The Glass Half Full E-Book

Eleanor le

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Open Scotland
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 179

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A self-help book for the Scottish psyche. Cultural Miserablism: the power of the negative story with no redemption and no escape, that wallows in its own bleakness. Scotland is a small and immensely creative country. The role of the arts and culture is one that many are rightly proud of. But do we portray Scotland in the light we should? There is a tendency in film, literature and other cultural output to portray the negative aspects of Scottish life. In The Glass Half Full, filmmaker Eleanor le and academic David Manderson explore the origins of this bleak take on Scottish life, its literary and cultural expressions, and how this phenomenon in film has risen to the level of a genre which audiences both domestic and international see as a recognisable story of contemporary Scotland. What does miserablism tell us about ourselves? When did we become cultural victims? Is it time we move away from an image of Scotland that constantly casts itself as the poor relation? From the Trainspotting to the Kailyard, The Glass Half Full confronts the negative Scotland we portray not only to the world but, most importantly, ourselves. Do [they] accurately reflect the reality of life in Scotland for the majority of the population or are they just 'stories' we like to tell ourselves about ourselves? ELEANOR LE Our greatest export is the diversity of our fiction, the myriad of alternatives between its contrasts and all its new heroes and heroines. It's time we knew it. DAVID MANDERSON

Leseprobe

ELEANOR YULE is a Scottish writer, film director and screenwriting lecturer. She is best known for her feature filmBlindedand her arts documentaries for the BBC with Michael Palin. She lives in the West End of Glasgow with a large ginger cat.

DAVID MANDERSON is a writer and academic. His publications include novels and collections which contributed to the Research Excellence Framework. He lectures in fiction writing and narrative at the University of the West of Scotland.

Open Scotland is a series which aims to open up debate about the future of Scotland and do this by challenging the closed nature of many conversations, assumptions and parts of society. It is based on the belief that the closed Scotland has to be understood, and that this is a pre-requisite for the kind of debate and change society needs to have to challenge the status quo. It does this in a non-partisan, pluralist and open-minded manner, which contributes to making the idea of self-government into a genuine discussion about the prospects and possibilities of social change.

Commissioning Editor: Gerry Hassan

Luath Press is an independently owned and managed book publishing company based in Scotland, and is not aligned to any political party or grouping.Viewpointsis an occasional series exploring issues of current and future relevance.

The Glass Half Full

Moving Beyond Scottish Miserabilism

ELEANOR YULE and DAVID MANDERSON

LuathPress Limited

EDINBURGH

www.luath.co.uk

First published 2014

ISBN (PBK): 978-1-910021-34-7

ISBN (EBK): 978-1-910324-16-5

The authors’ right to be identified as author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

© Eleanor Yule and David Manderson, 2014

MISERABLE

Wretched, exceedingly unhappy, causing misery, extremely poor or mean, contemptible

THE CONCISE ENGLISH DICTIONARY

MISERABLE

1 unhappy or depressed; wretched

2 causing misery, discomfort, etc:a miserable life

3 Contemptible:a miserable villain

4 Sordid or squalid:miserable living conditions

5 Chiefly austral.Mean, stingy

6 (Pejorative intensifier):you miserable wretch. (C16: from old French, from Latinmiserabilis, worthy of pity, frommiserarito pity, from miser wretched

COLLINS ENGLISH DICTIONARY

SCOTTISH MISERABLISM

A drowsy addiction to imagined injury

ANDREW O’HAGAN,London Review of Books

SCOTS MISERABLISM

Marked out by their tragic tone miserabilist screenworks depict the lives of violent and addicted anti-heroes set against the backdrop of post-industrial hopelessness, urban squalor and decay. Where redemption and forgiveness seem impossible without exile from Scotland, and where the hero struggles to develop tools or strategies to ultimately overcome his misery or ‘temptations’.

ELEANOR YULE

Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologueby Eleanor Yule

Introductionby Eleanor Yule

CHAPTER ONELiterary Roots: The Making of MiserabilismDAVID MANDERSON

CHAPTER TWOThe Urban versus the Rural and Nothing in BetweenDAVID MANDERSON

CHAPTER THREETo See Ourselves As Others See UsELEANOR YULE

CHAPTER FOURThe Emergence of the Miserablist HeroELEANOR YULE

CHAPTER FIVEThe Great PretendersELEANOR YULE

CHAPTER SIXWholeheartedness: The Way Forward?ELEANOR YULE andDAVID MANDERSON

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

This book is a joint endeavour between the two of us and a collaboration in its ideas and content. Many thanks to Gerry Hassan for commissioning this book, and to Beth Armstrong, Andrew Lyons and Jim Sullivan.

Prologue

ELEANOR YULE

TOWERING AND MAGNIFICENT,theQueen Marypassenger liner, like many of Scotland’s world-class celebrities, resides far from home. She was decommissioned and preserved close to the shores to which she carried many of Scotland’s talented sons and daughters who, like her, would never return home.

Built in the ’30s by John Brown and Company, shipbuilders in Clydebank, she was both a technical and aesthetic triumph. Twice the weight of the Titanic and with faster engines by far, she is 12 decks high and boasts ten million expertly placed rivets. At any one time a community of 3,000 highly skilled men worked together on the construction of a sublime feminine form that would go on to grace the high seas.

Her 81,000 tons of steel sit eternally anchored at Long Island in a purpose built dry dock. She is now an American tourist attraction and celebrated as an Art Deco masterpiece. Her miles of beautifully preserved wood-lined corridors, mirrored, marble ballrooms and polished brass piano bars are crafted to perfection; even her Bakelite air vents are works of art. Her glamorous history continues to attract crowds of enthusiastic visitors. And, like any good Scottish creation, there’s a dark side. An aimless phantom haunts the ladies changing rooms in the cavernous bowels of her titanic hull; its digitally simulated appearance is a big hit with the tourists.

On the ship’s completion in 1936 she was heralded as a symbol of world-class Scottish engineering and design and an icon of the Empire. Her launch was celebrated as a sign of British industry returning to work after the Great Depression, which had halted the completion of the ship and marked the first cracks in the eventual shattering of theUK’s heavy industries, and the economic division of the country between the wealthy South and the grim North.

The long post-war decline of the shipyards, mines and steelworks hit the highly skilled labouring class in Scotland. The mass unemployment of the ’80s forced these proud workers into unsatisfying unskilled jobs, or into the long humiliating queues that wound around the ‘buroo’. In this new landscape the skilled riveter, responsible for ensuring a ship was watertight, was worthless and his craftsmanship non-transferable. The modernist dream of purpose-built council schemes to house this ‘problematic class’ quickly became a no-man’s-land, a bleak post-industrial waste ground for impoverished hard men and anxious, overworked women.

New survival skills would emerge among the unemployed male working classes, particularly in the north, where climate contributed to the atmosphere of depression. Violence, addiction and black humour would help men survive the new landscape of poverty and worthlessness, not to mention the boredom of their rudderless existence.

In Scotland a new sensibility began to emerge as things declined, a close cousin of naturalist literature and British social realism. ‘Clydesidism’ oozed out of the pens of Scottish writers like William McIlvanney, James Kelman and screenwriter Peter McDougall, exposing the plight of these proud forgotten men. ‘Clydesidism’ was identified by film theorist Duncan Petrie as an important reaction to the other extreme, the over-idealised depictions of a rural Scotland, the quaint, the twee, the world ofBrigadoonandPara Handy, a land of tartan, shortbread and the Kailyard.

By the ’80s and the peak of Margaret Thatcher’s reign, ‘Miserablism’ had seized Scotland’s fictional imagination and at its centre, the ‘Miserablist’ hero loomed large. Born as a fearless protester, fighting for his dignity, four decades later he has become a macho stereotype, a cultural victim, stuck in a cycle of hopelessness, an urban Scotsman with little to be proud of and a chip on his shoulder the size of theQueen Mary.

There’s a much quoted and telling sequence inTrainspotting(1996), the film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s bestselling novel. In it, the athletic and clean cut Tommy (Kevin McKidd), takes his heroin-addicted mates on a train ride hoping to tempt them away from their self-destructive lifestyles by showing them the great outdoors and instilling in them a sense of pride in their own country. The miserablist hero, Renton (Ewan McGregor), takes one look at the breathtaking view of the hills and tells the beleaguered Tommy exactly what he thinks:

It’s shite being Scottish, we are the lowest of the low, the scum of the fucking earth, the most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilisation. Some people hate the English, I don’t, they’re just wankers. We on the other hand are colonised by wankers, can’t even find a decent culture to be colonised by. We are ruled by effete arseholes. It’s a shite state of affairs… and all the fresh air in the world won’t make any fucking difference.

This starts Tommy, one of the most tragic characters in the miserablist canon, on a downward spiral from a positive, healthy character in a loving relationship to a heroin-addicted recluse withAIDS, who is later found dead, his eyes eaten out by worms.

So ifTrainspottingand miserablism in general give us a glimpse into the Scottish psyche, what does this tell us about ourselves? Have we turned our backs on our heritage, our landscape and our diversity and redefined ourselves as not just rivals with the English but inferior to them? When did we become cultural victims? And the bigger question is: how useful is it for us to keep replaying the same stuck record? Is it time to move away from an image of Scotland that constantly casts it as the poor relation? Do we have a responsibility to project other images of Scotland and Scottishness that show our culture’s richness and diversity? And how will we do that if most of the editorial and financial decisions are still being made in the capital of a country that we believe are our oppressors?

Introduction

ELEANOR YULE

Oh, the British politicians, they haven’t made a hit, They are ruining the country more than just a bit, If they keep on the way that they’re goin’ we’ll all be in the jobbie, So you better get your feet in your wellies.

BILLY CONNOLLY– The Great Northern Welly-Boot Show

IRONICALLY IT WASthe threat of shipyard closure in Scotland and the lack of work for Scottish actors that meant I would grow up a stranger to my own land.

Although born and bred in Glasgow, I spent my childhood far south of the border. My parents were part of a steady hemorrhage of skill and talent from Scotland which meant, at its peak, 50,000 people, one percent of the population, left Scotland in one year for more promising lands.

My parents, both Scottish actors, were performing alongside Billy Connolly inThe Great Northern Welly-Boot Showwhen they jumped ship. The show had taken the Edinburgh Fringe by storm in 1972 and shortly afterwards transferred to London. My parents, like some others in the Scottish cast and crew, decided to stay on in England indefinitely and join the legions of expatriate Scots scattered around the leafy suburbs of what is now theM25. For a Scottish actor, the streets of London were paved with gold. With its packed audition rooms and well-connected agents, England was a land of opportunity compared to the modestly paid repertory theatre and occasionalTVroles on offer back in Scotland. Despite the jump, my mother, actress Katherine Stark, never did manage to throw off the mantle of playing prostitutes or addicted mothers. She went down to England playing a Glaswegian tart and, as an actress with a Scottish accent, it stayed that way for most of her career. Much of this typecasting was down to a lack of female roles for Scottish actresses and the dominance of miserablism. My mother would reappear in an iconic role in one of the most significant works of the miserablist movement, Peter McDougall’sJust a Boy’s Game. My father, John Yule, on the other hand, fared rather better. A steady stream of Censored aftershave adverts, a few Hammer Horror films and a variety of parts in Scottish Kailyard drama series for theUKnetworks kept the wolf from our door.

The Welly-Boot Showlaunched many Scots careers. Actor Bill Paterson, director Robin Lefevre and Billy Connolly have all found success through it, and fared far better than the doomed shipyard workers the comic satire was about. The play introduced the London luvvies to the grim struggles of the north, and the plight of the Upper Clyde Shipyard workers who were fighting Edward Heath’s government to keep their jobs. Their cause was championed by gifted orator Jimmy Reid, who was satirised in the show and played by Connolly. Reid did save the shipyards and the livelihood of his men, and although at the time the outcome was hopeful, Thatcher’s succession meant the war was far from over. The dignity of the worker was already tragically compromised.

It was not until Glasgow was named European City of Culture in 1990 that I was able to return to my home city. Transformed, and undergoing a cultural manicure, it was almost unrecognisable from the depressed and darkly pessimistic city my parents had left in the ’70s. The Garden Festival site had started to transfigure the Clyde into a decorative asset, with the Finnieston Crane a lonely vestige of its industrial past. Glasgow as City of Culture followed shortly afterwards and set about reconstructing the depressed communities of the schemes into ‘actors’ and participants in colourful street theatre, while the explosion of Mackintosh mania and the presence of Nina Simone, Robert Lepage and Peter Brook in the Southside’s Tramway Theatre brought visitors from all over the world to a newly colourful, cosmopolitan Glasgow.

As a trainee atBBCScotland, I was one of an intake of nine bright young things chosen by theBBCbosses to help ensureBBCScotland’s broadcasting future. Even so, the award-winningBBCScotland film unit was being dismantled as I arrived. Under Pharic Maclaren’s visionary leadership there had been a golden age of Scottish television, eclectic and representative of the nation’s talent. The film unit produced countless adaptations of Scottish classics such as Stevenson’s unfinished masterpieceThe Weir of Hermistonand Grassic Gibbon’sSunset Song.Historical Scottish dramas likeThe Eagle of the Ninth(recently remade as a feature film) andBoswell, starring a young Brian Cox, were all being produced for theBBCnetwork. In contrast were the Kailyard stalwarts such as the long running and popularPara Handyand the legal drama seriesSutherland’s Law.New writing was also represented in plays such as John Byrne’s debutThe Slab Boys(1979), while cutting edge social realism for the Wednesday Play strand all emerged from the same unit. The whole of Scotland was represented on television, across all classes, not just the Central Belt and not just Glasgow.

‘Producers choice’ changed things. This term, like almost allBBCgenerated jargon, was a euphemism for cost-cutting. Under John Birt, Director General of theBBCbetween 1992 and 2000, Auntie’s doors would be thrown open to competition from the freelance world. The Reithian ethos to educate, inform and entertain would now include a pressure on producers to cut costs and pursue ratings, celebrity-driven content and format shows. This Thatcherite ethos also created a growing suspicion of ‘artists’, ‘writers’ and ‘new talent’. The emphasis was firmly on production and productivity, with a nod, of course, to quality, and a newly created generation of thrusting ‘Assistant Producers’, ‘Heads of Department’ and ‘Programme Controllers’ would march Auntie through her seismic change.

Increasingly, ‘savings’ across programming meant a reduction in filming budgets, making locations restricted. It was cheaper to film in the Central Belt, particularly in drama where transporting cast and crew to the Highlands and Islands, for example, soon became a luxury. Editorial power also began to shift towards London. In one surreal commissioning meeting we realised that the ‘Strand Controller’ of the arts, a Hampstead resident, had never heard of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. On that occasion we got the benefit of the doubt and a film was commissioned, but there were many other occasions where great Scottish subjects and writers were overlooked due to a London commissioner’s lack of knowledge about the Scottish cultural landscape. But what the commissioners did know about Scotland was miserablism. This particular representation of Scottishness had an impressive track record, had showcased some of the best Scottish writing and acting talent, and was a safe bet.

I was one of the new kids on the block and, not surprisingly, distrusted by theBBCold guard, the long term members of staff who were highly unionised (not unlike the workers on the Clyde) and from a generation of men not used to female bosses.

One of the first shoots I directed for theBBCtaught me to navigate the male-dominated industry in Scotland with caution. I’d broken etiquette and spoken directly to the ‘spark’ or electrician who was fixing the lights rather than going through his boss, the ‘lighting cameraman’. Furious at my lack of decorum the spark threw a chair at me. At film school we had just worked together in teams. At theBBC, even in the ’90s, it was another ball game, and one where women were best seen typing in an office and not in charge on the film set. Nevertheless our numbers were swelling and we moved through the ranks, particularly on the production side. Women were a good fit in production as hard working, backstage organisers, but were much less visible in the front-line creative jobs.

When I was expecting my first child at the age of 25 I looked around and saw that as a pregnant, female,TVdirector there was no one else like me. I was so alarmed by my apparent isolation I hid my bump for five months before revealing it to my boss who saw it as a large inconvenience. A well-known presenter saw my swollen belly in the lift one day and thought it was a joke – she told me I could remove the cushion, and was horrified when I told her it was real.

It was not until the end of the ’90s, however, when I left my staff job at theBBCto venture into the world of film, that I began to hear the term ‘miserable’ used to describe many of the film ideas that were being submitted to Scottish Screen for development. I’d had an attempt myself, with various film projects and strong producers, to buck the gritty realist trend, with projects such asThe Glasgow GirlswithBondagerswriter Sue Glover about a group of female artists;The Lantern Bearersby Bearsden novelist Ronald Frame, set in ’50s Kirkcudbright with themes of music and adolescent homosexual love; andEasywith award winning writer Nicola McCartney and 7:84 producer John McGrath about date rape.

There were many reasons why the projects failed. Much of the problem was my lack of ‘bankability’ as a first-time director, but the standout films that were produced around that time, such as Lynne Ramsay’sRatcatcher(1996), Gillies MacKinnon’sSmall Faces(1996) and Peter Mullan’sOrphans(1998), although skilfully made by talented directors, all bore the stamp of ‘Miserablist Cinema’. Interestingly neither MacKinnon nor Ramsay had been known for their miserablist sensibilities prior to being funded in Scotland. MacKinnon’s breakthrough filmThe Grass Arena(1992), a tramp to fame story, was praised for its uplifting sense of redemption, yet on his return to Scotland he chose to revisit the late ’60s razor gangs, sexism and violence of his youth in his fiction. In the same vein, Ramsay’s short films, made while at the National Film School in Beaconsfield,Kill the Day(1996) andSmall Deaths(1996), were episodic lyrical pieces with a sense of poetic realism and female protagonists. For her first full-length feature, funded substantially by the Scottish purse, she choose a male protagonist and the depressed Scottish landscape of the ’70s, the historical heartland of the miserabilist screenwriter, an era which Peter Mullan recently revisited in his feature filmNeds(2010).

So although miserablism may have its roots in the past and have emerged out of the demise of Scotland’s heavy industries and the subsequent economic depression, as an aesthetic it dominated our screens, its grip tightening around the Scottish imagination long after its inception.

On the day of the 2011 ScottishBAFTAawards journalist Teddy Jamieson wrote an article forThe Heraldhighlighting the dominance of miserablism across all categories of nomination:

Peter Mullan’s filmNeds, with its vision of 1970s gangland culture in Glasgow; the voyeuristic documentaryThe Scheme, which followed drink and drug-blurred lives on a Kilmarnock council estate; [and] even the return of Govan’s favourite string-vested ‘scum’,Rab C Nesbitt. What is their Scotland? It’s an urban Scotland, it’s usually a Glaswegian Scotland and it’s a grey, dreary, defeated, often dangerous Scotland. Yes, there’s still humour there but it’s a humour riddled with despair. It’s a vision of a country that is alcoholic rather than merry, that is ground down rather than fighting back. It’s as if someone had turned out the lights and plunged all of us viewers into the dark.

It was on an artists’ retreat in the Borders in 2009 that I began to think about this subject and its relationship to my career which up until then, although relatively successful, had also been frustrating, particularly when it came to film development and trying to raise money for female driven narratives.

This led me to think that the health of a nation is reflected in its creative imagination and the way in which it chooses to project itself, and that within Scottish cinema a dark strand had emerged that chose to project a narrow and negative view of the nation. Around this time I was asked to give a talk about the way poverty had and was being depicted within Scottish film, hoping it might shed some light into the Scottish creative psyche and its dark tendencies. My response was immediate. ‘Do you mean miserablism?’ I asked. I then decided to concentrate on Scottish cinema output and original screenplays. There is so much to be said solely about miserablism in the Scottish televisual context, but I chose to narrow my focus to films for the purposes of the talk.