MovieChat Forums > Riff-Raff (1993) Discussion > Loach is a leech.

Loach is a leech.

posted 15 years ago by Pixielix
6 replies | jump to latest

A Glasgow, Scotland based newspaper recently revealed how Ken Loach had completed another of his social commentary meanderings, after visiting the set each day from his Hilton hotel room.

The green-tea socialist set of the West of Scotland were aghast - he didn't sleep in the homes of the amateur actors that occupied his screen? The myth of the director squatting down and breaking bread with his untrained, then abandoned actors was demolished. His recent toe-dip into commercialism in Britain with a film about Eric Cantona added to feelings of confidence trickery by the denizens of art-house cinema. Why was anyone surprised?

'Riff Raff' (1991) is almost a caricature of a Ken Loach film. The film was publicised as containing searing social comment on the aftermath of Thatcher's Britain and the camera does capture the fresh wounds on the physical and spiritual landscape of Britain in some moments - the building site that appears never to near completion to the unchivalrous crowd response to a female singer in a pub.

This is where the good faith that might be earned by the film ends - Loach could have delivered vignettes on this Britain, but cannot help but have his improvising actors weave an overbaked tale of bleak morality and agit-prop cliché (a hippy woman inexplicably produces a heroin needle at one point, while a worker is immediately laid off after one union-based entreaty to his gaffer). Loach doesn't just let loose his bid for working class heroism - you can almost hear him salivating for the accolade.

Loach's view is that the default moral and cultural position of the working classes is debauchery and bad taste. When a female enters the building site, not dressed like Sam Fox on a hen night, but wrapped in more woollens than an Inuit chieftain, she is wolf-whistled. One can almost hear the Professor Yaffle tones of Loach screeching with glee "Yes, wolf-whistle her - that's what you lot do, isn't it?!"

This is masturbatory fantasy of what working class life is like,aimed at hash-cake eating and joss-stick burning university graduates. It clearly influenced the more patronizing parts of Caroline Aherne's 'The Royle Family', treating the working class men as toby-jug faced cheeky-chappies with hearts of gold and the women as despondent ragdolls.

It is modern titillation on a par with what Hogarth produced in his etchings centuries before and is as vile as Thatcher herself.

[–] marc-137 15 years ago

Firstly, your first two paragraphs have no bearing on the film in question and were clearly thrown in because you could find nothing better to smear Loach with.

You seem to misunderstand Loach's ethos entirely - yes he lays it on thick, but not because he's 'salivating for the accolade', but because he's so desperate to get the message across. As for the heroin scene, interestingly to me too it seemed a little misplaced, but to say it is 'inexplicable' shows a lack on your part, both of empathy and historical judgment. Heroin use was and is a serious problem in the UK - it's hardly out of the question that a woman like Susan, drifting through life with little prospects for the future, would drift into smack use too. As for you calling her a hippy, all you do is betray your Daily Mail soaked prejudices. Presumably you think she is because she wears long skirts.

And again, when you claim that a female being wolf whistled is an attempt by Loach to portray the debauchery of the working class. Nonsense - sexism is a fact of life on sites entirely composed of working men, but is hardly unknown in middle or upper class circles either. Loach is merely holding up a mirror to what's there, giving the lie to your misplaced belief that he's trying to give a glorified picture of working class life. You also omit to mention the tact with which the workers back out, leaving Stevie and Susan to try and resolve their differences.

Again, you betray your class hatred with the idea the film is a masturbatory fantasy of working class life. It's sad that your own prejudices blind you to the hopes and dreams of the characters in the film, reducing them in your eyes to 'toby-jug faced cheeky-chappies with hearts of gold and the women as despondent ragdolls'.

To then go on and call Thatcher vile reduces your post to meaningless babble, when all you have done in your previous paragraphs is reflect the prejudices and hatreds with which she was able to manipulate her support base. Not only that, but you try and put down Loach by comparing him to Hogarth, when in fact I suspect the director would welcome the comparison.

As Hogarth himself said, "painting and engraving modern moral subjects ... to treat my subjects as a dramatic writer; my picture was my stage" - something which could equally be applied to Loach.

You're blind, pixielix. Open your eyes while there's still time.

[–] Errington_92 12 years ago

This is masturbatory fantasy of what working class life is like,aimed at hash-cake eating and joss-stick burning university graduates

Personally I can not contempate your opinion of Riff Raff portraying the working class as a prop which people can laugh at. The working class are portrayed in a sympathetic manner, the stuggles they go through in their personal and professional lives and are shown to have more heart than those in authority.

The rats shown at the beginning and the end of Riff Raff are symbolic for the working class in terms of struggling to survive. At the end when Patrick set fire to the work site the rats are shown running around looking for safety. It is symbolic for the workers who are seen as rats by those in higher positions who will now have to find secruity in another job, which will be hard task. Since Riff Raff portrays the working class sympahetically in such a way I highly doubt the intention was for those outside the working class to enjoy watching them in a sadistic manner.

"I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not".

[–] erez-yam 11 years ago

Cheating the African worker out of the five pounds each one had promised him for going on a collective errand? The impulsiveness, the never thinking ahead to the consequences? The inability to delay gratification? This was actually the first Loach film I've seen that showed little sympathy for the lower class.

[–] Squeeth2 8 years ago

Inability to delay gratification? Do your homework boy, in the circumstances of the working class, all too often, if you delay gratification, you don't get it because it is stolen off you by the state.

Marlon, Claudia & Dimby the cats 1989-2010. Clio the cat, July 1997 - 1 May 2016.

[–] epa101 9 years ago

This is certainly not the case in all his films. In some of them, the working classes are portrayed too idealistically for my tastes. I prefer the ones where he shows them warts and all.

[–] Squeeth2 8 years ago

Twat

Marlon, Claudia & Dimby the cats 1989-2010. Clio the cat, July 1997 - 1 May 2016.