“When do we live, that’s what I wanna know”. A rather pretentious line, I’ve thought, delivered by protagonist Mick Travis in Lindsay Anderson’s surrealist film, If, from 1968. A bell rings out, signaling a call to assembly. Mick and his mates must stand to attention, looking glum yet dreamy as they ponder escapes from an oppressive boarding school that offers religious fervor, military training, instruction in increasingly irrelevant Latin, plus—more secretively, homoerotic sadism, all wrapped in Bach chorals and platitudes about England’s present and past greatness. Clearly, Anderson, the director, had gone to schools like this unnamed fixture ensconced somewhere within a bucolic Gloucestershire countryside. Many of the boys he depicts, ranging in age from about ten to eighteen, all cut from upper class cloth, will proceed to universities like Oxford and Cambridge, and will ultimately land in the gentries of medicine, the law, or politics. Otherwise, they will be groomed for the military, destined to be officers ordering lesser privileged or innately ill-equipped men to suffer. That’s why I thought Mick a lucky and therefore self-pitying boy: he’ll be alright one way or another, I figured.
The school is a training ground for either side of an equation. It will separate the perpetrators and the victims, with the latter faction earmarked for a passive existence, such as the lives we once associated with accountants, insurance agents, or the back corridors of civil service. They will be studious but not ambitious, because public school will have (literally) beaten it out of them. One imagines a character like Jute, a roughly ten-year old newcomer to the school who looks nonplussed throughout the story, living a depressive, deadened life hereafter unless he is rescued from this hell and guided elsewhere. In the opening scenes, the viewer is introduced to him as though he will be the protagonist: the obvious underdog who will at some point rise up and discover himself. However, the film more or less abandons him midway, casting him as a minor figure in the revolutionary scene that will climax the action. A touch of reality, perhaps, for only Mick Travis, played by the already mischievous and sinister Malcolm McDowell in his introductory role, has the charisma and strength to lead an uprising. And this rebellion shouldn’t be so difficult in one sense, as the adults in charge are a curiously diffident group comprised of stuffy preachers, idiosyncratic professors with perverse leanings, plus a complacent headmaster who seems to think he has his finger on the pulse of youth, but instead seems hopelessly deluded and lost in his own dream of glorious England.
McDowell’s Mick is the figure that will burst the bubble of this hoary establishment, though he won’t be alone in his fight. His tight and loyal posse features a small cross-section of 1968’s idea of the disenfranchised: a fellow individualist/intellectual who shies away from militarism, a closet homosexual plus his beauteous underclassman and lover; on the periphery are the likeable runt, Jute, and then finally, and anomalously, a surly if lovely girl who will shoot the obtuse headmaster in the forehead in the last scene, thus representing militant feminism. What this drama lacks are the kind of figures we might expect to feature in a film about revolution: a rugged, working-class hero. Or if it were being made today: a person of color character, representing what would be better represented in general today. But this film is not futuristic, so even though it plays with reality as much as it does, injecting events that may be happening or not due to the boys’ fantasies, the inclusion of characters from the other side of tracks or overseas would have stretched historical credibility. That said, surrealist elements invoke foreignness: in his private study, Mick admiringly pins images of guerrilla warriors, or a then-fashionable poster of Che Guevara, to a wall, and repeatedly listens to a recording entitled “Missa Luba”, which features sacred chanting of an African tribe. However, as viewers, we are mostly exposed to conflicts between the relatively privileged, featuring their strange hierarchies: so-called whips, for example, who are peers to the fellow students to whom they exact punishments and cruelties, yet when they’re in class or in the pews of the school cathedral together, their after-hours authority dissolves into invisibility.
Then there are rules and norms that make little sense to conventional observation. An officious upperclassman yells, “run in the corridor”, to stir a manic response amongst his younger charges, who then run amok within the hallways, beating or scratching at one another, discharging an ever-rumbling angst. Run, not walk? Meanwhile, the youngest, or newest pupils on the totem pole are dubbed “scum”, suggesting the boys grant status, ala Lord of the Flies. “You’re a scum, aren’t you?” says an irritable whip. “I don’t know”, Jute replies. He doesn’t know who he is, what he is, and he is as yet unoffended, for as a Lacanian might observe, language here is a trauma that a child must assimilate as it invades us. Soon, as adults appear from behind closed doors, ready to sermonize and deliver pedantic edicts, the boys still themselves, become frozen in mind and body. “Stop talking!” the whips continually berate, to consolidate order, for they are not just ill-tempered scolds working for the man, they are the de facto governors in this realm. Stop thinking, we might infer is the meta message here. Just keep running, moving from one action to another without reflection, without consideration of either history or a future. Is it any wonder that one character, a stoical, decent, outlier-like teacher played by the eccentric Graham Crowden, pauses to critique the impact this dire education is having upon youth? “If you insist on staring at me like a row of Christmas puddings”, he moans at them, half-sympathetically, for he knows that the crusty institution that employs him is killing souls.
It’s well over fifty years since If first came out and became a cult hit from then onwards. The romanticized rebellion, replete will darling acts and phrases, blended with xylophonic musical pastiches, seduced my late adolescent mind and stirred a dream of roaming insurrection once. But it is a dream that embarrasses as much if not more than it does inspire. The problems of privileged youth in leafy rural England of yesteryear yield as much envy as they do sympathy, so the end result is something of a neutralized halting—a sense that as a viewer you are taking a pleasant hallucinogenic drug, not prepping for a cause. If you are middle or upper class and herald from a westernized society wherein food is plentiful, infrastructures are sound, atrocities are something heard about but not directly witnessed or felt personally, its message is for a siloed constituency recalling a cultural artifact–something of a wet dream. Still, the film is far from a shallow entertainment. Among its indelibly-expressed lessons is the idea that authoritarianism is not simply an external force to be defeated. It’s an internalized phenomenon that manifests in peer systems, and lives on intergenerationally. That’s the horror of these boys’ prison—there despite the wealth that affords it and the lack of apparent existential threat. If reflects one version of youth rebellion, one that is solipsistic, grounded in material comfort even as it battles false austerity, and reeks of the primitive. Above all, it depicts a world in which choice is limited but still so much vaster that what might have been put on celluloid.
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 