Odyssey 2.0:
Mike Leigh’s Naked, 30 Years On

1,908 words

Have you ever thought, right, but you don’t know, but you may have already lived the happiest day in your whole fucking life and all you have left to look forward to is fucking sickness and purgatory? — Johnnie, Naked

Of all creatures that move and breathe upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man. — Homer, the Odyssey

I saw Mike Leigh’s 1993 movie Naked the week of its release, and during a rare English heatwave. The cinema was not air-conditioned, and that seemed strangely appropriate for the clammy closeness of the movie. Given that the film is a dark and scuzzy odyssey through London’s underbelly, it also seemed perfect that I saw it in my favorite part of London, Camden Town.

If Camden was a woman she would be a slut, and there is much to love about her grime and lack of moral fiber. The market is world-famous — although it keeps burning down — and I lived there on the canal for a while, back when I had a narrowboat. In 1993 I was bar manager of one of Camden’s more famous restaurants, and I had agreed to meet a friend in the evening for a drink at one or other of the various pubs occasionally frequented by Amy Winehouse (although not then; too young, even for London) and those members of The Clash who were still talking to each other. Camden draws those who are less than morally impeccable — among which I number myself — like moths to a lit candle.

The problem that faced me was that I had just finished a lunchtime shift and had a few hours to kill before the meet. I didn’t want to sit around all afternoon in a boozer reading a book — although that was my natural habitat and practice back then – because when friends meet, they are supposed to get drunk together. It doesn’t really work if one is already pie-eyed at the start of proceedings.

So, I wandered up Parkway towards London Zoo, backing as it does onto The Regent’s Park. In those days, you could still see the wolf park without having to pay to go into the zoo itself. Those of you who have seen Withnail & I — a film with stylistic links to Naked — will know the wolf park from the final scene. Don’t watch that if you haven’t seen the movie. It’s a terrible spoiler, and I don’t want that on my conscience.

Halfway up Parkway, just near the famous jazz club which is so famous I can’t remember its name, I saw the Parkway Cinema advertising that it was showing a film called Naked. It was an odd poster, and I thought for a moment the famous old picture-house was trying to make up for seasonal losses by showing porn. Naked is porn, in its way, but not that way, although there is a lot of sex in it, if you can call it sex. The promotional posters make my point for me. The first is ridiculously beguiling, apparently advertising some smutty item for raincoat-wearing masturbators, the second giving one of the most accurate visual depictions of the heart and soul of a movie I have ever seen.

Mike Leigh is one of those English film directors who is simultaneously loved and shunned by film audiences. He is very Left-wing, although not on the same high rung of the ladder as, say, Ken Loach. I suppose he is a sort of white Spike Lee — the names are almost identical, phonetically — except that I have never seen a film by Lee. I tend to stay away from films by blacks, which I imagine would exclude me from most “movie theaters” (as Americans have always called cinemas) just at the moment, where I am betting that every second movie concerns the fascinating subject of slavery. Come to think of it, I pretty much stay away from black culture sui generis. I don’t think I’d like it very much, although Othello and the theme song from Shaft are not at all bad. Oh, and Tamla Motown. But I digress. After that word from our sponsors, back to the movie.

Naked is a rom-com for sociopaths. During the vanishingly rare moments of tenderness, you are almost appalled at how incongruous they seem in the context of the film — which, of course, heightens the tenderness. But this is a film about hatred, cruelty, and despair, so not one for a night in with your partner. If you decide otherwise, it is (at the moment of writing) available for free here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1-UfrFOaPU

The plot is simple: Johnnie is a Mancunian miscreant who is first shown having violent sex with a prostitute in an alleyway. This incoherent and sexually violent scene sets the mood for the rest of the film, and he steals a car and drives to London to find his ex-girlfriend. Chaos ensues, and Johnnie invites most of it:

Why did you come to London, Johnnie?

Well, I was going to get a beating in Manchester, so I came to London, and I got a beating.

You can buy Mark Gullick’s novel Cherub Valley here.

The whole movie is a beating, psychologically speaking. It is easy to find mental cruelty, as well as the physical variety, if you are an aficionado of horror, thrillers, and so on. Naked is neither.

It is a skill honed between screenwriters and directors to make a movie which is very violent but features no guns, knives, or other agents of delivering death. Leigh both wrote and directed Naked, which perhaps explains its success in this respect. Johnnie gets what we English call a “kicking” from a guy he pushes too far, and a brief, Clockwork Orange-style beating from a pack of feral youths, but that aside, the violence is mostly psychological.

Johnnie is a narcissistic failure, but he is also a well-read perfectionist. As a practitioner of psychological intimidation, he is skilled, thorough, and ruthless. The character is true to life, if you have met people like Johnnie, which I have: people who goad you, aim at what they know will push your buttons. Some people become very accomplished at this type of personal trolling. Some of them go too far, and the problem with Johnnie is that he goes way too far, and he does it intentionally. There is a parallel with Johnny Boy in Mean Streets — reviewed by myself here on its 50 birthday — and Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

The film is an odyssey, and the Odyssey itself makes an appearance which could seem clunky, but in the context of the scene it works well, as Johnnie taunts the girl who has taken him in for the night by holding up a copy of the book:

Do you know this? I bet you do. You most likely did it at school. You just can’t remember. You know like, uh, Achilles’ heel, the wooden horse, Helen of Troy. You know them? Psyclops.

It gently evokes Joyce’s Ulysses, just for a moment: the intersection between our modern world and what was effectively the equivalent of the Bible for ancient Greeks.

The girls who fall into Johnnie’s web — and there are many in the film — offer him shelter and the English answer to all woes, a cup of tea and some baked beans. He repays them by making them cry in a way which is remorseless. They want company and love. He wishes only to cause mental distress to others. He tells one she has a sad face. She asks if he ever had a dog and he says, no, did you? And did it die? And did you bury it? What are you doing for Christmas? She cries and he goes on and he won’t stop.

The supporting characters are superb. The parallelism between Sebastian Hawkes — or whatever his real name is — and Johnnie both feature sexual violence, and quite a lot of it. There are surprisingly tender moments in the movie, but they don’t involve love-making, some of which is technically rape. Hawkes kisses a waitress he has brought home to his fabulous apartment — he is what we called a “yuppie” in those days — and bites her lower lip, hard, making it bleed. Johnnie will do exactly the same thing to a drunk woman whose apartment he enters by lying in a later scene.

Sitting in Soho with a Scottish criminal with mental health problems which are even more obvious than those of the other characters, watching the young man’s tics and twitches, and listening to his psychopathic jabbering, Johnnie delivers one of the film’s great lines: “What’s it like to be you?”

I imagine that many of you will have seen the mentally ill in the wild, as it were, free range, and thought the same thing. From where I am sitting, via news reports both mainstream and not, the streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and a host of other cities make the depiction of severe mental distress in Naked look like a dramatization of Jane Austen.

Which reminds me: It is hard to pick the cruelest thing Johnnie does, but I am going to go for the vodka-soaked slattern mentioned earlier. She clearly wants him to rape her — some women do have rape fantasies, although few act them out — but he refuses her even that vile consolation: “Do you think you can recapture your youth by fucking it? You don’t want to fuck me, love. You’ll catch something cruel.”

Johnnie is fascinated by books, particularly the Bible, which he knows exhaustively. He looks through the woman’s meager collection and says, “Oh, look. Jane Austen, by Emma.” She tells him that it is her favorite book. Later, when she has passed out on the rank bed, Johnnie puts all her books — including Emma — into his bag and leaves. He doesn’t want to read them — Revelations is more his preferred entertainment; he just doesn’t want her to have them anymore. This is mental cruelty taken to the level of the psychopathological.

Now, of course, Naked is unlikely to get much of a re-release. The actors are all white and there are no sympathetic characters from the Asian subcontinent. Plus there is a lot of sexual and psychological violence aimed at women. I suspect these are among the reasons I like the movie still, after all these years. I would say that, although I am a misogynist, I don’t hate all women. I haven’t met them all yet. Had we but world enough and time.

Leigh is known for scriptless pre-production. He sketches out characters and works with the actors one-on-one, teasing characters out of them. Then the film comes into being. The yuppie character seems bolted on to the screenplay, but I suspect that tells us more about Leigh than life in general.

In many ways, Naked is an absurdist work of art. But, in an absurd world, absurd films increasingly look realistic. I have seen it many times, and like a good album, there is always something you didn’t notice before. The music is superb, a strange mixture of cello and harp which suits the film oddly but perfectly.

Is Naked a shining example of British cinéma vérité? I would say yes, it is. It is as cruel as Alfie, The L-Shaped Room, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and the almost unbelievably bleak This Sporting Life. As noted, this is a feelbad movie — but I feel the spirit of Camden would applaud its cheerless humor.