one of the great things about that film is, that you know, it's a proper kind of, it's a real kind of like making the invisible visible project. Yeah.
Speaker: So a couple of things. First of all, my my sister is a longshore woman, i suppose, insofar as that's a term we use, at the Port of New York. And it's very important, obviously. They were going to strike last year and almost immediately won their demands because, you know, what are you going to do if the Port of New York doesn't work? Right, right, right.
Speaker: Yeah, there's no sense in which anyone who lives in this area thinks that we're in this you know and maritime ah paradise or something. or not even paradise, but just a place that is maritime in a meaningful sense. It's sort of least siloed off to those who work in that industry, which is, of course, shrinking.
Speaker: I also just on this question of visibility, I think it's a wonderful, wonderful point because someone who lives in the United States, which is sort of, ah you know, the Veronica's veil of this process of suburbanizing industry. You'll have to impact that one.
Speaker: Well, just in it it's the it's the true image, right? It's like, if you want to know how to put a big business park at the edge of a city or a town, I mean, i I'm ah a local politician here in Garwood, New Jersey, a town that I promise you does not end up in movies anymore.
Speaker: And, you know, we we sort of had this whole debate about whether or not to put a storage facility on this particular site. And we ended up getting a community center, which is, I think, better. But the point is that our choice was between a storage facility and something we were doing with the hope that children or something would come to it. And when you live in that kind of place, when you live in a place where service industries in the outskirts of town or even, God forbid, in the middle of the town are essentially what labor means for most people, you learn to unsee those things. Because there's no purpose in being able to see the target in Clark, New Jersey. There's no purpose in being able to see the storage facility that would have gone on North Ave.
Speaker: But there is something worth seeing in, you know, I don't know, ah sailors running around the port or something like this. It's live. Right, right. It's somehow less integral. I feel like if Patrick Keller was to make a Thorpe Robinson film, it would be on sort of Amazon distribution centers outside like Northampton or something. Yeah, i mean, I kind of expected that's what he would do if there was the third, which he very pointedly didn't. It ends up being about the British countryside. And I think that's, again, kind of, but there's usually someone you can map onto what he's reading for each one. And I think if the first film was Nan Anderson and the second is Ellen Wood, the third one is Karl Polanyi.
Speaker: So it's really, it's very, very deeply about the British countryside and about Spenum land and about the kind of, you know, the British countryside as as the actual, the English countryside specifically, the southern English countryside, as the actual sort of birthplace of capitalism made, in that particular case, not around the election, but around the 2008 crash. So...
Speaker: I think I posed this to Sam initially when we spoke about this, and maybe you have more you can add here, Owen. So obviously this character is called Robinson, the character the narrator is following or kind of paired with. And Robinson Crusoe comes up throughout both films, right?
Speaker: I'm just curious about... What might be going on there? There is this investment in a certain kind of British literary tradition, but he keeps coming back to Robinson, Russo, and I guess Laurence Stern is the other is the other who comes up a bit. So what exactly do you think is going on there?
Speaker: Well, I think there's a couple of things. One of them is, you know, Robinson Crusoe is always, you know, the kind of ideal economic man, right? You know, he is sent to this kind of nowhere and then he actually basically creates capitalism within it.
Speaker: But I think the other thing that's going on, especially in the first film, is the attempt to eradicate the 19th century, which Britain's modernist intellectuals have always wanted to do.
Speaker: you know, I think of like Wyndham Lewis and Blast, like specifically like Blast's era, what was it, era 1841 to 1900. So, you know, the entire Victorian era of like, you know, if we could just like forget that ever happened. And I do think, you know, that kind of, that's kind of very much part of the kind of New Left Review project as well of kind of like,
Speaker: What if the Victorians had never happened? You know, 18th century English and Scottish culture, it's much more connected to the Enlightenment, it's much more connected to Europe, it's much more theoretical, it's much more experimental. Think of, you know, the the novel, if you begin it with Laurence Stern, or if you begin it with like Dickens and George Eliot, you know, you go to a very different place.
Speaker: And, you know, the kind of, the the sort of um modernist intellectuals that Kiela was interested in, the surrealists or the kind of Russian formalists around, Viktor Shiklovsky, all absolutely loved Stern, Defoe, Johnson, Fielding, all of these, gates Swift, all of these kind of pre-Victorian, very, very kind of experimental figures. I mean, that's there's something of Johnson and Boswell in the narrator and Robinson Reitz.
Speaker: the the Johnson statue turns up in, um, in London. And I think there's also of an obvious kind of, um, you know, sort of Defoe influence in the second one. And there's a tour through the whole island of Great Britain.
Speaker: mean, he even, I i mean, it's quite, I think Keller makes it almost explicit, right? Like, um, In the first film in London, he makes a big deal the narrator, we should say is narrated by his flat, you know, and when he does leave his flat, the only time he ever really leaves his flat is to go to the supermarket, where he has these kind of reveries of being abroad. Yeah.
Speaker: In a way that he can can't quite ever manage when he returns to his flat where he isolates himself. Great shot, too. I just have to indicate, I love the sequence in the supermarket at the beginning. Yeah, phenomenal. But there are two moments in the first film where the narrator kind of realizes the degrees to which this is a little bit of a pose.
Speaker: One of them is in Brixton, the other is in Wembley, when he finds that Robinson's actually found, almost kind of without looking for it, the exact thing he's looking for. You know, Brixton especially, know, they mentioned like Brixton having its own Bon Marche department store, not the current chain, but you know, the 19th century Parisian Bon Marche, you know, the arcades and the market and the electric avenue and all of these things, you know, Brixton could be,
Speaker: you know, a kind of Rizian inner suburb in lots of ways. And obviously there's a multiculturalism of Brixton when you add that to it. And there's a later scene in Wembley, you know, a very kind of aesthetically unprepossessing suburb, which nonetheless, you know, has people from all over the planet kind of, you know, cheek by jowl using the same high streets. And it's in those two moments when he's kind of like, oh, actually, maybe I have found this sort of surrealist city that I've been looking for here after all.
Speaker: Whereas in Robinson Space, it's extremely conspicuous by its absence. And there's there's a lot of moments, you know, that the narrator is an unreliable narrator and Robinson is an unreliable, you know, friend of the narrator.
Speaker: like there's It's not the case that what's being kind of reported in each film is necessarily the director's view. I think there's a lot of jokes at their expense, particularly in the first one.
Speaker: For some reason, I don't know why it stuck out to me so strongly, but at the beginning of the second movie, right after he moves to Reading, ah he said we're we're told that when he does briefly leave his home, he's immediately chased away with homophobic slurs by local youths. and i yeah yeah Something about um that being the way that he's reintroduced in the second movie.
Speaker: After the narrator has been reading, you know, on the train from Paddington, has read, thumbing through his copy of Raoul van Aigen's The Revolution of Everyday Life. But yeah, that that I mean, also, i mean, I was 14 in 1995. And if you went out in a town like Reading, St. Fempton is not massively unlike Reading. if you went out in town like Reading with dyed hair and nail varnish, as I did, you would get your head kicked in.
Speaker: And that's not the case now, which I'm delighted by. um But, you know, I imagine, you know, Robinson, although we never see him, you know, he is probably very easily identifiable for his sexuality. I imagine him to be easily identifiable.
Speaker: And so, yeah, the kind of the the taunting. I mean, that turns up in the other film as well, actually, when they go to... um like they They go to the Green Man pub in Putney, I think, and they kind of um they have they have a similar experience. So and you know so this is all pre-New Labour's kind of version of New Labour take kind of major thing of kind of humanising Thatcherism and take it much, much further.
Speaker: um They repeal the Notorious Section 28, which was a ah measure in schools that discouraged the um heavy scare quotes promotion of homosexuality. And, you know, that that that section in schools, you know, there's a generation of people that that I've never really recovered from late. Not just the fact that they were bullied at school for for their sexuality, which was part of the cause. It's the fact that when that happened, they were not able to be defended by their teachers.
Speaker: And that's what made it so monstrous. There was no sense in which the teachers could intervene, could reminiscrate from the kids, could, you know, do a kind of assembly or a talk about why this is bad. Instead, they basically had to literally turn a blind eye to it.
Speaker: um So a lot of filmmakers like Keela didn't quite know what to do or became kind of very toothless after that because suddenly they were kind of in power. you know, New Labour, very much in contrast to the Labour government that currently spent a load of money on the arts, was very socially liberal and very socially progressive, what had initially, at least for its first two terms, was very publicly enthusiastic for multiculturalism.
Speaker: And so if you didn't look at the fact that the kind of economically the neoliberal offensive was actually intensifying and actually de-industrialisation in particular was speeding up at that point and becoming much more brutal, if you lived in London and you worked in the arts, there was a lot less to complain about after 1997. Yeah, I mean, I think it's it's really interesting how butify these two films function as a kind of a useful, so productive corrosive or the retrospective corrosive.
Speaker: to, I think, the sort of of retrospective understanding of the 90s now. mean, I ah barely remember them. I was born in 1995, so, you know. but This is all mediated through, you know, like, films and stuff. But, you there's sort two things that stand out, are the kind of populist, um called Britannia moment of Tony Blair, early Tony Blair, with, you know, like, God, I don't know, new galleries opening up, like, all like I think it's like the Walsall New Art Gallery um that opens up.
Speaker: Or, you know, Oasis and Blur and all of this stuff in Downing Street. And then I kind of... That's what the fringe is of Rubberdison in Space. There's a particular mention of an Oxford pop group, which I always assumed was Radiohead. And think it's actually Supergrass.
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, and then you have a kind of like a sort of social, the kind of like pre camera night, the sort of social liberal tourism of something like four weddings and a funeral on nothing hill. Yeah. And that's kind of what the predominant, I think understanding of the nineties now. And yet you look at these two films and you the first one is making a case for a kind of feudal backwards England. And the second one is making a case for a sort deeply anodyne, deeply sort of placeless globalized England. Yeah.
Speaker: both of which I think are in stark contrast with like, yeah, the vision of England in 1997. if you If you kind of look at a lot the sitcoms at the time, you see this a lot more strongly.
Speaker: And it's the case in sitcoms that, you know, don't have a particularly high reputation, like the British Empire of Keeping Up Appearances, which, you know, deep cuts for the for the heads. and But also my ah I'm Alan Partridge, which everyone goes on about. And, you know, it's a real kind of like, you know, to understand Britain, you must watch I'm Alan Partridge series one. um But if you look at the landscape in those series, especially I'm Alan Partridge, which takes place in a what the main character describes as a travel tavern, um a kind of system-built hotel on the motorway between London and Norwich.
Speaker: the landscape in that, the carpets in that, the kind of surfaces, you know, the breakfast buffets, um the all-night garages. Like, if I watch that, that's and exactly the landscape I remember from the mid to late 1990s in a way that actually the kind of, you know, i think unless you were living in Camden or the centre of Manchester, that other version of the 90s was a thing that, it was there, but it wasn't your daily life. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: I think even of like the London Docklands around like Surrey, Surrey Keyes, that kind of area, Rotherhide, there's a kind of postmodern end of history, John Majorite landscape emerging.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the Surrey Keys an interesting one yeah because it's it's so low density. And they've been kind of shoving in these very high density high rises as recently to kind of try and get away from that. But there's huge swathes of it where you do see what the kind of property developers kind of ideal of the late 80s and early 90s really was, which was, i mean, to call it Americanized is true up to a point in that it's very, very low density by English standards. Yeah. But all of the kind of twee little details, don't there's something about it.
Speaker: It all lacks the kind of actual expansiveness of the actual American version of this. There's no kind of like, you know, you will drive along the endless freeway and then, you know, now you're you you you'll drive and then you'll get to St. Albans. There's no sense of kind of endlessness. It's not not there.
Speaker: mean i mean it's's yeah I think you're quite right. like There's a ah shot, I think, 10 minutes into the first film, London, of a McDonald's outlet next to a sort of bypass with a huge Ronald McDonald.
Speaker: But it's just incredibly grey and like there's roadworks. There's just like intensive roadworks going on and it's like somehow it all feels in miniature. Yeah, absolutely. and and And, you know, that's the thing. You can't sort of reproduce that landscape in a, you know, I mean, i the the the US has its own reasons for doing the things that it's done. And I think, you know, it's but they've all been very, very questionable, but they've all had an internal logic.
Speaker: Whereas when it was brought here in the 80s and 90s, it had much more of the quality of a cargo cull. You know, it's far too dense and small an island for that stuff not to have been disgusting. And it was all disgusting.
Speaker: I was just going to say, may bring the American perspective ah briefly here, is so you're very right, of course, that ah Britain is much smaller and they're a very different density. But I think that the way in which there are these constant references to both English writers and then also very often French writers who end up in England for one reason or another, there's this sort of whole section about, I think it's Henri Berson's mother who is somehow right, and Rimbaud gets talked about and so and so forth. So there's also this sense in which history weighs very strongly on the island in both movies. i mean, of course, in the first, it's more explicit, but in the second, every reference to East Asia is sort of inclusively this discussion of Britain's you know prior relationship to Asia and you know all of these things. When I think in America...
Speaker: partly due to the spaciousness, partly due to what amounts to just having less settler colonial history, right? it Just not having the structures for as long. It's difficult for me to imagine a version of this that would even be legible, right? So you could maybe say, you know, George Washington stated this inn, which now happens to be next to this gas station. but You might must bear in mind that some of it's made up. like yeah The stuff about Montaigne at the start of the first film is completely made up.
Speaker: I mean, that almost makes it... yeah your point is your Your point is right, but I think also like some of it is complete invention. But I don't think an American would even be smart enough to do that. and i can say that.
Speaker: I don't even know that we would think to do that. Was the Montaigne thing just so it would all align with the Montaigne English School effectively? And there's this kind of line which didn't hit me until like the third or fourth viewing. I've seen both of these films far too many times. was like, it is not generally agreed that Montaigne taught for a while. You know, there's all these sorts of like little... The University of Barking is the other one of those.
Speaker: I do think in a sense these are films about an interregnum. I mean, like, obviously he wouldn't have known he was in in an interregnum in that kind of Gramscian sense because he was sort of in media res while he was filming it.
Speaker: I mean, there's that line where he sort of talks about the fact there are 7,000 miners still working in the industry and 1% of the number in 1946. Yeah. which i obviously at the time in the 90s would have seen this huge sort of drop. Well, it is a huge, like, absolutely it's a huge drop. Relatively right. Like, there's, what, like, two miners left in the None.
Speaker: I don't know. um so from our perspective, 7,000 seems like a huge amount. Yeah, and and they could organise and and a huge demonstration in the centre of London, as they as as you see at the end of that first film. So...
Speaker: yeah So were we're in this weird phase where it's kind of like we sort of in the popular imagination sort of think of de-industrialization as being complete by the late 1980s. That's done.
Speaker: Battle of Orgreave, et cetera, and you're done by 1989. Whereas actually de-industrialization is this much longer story going all the way to Port Talbot today. Yeah, it's not wholly complete, although it's you know it's not far off by now.
Speaker: And the pace of it really, really steps up in the Blair era, actually. Whereas in that film, you can see the new and you can see the new stuff arriving. You know, it's the you know the the the gigantic kind of you know kind of things manufacturing you're not quite sure what in Sheerness, you know, the Nissan factory in Sunderland.
Speaker: There's all these sorts of things that are happening that are actually new industries in strange places. And actually the kind of shift to everything being services and property, particularly property.
Speaker: really actually accelerates after these films are made. but i mean, the really, really big absence in both films is gentrification. And that's actually, I think that's actually connected a bit with the particular architectural faction that Keeler was in as an architect. Yeah.
Speaker: I don't think he'll he'll thank me for saying this, but, you know, if he ever hears it. But the people like Cedric Price and Rainer Banner, you know, that's his, but that's where he comes in. and they And those people that they actually were in favour of a sort of depopulation of the cities in many ways.
Speaker: You know, they kind of imagined, know, Britain being full of kind of rather L.A. like kind of constantly moving landscapes. Yeah. um they imagined it being architecturally a lot more interesting than what happened in the 90s. But actually, even though all of these people live in, by and large, in nice bits of London,
Speaker: they didn't really imagine an urban future as such. They kind of imagined the future being a bit like LA maybe a bit like Tokyo at best. um You know, this kind of enormous, sprawling, kind of multi-level kind of thing where each generation, you know, that he's also, as an art of influence from the futurist, from some St. Elliot, the kind of idea of, you know, every generation should build its own city. And that comes through very heavily in the the third film that isn't Robinson film, although it kind of is in dialogue with them, which is called The Dilapidated Dwelling, which is a film about architecture and housing made for Channel 4, which is a great lost film in lots of ways, but it lacks the bickering sexual relationship that makes the Robinson film so enjoyable. and
Speaker: But it's a really, really fascinating film in its own right. And that that film is kind of like, why aren't we doing this? Why aren't we kind of, you know, building a new futurist city every 10 years like they kind of do in Asia?
Speaker: And... um What actually happens in the late 90s, which those kind of thinkers hadn't anticipated at all, is the the kind of the people who the the the the children and grandchildren of people who had fled London after 1945 back.
Speaker: <unk>pa right Yeah, like there's a there's a scene where they that he shoots Spitalfield Market, right? like And it's completely dilapidated. There's rubbish everywhere, like the church. And it talks about it as being like the kind of front line between, we know, the city of London and the East End.
Speaker: And you can literally see a load of like bankers outside a pub, almost kind in a line. so that they don't step beyond the city boundary in Spitalfields. There's almost a kind of a force field around them, and they know that beyond there, you know, who knows what they'll find.
Speaker: um And obviously, you know, those that don't know London, that area is now unbelievably gentrified. I mean, there's still plenty of council housing estates there where a lot of poor people still live, but the main streets and buildings and markets and so forth have been completely kind of, you know, we-work-ized.
Speaker: And that, you know, but millions of middle class people left the home counties and the rest of London to go and live in many cases, the former industrial, quite depopulated kind of east of London. um You know, this place that's kind of a ghost city in the first film.
Speaker: is now probably has more people living in it than ever have before in its history. You know, it's at its peak population right now. So, and he doesn't anticipate that at all. And I think there's an element of like the moment when he kind of imagines, you know, the city of London turning into this kind of fascinating European coffee culture. Well, you know, be careful what you wish for.
Speaker: you know So i ah trained as ah as a medievalist, ah not architecturally speaking, but literally speaking. And i I can't help but ah think about how the description you're giving of London, and its relationship to the rest of the country, and specifically the royal presence that we get in the first film, are characteristic of post-Black Death London, where you have this ah depopulation caused by the Black Death, of course, a little bit different than fleeing to the suburbs, but nonetheless. yeah ah And people come back in part because they can be more mobile, right? These serfs are no longer, they can't be bound to the land in the same way. But also, where this kind of emerging royal presence is a bit unsure of itself, it's no longer as peripatetic as you know ah courts would have been in times past. It sort of wants to be a part of London, but is very much not for a variety of reasons. And ah there's something very kind of, I don't know, delicious for me about, you know you're talking about thinking about the development of British capitalism, whether or not it comes out of these feudal market economies that happen in rural England.
Speaker: And somehow this results in ah something like the reemergence of, you know, 1385 London or something. Yeah, yeah. I mean... You know, going back to Defoe, you know, ah practically everyone I know read or attempted to read the Journal of the Plague Year in 2020.
Speaker: So that that kind of thing of London suddenly depopulating. And and actually in that year, it did. for but A lot of those people went back to their families or, you know, those those investments that went back home.
Speaker: And for a while, London sort of depopulated again for a bit, which I rather liked. You know, the fear of death wasn't good, but, you know, that's a plague for you. But but the the other thing with the film that I like is it's, you know, the sort scattered mentions of a sort of pre-17th century London often hinge on... There's a great line about, you know, London is a colonial city. There was nothing here before the Romans. Yeah.
Speaker: And at the time, i remember thinking, is that true? And of course, it is absolutely true. You know, like, a few kind of, most of, more so you know, nationalistically inclined historians might be like, oh, no, we found, you know, an axe here or whatever.
Speaker: i remember there's a very famous passage in ah Conrad's Heart Darkness, right, with the Roman fleet is sort of like rowing down the Thames. And it's sort of the netic double for a British colonial fleet sailing down the Congo. And it's like, there's nothing there but jungle.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, i also, like, there's, you know, there's a, the the disgusting monument to Boudiccia on Westminster Bridge has some inscription along the lines of, you know, like, and her daughters will build an empire even vaster than thine or something like this. Some real kind of like, you know, not only, you know, she will get her revenge on the Romans by being even more disgusting than the Romans.
Speaker: Yeah. And of course, the medieval vision is that, you know, Brutus escapes Troy and and founds new Troy ah in in of course, yeah where London is now, which is maybe my favorite for obvious reasons. Yeah.
Speaker: I think my last question is obviously Robinson throughout both films is sort of this constant search for utopia. And like you said, he kind of finds it in the first film in this kind of cafe culture and in Brixton. And yet at the end of the second film, Robinson is base. The narrator says, they're almost the last line's penultimate line says, I cannot tell you where Robinson finally found his utopia.
Speaker: I'm just wondering, like on the podcast themes as kind of end of history and, you know, in some way, like, liberal democratic capitalism being kind of unspoken, well not for everyone, but for, you know, sort of like Fukuyama's sort of attempt to imagine that system, that combination of elements as some kind of utopian finality.
Speaker: i mean, i do these two films sort of, like, reach for a utopia, or are they more interested in kind of the the impossibility of utopianism in the 90s? Mm-hmm.
Speaker: But they wholly lack the sort of smugness of a lot of end of history discourse. There's no sense that like, there's no sense that this is the best, you know, or for the best and the best of all possible worlds in either film. You know, there's a, particularly in the second one, there's a lot of sort of violence just out of the frame. You know, there's very much a sense that like, this has fucked a lot of people up.
Speaker: So, and that there's I think there's a kind of, it takes seriously a lot of things that, both the kind of, you know, Fukuyama discourse and the kind of New Labour version of it, which is regardless of pure scorn, you know, council housing, um,
Speaker: You know, there's so much in the first film in particular of just going to places like the Boundary Estate, the the first of the big London County Council estates designed by disciples of William Morris and finding utopia there. Whereas, you know, the Labour government would do its best to dismantle lot of these places. Actually, it specifically tried to privatise that very estate in the early 2000s, defeated by a residence ballot.
Speaker: And that kind of legacy of, I guess, of such social democratic Britain of sort of, you know, 45 79. Keillor, as someone that had worked in it as an architect, you know, had had worked on some of the major council projects at the time, like the Alexander Road Estate in Camden.
Speaker: You know, he he regards them as as as as noble attempts to do something. You know, there's one moment where Robinson is kind of, you know, at the Haygate estate in the Elephant and Castle, which at that point was very much a demonised estate, actually. When they tried to demolish it 20 years later, there was a lot of public opposition, which was ground down. And then they did demolish it much later than planned.
Speaker: um But all of that stuff is taken seriously and praised. So there is a sense in which the film has a slightly retroactive utopia, which is, you know, the London County Council, broadly speaking, is is this kind of left of social democracy London um with its own municipal government that's informed by, you know, a kind of strange mix of William Morris and Le Corbusier.
Speaker: And is, you know, building sort of schools and housing and and and public buildings um for the good of its residents. And that stuff was really, really, really hated in the 1990s by professional opinion, by a lot of people that wouldn't like to be reminded of how much hated at the time.
Speaker: So there's the retroactive utopia there. There's, think, there's an irrationality in the films, which you know comes from the surrealist influence, which actually comes out a lot in the very end of that film. When he says, you know, I can't tell you where Bronson found his utopia, what you can see there is Neolithic artworks made on rocks in the Pennines.
Speaker: So there's these kind of abstract artworks that have been carved, you know, centuries before English people or even so i think centuries before Celts arrived here. And they're creating this kind of abstract land art. And there is an element here of just the utopia that that he actually finds. you You see this, you see that rock art and you see ah phone card, phone cards probably need explaining, but anyway, a phone card of Hadrian's Wall.
Speaker: And then you see the bridges over the Tyne. So actually the utopia there is Newcastle upon Tyne. And I think that, again, this is a loss on nonb British viewers slightly, but Newcastle you know is one of the few English cities that really feels like a metropolis a lot of the time, even though it's been deleterious and dilapidated.
Speaker: If you go to the quayside next to the river, yeah whether you've got two bridges crossing over each other with like the sort of grand, like huge so megalithic buildings underneath. It's amazing. It feels like New York.
Speaker: It's astonishing. and And, you know, one of those, but name the high-level bridge, one the one that you can see in the the foreground in that scene, this incredible you know early Victorian structure that's got like a railway bridge superimposed on a road bridge. you know It's already this double-level, incredibly ambitious bit of engineering. And so the last thing you see pretty much, it's when he's got speckling, not going to tell you where he's where his utopia is, but the visuals, I think, tell you the story anyway. And it's you know it's abstraction, it's the Neolithic, and then it's this vision of
Speaker: Interestingly, given how much the Victorians get it in the neck in both films, this kind of vision of Victorian futurism. And, you know, a place that at one point did completely, you know, to build those roads, build those bridges, they they literally ploughed them through a medieval castle. Incredibly kind of fearless, futuristic engineering.
Speaker: And so I think there's a little bit here of these the kind of these strange usable pasts here, a kind of a past that isn't even English and, you know, a kind of vision of futuristic engineering is what could have left with there.
Speaker: What you've described there, ah well, ah two things. First is that the version of a sort of new labor person you've described and their relationship to the idea of social housing or sort of public spending period very much reflects sort of contemporary America. So in an odd way, maybe that means that that sort of ninety s Britain is about 30 years ahead of the United States. So, you know, maybe we look forward to our own sort of Brexit and Keir Starmer in a few decades. right i think I don't think you've got that long to wait, but yeah yeah. You're right. These things do tend to accelerate. I'll give it about five years. I'm trying to mention American Keir Starmer there.
Speaker: But the the more salient point, I think, if I can compare this both to what we've watched so far and to sort of um bring it into conversation with the viewpoints that we've seen from from mostly American films, there's actually ah an an odd hopefulness that you're essentially describing. um It may be composed of fragments of a series of, to some degree, inaccessible pasts, moments that are are only present themselves when you really know how to look.
Speaker: right yeah But in most of what we've seen thus far, the only sense of hopefulness has been in a sort of in an almost kind of unregulated individual rebellion. There's something more sort of ah maybe heterodoxly Marxist, but at least Marxist insofar as it imagines, I think. A more communitarian project, if I can use that word. Whereas ah a lot of the films that we've spoken about so far are sort of about fracturing, and they concentrate on the fracturing itself, on the negative, on the breaks in society. And what's so interesting about especially Robinson in Space for me is when he goes and looks at, say, a Tesco distribution center, and frankly, shout out to Tesco, they kept me fed on 90p garlic bread when I was living in Oxford. Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I complain too much, ah much cheaper than what you'd get in the United States. But when we see those, I mean, yes, they're sort of an eyesore. I mean, I'm American. I see them all the time. i mean, it's, you know, whatever. It's an eyesore. But there is also a sense in which it does still feel maybe more vital than how I imagine that would be shown in an American context. I do genuinely believe that, even if it is not, you know, something that's being figured positively.
Speaker: and i I find that um charming almost. Maybe that sounds a little bit derisive, but i do genuinely find it sort of more willing to maybe try and buck the end of history that Sam was just talking about, where you know even within ah this problem of liberal democracy, we did at one time seem to be able to have these ideas of something greater or better. And sometimes that means like yeah William Morris, who is you know likes designing wallpaper and likes medieval guilds and things. And sometimes that means going for you know ah futurism or you know sort of fascist adjacent architects or whatever.
Speaker: But you need to be able to look in those places. And i that's just not something I think we've seen a whole lot of, Sam, so far. i mean, maybe you can speak up on that. Well, I feel like England has... And obviously, if the US had FDR, and it had like Eugene v. Debs, and it had like the populist agro-garrion movements and stuff. and But...
Speaker: I feel like England, in a way that America doesn't, has this kind of reliquity of social demand social democracy, right? like You can walk around London, you can walk around Birmingham, and you can see the ruins or of social democracy.
Speaker: so and in that sense, says there's... Like in the same way that the Renaissance sort of reimagined European modernity through looking at Roman ruins... there's maybe like a more approximate ah escape route from the end history from this kind of like closing of the Overton window in the UK in the sense that there are things to point to in a more immediate sense. I think I'd agree.
Speaker: Whereas the sort of American, i don't know if you're all familiar with this um old English poem called The the Ruin. it It should pretty much you know tell you what it is right there. It's a poem about you know sort of elegiacally reflecting on the existence of these Roman ruins, I think at Bath, if I remember correctly.
Speaker: um But the point of the poem is very much like, you know, you you yourself are like a ruin. One day, you know, you will be bones in the ground and your society will be ground to stone dust. And that to me seems almost the American perspective or something. You know, i don't know. There's something very very dark about that. Whereas here, yeah, you're right. There's at least an attempt at, yeah, if not recuperation, then at least marveling at human possibility. Yeah.
Speaker: I think especially in the first film, you know, the the fact that the moments where, you know, the narrator kind of loses patience with Robinson a bit, you know, where he is kind of like in Wembley and in Brixton, and it's like, this is actually fine. This is actually the thing that you've been looking for all along.
Speaker: Like, this is your tapir here. And I think there is, you know, it's it's got that kind of very... in a proper set of modernists you know, you know, of Benjaminian thing of like, it's utopia is being in many ways quite a solitary character who nonetheless lives in this quite collective world and enjoys it.
Speaker: And that's, you know, there's not, you know, it's not, I'm going to compare it with something like, i don't know, like Ghost World. Mm-hmm. which which I love, incidentally, but that it's ah so much more nihilistic in the way it presents that that that landscape and those people. there's I think because, you know, there is no, is it I presume it being Clouds, it's set in some and like Illinois, presumably.
Speaker: yeah it's it's like a suburb, as I recall. yeah there's no There's no kind of Brixton there that they can kind of go to and, you know, and enjoy the kind of arcades and the Bon Marche and the Electric Avenue and, you know, the the fact there'll be a load of stalls there where they're playing roots reggae, you know, you don't, you don't have that.
Speaker: Um, my greatest kind of, um, descent of ghost world is the scene early on where like a character goes, do you want to go and listen some reggae tonight? And the girls are totally disgusted. it Whereas like, actually, you know, if you live in South London, you do indeed want to go and listen some reggae tonight. And that's where you'll actually find your modernist utopia.
Speaker: I, I, you know, it's funny that it's given me a new way of thinking about some of, uh, the the versions of this that we've seen from the U.S. so far. So we watched, for example, a a documentary from 1984 called Streetwise, which you might be familiar with. It's about sort of a homeless youth in Seattle in the early and mid-80s. And it's a movie in which, I mean, there is no utopia. Let's get that straight. But insofar as there could be something approaching a utopia, it's essentially found family on the streets and learning these sort of crust punk survival skills that
Speaker: There's also, there's a level, because it's in Seattle, right, but there's a level of serendipity, right? there they're constantly running into each other. This is kind of, it's like networking, set like, just like a constant sort illusion of, like, chaotic elements coming together, and they're never alone.
Speaker: I think it's the key, the key aspects of streetwise. You know, you know, I think one of the things that I really ought to, ought to go, but I think one, one thing that's worth drawing attention to here is that this is a film whose two protagonists, there's only kind of two actual characters, and,
Speaker: middle-aged gay men. How many you know of the films you know of of the 90s and 2000s can we think of in America or anywhere else where the main protagonists are two middle-aged gay intellectual men who are obsessed with architecture and the failure of social democracy you know And so so you know they they they kind of they'll have a kind of like distant relationship to things like pop culture, but they're far, far too young to know what crust punk is, ah but far too old, rather, to know what crust punk is rather than to be part of one of those sorts of communities. So a thing they kind of admire from afar. you know Think of the Peruvian musicians they meet in the first film, the Jamaican culture that you see in the first film.
Speaker: It's a thing that is kind of like encountered a little bit from afar by people that because of their sexuality and their age, they're always kind of going to be a little bit out place, but they can nonetheless kind of find a place within that for themselves.
Speaker: i So I know you need to go and I will simply say, response that very briefly, i will be as brief as a a man of my sort of ah loquaciousness can be. First of all, you're saying, of course, that middle-aged gay men are the subject of history, so we've sort of we've un ah you know sort of found that out.
Speaker: But ah you know on on top of that, I do think it's an interesting point for for one very specific reason, and that is that The implicit argument there in a way is that the exposure to the reality of a better time, or at least a time that's thought bigger, if we can put it um in those terms, that that alone is enough to sort of allow you to carry forward a kind of germ of hope. Yeah. You know, and and maybe that is, you know, in some kind of blocky way, the the best we're going to be able to do utopia-wise, right? That at least we can hang on to that that sort of liberating hope that might get us somewhere.
Speaker: Yeah. whereas in a lot of what we've dealt with so far we are dealing with younger people even if they're being directed by you know boomers or something they are ultimately younger people who at least in the united states by the late eighty s ah early ninety s a lot of um a lot of these things only exist in the biggest cities. i mean, rent control departments essentially only exist in New York City and maybe to some degree in LA or Chicago.
Speaker: There simply isn't that material presence, if we want to talk about architecture, but also that legal presence insofar as a legal regime makes possible things like, yeah, socialized housing, or makes possible things like ah not putting everyone in prison all of the time. So when you've when you've never seen that, right you sort of have to somehow excavate it yourself.
Speaker: But when you have seen it, the the germ lives inside you, the spark lives inside you, and I do think that makes a difference. So, you know, point to England on this one. ah We will have our revenge on that. I think it's it's kind of relevant, isn't it, that, what, like, I don't know, 10 years later, Mark Fisher is sort of like digging around and see talking about 60s modernism and a lost utopia of,
Speaker: 60s social democracy, right? And he's he's really Gen X, I think, Fisher. So yeah you get that. you actually The sort of things that Patrick Keller is hinting at sort of come full-throated into the sort of labor movement and Corbynism through Mark Fisher by 2009, 2010.
Speaker: yeah This will be my last statement on the matter, but that way back in the way back in the midst of time in 2019, I was involved in getting signatures for an open letter of people that were supporting Jeremy Corbyn in the election of that year. And so I was kind of tasked with getting like cultural figures that I might have met to sign it.
Speaker: And um probably the person I was proudest by a long chalk of getting to sign it was Patrick Keeler. ah oh and thank you so much is there anything that you would like to to plug or or promote or uh if you know perhaps your thesis about middle-aged gay men being the subject of history whatever it happens to be i've not read that one yet um no i think i'll leave it there you plugged my new book at the start so i won't replug it um so yeah i'm happy to stop there well i'll plug for you modern buildings britain then because it's i think it's a fantastic book it's very kind of you my pleasure thanks all right thank so much
Speaker: With that, goodbye everybody. This been Dead as a Photograph. Culture the end of the street.
