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After years of searching and frustration, I finally watched this film last night (through the good graces of my local public library, whose buyers continually astonish and delight me with their catholic and unfailing tastes).
Many, many thanks to all who have written such terrific, insightful comments in this thread. So right. Such a sad movie—not really a comedy at all, but a melancholy meditation with hyperverbal tics.
That said, I find myself in the not-unusual position of somewhat disagreeing with a Flyboy critique: what’s unusual is that I’m kinda coming in from Flyboy’s left.
[W]hat I really get from the film these days is the terrifying spectre of what we might call Thatcherism for want of a better word... An ideology that basically says there is no place in the kind of England we want for weirdo misfits like Withnail or Monty or Marwood-pre-haircut. They are not useful. They do not contribute to society.
See, I didn’t see it that way. Monty and Withnail are not, I think, crumbling due to outside pressure—they are rotting from within. And Marwood’s careerism is, I think, not so much bowing to societal demands as it is a step towards personal fulfillment—as GGM suggests, Marwood is simply growing up.
And he's reaching for sanity, surely. Marwood is a crockpot of neuroses throughout the film, and much of that, I think, has to do with his enforced idleness. Marwood really wants to work—at least, he wants to do something. Both Withnail and Marwood are in a downward spiral—but only Marwood is willing or able to try to take action to escape, to save himself—however flailing and ill-advised that action is. It’s his idea initially to take a holiday, and he actually says something along the lines of “I’ve got to get out of here (London) before I crack up.”
So I really don’t think it’s got as much to do with “the kind of England we want” as with the kind of person Marwood wants to be. In the last scenes, post-haircut, Marwood’s whole body language has changed. He doesn’t strut, but he’s more confident and relaxed—The Fear is no longer with him. By taking action, he has done more than just beconme a "useful member of society": he has saved himself—saved his sanity, maybe even his life (esp. in light of the unused ending & Withnail's suicide).
I guess it comes down to how one feels about work and its rewards. Doing The Work can be its own reward. I think that's how it is for Marwood. He's grateful just to have something to do.
The irony, of course, is that Withnail as much as Marwood yearns for purpose—at least for fame and power—but lacks the inner resources to break out of his rut. “At least you’re getting auditions,” he grumbles to Marwood—but later on we hear Withnail on the phone to his agent, actually turning down auditions. The pity of Withnail is that he is so terribly, wilfully passive: he would rather think of himself as an undiscovered genius than actually take action to get himself discovered.
And this is where things get interesting, politically. Because there’s an obvious class parable going on here, isn’t there? Marwood, his jumper and flat cap the signifiers of his origins, reveals in the end the working-class virtues of self-reliance a willingness to take life as it is.
The two Withnails, on the other hand, are another story. There’s obviously money in the family—or perhaps only in Monty’s, although I could not shake the feeling that the younger Withnail came from wealth as well. (There’s not a shred of real textual evidence to support that, of course—Withnail is ostentatiously unwilling to discuss or contact his parents; but that very unwillingness made me wonder if his squalid life was an extended bout of slumming, of wanting to live like the Common People.)
Paralyzed by a sense of entitlement, capable of communicating only in tones of condescension or contempt, Edwardian finery fraying at the edges—the Withnails are codified as aristocrats, the decadent leisure class bringing about their own ruin by their own weakness and lassitude. It’s not just that the younger Withnail is unsuited to the demands of looking after himself, it’s that he’s so unwilling to try—Marwood is equally useless at country living, but at least he’s out there giving it a shot, while Withnail whimpers in the background, undone by his expectations of being treated in a manner appropriate to his station (his cries of "How dare you?" are quite telling, I think), shocked, shocked by the beastly injustice of a world that does not recognize his greatness.
Withnail is less Bartleby than Oblomov, lost in reveries of fame and power (to make them all pay for treating him so shabbily, as he screams from the hillside—see also “I am buying this establishment and firing you”), constantly blaming others for the consequences of his own fecklessness, cursing the darkness (loudly, and in colorful language) rather than break a sweat lighting a candle.
Monty, while more sympathetic and better able to relate to others (probably because his outsider status has forced upon him a greater degree of self-awareness), shares his nephew’s failings—blaming his failure as an actor on his old agent (with offhanded anti-Semitism); I half-expected from him Norma Desmond’s line “I am big—it’s the pictures that got small”—even his pursuit of Marwood can be read as the expectation of droit de seigneur.
The Withnails are underdogs now, but were top dogs historically. Yes, Society is transforming around them; but if their vestiges of privilege are the first to crumble in a slow march towards meritocracy, how much sympathy can we really have? In the final analysis, if Society will no longer provide support or justification for parasitic posho fucks who feel that the world owes them a living, isn’t that, well, a good thing, politically? Is this the Flyboy of my youth? |
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