Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Contributors
- 1 Introduction: Shane's World
- 2 Structure and Agency: Shane Meadows and the New Regional Production Sectors
- 3 Twenty-first-Century Social Realism: Shane Meadows and New British Realism
- 4 ‘Al fresco? That's up yer anus, innit?’ Shane Meadows and the Politics of Abjection
- 5 No More Heroes: The Politics of Marginality and Disenchantment in TwentyFourSeven and This is England
- 6 ‘Now I'm the monster’: Remembering, Repeating and Working Through in Dead Man's Shoes and TwentyFourSeven
- 7 ‘An object of indecipherable bastardry – a true monster’: Homosociality, Homoeroticism and Generic Hybridity in Dead Man's Shoes
- 8 A Message to You, Maggie: 1980s Skinhead Subculture and Music in This is England
- 9 Changing Spaces of ‘Englishness’: Psychogeography and Spatial Practices in This is England and Somers Town
- 10 ‘Shane, don't film this bit’: Comedy and Performance in Le Donk and Scor-zay-zee
- 11 ‘Them over there’: Motherhood and Marginality in Shane Meadows' Films
- 12 ‘What do you think makes a bad dad?’ Shane Meadows and Fatherhood
- 13 Is This England '86 and '88? Memory, Haunting and Return through Television Seriality
- 14 After Laughter Comes Tears: Passion and Redemption in This is England '88
- Index
12 - ‘What do you think makes a bad dad?’ Shane Meadows and Fatherhood
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Contributors
- 1 Introduction: Shane's World
- 2 Structure and Agency: Shane Meadows and the New Regional Production Sectors
- 3 Twenty-first-Century Social Realism: Shane Meadows and New British Realism
- 4 ‘Al fresco? That's up yer anus, innit?’ Shane Meadows and the Politics of Abjection
- 5 No More Heroes: The Politics of Marginality and Disenchantment in TwentyFourSeven and This is England
- 6 ‘Now I'm the monster’: Remembering, Repeating and Working Through in Dead Man's Shoes and TwentyFourSeven
- 7 ‘An object of indecipherable bastardry – a true monster’: Homosociality, Homoeroticism and Generic Hybridity in Dead Man's Shoes
- 8 A Message to You, Maggie: 1980s Skinhead Subculture and Music in This is England
- 9 Changing Spaces of ‘Englishness’: Psychogeography and Spatial Practices in This is England and Somers Town
- 10 ‘Shane, don't film this bit’: Comedy and Performance in Le Donk and Scor-zay-zee
- 11 ‘Them over there’: Motherhood and Marginality in Shane Meadows' Films
- 12 ‘What do you think makes a bad dad?’ Shane Meadows and Fatherhood
- 13 Is This England '86 and '88? Memory, Haunting and Return through Television Seriality
- 14 After Laughter Comes Tears: Passion and Redemption in This is England '88
- Index
Summary
The term ‘father’ can signify many things.
Stella Bruzzi (2006: vii)Like its predecessors in Meadows' hugely popular film and television cycle, This is England '88 (2011) begins with a poignantly hauntological montage of archival news footage from the 1980s. Evocatively fuzzy, the sweepingly impressionistic series of analogue video images reaffirms Meadows' insistence on understanding the 1980s as a kind of national primal scene: a traumatic era in which social and political upheaval becomes irrevocably entangled with popular and personal memory. This expressionist strategy is exemplified by what are perhaps the most disturbing moments in Meadows' career to date. The protracted sequence featuring Lol's hospitalisation following a suicide attempt powerfully conflates personal biography, subjective trauma and prosthetic memory. Overlaid with an undulating sound mix of prayer, Catholic incantation and the voice of her dead father, Meadows splices together a highly condensed affective bricolage: religious iconography is interspersed with joyless sexual coupling; Lol's aborted marriage to Woody appears next to horrific footage of children cowering behind gravestones during the Loyalist massacre at Milltown Cemetery; grotesque close-ups of a leering Combo sit uneasily alongside blurry shots of emaciated African children. The emergency purging of Lol's stomach is conflated with the violently incoherent regurgitation of her fractured selfhood, the sacred and profane overlapping in an emotionally affective and necessarily over-determined melange of love, rape, guilt, spirituality, post-colonial fallout, murder, procreation and humanitarian catastrophe.
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- Shane MeadowsCritical Essays, pp. 171 - 185Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013