“Donald Trump is going to make punk rock great again,” the mouthy musician Amanda Palmer said after that individual was elected president of the United States for the first time. You think?
In the same year, 2016, the United Kingdom elected to leave the European Union. Nobody suggested that punk would feast on incoming catastrophe, but there was great wailing from the literati.
“I think it’s a self-inflicted wound,” Martin Amis said. “I don’t like the nostalgic utopia.” Ian McEwan described Brexit as “the most pointless, masochistic ambition ever dreamed of in the history of these islands”.
One imagined poets and choreographers collapsing in despair up and down the aisles of north London’s classier off-licences.
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Brexit would now reap the artistic whirlwind. Right? The Europhobic voters of Stoke-on-Trent will feel silly when they hear about that ballet concerning lengthened queues for non-EU passport holders at Florence airport.
Worthwhile anti-Trump culture proved thin on the ground in that president’s opening term. There was even less Brexit-bashing art in the aftermath of “Britain’s fateful decision” (to use the approved cliche). We did get a great many popular – and good – nonfiction books on the mechanics of the referendum, its potential aftermath and its moral implications.
Fintan O’Toole, of this jurisdiction, had a big hit with Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain. Tim Shipman’s All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class did what the title claimed in exhaustive fashion. There was a lot more where those came from. But few were writing operas or novels on the topic. We are still awaiting the first great anti-Brexit protest song.
These thoughts are prompted by the arrival this week of the second sequel to Danny Boyle’s classic zombie flick 28 Days Later. It hardly needs to be said that Alex Garland’s script for 28 Years Later does not halt the violence to ponder article 50 of the Treaty on European Union.
We are dealing in allegory here – an unmistakable and blackly hilarious allegory. The mindless zombies have been driven back to Britain from the Continent. (I didn’t catch if, like the Romans, the rage virus left Ireland uncolonised.) One proud island off the northeast coast has, however, kept the hordes at bay and, in the process, retreated into a class of mid-20th-century patriotic nostalgia.
Boyle intercuts a reading of Rudyard Kipling’s poem Boots with clips from Laurence Oliver’s Henry V. “Gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here!” And so on.
The film-maker confirmed his intentions to El País newspaper. “We haven’t made a political film,” he said. “But we’ve used the current world as a reference, how we behave in it, what cultural legacy we’re going to leave behind. Brexit has constrained us, locked us in, and that’s what 28 Years Later is about.”
A stubborn Mancunian of Irish descent, Boyle will care not a whit if the thumping allegory upsets leavers, not least because it in no way impedes the hurtling progress of the core narrative. He can feel proud of showing how the subject can be addressed without dragging your film into po-faced agitprop.
Why have so few artists attempted anything similar over the past decade? Have a look at Anish Kapoor’s A Brexit, A Broxit, We All Fall Down from 2019. Created for the Guardian newspaper, it works an enormous cleft along the spine of Britain. The meaning is clear – a little too clear for an artist of Kapoor’s subtlety. In 2017 the unavoidable, pseudonymous Banksy delivered a mural showing a sculptor chipping away one star from the EU flag. Not his most affecting piece.
British novelists proved reluctant to engage so directly with the subject. It remains an oddity that Ali Smith’s Autumn, frequently labelled the first post-Brexit novel, was published just four months after the vote. Alex Preston, writing in the Financial Times, marvelled “that writing this good could have come so fast”. No deluge of Brexit fiction flowed into the succeeding abyss of negotiation.
Plenty of films seemed to offer comment on the Brexit mindset. You could see Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk making the case for either side. The triumphant Paddington 2 played as an argument for diversity and inclusivity. But 28 Years Later really does feel like the closest thing to mainstream cinematic engagement with Brexit since the country voted on June 23rd, 2016.
Maybe the argument against feels too much an obsession of elite London dinner parties. Maybe the wider subject is too complex to address as allegory or side narrative. Most likely audiences (and creators) just got sick of it long before the documents were finally signed.
It’s not Vietnam. Nobody was going to make an Apocalypse Now about Brexit. Though Boyle has come closer than seemed possible.
