‘Where you from, you sexy thing?’
Popular Music, Space, and Masculinity in The Full Monty
Elena Boschi
Abstract:
Questions of class, masculinity, and diversity are a recurrent theme in debates about The Full Monty (1997) but, despite their prominent role in the story, songs are not discussed as a significant element in the film’s representation of white working-class masculinity. In this article, I examine The Full Monty’s soundtrack, showing how the characters’ wounded masculinities are (re)constructed through music and considering the connotative baggage brought into the film by songs, often heard through visible devices which act as a signifier alongside themusic. Songs of other non-dominant identities – women, non-white, and queer – enhance The Full Monty’s audiovisually inclusive image, amplifying these identities despite their otherwise problematic representations and serving a temporary reclamation of damaged white working-class masculinity after the dismantling of heavy industry in post-Thatcher Britain. However, despite its aural reimagining of a diverse working-class masculinity, the way women, non-white, and queer characters are represented weakens the musical connections between jobless white men and these non-dominant identities.
Keywords: British cinema, film music, The Full Monty, masculinity, diversity, space.
The Full Monty’s (1997) story of wounded working-class masculinity in post-Thatcher Britain has attracted extensive scholarly attention since its original release. Class, masculinity, and national identity are among the aspects that have been addressedbut, while debates about The Full Monty and other similar films are apparently exhausted, their soundtracks still await close consideration. In this article, I will develop an audiovisual perspective to build on these debates, showing how popular songs and the visible devices playing these songs (re)construct damaged working-class masculinity through aural connections to other non-dominant identities. In addition, I will examine key intersections between space and popular music, which mark the job-related locations where the men had lost power, reinstating their dominance. While current scholarly writing on The Full Montydeals with thewomen, non-white and queer characters present in the film, a consideration of the soundtrack starkly exposes the gap between, on the one hand, the few visible members of these non-dominant identities and their marginal presence and, on the other, the film’s significantly diverse soundtrack, raisingimportant questions about identifications and the film’saudiovisual reimagining of the working class after Thatcher.Popular songs and their careful placement enhance the inclusive working-class imageThe Full Monty offers and amplify various other non-dominant identities which are invited tohear themselves in the film’s diverse soundtrack.However, I will argue, these musical materials primarily serve to restore damagedwhite working-class masculinities through the connotative baggage the songs bring; indeed,problematic representations ofwomen, black and queer charactersundermine the musical connections between jobless white men and these other non-dominant identities, weakening the soundtrack’s inclusive slant.
The Full Monty follows six jobless men as they renegotiate their disrupted working and private lives. Gaz (Robert Carlyle) and Dave (Mark Addy) are unemployed steelworkers and, after finding local women queuing outside the working men’s club to attend a women-only Chippendales-style night, Gaz decides to start up his own strippers’ act and involve other disenfranchised men. While the two are out jogging on the outskirts of Sheffield, Dave rescues Lomper (Steve Huison), whom they find breathing his car’s exhaust fumes in an obvious attempt to kill himself. Lomper works as a security guard for the abandoned steel factory where one night the three men and Nathan (William Snape), Gaz’s son, spend a few hours hanging out and playing Lomper’s records through the PA system. Gaz’s first awkward strip tease attempt to Hot Chocolate’s ‘You Sexy Thing’ marks the empty factory as the rehearsal space for the group, fittingly named Hot Metal. Gerald (Tom Wilkinson), another Job Centre regular whose quiet middle-class existence risks falling apart after redundancy, joins Hot Metal and the four men arrange auditions in the steel factory and recruit Horse (Paul Barber), a black man who knows a few dance moves, and Guy (Hugo Speer), a young well-endowed plumber who cannot dance. Dave drops out but, after temporarily working for a supermarket chain, rejoins the group. Meanwhile, the others get caught by a guard during a dress rehearsal – all but Lomper and Guy, whose naked escape results in momentarily visible queer romance, with the film ticking yet another diversity box. Despite all the ups and downs, the six DIY strippers reclaim the stage of the working men’s club where they go for the ‘Full Monty’ (i.e. strip all the way) – that is for the internal audience, but not for the cinema one.
On the surface, The Full Monty manages to incorporate diversity in a story about working-class men rescued from a post-Thatcherite wasteland where manufacturing has been wiped out and Britain’s low-skilled workforce waits for another job that might not exist – a context which, despite its known political origins, remains unmentioned until the end. Gaz makes a perfect ‘underclass everyman’, as Andrew Spicer notes in Typical Men (2001: 190), beleaguered but resourceful – a feature which calls for a subtype I will call ‘enterprising underclass man’ to incorporate a distinctive element Gaz and other 1990s types share.[1] Their entrepreneurial efforts bring success, serving up a perfect Thatcherite happy ending with a side of diversity, another important element which seemingly clashes against Thatcherite ideas about immigration and sexuality, but perfectly fits Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’ fantasy. In her compelling reading of 1990s underclass films, Claire Monk (2000) discusses how The Full Monty and other films symbolise the ‘re-branding’ of Britain championed by Tony Blair’s New Labour after commissioning the Britain™ report, which aimed to replace the UK’s old-fashioned image with the ‘reality of Britain as a highly creative and diverse society’ (quoted in Monk 2000: 283). Monk notes the men’s creative approach to chronic unemployment, closely examining women’s accessory roles, but does not discuss how racial and sexual diversity are represented.
In scholarship about 1990s British cinema, others have discussedThe Full Monty’s renewed inclusive image of resourceful British working-class men, stripping their way out of chronic joblessness. John Hill (2000), for example, explores the film’s juxtaposition between the decline of traditional masculinity, on the one hand, and the decline of the working class, on the other. While the six men reverse these two processes through roles traditionally attributed to women (being strippers for a day faces them with anxiety about their looks), their dignity is not fully threatened, and these men recover their endangered pride through re-bonding rather than by modernising their masculinities. Women, as Hill observes, are still playing secondary roles, but the working-class men portrayed are not all white heterosexuals and the film thus contributes to a diversification in cinematic representations of the working class in the 1990s. The way music informs these representations is not discussed and, while the diversification Hill sees is strongly echoed in the soundtrack, I will argue that other textual components contradict The Full Monty’s diverse aural façade.
Monk (2000) discusses The Full Monty and other films which similarly focus on the decline of the working class and men’s anxieties about their roles. She notes how the nostalgia for old patriarchal hierarchies through which the films address these anxieties stirred broad emotional responses to the lost sense of community more than to unemployment, which Monk relates to the broad appeal of Brassed Off (1996) and The Full Monty for men and women alike. These films restore their upset order through commodified ‘happy endings’, serving those ideologies of ‘new’ Britain that the Blair Government tried to promote in the late 1990s. Monk’s reading problematises the hopeful interpretations these endings suggest, casting light on the complex nuances in the stories, but again music is not discussed. Yet a consideration of the use of songs on the soundtrack expands her point about why women found The Full Monty appealing. In addition, its unusual musical choices for a white British working-class story further justify its success, as the songs amplify a ‘new’ inclusive Britain, aurally imagining a diverse community which does not chime with the way other non-dominant identities are still represented on the margins.
Moya Luckett does refer to the use of music in her discussion of representations of Britishness in 1990s films, including The Full Monty and Brassed Off. She notes how these two films express local pride and regional identity through the brass band: ‘sound – particularly music – comes to stand for a regional refusal to acquiesce to imperial or metropolitan power’ (2000: 93). However, as I will demonstrate, spatial placement of the brass band greatly affects its meaning for Gaz and Dave. Furthermore, Luckett does not discuss other popular songs which, in The Full Monty, far outnumber the appearances of the brass band and carry a different connotative baggage, as the songs often evoke other non-dominant identities. Luckett addresses diversity and for her The Full Monty offers a superficial multicultural image in which regional, class and ethnic difference is assimilated and commodified. However, as I will argue, popular songs do not straightforwardly amplify its superficially diverse image but, by aurally evoking other sexualised non-dominant identities, provide the textual materials to (re)construct damaged working-class masculinities without fully reimagining them.
In her work on class and national identity, Julia Hallam discusses the local setting and the production context of a handful of mid-1990s working-class films including Trainspotting (1996), Brassed Off,Twin Town (1997), and The Full Monty, observing how these films share ‘their re-articulation of working-class identity through its relation to national and regional stereotypes and geographical marginalisation’ (2000: 268). Hallam addresses the commodification working-class representations undergo in these films and her point echoes Luckett’s criticism of The Full Monty’s happy-go-lucky multiculturalism. A consideration of music in the films Hallam discusses would highlight another means by which these films re-articulate working-class identity, not only through the national/regional sound of brass bands and male voice choirs, but also through popular music which does not carry any local connotation.
Kelly Farrell’s (2003) fascinating reading links two parallel crises, that of masculinity inThe Full Monty and the crisis in British national, post-imperial identity as Tony Blair, much like Gaz, was shepherding his reluctant flock through difficult times, irresponsibly selling misguided solutions which did not address their problem. The analogy works wonderfully and, after mapping their jobless condition onto the men’s ‘imperfect’ bodies, Farrell illustrates how power relations in the (male) gaze do not straightforwardly obey a reverse logic, given the harsher judgement which old ‘imperfect’ female bodies would probably receive. She references music briefly but fruitfully in her discussion. The Full Monty’s fetishising of working-class masculinity turns Hot Metal into ultimate poster boys of Thatcherism, as the aspirations driving their short-termist but resourceful alternative would deliver neither social nor geographical mobility, therefore maintaining the status quo. However, the soundtrack’s diversity does not straightforwardly fetishise working-class masculinity, but updates its image for Blair’s ‘new’ Britain.
Viewing The Full Monty ‘as [a] brazen, political denunciation of the socially crippling, homogenizing tendencies of globalization’, as Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy (2005: 125) defines it, becomes difficult in light of these careful studies which uncover its true political colours. Furthermore, the fact that neither the national political context nor globalisation are overtly mentioned in the film weakens her claim that the film works as a denunciation since Thatcherism and global market forces were notoriously responsible for the decline of British manufacturing.
Critics have thus taken up the difficulties of seeing masculine figures in these films as unproblematic representations of damaged working-class masculinities, knowingly embracing diversity while bravely following their entrepreneurial imagination. The debates I summarise above highlight important intersections between class and masculinity in The Full Monty and other 1990s working-class films. However, soundtracks do not often feature in these or other discussions of British cinema despite the fact that, as I will demonstrate, a comprehensive audiovisual perspective on 1990s working-class films can expand our understanding of the ways these films reimagine working-class masculinity after Thatcher. The soundtrack expands these representations, inviting what Kassabian calls ‘affiliating identifications’ (2001). In her book Hearing Film, Kassabiansets such identifications against ‘assimilating identifications’ which are facilitated by composed scores and ‘track perceivers toward a rigid, tightly controlled position that tends to line up comfortably with aspects of dominant ideologies’ (Ibid: 141)[2]. Compiled scores, however, often invite ‘affiliating identifications [which] track perceivers toward a more loosely defined position that groups, or affiliates, several different narrative positions within a fantasy scenario together’ (141). Crucially, for Kassabian the latter can ‘permit resistances and allow multiple and mobile identifications’ (Ibid: 139). Through the processes Kassabian describes, The Full Monty’s largely compiled score invites affiliating identifications, weaving connections between aspects of the characters’ identities and the aural signifiers of a parallel marginal existence available through the songs’ pre-cinematic pasts.
While such affiliating identifications generally offer a progressive alternative, I will argue that the songs linking diverse non-dominant identities in The Full Monty carry potential for cross-group connections which remains largely unfulfilled. Problematic representations of the other non-dominant identities stall the soundtrack’s progressive potential and instead the songs simply provide the textual materials for the (re)construction of damaged white working-class masculinities. The locations where these connections are articulated and the visible technological devices through which music lands in the film world are other significant aspects of the film’s audiovisual economy which I will also examine. Finally, given The Full Monty’s predominant focus on white British working-class masculinity, the striking musical imbalance between songs evoking other non-dominant identities and white British working-class culture will receive close attention.
Hallam notes an interesting trend in representations of working-class masculinity, which is worth exploring further in musical terms:
Contemporary British films reiterate this approach: working-class identity is depicted not as the collective political unity of a group in society but as a site for exploring the personal stagnation, alienation and social marginalisation of their (primarily) white male characters. (2000: 261)
Interestingly, the social marginalisation of The Full Monty’s white males is articulated musically through several songs by non-white artists (often women), but the national and regional stereotypes and geographical marginalisation Hallam discusses later in her chapter are not reflected in the musical choices. The Full Monty strikes a balance between British and American artists but includes only one traditional signifier of white British working-class culture and two oblique local references which aurally symbolise the threat to identities based on such a culture. While members of other marginalised groups receive limited foregrounding, songs related to these groups are prominent. Through their careful placement in the film, these songs could project a greater collective political unity, aurally imagining connections between the various marginalised groups whose songs are heard and the white males who use these songs to rebuild their identities. However, as we shall see, the way marginalised groups are represented through old stereotypes and renewed antagonisms undercuts the music’s potential for forging new alliances rather than simply amplifyingThe Full Monty’s surface diversity. In the following examples, I shall discuss how songs and their placement (re)construct working-class masculinities, first through a consideration of the brass band and the other local musical references, followed by an analysis of the songs by British and American artists which have no local connection but represent other gender, racial, and sexual identities.