Sing Street, Nostalgia, and the Affects of Parenthood

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affect, film, nostalgia

   Director John Carney’s Sing Street is as beautiful and silly as a dandelion puff.

[SOME SPOILERS]

Even if Carney had not told us in a trailer that the story is “basically wish fulfillment of all the things I wanted to do when I was the age of the character, but didn’t do”, most of us would have grasped his desire intuitively from the large, center-screen poster of Sigmund Freud in the bedroom of “the character’s” older brother, Brendan (Jack Reynor).

  The stand-in for Carney is a 15 year-old kid named Connor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), renamed Cosmo by his gorgeous heartthrob, Raphina (Lucy Boynton). Set in economically depressed Dublin in 1985, the film intermittently leans toward social realism and just as quickly pivots away from it with allergic embarrassment. The twirl is funny, because the characters keep bashing all the backward-looking adults stuck in their nostalgia for The Beatles and penchant for cover bands (“We are future thinking,” the kids say. “Our band plays futurist music”), and yet from the film’s first frame, showing Connor’s fingers hesitatingly plucking out a tune on an acoustic guitar, to the film’s last image of Cosmo and Raphina motor-boating off into the cold misty fog of the Irish Sea, the plot functions as little more than a clichéd container for unrestrained wallowing in nostalgia for 1980s music, fashion, and film (Back to the Future, of course).

   Because of money problems, Connor is sent to a downgrade school. Predictably, he crashes into trouble with the student bully and the priest bully. One issue is that his shoes are brown and his family doesn’t have the cash to buy the required black. And yet after we watch Connor “do homework” (a.k.a. listen to albums) with Brendan every night, absorbing the riffs and harmonies of A-Ha, The Cure, Culture Club, Joe Jackson and Hall and Oates, we then watch him and his band member friends stride into school the next morning accoutered from head to foot in hats, capes, make-up and shoes to match their latest musical craze. Sometimes (just to extend the repertoire? or to indicate the passage of time?) the raiment differs from the previous night’s music, so that we hear Culture Club but see Boy George, say. Love of music and dedication to art apparently transcend the mundane burdens of work slow-downs and loss of commissions, and clear the way for the boys to dress the part.

  Carney’s experiment in recreating the structure of feeling of the 1980s is just slick enough to keep the affective circuits flowing. After all, this is a dandelion puffball, not the phenomenological aesthetic we see in Malick’s restaging of the 1950s in The Tree of Life, say, or Linklater’s time-capsule of the early 21^st century in Boyhood. Sing Street‘s beautiful fuzzy seeds are mainly distributed by a narrow range and rapidly shifting set of fashion choices and chord progressions. But still it works, and does so for all the reasons that cultural studies scholars have noted how and why fashion both is political and stands in for political identity. Fashion problematically signals corporate branding, of course, but it also can–and in the 1980s surely did–signal social branding. Fashion establishes group identity and individual differentiation by positioning its wearers in clear but pliable networks of cultural association. [I am just diving into Tanisha Ford’s Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (UNC Press, 2015), which also draws from cultural studies research on subcultures and fashion.]

  Well, I loved the film for what it is. I laughed and danced in my seat and got teary-eyed in all the right places, even when I could see through all the moves.

One thing that does seem different, and I’m sure you all will tell me if/how I’m wrong: Brendan, whose own growing-up dream was stopped in its tracks by his mother, now lives at home (like a millennial) and exhibits what seems to me unprecedented emotional empathy for this same dream-killing mother. In one scene, he sits with Connor at the top of the stairs, smoking and peering down at their mother catching a few last rays of sun in the small “garden” behind their flat. He waxes poetic about her, informing Connor that their mom is emotionally-starved and perennially unhappy. Later, Connor and Raphina talk about family drama and parental restrictions and instead of bucking against them or blithely turning back to their ardent pursuit of music and sex, Raphina stops to comment: “It’s a strange kind of love. Parents.”

It’s a strange kind of comment, that. Maybe it more fully reveals the director’s wish fulfillment than the plot of boy-meets-girl-and-forms-band. Can we re-image childhood to fit our fantasy of how it ought to have been, and also hold out empathy and compassion for the very limited and fragile parents we have in fact become?

 

 

Mica Nava and the Affective Politics of Race

Embarrassingly, I am just now discovering the work of Mica Nava. Her 2007 book, Visceral Cosmopolitanism (Berg Publishers) is fantastic from start to finish. Her prose is flawless, her feminist cultural study methods impeccable, and her feminist theory rich, challenging, and free of jargon. Without dismissing or attenuating standard critiques of racism, she successfully attends to the under-researched question of how and why some white British women were not racist during the presumed height of British imperialism in the years leading up to WWI through the rage of identity politics in the 1980s. Nava draws on Richard Sennett’s sociology (“How Work destroys Social Inclusion”, 1999) to frame the problematic in terms of social and economic ‘belonging,’ and over and again she returns particularly to Stanley Cohen’s notion of “instinctive extensivity” (States of Denial: Knowing about Suffering and Atrocities, 2001) to wrestle with the psychological and practical dimensions of how and why some white women ‘decided’ to identify with non-white men over against the normative dictates of their class and families. As she puts it, her “approach has been to focus on the unconscious non-intellectual, emotional, inclusive features of cosmopolitanism, on feelings of attraction for and identification with otherness—on intimate and visceral cosmopolitanism” (8).

    My ignorance of Nava’s research, and of the specific British histories she details, retrospectively brought into focus my consumption of certain episodes of “Downton Abbey”, “Foyle’s War” and “Call the Midwife.” Do you remember Season 4 of the stupidly entertaining “Downton Abbey”, when Lady Rose (Lily James) falls for the American Black jazz singer, Jack Ross (Gary Carr)? Or Season 6 of the sublime “Foyle’s War” when Michael Kitchen’s Detective Foyle and his sidekick Sam(antha), played by the captivating and sublimely named Honeysuckle Weeks, take on the entire history of US military bigotry and UK anguished post-WWII masculinity in one episode, “Killing Time”? Or the two episodes of compellingly sentimental “Call the Midwife” which portray white women impregnated by Black men? Each of these severely compact TV episodes, which I consumed with relish, are given due flesh and soul by Nava’s careful and judicious assessment of specific race and gender dynamics that exhibited and sustained twentieth-century anti-racism.

I’ve not seen it, but I could add to this list the Masterpiece production of “Mr Selfridge,” a dramatic series about the American businessman who opened a British Department store in 1911 and saw huge success in large part because of his attention to women sales clerks and women shoppers. Nava devotes two chapters to the importance of Selfridge’s store, the first focusing on his labor practices, attention to women’s desires, and specific choices in stocking clothing and furniture that made ‘cosmopolitanism’ acceptable and affordable, and the second examining the so-called “big shop controversy” spawned by G. K. Chesteron’s publication in a London paper of a nasty letter about department stores (like Selfridge’s). Not only did Selfridge respond to Chesterton with his own, somewhat incoherent newspaper letter, but so did nearly 200 female employees, in another newspaper letter that Nava replicates and analyzes with the tender sophistication every feminist theorist should hone.

Throughout her book, Nava cites and uses critical race theorist such as Said, Stoler, Appiah, Bhabha, and Torgovnick to underscore the importance of delineating, exposing, and critically engaging the horrid categorizations, legal restrictions, and lethal practices surrounding race in the twentieth-century. But she also argues convincingly that race hatred is not the whole story. What bred, nurtured, and rewarded feelings of love for bodies and persons marked as racially other? Her answers are astute and beautifully composed.