In episode three of the BBC drama [see previous
blog, 7 June], Holly takes the stand at the trial and says: ‘I am not guilty,
but I am ashamed.’ It is a powerful moment in the drama, and it is not
difficult to imagine that her transition from denial (of guilt) to
acknowledgement (of shame) has allowed her to stay calm and speak truthfully in
spite of the aggression of the lawyer who is acting on behalf of the
defendants. It was her way to navigate from child to adult, from girl to woman.
She acknowledged that she felt shame. The prefix ‘ac’ indicates a movement
towards knowledge and away from pure sensation. She has discovered that she can
tolerate the feelings that rise in her body and still continue to think. This
allows her to speak on the public stage of a witness box, to act without
aggression, without blushing, without getting flustered – her body is calm, her
voice does not contain defiance, resentment or bitterness. In this way, she
becomes a credible witness and the law finds its way. Her friend Amber did not
navigate through this particular path and so she never lost the tone of voice,
the mode of body language, that left her prey to the label of ‘not credible’.
Neither did the men who were convicted.
So, what was Holly ashamed of that Amber was not?
It is a question that the drama does not ask, and so it is a question that the
drama does not attempt to answer. But I wonder if it has something to do with
their fathers.
Holly’s father was depicted as a man who had been
felled. He seemed to have lost his job, and was depicted at home and unable to
support, much less protect, his family. As long as he did not overcome the
shame he perceived as pertaining to that position, he was unable to help his
daughter, and was instead left to oscillate between permissiveness and
strictness. The trajectory of Holly’s father was a side story to this particular
TV drama, but there was one scene which showed him tolerating his weakness
(showing up outside the house where Amber ruled the roost) and being subjected
to a social humiliation, supported by his wife but nevertheless persisting
in his desire to detach his daughter from the group. That scene ends with the
camera holding the face of Amber, whose quiet tear at the window suggests that
she might, at that moment, have recognised her own lack of such a figure to
love and by loved by in her own life.
These girls are teenagers during the main stages of
the drama (Holly is 14 and Amber is 16). Teenagers, adolescents – this is a
construct of our particular society. It is a kind of rehearsal room or limbo
that we have constructed between childhood and adulthood which might be used to
give youngsters a second or even third chance.[1] This is not a view that is often articulated, and the lack of thought leads to confusion and even to cynicism. The drama shows this cynicism especially clearly in some of the police officers in the early interviews with Holly. It also shows it in the social services staff. One social worker, when faced with a pregnant teenager, seems unable to reconcile herself to the idea that a 'child' (in the eyes of the law) can be pregnant. For her, the knowledge of sex pushes the girl into another category, perhaps into that of 'adult' – someone who is no longer this social worker's responsibility. So, to justify her self-image as 'child social worker' she pretends great interest in the foetus whose future she begins planning as if the mother did not exist. The teenager vanishes from the category of child, but is not absorbed by the category of adult, hence she just vanishes from that social worker's view. This is lazy, cynical thinking.
Someone who is neither cynical nor lazy is Sara
Rowbotham, the sexual-health worker (played in the drama by Maxine Peake). Sarah also persists, and is also in a
position that represents our society’s rules and mores. She also demonstrates
an ability to think rationally in spite of the fact that she has to tolerate
the humiliation of a job which we see being routinely sidelined by a kind of
social service that is less and less linked to reality. This glimpse of
institutional employment reminds me a bit of some scenes in I, Daniel Blake.
Sarah is not ashamed of the girls’ sexuality, and manages to tolerate her
humiliations at the hands of other parts of society’s structure. She manages to
hold onto the possibility for these youngsters to exit adolescence without
guilt, resentment, or a wish for revenge.
And what about the questions of culture, religion
and race – the groups and groupings that presented themselves as explainers of
behaviour? The drama proved itself worthy of the word ‘culture’. It presented
the complexity of issues at play in this drama, and left a space for the
viewers to bring their own intelligence to bear. If Holly, her father, and Sara
Rowbotham succeeded, it was because they each found their own way out of the
morass of the various groups that they might have belonged to. Holly managed to
exit the gaggle of girls, her father came to terms with being alone and out of
work, and Sarah persisted even though the work groups rejected her work. In the
end, none of these key players sacrificed their own desire in order to remain
part of a group. This is why each one emerges as a kind of hero, thus contributing
to a kind of society that might be worth being part of. That the two women had
to lose their formal recognition of paid employment to do it, and in the public
services of police and social care, does not bode so well for any of us.
PS Former police officer Margaret Oliver’s arc in
the story follows the same heroic path. All three of the heroic adults in this
story find themselves outside our current UK society’s structures.
Dramatist – Nicole Taylor), director – Philippa Lowthorpe), producer – BBC in
collaboration with Studio Lambert.
*Humble, etymologically means ‘close to the ground’.
It come via Old French umble from Latin humbles ‘low, lowly’.
This was a derivative of humus ‘earth’, which is related to English chameleon
and human and was itself acquired by English in the 18th century. In
post-classical times the verb humiliate was formed from humilis, and
English gets humiliate [16] from it. [Source: Bloomsbury Dictionary of
Word Origins edited by John Ayto, 1990.]
[1] See Jacques Alain Miller, “In the
Direction of Adolescence”, forthcoming in The Lacanian Review, No 4. Autumn
2017.
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