Ken Loach
is arguably the leading filmmaker of working-class life in the
English-speaking world. Throughout his oeuvre, but particularly
his 1990s film Riff Raff, Loach has revealed a sharp ear as well
as a luminous eye for (male) workers and their discontents. His
people are playful, self-mocking and irreverent, without a hint of
over-sincerity or sentimentality in how they are portrayed. If
there is a pedagogy it consists of a critique of the audience. His
sense of the vernacular is acute; as a matter of fact Riff Raff
employs subtitles to assist the viewer unfamiliar with the various
accents of foreign and native-born workers on a London building
site to decipher their speech. Loach is making a point: you
middle-class viewers may think you speak in and understand a
language, English, but your conversations are conducted in your
own dialect. Needless to say, Loach’s films have been coded as
“independent” productions: they run on absurdly low budgets
and deliberately disdain the production values of commercial
movies, along with conventions like linear narrative.
Loach’s
new film Bread and Roses is a hybrid between standard Hollywood
movies and the almost extinct genre of the agitation and
propaganda (agit/prop) theatre. Intended for a mainstream rather
than an “art” audience, its narrative strategy is
conventional, with a beginning, a middle and an end. But unlike
typical commercial movies, it is also relentlessly didactic. Its
lessons are never ironic nor, with only one exception, are its
villains complex. As the lights go on after the final scene the
audience cheers and leaves the theatre feeling good.
The film
is set in Los Angeles during an SEIU organizing drive among a
group of office building janitors, most of whom are recent Mexican
immigrants. Although based on a true story, Bread and Roses almost
seems as though its basic plot was lifted from Norma Rae, another
commercially viable, heartfelt and cheerleading labor movie.
Norma
Rae Redux
As in
Norma Rae, the principal protagonists are a young woman and the
Jewish American male union organizer who gradually persuades her
to become a union activist. In both films teacher and pupil are
mutually attracted; in the more recent version, the two become
lovers. But whether in a small Southern mill town or contemporary
L.A., it seems the working class cannot achieve union
consciousness on its own: this must be introduced from the
outside. As a result in every scene where the workers congregate,
Sam Shapiro, the organizer, orchestrates the crowd and gives voice
to their grievances and to their demands. The paternalism revealed
in these gestures may be justified by the precarious legal
situation of undocumented immigrants, but in many ways it
accurately reflects the practice of even the best American unions
involved in organizing the working poor.
Of course
Loach is too good a filmmaker not to introduce some complexity;
there are always high hurdles to be overcome. He does not
sacrifice his feel for striking imagery or for language. And as in
Riff Raff, the workers speak in their own tongue and subtitles are
supplied for the benefit of non-Spanish speakers.
The first
scenes depict the harrowing process of illegal immigration; they
are fraught with violence, deceit and betrayal. Later Maya, the
young immigrant office cleaner, goes through her daily tasks and
the supervisor—as in the agit-prop tradition, an uncomplicated
bastard if there ever was one—is always on her to work harder
and faster. Along the bumpy road to dignity on the job Maya
confronts her sister, also a janitor, who has snitched to the boss
on a male union activist. During the angry altercation the sister
insists she only did it to survive, and reveals that she became a
prostitute in order to support the family and bring her sister
across the border. But this moment of complexity does little to
detain the “onward and upward” trajectory of the film which,
after a series of militant demonstrations, ends in the inevitable
union victory.
As a rare
instance of a film about union organizing among the working poor,
Bread and Roses is worth seeing, and thinking about whether there
is a place for agit/prop in mainstream media.
The film
poses the old question of the aesthetic value of political art.
Although Bertolt Brecht disagreed with the proposition that the
merger of politics and art was formally degraded because it
inevitably subordinated truth to instrumental ends, he demanded
that reflection be integrated within the political drama. His
plays are disrupted narratives that encourage the audience to
think about the action and how it is presented, thereby sharing
responsibility for the play with the producer. Even if limited by
the traditional expectation that the narrative should appeal to
the audience’s emotional heartstrings, Brecht invented devices
designed to subvert this expectation. His aim was to make the
audience think.
Loach has given us
propaganda without reflection. It’s not the politics as such
that mar the effort but the fact that Loach never interrogates the
standpoint of the union, or of the film itself. For even though
Bread and Roses takes pains to uncover the conflicts and
aspirations of its protagonists—and takes a swipe at the
bean-counting of a union bureaucracy whose rigid rules almost sink
the union drive—in the end it remains an advertisement for the
Service Employees International Union’s Justice for Janitors
campaign. That campaign deserves our support, but the film is a
step backward for Loach.
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