MEDIA & COLLECTIVE IDENTITY

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The film, ‘reflects the moment of ‘new laddism’, representing an aggressive reaction to feminism, anxieties over males roles and the glorification of consumer culture where the right shoes and fashionable clothes indicated status.’- Wood, Mary, Contemporary European

‘There is evidence of a connection between the gangster craze and the construction of post-feminist versions of masculinity in lifestyle magazines like Loaded and FHM preoccupied with representations of a time and a setting in which the rules of male association were clear, and the penalties for their

Mary Wood (2007) argues that the film ‘reflects’ a society where men have had enough of feminist ideas of what a man should be. They want to be free to be ‘laddish’ and masculine, asserting their importance through violence and style.

This view is shared by Steve Chibnall (2009) and he makes a link between the gangster cycle and the men’s lifestyle magazines of the time, Loaded and FHM. Launched in 1994, Loaded’s selling line is ‘For men who should know better’.

Thank God for Britain’s wideboys. We would be lost without them. They will be the saving grace of the British Film Industry by breathing a waft of fresh air into a business controlled by the Stuffy Luvvy Mob. They seem to only want to churn our frock-perfect period literary adaptations or highbrow intellectual twaddle. It’s time for the old-school tie brigade of Puttnam, Attenborough and Branagh to stand back and let the leary lads have a go.

- Nick Fisher, Sun, 29 August 1998Some disagreed that the new ‘lad style’ was refreshing. In the Sunday Times (11th June 2000), Bryan Appleyard complained that the films were ‘sexist’ and fascist’ and links the films to the rise in violent crime. He wrote, ‘There is, in the end, something irredeemably nasty about the new British gangster films…. The formalism they derive from Tarantino has become, in the hands of these directors, an oppressive wallowing in amorality, as if the only way they can find to entertain their audience is to transport them to a world where nothing matters and anything can be done.’

Reception

Clare Monk (2006) has also characterised ‘New Laddism’ as a ‘male backlash against the media – and – female imposed ideal of the new man’ and ‘a regressive escape from the demands of maturity – and women’. It is, she argues, reactionary in its attitude to both gender politics and social policy.

re·gres·sive/riˈgresiv/Adjective 1. Becoming

less advanced; returning to a former or less

developed state

Regressive escape is clearly evident in Ritchie’s

Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels . It’s

regressive because:

1. Conventional paid unemployment has been

largely eliminated or jobs are confined to being

a policeman or a traffic warden.

2. Social organisation has been replaced by a

jungle of ruthless competitors struggling for

survival and supremacy.

3. Few of the characters have reached maturity.

Most are struggling to play the roles expected

for them in this ‘jungle’. It’s been compared to

a boy’s playground where play-acting and

bullying are typical behaviour.

Guy Ritchie is usually blamed for what’s known as the pollution of the British Film Industry. Lock Stock was an unexpected success, low budget and privately funded. The reality is that while the film inspired stylistic innovation and further films of the crime-comedy genre, the gangster cycle was already in motion since about 1996. In the four years between April 1997 and April 2001 at least 24 British underworld films were released, more than had been released in the whole 20 years before. The cycle of films was paralleled by a stream of memoirs from real-life villains, the deaths and funerals of all three Kray brothers and the return of Ronnie Biggs from Brazil.

Many critics see the influence of Tarantino as a crucial factor in turning the more honourable tradition of ‘realist’ underworld films i.e. Get Carter (1971) into a ‘semi-comedic travesty’ in which authenticity is replaced by pastiche.