Steve McQueen’s new film Blitz offers a variety of narratives that very effectively explore race, class and empire during World War II, finds Ian Goodyer
The Blitz (a contraction of the German word ‘blitzkrieg’ or ‘lightning war’) occupies a prominent place in Britain’s self-image. It is a touchstone in the political imaginary of mainstream parties, and of course is a right-wing shibboleth, but its cultural and ideological potency is both more diffuse and more deeply embedded in the popular imagination than this might suggest. The air war that was fought over the UK — the Blitz and the Battle of Britain — evokes an historical era when the nation stood, alone but united, in defiance of Hitler’s Nazi onslaught.
Every year, this historical narrative forms part of the Remembrance Day memorials that take place across the country and it helps to cement the ‘official’ idea of British exceptionalism that is inculcated among its citizenry and trumpeted abroad. So when someone makes a movie about the Blitz, they are not simply creating a drama about a particular historical episode, they are also touching a cultural-ideological nerve that has been sensitised by decades of conditioning. If that movie questions some of the long-established assumptions about wartime Britain, it is likely to attract a certain amount of flak (pun intended).
Steve McQueen’s Blitz follows the adventures of the Hanway family, a close-knit unit comprising George (Elliott Heffernan), his mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and his grandfather Gerald (Paul Weller). The film opens with a terrifying depiction of firefighters struggling to contain the blazes caused by German bombs. The men are beset by fire and blast, and the scene is a maelstrom of flames, heat and desperate activity. Even the fire hoses pose a threat, as they buck and twist under enormous water pressure.
Narrative threads
In the face of this relentless carnage and slaughter, it is easy to see why Rita and Gerald reluctantly decide to evacuate George to the safety of the countryside. This sets up the two main threads in Blitz: George’s evacuation, his escape from the train he has boarded, and his attempt to find his way home; and Rita’s life back in London, where she works in a munitions factory and tries to cope with the immense strain of leading an existence under constant peril, while dealing with the emotional trauma of sending her son into the unknown. George’s odyssey is the most eventful and fully wrought of these two strands, but both characters’ experiences engage us in a story that touches its audience on multiple levels.
George’s journey becomes an episodic series of encounters, each step of which teaches him important life lessons. Some of these are positive; the power of simple solidarity as he teams up with a band of fellow absconders from evacuation, for instance. Some are negative; the capacity of war to corrupt people’s morals, as depicted in the activities of a gang of criminals who loot bombed buildings and rob the dead. A number of reviewers have commented on the tonal inconsistencies in Blitz. One section of George’s journey, for instance, resembles a Children’s Film Foundation romp, while his recruitment into the criminal gang is explicitly Dickensian and is populated with a cast of grotesques (Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke are splendidly vile). We get scenes of abstract patterns resolving themselves into bombers flying over a moonlit North Sea, snatches of straightforward wartime drama, episodes that recall propagandistic English films from the likes of Ealing Studios, romantic melodrama and so on.
I must admit to being a little confused myself, but while McQueen’s approach can be jarring, it makes sense as a way for framing the story. This is a film about the tensions, contradictions, conflicts and dynamism of a tumultuous period and it is appropriate that its form reflects its content. The apparent incongruity between one element of the story and the next achieves a number of ends. It echoes the structure of a Dickensian narrative, which McQueen appears to have consciously incorporated into his film. It also allows the director to present a mosaic of different experiences, styles, ideas, ideologies, cultures and so on in a way that emphasises their distinctness but also the ways in which they collide and interact. The overarching theme of the London Blitz ties together the whole film and it is what allows us to reconcile George’s encounter with the damaged and unstable character of Albert (Stephen Graham) and his childlike enjoyment of an adult-free adventure with a group of boys.
Empire, race and class
One of Blitz’s central themes concerns race, and more broadly, empire. London, after all, was the imperial capital, and McQueen captures the contradictions and dynamism of the multicultural milieu that this entailed. As historian Angus Calder notes in his book The People’s War, Stepney (where the Hanways live) was an exceptionally diverse borough in a highly cosmopolitan city. We therefore see young people from multiple backgrounds; Lindy Hopping in a working-class nightspot and the well-heeled patrons of a West End nightclub dancing to the jazz performed by a black band. The 1940s East End was dominated by London’s docks: a centre of trade that brought together peoples, products and cultures from vast swathes of the world. McQueen’s cast is correspondingly diverse. But alongside the joyful and creative interplay of cultures that we see portrayed in the film, McQueen shows the prevalence of casual, endemic racism. George never got to know his Grenadian father, who was deported following a fight with white racists, and he is confused about his own identity. He receives racist slurs from adults and children, but is living in a white household in East London.
A key moment in Blitz occurs when George finds himself in the Empire Arcade, a covered shopping street dedicated to displaying and selling commodities imported from Britain’s imperial dominions. The goods are presented alongside images and messages depicting plantation labour and caricatures of the Empire’s non-white subjects. George is mesmerised by the opulence of the displays and seems bemused by the accompanying representations of Black people. It is at this point that he is befriended by Ife (Benjamin Clementine), a Nigerian air-raid warden out on patrol. As Ife takes George under his wing and walks him to safety, his warmth and humanity offers a contrast to the colonial imagery of the Empire Arcade. George asks Ife if he is Black and when Ife replies that of course he is, George declares, ‘I’m not Black’.
The presence of Ife as a role model later helps him to reconsider this self-image and to feel the confidence to assert proudly his identity as a Black person. This portrayal of a child’s emerging awareness of his self and his place in the world also reminds us that plucky little Britain did not, in fact, stand alone against Hitler: it was buttressed by the material and human resources of a vast Empire. Whether toiling in their home countries, fighting in the British armed forces, keeping open the shipping lanes that provided vital resources, or helping with the war effort in Britain itself, Britain’s imperial subjects were an indispensable part of the fight against Nazi Germany. This is a truth that some people still find too uncomfortable to accept; it undercuts the simplistic image of an embattled bastion of liberty fighting a fascist behemoth and exposes the fundamental nature of World War Two as an inter-imperialist conflict.
Class and solidarity
The theme of wartime social solidarity is one of the lynchpins of the ‘authorised’ version of British history. But while McQueen doesn’t deny that a sense of shared sacrifice and struggle was a real asset, he doesn’t simply repeat familiar clichés about cheerful Cockneys and cross-class patriotic zeal. Down in London’s murky underworld, the looters and grave robbers who abduct George reveal a streak of self-centred opportunism being fed by the war’s chaos and privations. Meanwhile, among the country’s ruling echelons, the government’s refusal to authorise the opening up of the city’s underground stations as air-raid shelters leaves many thousands of people without a place to take refuge from the Luftwaffe’s bombs.
Rips in the social fabric manifest themselves at all levels. The types of solidarity that arise in response come from below, generally in opposition to the state’s impositions and edicts. Groups of citizens set up their own community shelters. Masses of Londoners force tube stations to open and occupy them in defiance of the police and the authorities. In one scene, set during a live BBC radio broadcast from Rita’s munitions factory, a small group of women rush to the stage after Rita finishes a song and start up the chant: ‘We need shelters! Open up the underground!’ This fight for decent air-raid precautions against official hostility is a well-documented part of British history, but one rarely mentioned in the versions of the Blitz story fed to us through mass media.
One reason for the reticence to acknowledge such struggles is that they were often instigated and led by socialists and communists. In Blitz, Steve McQueen situates this tale of grassroots solidarity alongside other types of quotidian, working-class community spirit, whether this be in multiracial bars and clubs; among female industrial workers mocking management or preparing for a night out; in East End boozers around a stand-up piano; in communal sing-songs in bomb shelters and so on.
Blitz isn’t always fully resolved as a drama, and in certain respects it isn’t as carefully crafted as other Steve McQueen productions, particularly his brilliant BBC anthology series Small Axe. The script sometimes becomes stilted and didactic and some of the narrative threads are underdeveloped. This is partly down to the complexity of the story that McQueen is telling and the limitations of the film form — a limited TV series or a longer running time may have offered more scope. Blitz is, however, a powerful and iconoclastic account of an episode in British history that is shrouded in myth and official amnesia. The film includes scenes of genuine shock and spectacle, and its production design and cinematography successfully capture the atmosphere and texture of 1940s London. Steve McQueen has incorporated many of the Blitz’s real-life characters and incidents into his film, including the bombing of the Café de Paris, and life in the community air-raid shelter run by Mickey Davis. The exhaustive research carried out by the director helps to anchor the narrative and to counter those critics who have inevitably objected to the film’s themes and content.
The pitiless nature of industrialised slaughter and the randomness of death during war are constantly present during Blitz. It is impossible to watch the film without thinking of the murderous onslaughts currently taking place across the world, but most particularly in Palestine, Lebanon and Ukraine. Perhaps the most important message of Blitz is that grassroots solidarity offers a way to resist the brutality of state-sanctioned mass murder, and as the characters in the film come to realise, the enemy is at home as well as abroad.
