Film: Pride
Sep. 9th, 2014 12:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livReasons for watching it: I saw a poster for it at the cinema and I was really interested in the concept of a gay rights group supporting the miners' strike. And then IJ was enthusiastic about the film at a party, so I had some hope that not only is it a cool premise, it's a cool premise done well.
Circumstances of watching it:jack and I got to the point where there's nothing else further we can do to get things ready for moving, other than tasks that need to be done at the last minute. So we went out to the cinema in the shopping complex behind the station; I'm still not used to the idea that there's actually stuff in that bit of town one might want to go to!
Verdict: Pride is a very strong film, both funny and emotionally affecting.
Pride just about broke my heart, I was pretty emotional throughout and broke down weeping when we came out of the cinema and tried to discuss it. The film itself is, I suppose, competent, it's decently acted and gets you to care about the characters, it is well-paced and successfully employs a bunch of fairly standard tricks for maintaining the emotional tension, it explores all the possible comic implications of a encounter between urban, worldly gay libbers and the community of a small Welsh mining town. But what really got to me was the story it's telling. I saw all the "based on a true story" stuff and assumed it was just genre convention, so initially I was sad about how unrealistic the portrayed alliance was. But no, the whole thing with Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, and miners' union groups marching in the Pride parade actually happened, a few links deep from Wikipedia you hit scholarly articles detailing the history of the events portrayed in the film.
So now I feel sad that I had absolutely no idea until this film came out. These people terraformed the world for me and mine, they put their lives on the line and endured violence and prison so that ten years later when I came out I didn't get rejected by my parents or thrown out of my religious community or lose access to education or employment. And so that thirty years later, films like Pride get made as cute quirky comedies, shown in mainstream cinemas, where it's just a complete given that everybody sympathizes with the gay characters and the nasty homophobes are barely more than cardboard villains. And I know nothing about them. I feel like I should have been sitting in the cinema nitpicking the historical details and the things the film changed to heighten the drama, but no, it was all so completely new to me that I didn't really even believe the "true story" framing.
Thing is, I was six-ish at the time the film is set, just about old enough that some of the scenery and costuming and props (rotary dial phones!) used to portray a sense of period look actually familiar rather than historic. I dimly remember having a sense of the miners' strike, mostly being vaguely pro-Thatcher in that I knew she was the Prime Minister and therefore to be respected, and she appeared on TV as a suited, coiffed woman speaking standard English and generally much like many of the adults I looked up to, whereas Scargill was shouty and scary and I thought he might try to take away our electricity. (Yes, that makes me an outlier in much of my social circle who have hated Thatcher and the Tories since they were pre-verbal; so it goes.) So ok, I didn't know much about industrial relations, that's normal for someone only just school-age, but at least I've picked up some bits and pieces since. I also knew literally nothing about the gay rights struggle then, and I still basically don't, and I feel somewhere between resentful and guilty that I'm having to learn what should be my history from random feel-good comedy films.
The other thing that upset me is that Pride follows what has become the standard basically upbeat gay story arc: kid realizes he is gay, confronts his family and is rejected by them, runs away from his backward narrow-minded provincial small town and arrives in the big city where he gets to express his identity openly and isn't that lovely? I mean, that's a story, I'm sure it's a true story for many people, especially gay men through much of the second half of the 20th century, it's the whole Dan Savage "It Gets Better" thing. Since I was a teenager myself I've always found stories about people being rejected by their families and communities because of who they are and who they love really hard to handle, and perhaps even more so when this is portrayed as a positive outcome. (Even Fiddler on the Roof, sentimental though it is, gets to me these days.)
Even though it's becoming the exception more than absolutely inevitable these days, I know far too many people who have in fact been rejected by their families for being LGB or trans or other gender, sexual or relationship issues, and maybe they have great lives now, but still, that's a loss. The truth is that when you come out you lose some people, and if you're lucky they're only peripheral people who don't really matter to you that much. So part of what broke me was seeing Joe and Gethin (who as far as I can work out are original characters, whereas most of the LGSM people are based on real historical figures) playing out this trope in different ways, and being reminded of the people who have in fact rejected me because they don't approve of me being bi (even though my actual immediate family have always been entirely supportive), and the much worse experiences many of my friends have been through.
Also, AIDS. It's pretty much a given that generally LGBT positive films have to have minor characters dying of AIDS in the background somewhere, it's almost a shorthand for "this film has pathos". And I wouldn't want to watch a film about gay issues in those decades which pretended the AIDS epidemic never happened. But still;jack thought that perhaps our naif blond viewpoint character Joe might be the designated sacrificial victim, but I knew perfectly well it was going to be the obviously flamboyant / effeminate characters, because that's how it works in films.
The other thing about this film is that, fun though it is, I am somewhat conflicted about how it portrayed the Welsh mining community characters. It turns out, now that I've been reading up on the real history, that the main thing the film changed is that in fact the impetus to work with the London-based gay and lesbian group originally came from the mining community. The Dulais folk are portrayed as rather simple and backward, completely unaware of anything outside their immediate experience. Endearing, yes, but much of the humour of the film comes from assuming all the Welsh characters are entirely ignorant of anything outside the binary gendered nuclear family structure. So you've got fierce little old ladies brow-beating their neighbours into being more tolerant and living up to the traditional Welsh values of hospitality, sweet naive little old ladies asking well-meaning but hilarious questions, macho, belligerent young men gradually coming to idea that knowing how to dance might be an asset, the requisite couple of people who realize that they themselves may not be entirely straight, and oh, the uneducated but passionate canteen worker counselled by the older gay man not to waste her potential, giving her the impetus to go to university as a mature student and eventually become an MP. So the film completely cuts out any suggestion that the Welsh labour movement might in fact have been self-aware, educated, intentionally organized with an actual strategy, it's just the poor little miners who accidentally found themselves confronting the establishment because they were desperate, and being "saved" by the middle-class London gays.
Of course the other thing that's really sad about this story is that in some sense the gay and lesbian group "won" or at least made real progress in terms of getting LGBT issues enshrined in Labour party politics and successfully changing attitudes. Whereas the striking Welsh miners essentially lost, the strike was ended and the mines were closed and the communities economically destroyed within a few years of the end of the film. The realities of the strike, the bits where people were actually starving and unable to heat their homes through an exceptionally cold winter, the violence both by the police and intra-community are very much glossed over, partly of course because that's not what the film's about.
The other thing that's glossed over is homophobic violence. There's a very brief and artistically vague scene where people throw bricks and firebombs at the gay bookshop, and we see one of the original characters get into an altercation and then the screen fades to black and we see him in hospital in the next scene. I'm not saying the film would be improved by showing violence more directly; I don't especially want to see that kind of thing made pornified for entertainment. Just it's a very, very feel-good sort of film based on a reality that was in fact quite horrific in various ways.
Circumstances of watching it:
jack and I got to the point where there's nothing else further we can do to get things ready for moving, other than tasks that need to be done at the last minute. So we went out to the cinema in the shopping complex behind the station; I'm still not used to the idea that there's actually stuff in that bit of town one might want to go to! Verdict: Pride is a very strong film, both funny and emotionally affecting.
Pride just about broke my heart, I was pretty emotional throughout and broke down weeping when we came out of the cinema and tried to discuss it. The film itself is, I suppose, competent, it's decently acted and gets you to care about the characters, it is well-paced and successfully employs a bunch of fairly standard tricks for maintaining the emotional tension, it explores all the possible comic implications of a encounter between urban, worldly gay libbers and the community of a small Welsh mining town. But what really got to me was the story it's telling. I saw all the "based on a true story" stuff and assumed it was just genre convention, so initially I was sad about how unrealistic the portrayed alliance was. But no, the whole thing with Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, and miners' union groups marching in the Pride parade actually happened, a few links deep from Wikipedia you hit scholarly articles detailing the history of the events portrayed in the film.
So now I feel sad that I had absolutely no idea until this film came out. These people terraformed the world for me and mine, they put their lives on the line and endured violence and prison so that ten years later when I came out I didn't get rejected by my parents or thrown out of my religious community or lose access to education or employment. And so that thirty years later, films like Pride get made as cute quirky comedies, shown in mainstream cinemas, where it's just a complete given that everybody sympathizes with the gay characters and the nasty homophobes are barely more than cardboard villains. And I know nothing about them. I feel like I should have been sitting in the cinema nitpicking the historical details and the things the film changed to heighten the drama, but no, it was all so completely new to me that I didn't really even believe the "true story" framing.
Thing is, I was six-ish at the time the film is set, just about old enough that some of the scenery and costuming and props (rotary dial phones!) used to portray a sense of period look actually familiar rather than historic. I dimly remember having a sense of the miners' strike, mostly being vaguely pro-Thatcher in that I knew she was the Prime Minister and therefore to be respected, and she appeared on TV as a suited, coiffed woman speaking standard English and generally much like many of the adults I looked up to, whereas Scargill was shouty and scary and I thought he might try to take away our electricity. (Yes, that makes me an outlier in much of my social circle who have hated Thatcher and the Tories since they were pre-verbal; so it goes.) So ok, I didn't know much about industrial relations, that's normal for someone only just school-age, but at least I've picked up some bits and pieces since. I also knew literally nothing about the gay rights struggle then, and I still basically don't, and I feel somewhere between resentful and guilty that I'm having to learn what should be my history from random feel-good comedy films.
The other thing that upset me is that Pride follows what has become the standard basically upbeat gay story arc: kid realizes he is gay, confronts his family and is rejected by them, runs away from his backward narrow-minded provincial small town and arrives in the big city where he gets to express his identity openly and isn't that lovely? I mean, that's a story, I'm sure it's a true story for many people, especially gay men through much of the second half of the 20th century, it's the whole Dan Savage "It Gets Better" thing. Since I was a teenager myself I've always found stories about people being rejected by their families and communities because of who they are and who they love really hard to handle, and perhaps even more so when this is portrayed as a positive outcome. (Even Fiddler on the Roof, sentimental though it is, gets to me these days.)
Even though it's becoming the exception more than absolutely inevitable these days, I know far too many people who have in fact been rejected by their families for being LGB or trans or other gender, sexual or relationship issues, and maybe they have great lives now, but still, that's a loss. The truth is that when you come out you lose some people, and if you're lucky they're only peripheral people who don't really matter to you that much. So part of what broke me was seeing Joe and Gethin (who as far as I can work out are original characters, whereas most of the LGSM people are based on real historical figures) playing out this trope in different ways, and being reminded of the people who have in fact rejected me because they don't approve of me being bi (even though my actual immediate family have always been entirely supportive), and the much worse experiences many of my friends have been through.
Also, AIDS. It's pretty much a given that generally LGBT positive films have to have minor characters dying of AIDS in the background somewhere, it's almost a shorthand for "this film has pathos". And I wouldn't want to watch a film about gay issues in those decades which pretended the AIDS epidemic never happened. But still;
jack thought that perhaps our naif blond viewpoint character Joe might be the designated sacrificial victim, but I knew perfectly well it was going to be the obviously flamboyant / effeminate characters, because that's how it works in films. The other thing about this film is that, fun though it is, I am somewhat conflicted about how it portrayed the Welsh mining community characters. It turns out, now that I've been reading up on the real history, that the main thing the film changed is that in fact the impetus to work with the London-based gay and lesbian group originally came from the mining community. The Dulais folk are portrayed as rather simple and backward, completely unaware of anything outside their immediate experience. Endearing, yes, but much of the humour of the film comes from assuming all the Welsh characters are entirely ignorant of anything outside the binary gendered nuclear family structure. So you've got fierce little old ladies brow-beating their neighbours into being more tolerant and living up to the traditional Welsh values of hospitality, sweet naive little old ladies asking well-meaning but hilarious questions, macho, belligerent young men gradually coming to idea that knowing how to dance might be an asset, the requisite couple of people who realize that they themselves may not be entirely straight, and oh, the uneducated but passionate canteen worker counselled by the older gay man not to waste her potential, giving her the impetus to go to university as a mature student and eventually become an MP. So the film completely cuts out any suggestion that the Welsh labour movement might in fact have been self-aware, educated, intentionally organized with an actual strategy, it's just the poor little miners who accidentally found themselves confronting the establishment because they were desperate, and being "saved" by the middle-class London gays.
Of course the other thing that's really sad about this story is that in some sense the gay and lesbian group "won" or at least made real progress in terms of getting LGBT issues enshrined in Labour party politics and successfully changing attitudes. Whereas the striking Welsh miners essentially lost, the strike was ended and the mines were closed and the communities economically destroyed within a few years of the end of the film. The realities of the strike, the bits where people were actually starving and unable to heat their homes through an exceptionally cold winter, the violence both by the police and intra-community are very much glossed over, partly of course because that's not what the film's about.
The other thing that's glossed over is homophobic violence. There's a very brief and artistically vague scene where people throw bricks and firebombs at the gay bookshop, and we see one of the original characters get into an altercation and then the screen fades to black and we see him in hospital in the next scene. I'm not saying the film would be improved by showing violence more directly; I don't especially want to see that kind of thing made pornified for entertainment. Just it's a very, very feel-good sort of film based on a reality that was in fact quite horrific in various ways.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-09 12:17 pm (UTC)I looked for any more background, and I found http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/31/pride-film-gay-activists-miners-strike-interview I can't vouch for it, but it sounds to have actually talked to some of the real people involved.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-09 12:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-09 03:40 pm (UTC)It is amusing to see the 'at first, I didn't believe it, was it a legend?' comments in various places - the gay press of the time had plenty of stories about it, and it can't have taken more than an hour at any decent library to come up with stuff confirming it.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-09 04:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-24 11:46 pm (UTC)Some of it is spot on, including the complete absence of the word 'bisexual' from the lot of it. It also caught Mark's personality.
There are some definite anachronisms, including in the bookshop with some things that weren't published at the time, not nearly enough people smoking in the gay scene scenes, and.. did they call it HIV despite the name not coming until 1986?
The Gay's The Word shopfront is oddly wrong - given it's still there, they could get right - and there's some dodgy CGI in the Hyde Park scenes, and I don't remember there being an effort by the organisers to be non-political - the move to a 'mardi gras' (spit) came in 1999 after the end of the Pride Trust, and there was a float from Gays The Word about their obscenity tussles with HM Customs.
But overall, yes, fab.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-10 09:28 am (UTC)I feel sad that I had absolutely no idea until this film came out
I blame Section 28. It came up in a locked conversation elsewhere a while ago, and I realised that it covered my entire time at school, and was not actually repealed until after I had got engaged to Tony. I did not really encounter useful information about LGBT+ issues (especially B or T) until the last ten years or so. Not that I regret being married to Tony! But I was so ignorant, and society conspired to keep me that way.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-15 07:16 pm (UTC)I did get useful information earlier than 10 years ago, partly because the Jewish community was much more open about these issues than general society at the time, partly because I was lucky enough to find my people at uni. But next to nothing at school. I was 20 and intensely in love with a woman myself the first time I saw two women kissing, the first time I encountered the idea that being non-straight was actually about attractions and potentially falling in love and having relationships, not just an unfortunate problem to be pitied (if you were lucky).
And yeah, the media around Pride as if LGSM were an arcane secret is the usual bullshit hype,
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-15 05:58 pm (UTC)So the film completely cuts out any suggestion that the Welsh labour movement might in fact have been self-aware, educated, intentionally organized with an actual strategy, it's just the poor little miners who accidentally found themselves confronting the establishment because they were desperate, and being "saved" by the middle-class London gays.
I think it's over-simplified, but it's certainly true that if you grew up in a mining town in Wales or the North East, your opportunities were extremely limited - which is why the strike was quite so devastating, the pits were all there was for many communities. We didn't do quite so badly in the North West because we don't have so many mining towns (in the sense that there are pits, but they're mostly in places with other industries too). But it certainly felt in the 80s it felt like London was the centre of the UK, and it was incredibly difficult to have to any kind of political influence if you were somewhere else. In particular, all of the TV news came out of London and none of it cared about people outside London. So in that sense they probably were somewhat "saved" :-/
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-15 07:22 pm (UTC)I didn't find the film horribly insulting or patronizing to its Welsh characters, I've certainly seen a lot worse, but it was enough to make me feel slightly uncomfortable especially since it is such a common trope in a lot of media. What was really striking was reading up on the real events that inspired the film and finding that they'd kept most of the real history intact, but edited out the fact that it was originally the Dulais community who came up with the idea of partnering with other solidarity and activism groups, including LGSM. Also, there's someone I really want to discuss this film with who lives in Wales and is married to a Welsh guy and I'm kind of hesitating, can I really recommend the film or is it just going to be cringey?
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-15 08:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-18 07:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-18 09:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-26 12:11 pm (UTC)As far as I can gather from further reading last night, Gethin was (and is) a real person. He wasn't Jonathan's partner though, and apparently has teased Jonathan something rotten about the fact that they're portrayed as a couple in the film. ;-)