Tout va bien (Jean-luc godard & jean-pierre gorin, 1972)
“Maybe it’s a question of style. I don’t know if you understand, but the office has its own style. If you listen to the broadcasts, it’s like everything was written by the same person. But I realised that for me to say what I want to say, that style doesn’t work.”
So this is London, England. 2016. But isn’t it crazy what happened 4 years ago?
Just in case you’ve been living under a rock, I’ll give you the highlights:
It all started at universities outside London. Students occupied administrative sections of the buildings, declaring them ‘student operated sites’. Hundreds of young people, sitting everywhere, hanging out windows, chanting, singing songs. Of course, the Police were eventually called in, and days and days of stand-offs happened. And then something astonishing followed.
Normally we all make a joke of students: their dumb hair, and noisy music, but not this time. Instead factory workers took inspiration from the students and went on strike and occupied their factories. How many workers? Amazingly it was 11 million, 22% of the working population. And as you might expect, the police were called again. As well as the army. Things started to become more and more heated, and then it swelled.
There were huge marches across London, protests and speeches in both Trafalgar square and Marble Arch. Both the Police and the Army lost all ability to control these crowds. We’re talking approximately 35-40% of the population of England getting involved here.
And then the Prime Minister fled.
He ran to a Military Base for sanctuary. Granted, he was only there for a few hours, but I think that’s a huge sign of how crazy things were getting.
And then, after about 5 or 6 weeks, everything quietened down again: students went back to their studies, and workers went back to their factories.
And that was only 4 years ago.
You can still see the graffitti on the walls, statements like "This concerns all of us" and "It is forbidden to forbid" accompany us on our way to work. It’s had such a huge impact on us all that it’s complicated our ability to switch off, to get away from it all, to enjoy the comforts of life. We’re ever conscious of the presence of unrest. Previously, escapist media had been king, but it just doesn’t fly with us anymore. Companies like Disney are reeling, not knowing what kind of output to create. In desperation major entertainment companies have turned to auteurs, they’ve embraced the difficult, they’ve made their products as dense and layered as the times that they are created in.
But let’s be honest, everything that happened here 4 years ago is now boiled down to a conversation about big numbers, and we don’t live in big numbers. The important thing here is how this affects us: you and me. Our lives together. Our breakfasts. Our friendship. Our fights. We have hopes and dreams which are suddenly tied up into the politics of our country, and that just makes everything so damn difficult. What’s important to us is how comfortably we can spend time together. Our ability to sit together in the same place, with points of view that, while not necessarily identical, are close enough that we like each other, and maybe even allow us to learn a little from each other.
Part of the ability for us to be together involves thinking about things we don’t want to think about. And when we open our mouths, when we talk, either to each other or to anyone else, we reveal these things that we don’t like to think about. Often these thoughts can be represented with an image, one that we wear on our faces when we speak. My image is a picture of one of us dead. I can’t tell who it is, but death, or more appropriately, the end of life and the annihilation of hope and impossibility of continuation has slowly become that which extends into all things for me. In this picture it’s one of us lying on our side, facing away, and I know when I look at that image that the person who remains will have to be faced with this sight in one way or another, and they’ll have to deal with it, making phone calls and organising events that they don’t want to organise, all the time with this cold, damp nausea in their chest and throat, this buzzing in their head, tears in their eyes the whole time, and the awareness that ‘this is it’ now and forever, all of that time together and all of those talks and walks and words and feelings and shared moments are over, and will never happen again.