Rita and Sue Escaping Constraints of Class and Gender Backgrounds - Essay Example

 According to W.G. Runciman there is a British underclass below the working classes of skilled and unskilled manual workers, a term which ‘stands not for a group or category of workers systematically disadvantaged within the labor-market but for those members of British society whose roles place them more or less permanently at the economic level where benefits are paid by the state to those unable to participate in the labor-market at all … They are typically the long-term unemployed’. (Runciman 1990). Films of the 1980s depict concern about the quality of working class life. They focus on characters who wish to escape from the constraints of class and gender backgrounds as what Rita and Sue seems to be doing in Rita, Sue and Bob, Too. The film’s opening sequence show’s Sue’s father swaggering from drunkenness on his way home. Meeting Sue just before he approaches the house, he questions the girl as to where she was going and admonishes her not to be out all night. Sue tells him to mind his own business and that she’ll be back when she wants. This first instance immediately shows escapist behavior for Sue who disregards male dominance and asserts feminism. “The changing nature of work… the introduction of new technologies and the subsequent deskilling of traditional male jobs… have undermined traditional working-class masculinities.” (Rutherford 1988) The next scene is Sue and Rita going to Bob’s house to baby-sit. Also early in the firm, Sue works for a taxi company where she meets Aslam. Again these depict the feminine response to the changing economic and social circumstances of the period. Instead of females staying at home and males going out to work, Rita and Sue are escaping the traditional gender expectation that they assume domestic roles. In another scene, Sue derides Aslam. She first insinuates that being Pakki or Asian is beneath her class, and then makes up her mind that since Aslam is a man he’d probably be no different from all other men, which passes judgment on the growing emasculation of the males of her time. The use of profanity throughout the film is another form of escape. Vulgar language is freely used by males and females alike. For the females, use of such language is gender freedom from previous eras when men silence women. The girls’ sauciness is also a form of rebellion against conformity, an underclass characteristic which have tends to prevent its members from rising above their class. Very prominent in the story and on which the plot revolves is the sexual relationship between Bob and Rita and Sue, including the minor details it involves. The entire series of sequences portrays escape for the two female lead players from their underclass which is characterized by unemployment, work devaluation, welfare dependence, broken families, de-stabilization of the male-breadwinner role, poor education, poverty, criminality and disadvantages in housing. Having fun by just getting a lift or a drive in Bob’s car, baby-sitting in a middle-class house expensively decorated and furnished, with nice lawns and open spaces, enjoying a rock video on a comfortable sofa, going to the nightclub, many meetings in not very popular public places, reveling in dancing to Black Laces’s Gang Bang without a care in the world, are all forms of escape for Rita and Sue. Contrast Rita and Sue’s squalid housing against Bob’s relatively affluent middle-class home. By simply being in Bob’s house, the two girls experience a different world and escape their own. Getting a lift, going for a ride, listening to the radio in Bob’s car, all pass time away from the urban decay of their Bradford Buttershaw Estate. Going to the nightclub and many other public places, watching Black Lace and dancing to their tune would all not be affordable in the girls’ current status. But being in a relationship with Bob has provided them many new experiences and opportunities for escaping their realities, albeit temporarily. From what the story portrays the ultimate escape from both gender and class backgrounds is the two girls’ sexual relationship with Bob. They just simply wanted to have fun, to take their lives into their own hands and get what they wanted out of it, instead of succumbing to apathy and squalor. Having a dirty and sleazy romp with an affluent man was just like being middle-class themselves, more so since the real missus wasn’t getting any of it. Each girl losing her virginity is another form of escape. And persistently asking Bob if there will be a jump each night indicates that this escape form is effective and they wanted more of it or for it to last longer. Rita and Sue arguing who should go first with Bob, Rita complaining about the length of time it was taking to deflower Sue, Rita demanding equal time with Bob, Sue disagreeing with the heroine who dances on broken glass in a film she watches with Aslam, all are assertions of each one’s self, unlike the resigned an unaspirational attitude exhibited by members of their underclass. Rita’s getting pregnant and moving in with Bob is like a coup de grace to end all suffering. And finally, Sue joining Rita and Bob at the end, although unrealistic, defines the final escape. “Their taking over of Bob’s home has freed them from the oppressiveness of their own domestic backgrounds and from Sue’s imprisonment at Aslam’s sister’s.” (Dunbar 1986) According to S. Hall, Margaret Thatcher’s goal when she was in power was “to transform society by creating a new common sense based on the market, on distinctions between the productive and the unproductive, private and public, wealth creating and wealth consuming, and on the privileging of freedom over equality.” (Hall 1988) It is noteworthy that the strongest opposition to this ideology came from the realm of literature and film. One such work is Andrea Dunbar’s Rita, Sue and Bob, Too. Thatcher’s policies benefited the small business and financial sectors, rather than the working class. But Thatcher needed some working-class support for her policies to work. To accomplish this she constructed two different and incompatible positions. Her first position was for workers to prove themselves patriotic, they should be loyal to their wealth-creating employer rather than to the trade union movement. The other position was an invitation to working people to participate in entrepreneurship, to seek out or create jobs in the private service economy; to buy their council houses, to purchase shares in one of the privatized state monopolies or by seizing opportunities provided by profit-sharing schemes. Those who rejected Thatcher’s positions were practically erased from the landscape and excluded from the one nation that Thatcher wanted to create. In opposition, the creative arts through literature and film, like Rita, Sue and Bob, Too, instead of obliterating the unemployed, put them at the center of the working-class. “By identifying unemployment as the typical fate of the working class in a Conservative Britain,… one may ask serious questions about the social justice and human cost of Thatcherite policies.” (Monaghan 2001) Because of the incompatible Thatcherite positions, instead of finding new opportunities, the working class lost confidence in securing jobs which created more than purely economic results. Jobless males lost their self-esteem which led to a breakdown in family relationships and class solidarity, as is depicted in Rita, Sue and Bob, Too. The combination of unemployment and alcoholism has turned Sue’s father into impotence, no longer able to command respect from his wife or daughter. In the scene with Rita and Sue leaving their block of flats in Buttershaw and cutting to another scene showing them striding to a more well-to-do middle-class neighborhood, the visual disparity between the have’s and have not’s is clearly shown, hammering the nail on Thatcher’s two nation policy, and encouraging attitudes of escaping from the constraints of underclass realities. The effects of Thatcherism were dramatic. According to a study by Iverson and Wren in 1998, “all available measures of wage inequality show that the U.K. now exhibits levels of wage inequality and private service sector growth comparable to those of North America. It is also the only country in the study that has exhibited a decline in public sector service employment in the last decade. However, these benefits must be weighed against the costs incurred, not just in terms of wage inequality, but also in increased labor market insecurity due to cut-backs in workers’ rights. The simultaneous achievement of budgetary restraint and employment growth in the U.K. was paid for by a deepening of class divisions. These social costs were ultimately translated into political ones for the Conservative Party, which was voted out of office in April 1997.” (Iverson, Wren 1998) Works Cited Dunbar, A. “Rita, Sue and Bob, Too.” 1986. Hall, S. “The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso, 1988. Iverson, T. Wren, A. “Equality, Employment, and Budgetary Restraint: The Trilemma of the Service Economy” Johns Hopkins University Press. 1998. Marshall, G. “Underclass.” A Dictionary of Sociology. 1998. May 8, 2008. Monaghan, D. “Margaret Thatcher Alcin Bleasdale and the Struggle for Working-Class Identity.” Journal of Popular Film and Television. 2001. May 8, 2008. Runciman, W.G. “How Many Classes are There in Contemporary British Society?” Sociology. 1991. Retrieved May 8, 2008 from Rutherford, J. “Who’s That Man?” in Chapman, R. & Rutherford, J. (eds.) “Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity.” London: Lawrence & Wishart. 1988 Read More