A Little Bit of a Monster

Andrea Arnold​ is best known as a director of films about young working-class women determined to get some joy out of a life that has been shaped by the needs and desires of others (not all of them men). By the time we meet these women, it’s generally too late for introductions. Someone, it seems, has gone ballistic. The films duly drop us in mid-rampage. People don’t just leave the house in Arnold’s films. They set off, door slammed, shoving stuff into a bag, shooing children ahead of them, down the road, across a strip of urban scrubland, headed who knows where. The camera (Arnold favours handheld) shares their agitation, now trailing behind, now out in front, a vortex of angles. Whatever its outcome, the trace left by this swirling hell-for-leather getaway is that of utter fearlessness.

American Honey (2016)

But it isn’t all rampage. An uncharacteristic air of benevolent absorption pervades the three-minute opening sequence of Red Road (2006), Arnold’s debut feature. Jackie (Kate Dickie) is employed by a security company called CityEye. Neatly uniformed, she sits at a console in front of a bank of CCTV monitors which provide round-the-clock surveillance of the public spaces of the Barmulloch area of Glasgow, at that time still a grim repository of postwar overspill housing. Her job is to spot the first signs of trouble and alert the appropriate emergency service. But the efficiency with which she performs this role doesn’t preclude the sort of behaviour that belies easy assumptions about the objectifying distance built into systems of surveillance. A man walking a portly bulldog becomes a source of amusement, and then of concern. Jackie zooms in on him as he bends down to inspect the dog’s faeces before scooping them up from the pavement. It matters to her that the dog is evidently not well. Curiosity once meant the scrupulous exercise of care and attention; it now means their overuse, or inappropriate application. The short sequence reveals Arnold’s determination to restore its good name. But Jackie, too, will soon go ballistic. Identifying in the CCTV footage the man she holds responsible for the deaths of her husband and her daughter, she embarks on a revenge spree which culminates in a lingeringly explicit scene of sexual entrapment accompanied by the howls of an urban fox. But her heart isn’t in the vengeance (or, come to that, in the call of the wild). Ending the feud enables her to resume the proper exercise of care and attention. The bulldog didn’t make it, but she’s pleased to meet its successor on the street, and to chat with its owner. The film seems to want to say that curiosity, too, animates and enlivens after its fashion – by means of the very disproportion between feeling and object for which it is customarily decried. Its reinstatement at the end of Red Road is evidence of the strength of the moral undertow in Arnold’s films, which works back against or beneath the narrative’s helter-skelter impulsion.

Arnold came late to filmmaking. She was born in 1961, the eldest of four children brought up by a single mother on a council estate in Dartford. Leaving school at sixteen, she found work as an actor and presenter on the ITV Saturday morning children’s show No. 73. The experience persuaded her that she would ultimately feel more comfortable behind the camera. She studied at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, graduating in 1991, before returning to Britain to make short films for TV. She won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for Wasp in 2004. The garlands (Jury Prizes at Cannes, Bafta Awards) have continued to pile up. They’re a tribute, among other things, to the truly astonishing performances she has managed to coax from previously unknown young actors. Arnold was appointed OBE in 2011. Who knows what honours are awarded for these days, but it’s reassuring to discover that an urban fox-themed depiction of cunnilingus won’t necessarily rule you out.

Arnold’s second feature film, Fish Tank (2009), widely distributed across Europe as well as in the UK, was a major commercial and critical success. Unschoolable 15-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis) shares a cramped flat in a high-rise block on the Mardyke estate in Essex with her mother and younger sister, putting in hours of practice on the dance routine she hopes will eventually enable her to make her own way in the world. We first meet her as she sets off on a rampage which will culminate in an expertly targeted head-butt. Her mother’s swashbuckling new lover, Connor (Michael Fassbender), seems like a good thing, with his easy charm and his largesse; until, aroused by Mia’s pugnacity, he starts to groom her for sex. Like Katie in Red Road, she exacts a revenge as cunning as it is ferocious. But for her there will be no immediate redemption. Her career ends before it has begun, in a humiliating audition at a moribund strip-joint. She sets off again, this time by car, with a man she’s met who knows some people in Cardiff. Not exactly Thelma and Louise.

The success of Fish Tank made Arnold a film studies fixture. It established her as a standard-bearer for the ‘new British realism’, in David Forrest’s phrase: an attempt to build on Ken Loach’s dialectical or discursive approach to the social and political realities of working-class life by developing a more ‘poetic’ or ‘phenomenological’ emphasis. The phenomenology has been thought to lie in the visual, aural and (almost) tactile rendering of embodied sensory experience; the poetry in the evocation of space and place as an environment in which identities including but not restricted to that of the protagonist can take shape. After delivering her head-butt, Mia goes for a recuperative stroll. Her eye is caught by some Traveller caravans on an empty site beneath a flyover, and beside them a white horse chained to a block of concrete. Mia visits the horse on two separate occasions in the film’s first ten minutes. Each time the camera caresses her as she caresses the animal. We see her, and we see with her. She decides to free the horse. The ensuing confrontation with the Travellers establishes this strip of scrubland as a liminal space affording the prospect of transformation through ordeal. Her refusal to back down has been taken as an expression of the film’s radical feminist politics.

That Arnold’s characteristic style does indeed merit description as poetic and phenomenological is owed in no small part to the sustained excellence of her cinematographer and long-term collaborator, Robbie Ryan. ‘You’re trying to be lyrical,’ Ryan has said, ‘with something that’s real.’ It would, however, be a mistake to underestimate the strength of the moral undertow I have mentioned, which works back against the storytelling’s poetic-phenomenological method, quietly interrogating its pieties. Mia’s final rampage carries her all the way down the A13 to Tilbury, where Connor lives in a spacious semi with his other (real) family. She takes her revenge on him by kidnapping his daughter, Keira, and hauling her violently off in the vague direction of the Thames estuary. There’s no mistaking the child’s terror. A struggle ensues, during which Keira falls – or is pushed – into the water. Generally speaking, Arnold is not an allusive filmmaker. But it’s hard not to recall the scene from James Whale’s classic Frankenstein (1931) in which the monster pitches a rather similar blonde innocent into a lake and leaves her to drown. Keira survives, even though Mia, like the monster, can’t swim. The film’s moral undertow has on this occasion forced us to admit the starkness of cruelty: the extent to which the gratuitous infliction of physical and psychological suffering exceeds any attempt to explain or justify it. Keira can scarcely be blamed for Connor’s manipulations. Mia’s flicker of monstrosity poses a tricky question for the viewer thus far absorbed in her fearlessness. Exactly what part does child abduction play in a radical feminist politics?

That same undertow will, however, pull us in further, contrary directions before it comes to rest. Mia makes a third and final visit to the Travellers’ site. It seems that in her case, as in Jackie’s, the conclusion of the rampage has reignited curiosity. But there’s no sign of the horse. Hearing that the animal has been put down, Mia squats abjectly, head in hands, shaken to the core by grief. The horse was old and sick, she’s told; its time had come. The usual interpretation of this scene is that she grieves because she has read in the animal’s shackled life and unceremonious death a lesson about her own future. But it might be more interesting to suppose that she’s crying for the horse rather than for herself. Arnold has caught the contradictions of Mia’s moral being. She is as tenderly curious as Jackie; and a little bit more of a monster.

Since Fish Tank, Arnold has tried her hand at genres as various as costume drama and the road movie. There’s been no let-up in the phenomenology. The images of rural life and landscape in Wuthering Heights (2011) and of Midwestern urban sprawl in American Honey (2016) are as rich and varied as anything in the picturesque tradition. But it’s monstrosity as much as moorland which seems to have drawn Arnold to Wuthering Heights. To what extent, Brontë asks, does the physical and psychological abuse Heathcliff suffered as a child – ‘enough to make a fiend of a saint’, according to Nelly Dean – explain or even justify his subsequent sadism? Arnold furthers the novel’s preoccupation with the starkness of cruelty by discarding its convoluted second half. Her decision to cast Black actors as young and older Heathcliff (Solomon Glave and James Howson respectively) leaves contemporary audiences in no doubt that the man returning in triumph with a valise full of cash was once treated like a slave. Unfussy flashbacks to that earlier condition of servitude – and the happiness it barred him from – provide a measure of explanation, at least, for the physical and psychological punishments he now inflicts with such relish. But their vicious sadism nonetheless stands out in vivid relief. As the film ends, Heathcliff watches young Hareton Earnshaw, no doubt keen to impress the new master, stringing up some puppies from a gatepost in order to watch them die slowly. There’s only one person he could have learned that trick from. The master seems to approve.

Animals have long served Arnold as a way to explore sadism. The dog in Dog (2001), an early short, consumes a man’s dope stash while he’s having sex with his girlfriend, much to her amusement. To revenge himself on her, he kicks the dog to death. From Fish Tank on, however, the omnipresence of animals both within and beyond the immediate narrative action enables her to frame a more far-reaching question about what constitutes cruelty. American Honey – in which the headstrong Star (Sasha Lane) joins a busload of teenage dropouts selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door in towns across the Midwest – incorporates her most extensive and varied bestiary to date. Animals consistently mediate Star’s understanding of and resistance to the motorised call of the wild which fuels the road movie as a genre: Jake (Shia LaBeouf), the mag crew’s top break-dancer and resident shaman, summons her to him by howling like a wolf. Declining to fetishise animals, however, won’t necessarily do them any favours. The only glimpse Star gets of a grown-up future is from an amiable and considerate truck-driver who befriends her when she hitches a lift (they sing along together to Springsteen’s ‘Dream Baby Dream’). The unfathomable dismay which abruptly overwhelms her when she realises that he is shipping cattle to the slaughterhouse is caught beautifully. Cruelty begins to look a lot like life itself; which brings us to Arnold’s most recent film, Cow (2021), a documentary shot intermittently over four years at a medium-sized dairy farm in Kent.

Arnold considered a variety of animal species as possible subjects for an intimate portrait before deciding on the cow, and the dairy cow in particular. Maternity is a favourite theme. Milk (1998), her first short, had been about a woman coming to terms with a miscarriage. Arnold has said that she ‘wanted to show the character and the aliveness of a non-human animal’: the aim being, as in her previous films, to look – in this case, by means of Magda Kowalczyk’s intrepid camerawork – both at and with our heroine. Luma, the lead cow, was apparently chosen on account of her feistiness (that other favourite theme). A dairy cow’s life is a life of cycles: calving, lactation (for about three hundred days), a sixty-day dry period, then the next calving. Its interminable routine is nonetheless punctuated by moments – or episodes – of startling emotional intensity. So birth seems like a logical place for the film to begin. Portraiture doesn’t get much more intimate than the gentle lapping sound Luma makes as she licks her calf clean of amniotic fluid. But everyone and Damien Hirst knows what’s going to happen next: Mother and Child Divided. The palpable distress caused to both mother and child by the child’s removal shortly after birth has long been a prompt to human self-scrutiny. Shakespeare’s Henry VI compares his inability to come to the aid of the Duke of Gloucester to the plight of a cow whose calf has been taken away from her at market. But it isn’t all helplessness. Arnold’s lyricism vividly captures in extensive sequences the sheer delight of cattle released into pasture in spring. One way and another, there’s plenty of pathos to be milked.

Cow is not a mawkish film. Its subject is an animal-machine bred to serve human needs until exhaustion, and then discarded. It has to be in large part an investigation of mechanical procedures which don’t correspond to anything in human experience. Vegans already have a straightforward answer to the question it poses. The omnivore constituency has recently been well served by books which expound the history of dairy farming and explore alternatives to the scaled-up industrial model on which it now largely operates, especially in the United States. So why make a film? ‘Don’t worry Luma, we see you,’ was Arnold’s mantra during the edit. She wants us to see Luma unfailingly, without distraction. Apart from some manipulation of the soundtrack, editorial commentary has been reduced to a bare minimum. There is no attempt to explain, justify or condemn. For basic information about one of the more esoteric procedures featured in the film – the removal by electric hot-iron of a calf’s horns at the stage when the buds from which they will grow still float freely in tissue – I had to rely on a helpful YouTube video posted by someone calling himself the Funky Farmer. Arnold’s Trappist vow of silence creates a kind of anti-pathos: an absolute determination to go on seeing Luma even (or especially) at those moments when there’s really nothing to see in her except an aliveness emptied of character by circumstance.

The film’s finely judged conclusion brings pathos and anti-pathos into clarifying contradiction. Luma is named twice in it: once early on, by way of casual introduction; and then again right at the very end, as she is led away to execution by bolt gun. Arnold has expressed surprise that anyone should have been surprised by this outcome. Luma is by now elderly, by dairy-cow standards, and in poor health. She can barely walk. The film’s final scene is shot as matter-of-factly as the animal. But we’ve come too far with Luma to let her go without complaint. Commemoration by naming is one way to ensure that even the lowliest of fellow creatures has after all been ‘seen’. Cow is Arnold’s ‘Elegy in a Country Cattle-Shed’. I was reminded of Fish Tank. Luma’s time has come. If we cry at her death, as Mia cries at the death of the white horse, we need to know what we’re crying for.