Pride v. Billy Elliot--humanizing v. stereotyping

Pride and Billy Elliot: contrasting depictions of striking miners contending with queerness and solidarity. Plus: What I'm Writing

Same strike, contrasting portrayals

Pride, 2014, dir. Matthew Warchus, photo from: RogerEbert.com

Unions and strikes do not often appear in mainstream cinema, so as a student of fiction featuring activists and social movements I pay attention when they do. Both Billy Elliot and Pride are set during the pivotal 1984-5 Miners’ Union strike in northern England, where miners struggled for over a year against the implacable Thatcher government to win better working conditions.

What particularly interests me about these films is that both present up-close views of workers living through the same prolonged strike. As I do with all fiction that centers activism and social movements, I focused on how fully and fairly these are portrayed. Are the strikers and organizers shown as multidimensional humans rather than stereotypes? Do these stories increase our understanding and connection to the reality of a union on strike?

In Billy Elliot (2000, Stephen Daldry), eleven-year-old Billy faces disbelief and disdain when his father and brother, both striking miners, discover he’s been learning ballet and wants to be a dancer. The story follows Billy’s father’s transformation as he grows to accept his son’s unexpected talent and struggles to raise tuition money, despite being on strike, to send him to an elite ballet academy.

In Pride (2014, Matthew Warchus), a group calling itself Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) offers support to the striking miners, seeing them as comrades in suffering and struggle. They discover that the miners’ prejudices and their own false assumptions make cooperation a challenge. The movie follows their poignant and often hilarious encounters as the two groups explore the complexities of solidarity.

In both films, striking miners are central characters who battle class and gender-based oppression as well as their own prejudices.

So far, so good. But what impact does each movie have on viewers’ feelings about the workers and the strike?

Billy Elliot and the striking Miners—original art by Sophie Barnet-Higgins

Billy Elliot: Soaring Dancer, Sinking Union

Young Billy Elliot hates his boxing lessons. He’s fascinated by the ballet class that practices next to the local boxing ring (we’re told the strikers’ soup kitchen displaced the dancers from their usual classroom.) Deceiving his father and brother, Billy cuts boxing and attends ballet with the tutu-wearing girls, becoming the ballet teacher’s star pupil.

The father and brother discover Billy’s secret and pour contempt on him for being a “sissy”--until they see him dance. After they are won over, the story centers on whether Billy will get into a famous London ballet school, and whether the father can afford the tuition.

The movie gives a balanced, sympathetic portrayal of the class tensions that arise between the father (whose poverty we are given to understand is due to the strike) and the middle class teacher who wants to support Billy’s gift. It adeptly shows Billy wrestling with gender pigeonholes, expressing his conflicted emotions about his relationships with his gay best friend and the ballet teacher's sexually precocious daughter through his spectacular dancing.

Billy Elliot, 2000, Stephen Daldry, dir. Photo: Jane Austen Book Club

Yet the film squanders its opportunity to humanize a household on strike with the same empathy and gentle humor it bestows on the characters’ efforts to come to terms with Billy’s ballet. Instead, it retreats into stereotypes and othering, depicting the economic hardships of the strike and the bitter strife between strikers and “scabs” in alienating ways that fail to illuminate the conflict, let alone show the incredible heroism of the miners and their families.

Even though the father is a striking miner and Billy’s older brother is a strike leader, we glimpse nothing of the energy, intelligence, and creativity needed to organize and sustain an embattled industry-wide strike. We spend the entire film with these folks, at what turns out to be a crucial moment in their strike, yet we never see the characters engage in ordinary cooperative tasks of organizing, nor in the camaraderie they would certainly show each other much of the time.

Other than a few seconds overheard on somebody’s radio, we viewers get no information about how the Thatcher government and the mining companies constantly attacked the miners and their union, and we don’t hear the workers discuss it. The only clashes we see are miners battling police (with clubbing, arrests, and a very long chase scene) and miners yelling, snarling, and throwing things at strikebreakers. We learn virtually no information or background. Ironically, the only substantive dialog about the strike’s merits is the negative commentary of the ballet teacher’s conservative husband.

Police and miners clash, with Billy Elliot’s father in front

If the film had allowed the workers to clearly express their demands, as they would on any picket line, we could have learned what motivated them. But they don’t even carry signs (unlike in my daughter’s drawing above). We only hear them monotonously shouting, “Scab! Scab! Scab!”, an epithet many viewers may not even understand, given how little young people are taught about labor struggles, and how infrequently these appear in popular media. 

Not to mention the puzzlement we feel at seeing the strikers throw eggs at the strikebreakers’ bus rather than feed them to their hungry children.

At the movie’s end, Billy triumphs as a lead dancer, while the union ignominiously “caves” and is heard from no more.

Pride and the Union

This 2014 film takes a different approach. A group of LGBTQ+ Londoners discuss the miners’ strike and note how they are linked by shared experience of persecution. After the group’s little storefront headquarters is attacked early in the film, they organize—with some internal dissent—Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM). The project raises money for the strikers, and eventually makes a journey to the North of England to personally hand the funds to the miners.

In contrast to their negativity and inarticulateness in Billy Elliot, the miners and their families in Pride are vivid, intelligent, sympathetic characters with whom we readily identify.

The story gives a closeup of interpersonal, organizational and family struggles among the miners as they confront the hardships of the strike—but unlike Billy Elliot, Pride does not blame or treat the strike and the union as alien forces.

In Pride we witness conversations and arguments that illuminate the political and social issues the characters are facing. We follow the arc of the encounters between LGSM and the miners as it progresses from bewilderment and rejection to friendship and solidarity, in engaging, often amusing scenes in the miners’ homes and union hall. We see the miners’ views transform when they return the LGSM folks’ visit and glimpse London nightlife, culminating in a drag show fundraiser for the strike, where strike leader Dai steps onstage to raucous acclaim from the Queer community.

Pride illustrates joys and challenges of building solidarity, and how this process changes people in both groups in ways that go beyond the strike itself.

The actual LSGM (Photo from high570.blogspot.com)

Fairly Depicting Unions in Fiction

Granted, the themes of the two movies are different: Billy Elliot is about the power of art to overcome preconceptions and stereotypes, with the strike in the background. Nor is Pride  exactly ‘about’ the strike, but about how two distinct subcultures overcome deep mistrust to find common ground, support one another’s struggles, and form genuine human connections.

The more individualistic focus of Billy Elliot is not why I think this movie presents a regrettable picture of the workers’ movement. After all, fiction illuminates social issues precisely because it shows them up close, through the struggles of individuals.

The problem is that the union is portrayed as a remote entity, and even though the strike is the setting for much of the film, we learn virtually nothing about its workings, demands, accomplishments, or progress, much less what it feels like to be part of one–because the workers appear to consider it a separate force (exactly what bosses want workers to feel about unions, in fact.) Nor do we learn about the solidarity that linked the strikers from all over England, as well as other supporting groups, including the LGBTQ+ groups that inspired the story of Pride.

Subtle emphasis and de-emphasis matter. In Billy Elliot, collective support among the miners, like the soup kitchen set up in the ballet classroom that precipitates Billy’s story, is all off-screen, mentioned only in passing. We even learn—if we’re paying close attention—that the union took up a collection to contribute to Billy’s ballet school tuition. Yet we viewers are denied even the briefest on-screen glimpse of this generous gesture, which could have somewhat counterbalanced the scenes of workers yelling at each other, and would have showed us how not only the father and brother but the union itself experienced transformation by overcoming macho prejudices.

Moreover, unlike Pride, where the union women are as key as the men, in Billy Elliot the women of the strike are simply not present. [For an excellent view of the real role of women in that strike, see Women in the Miners’ Strike, 1985-5.]

From “Women in the Miners’ Strike” 1984-5

Anti-union details sneak past our awareness

Billy Elliot is a heartwarming family/dance film with a positive, progressive message concerning gender norms and the importance of allowing young people to express themselves creatively.

At the same time, many details, impressions, characterizations, even the bleak color palette and other cinematographic choices, present the union and the strike in a negative light.

I feel that subtle impressions can be more harmful than an overt anti-union message, because devices like those mentioned above play on our ingrained, unconscious stereotypes. The manipulative union; the loutish, inarticulate workers; the strike sowing dissension and causing hardship, are tropes that affect us without our notice. Most likely, the filmmakers weren’t aware they were weaving unexamined prejudices into the story—but that does not excuse them.

Pride is not without flaws in terms of activist representation—the LGSM members are all White, for instance, and the fact that their leader was in real life a socialist is absent in this story, as are other interesting details you can find in this review. And while the striking miners are shown in a much more nuanced and humanizing way than in Billy Elliot, we still don’t learn very much about the strike or its context. I know, a movie is not a history lesson, but a little more info could have been integrated very naturally into a couple of conversations in Pride, as it certainly could have in Billy Elliot.

Overall, however, Pride gives a much fairer view of this epic struggle, ending not with the union’s defeat but with a major London demonstration, with the miners and LGSM marching together amid thousands, leaving us with an uplifting image that reinforces its thoughtful exploration of the complexities and the beauty of solidarity.

And?

So why does this matter?

I plan to write more on the importance of full and fair portrayals of activists in films, novels and other fiction forms. And the importance of calling attention to dismissive and stereotyped depictions. For now, check out my interview with Ellen Bravo, co-author of a novel about a pair of organizers, Standing Up, where I list a number of reasons this topic matters.

We need more awareness of how by erasing and stereotyping activists in fiction the dominant culture messes with our minds and manipulates us into forgetting, fearing, and otherwise being negatively disposed to what is, coincidentally, the ruling class’s biggest nemesis: working class organizing.

Thanks for reading! I look forward to your views. If you know of other movies, novels or other works of fiction about workers, strikes, and connections between Queer and worker organizing, please suggest them in the comments! Whether they are fair portrayals or fall into stereotypes (or both) I’d love to hear about them.

And now, an update:

Dear friends:

Occasionally I need to remind myself why I write this newsletter, so here goes: I am chronicling my quest to understand activist culture, exploring twists, turns, and tunnels; delights, dilemmas, and dangers of activist life in the struggle for justice, peace and planetary survival.

We don’t suddenly discover understanding under a rock; we construct it gradually by thinking together. This newsletter is my participation in that process—I’m glad you are in it with me!

My current areas of exploration:

• Being a globalist Jew. I have been reflecting on the complexities and confusions of being a US-born and based Jew during the US-backed Israeli onslaught on Gaza.

  I will be writing more about that, including organizing locally with family and neighbors for a just peace. I plan to write further on the realities, responsibilities, and rage of being a denizen of the most deadly empire in history, aspiring to live by the principle that humans are each truly unique and truly equal.

• Life in the Liberated Zone. I am fascinated by communities that arise in the midst of social and political struggle. These “liberated zones’ are spaces people carve out to structure and sustain their movements, and where necessity and principles combine to engender new ways of living together.

  For instance, the student encampments at universities in the last few months, which, to my delight, were called “Liberated Zones.” As with other liberated zones, including Standing Rock and others, I visited and spoke with students at some of these spaces, learning how they immediately created alternative structures to sustain themselves and their movement in the few scant weeks before repression shut them down…for now.

• Activism and Human Nature. Why do we act/react in certain ways? I am exploring how better understanding our nature can help us become more conscious of our collective power and be more alert to how we are manipulated by those who want to keep us from doing so.

• Fiction featuring activists. We activists are stuck living in the belly of the beast—the system of domination and greed—that we’re working to transform. We are engulfed in this system’s overpowering narrative—the stories it feeds us to make us go along with its absurd cruelty.

  What stories does it tell about activists? To what extent do we internalize and believe them? How can we counter them with better stories? These are some of the questions I ask in my writing of, and about, fiction featuring activists or FFA.

  My FFA writing is chiefly my novel Rainwood House Sings, which I am serializing here in this publication, and subsequent movement mysteries. My writing about FFA includes articles like Where Are the Social Movements in Fiction? and movie and novel reviews in the Fiction Featuring Activists section of this newsletter.

  The FFA review about Billy Elliot and Pride is a revised version of one published a year ago. I am sharing it with you again in recognition that June is Pride month and May is International Workers’ month.