Council Estates and the Cosmos; or, When Fantasy Is Not Escapism

Long time between posts on this blog, but this one will be personally epic: despite my ancestral prejudices, I am actually going to give the British credit for something.

I saw Attack the Block tonight. In case you haven't heard about it, it's basically a British alien invasion movie. Despite the fact that there were dozens, maybe hundreds, of people listed in the end credits as helping to create the aliens, the aliens still looked relatively cheesy. They were essentially jet black dogs whose fangs glowed blue. The filmmakers wisely decided not to show the aliens too much and the film worked much better that way.

What's most interesting to me about the movie, though, is where I saw it: at the Quad Cinema in the Village, which is what we used to call an "arthouse." In the early 1980s, there were two prestige alien movies (Brother from Another Planet and Liquid Sky) but they were about aliens the way Gore Vidal's Visit to a Small Planet was about aliens, the way a utopian novel like A Visitor from Altruria is allegedly about another country. Attack the Block, though, is a popcorn movie, a grindhouse movie. In the old days, it would have been perfect in a drive-in. But in 2011 it's playing an art-house, in limited release. Why?

Well, for one thing, it's British, and therefore sorta kinda maybe foreign. More important, though, it is seen as having a certain amount of "social consciousness." It takes place in a council estate, the Brit equivalent of a housing project, and unemployment, street crime, police harrassment of minorities, even the use of marginally prepaid cellphones are featured in the plot. The British thing may be important--black horror movies from Blacula to Tales from the Hood have played the malls rather than arthouses--but I want to focus on the council estate setting, because I think it says something about British genre work in the twentyfirst century.

Knowledgeable genre fans will remember that the original Candyman starts in the infamous Cabrini Green projects in Chicago, but we enter that world through the eyes of privileged white anthropologist Virginia Madsden.  Attack the Block, on the other hand, completely adopts the point of view of those who live in the council estate, mostly black residents but a few white ones as well.  The police in this movie are outsiders and wholly unequipped to deal with the alien horde.  The climax of the movie in fact depends on a certain realization of analogous values systems between the aliens and the unemployed teenagers who live in the project.  The main teenager is even called Moses, and he is unabashedly shown trying to lead his fellow residents out of captivity and occupation.

As racist as American popular culture can sometimes be, it is far more likely to foreground issues of race that it is to foreground issues of class. See a housing project in an American film (e.g., Clockers) and you can be pretty sure that film will be received as a "social consciousness" film even if it is essentially a crime story.  By contrast, a popular British film like Attack the Block works very hard to show begrudging understanding among characters across the racial divide while insisting that those outside the estate will never understand those who are in it.

This reminds me of another council estate in twentyfirst century British popular culture: the Powell Estate in London, where Rose Tyler of Doctor Who lives.  Before Russell T. Davies rebooted Who in 2005, he was primarily known for social realism in tv, not genre work, and so it came as no surprise that Rose, the Doctor's companion for the first two new series, had a fully realized social life.  She worked in a shop, lived in cramped subsidized housing with her mother, and spoke in a more notably uneducated accent than virtually any of the Doctor's twentieth century companions.

Rose was also a teenage white girl with a black boyfriend, Mickey Smith. whose race drew almost no comment in reactions to the new series.  As in Attack the Block, class trumps race in terms of distinctions between characters.  Few viewers, especially in Britain, questioned that Rose and Mickey belonged together, precisely because they grew up in Powell Estates.  For Mickey, it is the Doctor's toff manners and flashy vehicle (the TARDIS being the blue intergalactic equivalent of a bright red Ferrari) that are more of a threat to his relationship with Rose than the paleness of the older gentlemen's skin.

Because of his open, proud homosexuality, Davies' Who has drawn negative comments from online Neanderthals who claim that his version of the series had a gay agenda (which it didn't), but it's surprising how little comment it drew for having an agrressively multiracial agenda (which it definitely did).  The casting throughout the series is far more racially colorblind than one would usually see on an equivalent US genre program, and when the Doctor travels with his next companion after Rose, Martha Jones, she is notably dark-skinned as well as upper-middle-class.  Martha is a medical student, not only older but much more thoroughly educated than Rose, and her parents are both professionals.  When she and the Doctor are forced to hide at a boys' school in 1913, however, the prejudice based on her visible race is an essential element of the story.

Think of equivalent American science fiction and fantasy series of the last two decades--Lost; Fringe, Buffy, XFiles, etc.--how often of them even deal with race, let alone class?  On a crime show like Homicide or Law and Order, even on a medical show like ER or Grey's Anatomy, class differences and racial differences may come up as a plot point, but not in fantasy and science fiction.  Although the best US fantasy shows reflect real-life emotional problems, they don't often take place in socially realistic worlds.  They're not even shot in as many culturally specific locations--Homicide needed to shoot in Baltimore regularly, ER in Chicago, but Fringe doesn't care if their Cambridge or New York actually looks like Cambridge or New York (except for the WTC reveal at the end of the series' first season).  Even when the BBC substitutes Welsh locations for English ones, it is amazing how lived-in those locations look.  No matter how intermittent the quality of Torchwood's first two seasons of episodes may have been, they all were shot on location and it showed.  The aliens might have been CGI, but the houses they invaded all verisimilarly in Cardiff.

I think this may also be one of the reasons why actors seem to move back and forth between scifi shows and "real-world" shows more easily in Britan than in the United States.  Dick Wolf's venerable Law & Order is currently in the midst of the fifth season of its British reinvention as Law & Order UK with scripts from the original US series, many of them decades old, rewritten to fit a twentieth-century British setting.  Of the casts' six main regular actors, two of them are best known for having done Doctor Who (Freema Agyeman, who played Martha Jones, and Peter Davison, who was the fifth tv incarnation of the Doctor) and a third was best known for having done the twentyfirstcentury reboot of Battlestar Gallactica (Jamie Bamber).  By contrast, the equivalent performers on the orignal US incarnation of the show Americans (Jill Hennessy, Sam Waterston, and Chris Noth) were all best known for playing "real-world" and/or prestige roles.

There are many good things about US genre tv--Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams definitely have votes of confidence in my book--but setting fantasy in the real world is not something American tv showrunners do well.  It breaks my Hibernian heart to say this, but in this specific case I am forced to admit that there is something that Brits do better.