Peter Cattaneo’s 1997 film The Full Monty was released during a time of political turbulence in the UK; for the first time in eighteen years the sitting Prime Minister was a member of the Labour party, the general election won in a landslide after Tony Blair’s rebranding, and despite her not having been in office for almost seven years, the British economy was still trying to recover from the recession caused by Thatcherite policies. While definitively a light-hearted comedy the film still played heavily with the ideas of the latter, involving a group of six recently unemployed northern men banding together to help each other out of their dire economic situations by creating their own strip-tease act. Upon first watching, the comedic aspects seem to make up the bulk of the film, and it may not appear to be the most politically weighted. However, the audacity of the film’s optimism at such a calamitous time, and the nuanced politics of the group define it undoubtedly as an example of protest cinema, undeniably going against the grain of the ideals of Tory Britain that everyone had become accustomed to. Thatcher’s demonization of any form of collectivism that was rendered as “uncontrollable mob activity” in her speeches is, as this essay will argue, at direct odds with The Full Monty’s ethos of community, and while their specific mob consisted of only six men, the film arguably packs enough punch for the thousands the word ‘mob’ implies, outright defying the notions of individualism and a ‘classless’ society that the politicians of the day pushed relentlessly (McGlynn, 2016: 313).
The movie opens with a short film entitled Sheffield – City on the Move (1971, J. and M. L. Coulthard) embedded into the screen, the decidedly southern English brogue of the voiceover artist going on to wax poetic about the city’s fundamental place in the booming steel industry, laid over various images of groups of men hard at work, accompanied by more clean and romanticised views of the towns. Cut to twenty-five years later, we meet two of our main characters, Gaz (Robert Carlyle) and Dave (Mark Addy), along with Gaz’s son Nathan (Wim Snape), as they explore an abandoned steel mill they once worked at, in the middle of looking for parts they could sell. It is these particularly grim circumstances that our leads find themselves stumbling upon a male strip show, seeing how many women are in the audience and deciding perhaps there could be enough money in that to help them out of their financial strife, at least for the moment. Despite there being no direct mention of her in the film, the average viewer at the time of the film’s release was aware that the closing down of the steel mill was a direct result of Margaret Thatcher’s governmental policies. During her time in office, the steel industry in Britain went from being a workforce over one hundred and fifty thousand strong, to in 1988 supporting only fifty-five thousand workers (Deans, 2016). The privatisation of the industry in that year, and the closing of some of the largest steelworks sites was catastrophic for the country, and in the early nineties unemployment rates skyrocketed (Anon, 2013). Thatcher’s penchant for privatisation (as steel was not the only industry in which this happened) seemed to flow with her general idea of society – her idea being that there was not one. In one interview given by her, she was quoted as saying, “who is society? There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to ourselves first” (Moore, 2010). This idea was bordering on the laissez-faire attitudes of more archaic governments, circulating a very much ‘every man for himself’ mentality. In her mind, the government was not responsible for coping with the problems of the individual. The privatisation of industry was used to raise revenues, essentially a money-making scheme, wherein companies no longer had to put the social benefits for the people above profit motivations like the government had done. Essentially, Thatcher’s time in power was steered by a heartless individualism that seemed to be the dominant way of working during the eighties and nineties. This was only furthered by the Tory governments general insistence that we lived in a ‘classless’ society, propagating the allusion that there were no longer large economic barriers between certain groups, and that everyone was on equal footing as they all individually strived for economic success.
The Full Monty, then, could not be further from the supposed Tory ideas of individual-over-group mentality, and rather exists as a heart-warming tale of community. Summed up neatly by John Hill,
“it is also a community spirit upon which the film places most value […] it is less work, or money, that they are seen to need […] than the support or self-respect that participation in the group, and the strip-show, provides” (2002: 183).
While I would argue that there is more importance placed on the work and money aspects than Hill suggests here, it is irrefutable how much of the film is dedicated to building rapport between the group, and how much prominence is placed on the communal attitude of banding together and sharing the experience as a team. Throughout the film, we see all members of the group dealing with their own struggles; Gaz’s unemployment means he does not have enough money to pay his child support and may lose custody of his son, Dave’s relationship with his wife is suffering because of the severity of his insecurities, Gerald (Tom Wilkinson) has been unable to work up the courage to tell his wife he is out of a job, so has been pretending to go to work every morning while she spends money they do not have. Each man has something to worry about, a concern that is likely to keep them up at night and is their driving motivation to take part in the strip-show. However, when it comes down to it, the group are also motivated by their love and care for one another – they do not want to let each other down. At one point, Dave’s insecurities get the better of him, and he backs out of the show, takes the decidedly more stable job as a security guard at a supermarket. Nonetheless, when it comes down to it and his friends need him, he abandons these ideas of putting himself before his mates, selflessly deserts his job mid-shift to be there for those that need him. Not only this, but the final scene is an incredible example of the films own brand of collectivism as we see what appears to be the entirety of their town showing up to the strip-show to support a few of their own. As stated by Howard, “the men know most of the people in the audience, who have flocked from the predominantly blue-collar neighbourhood to watch friends and family do something silly” (1990: 56). Thatcher’s ideas of individualism saturated the media and politics of the time and left little space for other concepts or ideas to even introduce themselves. This film then, purely because of its focus on community, was somewhat of a radical notion at the time of its release. People had been continually exposed to ideas of the individual taking precedent over the majority, and the rampant aversion shown for any group of people who went against this grain made it somewhat intimidating to entertain old ideas of kinship with those of similar circumstances. As put by McGlynn, “Thatcherism not only articulates distaste for groups of working-class men in particular but helps effect the wholesale erasure of positive depictions of such groups as functional and productive” (2016: 311). Things like the miners strikes of the eighties, instead of being viewed as people fighting for their right to earn a decent living, and continue the jobs they had been in most of their lives, were propagated by Thatcher as groups of grimy working class people who were not able to cope on their own, government interference or otherwise – they were dependents, and did not deserve to be listened to (iconic: Nov, 2010). For this film to then display an unabashed sense of community spirit, of helping lift one another up, and doing something as a unit, it was quite a courageous move. It spoke to a part of the country that had not been heard in a long time, allowed those not indoctrinated by Thatcher’s heartless form of individualism to find some semblance of comfort, and their own small personal rebellions by turning out to theatres to see it. Clearly, it worked – The Full Monty remained in the box office for twenty-nine weeks, and replaced Jurassic Park (1993, S. Spielberg) as the highest selling film in Britain of all time, for a while (25th Frame). The film “[gave] voice to a certain yearning for ‘national wholeness’ in the face of economic and social divisions and the rise of self-interested individualism that characterised the Tory years” (Hill, 2002: 184).
Similarly, this promoted idea of a classless utopia pushed by both Thatcher and her successor John Major, is dismissed by the film almost immediately. We meet Gerald in one of the first scenes set in ‘job club’, a place seemingly used to waste time waiting for job offers to come in. He is trying to scold the other men in the room for not filling in applications, only to be resolutely informed by Gaz, “you forget, Gerald, you’re not our foreman anymore. You’re just like the rest of us: scrap.” Gerald has, in the past, been their boss. While it is unlikely that we are able to describe him as having a middle-class job, Gerald has perceivably been living a much more comfortable life than any of the other men laid off in his job. His position of authority and proximity to that of a middle-class lifestyle makes the other men in the film wary of him at first. He is not viewed as being on the same level as them – Gaz states that Gerald no longer has any station over them, however the knowledge that he was once in charge of them, that he was living securely and without the exertion of the manual labour they were used to, has warped their mindsets into believing that while they have all been laid off, this is still the case. Gerald has more money, a nicer house, fancier things – to them, he is the embodiment of the cushy middle-class. It is not until later in the film when Gaz and Dave have potentially ruined a job opportunity for Gerald that he breaks down, a fit of anger accompanied by tears as he admits that he is barely scraping by, and in desperate need of a job. It is this action, this momentary lapse in façade that leads to the other men inviting Gerald to join their venture; only when they can see that he is indubitably in the same circumstances as them do they accept him into their folds. The tension does not allow the audience to brush aside these differences in the social status of the men in the group, they are forced to confront the complexities of class relations in a rather simple way and while the group does go on to include Gerald in its ranks, the film suggests that this is only because of his now lowered status. The country was, and still is, far from utopic in terms of class, and the tensions framed in The Full Monty are still very much rampant to this day.
The turbulent nature of politics in the 1980s and 90s meant that politically, and socially, ideas of both radical and quieter forms of revolution were formed. During these decades the film industry became host for an array of complex films of protest that took their form in all shapes and sizes. The Full Monty is a protest film wrapped up in a warm story of community, and laughter, but it still refuses to pull any punches in its condemning of obdurate Thatcherite individualism, and the forced view of classlessness. The film has, in other words, “successfully provided […] a reminder of the continuing economic divisions within Britain as well as giving voice to the desire for a different kind of society in which community and social attachment are accorded greater importance” (Hill, 2002: 186). The Full Monty exists as both a grin inducing cheese fest, and a staunch denial of Tory policies and propaganda, and I believe it has earned a spot on the shelf of protest cinema.
17.02.2019