This was meant to be a Facebook post, so, now I’m no longer appealing to my imagined Facebook audience, but my imagined blog one, I apologise for the overtly ‘lol’ nature of this post. Maybe I should stop trying to appeal to everyone, but there again I am a condemned fool to the pursuit of a ‘universal’
I feel like I’ve slowly found a new way if making, via film, potentially a new way of dealing with the complex issues of existence which lack the kind of answer that my blogging or drawing often felt compelled to try to conclude . I jumped into it with no experience a couple of years ago as a kind of necessity (and it must be said, I wasn’t the one doing the filming here!). I’m definitely the kind of maker who’s ideas dictate what shape the work will take, and for a long time I shied away from unfamiliar mediums, but with this film (that became ‘Wall, i), I knew I had to make it and I knew it had to be a film.
Admittedly clunky, full of way too much context to deconstruct for an average 21st century attention span (especially my own🧠), I decided the film had to be constructed to songs, which, if it ended up having the feel of a passive consumption of 90s and early 00s music videos, then all the better for it!.
On a whole, I’ve become less reliant on having to communicate my ideas as if there’s the ghost of some academic know-it-all stood behind me – I think it can be poisonous when it’s misused.
But I’ve also been enjoying explaining the ideas in this film, scene by scene.
By itself ‘After the Sugar/Living Your Life’ rush was probably the most comical of the scenes, as the protagonist, initially trying to prove his exceptionality and reason to be saved by pathetically telling women in pubs he’s special, “an artist”, and “an individual”, becomes the same individual sat in a therapy room, unable to identify the self that the therapist is constantly telling him to “be” (and, yeah, it is a marginally fictionalised account of my own 20s, lol-esque).
It had to be a little lighter than the following bits, to try to relate to the experience of encountering people like this (an intense, eager-to-be-accepted mess, like I probably was, maybe still am at times), and the more serious mental health issues that (whether one sees it as ‘snowflake’ or not) have become unavoidably widespread over the past few decades.
Now, how do I go into the next bit, without having to drag in philosophers that I don’t even feel qualified to talk about? Fxxk it, there was a French philosopher called Michel Foucault who described Modern, industrialised societies, as ‘Discipline and Punish societies’ where humans were kind of born as “lumps of clay” in the service of a country, that had a need to keep production chains going and go to war to protect the things it had in other countries -they were basically tools for the machine that was the state. That sounds horrible, and it was, largely; it’s what our parents and grandparents remind(ed) us of; tough, gritty lives, where (for our grandparents) war was often compulsory – “lifestyle choice” was a concept that hadn’t really been invented yet.
Skip to my generation. Born in the dying days of a dirty industrial landscape that was once this area (where I am) and may others; born as the coal mines were being demolished. I definitely recall a sense of relief as a small child at the turn of the 90s, as a gritty landscape began to be taken over by a landscape of shopping malls, and lighter bricked housing estates, Television that, from the Big Breakfast to the Spice Girls to early PC adverts, seemed pregnant with the hatching that would be our self-actualisation within the early 21st century. This was the generation that were to be individuals, they could be ‘anything they wanted to be’. (sorry if you’ve read this far, lol).
Between the age of 6 and 10 I may not have had some philosopher’s term to describe what I was coming of age in, but I certainly picked up on a cultural mood, of relief, mixed with light heartedness and excitement, which, although largely indebted to what it turns out another philosopher Francis Fukuyama called ‘The End of History’, was also understandable as a sense that the restrictions on life that defined a ‘Discipline and Punish society’, had gone.
My feelings after analysing my teenage and early adult years that followed was that something that was crucial to surviving modern life disappeared at the same time, to be replaced by what I, slightly nicking from Foucault, call a ‘cult of self-belief’. It’s not just that we have to ‘be ourselves’, it’s that we also have to believe in ourselves, the selves that will have to compete in a more competitive indivdiualism that has become so dominant. We all, well most of us, know the after taste; of never feeling good enough, that deep down, we recognise that our right to survive depends on how successful we are as individuals, in work, in looks, in skills, in love.
What is a life without recognition in a post-discipline and punish society like? Well, for many in (I admit) more desperate households around this metropolitan county, the reality was often drug addiction, or even worse. For me, it was a life of messy benders to try to divert myself from myself, and the indescribable feelings of discomfort over being spoken badly about, mis-recognised, as I clumsily tried to over assert my shy and anxious self as somebody who was ‘one of the faces’, to reference Quadraphenia (kind of pathetic, really. But, real, and lived). A life where you are forced to compete for the sake of your own identity as a person! If the previous decades’ emotional pain was centred around more concrete forms of suffering, ours was based around the loneliness of feeling like our existence was invalid in the face of the surrounding success.
These scenes in ‘Wall, i’ are pitched in a period prior to our social media saturation (which have blown those early millennium days out of memory), in a person’s early adult years (yeah, my own, I admit), where I encountered so much distress around such trivial occasions, like pubs and clubs, and also saw it in others. A desperation to be validated in a world, which although not seemingly too different from that of their forefathers, had had its co-ordinants tampered with enough to create the conditions which we now accept as normality in our deeply ‘unsurprised’ times, where mental illness is an accepted norm, even before Covid.
But, leaving that aside, as I said, I’ve wanted to talk about the scenes in this film for a long time. I guess it was the largest project I ever embarked upon. I think my newer film works are better, and hopefully they will continue to be so. Yet it will take many years for a new work to displace the emotional attachment I now have to ‘Wall,i’.
Thanks, and sorry for bringing too much theory into this, badly.
John B Ledger 