Class Enchantment

Since 1997, when I saw both films, I have been ruminating over the very different things that Brassed Off and The Full Monty have to say about class politics.[1] It’s almost as though one film was designated as the point of departure, serving up modernist class politics at the moment of its death, while the other shows us the way forward into a postmodern politics of class. But before I get into exploring what that could possibly mean, I should start with a brief synopsis of the films. Both are set in English working class communities undergoing deindustrialization. Brassed Off takes place in a coal-mining town where the mine is slated to close. We see the losing battle to keep the pit open through the eyes of miners who are part of the Grimley Colliery Band — a brass band that becomes the symbolic voice of opposition in the film. After the mine has closed, they go on to win the national band competition in Albert Hall. This gives the terminally ill bandmaster a platform and an audience for the harrowing speech of protest and lament that closes the film. Though Brassed Off stretches a love story across the management-worker divide and coats itself with a thin layer of working class humor, the principal affects evoked are pathos and rage. At the end we are left with painful and powerful feelings of loss.

Whereas Brassed Off has a documentary feel, The Full Monty is a utopian fantasy that starts some time after the closing of the steel works in Sheffield. The unemployed steelworkers spend their time at Job Club or pilfering scrap metal or hanging out on the street, feeling like “yesterday’s news.” But when a group of male strippers come to town, some of the men who see the crowd of screaming women and the huge box office draw decide that they can do it too. The film tells the story of men who come together out of (mainly) financial desperation and become a collectivity of performers and friends. It ends in their striptease before a crowd of admiring, excited and voluble women, where they take it all off and become reborn as “workers” and as “men.” The Full Monty offers us surprise and hope while providing the joyful and forward-looking finale that is the hallmark of comedy.

One of the things that has attached us to these films is the reading — about their divergent takes on class politics — that we’ve constructed around them. And it is just this reading that often gets us into trouble when we talk about the films, perhaps because it is so clearly a reading and so transparently our reading. Many seem determined to read the films as realist texts sited upon the common ground of deindustrialization, with Brassed Off providing the awful truth of that process and The Full Monty trivializing (though unable ultimately to palliate) it. The semiotic extravagance of our reading betrays us as intellectuals with no understanding of working class reality and little sympathy for its subjects.

Having encountered this response on many occasions, we have begun (along with others) to wonder why the realist epistemological stance is so often accompanied by social analyses that are bleakly and ungenerously negative. More important than that question, however, are the questions that the different readings prompt about the politics of reading, and the choices that are always being made — for one reading or another, for one reality or another, for one set of options or another world of possibility. What is to be served (once we exclude “reality” and its denizens) by reading The Full Monty as a film about the commodification of male bodies, or a farce about the hopelessness of livelihood replacement for working class males, or a testimony to the victories of capital and Thatcherism in the final years of the century? That is the question that plagues our hopefulness, and makes us wonder about ourselves. Why are some viewers so excited by The Full Monty and others so distressed or disappointed? Perhaps many of us — especially on the left — are embarrassed to avow a positive...