Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image

4. Derek Jarman in the Docklands: The Last of England and Thatcher’s London

77 4 Derek Jarman in the Docklands: The Last of England and Thatcher’s London MARK W. TURNER My world is in fragments, smashed in pieces so fine I doubt I will ever re-assemble them. —Derek Jarman In spring 1986, Derek Jarman directed The Queen Is Dead, three linked music promos for the zeitgeist Manchester indie band The Smiths. This cinematic triptych for the songs “The Queen Is Dead,” “There’s a Light That Never Goes Out,” and “Panic” captures something of both the band’s and Jarman’s deeply felt anger about the cultural and political malaise at the heart of Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s Britain. The Smiths’ jangling guitars with lead singer Morrissey’s sharp, aching lyrics are heard over a montage of urban alienation, quickly cut images of derelict urban sites that foreground a city of isolation and disconnection in which the center doesn’t hold. The third film in the triptych, for the song “Panic,” focuses our attention on an isolated young man on Waterloo Bridge, the footage captured by the Super 8mm camera moving around him and offering fleeting glimpses of the built environment on both sides of the Thames: Denys Lasdun’s modernist Royal National Theatre and the tower blocks of south London beyond; the iconic Houses of Parliament; the 1930s Shell-Mex and BP Ltd. building; and the eighteenth-century former palace Somerset House, once home of the Internal Revenue. Jarman had a keen interest in architectural history, developed when he studied under Nicholas Pevsner while a student at King’s College London, but here the monumental presence of the eclectic architecture at the center of the capital is juxtaposed with the bleak, abandoned spaces of the East End, with its boarded-up buildings and streets in decline, uneasily highlighting the dereliction at the city’s margins. At several moments during “Panic,” graffiti flashes across the screen, providing snatches of text 78 | MARK W. TURNER that locate The Queen Is Dead in a specific political moment. “LDDC are Bloody Thieves,” “Local Land for Local People,” and “Hands Off our Waterfront,” we read; these slogans all point to the ongoing social conflict over the urban regeneration of the warehouses, wharves, and docks in the East End of London (Figure 4.1). The view from the bridge in “Panic” is a reminder of the young man’s disenfranchisement from establishment London. The politics of place were important to Jarman, and from his Super 8mm films of the 1970s and his punk-inspired dystopian feature Jubilee (1978) to the Smiths promos and The Last of England (1987), the spirit of resistance and anger expressed is deeply connected to an understanding and knowledge of specific London sites and their ongoing, ideologically motivated transformations under Thatcher. “I wouldn’t wish the eighties on anyone,” Jarman writes in At Your Own Risk. “It was the time when all that was rotten bubbled to the surface.”1 In The Last of England, perhaps his most fluent, personal, and political feature-length film, art and politics coalesce, though not in any tidy way. The process of the filmmaking (a collaborative, opportunist, unscripted, shoestring venture) and the content of the film (a nonlinear narrative focused around a set of overlapping political ideas) find their meeting place in London’s Docklands. The use of this location is no accident. The redevelopment of the Docklands was a flagship project for Figure 4.1. “Local Land for Local People,” found graffiti in The Queen Is Dead (1986), Jarman’s film for the Smiths. DEREK JARMAN IN THE DOCKLANDS | 79 Thatcher’s radically neoliberal, market-driven restructuring of Britain. Describing the feeling of “complete catastrophe” depicted in the film, William Pencak notes, “Thatcher’s economic policies in the eighties led not only to the destruction of traditional England, but even modern factories and housing projects degenerated into slums and then ruins.”2 In the mid-1980s, the derelict industrial sites where Jarman locates his film are places richly layered not only with historical but also with contemporary political meaning. In a condition-of-England film that seeks to explore the collision of the past and present as filtered through Jarman’s individual memories, London’s Docklands represent many things: an endpoint of industrial modernity, a contemporary social struggle in the context of Thatcherite neoliberalism, a paradoxical site of both spiritual malaise and artistic freedom at the city’s margins, a place of...