Peaky Blinders: love the attitude!

Peter Strempel, 29 August 2023 

It would be perfectly reasonable to dismiss Peaky Blinders as just another show about gangsters, or thugs.

But I’ve never had much time for bourgeois sensibilities, especially the one about being reasonable on subject matters that are far from reasonable in themselves.  Being reasonable is an ideologically imposed self-censorship, or the infantilization of who we really are as a species, and how we live as subjects to gangsters of all kinds.

What I really love about Peaky Blinders is the attitude.  It’s like watching the ghost of Sid Vicious pissing on the graves of Dallas or Falcon Crest, with trademark swagger and sneer, beer in one hand, cock in the other.

Punk soap opera, underscored with edgy indie rock riffs, and some not-so-indie-anymore classics: Nick Cave, White Stripes, Tom Waits, Arctic Monkeys, PJ Harvey, The Raconteurs, Radiohead, Leonard Cohen, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Black Sabbath, Joy Division, Sinéad O’Connor, and so many more.  What’s not to like about the ambience?

It seems to me the soundtrack is not just ambience, but a deliberate call to a specific demographic: those who were engaged with the (mainly) British music scene of the 1980s and ‘90s.  People who could understand and empathize with the punk ‘fuck you’ attitude of the Shelbys.

If you want to get serious, part of the appeal parallels the Godfather story: a new generation of gangsters muscling their way into ‘respectability’ the same way previous generations have.

Europe has a long history of it: warlords raping, killing, and pillaging their way into ‘noble’ titles, supported by their partner in crime, the Church.  Fast forward to WWI, and it’s just more of the same carnage by the same gangster families, now dressed up in royal fineries and upper class couture.  Enter the underdogs.  Low-brow thugs from Birmingham slums and gypsy heritage, newly trained by their warlords in carnage and mayhem on French battlefields.

I love a good underdog story.  Who doesn’t? 

The best episodes are those with Alfred Solomons (Tom Hardy) and the fascism story arc, with Sam Claflin as a libertine Sir Oswald Mosely, perhaps because they contain less direct violence instead of more complex explanations for it, but these episodes could hardly work without the foundation of the first couple of seasons establishing the boundaries of the violence that has always attended a change of guard in ‘business’.

Merge the whole punk vibe with period costumes, gorgeous sets, wild men and women giving the finger to establishment ‘virtues’ in story arcs with cliffhanger episodes and a sublime supporting cast that included Sam Neill, Annabelle Wallis, Charlie Creed-Miles, Noah Taylor, Tom Hardy, Gaite Jansen, Paddy Considine, Adrien Brody, and many more.  It’s ensemble epic!

In the landscape of tame and de-fanged ‘family’ shows, the Austen-Brontë fetish, and the usual avalanche of American effluent, it stood out just the way punk rock and its aftermath stood out in the dross of 1970s-80s corporate-sponsored pop-rock.

I confess I have much more sympathy for these 1920s–‘30s Birmingham gangsters than the entire recent generation of cut-rate wannabes in bling and gaudy sports clothes.  At least the Peaky Blinders wore suits and fine dresses, real shoes, fob watches, and tasteful jewellery.  But that’s a personal gripe about the vanishing notion of style, buried under the oleaginous slag layers of ‘fashion’.

A last reckoning would have me admit that it’s just good entertainment, even if raw and violent.  Honest about the nature of capitalism, bourgeois society, and family loyalties (and fights) the way ‘clean family fun’ never is.  With characters that are relatable the way few are in other shows, even if only in a sentimental, nostalgic way, remembering some of my own youthful follies and pretensions.

Ripley's Game (2002)

 

Peter Strempel, 18 August 2023 

Mr Mudd (production company), produced by Simon Bosanquet, Ricardo Tozzi, Ileen Maisel, written by Charles McKeown & Liliana Cavani (based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1974 novel Ripley’s Game), directed by Liliana Cavani, photography by Alfio Contini, music by Ennio Morricone.  With John Malkovich as Tom Ripley, Dougray Scott as Jonathan Trevanny, Ray Winstone as Reeves, Lena Headey as Sarah Trevanny, Chiara Caselli as Luisa Harari.

As I was watching this old favourite again—the umpteenth time—a friend remarked she didn’t enjoy any of the Ripley films, and didn’t find him a sympathetic character.  When I ventured that Malkovich is eminently watchable, she agreed only in so far as watching him in this film was watching him being ‘horrible’.

Which of course led me to interrogate what it is about this film that so appeals to me that I would watch it multiple times.

I had forgotten Ray Winstone’s impressive performance as the brashly intrusive and objectionably boorish British gangster Reeves (American gangster Reeves Minot in the novel).  You could really get to despise the character, and want him gone.  Making me wonder why Ripley didn’t just dispose of him after the art swindle in the film’s opening.  I still don’t really know what it is in Ripley’s character that demurred on this point, given his evident homicidal skills.  Perhaps it is only so the story can progress to Ripley’s subornment of Jonathan Trevanny to murder, perhaps for having made sarcastic remarks about Ripley, or perhaps for other reasons.

I do recall that Dougray Smith’s performance as Trevanny used to annoy me.  This time around I found it was really only the ridiculously overplayed melodrama of his self-pitying episodes in the bathroom after the train murder, and subsequently with his wife, trying to justify his sudden wealth against her almost ideological opposition to such a thing.

 

The annoyingly melodramatic bathroom scene.

It is his wife, Sarah, played with some sharpness by Lena Headey, that is the weakest point of the story, but a logical one if Patricia Highsmith’s original intention for Ripley was to have been as a foil for the stifling bourgeois moralism.  In an existentialist critique of her society some reviewers read into the first Ripley novel, The Talented Mr Ripley, published in 1955.

Having not read the Highsmith novels, I can nevertheless see that aspect in the Minghella adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), and even more so in Ripley’s Game.  Ripley stands outside bourgeois society, eschewing its servile moralism (to be seen as distinct and opposed to principled ethical judgement) in a Nietzschean reach for pursuing his own destiny.  In a world he rightly sees as being raped and pillaged by crooks of all kinds, who are themselves ripe for the picking by someone more … talented.  That was certainly an accurate picture of America in the Nixon era, when Highsmith wrote Ripley’s Game.  And Ripley, in that era, or any other, comes across making an authentic Heideggerian choice to reject ignorant and hypocritical public ‘chatter’ about how people should behave in favour of keeping his own counsel.

Sarah Trevanny is the character most representative of the servile bourgeois moralists despised by Nietzsche and the existentialists, clinging ideologically to an obedience of norms that simply no longer apply to her husband, who is dying of leukaemia.  It is true that if the Trevannys had a real partnership, instead of a just a marriage, he would have confided in her how he intended to look after her and their child.  Giving her the option of walking away or supporting his decision.  But Trevanny knows it’s not a real partnership, of the kind he can see between Ripley and Luisa Harari.  So he doesn’t tell her, and Sarah’s rôle becomes a stereotype in Western culture of the kind we can trace right back to Beowulf, in which Danish chieftain Hrothgar’s wife Wealtheow acts as the custodian and arbiter of rules and customs to becalm the lawless Vikings.  The perfect mirror of Nietzsche’s revanchist bourgeois provincials, and Heidegger’s inauthentic, thoughtless people who allow decisions about their lives to be made for them by others.

Ripley is no ‘good guy’, but his sociopathy is purposeful and not barbaric.  At least not in the clumsy way many American storytellers like to paint their villains.  He is cultured, and even principled, in his own way.  And he offers Jonathan a chance to live on his feet for a few days, rather than slowly atrophying into an undignified and painful death.  Malkovich plays him with the reserve that hints at the violence he endured in childhood, and the strategies he developed to cope.

I have seen a close friend die of leukaemia.  I can state with all conviction that there is nothing at all dignified or worthy about it.  Had I been a Ripley, I would have offered him some other way to end his days.  And perhaps this is the appeal to me of Malkovich’s Ripley.  He knew how to live, and let others taste the same independence from stifling, masochistic norms.

Some reviewers have suggested the final scenes are about Ripley’s complete indifference to the harms he caused to befall others.  I don’t see it that way at all.  The smile on Jonathan’s face at his end says to me he got to choose his fate, and was glad of it.  That Ripley enabled him to make that choice, just as his partner’s concert on the restored harpsicord was Ripley’s enablement of her art.

My friend was of course right: Ripley is not a sympathetic character.  Perhaps we differ only in my perception that ‘ordinary people’, living their lives according to the priggish moralism of self-imposed rules that serve only the grotesque gangsters and sociopathic criminals in business and government, makes of them much less sympathetic characters than a Ripley here and there. 

The Germans have a wonderful word for such a certain species of ordinary people: Spießbürger.  Meaning literally spear carrying citizens, it refers to historical town militia, but today denotes a pompous, self-righteous, judgmental bigot, ready to condemn others for their transgressions while hiding their own hypocrisies, prurience, and salacious fetishes.  A kind of ignorant, back-water bourgeois everpresent in every lynchmob found in history.

I’d rather have dinner with a Tom Ripley than any number of Spießbürger, lacking the faintest self-awareness or spark.

Cavani’s Ripley’s Game is my best chance at that dinner with Ripley, or Malkovich, or both.  That, and my own friend’s suffering under the blight of leukaemia, are likely the film’s lasting appeal to me.