Sunday Story Break — Brexit

JUNE 26TH, 2016 — POST 174

This is the seventeenth in a weekly series in which I try and find a movie story in some piece of news, pop culture, or trope. You can read last week’s, about an elite gas-powered motorsport in a self-driving world, here.

It’s rare that we get to witness the world change on a dime. The GFC in 2008 happened over about a year of waning confidence in the mortgage structures underpinning so much real estate in the U.S.. Whilst Hitler’s invasion of Poland can now be seen as the inciting incident, it took two bombs being dropped on Japan to lay the last of the foundation of a fundamentally new world. And if Trump is to be elected President of the United States, the mechanics of congressional politics will undoubtedly protract any impact the man might want to have.

Even though the process of cleaving from the European Union will take years, the Leave decision alone has already changed the world in the few hours since it was announced. Currency markets are in disarray. Scotland is set to revitalise a movement for independence from Britain with Northern Ireland presumed to follow suit. And the value of the European Union itself is being questioned with other nations calling for similar exit referenda. There is even some remote possibility that the longest period of military peace in European history could be upset, with Vladimir Putin losing one of his staunchest EU opponents in David Cameron. Briton’s on Friday woke up to a different world.

Critically, as far as the world is concerned, the decision is a sobering realisation: the set of assumptions we hold as true just can’t be treated as certain. We presumed that intelligent thought prevails. We presumed people who might not necessarily have information to make a good decision will seek out that information. And we presumed that the march toward progressivism moves inevitably forward. None of these can be taken for granted anymore.

Screenwriters and novelists are undoubtedly working on something or other spun from these events as I write this. The story is too monumental to ignore, especially for those directly affected by it. The question, then, isn’t “Will this become a movie?” but rather “How will this become a movie?”. The layers of story here are so rich, like any global upheaval, that five hundred movies could be written without two being alike.

The most obvious centres on soon-to-be-former Prime Minister David Cameron. Cameron promised this referendum as an election promise, one he certainly expected, like most of us, to result in a resounding “Remain”. It was an attempt to give people what they want to they have them shut up. With Cameron already announcing his intention to resign, the Brexit referendum is not only one of the most consequential backfires in history (up there with Chamberlain’s handling of Hitler), but has tarred Cameron with the label of “Worst Prime Minister in 100 Years. There’s something so dramatically compelling about this career-ending misstep, a career which to even hold Britain’s highest office must have been by all objective measures outstanding. There’s a film coming that has Cameron at the centre with only tragedy in its third act. It’ll be called Leave.

If you wanted something a little more uplifting (well kinda), there’s also an ensemble comedy that could fall out of this decision. There’s almost a cinematic tradition of a bunch of cockney working class men robbing a bank. If there’s a lining to the Brexit cloud, it’s not silver: it’s gold. Gold has risen substantially as a result of the Sterling’s plummet. Suddenly, in this fictional world, there’s a group of lager-swilling buzzcutted men have lost a bunch out of this decision (perhaps even after voting to Leave themselves) and suddenly the stacks of gold bullion in some vault somewhere are looking more attractive than ever. It’s The Italian Job meets The Big Short you can already hear the pitch meetings going.

My vote for best approach on this one keeps the Brexit decision as a background for the first half before it can no longer be ignored: moving in facelessly and powerfully. As much as The Power Of One retold the White messiah story, it focused in on small-scale conflicts against the backdrop of Apartheid South Africa — a backdrop that becomes evermore potent as we continue. There is then a good choice in another British cinematic tradition: the coming-of-age story. From Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank to Paul Wright’s For Those In Peril, the “backwaters” of Britain are a consistent well of inspiration for telling unequivocally British stories. And despite Brexit touching the entire world, it will hit hardest at home.

This movie, to be titled But I Feel Fine, will follow a girl heading into her final year of high school in a small town in the Midlands. Her parents are Pakistani immigrants but she was born in Britain. Spinning convincing lies of piety to her parents, she cuts class with friends to smoke and drink in a local park, a teenage tradition. There’s a group of boys hanging around too, a quiet member of which takes an awkward liking to our protagonist. But the most vocal of the group never lets our protagonist forget “she flew here, we grew here”, emboldened by Special Brew. A group trip to Alton Towers over the summer before her final year, sees our protagonist navigating her sexuality on the advice of her friend, both encountering the expectations of “dudeness”. Our protagonist never expected semen to clump up in water like it does, giving her first handjob at the Alton Towers Resort waterpark. The group’s trip back to town gets stranger and stranger, like Marty McFly coming back to the wrong 1985 in Back to the Future Part II. This isn’t the town they left. With the country voting to Leave, in virtue of her race, our protagonist is robbed any semblance of her old existence from hate crimes directed at her father and other members of the community. Familial stresses are compounded by the loss of accumulated savings value, limiting the amount of support her father and mother can provide family back in Pakistan. She lobbies her sorta-kinda-boyfriend to make their own escape, even if just for a few days. But even though the country has voted to Leave, our protagonist has a hard time doing just that.

There’re a little in terms of strong story beats here, partially inline with the coming-of-age tradition in Britain. They’re often quite understated in terms of plot — part of this age is simply not knowing what comes next. But with a bit of work, this could be a winner.

Let me know if you feel like taking it further.