This Is England': a case study of a subculture in the England of 1983: the skinheads

Résumé du document

This is England' is a title of a famous song made by the Clash in 1985. The lyrics of this song highlights the difficulties faced by England in the mid 1980's which include urban violence, unemployment, racism, police corruption, the Falklands War. This is England, is also the title of a Shane Meadows movie. It could have been called 'Believe me, this is England' or 'This is also England'. This movie is actually about a particular aspect of England which is called as the skinhead subculture. This particular subculture helped Sean Meadows to draw his vision about England in 1983. The beginning of the movie, takes us to Thatcher's period during the war in Falklands. The main actor Shaun lost his father during this war. He suffers a lot from this death and he is rejected by his companions at school. He meets a group of skinheads who adopt him and he then goes to become the mascot of this band of teenagers.

Extraits

[...] This specific sub-culture that we discover is the culture of the skinhead. This culture is born with the reggae, the rock steady and the ska music and that's why the film starts with one of the most famous reggae band: Toots and the Maytals. The skinhead had nothing to do with racism and xenophobia at the beginning. During the 60's and the 70's a lot of young people came to England from Jamaica in order to work in the industry (for example in the shipyards). [...]

[...] For example he made the same tattoo on his hand as the little boy in the movie. This realism also comes from the fact that Sean Meadows uses non professional actors and especially the main character: Thomas Turgoose who was 13 at the time of the filming. This movie starts with one of the most famous of the reggae bands Toots & the Maytals and their great: was my number''. The first images are archive films and they give the feeling that this movie could have been called This was England''. [...]

[...] I've done this short summary of the film because I wanted to stress some of the main underlying elements of this movie that I judge really interesting. First, this movie is a really good attempt to give a social description of the society in United Kingdom in the 80's. We can really feel the economic difficulties (as in The Full Monty by Peter Cattaneo or in Billy Elliot by Stephen Daldry). However, the aim of the movie is not to complain about this situation but to show how people lived during this period. [...]

[...] But the mod scene splits between the working class roots and the upper- class pretentions. The first part of them starts to focus more on their proletarian origins by cutting their hair and replacing the expensive suits by jeans and heavy boots: they became the hard mod. The hard mod started to join the rude boys. Dick Hebdige claims that they desired to ''understand the mysterious complexity of the metropolis». That's why they got close to the black culture of the Jamaican rude boy, because black people had more streetwise "savoir faire". [...]

[...] The culture is needed at the really basis of every community and if you want to have this culture you have to respect the codes in a ritual. This ritual is well presented with the really symbolic moment of the shaving of the head of Shaun. Conclusion As this essay has shown, what is most striking about the skinhead subculture is the extent to which it is linked to a lot of different influences. The original skinheads were listening Jamaican reggae and to ska. Then the skinhead of the first revival chose the punk music and finally the racist skinhead chose the Nazi Rock. [...]