Naked

Spoiler ALerrrt

Was feeling a little blue this evening and, ignoring the short list of undoubtedly edifying/cheerful/camp films a dear friend recently sent me, I sat down in front of my projector to rewatch Naked. It maybe had something to do with missing England. I watched Naked, Mike Leigh’s 1993 “black tragicomedy”, for the first time when I was about sixteen. My residual impressions were vague: unrelenting nihilism, two figures walking around an empty office block at night, David Thewlis’s long blonde moustache, a toilet.

The film opens to Johnny (Thewlis) raping a woman in a dark alleyway. The setting might give the impression this was a random attack, like he’d just pulled her off the street, but judging by Johnny’s ensuing sexual encounters he probably charmed her into the alleyway with a spitfire monologue and a few jokes, only for it to turn ugly and violent. This is his usual MO with the women he meets, he likes to procure breathless consent just so he can stomp on it afterwards.

It’s clear there’ll be some comeuppance because the woman runs after him screaming revenge, something about her brothers, I can’t remember, and so he scoots outta there (Manchester) to London, where he can crash at his ex-girlfriend Louise’s. Louise is at work, and he’s sitting outside the terraced Dalston house (how different Dalston was before you all moved there) when her flatmate, Sophie, comes home. So begins the unrelenting monologue. He seduces Sophie, Louise returns, he’s nasty to Louise, he’s nasty to Sophie, he fucks off into the night because he cannot deal with two women staking any kind of emotional claim on him.

It’s not a film in which like, stuff happens — except for, thankfully, a bunch of teenagers finally beating the shit out of Johnny (unprovoked, surprisingly, as he does plenty to provoke beatings earlier in the film) — we just follow him as he wanders around London chewing the ear off anyone mad or bored or similarly unhoused enough to listen to him. It’s a grotty just-post-Thatcher-era skit on the Odyssey — that’s spelled out to us when Johnny pulls the book off the shelf in a gay couple’s apartment and says he’s not ‘Homer-phobic or anything, like’.

His relentless speeches are correspondingly peripatetic, moving in jerks from pun-laden charm to malice to doomsaying and biblical conspiracy. My internet-monkey-brain kept saying to itself ‘he’s sooooo ADHD, what if he just took some medication?’ The theme, overall, is ‘everything’s fucked’. He’s a Marty from True Detective prototype, and when you meet either of these characters at 16 you feel they’re really onto something dark and adult and true and slightly beyond your understanding, only to meet them again a decade on and find their intellectualised depressive tendencies have lost their glamour. Maybe I’ll feel differently again at 36. It’s a real pleasure when Johnny does come across somebody he can’t for one reason or another verbally bulldoze, such as Archie, the monosyllabic Scottish junkie with the aggressive cervical tic.

This is not to say that Johnny has no allure. He’s super erudite and super eloquent and mostly he’s a pleasure to watch (to David Thewlis’s enormous credit) and I’d probably be sexually obsessed with him if we were to meet. The women he encounters in the course of the film are pretty uniformly won over by him, despite his infidelity/cruelty/sexual aggression. As we see at the end of the film, when Johnny has a kind of regressive post-beating fit, he’s got some explanatory early trauma that we women intuit and simply cannot resist (!) There’s also, for better or worse, a lot to be said for a man who can make you laugh (and maybe a man who talks so much you don’t have to think?)

There’s also a subplot involving another rapist, Sebastian, Sophie and Louise’s yuppie landlord (that’s how Wikepedia put it, there’s something very aurally satisfying about ‘yuppie landlord’), who has this absolutely unbearable laugh, it’s like a snort plus boyish giggle that I imagine was perfected over weeks of Leigh’s improvisational rehearsals. He rapes Sophie, then wanders about their home, hairless and arseless in black y-fronts, and only leaves when Louise pulls a knife on him.

At the close of the film, the absent third flatmate, Sandra, comes home from her trip to Zimbabwe and loses her rag. The house is a mess, and Johnny, Sophie, and Louise are all asleep in her bed. Louise goes off to work and a bruised Johnny sits on the sofa as Sandra rants incoherently, unable to finish her sentences: ‘This isn’t the time, or -’ ‘the place? Johnny offers. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘this is where I -’ ‘Live?’ says Johnny. ‘I’ve had enough,’ Sandra says, ‘it comes at me from all angles - all of you, you just - it’s the tin lids - I mean, when, how, will the world -’ ‘End?’ Johnny says. Naked’s main motif, Johnny’s ultimate proposition, is that according to Nostradamus the world is going to end in 1999. The sincerity of Johnny’s belief is unclear, but either way it’s the nub and the gist of his nihilism. This question, ‘how will the world end’, constitutes the final words of Naked, after which we see Johnny leaving the house, looking like shit, limping off down the street. It feels like a rejoinder. The world won’t end in a flash, as destructive cynics like Johnny might like to believe… it will just keep limping on………………….

Goodnight X