Stained flesh – Ireland as idyll/damp patch in Mike Leigh's Naked

Abstract

This article reflects on a number of enigmatic allusions to Ireland that surface in Mike Leigh's 1993 film Naked. The essay explores these allusions in terms of Ireland's cinematic positioning as a shorthand for ‘home’ and an idyllic retreat from modernity. Thereafter, it ventures a more speculative thesis that, in fact, the film's cryptic ‘Irish’ signifiers can be understood as emblematic of a postcolonial unconscious at work in contemporary Britain. The discussion draws on existing Leigh scholarship and contemporary postcolonial theory.

Keywords:

• Mike Leigh
• Naked
• Irishness
• postcolonial unconscious
• hybridity

Notes

 1. Stuart Jeffries, ‘I Got Dangerously Close to Johnny’, The Guardian, 15 August 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/aug/15/mikeleigh (accessed 10 September 2009).

 2. Carney, The Films of Mike Leigh, 16.

 3. Quoted on the set of Untitled ’95 – later to become Secrets & Lies – in Coveney, The World According to Mike Leigh, 3–4.

 4. Coveney, The World According to Mike Leigh, 20.

 5. Dargis, ‘Johnny in the City’, 55.

 6. Bohler's concept of the telotype is discussed in Vincendeau, Jean-Pierre Melville, 185.

 7. Indeed, it's worth noting that all of the characters in Naked carry on their person some sort of charm, whether it be a material item, such as Maggie's dishevelled toy troll, or an emblem inscribed on their flesh, such as Sophie's swallow tattoo.

 8. Carney, The Films of Mike Leigh, 16.

 9. A reading that would put Johnny in the centre of an Oedipal matrix, in which the weathered woman is his symbolic ‘mother’ and Brian the security guard his symbolic ‘father’ is certainly available. In addition to comparing the woman to his mother, Johnny earlier in the film has warned Brian to ‘back off, dad’.

10. See Gibbons, ‘John Hinde and the New Nostalgia’, in Transformations, 37–43.

11. Gibbons, The Quiet Man, 1.

12. Rains, ‘Home from Home’, 196.

13. Barton, Irish National Cinema, 6.

14. As my emphasis will be on Johnny's possible Irish ancestry, the term ‘post-imperial unconscious’ may be deemed by some more appropriate than ‘postcolonial’. There has been debate about Ireland's status within the bounds of postcolonial theory. Significantly, Ireland's status as a British colony was brought into question in The Empire Writes Back, one of the more influential texts in postcolonial theory. However, Luke Gibbons has engaged with, and satisfactorily punctured, I believe, this distinction between Ireland and those British colonies further afield. See ‘Unapproved Roads’, in Transformations, 171–80.

15. Moorjani, ‘The Postcolonial Unconscious’.

16. MacCannell, ‘The Postcolonial Unconscious, or The White Man's Thing’.

17. Moorjani, ‘The Postcolonial Unconscious’, 19.

18. Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland, 136.

19. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 220.

20. I believe the appropriate expression is ‘Blink and you'll miss them’.

21. Moorjani, ‘The Postcolonial Unconscious’, 20–1.

22. Greenslade, ‘The Black Bird Calls in Grief’, 38.

23. Ibid., 49.

24. In this regard it is interesting, and perhaps somewhat revealing of Leigh's thought processes on this matter, that Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) features a melancholy cameo from a homeless and apparently mentally unstable Irishman (Stanley Townsend). Similarly, Topsy-Turvy (1999) features a cameo by Brid Brennan as a mad Irishwoman who also abides on London’s dark streets. I am grateful to Tony Murray for calling the scene in Happy-Go-Lucky to my attention. See also Bronwen Walter in this special issue.

25. In fact, during the commentary Leigh underplays their significance. Of the conspicuous non sequitur of the Irish map, for instance, he says:

Why is there a map of Ireland on the wall? Well, in creating this location with Alison Chitty, we sort of talked about what could be there, and I, having an interest – as we all do – in Irish politics, I said ‘Well maybe there's been a couple of guys in there operating.’ That's to say members of the IRA … So that's how the map of Ireland has been left on the wall. It's a kind of implicit idea. It's not to be taken too seriously but these kind of things are part of the texture of everyday life.

In spite of Leigh's instruction that it shouldn't be taken too seriously, I would only emphasise that his back-story for the map only explains how it got on the wall – it doesn't account for its possible resonances within a film in which visual emblems of Ireland so curiously circulate.

26. As with the Irish map and Brian's photograph, the resonances between these two books also uniquely twin or pair them.

27. Said, ‘Jane Austen and Empire’. Said reflects on the peripheral references in Mansfield Park to Sir Thomas's sugar plantations in Antigua, references to a colonial reality that is disavowed and silenced within Austen's narration, however. Hence, the momentary irruption of the slave trade into the novel's register is foreclosed by a subsequent irruption of ‘dead silence’. Says Said: ‘[O]ne world could not be connected with the other since there simply is no common language for both’ (96).

28. Ibid., 84.

29. Southam, ‘Jane Austen's Englishness’.

30. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’.

31. Ibid., 113.

32. The titular protagonist of Emma is a naïve and self-deluded ‘match-maker’.

33. Watson, The Cinema of Mike Leigh, 110.