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  • Class Enchantment Part II
  • J.K. Gibson-Graham (bio)

Class Enchantment, continued from Part I

Brassed Off is a film of and about closure — not only the closure of the pit, but closure around a particular masculine identity, the closing of the era of working class politics, the closed and closed-off (hidden) nature of truth — whether it be the truth about the pit, or household finances, or health and death, or male emotions. The Full Monty, by contrast, is about openness and becoming — most visibly the becoming of new masculine selves who are physically aware and sexually diverse, in new gender roles and economic relations. It is about stripping away myths and falsehoods (including those that proclaim the fixity of antagonistic social distinctions) and the baring of the truth. These are radically different films, despite their similar settings and multiple points of connection.

For one thing, they cultivate radically different affective ground. Brassed Off angrily polices identity boundaries — between men and women, workers and management, us and them: “Why’s your bird got a management logo on her key ring?” The film confronts us with the violence of belonging, pulling us toward ressentiment and righteous outrage — the signature emotions of modernist class politics.[6] The Full Monty gives us instead the relief and joy of recognition — of otherness as well as sameness, of self-value, of economic (and class) possibility as something that cannot be negated or denied.[7] It is this buoyant emotional substrate, as much as the story line and characterization, that prompts us to read the film for lessons in a politics of becoming.

On one level, the crisis of modernist class politics is a crisis of desire. And where the two films diverge most is in the representation of that crisis. In Brassed Off, desire is stuck: on keeping the mines open; on being employed (and thus exploited by capital); on solidarity that is based on shared male experience, including that of capitalist exploitation; on keeping alive communities built on exploitation as well as life-destroying work. Desire is stalemated in a neurotic fixation on the demand of the capitalist Other — for labor and for an antagonistic political complement, the “working class.”

The bandmaster recognizes the significance of labor’s contribution to building and sustaining the larger national community and the communities around the mines. But he sees no alternative to the exploitative capitalist form of this constitutive relation. So as they celebrate labor’s contribution, the miners are momentarily re-living the “satisfaction with dissatisfaction” that has been their principal relation to working life. With closure of the pits, they have experienced a crisis of this compromised form of enjoyment, a crisis of “jouissance” (the complex French word for pleasure that is “tied up in knots” by others’ demands and desires).[8] Their response is to fix upon restoring their former modes and means of satisfaction. The prohibition of the worker identity has eroticized this identity in retrospective reflection, conjoining it with an image of quintessential manhood. Their fantasy is to reclaim this now prohibited state.

Anxiously fixated on a bygone capitalist order, Brassed Off acts out the fundamental fantasy of loss, staying with anger at the closure of the mines and within the experience of masculine crisis/castration. What is so adventurous about The Full Monty, on the other hand, is that it begins with the hollowness of eroticized employment — Job Club has done a job on the job, it seems — and with the acceptance of masculine crisis: “A few years and men won’t exist — we’ll be extinct, obsolete, dinosaurs.” It begins with castrated subjects and shows us a process of re-eroticization, the forging of new desires, satisfactions and masculinities freed from an anchor in a certain form of work.

The Full Monty liberates desire in two sorts of ways (and this liberation is probably what has made the film problematic for so many people, given its setting in devastating loss). Most obviously, with the closure of the steel mill the employed subjects experience a death, an interruption of subjection to capitalism, and thus the opportunity to be something else (though what that might be does not readily present itself...

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