Despite its long association with the notion of cinematic realism from the early 1960s, This Sporting Life, as Barnaby Taylor argues, stands at the threshold between the British filmmakers’ faith in and scepticism about realism.[1] For Robin Cross, the film “was caught by the turn of the tide and left stranded like a beached whale on the sandbanks of fantasy which were to mark the changing mood in British society and cinema.”[2] In other words, these New Wave directors’ self-proclaimed representation of the working-class social reality in the industrial North at the time is, seen retrospectively, a fantasy that puts a deeper problem, personal or social, under erasure.
For Taylor, Anderson is less interested in social criticism than visualising the naivety of an individual’s ambition that is persistently confined, in every single frame of the film, by the social conditions and institutions around him. On the narrative level, Frank Machin (Harris), a miner who tries to break away from his immediate economic confines by securing a position in the City Rugby League team, finds himself limited by another set of confines. On the one hand, Machin is financially (and almost sexually) exploited by the club’s owner Gerald Weaver (Alan Badel, 1923-82), and his wife Anne (Vanda Godsell, 1922-90). On the other hand, the brute force that earns Machin success in football fails to earn him love and family with his landlady Margaret Hammonds (Rachel Roberts, 1953-80). Taylor argues that the film can be summarised by a single shot towards the end, in which Machin, having escaped from the confines of the decrepit boarding house he ends up staying, finds himself graphically limited by dark, cold, angular, and mechanical lines and shades of “nature,” and the inescapable gaze of the camera frame (figure 1).[3]
Figure 1.
If this shot is indeed the visual and semiotic motif par excellence, to what mise-en-abîme does the constellation of signs around it lead for us? As Cross suggests, we may produce a more productive reading of the film by not treating what surrounds Machin as “nature” or reality, but as a fantasy. Two-thirds of the film’s narrative is indeed organised into flashbacks, triggered by Machin’s inhaling nitrous oxide as a dentist tries to pull out six front teeth that were broken in a match. These flashbacks are therefore best understood as memories that his mind reactivated or reinvented in order to make sense of the traumatic pain he is experiencing, induced in a proto-narcotic state.[4] In other words, the film is about Machin’s attempt to locate a totalising myth that can somehow gives consistency to his trauma, but fails to do so.
This proto-narcotic state allows Machin to finally navigate these fantasies or events that he has so far refused to access. Throughout the film, Anderson represents Machin as an oversized bundle of physical nerves that lack any psychological dimension. For example, in Machin’s trial game, the film uses a series of jump cuts to concatenate corporeal impacts and dangers that Machin creates both for the opposing team and his own teammates. In fact, Machin earns himself a chance to occupy the striking position by first burying himself into a scrum, hits the striker of his own team from within, and blames it to a member from the opposing team. In the dressing room, we constantly see Machin swelling his already broad chest and asking his teammates how he looks. His oversized and well-coordinated body, however, is made clumsy by the low-ceilinged and claustrophobic house in which he lives with Hammonds, often shot with high-contrast lighting that shades whatever open space left by the clustering furniture. In the scene in which Machin coerces Hammonds to sleep with him, the camera “crouches” behind the bed, observing and magnifying from a low angle the irresistibly large body of Machin blocking and grabbing the physically and fragile body of Hammonds. By exposing the film for the interior while maintaining a high contrast ratio between the exterior and the interior, the overexposed window that opens to the external world is completely erased, making Machin’s body the only visual, and in fact sensual, dominant in the entire frame. In a repetition of this scene later on, Hammonds complains that Machin is “too big” and too “stupid.” Towards the end of the film, after Hammonds’s death, Machin punches a spider on the hospital wall, as though he could only organise the world he perceives by the physical memory of pain.
In his proto-narcotic state, however, Machin comes close to identifying a symbolic substitute for his traumatic pain: the pair of boots that belonged to the deceased Mr. Hammonds, carefully preserved and cared for by Rachel Hammonds by the fireplace, and is always isolated from the narrative continuity by close-ups. These close-ups are often followed by Machin’s sceptical, despicable, and frightened looks, as though the boots had been looking at him.[5] The threatening gaze of the boots is then tentatively disavowed after Machin and Hammonds have finally slept together and remained in good terms, as Machin discovers that Hammonds has secretly concealed those boots within a cabin. The narrative therefore seems to be organised around Machin’s attempt to substitute Hammonds’ dead husband and his failure to do so. This failure is confirmed powerfully in a bleak medium close-up of Hammonds in front of a graveyard of a church in which the wedding of Machin’s best friend Maurice Braithwaite (Colin Blakely, 1930-87) has just taken place. The telephoto lens flattens the tombstones and Hammonds’s face onto the same plane. In an equally flat manner, Hammonds tells Machin, “If you are with dirt, you are dirt. Everyone can see it.” The “dirt” here explicitly refers to Machin, who behaved “like a pig” in a high-class restaurant the evening before. Nonetheless, it can also be understood as a reference to Machin’s wish to become the dirt that covers her husband’s dead body, and that he shall remain as such without ever displacing the body.
Machin’s fantasised love for Hammonds is therefore a “classical” form of misrecognition. What does he try to disavow? One aspect of his life that he disavows has a classical Oedipal explanation. Upon meeting an old man Mr. Johnson (William Harnell, 1908-75), who agrees to give Machin a trial game and takes on a personal interest in Machin’s well being, Machin calls him “Dad.” This apparent Oedipal complex, however, is quickly denied by Machin, as Hammonds suggests that he treats Johnson as a father, a figure that seems to be missing from Machin’s life. Similarly, Machin never takes his manager (the British term for a head coach) Charles Slomer (Arthur Lowe, 1915-82) seriously as a caring father surrogate, even though Ann Weaver has once told Machin explicitly that it was Slomer who persuaded Gerald Weaver to sign Machin.
Nonetheless, the most striking scene, I argue, is a moment in a pub at which Machin holds the hands of his best friend Braithwaite tightly, and asks Braithwaite to convince him that he would never lose Hammonds, the only person who gives meaning to his life. At this moment, the film cuts to a close-up of Braithwaite and stays on his face for a long time, showing us the utterly embarrassed and shocked Braithwaite trying to look somewhere in order to escape the overwhelming gaze of the camera. What shocks and embarrasses Braithwaite is Machin’s unexpected need for same-sex intimacy, openly judged by the Gaze of the camera, unable to be sutured unless he is willing to return it (as a reverse shot). In fact, Machin’s latent homosexual desire has been manifested twice before in the film. First, in the dressing room, the camera observes Machin and Braithwaite, stark naked, wrestling in a bathing pool, technically rubbing their genitals together (the team’s masseur indeed calls them “fags”). Their homosexual pleasure, however, is concealed under the disguise of team celebration and machismo. Second, at the height of Machin’s season, in a pub, Machin walks up to Braithwaite and boxes with him playfully. At this point, Machin’s fiancée walks into the pub and tells Machin about her engagement with Braithwaite. The camera, lurking around a corner and observing carefully Machin’s face (albeit in a medium shot), captures a moment of disappointment. Machin then quickly hides his disappointment by giving the fiancée a kiss, an act that he repeats awkwardly after Braithwaite’s wedding.
This Sporting Life is therefore best understood as a queer text that is narrated under the confines of a heterosexual text, a structural tension that, one may argue, mirrors Anderson’s own sexual repression.[6] The narrative of an oversized bundle of nerves trying to make sense of his desire and death drive through the symbolic, and the social conditions that make such mediation impossible, are therefore a metaphor for the actual condition of a sexually repressed gay man of the time. Nevertheless, Anderson, who openly admires Harrison’s body, uses the camera as an observing eye to capture the actor’s need to come to terms with his latent desire for same-sex intimacy. In this sense, we may need to re-adjust our former reading of the camera as a gaze of judgment; rather, it is best comprehended as a tool for individual liberation. In this sense, in the emblematic shot that Taylor analyses (figure 1), the camera does not serve as the ultimate boundary that limits the vision of Machin; rather, Machin’s overdeveloped sentient body is always looking beyond the information that is capable of being mediated within the camera frame.
By erasing the queer text with a classical heterosexual text, This Sporting Life called for the end of an era for both cinema and football. What Anderson suggests is that cinematic realism, as believed by the Cashiers group (the dominant discourse of the time), mobilised simply as a hetero-normative device, is not real enough. Similarly, the football pitch, shaped and structured like a cinematic screen in order to satisfy the death drive of the self-proclaimed heterosexual males, will never stage a “real man-to-man” struggle until it reinvents itself to accommodate desire. In the final shot of the film, the camera, in one single take, observes Machin being hit by an opponent violently. The camera then tilts down in slow motion to show Machin panting on the ground. Machin then gets up in real time, and the camera stays on a low-angle medium shot until a spectator from behind him yells at him. The camera, in slow motion, then shows the haunting image of Machin turning his head towards the spectators in utter contempt (see the title figure). Returning to normal speed, the camera then shows Machin running away from it, and the camera pans right to show a long shot of the pitch. In the frame, Machin runs towards the rest of the team. The background of the shot uses the gloomy Victorian town as the backdrop, with two oversized nuclear reactors “inserted” in the middle (figure 2). Taylor argues that in this shot, the open field is delimited by the spectators on the one hand, and the wasteland on the other.[7] We may turn around this argument. The football field is supposed to be an organised space, a lawful opening between the disorganised and fragmented space of the city, and the spectators who behave like animals. The image of Machin marching towards an industrial wasteland signifies a call for cinema and football to be reinvented in order to confront a deeper, and possibly more disturbing, reality that we have yet to confront.
Figure 2.
From a sociological perspective, the haunting presence of the nuclear reactors as the visual dominant that haunts this Victorian town also signifies the incongruence between conflicting modes of economy. It is perhaps too easy to say that the conflict is one between Fordism and post-Fordism, for sociologists like David Landes and Martin Weiner argue that despite being the first European nation to be industrialised, “England” has never been fully industrialised, nor has it fully gone through Fordism and experienced the social transformations associated with it.[8] In this sense, Machin’s transition from the mine pit and the football pitch is best understood as a mere change of trade within the pre-Fordist mode of production.
Most important, throughout the film, Machin is unable to recognise his position in this structurally incongruent economy. For example, his insistence upon the club’s paying him Ł1,000 up front (a practice that foreshadows the post-Fordist football business today) without knowing why, and his use of this sum of money to purchase an oversized car (which, like his own body, looks ridiculously large in the provincial town) signify his sensitivity to, yet incomprehensibility of, an underlying economic change. In fact, the board room scene and the aftermath thematise this incongruence between pre-Fordism and post-Fordism. In the board room scene, although Machin is overjoyed after he has been told by the board of directors that he will be paid Ł1,000 up front, Weaver’s jocular mood and the relative ease of the decision-making process suggest that Machin could have asked for more. In fact, as he asks Johnson and Hammonds if they could guess how much he is worth, not only that the concept of estimating a footballer’s labour as a future commodity is alien to them, the incredible joy of Machin tells us that he still has no idea how his labour is being measured. Here, a misrecognition takes place. When Weaver drives Machin home, Weaver first explains to Machin that Mr. Hammonds died of an accident in Weaver’s mine, and Weaver denies compensation to Rachel Hammonds by considering the accident as a suicide. At this point, the film’s spectators are aware that Weaver’s company is evading their legal responsibility, although Machin takes Weaver’s words seriously and misconstrues that Rachel Hammonds must have known that her chronic depressive manner has driven her ex-husband to committing suicide. Machin’s incapability of comprehending his alienation is further enhanced when Weaver slaps his hand on Machin’s knee as a sexual innuendo. In other words, what Machin is worth as a future commodity is supposed to be measured not by his ability as a footballer, but by his sex appeal to the owner of the club (and his wife), a point that Machin will once again miss when he turns down Ann’s sexual offer.
In this sense, the social blockage that makes impossible the fulfilment of individual desire is Britain’s own “pre-modernity,” both economically and ideologically. What Anderson tries to suggest is not really the plight of industrialism and the psychological fragmentation that is associated with modernity; rather, the sense of psychological fragmentation and sexual repression have their roots in the spectators' very failure to recognise and articulate their pre-modernity and desire in the first place.
Notes
[1] Barnaby Taylor, The British New Wave: A Certain Tendency? (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006), 143-63.
[2] Robin Cross, The Big Book of British Films (Bideford: Charles Herridge Ltd., 1984), 152; qtd. in Taylor, 156.
[3] Taylor, 144-63.
[4] See Jean Laplanche, “Notes on Afterwardness,” in John Fletcher, ed., Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge, 1999), 260-65.
[5] See Slvoj Žižek, “In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large,” in Žižek, ed., Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (1992; London: Verso, 1997), 247-52.
[6] See, for example, Gavin Lambert, Mainly about Lindsay Anderson (New York: Knopf, 2000).
[7] For an analysis of this last shot, see, for example, Taylor, 156-60.
[8] David Landes, Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989); Martin Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981).
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