Transcript
Speaker: Hello, I think we're on. Chase, my fellow co-host, is currently stuck in what seems like a two-hour long going call with American Health Insurance, so he's going to drop in later, but in the meanwhile it seems like we're recording, so I will introduce our guest today.
Speaker: Our guest today is David Jamieson. is a writer and journalist. He's the editor of Conta Scott and he also co-founded the Radical Independence Campaign in 2012. He's written for a wide array of publications, including The New Statesman, Bella Caledonia, Jackman and a Tribune.
Speaker: He also co-hosts Conta Radio and produces the Sunday Sermon, which in my mind is an indispensable guide to view Scottish, British and international politics. He's on Death as a Photograph today talk about a classic Gen X film, which is Braveheart 1999.
Speaker: quick disclaimer, David is not, I think, a Gen Xer, but a late or early millennial. However, he'll hopefully have a lot to say about Scottish nationalism in the uni-prolo moment of So, Thank you.
Speaker: welcome david Thanks for very very much for having me on i'm looking forward to Yeah, my pleasure. And yeah, we gave you a, you kind of came a short list of and Gen X films for us. And we sort of resolved on Braveheart, which was released in 1995.
Speaker: you want to give us a quick summary for listeners, what Braveheart is and your sort of basic understanding or reading of it? Yeah, so i think I gave you a short list and many of the others were more kind of obvious Gen X cinema classics. I mean, I think one of them was Silence of the Lambs.
Speaker: um And when I was thinking about ah ah Scottish option... The obvious choice would have been Trainspotting, which is of course based on the Arn Welsh novel about drug addiction in post-industrial ah Scotland. um I thought I'm highly likely to get pigeonholed as a Scot anyway, so I might as well put in what I think is the kind of anti-trainspotting response.
Speaker: Braveheart is the type of film that you wouldn't perhaps think of as Gen X cultural production because it doesn't deal with people who are outsiders or alternatives or live in alternative lifestyles. When you think of Gen X, you think about grunge or you think about mole rats or that kind of alternative American subculture. But for me, you know, it's a bit like that thing people, they think of the 60s and they think of hippies, but in the 60s almost no one was a hippie, right? Most people were experiencing a kind well, most Americans, for example, were experiencing quite a socially conservative consumer boom, white picket fences, et cetera, et cetera. To me, Braveheart is,
Speaker: bravehart much more directly speaks to the the cultural experience of this time. So it's obviously a historical kind of i mean a historical film, you could almost say kind of historical fiction, dealing with the medieval uprising of William Wallace, against the English occupation of Scotland. It is wildly historically inaccurate. One of the few things people might know about the film is just how inaccurate it is.
Speaker: It was written and directed by Mel Gibson. It was produced by his Icon Productions. So it's very much a part of Mel Gibson's oeuvre and Mel Gibson's a very representative figure in cinema of the period this is the time of kind of there are lots of you know real men in the cinema in this period Mel Gibson, ah Bruce Willis, Kevin Costner this is a time when somewhat grizzled middle-aged men were considered the kind of platonic ideal of what it was to be a man
Speaker: And it's an extremely gory action film that was notorious for the period, not just for its historical inaccuracies, but also for its belladrama, and for its depiction of ah homosexual characters, and for its depiction of the English. And some critics regarded these depictions as sort of spiteful and motivated.
Speaker: But I think that the the film's interesting on a number of levels. I think it reflects something about ideology at the time, about the importance of nationalism, and and that's something that I think has subsequently been borne out, and also the importance of a certain idea of freedom attached to the national project and the idea of national identity.
Speaker: Because the film is often thought of as very Scottish, and of course it's not. It doesn't reflect Scottish culture. it's It's American. It's an American production, and it very much projects an American idea of national freedom and the place of the nation um in identity.
Speaker: Drawing on the experiences of, know, this is right at the end of the 20th century, and it's drawing on the kind of collective experiences of nationalism in the 20th century in an extremely kind of garbled way. So I think it's it's interesting for those reasons, for its projection of national freedom, national identity, masculine identity to a certain extent as well. And it was at the time as well, of course, an absolutely like huge hit. like It was a barnstorming film. It was experienced like an earthquake and in Scotland, and in Scotland's small cultural sphere.
Speaker: It drove enormous tourism to Scotland and was instrumentalised by political figures here. It obviously landed without the same weight elsewhere but it was nonetheless like a huge blockbuster of it of a certain, I mean, I don't want to be too nostalgic. I feel like you don't quite have that blockbuster culture in the cinema anymore.
Speaker: You know, it's it's a standalone historical epic and that in itself feels kind of old fashioned today. Yeah, I mean, this is a ah sort of topic that's come up on the podcast like a lot, which is that these kind of 90s, big 90s films, we are we talked with previous guest, Spencer Leonard, about Glory, which I think is 1989, Civil War film.
Speaker: But then there's this kind of unitary understanding of kind of unitary, non-fragmented media at the time, which is, I think, particularly Gen X, which you just don't have now. i mean, what was the impact on, obviously, you have...
Speaker: This is what, two, three years before the start of the independence, sorry, not independence, devolution movement you have. I think it's 97, things start moving and you have the referendum in 99.
Speaker: And you obviously we have Alex Salmond taking over the S&P five years prior in I mean, how is how does this film sit with kind of nineteen ninety s Scottish nationalism and even, you know, the kind of more moderate sort of mediated third way approach of devolution?
Speaker: So, it should be said, the SNP campaigned with the film. So, like, um if the film had its premiere in Starling, which is, of course, the scene of many of its kind of most famous scenes.
Speaker: So, there's the Battle of Starling, but the Battle of... yeah literature but Yes, yeah, the the Battle of Stirling Bridge, and there's no bridge in the film. And also the Battle of Bannockburn, which features at the end of the film.
Speaker: And indeed, I think the Battle Falkirk is also depicted, and it's not that far away. It's between Stirling and Edinburgh. Anyway, the the film's launched in Stirling, and you know the SNP were leafleting outside of cinemas when it was playing.
Speaker: How much impact any of this had as anyone's guess. I get the feeling that in in immediately it didn't have much of an impact, right? Devolution is a Labour Party project. And when what I recall, because I remember my parents taking me to the polls to vote, you know, for the Scottish Parliament and for it to have tax raising powers and so on, this felt very much like a New Labour thing.
Speaker: A kind of guarded optimism, an idea that after a long period of Tory rule, these things were coming to an end and there was ah a kind of slightly more dignified political scene and and so on. It didn't feel like a moment of nationalism, political nationalism at that point. And it was still very much under the rubric, as I say, of this kind of putatively modernizing political project.
Speaker: So I think that its political influence would only tell over time in that by the time of the 2014 independence referendum, people would reference it half in jest, right?
Speaker: It would be a common insult that you were only supporting independence because you'd seen Braveheart too many times. Yeah, and I think the Guardian depicting Alex Salmond in kind of like woad in a kilt.
Speaker: Yes, you know, and then and then the way that that was dealt with, and in a form that's now become very familiar to us in the kind of mimetic culture war era, people would respond by by embracing it, right? Not by saying, not by feeling guilty or whatever, are saying, stop saying that. They'd respond by, I remember... um close to the date of the referendum, there was a a panel-based poll that showed that independence was neck and neck, as against other polls that had shown independence behind.
Speaker: And a popular meme went around, which was that scene in the film where the Stirling battle and the yeah you know they they raised the pikes that that stopped the the cavalry charge. right So people would share this around and it said that The company that had produced the poll was called Panelbase, and this meme said, Panelbase, you're bass, right, with a picture of the phalanx of Spears.
Speaker: So it became this kind of, it was kind of regurgitated in 2014, half in jest, I mean, there's always been this attitude that amongst unionist opponents of independence, that this all began with the film. That's certainly not true, right? And the cultural moment wasn't really there. and In the 1990s, the SNP were still very much seen as eccentrics. I mean, I remember my dad, who would go on to be an SNP member, telling me at the time that that it was an eccentric party, that these people were sort of like Lib Dems and kilts.
Speaker: yeah and I think someone else described it as a kind of coalition between Tarth and Tories, like ethno-nationalists and like kind of civic nationalist Presbyterian middle-class shopkeepers. Yeah, with with a few with a few kind of eccentric Republican lefties thrown in for good measure. It was a bit of ah an odd assortment at this time. And it wasn't, like I say, it really wasn't their time.
Speaker: I mean, it was a sensation in Scotland, but I don't think it was it immediately had any kind of major political impact. I'm curious about the division in the SMP between sort of boomers and Gen X, not to be too deterministic about this, but Alex Salmond is late, you late to this parish. Um, was a boomer, I think 1952, three or something.
Speaker: And also Nicholas Sturgeon is sort of right span back in the middle of Gen X is 1970. And then I think among the older generation of the SMP, there feels to be more of like a brave heart Dane about them.
Speaker: Like, Alex Salmond, or at least to my perception, Alex Salmond always seems to dance between a kind of Braveheart nationalism and a kind of anti-austerity, anti-neoliberal left-wing nationalism. And like Sturgeon, Nicola Sturgeon to me represents a kind of professionalised PMC rejection of both those things, but like a clear like aesthetic distaste of the kind of Braveheart style romantic nationalism.
Speaker: And I wonder how those kind of generational interpretations of the film maybe play out. You're probably right, right, that despite it being, I think, Gen X era cultural production, in the sense that the late 80s and the first half of the 90s is probably the most formative period culturally.
Speaker: I think, yes, I think that the boomer nationalist is just inherently less embarrassed. of almost anything, maybe that's like that's a benefit of getting old. You stop being embarrassed. You don't care. You don't care about being cool or being well-received by the right people or whatever.
Speaker: unless i mean, it's worth remembering, like, the uses to which the film was put, either in the 90s or that kind of aesthetic was put by Sam and later, it was always quite tongue-in-cheek. But you know the way these things work. It's sort of like you're smuggling the imagery and the heroic sensibility in under the the guise of it being kind of tongue-in-cheek, you know. um And the other thing is, depending on where you are,
Speaker: The resonances of a film like that are very different. What people in Scotland remember about the film is it's slightly fun, slightly cheeky, but ultimately sentimental attachment to the idea of Scottish freedom, which is, of course, in the period that the film is depicting, totally different.
Speaker: out of time and out of place and anachronistic because it won't be for hundreds of years yet till people develop an idea of kind of Scottish national patriotism, let alone the idea about independence.
Speaker: So the the film does imply that independence is kind of a a permanent struggle in Scottish history. It's not even a permanent struggle in modern history. I mean, the fuck before about 2011, when the SNP won the majority, it was an issue that was, again, it was seen as eccentric by most Scots. It was seen as completely besides the point.
Speaker: So, yeah, that that that's the bit that's received in Scotland, this retrofitting of of Scottish national, political nationalism. it's an interesting question whether this film, to what extent this film is even directed a Scottish audience, right? In the sense that the nationalism that is presented, which obviously is clearly very anachronistic.
Speaker: This is kind of postmodern bricolage of kind of 18th century civic Republican stuff from like Jefferson and Thomas Paine, this idea of like tyranny and independence, a kind of nineteenth century ethnic nationalism and romantic conservatism is in there, but also a kind of,
Speaker: nineteen fifty s to 1970s kind of third world anti-colonial yeah struggle. Like that's very much in there as well. Like it's this kind of mashup um of things. but I suppose, know, your average sort of Gen X audience member in America, I don't mean like Connecticut or something, like it's going to have a better understanding of Thomas Jefferson and don't know, maybe like the Tibetan freedom movement and maybe some kind of vague osmotic sense of like third world liberation than they are.
Speaker: you know the divine right of kings or the treaty of our birth or like the nature of you know sort of like Norman pan sort of Scottish English, Norman aristocracy at the time. right Absolutely. So the idea of nationalism, and again, national freedom, I think, is the concept. I mean, freedom's the famous kind of tagline of the film. Everyone knows at the end of the film he screams freedom, right? And if you if you've ever been abroad, you'll know. like I mean, I was in Berlin a few years ago and someone just grabbed me and shouted freedom.
Speaker: A friend of mine was in Palestine and a Palestinian grabbed him and shouted freedom when he found out he was Scottish. So it's that that idea has travelled around the world, right? That Scotland somehow represents the idea of national freedom. And I think that largely does come from the film, right? I mean, so that's... It's had a big impact outside of Scotland on perceptions of Scotland.
Speaker: But the... you're right in that it's a blancmange of various ideas, a kind of syncretic historical collapsing of ideas about national freedom. So in the film, i mean, it's maybe worth even sort of going through the, such as the film has an arc. i mean, one of the criticisms you could make of it is the characters are quite flat. They don't really change over time or anything like that. Right.
Speaker: But Young William Wallace is depicted as, well, his father fights against the English because of English oppression and so on. He is marked by that as a child, but he decides as a young man to give up on the struggle for Scottish independence and then returns to it once his Um, he has an illegal wedding with his, with his wife to ah avoid an English noble engaging in prima nocta, which is, this isn't a real historical thing.
Speaker: You know, English lords sleeping with Scottish maidens on their, on their, on their wedding night. Right. So to avoid this, they have an illegal marriage. She's murdered by an English magistrate leading him into revolt. And that's how it all kind of, how it all kicks off. Um,
Speaker: But the key idea in all this is that William Wallace is commoner and he leads the Scottish commoners, right? He leads the kind of plebeian mass of Scottish society and he's in constant tension with the nobles, right?
Speaker: And there is there is something of that historical tension in this period. There are always class tensions in society. But the way in which it's presented is much more like ah a contest between and a national liberation movement like the bourgeois wing and the you know the the mass wing, right?
Speaker: It's almost like the 1848 revolutions, right? that The nobles are always holding the working people back from from carrying through the struggle to its conclusions, right?
Speaker: I going to ask you, which is is an odd stylistic or production choice to elide the fact that William Wallace is actually a member historically of the sort of minor gentry or some minor nobility. He's not, well, I suppose he is a commoner in the sort of strict sense of the word, but he's not a sort plebeian hero in that. So he's not a Walt Tyler figure.
Speaker: No, and and and the struggle but the struggle, the things that we call the wars of independence are kind of principally and struggles between different sections of the nobility on the British Isles. So it's it's it's a fraudulent kind of projection. But the fact that it is projected in that way, I think, is what what is interesting.
Speaker: And the thing to remember about this is, and this is something that people often forget about ideology. I mean, I would say that Braveheart is is a right-wing film. It's right-wing art, right? In the sense that it's presenting right-wing attitudes about society, about the nature of society and the nature of history, right? Right.
Speaker: I think there's also ah a sense that Gibson actually brings across quite well, surprisingly, which is that the nobles are in some sense transnational, right? Like, there is this kind of Norman, Anglo-Norman caste, like Debruce, right? Like, you you hear the names like Debruce, Balliol, like they're clearly Latinate, they're clearly Francophone, and there is a sense that, mean, it's not... massively fleshed out, but there's a sense that you know these these Scottish nobles, they own land in England in england and New Yorkshire, they have kind of competing interests on the other side, they have this kind of like family connection to what was referred to in the 18th century as the Normandy yoke. it's not It's not brought out in a massively sophisticated way, but I think there is some sense of of that.
Speaker: We are constantly reminded as well that this English... it's not quite an empire, right? It's pre-empire, but this English kingdom is transnational because it's kind we're constantly reminded that Longshanks, Edward Longshanks, is fighting in England to try and expand his son's inheritance and his son is tasked with fighting in Scotland, right?
Speaker: So we have we have this idea of this kingdom is a pre-national entity, right? So it's not part of this world of of national freedom that is being fought for by William Wallace, yeah.
Speaker: But that this this is also an interesting tension in the film, right? Because the film's full of Catholic imagery. i mean it must be so I mean, to situate Braveheart in the Mel Gibson oeuvre, it's part of a few a series of films by Mel Gibson which culminate in The Passion of the Christ. And in a sense, Braveheart is the kind of first run of The Passion of the Christ, right?
Speaker: So, of course I mean, at the end of the film, he's crucified, right? And you may know that Mel Gibson wanted to play Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, and he doesn't he's too old by that point for people to notice that he's not, you know, 33, however Christ is, old he is when he dies. But he does he does get the next best thing, which is to die as a kind of Christ-like figure, right?
Speaker: And um he's put to death, of course, by the kind of the effete of The effeminate English who represent, of course, this you know the evil spirit of the world, the spirit of the times against which William Wallace is rebelling. right So you have quite a classic structure of right-wing ideology in the sense that you have the the dark principalities of the world who are feminine and insidious and poisonous and calculating.
Speaker: And then you have the noble, rustic savages who are masculine and benign and have traditional values and so on. I mean, when thinking about the internationalism of of elites in this period, it's complicated, you might think, for Mel Gibson, because of course...
Speaker: The film has Mel Gibson-like tropes, like he's constantly prostrating himself before the cross or presenting himself as a cross, right? So that he's he's shown on a cross in the torture scene at the end of the film.
Speaker: He also presents himself to the magistrate who kills his wife in a Christ-like pose. There's loads of this stuff throughout the film. All Mel Gibson's films have a lot of that imagery, like he's clearly doing it quite consciously.
Speaker: But you'd think, isn't there a problem here for Gibson's nationalism and nationalism in the film because the Catholic Church is, of course, a pan-national kind of, it is the universal church, right?
Speaker: And there's a nod to the kind of cosmopolitanism the Catholic Church, like early in the film, Brian Cox, who's playing his uncle, Argyle, who takes him You know, the first thing he does is teach him Latin, right? He must teach Latin. And then he takes him to see Rome, to see the Pope.
Speaker: um And there's all this. But you but remember the Catholic tradition that Mel Gibson comes from. His father is outside the church. because his father is part of a kind of ultra-reactionary anti-Semitic schism that doesn't recognise the Holy See, and so opposes the Church hierarchy.
Speaker: ah these what they call sedivantists? Yeah, yeah. He believes that the the seat is empty, um and so therefore does not recognise the cosmopolitan international hierarchy of the Church and its worldliness.
Speaker: How did the sort of Catholic strains of Braveheart play to a Gen X audience, you know, that was sort of the end of the wrong word, but in a a Scotland that was sort of, the sectarianism of Scotland was sort of like ebbing slightly.
Speaker: I think you get to the 90s and things are a less pronounced. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, I suppose we think of Gen X as a kind of secularizing generation. It possibly wasn't in the United States. I mean, that's a very modern development in the United States. But in Europe, it was, you know, in Western Europe, there was ah a good degree of secularization.
Speaker: So I would say Mel Gibson's Catholicism kind of sits, and the way it's presented in the film kind of sits awkwardly in that situation. It does feel very crowbarred I mean, Scotland, of course, in modern history is ah is kind of a notoriously Protestant um country and it's in its kind of established religion. i don't know if how to what extent he's aware of that and he's just...
Speaker: feverishly reminding people that it was, of course, a Catholic country for most of its history. ah But again, that if you look at the depictions of the Catholic Church in the film, it's an underground church.
Speaker: So it's a Catholic priest who conducts their illegal wedding. And there's a deliberate juxtaposition in the film between this underground church perhaps kind of like primitive church, which is close to the, ah you know, to the the true faith, right? And then you cut to a Latin ceremony in an ornate English church, and the wedding itself is is fraudulent, you know, because the king's son is getting married to a French princess, and he's looking over his shoulder to his male lover, and they're giving each other kind of knowing glances and and all this. It's supposed to be Biers Gaveston.
Speaker: quite obviously the whole thing is sort of this David Cameron sticking his cock in a pig's head the whole thing is supposed to be kind of like look at this virtuous rustic church there's a field church you know there's a Celtic cross that they're kneeling in front of and is that a sort of transliteration from when he's knighted in Selkirk I think right Which is, in ah and I think in in a Blind Harry's account, at least, that knighthood is, that knighting process is done in a kind of Glen. like and And obviously you have that kind of covenant of tradition 100, 200, 300 years later, maybe a little bit longer than that, which is a kind of preaching in the Glen that is kind of... um Yeah, I mean, this is, so it should be said, the film is based on on the Blind Harry iteration of the William Wallace story, which is, of course, a kind of myth-making piece. And it was recruited by the Victorians.
Speaker: um to that end. So it's very much part of a tradition of myth-making around William Wallace. And I always got the impression that the writers of the film, and Mel Gibson said almost as much as like, I wanted to make a good film.
Speaker: So I want the legend. I don't, you know, I mean, i don't tear I don't care that much about historical accuracy, which as far as I'm concerned, by the way, is the right attitude. Who cares what actually happened? You're making it mass entertainment, right?
Speaker: So yeah, I feel like bits and bobs of Scottish history are picked up here. you welly-nilly and chucked in there. Yeah, I think it is very much ah a film of its moment, a film of the 90s in the sense of its kind of post-modernity. It's is a historical nature. So um I think, and'm I'm not massively concerned about the anachronisms, but I do think that the anachronisms maybe speak to the moment in which it was made. In essence, I think there was one critic who said, you know, like, the aesthetics of the costumes of Braveheart are both a thousand years too late and 500 years too early. Yes. Referencing the woad, obviously, and the kilts. Yeah.
Speaker: And there's a kind of weird sort of binary telescoping of history where it's kind of like this midpoint where it's telescoping back and telescoping forward. And it's sort of creating this inventor tradition, which like really brought me um to Eric Hobsbawm and Ranger's inventor tradition.
Speaker: I think there's a whole chapter on Tarsinary and this kind of idea of Victorian recuperation of... them something that the ethnic bit the, the ancestors would have had, the Victorian elites ancestors would have had a large part in crushing, also denaturing, and then also sort of wanting this, like, to recuperate this thing that was lost or that they've destroyed back into into their culture. Obviously, there's a huge embrace of kind of Scottishness, you know, tartanery, the Highlands, Gaelic Scotland by the Victorian elite in sort of the mid-19th to late 19th century.
Speaker: And I'm wondering what, if we see, we can read Braveheart as like an invented tradition in some way for the 90s, like what what what what are people trying to recuperate in the 90s? What's lost in the 90s that this kind of weird anachronistic recuperation is trying to attempt to settle? Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think i think it's a telling comparison, right, to the tartan craze of the 19th century, which partly ran through the kind of royal family.
Speaker: And that's a process which is about a kind of the consolidation of the modern British state. i mean, it's this strange kind of, you know, angel of history flying backwards type thing where It's because Britain is gripped by the Industrial Revolution that various parts of British society start to consider um our roots in kind of ancient, pure, romantic tradition and so on, right? is' that it ah It's a kind of response to modernity itself.
Speaker: And then the film... is kind of a response to post-modernity, right? It's a response to, and and and a deeply contradictory one, because here's this, Hollywood is, you know, one of the great world-spanning cosmopolitan industries, cultural production, and its central focus is trying to re-recruit actors Ideas of a primitive, pure, healthy past to describe sort of cultural and spiritual tensions in the in the modern world. But what's interesting about, and and despite the fact that it is a response to postmodernity in that sense and a response to hegemonic liberalism,
Speaker: course, by the film by the time the film comes out, it's you know the neoliberal triumph is is quite secure and is in its second phase, the the so-called kind of social neoliberalism phase, where Clintonism and Blairism and so on is consolidating the revolution by giving it this kind of lilt of hyper-modernity and we're moving into a new era, social liberalism, etc., So it's a response to these things, but it is it's kind of the classic moment for this, right? I mean, it's like, this is not the period in which you would expect the zeitgeist to be grabbed by this kind of right-wing kind of film tradition and this response to to these things. But at the same time, it is itself postmodern, as you say, because it's like, it's a great example of presentism, right? In a sense, there is no history at this point.
Speaker: you know, history could be, it's warred from the kind of era of the Roman Empire, as you say, much later traditions of Tartanry from kind of, you know, it's sort of like, it's trying to evoke the the Jacobites, as far as I can tell, the the the nature of the dress.
Speaker: The last battle, which is... um hispanic banic bone yeah Yeah, Bannockburn. It sort of looks like Culloden. It looks like something out of the 18th century. and And of course, the other thing is, they strongly suggest that this is partly taken from the imagery of Culloden, is the Scots are portrayed as highlanders and they're engaging in things like the Highland Charge. I mean, the military tactics described in the film are interesting in the same way because they do this thing that's very common in the 90s, which is they invent guerrilla warfare, right? So as you were saying, it's kind of like recruited from sort Vietnam and stuff.
Speaker: the In loads of films from this period, various historical actors are inventing guerrilla warfare, right? It's interesting that that becomes an image of heroic nationalism.
Speaker: it's It's such a powerful image that the Americans can't resist it, even though they were victims, as were the Europeans, of guerrilla warfare and its development throughout the 20th century. But also, i mean, again, elsewhere in Mel Gibson's career, you'll see these tricks repeated. So that there's a film called The Patriot, where Mel Gibson, I mean, it's practically Braveheart for America, right for the American War of Independence. Right.
Speaker: You have Mel Gibson as this ultra-violent but essentially noble and primitive farmer um who invents guerrilla warfare and thereby defeats the evil English for you know yet yet another on yet another occasion. But also so that the scene with the pikes, he invents the pike. By the way, this idea of historical invention is everywhere in Mel Gibson's films. There's a scene in The Passion of the Christ where Jesus invents like the chair and table.
Speaker: right so his characters in his films often invent things like that are totally sort of arbitrarily and selected so he invents the pike Gen X though that kind of like notion of independent self-reliance a kind of DIY you know that kind of like late punk DIY notion right Yeah, yeah. um Again, like, I mean, we're we're absolutely slathered in this idea of the nobility of primitiveness, not just on the right either, right? Like, how many, you know, hipsterism is a cult of the antiquated. It's a cult of the kind of artisanal, right?
Speaker: Yeah, it's a complete embrace of, like, fin de siècle, late 19th century aesthetics and a Right, I mean, this is something that which is kind of, um it's so omnipresent in the film and in right-wing ideas about what's involved in national freedom that you would miss it if you, you know, you can overlook it. But what is the ultimate object of freedom, according to William Wallace, right? I mean, it's two things, really. One is to fight your enemies, right, and the the virtue that comes with that. But the second is just to be left alone.
Speaker: Right. He wanted to be left alone to, as he says near the start of the film, to farm and to raise a family. Right. So um the ultimate object of national freedom is is freedom from external governance. Right. Freedom from government, perhaps full stop.
Speaker: um So it's it's this, I think it's, he's saying things that will later become kind of hegemonic political preoccupations, particularly in the era of kind of late neoliberalism, where, I mean, it's all these ideas that are a bit current at the moment, because Quentin Slobodian has written that book.
Speaker: Hayek's Bastards, which is kind of related to all these ideas, right? Like there is a strange dialectical unity between, there's a kind of unity of opposites between the idea of freedom and authority here, right? Where ultimately the demand for freedom from government helps bolster some very kind of brutal and reactionary ideas. That unity is very much kind of their in this film. So it's, he's picking up these ideas about national freedom, one from an oppressive opponent, which is a kind of big government run by um kind of effete creeps to release the kind of savage beauty of these kind of tough Hamlet dwelling kind of underground Catholics. I mean, that is the that is the project.
Speaker: Hello, we've we've we've got our co-host has finally escaped to the Byzantine maze of American health insurance. Yeah, I mean, Chase, what looks, Chase has just obviously appeared in the podcast halfway through. it What was your take on the film, and Chase? I mean, as a non-Brit.
Speaker: can Can I confess that I had not seen Braveheart since maybe catching glimpses on television when I was a child. So this was as much an initiation as anything else. You know, I come from this background as a medievalist.
Speaker: So of course, for me, the first thing is sort of, what does make sense here, what doesn't. But you know quickly, that feels like it becomes kind of annoying or nitpicky or something like this. So then i I feel like I pivoted towards thinking about like why is Mel Gibson making this? like I guess I was fundamentally confused about it feels like such ah ah a clarion call of a certain kind of romantic nationalism that is very Scottish just insofar as Walter Scott is you know does this kind of revisionism for the Middle Ages that's clearly being picked up by the movie.
Speaker: But I don't know if we all discussed this, like what gets Mel Gibson involved? did Did we talk about that? I apologize for being... This is the question we've not asked, so I think it's it's a useful one. I mean, it...
Speaker: As kind of, as I was saying earlier, I think it is worth i actually reappraising this. I think it's this is Mel Gibson's project kind of full stop, right? so he's telling that he's quite often telling the same story over and over again, right? As as any artist does, right? So he tells this story again for the the American war of Independence in The Patriot.
Speaker: I think that Braveheart is to considerable extent a dry run for the Passion of the Christ. And so William Wallace is ah is a very Christ-like figure. He even kind of, you know, he has the hair and all this kind of stuff. And of course, he dies. I mean, they they basically crucify him in every way, but literally putting him up with two thieves and So he is on a wooden cross at the end of the film. you know there's There's all that kind of symbolism. But also if you look if you watch films like Apocalypto, which he doesn't star in, but he he directed, you know um again, there's the same kind of themes of decadent civilization versus a pre-civilizational, morally healthy community, strong community. that is then attacked by this evil and separate empire and so on. So these are themes that he reappraises over and over again. I think it's the destination is a secondary thought. I think the romanticism of it appeals to him, the romanticism of the nationalism, I think the the capacity to kind of have are a white Christian medieval Che Guevara is irresistible to him.
Speaker: Irresistible. That's a very good point. also ah Also, I mean, something that the that the film was also noted for at the time, but has been obscured by the passage of time, because I don't know how you felt about the battle sequences. They were received as controversial and sort of appalling at the time, because not only they extremely violent and blood-soaked, there's an immense kinetic feeling to the violence. I mean, yeah the battle, what should be the Battle of Stirling Bridge minus the the bridge, like, people's heads explode quite a lot. you know an impact with hammers and stuff like that.
Speaker: and It's thought to have had, by the way, quite a big impact on Game of Thrones. So after Game of Thrones, you wouldn't view it the same way, right? It's almost taken to kind of joke level in in Game of Thrones. But you know people being stabbed in the genitals and the eyes and having their heads exploded and their legs cut off and all kind of stuff was considered quite shocking at the time. And it's a piece with...
Speaker: Mel Gibson's general obsession with gore and with torture. and But, I mean, if you've seen The Passion of the Christ, again, it was the torture scenes in that are considered extremely shocking.
Speaker: But as well, there's an idea of revenge here. yeah of violent revenge, which again, i mean, the film is quite influential, I think, in a number of number of ways. i mean, another person I feel like the film had an influence on was someone like Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino likes to present himself as influenced by, you know, American popular culture in quite a sort of, he's a nerd and he's into it on that level. I think Mel Gibson's quite a big influence on Quentin Tarantino and a certain idea of
Speaker: very indulgent grisly revenge. Like, the film's very indulgent in its violence, and it understands that when you see the magistrate who murders William Wallace's wife, you know, there's kind of almost a close-up on his throat being slit, and i was like there's almost a sort of cathartic release in the extreme violence meted out on really cartoonishly evil people.
Speaker: And Mel Gibson understands the emotional resonance of that, I think. So, I mean, I think that's a wonderful point, and I can't not permit myself a sort of brief lowbrow reference here, which is, of course, the South Park version of Mel Gibson from the early 2000s, where he just wants to be tortured. It's like the boys go to get their money back for Passion of the Christ because they hated it so much.
Speaker: And they go to his house and he answers the door, rips his shirt off and says, you'll have to torture me to get them, you know, to get the money. And they're like, we don't want to torture you. just And he like ties himself to a table and, you know, it's just like, oh, you know, he's like twisting his nipples and saying, oh, you think that's going to get me? I'll never talk. You know, like, yeah and it I mean, that does kind of get to something about Mel Gibson as a character. But what I, what i like about what you're saying is that it gives us a way into thinking about, know,
Speaker: The ninety s as the decade of this kind of battle over the idea of violence to a substantial extent. What I mean by this is you've got Tarantino coming up along. This is the decade of the Saving Private Ryan in opening sequence. It's kind of extreme kineticism. It's in the aftermath of this late 80s, early 90s debate about you know how many times have video nasties come up on this podcast so far, Sam? Quite a few times. Yeah. This but it also is a color this sort of like, you know, if I can be permitted a little bit of um pretentiousness, I don't know, this sort of Aufhebung of, you know, okay, there's this problem of violence running through the bottom part of the culture. We're going have a big debate about it. And we're going to find a way to tear out the kind of essence of that violence and sanitize it just to enough enough to make it part of the blockbuster in a way that would not have been true in, you know, the Spielberg, George Lucas, late seventy s early 80s.
Speaker: So again, I think this is important for understanding the mutation of the modern political right, because whatever else you could say about Mel Gibson, he's not Mary Whitehouse, right? Like, he's not saying that sex and violence and drink and drugs are bad. um he's he's He's saying...
Speaker: you know, wow, isn't this stuff cool? Like that guy's head just exploded. This is great, right? And this is a kind of pendulum swing to the kind of like the idiot, right, in a way, right? Like it's all felt experience. It's all intuitive. The other thing, though, this is a kind of, you know, one of the things about right-wing art historically is it tends to be sort of extremely sentimental.
Speaker: I mean, the film's so sentimental. and Mel Gibson is constantly crying. Like he's, I think it's that's partly because he's, um It's, you know, actors like it when they can make themselves cry, you know, and he's got a knack for crying. He's constantly blubbering and exploding people's heads and shagging people and like, you know, wildly in love. It's a very emotional film. It's very melodramatic. So this is kind of the right learning to have fun, right? It's we're not censorious anymore. We're enjoying the violence. We're enjoying the the low culture and and so on.
Speaker: and The question I was going to ask you was that, I mean, you could kind of quite easily twin Braveheart with a film that came out five years ago, which is also about the Scottish Wars of Independence, which is Outlaw King, which centres Robert the Bruce as the protagonist rather than William Wallace.
Speaker: My point of view is that Braveheart is sort of representative of a deeply, as you say, sentimental romantic nationalism for Gen X. Something like Outlaw King, you post Game of Thrones, is kind of highly representative of a kind of cynical nationalism or a cynical politics that is quite representative, I think, of the millennial ethos. And I wondered whether that is representative of Scottish nationalism as well.
Speaker: I think this is an interesting point because like if you see a modern depiction of a medieval type scenario now whoever's making it or writing it thinks it's terribly clever to remind you endlessly of realism as a political concept right so Game of Thrones is all about the endless realism of all the characters right you know it's it's almost like people think they invented the idea of Machiavellianism, that's become a real kind of fixation in modern kind of historical and and fantasy and literature. Whereas Braveheart is the total opposite of that, right? The sole motivation, again, Mel mel Gibson's character is almost Christ-like,
Speaker: in the sense that his his whole motivation is something holy and pure and almost supernatural. There's a telling bit towards the end. i mean, he's visited by the ghost of his wife repeatedly, right?
Speaker: And there's a bit towards the end of the film where he's possibly going to his death, I mean, he's in the Garden of Gethsemane, right? And he thinks he might be going to get seized by the English, right? And put to death. And he says he's going to do it anyway. And one of his friends says to him, oh, you think, Morrin, your wife is watching you, right? And he says, I don't think I know it.
Speaker: Right. again, it's it's it's a level of kind of emotionality, which is almost supernatural. it's He's involved in the supernatural world. This is a struggle which is not temporal or material.
Speaker: This is a struggle between good and evil that transcends humanity. planes of experience, the natural and the supernatural. So it couldn't be more fanatically idealist in its conception of the world. And that's a massive contrast with other kind of historical fiction where people are just reveling in the realist thing.
Speaker: and And an almost kind of scientistic idea of what realism involves, where there's no ideology. Every ideology is a lie. Everyone's just lying. and and And really, you're proving how intelligent you are if you understand just how cynical everyone actually is. So that's, I think, a big shift as well.
Speaker: I was going to say, I sort of understood Braveheart's attempt, hand-fisted attempt at class warfare, which we were talking about earlier, in the sort of delusion of William Wallace's gentry status and making him this kind of peasant commoner.
Speaker: There's a kind of, um it's it's more a universalistic class warfare in the sense that you know when Wallace is dragged through London to his execution, the English presentry aren't depicted as kind of potential allies or potential sort of class comrades, right? They're sort of depicted as morally polluted, you know, sort of like sadistic imbeciles, effectively. And there is a sense that the kind of, the class analysis is, yeah, like you say, it's almost a galleon, it's idealistic and it's senseor that there are there are different sort of equivalent social classes, but one is kind of carrying the absolute spirit, to sort of use a Hegelian term, whereas another isn't. it's very It's not Marxist in this sense. Somehow the Scottish nation carries this kind of in know world spirit or zeitgeist within it.
Speaker: Yes. So, so like, I mean, i mean, it's ham-fisted on one level, but on the other hand, i mean, you might have to say, i mean, reactionary socialism has been like a very popular and and historically often with tragic effects, you know, quite an effective form of, you know, what he's, what his version of class politics is like, it's organic solidarity, right? So you're quite right. It's almost like racial solidarity, right?
Speaker: right Even more than can a national solidarity, because the English and the Scots aren't the same. The English are a kind of atrociously ugly breed of under-people. But the worst thing about them is that they are ruled by people.
Speaker: gay, people whose gender is kind of nonspecific, the kind of the ruled by man-woman type creatures. right and i mean I know it's become fashionable to har hark on about sort of Mel Gibson's anti-Semitism, but But there's a similar kind of vogue of ideas in the sense that, again, like, you know, the idea the idea in classical antisemitism is that the Jewish people are bearers of modernity, right?
Speaker: The English in this film are bearers of modernity or bearers of post-modernity. They bring with them all of the evils of civilisation. the effete-ness, the femininity, the slavishness, right? Perhaps even the starkness of the separation between the social classes. Because the Scottish nobles and the Scottish commoners aren't seen as divided in quite the same way. The um the Scottish kind of commoners are not so in so humiliated and degraded in the state ah state. And again, the the most romantic depictions in the film are of
Speaker: Wallace and his immediate community, right, of Scottish commoners. And they are strangely pixie-like twilight existence in forests with the moon shining through, conducting these underground Catholic ceremonies. That to him is perfect. Like that to Mel Gibson is the way human beings should live. And he's obsessed with the forces which he believes have polluted people.
Speaker: and undermined that existence. And with this this group of kind of noble savages, their struggle against the the wickedness of the civilised world. So, I mean, to return to the idea of why does he, what attracts him to, you know, the the Scottish Wars of Independence, I think it's that. I think it's a perfect canvas for his permanent preoccupation with this idea of noble savagery, and and yeah, the kind of class solidarity that that breeds, the organic national racial solidarity that can underpin that struggle against the the wickedness of the modern or the postmodern world.
Speaker: i just I feel like the the term that needs to be attended to here is that Mel Gibson is raised in this sed vacantist situation where you know these this is this group of Catholics, I guess you could say, who basically think that there hasn't been a Pope since Vatican II, more or less.
Speaker: You know, what is that about? What is that position about? It's about a kind of idolization of a 19th century piety, right, which is read as transhistorical. This very sentimental, very bourgeois piety. You'll see the, you know, the cherubs with the sort of rosy cheeks, the little statuettes of Thérèse of Lisieux or these sorts of 19th century figures.
Speaker: It's very rooted in an eye in know in a modernity that it thinks of as premodern. And so I think someone like William Wallace is perfect for that because he's still Catholic in a way that, you know, Scots of a few centuries later, they're not going to be. He's close enough to the earth that, yeah, all of this kind of organicity you're talking about is there.
Speaker: But he's also capable of being this kind of sentimental warrior who can code as both modern in the way that you know you need like a you know a good soldier to be modern, I don't know, in in the way that one said Vicentis might imagine that someone who fought against Napoleon was you know a good soldier or something.
Speaker: But at the same time, pre-modern enough to not be sexually licentious, right? I mean, let's let's think that through for a second. The English are ruled by women. What does Mel Gibson do to the woman who's effectively ruling the English? He has sex with her.
Speaker: but Which, in the world of the movie, is not considered licentious or a bad thing because it's essentially him. First of all, it's love. It's an attraction, right? If it's not love, it's romantic attraction. It's not rape.
Speaker: But it's also literally him dominating the woman who rules the English. It's a you know um and in an emasculation of whatever is left to the English. it's kind of It's even more kind of abrupt than that because in one of the most ludicrous scenes, right because el Isabella of France, of course, is a child living in France at the time that all this is supposed to be going on. right So it's complete bunkum. But there's a scene towards the end of the film where ah Long Shanks is dying.
Speaker: And he's leaving on the throne his gay son, who hates him you know is you know he obviously can't rule with a firm hand. He is the kind of effeminate gay son who has consistently failed to stop Wallace throughout the film. And Isabella France goes over to Longshanks and says, basically, oh I'm carrying a child who is not your son's, right? So basically, William Wallace, this is the other thing you have to remember, right?
Speaker: and well because that these all passion plays, Mel Gibson's films, it's good news. At the end of the film, Wallace has won, right? And he's won in two senses. He's turned around Robert the Bruce from his effeminate ways, and Robert the Bruce is turned into the new Tartan Che Guevara. But also, he has literally usurped the the the throne of England yeah by knocking up Isabella of France.
Speaker: So, like... And what I find so fascinating about that is like in both of those cases, it's a second life, right? So he has been killed on the cross only to return, right, in the form variously of Robert the Bruce and the future king of England.
Speaker: The active union of entre-littre, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, um and again, it's kind of implied that the sacrifice was necessary, right? It's substitutional atonement, you know, that his his death was absolutely required in order for this transition to take place and and Scotland to become independent. And the the one the last thing... I think needs to be borne in mind about that famous end of the film. I mean, there's so much in there that's so ludicrous. Like there's a scene where Isabella comes to him with a potion that will stop him feeling any pain.
Speaker: And Mel's like, no, I must, I must feel pain. It's, it's, Why? this is ridiculous, right? you know I must die in absolute agony, right? Which, of course, again, is this kind of thing of you know Jesus in Gethsemane begging God not to make him go through with this, and ill be you must he so he must overcome this as well.
Speaker: And just think of this. If Mel ever, you know, he he was too old, obviously, but had he been able to play Christ, right? which has obviously been his lifelong fixation, it was his lifelong wish to have been literally crucified, right, um ah on the cross, in front of an audience of his accusers, right,
Speaker: And the closest he ever gets to that is the last scene in Braveheart. So if you ever wondered what it would look like for Mel Gibson to actually achieve his E-Day fix and be destroyed physically by his enemies who represent the wicked soul of modernity, right, in this bizarre ritual that he's been trying to reproduce his entire life, the film to watch isn't The Passion of the Christ. The the film to watch is Braveheart.
Speaker: But, you know, that is a peculiarly almost medieval desire. I have to say, you know, there's this whole imitatio Christi tradition, this whole tradition of meditating on the crucifixion and imagining yourself either as a spectator or in the more extreme version, yes, as someone who is responsible for the crucifixion of Christ to the extent that you basically deserve the punishment that he's receiving. And so Mel is basically just taking that one step further and saying, you know, no, Lord, i will be Christ to you.
Speaker: you know I will be the one who stands in and absorbs ah you know God's wrath so that you don't have to. which is i I do think it's it's interesting to think about that. I know we're talking about his kind of neuroses. right We're not talking about a generation per se, but it means it's interesting to think about that as a as a phenomenon for a certain kind of, i don't want to say boomer, maybe boomer into Gen X. like I think a lot about, when I was watching this and based on our conversation, I thought a lot about like late 90s nu metal artists who are both extremely sentimental. like If you listen to a lot of the songs, there'll be these kinds of love songs and they're like meant to have sex to. When they were recording, they were like, this is going to sound great.
Speaker: But they're also hyper-masculine, hyper-violent, reject any notion of femininity as being part of the the cultural space that that this is taking place in. I mean, look at Woodstock 99 if you want an idea of sort of what to expect.
Speaker: it's you know Obviously, it's not the same thing as Mel Gibson, but he does seem to be an avatar or at least representing a kind of sentimental masculinity that hides underneath its own machismo. like His desire is to be tortured, which in basically any other context is that is not a masculine desire within the normal gendered frameworks that we bring to bear ah in general.
Speaker: I mean, a lot of the music from this period, there's a lot of masochistic speculation. I mean, need I utter the words, cut my life into pieces, this is my last resort, right? so and And yet that's like, that band was like quite, yeah, like quite masculine and stuff like that. So yeah, I think that that is, there's a rehabilitation of the kind of the masochistic. I mean, I feel like, again, for Mel Gibson, like, his whole career is building up to the passion play. He's obsessed with passion plays, right? And he's obsessed with suffering. and Even in films which are more collaborations or more other people's films, I mean, watch Polanski's Hamlet, where his Hamlet is this kind of Gethsemane type figure, crying and screeching and shouting, and and at the same time,
Speaker: very physical, very violent, very masculine. Polanski chose him for these qualities. Polanski thought that a 90s Hamlet would be this way, a kind of a man at once divorced from his emotional masculinity, but still bearing a kind of young man's physicality and so on. So Mel Gibson is the perfect choice for that. And it's very much his style and what he reproduces. And the whole point of the passion, of course, is, is the mortification of flesh. And it's often been said that there is like a kind of, um, depictions of the passion often have this kind of masochistic sexual quality to them. And,
Speaker: and That's also a very medieval thing, right? The mortification, the desire to to experience a spiritual connection with God which is connected by pain and self-destruction in some way.
Speaker: I think to an extent that kind of Christ-like masochism feeds into a kind of nationalist consciousness, right? There's always an element of victimhood to nationalism, whether that be a dominant nationalism like British nationalism or a kind of in scare quotes, marginalized nationalism, like Catalonian or Scottish nationalism.
Speaker: There was always this kind of friend-enemy distinction that leads and back into a kind of victimization masochistic trend. I mean, i think of Tom Nairn's sort of coinage of self-colonization, right?
Speaker: Which, on the face of it, is it supposed to be about a historical process of self-colonization, e.g. that the Scottish aristocracy were complicit in the anglicization of, you know, Scotland and the the Union and that this wasn't a kind of standard 19th century style colonization in any sense. There was also another sort of like personalistic sense of self-colonization which you see among some of Gen X, sort of Gen X nationalists in Scottish nationalism, which is this kind of like willingness or an imperative towards a kind of civilized identity that is kind of like um contradictory to the historical record but it's very much there I think among some Gen X nationalists is kind of like desperation to be one of them you like to be a subter and I wonder how that feeds into both Braveheart and Gen X I mean in the sense that you can talk to and I know you're not one of these kind of Scottish nationalists you can talk to a certain brand of Scottish nationalists who will sort of
Speaker: full on deny that Scotland was in any sense a kind of joint partner of empire um or you know, like yeah they won't really acknowledge the union of crowns or the fact that the union of 1707 was, you know, the result of failed colonization of the Darien scheme.
Speaker: There's this is kind of the erasure of Scotland's own outwards attempts at colonization towards this kind of inwards self-colonization, which think really comes out in very part. It also comes out generationally to a certain extent.
Speaker: So, i mean, again, i would i would have to say i think Scotland itself is not the best example for the model of nationalism and and nationalist freedom, which is just stated in the film. But I would say that there are that that your what you're saying is correct, right? There's ah an idea that kind of national identity is legitimate because of suffering.
Speaker: right um but I would actually say that that idea we're witnessing with a film like Braveheart the gestational period of an idea which has really taken over western politics like completely right this idea of a national identity based in suffering and in oppression and in being maligned by others right including others who are kind of sort of like I say like yeah sort of a feat in cosmopolitan and so on so on right like That is obviously a powerful idea in Western politics and an idea that the thing that the nation does, I mean, this is the weird contradiction at the heart of this because we've talked about this idea of the nation as organic solidarity, right?
Speaker: But at the same time, the object of national freedom is individual freedom. Right? That's the outcome. That, to me, is like the cellular heart of Malay in Latin America or any number of kind of new hard right political projects or Trump in America, right? The thing that the nation does is...
Speaker: is it's your vehicle for self-reliance, for an and ah quite a hyper-individualist view of self-reliance. And again, it's very sentimental.
Speaker: You recruit the the kind of sentimental forces... for that project, from an awareness of your history as, you know, ours was a green and happy land until the World Economic Forum cast its shadow across our green pastures, right? And now we need to struggle with all our atavistic virtue against this, and you know, yeah what is it that that the alt-right call it, like global homo?
Speaker: I mean, there it is. right and there it is literally it's like there's a world of like cosmopolitan ultra modern femininity that we need to struggle against in order to restore the nation and its and its subjects who will then go off and farm and return to the land and leave behind all this shit right leave behind the the painful, confusing, unpleasant, alienating culture of of modernity. So I kind of think that you can see that maturing everywhere as as a political concept. And in that sense, like, I mean, when you think that this was 1995, this film was being made, that's mad.
Speaker: Because that that is the height of, as I was saying, like New Labour, Clinton, the social phase of neoliberalism, when precisely this kind of post-borders social liberalism things at its peak.
Speaker: The stuff that you get these days, like there's the cultural production of art period in terms of like historical films and so on, like it doesn't have that resonance at all.
Speaker: It doesn't have an emotional resonance and it's not going to last and carry and have that type of imprint on consciousness. I think that's the the deep tension in sort of Gen X art is this, we've discussed this in previous podcast episodes, is the kind of between earnestness and cynicism, sentiment sentimentality and kind of materialism.
Speaker: And yeah, Brain Heart, I think, is another film that kind of really straddles that yeah in an interesting way. is It tends towards more the sort of sentimentality of Gen X. It tends to represent that strain of Gen X. Whereas obviously in a year's time in 1996, you have Transpossing come out.
Speaker: which is also a film that is both deeply sentimental and in some ways deeply cynical. And I think it, you know, it weighs in the opposite direction. It weighs slightly more towards the cynicism of, you know, pick a life, pick a job, pick a career, this kind of like,
Speaker: Like a lot of culture and in in Gen X, and this is but like a lot of alternative culture, right? Like the cool kids watched, you know, so-called watch train spotting, right?
Speaker: Or went along with some music scene in Seattle or whatever. Like a lot of that stuff, even if just performatively, it runs cold, right?
Speaker: Like it's something that's often said about bands in the era is they don't smile, right? You never see them laughing or smiling or something. They're always scowling, right? Because, you know, mysterious and and so on, right?
Speaker: Whereas, like like, Mel Gibson's... Yeah, Mel Gibson's kind of like the the total opposite of that again, right? No one's hanging out or should be hanging out watching Braveheart. It has this kind of Wagnerian quality where everyone should be transfixed by by what's going on on stage, right?
Speaker: And... yeah, it's like the all the emotions are turned up to 11 and, um you know, everyone's always either laughing or screaming and crying and shouting and and and so on. So, like, it leaves it leaves that imprint. And that's that's the difference, though, between a cultural product that I think is more era-defining in a way
Speaker: I think it's a deeply telling historical relic in that sense that we have a kind of retrospective understanding of Gen X as deeply cynical, sort of as a counter-reaction to the idealism of the boomer generation, of the hippie movement, the counter-culture, this kind of rejection of idealism and sentiment.
Speaker: And yet, so many of Gen X's kind of cultural productions, cultural relics, whatever you want to call them, are actually deeply sentimental. I think that sentimental strain is, you know, like, I think we're coming to understand that sentimental strain and in in that generation people.
Speaker: And as you say, as they tip take the reins of power. As our gerontocracy slowly releases the levers of power to Gen X, um I think, yeah, that there's sort of thinking through that dialogue between cynicism and sentimentality Yeah, I mean, I just think, you know, I'll be very interested to see how how those tensions kind of mature into into mainstream politics. I mean, I've mentioned it before, but Malay to me is is kind of...
Speaker: the kind of ultimate model of this sort of politics, right? Extremely sentimental, constantly emotionally hyperactive. um should be a joke, but it's apparently good at winning elections. But, you know, again, there's this idea that the nation and freedom, there's some essential connection between these two things.
Speaker: I think of him as quite representative of at least one outcome in Gen X politics, right? I think of that as a potential model. I'm not fatalistic. I'm not saying that's where we arrive, but there you have this collection of kind of classical liberalism meets a quite aggressive nationalism and combined with a paranoid hysterical um hatred, very emotional and pronounced hatred of perceived kind of global elites and and so on. like he he is the the the modern
Speaker: ah the modern brave heart We'll wrap up there. And um again, thank you so much. for there anything you want to plug? Anything I want to plug, I suppose just Conta.scot. I mean, if you're interested in contemporary Scottish politics, you could always sign up to the the Patreon and and help us out a bit. But it's kind of a niche kind of thing, isn't it? I mean, sort of this type of discussion. But we do we do discuss kind of culture and stuff a lot on that, but we kind of straddle Scottish and world events. So anyone interested in that, do come along.
Speaker: i mean I can't recommend Sunday 7 highly enough. I know that you stopped publishing on Spotify, but even the the back back catalogue of those, they're fantastic. and um Yeah, they really lend themselves it. I mean, you start with Scottish politics, but you sort of end up on the geopolitical stage quite a lot. and yeah I think they're fantastic. so Thanks very much. Yeah, so come along and and save me from penury.
Speaker: Save us all from penury. Thanks a much, David. and Cheers. Cool. Thanks very much.
