8 - The Future is Past, the Present Cannot be Fixed: Ken Loach and the Crisis

Summary

As the contemporary version of the crisis brought on by the financial crash of 2008 reaches its second decade, the cinema of Ken Loach presents something of a conundrum for the politically radical spectator. Since his return to frequent feature film production as the Cold War began to end in 1990, his work has predominantly been focused in two areas: the everyday struggle for existence in the contemporary world: for example, Riff-Raff (1991), Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), Sweet Sixteen (2001), It's a Free World (2007) and I, Daniel Blake (2016); and the historical, revolutionary struggles of working people against capitalism and imperialism, such as Land and Freedom (1995), Carla's Song (1996) and The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006). There have also been documentaries made for television, notably The Flickering Flame (1996) and Spirit of ‘45 (2013).

In this chapter, the defeatism of the British left since the 1980s and the positions taken by its reformist wing following that period, one in which Francis Fukuyama (1992) pronounced ‘the end of history’, will be posited as a seam running through Loach's contemporary cinema. A binary is set up by Loach’s films during this period: a Gramscian War of Manoeuvre is represented in the revolutionary time of the historical films, but in the contemporary period texts, there is no complementary War of Position, which is the form that the struggle takes in order to fight the hegemony of bourgeois culture; instead, we have a working class that is atomised and ground down, with any victories presented being on an individual level. Moreover, as the neoliberal model has lurched further into crisis since 2008, and as social movements attempting to combat neoliberalism have risen since the Seattle World Trade Organization protests of 1999, no change in Loach's cinema can be discerned. In order to ascertain why this might be, Alain Badiou's work on the constitution of the subject will be used to suggest that what is missing from Loach's worldview is faith in what Badiou calls ‘the Idea of Communism’, which he situates as one ‘related to the destiny of generic humanity’ (2009a: 79).