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Masculinity in question
Billy Elliot has cinema-goers in tears - not least because it highlights what is going wrong for men today
Madeleine Bunting
Sunday October 01 2000
The Observer
All across the country, cinemas this week are full of the discreet sniffs, surreptitious wiping of wet eyes and shuffling in seats that constitute British emotion. The cause? Billy Elliot. Already billed to shoot an unknown child actor, Jamie Bell, from Teeside to Oscar nominations, the film has moved the toughest critics to shedding more tears than they can remember. Yes, it's sentimental, the reviewers acknowledge, before going on to lavish praise on the director, Stephen Daldry. Unbelievably, it seems we're going to forgive Daldry what was regarded as unforgivable in good cinema: this film is loaded with the most blatant button-pressing sentimentality. But all of us old cynics are happily sobbing away as we hear Billy recite from memory the letter his mother wrote from her deathbed.
What are we all crying about? Two things. The first is the intense vulnerability of a young boy, portrayed with engaging brilliance by Bell, struggling to reconcile his love of ballet with the concepts of masculinity of his Durham mining community in general and his miner father and brother in particular. The second theme is familiar but portrayed with tragic impact by using the miners' strike as the backdrop to the film: the disintegration of traditional concepts of masculinity during the mid-eighties collapse of mining and heavy industry.
Anxiety about the vulnerability of boys is a growing cultural preoccupation. It is introducing into the long-running gender debate a revived protectiveness towards boys. Billy Elliot captures this. So does the winner of this year's John Kobal photographic award currently on exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. In the photograph, a nine-year-old boy has his back to us. His shoulders are narrow and tensed, his elbows scarred, and he faces into a blank whiteness looming above his over-large head. His thick black hair is touched with grey; he looks both old and young. It is an eerily disturbing photo of boyish defiance, fragility and the vacuum into which he is growing up.
You don't have to be the mother of a son to worry about what kind of men we are asking boys to grow into when so many of the old role models are redundant. Male identity has always been built on the subordination of women. If girls are achieving so much more academically, how will boys accommodate women's equality? In the conclusion to his book, On Men, Anthony Clare quotes scary predictions of what faces men. Rising suicide rates, one in three men living alone and 1.5m men excluded from the workforce either because of early retirement or because they don't have the education and skills for employment. Perhaps, Clare hopes, women will find a compassionate awareness of men's insecurities, while not compromising their own legitimate self-assertion.
The second theme of Billy Elliot is, if anything, even more painful. We constructed a masculine identity that served the industrial revolution well; we exiled men from home and children to work in factories and down mines, destroying the family units of the agrarian and pre-industrial cottage industry economy. Now heavy industry is finished, their masculinity is as redundant as their labour. Billy Elliot, like The Full Monty, is humourously playing with a history that lies heavily on the British heart: the decline of heavy manufacturing has destroyed not just communities, but souls. It was the exertions of such regions that were the foundation of our industrial development, and now, we've uneasily turned our back on them. We like Billy Elliot and The Full Monty, these parables of men and industrial decline, because they explore middle England's guilt, purporting to offer feel-good answers that, for all their wit, are criminally deceitful.
In The Full Monty, the redundant steel workers turned themselves into sexual objects (just as poverty turns women to prostitution) casting themselves roles in a sexually voyeuristic culture, offering fantasy sex to titillate women. Even as we laughed, we knew this was the cruellest of hoaxes.
Billy Elliot is more subtle. Here is the American dream of the individual who makes good - and the age-old co-option mechanism that has kept the English middle class securely on top of the pile through two centuries while revolutions reverberated all around it: you cream off the working-class talent and exile it from its roots. Billy's desire to dance is represented as a desire to escape the confines of the mining town. In his triumph - he performs at Covent Garden for the enjoyment of the middle classes - it is not suggested that he may lose as much as he gains among the emotionally stultified middle classes. Salvation is only for individuals. The rest are stuffed. The strike is lost, the men go back down the pit.
So, 16 years on from the miners' strike, the fictional Billy Elliot is now in the Royal Ballet, Jamie Bell has the possibility of an Oscar, and unemployment in the north-eastern towns where Billy Elliot was filmed (and where Bell comes from) is three times that of the south-east. And it has got worse under Labour, not better. An Institute for Public Policy Research study published last month found that 180,000 jobs have been lost since 1997 - most in the north - compared to 150,000 gained in the last three years of the Tories. For every Billy Elliot, there is a Homing Pigeon Boy, the 16-year-old from Bishop Auckland sentenced this summer to four years for nearly 1,000 offences. Or a Lambton Worm Boy or a Laughing Boy, other examples of the north-east's penchant for nicknaming its most notorious juvenile criminals. The point is that Billy Elliot is a morality tale celebrating the winner/loser culture. And there are plenty of losers - Billy's father and brother and the norther!
n mining towns for starters.
Billy Elliot celebrates the very syndrome from which men are suffering. For, as Clare argues vigorously, winning brings only isolation and insecurity - a point also made by psychologist Oliver James in his book, Britain On the Couch. Men's competitive instincts are encouraged in such a culture, but at a great loss to themselves - in the quality of relationships with their families and communities. It is men who are suffering more from the decline of social capital - the breakdown of families, trade unions, churches, political parties and so on - because these institutions provided men with a context of social solidarity and cooperation rather than the loneliness that goes with meeting expectations of the self-sufficient, competitive male. Muslims graphically illustrate this when they bunch themselves in tight rows for Friday prayers in the mosque; they are, literally, shoulder to shoulder in expression of their solidarity.
Billy Elliot may usefully encourage a sympathy for the defiant vulnerability of young men, but it offers no way forward, despite its claim, for the painful reformulation of the social construction of masculine identity.
madeleine.bunting@guardian.co.uk
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
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