David Hare and his play writing colleagues, weaned on 1960s British university radicalism, have continued the expression of chronic social discontent begun so scathingly by John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger. But in an effort to spread their message to a broader audience, these writers have been working increasingly in the mechanical media. The primary distinguishing characteristic of Hare’s films and plays lies in his insistence on linking political and ethical decline to his characters’ personal lives. To understand how Hare accomplishes this connection onscreen, it is necessary to look closely at his habit of placing his characters in recognizable genres; they operate as psychologically-rounded people and as types. The nostalgia inherent in using established genres—and often American ones at that—is a sign both of Hare’s willingness to break from the leftist pack and of his increasing frustration with the ineffectiveness of sixties-style radicalism in the face of England’s political reactionism. Tracing his use of genre is an important first step to understanding Hare’s aesthetic and philosophical development.

All but two of Hare’s films exploit cinematic genres. The narratives of two of Hare’s television films, Dreams of Leaving (1980) and Heading Home (1991), however, are based on the literary genre of the Bildungsroman—the novel of development.¹ The Bildungsroman form allows Hare to link personal decision-making with political possibilities, because the idealism of his youthful characters corresponds to that of their eras. Although the genre originated in a cultural philosophy which assumed the desirability of the maturing individual’s incorporation into social institutions. Martin Swales has convincingly argued that from the beginning it also questioned such incorporation through ironized endings.

Hare employs the genre, but in the ironic way described by Swales. Both films follow the stories of young people newly-arrived in the big city of London. William in Dreams of Leaving and Janetta in Heading Home are searching for fulfilling careers and personal relationships and face climactic choices in their lives, but neither finds a satisfying vocation as a result of his or her decisions. Both drift into compromise and unhappiness, their maturity marked by greater age but not greater knowledge. Looking back over the results of his youthful decisions, William expresses a despair that is deeply felt but finally incurable: “Our lives dismay us. We know no comfort. … We have dreams of leaving. Everyone I know” (41). Janetta Wheatland similarly guides us through her past from the viewpoint of 1988 and expresses the same bewildered sadness about the central relationship in her life: “I understand to this day that people like Leonard do not speak their feelings. But I still to this day am not wholly sure why” (65).

While this genre allows Hare to link his characters’ lack of development to his society’s, the central problem Hare faces when working with a genre that was originally literary is that its narrative convention approaches first-person even if it is literally third-person. This makes social criticism difficult since such criticism will always be seen as rooted in the perhaps-idiosyncratic protagonist’s mind and not in an objective material condition. As Franco Moretti notes in his study of the Bildungsroman in Western culture, this focus can be frustrating.

As a rule, the classical Bildungroman has the reader perceive the text through the eyes of the protagonist. … The reader’s vision hinges then on that of the protagonist: he identifies with the hero, sharing the partiality and individuality of his reactions. But—at a certain point—he wishes to free himself from this position, because he discovers that the protagonist’s viewpoint, contrary to his hopes, does not allow him to see, or not enough, since it is too often mistaken.

(56)

Hare transfers a literary narrative to a new form—film—but he also uses the particular premises of the mechanical media to transform this genre, by simultaneously suggesting and refining this focus on a single character’s mind. Using film rather than the stage, Hare can exploit the intermediary and directed nature of the camera. Both these works are filmed from the point of view of their main characters, yet the camera inevitably includes the world outside the protagonists’ psyches. As Thomas Schatz remarks in his discussion of Lady in the Lake (1946), because it is simultaneously personal and public, a subjective camera is uniquely qualified to respond to the frustrations of the first-person fictional narrator as expressed by Moretti:

While this technique clearly is designed to draw the viewer into the closest possible identification with the [hero] and his attitude, its ultimate effect is essentially the opposite. Instead of strengthening our empathy for the hero, it serves to further distance us from him, repeatedly reminding us that his perceptions are radically different from ours.

(138)

In Hare’s use of the subjective camera and voice-overs, the perceptions that are thus distanced concern English political history: both films are set during periods important to Hare’s generation and to England as a whole. In Dreams of Leaving, the flashback is set in 1971, and the framing “present” is 1980. William was born the same year as Hare himself, 1947, and speaks for the generation that was caught up by the political promise of the 1960s, which began to turn into disillusionment in the succeeding decade. Nineteen-eighty, the framing year, was one year after Margaret Thatcher’s first government, an event representing for Hare and his playwriting colleagues the metaphorical, if not the actual, nadir in English political morality. In Heading Home, Janetta is 23 when she arrives in London in the winter of 1946–1947, two years after the election of the post-war Labour government that was expected to institute a variety of social reforms based on the Beveridge Report.² From the perspective of 1988, by which time Thatcher was in her ninth year as Prime Minister, Janetta sees both her life and England in the post-war years as idyllic but also doomed. Her youth, like William’s, corresponded to a period in English history which held great potential for change, but which ultimately led to disillusionment and cynicism.

The problems faced by William and Janetta, and by extension progressive England, derive precisely from that aspect of their personalities which can be actualized on film but only described and suggested in a novel: the way they see their societies and other people. Through the subjective camera lens as guided by voice-over, we see as they see, but not completely; the camera always picks up figures on the fringe which are not quite incorporated into the protagonists’ subjective viewpoints. We are led to look for their development through the narrative’s evocation of the typical Bildungroman, but when this development fails to materialize, we begin to reconsider the accuracy of their viewpoints. William’s attitude toward his profession and Caroline, the object of this obsessed gaze, is revealed to be superficial and self-serving. Janetta’s view of Leonard and Ian, her lovers, and the spaces they represent and which in turn represent post-war England, plainly has been informed by her misguided desire for simple choices and clearcut rules for behavior. Both mistaken viewpoints are linked to mistaken social attitudes by the dual action of the subjective camera. While these films are deeply personal and individual, as is appropriate for Bildungromane, they resonate within the terms the camera dictates to apply to their respective historical periods as well.

DREAMS OF LEAVING (1980)

Dreams of Leaving was broadcast as a BBC TV “Play for Today” in January, 1980. A young university-educated journalist, William, comes to London from Wolverhampton to make it big and meets Caroline, a stunning, “classless” young woman of shifting occupations (13). William is immediately attracted to Caroline after watching her across an empty nighttime newsroom, and the main part of the plot concerns his ardent pursuit and her manipulative and unexplained refusal to sleep with him. Like the typical Bildungsroman protagonist, William begins his adventures with naive and misguided hopes: “at the time I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know if it was breakfast or lunch” (11). In voice-overs at the beginning and end of the film, he reminisces regretfully about the summer with Caroline, concluding finally that her seeming emotional independence was actually masking a vague fear which he was too naive to see, and implicitly linking her fears and eventual madness with the “dismay” he sees in the lives of “everyone” around him. Just what she was afraid of, and what causes the dismay, he cannot articulate. While William does progress from a state of innocence to a state of experience, his experience only brings him despair and compromise, not self-knowledge. He sees himself, and we see him, as happier when be was innocent. William is unable to learn from his experiences with Caroline and with his profession because of the way that his society has taught him to see. Instead, he succumbs to the moral and emotional malaise around him; he “sells out.”

Hare uses a subjective camera and voice-over both to suggest the narrow focus on a single character of the typical Bildungsroman and to reveal the way society, and William, see women. The non-naturalistic style, on the other hand, prevents us from accepting the film’s viewpoint as documentary truth. The claustrophobic feeling of this film, which drove many of its reviewers to irritable reactions, is due to the way the camera mimics William’s obsessed gaze.³ Our awareness of the camera as representing a charged viewpoint accomplishes the filmic equivalent of the Alienation Effect, as we realize that this particular viewpoint is not the only one possible.⁴

One way Hare denaturalizes his camera work is by exploiting the decreased sense of depth onscreen to create specifically aestheticized visual tableaux. In Scene 17, for instance, Caroline shows William the Viewing Room at the gallery where she has her first job. They enter a small, velvet-curtained room with an easel and three chairs in its center. She walks in first “and stands by the easel” (16). She points out to William how the room works: “The customer sits down. He’s alone with the painting. … Once he sits down it takes nerve to get up” (16). In the small vignette she narrates, her position near the easel makes her stand in the place of the object of art which the customer, significantly called “he,” has come to see. In the next scene, in which they are looking at the gallery’s store, Caroline “pulls out a canvas on a long rail, disappearing behind it” (16). Onscreen, this has the striking effect of turning the actress, Kate Nelligan, into a painting with legs. Visually, she becomes the equivalent of an object d’art.

William’s artificial viewpoint is firmly contextualized and plainly typical. The clearest example of this contextualization occurs in Scene 68. Four men are playing poker under an Anglepoise lamp: William, his neighbor Andrew, his coworker Xan, and a newcomer named Robert. Hare uses focused overhead lighting to concentrate our attention on his characters’ faces and to imply an emptiness beyond. The air is cloudy with cigarette smoke and the game is intense; it is a stereotypically masculine scene. In revenge for losing a close hand to William, Robert turns the conversation to Caroline, with whom he had been involved. “Everyone always used to say she was ruthless. But I never minded. She was so good in bed,” he asserts, puffing on the rather unsubtly-Freudian cheroot in his mouth (33). In response, William suggests they raise the stakes: “Why don’t we play for a bit more this time?” (33). The strutting of the poker game represents a particularly retrograde maleness still operating in Hare’s society. It reminds us that William participates in this degrading attitude toward women, in which their sexual abilities are used as coins in a poker game. Significantly, this attitude is invisible to William himself, who cannot see beyond Robert’s insult to his own masculinity.

Hare also contextualizes William’s viewpoint by making William a journalist. The irony of William’s artificial gaze resides in the fact that he has as his professional goal the transparent description of events, yet his primary impulse is to mold the experiences he witnesses into culturally endorsed artifacts. His complaint against his own profession, sparked by and linked with his developing (non)relationship with Caroline, is precisely that it does not wrestle vigorously enough with its subject. In crisis, William tells the assembled staff of his newspaper:

I walk down Fleet Street, I look, I go into the bars. There you’ll find … the retreat into alcohol … the smell of bad conscience heavy in the air. [Pause] Why do journalists all become cynics? Is it really the things that they see? Isn’t it more likely … the cause of their unhappiness … is something to do with a loss in themselves?⁵

(32)

The expectations that viewers bring to the Bildungsroman, which the film has worked to arouse up to this point, suggest that William’s speech will mark the turning point in his moral development. One of two things should happen here: either this speech will reform the journalists around him, infusing them with a new passion and idealism, or William will leave the unrepentant profession and find a career which he can pursue with integrity. The irony is that nothing and no one changes. We discover later that William stays with the paper and becomes a favorite of his editor. The paper, in turn, continues its unchallenged and unchallenging reporting.

William’s continuing desire to reform moves from his professional to his emotional life. When he finally breaks from Caroline, we expect him to progress toward maturity. Yet his own response is to become even more “depressed,” and to begin to incorporate himself into the profession he had just denounced. Caroline, in turn, starves herself into madness and is committed to Springfield Mental Hospital. In the closing scenes, we find ourselves with William in 1980. He has settled into middle-class respectability, having married and worked himself up to a desk job at the newspaper. In his closing voice-over. William’s interpretation of the events we have witnessed also reveals how he has made Caroline into his own image, for his remarks about her echo precisely our view of him, especially when we remember that both his view of Caroline and our view of him are through specifically focused lenses, metaphorical or actual. “What I always took to be her self-confidence, now seems a way she had of hiding her fears” (40). William’s “I haven’t done badly” holds its own corresponding fear: “Our lives dismay us”; William’s seeming confidence hides his own fear of entrapment and compromise (40).

Perhaps the pronoun shift in this closing voice-over is our clue that these remarks apply not just to Caroline and William but also to their, and Hare’s, generation. Except for one sentence,. William speaks in the first person singular until his closing lines: “I haven’t done badly”: “I’ve found great happiness in having children”; “Obviously Caroline is much with me. I mean it’s something I shan’t ever forget. …” But at the point when he proposes to speak personally—“I can only tell you what I think for myself”—he actually speaks for everyone: “Our lives dismay us. We know no comfort. [Pause] We have dreams of leaving. Everyone I know” (41). The “we” echoes the only previous use of the plural pronoun in the section: “We’ve always tried to keep an open marriage.” Our “open marriage,” therefore, is linked verbally and perhaps causally to our “dismay.” William’s justification of his lack of commitment, seen as typical, prevents him from establishing the emotional integrity that seems to be what is needed to give him and his generation “comfort.”

HEADING HOME (1991)

Shown on January 13, 1991, Heading Home was the premiere broadcast of the season for the BBC’s Screen 2 film series. Like William, Janetta Wheatland is a Bildungsroman protagonist who ultimately cannot fulfill our expectations. Twenty-three and freshly arrived in London during the coldest winter of the century, 1946–47, she meets and moves in with Leonard, a poet who works by day for the BBC. Their relationship remains platonic until she takes the initiative after meeting Ian Tyson (played by the ever-ominous Gary Oldman), a sleazy but energetic slumlord who later also becomes her lover. Although he told her they should have an open relationship, Leonard leaves Janetta after she spends three days with Ian. She soon loses Ian as well when his competition with a rival slumlord turns violent and he jettisons her for her own safety. Forty years later, Janetta looks back at that winter and the following summer and regretfully concludes that she had always loved Leonard and that her relationship with him was her only chance at happiness.

Like William and the conventional Bildungsroman hero, Janetta begins her narrative with few plans, propelled by little more than a sense that the capital represents opportunity. She applies for a job at a library out of a vague sense that it would be nice to be around people who read. When her interviewer asks her, “What is your background?” She answers, “Oh, I don’t have any” (11). But Janetta does not gain self-knowledge. Her voice-over as a mature woman reveals her to be just as bewildered and hurt as she was when young, and just as unaware of the reasons for her pain, and yet she cannot relive her life. Hare is again manipulating his convention to raise and then subvert our expectations that his main character will progress, and again, this character’s failure is associated with a larger failure in her society. Heading Home differs from Dreams of Leaving, however, in that the association between personal and social failure is not revealed to be a cause-and-effect relationship.

On first inspection, the film’s love triangle creates sharply differentiated dichotomies associated with Ian and Leonard between which Janetta must choose. The dichotomies are created visually through the camera’s focus on space, as well as verbally in the plot and especially in the voice-over. Space is important thematically because the film is at least partially about the future of England’s urban and rural spaces after the war. Janetta, as she directs the camera’s attention through her voice-over, associates Leonard with literary pubs, cramped friendly flats, and untouched nature: Old England, able to adjust better to wartime privations than to post-war boom. Ian, on the other hand, is most at home in huge empty industrial warehouse, jerry-built flats, and smoky clubs filled with emigrés.

As suggested by the title, the film is especially concerned with what sort of home space England will provide. Space, particularly that in which people live, also works as a metaphor for the emotional choice between Leonard and Ian that Janetta faces, as well as the economic choices confronting England after the war. With huge popular support, the Labour government had an opportunity literally to rebuild England and especially London in a new way that was less class-divided. Ian’s response to the rebuilding is amoral: he doesn’t think, he acts, by buying run-down properties, subdividing them, and renting them out. He sees the situation purely as an opportunity to make money. Leonard’s response, however, is to think first: “People claim poetry doesn’t do anything. They say, what does it get done? … Isn’t it weak to sit around thinking and writing when there’s been so much destruction in the world? … I say no. It’s strength. It’s true strength” (52). But the war between these two responses to space and what it represents will be won by Ian’s kind. When Janetta returns forty years later to a beach she visited with both men. “It was bricked over. The bay has gone. England’s bricked over. Just like Ian always said it would be” (64).

The dichotomized philosophical choices ostensibly proposed by Heading Home are questioned by the fact that they are based on a specific person’s point of view at a specific time. Janetta has her own reasons for wanting to see that events forced her to make the choice between Ian and Leonard she finally did make. Looking back on her life, she can be reassured that she chose to become involved with Ian because he was part of an energetic new England which was replacing the old, and not for the less gratifying reason that she was incapable of understanding or appreciating Leonard. In her view, choosing between two men is purely an intellectual puzzle; she is incapable of acting on her emotions. As in Dreams, Heading Home’s central character is trapped in a flawed way of seeing which prevents her from reaching the self-knowledge expected of a hero in a Bildungsroman. The super-narrative commentary is suggested in a stage direction which equates Leonard and Ian: “IAN is sitting at a table, right by the filing cabinet, his back to us—just as LEONARD’s back has been to us previously” (40). It is also suggested in shots throughout the film in which we see Janetta lying against a pillow, but cannot initially determine if she is in bed with Ian or Leonard.

Like William’s, Janetta’s response to the break up of a relationship is emotional numbness: “I resumed life. I went back to the library. For years I worked as if in a dream” (64). Rather than “growing up” and accepting the strength of her own emotions, she retreats into a conventional marriage with a man who later dies of cancer. His death leaves no impression on her: “I mean no disrespect to his memory when I say, thirty years later, his death affects me less than the events I have described” (64). Janetta’s emotional numbness is implicitly linked with the disappearance of England’s natural spaces. At the end of the film, as we see shots of pristine meadows and hills, Janetta’s voice-over explains. “There used to be spaces. You took them for granted. In England, there were views” (64).⁶ In losing Leonard, Janetta has also lost England’s beautiful open countryside. It has become “bricked over,” just like her emotions. In the last shot of the film, the camera heads “out at high speed across the sea, skimming, like a low bird, just above the level of the water” (66). The shot implies that Janetta has not been able to find her home except in flights of memory. The film ends with a reference to her own death: “These events, ”, detain me and me only. No one else remembers them. … But of course I shall not remember them for long. (Fade to black.)” (66).

This later work is similar to the earlier in its narrative patterns and guided camera, yet it is much bleaker, and, perhaps, less successful in linking its central character to her society. While Janetta’s simplistic dichotomization of Leonard and Ian mimics her society’s attitude toward the importance of economic development over the environment, it is not caused by that attitude the way William’s view of Caroline was caused by pervasive male attitudes toward women. The beach and Ian’s tenements become little more than symbols for Janetta’s two options. We can see the flawed reasoning that led her to choose Ian, and can infer that this was the same reasoning that opened the gates that let the barbarian developers in to England’s South Coast, but Janetta is not sufficiently involved in land development to establish any kind of causal link. And there are no other characters or background context to imply the link either, as there are in Dreams.

The emptiness of the final shot is a fitting representation of Hare’s hesitation in this film to anchor his character’s unhappiness in a specific social or economic situation. Janetta’s disassociation from her society could be read as the result of an attempt at a feminine version of the male Bildungsroman: since as a woman she cannot participate in social power, she is depicted as developing outside the realms of that power.⁷ But Janetta’s development, or lack thereof, follows William’s closely. Both face decisions that have primarily to do with sex, and both envision their lives in isolation. The difference between Dreams of Leaving and Heading Home is not a function of their protagonists’ genders; it reflects, rather, Hare’s rejection of purely materialist psychology as sufficient to explain human behavior in the face of his country’s embrace of Thatcherism. His recent stageplays, such as The Secret Rapture (1988), and Racing Demon (1990), and his film Strapless (1989), all depart from earlier work in their grounding of character in intimate psychology rather than in social pressures. Comparing two films with similar genre roots enables us to isolate this shift in the thinking of one of England’s foremost contemporary writers.

Notes

1. Specialists continue to debate definitions of this genre. A useful recent collection of commentary is James Hardin, ed., Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman (Columbia: U of S. Carolina P, 1991). Most contributors in this collection propose limiting the definition to novels explicitly based on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and expressing a positive belief in the benefits of cultural assimilation. My use of the term is broader, to refer to novels which follow the protagonist from inexperience to knowledge. It is this broader definition which is used by feminist critics in their examinations of female Bildungsromane.

2. Hare is also working with an historical period important to his most famous play, Plenty (1978). Plenty’s protagonist, Susan Traherne, tries to relive the idealism she discovered during the war as a French Resistance agent, but becomes increasingly disgusted with post-war England’s social stasis. 1947 shows her budding disillusionment. See Scene 4. Plenty (New York: New American Library, 1978).

3. Possibly because Dreams was broadcast on television, there were only four published reviews in the major papers and journals. Peter Fiddick’s reaction was typical. “How early, and how strongly, do you actually find yourself wanting to knock their heads together….” See his review in the Guardian 18 Jan. 1980: 9. See also Ian McEwan, Times Literary Supplement 25 Jan. 1980:87; Julian Barnes, New Statesman 25 Jan. 1980; and Michael Ratcliffe,. Times 18 Jan. 1980.

4. Brecht defines the Alienation Effect in a number of essays included in Brecht on Theatre, (trans. John Willett, New York: Hill and Wang, 1964) most notably in “The Street Scene.” Film’s special applicability is discussed in “The Film, the Novel and Epic Theatre” (47–51). “This apparatus [film] can be used better than almost anything else to supersede the old kind of untechnical, anti-technical ‘glowing’ art, with its religious links” (48). Critics as early as Rudolf Arnheim in 1933 observed the effects of given camera angles in terms that are strikingly Brechtian. See Film as Art (Berkeley: U of Cal Press, 1957) 44.

5. William’s diatribe echoes Hare’s own complaint against journalism. In “A Lecture Given at King’s College, Cambridge.” Hare told his undergraduate audience, “the journalist throws off a series of casual and half-baked propositions, ill-considered, dashed off, entertainment pieces to put forward a point of view which may or may not amuse, which may or may not be lasting, which may or may not be true.” This essay was printed as an addendum to Licking Hitler in the 1978 Faber and Faber edition. When it was reprinted as “The Play is in the Air” in the collection of Hare’s essays called Writing Left-Handed. Hare diluted his complaint by changing “the journalist” to “the bad journalist,” and “throws” to “may throw” (26). See Writing Left-Handed (London: Faber and Faber, 1991).

6. In the Faber and Faber text, the directions tell us that “We begin to travel now along the front of the South Coast, along endless rows of Acacia Avenues, identical houses replacing identical houses” (64). In the broadcast version, we never see these “Acacia Avenues.”

7. Because women’s social opportunities are beginning to catch up with men’s, the Bildungsroman has been called “the most salient form of literature’” for feminists (quoted in Voyage In, 13). While Hare has always written strong female parts, Janetta does not fit the paradigm described by the editors of The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development for female protagonists of Bildungsromane. This paradigm insists on the particular social obstacles facing women which continue to make their fictional development different from men’s. To the Voyage In editors, this results in a stress on collective rather than individual experience, in a single illuminating “awakening” rather than gradual development, and an emphasis on sexual identity. Strangely, it is Caroline in Dreams who most closely fits this paradigm, and she is seen almost solely through William’s eyes. Voyage In’s premise that women’s experience is essentially different from men’s and results in a different concept of personal development is, in Hare’s film, precisely the same as the male premise that has damaged relations between men and women for centuries. It is, ironically, the self-consciously male dominated Dreams of Leaving that does more to reveal the social forces blocking women’s equality in twentieth-century England. See Abel, Elizabeth, and Marianne Hirsch, eds. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (Hanover: UP of New England, 1983).

Works Cited

Abel, Elizabeth, and Marianne Hirsch, eds. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. Hanover: U P of New England, 1983.

Hare, David. Dreams of Leaving. London: Faber and Faber, 1980.

———. Heading Home. Printed with Wetherby and Dreams of Leaving. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.

———. Writing Left-Handed. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.

Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 1987.

Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1981.

Swales, Martin. “Irony and the Novel Reflections on the German Bildungsroman” in Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Ed. James Hardin. Columbia, S.C.: U of S. Carolina P, 1991, 46–68.