The Scene
Mike Leigh, Mike Watt, Postgrad Plans
Nicola whines. It’s a piercing whine, somewhere between an adolescent shriek meant to trigger a parent’s biological response and the cutting rasp of a furious hipster. It’s a whine only Mike Leigh could conjure, and in his 1990 ode to English dreams and suburban happiness Life is Sweet, that’s exactly what he does. Leigh’s characters are always imbued with an electric naturalism that propels what seem like regular tasks and events. A man buys a dilapidated snack cart, a woman is getting her driver’s license, and it is in these simple moments that, just as in life, brilliantly slight stories, humor, and tragedies emerge.
Played by Jane Horrocks, Nicola dons oversized shirts emblazoned with political slogans and Smiths’ albums. In conversation, she has a tendency for name-calling, describing family, friends, and lovers as “fascists“, “sexists“, and “capitalists”. When challenged to expand and articulate these criticisms she cannot. Nicola is unemployed and living in her parent’s house, her bulimia is relapsing, and she can’t seem to help but denigrate the man she sleeps with. Nicola is loved dearly by her family, yet they are frustrated with her obstinance and inability to ask for help.
Draped in the trappings of an alternative 90s music scene and its political underpinnings, Nicola reveals a slight culturally critical bite to Life is Sweet. Leigh’s depiction of a young adult surrounded by the oxymoronic politics of the Smiths and the dregs of a once-thriving English punk scene using that cultural backdrop to frame pointless and empty contrarianism reads as a strikingly modern opinion of the young. It’s a 90s era critique that reads as all too familiar. Nicola is a more articulated, less stereotyped version of Todd Field’s vision of a “BIPOC pangender person“ who refuses to play Bach due to his “misogynistic lifestyle” in Tár. These characters are painted as rejecting for the sake of empty rejection and supporting themselves with a culture of rejection just as empty. Tár is clear about its contrarian serving as a piece of Lydia Tár’s heightened perspective of disdain, but Nicola seems all too human - her contrarianism is constructed from a deep self-hatred.
In both cases, the attention toward dominant culture and ways culture codifies ways of rebellion is bleak. Nicola’s mother Wendy (Alison Steadman) believes that the issue isn’t simply that Nicola’s politics extends to name-calling and an inability to hold a conversation, but that she does not engage in any political follow-through of her beliefs. Nicola doesn’t care about anything - her language of subcultural revolt is solely a defensive and antagonistic tactic.
Cultures of earnestness are few and far between. The artists Nicola engages with revel in empty irony and vacant pessimism. Leigh depicts a culture that can be used just as effectively for politics as for nihilistic spiraling and a false sense of purpose. Isn’t there anything more than this kind of empty posturing?
Perhaps New York City No Wave cinema is the wrong direction for an answer, but Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens is certainly a relative of Leigh’s cultural criticism, and far more direct in its relation to art and culture. The 1982 film shows New Jersey transplant Wren, a thief, self-promoter, chaser of rockstars, and leech to friends and institutions alike navigate the 80’s punk scene. Wren breaks the heart of Paul, a Montanna transplant in a graffitied van in favor of a criminal punk (Richard Hell).
Aside from a clear aesthetic influence the film had on no-wave cinema, Smithereens reflects an artistic, aesthetic, and cultural sensibility highly specific to New York City. Smithereens’ characters become closer to types operating in an aestheticized space, the work referencing and reconfiguring its own site of creation. The earnest transplant, deeply in love and helplessly exploited must leave the city/scene, the aging rockstar has his eyes on Los Angeles and a commercialized industry, and the transplant-poseur is defined by parasitism and narcissism. These characters become “the scene“, and its critique is an effective character study and a cultural criticism of an arts scene that has been vacated of care.
Smithereens leaves one with a similar sense of cultural ennui as Life is Sweet, that there is some failure of culture to adequately unite and define us. Culture is being used to repress us, or for a twisted clout, until as Smithereens shows us, culture becomes defined by the search for twisted clout. The added complexity and cruelty of Smithereens’ cultural critique is how specific and locational it is. It illustrates the naturalism of its flawed nature as inescapably real.
A root of both the indie British scene and New York City’s no-wave scene is the punk scene in the mid to late 70s. Here was a moment more raw in its experimentation, less commercially exploitable (yet) in its violence and spite, and less definable to be emulated. Hearing the voices from this generation is so invigorating because it rejects any sense of these scenes as they became, and because they so strongly reject the rewritings and reconfigurations of what exactly created their difference.
I recently listened to an episode of the 33 ⅓rd Podcast (an amazing series where legendary hip-hop producer Prince Paul interviews guests with insight on famous albums) featuring Mike Watt of the Minutemen discussing The Ramones. The 33 ⅓rd book on the album must define punk, the influence and interplay of the CBGBs New York Punk scene, and how the Ramones functioned in that scene. This creates a set of binaries: punk and not punk, studied and raw, existing and invented. Watt is a repository of insight and opinionated snarls, and he focuses intently on rebuking these academicized rewriting of The Ramones, of punk, and of subcultural analysis.
Watt’s vision of punk was in reaction to the “nuremburg rally“ world of arena rock, a return to the club, to the insular band, to the playable and reproducible. Watt’s vision of the Ramones’ meticulous first album was as a rallying cry for a club and band focussed movement centered on personal sound. This was not an articulatable sentiment - Watt decries labels like “New Wave“ and “mosh pit“ instituted from outside the scene to define it. This appropriation, and definition from outside sources seems inevitable to Watt. One of his most compelling statements is in mentioning that many punk bands’ first album was their best because it came from club sets, while their following albums suffered by being crafted in the studio.
Punk is a genre that rejects palatability in the traditional sense. Its aims are political, experimental, or performatively nonexistent (a punk would probably hate this sentence). Watt illustrtates a scene that was encouraging its own chaotic growth into new subjects and sounds, new movements and scenes. Watt also describes a culture which seeks definition and distillation, and it is these distilled and vacated scenes reproduced and critiqued in Smithereens and Life is Sweet.
If Nicola’s posters and shirts were a flattening and a twisting of cultural symbols, the Internet has created a whole new medium for distilling and generalizing art. Its corners and hubs of unique creation are and experimentation are niche, and have evolved not to rely on the physical. The politics of space have begun to disrupt the earlier systems for building these lasting subcultural communities and “scenes“. Gentrification relies on a similarizing of space, and globalization shrinks the gap between aesthetic and perspective. The locale of the internet has changed what an arts scene can be in the real world, and what its necessity and immediacy looks like.
I watched these films and heard this interview in the week after graduating college. I came back home, started sleeping again, and meticulously considered the right words to describe what was “next“. The answer was resplete with cities new and old, each with different promises and suggestions. They are “scenes“ to be sorted. With New York City standing as my natural next step, it’s hard to consider any fantasy of infamous New York subculture without the harsh reality of gentrification. Watt’s statement about institutional labelling of the subcultural as a means of control makes me curious at the different ways neighborhoods and city scenes are depicted as desirable. What does it mean to see a publication decide a neighborhood is the “coolest“ in a given city? What does that kind of label say about accepted and unaccepted practices and productions?
Luckily I have time to process my impending move, but I remain curious and skeptical of the delineation of scenes and neighborhoods, ambivalent of the Smithereens stereotypes etched on Twitter and in Tár, and resolute that any politics imbued in the location-specific production of art has irrevocably changed. Politics, art, and space are not unbound, but they are certainly not bound by the “scene“ anymore.