My Beautiful Laundrette
(1985) seems as good a place as any
to begin to feel out the field of Cultural Studies and my developing attitudes
toward it. Stuart Hall famously celebrated the film for “its refusal to
represent the black experience in Britain as monolithic, self-contained,
sexually stabilized and always ‘right-on’ – in a word always and only ‘positive.”
(see link). He’s right, of course, that
Frears’ film doesn’t represent stable identity categories (indeed, the film, to
me, begins to feel downright schematic in its determined efforts to ensure that
every character gets seen in multiple lights). Still, one of the questions that we
must ask ourselves in this class is whether or not this arrival at positive, or
even complex, forms of representation can be viewed as a positive endpoint in
its own right.
Adorno, so remarkably pessimistic in his assessment of mass
culture (or culture industries, as he carefully terms them), emphasizes the
complicity between culture and commodification. He writes that the “culture
industry misuses its concern for the masses in order to duplicate, reinforce
and strengthen their mentality, which it presumes is given and unchangeable”
(104). Emphasizing distribution processes, Adorno demands that we think more
deeply about films as objects of exchange rather than merely assess what we see on screen. By this
logic, it becomes important to understand that My Beautiful Laundrette was a film commissioned for Britain’s
Channel 4. Adorno reminds us that the
film’s progressive message, whatever cultural work it might perform, also ultimately
and primarily serves to foster the further consumption of media (doing so by
providing viewers with a sense of edification and by promoting the Channel 4
brand). Positive identity politics in media are invariably akin to a marketing
gimmick, he latently argues. Bérubé makes a similar accusation, stating that
the field has lost sight of these complex systems of capital when he writes
that “cultural studies had gotten distracted by postmodernism and identity
politics and had lost sight of the simple truth that the free market is a sham
and that people are mislead by mass media” (8).
These unresolved tensions exist within the film itself, to a
degree. After all, the laundrette, the space where heterosexual and mixed-race homosexual
love can exist side by side, is a semi-public space, at best, utopian and unattainable
at worst. The film’s sound design, and its music in particular, designate the
laundrette as a place apart, with many scenes set there functioning similarly to the production numbers in a
Hollywood musical. Unsurprisingly, the film’s narrative comes to a climax as the
racial and economic tensions of Thatcher era England come crashing through the
building’s façade, upsetting the dreams of progress and freedom. Nonetheless,
the film concludes on a hopeful note, conflating sexual freedoms with capitalist
market freedoms as Omar and Johnny splash one another, supposedly “free” as
they hide unseen in the confines of their place of business. The free market finally
is presented as the solution to the ills of society and a way to eradicate
differences in race, gender, and sexuality.
This problematic proposition seems to prove Adorno’s point.
The culture industry’s narratives are seductive (indeed, they even seduced Hall
to a degree) and self-perpetuating. While I would not as readily dismiss the
contributions of Cultural Studies as a field as Bérubé (indeed, I would claim
the field has made its greatest strides outside of the academy) it seems that
to a large degree we’d be wise as scholars to heed his call to pay attention to
mass media’s capacity to deceive, especially
when it claims to be progressive.
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