YourCheatin’ Heart
DirectorMichael Whyte| UK 1990 | 6 x 50m |cert 12
John Byrne’s Your Cheatin’ Heart, a much-loved but little-seen tale of Caledonian cowboys overrunning Clydebank and all other points on the Greater Glasgow conurbation, pistol packs a plethora of ingenious popular cultural inversions, cross-fertilisations and perversions. The imagination and wit with which this television six-parter shoehorns in arch allusions to the six-shooter squeezes every last drop of moonshine from its central comic conceit. Byrne’s work intoxicates because it the product of acute cultural observation and imagination. Your Cheatin’ Heart takes something true (the remarkable Glaswegian love affair with all things County and Western) and then drives it down a series of unlikely – and thus, intriguing– dramatic and thematic trails.
In attempting to map out the latter, we might start by noting the skill and sensitivity with which Byrne corrals the macho overtones and associations of the myth of the American West in order to create a Scottish story of maternal experience. Your Cheatin’ Heart’s surreal opening title sequence immediately frames the entire work as the primary property of Cissie Crouch, a retired C&W singer and recovering alcoholic still reeling from the loss of her infant son (who has been taken into care) at some point before the series’ narrative begins. If we follow the example of one character and see Cissie as “a Patsy Cline lookalike,” then the weird opening titles constitute, in the words of what is perhaps Cline’s most famous hit, the “Sweet Dreams” of maternal love that will not let her Clydeside counterpart “forget the past and start [her] life anew.” This plotline, consistently but never clumsily stressed as Your Cheatin’ Heart develops, provides a profound emotional anchorage to the work as a whole, enabling it to rise above the level of an astonishingly well-written and –performed postmodern pantomime.
No wonder, then, that Your Cheatin’ Heart’s very first shot is of Cissie in a retro striped American convict’s uniform (the culturally insensitive work gear for waitresses at the recently opened American Soul Food restaurant in which she works). But forms of possible collective imprisonment also figure large within Byrne’s work. It’s no accident that the eatery which employs Cissie bears the same name (Bar L) as the infamous local jail in which Cissie’s husband Dorwood is imprisoned. It’s also obviously and immediately striking that the clothing choices of nearly all Your Cheatin’ Heart’s major Scottish characters indicate the range of (often ill-fitting) borrowed American subcultural identities that these locals actively choose to inhabit. Billie McPhail, for example, alternates between an NYPD leather jacket when on-duty driving her black taxi and elaborate Western gear when onstage harmonising with her similarly attired friend and musical partner Jolene. Even Frank McClusky, the novelty food critic-cum-investigative journalist who wastes no opportunity to vent the contemptuous amusement with which he regards Glasgow cowboy culture can’t resist playing a version of the hardboiled gumshoe familiar from mid-twentieth-century American film and fiction. The bust nose that villain of the piece Fraser Boyle gifts Frank him half-way through Your Cheatin’ Heart’s first episode turns the latter into a bathetic rip-off of the similarly scarred Jake Gittes in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown(1974). The local paper Frank works for is called The Echo: a culturally pessimistic reading of Your Cheatin’ Heart might pick up on this fact, seeing Byrne’s work as an affectionate, but essentially apologetic, concession that the writer’s native culture has taken a collective decision to reduce itself to a quaint curiosity, a botched and naïve local echo of an American something and somewhere else.
That interpretation, however, does a disservice to Your Cheatin’ Heart’s considerable tonal and cultural complexity. Much of what Byrne writes could indeed be understood as a critique of a peculiarly Scottish cultural malaise. But how Byrne writes suggests a different viewpoint altogether. Perhaps the most prominent comic thread running through Your Cheatin’ Heart is woven by its creator’s obvious delight in the extent to which all things bright and beautiful become mangled, morphed and mutilated in the acts of (mis-)communication and (mis-)translation that go on between individuals and entire cultures. For this reason, the series is packed full of flustered phone calls and face-to-face conversations at cross-purposes, all of which go awry because of intrinsic difficulties that are less technical and more interpersonal. On one hand, memory is fallible. We routinely forget what something or someone really was: despite receiving the vital information only hours before, for example, Frank promptly forgets the name of the North Irish C&W band with which Fraser is running drugs. On the other, moreover, human interpretation is risible. We routinely fail to see what something or someone really is, or really says, even before we further metamorphose it through misremembering. Linguistic phenomena like homophones (words that sound the same but are spelt differently and mean different things) and homonyms (words that share the same spelling and pronunciation but may have different meanings) sabotage most every conversation we see and hear across Your Cheatin’ Heart’s entirety. In episode one, for instance, Frank almost fails to set the whole series plot in train because Billie and Jolene can’t find and get him to the Bar L restaurant: the girls labour under the misapprehension that it’s a fish joint (sole food) rather than an American one (Soul Food). When attempting to communicate just about anything to each other, Byrne avers, people always get their wires crossed even when the line seems absolutely fine. Viewed in this light, the innocuous sparkling of rhinestone in Johnstone isn’t an essentially Scottish peculiarity. Byrne presents Scotland as no better or worse than any other national culture in its enthusiastic and erratic embrace of outside cultural influence, just as Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954) does not in and of itself necessarily constitute incontrovertible evidence that the USA is a nation full of laughable cultural dullards.
Equally significant in this regard is Byrne’s astonishing ability to alliterate in the ornate dialogue he writes. While this is just the kind of thing you might ideally expect from a professional wordsmith (journalist Frank treats his lucky readership to zingers like “Crab makes crepes a feast of fun for Fifties freaks at Faifley’s Pancake Roadhouse”), Your Cheatin’ Heart also presents it as an ability shared by many West Coast Scots in the euphonious patter they purvey. On one hand, the implication seems to be that the good folk of Glasgow simply love to apply elaborate ornamentation to both the walk they walk (hence the bejewelled cowboy boots and associated gear) and the talk that they talk (a lip-smacking Caledonian creole of local dialect, transatlantic slang and lashings of ironic self-awareness). On the other, the linguistic (pleasure) principle of alliteration proposes that in order to justify the bringing of two things together, the disparate objects in question need only share enough (a particular phonetic sound made in saying two different words, for example) rather than everything in common. Thus, the indubitably substantial historical and cultural links between Scottish and American cultural traditions– think, for example, of the Irish and Scottish folk music roots of twentieth-century American Country and Western– are more than enough to explain and endorse the fact that many Glaswegians want to be cowboys too. Beautifully conceived, crafted and executed, Your Cheatin’ Heart is modern Scottish culture’s most accomplished examination and expression of Americana’s siren allure.
Jonathan Murray
Edinburgh College of Art