Naked (1993)
the world needs more toxic males
Mike Leigh’s Naked is a film that’ll sock you in the jaw, sucker punch you in the gut and then kick you straight in the nuts, all while you stand there like a rabbit in the headlights with your thumb up your butt. Like a lot of the women in the flick, you’ll feel used and abused but something about it will linger, eating away at you until you come back for more, even when you know what to expect. Some films don’t just demand you rewatch them but like an initiation ceremony, the first step is your complete violation. If films could bruise and wound, Naked would unapologetically leave you with two black eyes and a concussion.
It’s hard to believe the film’s 30 years old now coz somehow, it documents the crises many of us face when it comes to gender dynamics, economic uncertainty and the nihilistic hopelessness we feel when it comes to the future; all without the distraction of modern technology at its fingertips. In contrast, the feverish, attention-thieving distractions of today are represented by the ceaseless logorrhea of our leading man, Johnny, who never grants you more than a few seconds respite from his unrelenting, seething vitriol. It is only when alone, without other people to abuse, that we, ironically, are invited in, to see the real, broken and vulnerable man behind the facade, to share in his loneliness and cosmic insignificance. Something he’d outright and bitterly refute, despite how clearly it torments him throughout his sleepless weekend odyssey in post-Thatcher, shithole Britain.
The opening scene of Naked tells all about Johnny’s contradictory character and the underlying resentment he has not only for women but also, perhaps more poignantly, he has for himself. Beginning in medias race, or perhaps, medias coitus, the camera leads us up an alley to see our MC and a woman, having what appears to be consensual, albeit rough sex, which turns more volatile the closer we get, where Johnny places his hand more and more aggressively over the woman’s face until he finishes and she, post-violated, threatens Johnny by telling her boyfriend about him. This enlightens us to the coming events in next to no time, foreshadowing the grey area between abuse and threat of violence, the complete lack of loyalty in relationships and the struggle with one’s identity. Johnny goes from covering the woman’s face to hiding his own after his meaningless little death, prompting him to make himself scarce within the shadowy streets, steal a car and drive down to London throughout the night all the way from Manchester. The sex itself morphs from something consensual between two into only for one person, where Johnny uses the faceless woman as a mere masturbation tool. A little like, dare I suggest, the way many people treat one another on dating apps of today, judging people purely based on looks, without ever even entertaining the notion of actually seeing them as a person, before, during or after any given liaison. It makes you question whether we adopted the masks of avatars not out of fear of never being seen but instead to ensure that we never would be.
Once in London, Johnny invites himself to live inside his ex’s home, who is away on holiday. As another, more attractive female is there, the perpetually stoned Sophie, seduction soon follows. Again, this swipe-right on sight, situationship is merely a desperate attempt to feel something in a heartless world, more like a form of self-harm for each of them, posing as intimacy. Being so atomised and ostracised has these characters grappling for one like a painting of seventh circle Dantean hell. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Once his ex, Louise, arrives, they fall into their usual routine, with Johnny revealing himself as antagonistic in personality as he is aggressive in behaviour. He’s anti-work as well as anti-everything else, misanthropic yet seething; a vagabond-type not just out of choice but by circumstance too, setting us up for the directionless voyage he’ll embark upon once he’s fed up with the women surrounding him. The lack of any family support is evident by how infantilised Johnny and Sophie are beneath the surface, with him narcissistic to the point of being like a bratty little shit, and her developing a nonsensical obsession with him like a smitten little girl with daddy issues. Louise comes out the most grounded, challenging Johnny’s views but also seeing his point, though where he stands naked and hopeless, she shields and protects a little humanity for herself deep down. Maybe Johnny resents her particularly because that’s the only part of her he cannot steal for himself.
From there, Johnny roams the derelict, neglected streets that reflect these underclass inhabitants, talking at strangers with the sole aim of getting under their skin. Before long, you wonder if Johnny’s just looking to get his face kicked in. The humour’s often in his snarky, underhanded comments that usually go over the head of whoever he’s speaking to, but this only further alienates him as it goes on, fuelling his already embedded disillusionment. It’s no surprise he bumps into Spud from Trainspotting during his travels. Not only is it hard to grasp a fucking word he says but just seeing the streets they wander together will have you wishing you had yourself some smack, just to get through the misery of the movie.
Whilst Johnny prophesies the end of the world we’re left in irony, as when you look around, everything already appears post-apocalyptic. Some of the best dialogue comes between him and a security guard, the only other guy Johnny finds who enjoys reading like he does, who takes sympathy on him and lets him inside the building to take shelter from the cold. Johnny rewards him for this by saying a monkey could do his job. The guard, however, isn’t too provoked by Johnny’s bullshit and is instead content with himself to a certain degree. After debating for most of the night, he gets him a cup of tea in a greasy spoon and shows him a cottage he’s saving for. Whilst unimpressed, Johnny’s then warned by the guard:
‘Don’t waste your life.’
It might not be much, but the security guard has an aim, while Johnny strives for nothing. It’s during these scenes you pick up Johnny’s predilection for the conspiratorial, and whilst not completely mentally ill, it’s easy to see how close he dances with tipping over the edge. With the rise of conspiricism over last the decade or so in psychological fields, Naked appears to portend one of the consequences of atomisation. The lonelier the individual, the more susceptible they’ll be to connecting dots only ever found inside their head. Some say Johnny is either a Christ-like figure or the devil. Once Johnny convinces the security guard of god’s evil, it’s the latter that lingers.
The women in Naked, like Johnny, are outsiders, too crippled by poverty and ignored by society to ever truly thrive. That’s why they’re drawn to him, similarly to how the females in No Longer Human are attracted to Oba Yozo. Much like the novel too, a lot of Johnny’s pain and anguish comes from the clear abuse he once suffered and has had to live with alone. The film depicts this without ever alluding to its specifics, making it all the more palpable and painful to watch as Johnny succumbs to a nervous breakdown, not long after getting the beating he seemed to be looking for. In some sense, it makes you wonder whether getting bashed up was his way of getting back to himself. As he has a fit back inside the house, spitting anguished gibberish, he’s like a desperate child screaming for help.
The only ones granted hope in this rotten world are the ones born with it, gifting them a get out of jail free card to enable their worst psychopathic traits, knowing their economic advantage gives them carte blanche to behave however they please.
Paralleling Johnny’s aimless quest is Jeremy, also known as Sebastian, most typically an inheritance-blessed nepobaby yuppie and landlord of the house where the women live, who freely rapes one of them in a particularly gruesome scene and then hangs around, smug and supreme, knowing society’s got his back over everyone else in the movie combined. Some critics accused his character of being solely one-dimensional and only there to make Johnny appear better by comparison, but Jeremy is society’s celebrated ideal. A psychopath needs no arc. He or she just is, jumping from one goal to the next, where people are nothing but commodities and there truly is no such thing as society when consequences only apply to the have nots. The fact that the film came out two years after Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho was published does not look coincidental in the least. Jeremy or Sebastian or whatever his fucking name is, could easily be part of the Bateman bloodline. Bateman getting his name confused with another. Whilst his appearance does make Johnny look better, considering how loathsome he is, it means diddly squat. One imagines Johnny would be exactly like him if their situations were reversed. They’re each products of their environment and they fucking hate themselves for it. And maybe, rightly so. It’s one thing to be critical of society’s ills, a whole different thing to still exploit it for yourself. When it comes to women, Jeremy and Johnny are not all that dissimilar at all.
Naked has no plot essentially because its protagonist has no real future. The film drifts with him, bouncing between meaningless encounters bereft of hope, like Waiting for Godot in an urban landscape, only alone, long after God’s been declared as dead, with the threat of further mental illness around every corner. Made all the scarier because underneath Johnny’s insanity, through his crazy, frenzied and sleep-deprived outlook of the world, deep down, you know he has a point.
Though Naked is certainly reminiscent of the Angry Young Man trope popularised in the fifties and sixties by social realism pieces like John Osbourne’s Look Back in Anger and Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner, I couldn’t help but find similarities in its story and protagonist with that of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, published in 1864. During the second half of the novella, the nameless, angry (though not so young) man, ridicules the vulnerable prostitute of Lisa, only to find commonality in their social positions, leading him to indulge in a hero complex that ultimately leaves him vulnerable to her rather than the other way round, which prompts him to then humiliate the helpless girl by mockingly brandishing cash to Lisa for her time when he becomes exposed by her honest action of wanting to spend time with him. It is mere seconds later that he ruefully detests himself for how he treats her, only for him to once again begin chase and try to make amends, before finding himself alone again in the snow-ridden streets of St. Petersburg, crippled by the cyclical nature of his psychology. A neurological merry-go-round that will always leave him anomic and estranged from others; forever underground. A lot like Johnny, who, by the end of the film, is left crippled and alone to roam the streets of London, with nowhere to go.
This idea of the underground exists now in the form of social media, where what we see on the surface serves as little more than a disguise of what lies underneath. Be it in the subterranean suburbs of our subconsciousness, the divorce between the real and virtual or how people treat one another, behind the anonymity of their profiles, DMs, snapchats and snapshots, not to mention nudes (excuse the pun) regardless of whether their profile name matches that of their birth certificate. Where the characters in Naked are estranged from one another, people today are split between their pixelated selves and the ones they have to be when roaming the streets, where everyone is now a stranger to everyone else. Most notably and first and foremost, perhaps, to themselves.
The unrelenting bile spat out of the mouth of Johnny works similarly to how trolls and in general, dick heads operate, regurgitating their uninformed viewpoints on the comment boards of youtube videos and instagram pics, to lying about themselves on vacuous apps such as Tinder and Bumble, only, most of the time, without the autodidact advantage that Johnny all too knowingly possesses. But he, like them, is often nothing but a stranger to the majority of the people he interacts with, and considering he’s also Northern further alienates him from the Southerners of his Homeric voyage. Deep down, and most tragically, he knows no one gives a fuck and he doesn’t really give a fuck either. No matter how hard he screams on these streets, no one is listening. Everyone in the crowd is a faceless nobody.
Nowadays, Angry Young Man would be replaced by Entitled White Man, dismissing all of the social realism aspects of the movie and the difficulties it depicts for the average person of today, despite how accurately it portrays them. Instead of sympathising with Johnny, one imagines he would simply be labelled a toxic male and get MeToo’d, overlooking the very thing that makes him so similar to the women of the film. That isn’t to say he shouldn’t suffer some of the consequences of his actions, nor the original intent of the movement, but more how quick we are to judge in our modern times. Maybe the cost of endless distractions is to see everything as black and white. Maybe the modern person is simply too bored.
When trapped inside an infinite scroll, splitting between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, to like or to dislike, forces your grey world into a false black and white one. By design, the apps of today encourage you to act just as stupidly and simplistically as they operate, all so they can make you into a product just as worthless as the ones they’ll eventually make you buy. Smartphones and the like are the new form of hopeless escapism. In Naked, each character dreams of escaping too. In reality, both are just components of being an addict. There is no escape.
The biggest lesson to be taken from Naked is that, like it or not, you’ll never be immortal. You’re human, all too hopelessly and beautifully human. That’s the only meaning you’ll ever find. Ignore that at your own peril.
It’s for this and many other reasons, with its unrelentingly bleak outlook, nihilistic hopelessness and self-conflicted angst, not to mention depictions of rape and sexual abuse, that most people of today will hate Mike Leigh’s Naked. It’s a movie that’s hard to look at because of how accurately it depicts the modern way of living, and just how fucking bleak it truly is. From the very beginning, you know it won’t end well. What’s perhaps most terrifying about it is how the urban world — emojis, nudes and parasocial relationships aside — has only gotten colder and lot fucking uglier. The society it depicts is not one any sane person would like to live in. But just look around you. We’re already fucking there.
