Only once does Attack the Block’s dialogue turn openly nationalist, when a gang member sticks up for the home country at the expense of Africa, pouring contempt on a white philanthropist off doing aid work in Ghana: “Why can’t he help the children of Britain? Not exotic enough, is it?”isn't a patriotic dig at the expense of Africa, it's a dig at the kind of charity do-good mindset that finds the African poor exotic and other, and the British poor savages on Daily Mail Island.
First: The film’s visuals might be plenty nationalist—all fireworks and Union Jacks—but its dialogue is not. Anything but: The film’s teenagers routinely say that they are fighting only to defend their housing project, their block. Where the movie is John-Bullish, the characters are instead intensely localist: “We wouldn’t have mugged you if we’d known you lived here.” That’s a sentiment available only to someone whose sense of the imagined community stops cold at the corner shop. And to this jingoism of the neighborhood the characters add a working-class or black ethos of self-policing—the code, in the US context, of Stop snitching and jury negation and Walter Moseley novels: “This is the block. We take care of things our own way.” It might be possible, when trying to make sense of the movie, to simply superimpose these two terms—the nation and the locality—in which case we would conclude that Attack the Block is proposing a council-estate nationalism, a black-white alliance of the distrustful and cop-hating poor. There’s something to this idea, and yet the individual components remain visible and not fully resolved into one another.And honestly, I think Len perfectly explains why: "It's a big, loud, fuck you to anyone who argues that multiculturalism has been the ruin of modern Britain."
When Jessica Ennis – a Yorkshirewoman with a black father and a white mother, who are still happily married after 30 years – won the heptathlon gold at the Olympics last summer, she walked through the stadium with a Union flag. Not just that, but one with her fucking name on it! That said, pretty powerfully – and this is what Moses does with the flag in the film – that the Union flag does not mean what it used to mean. It's a huge symbolic shift: this flag is about, and for, us, not just the Queen and the Navy at Trafalgar and Enoch Powell.I have a feeling the Olympic legacy is not millions of kids doing cross-country it is Dizzee Rascal going bonkers and Mo Farrah falling to his knees in prayer.
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posted by Mister_A at 7:20 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]