Remember when Pat Buchanan “discovered” unemployment in New Hampshire during the 1992 presidential campaign? And shocked George Bush and the political press by flirting with 40 percent of the GOP primary vote? Outside shuttered shoe factories in the snow, he suddenly understood the political blind spot among cocooned journalists and free-trade intellectuals — both liberal and conservative — back in Washington. In a governmental capital that manufactures nothing heavier than hot air, many seldom if ever encountered discarded assembly-line workers. The cultural elitism of limousine liberals was matched by the technical elitism of limousine laissez- fairistes.
Being Pat Buchanan, he overstated his case at the time (even some journalists and intellectuals felt job insecurity during that most white- collar of recessions), but he had a point. Too many in Washington, cloistered from the local aftershocks of rapid technological change and capital flight, forget that unemployment, even temporary, is hell.
And they keep forgetting. The biggest surprise of this fall’s political season was the failure of President Clinton and Speaker Gingrich to gain congressional approval of ” fast-track” trade authority, which would have allowed the president to negotiate trade pacts that cannot be rewritten by Congress. Beltway journalists, pundits, and free-market mandarins underestimated the grass- roots fear and anger provoked by fast track.
Coincidentally or not, the biggest surprise of the fall movie season has been The Full Monty, a bittersweet tale of British steelworkers left for scrap when their steel mill in England’s blighted industrial north shuts down. Those mandarins surprised by the failure of fast track might want to catch up with this word-of-mouth British movie smash. Sometimes it takes an imported movie with a cast speaking barely recognizable English to explain the pockets of dread and distress scattered through their own backyards.
Rich in serious themes handled with the deftest of comic touches, The Full Monty has surpassed Four Weddings and a Funeral in England as the top-grossing British movie ever — and become a very profitable film. Made for $ 3.5 million, it has grossed more than $ 133 million worldwide, $ 31 million of that in America. And that’s before a planned Oscar promotional blitz for the film, directed by Peter Cattaneo and written by Simon Beaufoy. Not bad for six welders and a funeral for British heavy industry.
When the steel mill in deindustrializing Sheffield shuts down, Gaz and his newly unemployed mates learn that losing a job means losing more than a paycheck. Gaz, unable to maintain child-support payments to his ex-wife, faces the loss of visitation rights to his son. His overweight friend Dave becomes impotent.
Plant foreman Gerald exudes pride in his petit-bourgeois superiority to the working class boys on the shop floor. He confronts unemployment with such a stiff upper lip that he is unable to tell his wife the bad news — for six months.
Scrawny, pale, red-headed Lomper is jobless, friendless, and suicidal. In a conversation with Gaz and Dave — characteristic of the movie’s feeling for the comedy in despair — he eliminates possible methods of suicide one by one. Jump off a bridge? Nope, afraid of heights. Drowning? Can’t swim. Okay, proposes Dave, just have a mate run you over with his car. Haven’t got a mate, Lomper objects. “I’d mow you down sooner than look atcha,” offers Dave.
In a city where the working-class ideal of masculinity is dying along with the steel industry, the women are flocking to a nightclub offering a travesty of masculinity, a revue of Chippendale-style male strippers. At first, Gaz is contemptuous of the spectacle: “Some poof gettin’ his kit off.” Then he learns the revue’s nightly take is ten thousand pounds. Soon he is assembling his own chorus line of male strippers out of Sheffield’s reserve army of the unemployed.
One problem: Gaz and his friends aren’t built like Chippendale dancers. Okay, two problems: They can’t dance either — except for the man named Horse, who knows the Funky Chicken but has a “dodgy hip.” If they want to top the sculpted pros, they’ll have to go “the full monty” (British for ” the whole nine yards”). In other words, they will have to bare all — caboodle and kit too. In a way, they have learned Adam Smith’s secret of comparative advantage. (While there are some rear-view shots of male caboodle, this is not Boogie Nights; the kits are left to the imagination.)
Make no mistake: the movie’s politics are leftish and luddite, straight out of Britain’s Labour party before Tony Blair. Robert Carlyle, who stars as Gaz, is a former union organizer attracted to the role by the film’s anti- Thatcherism. The politics and theme of The Full Monty are similar to those in the American Roger & Me, Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary about the effects of closing a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan.
In spirit, however, the two are worlds apart. The American film was maliciously satirical — not just toward the board-room mercenaries who closed the plant, but toward the parochial boosterism and polyester values of a Midwest factory town. The British film is gentle, genial, empathic. The story-telling techniques of Roger & Me — the video stalking of GM chairman Roger Smith and Moore’s sardonic voice-over — were self-infatuated; the documentary’s real star was Michael Moore’s ideological self-love. The camera is self- effacing in The Full Monty, and the reflexive protectionism built into the fictional story’s premise quickly recedes in favor of quirky, mostly believable character development.
The film’s concerns are not limited to class politics. Its subordinate themes revolve around gender politics, and there is some table-turning sexual humor. In the course of conditioning for their big night, for example, the men pass around a girlie magazine. When Lomper naively disparages one girlie’s breast size, Dave has an alarming thought. Objectification cuts both ways, and they’re about to strip in public. “What if four hundred women say, ‘That one’s fat, that one’s old, and that one’s a pigeon-chested tosser?'” Funny in context, if a little predictably feminist.
But the movie’s allegiances are not always so predictable. Screenwriter Beaufoy seems to have figured out that class politics and cultural politics sometimes clash: A class liberal can be a cultural conservative. In fact, a big question posed by the movie is the one that feminism never answers: What happens to men, especially blue-collar men, in a postindustrial era of sexual equality in the workplace? Confronted with the prospect of economic obsolescence and social obsolescence at the same time, they are in for some uncomfortable self-examination at a minimum. What is their function in the family, exactly? Home-security guards? On-site, residential maintenance men? Stud animals?
Before I am lynched with an Adam Smith necktie, let me stipulate that the economic benefits of free trade in expanding exports and lower prices to consumers outweigh the costs. We owe everything from low inflation to energy-efficient American cars in some part to lively international economic competition.
But the politics of free trade are counterintuitive: Its benefits are diffuse, while its costs are highly concentrated and painful. A constituent who has lost his job harvesting flowers to duty-free Colombian competition is apt to punish a congressman who has voted for a free-trade measure. But a constituent who is paying slightly less for flowers imported from Colombia isn’t even likely to notice, much less to say thank you to a free-trader on election day with flowers — or a vote.
The chattering class, especially its laissez-faire section, is liable to underestimate this emotional discrepancy between the winners and losers in international economic competition. Backbenchers in the House of Representatives who read their constituent mail and run for reelection every two years are finely attuned to it, and that’s part of the reason fast track will have to wait till next year.
The Full Monty is a timely reminder of how tough economic change is on those caught unprepared. Before trying for fast track again, it wouldn’t hurt the cause if free traders adjusted their rhetoric to accommodate some benevolent acknowledgment of those caught flat-footed by economic change. It is possible to cheer for the creativity of capitalism without standing aloof from its destructive side- effects.
Of course, aloofness is only one expression of elitism. Condescension is another. Pat Buchanan and other protectionists should not condescend to the victims of capitalist change: Even victims can improvise, adapt, and overcome — and go the full monty with senses of humor intact.
Daniel Wattenberg, a contributing editor to George, last wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about the novelist Anne Rice.
