The Ruling Class: Love Freedom Schizophrenia Fear Loathing
It was one of those schools that managed to tick about just enough boxes that’ll get them a license/grant/sanction to keep the institution running, teachers and staff employed and kids educated enough to sign their names, recite ‘Babes in the Wood’, do the origami, know their Gandhis, Nehrus and noble gases and pass out of the standard 10 with (as the school liked to put it in aptly multi-colored chalk on a blackboard outside the main gate on result day) “flying colors”. While there were exceptions, the atmosphere was one of general apathy and mutual disinterest and the (these days) much touted, encouraged and brochured student-teacher relationship was more like that of a comatose patient having a sudden cardiac seizure and the middle aged Malayali nurse sitting next to him engrossed in this week’s installation of sordid magazine pulp. The routine was uncomplicated- the state board prescribed, the teachers programmed and the student, being students, had to accept it and even if they did not actually comprehend what was being fed to them, to know it all verbatim and by rote and very superficially would guarantee you the only thing that mattered- the ranks. We had it straight and ‘by heart’- the dams and powerplants were the sparkling jewels of our steady progress, Gandhi was infallible, Sudha Chandran was the National Pride, the k is silent in knack, Unity in diversity, Standatease-ATTEN-TION, blue and yellow is green, tan is sin by cos, all Indians are my brothers and sisters, the dodo is an extinct animal, good children respect their elders, the woods are lovely…, and that chapter on reproduction is for self study.
Even at best they were dreary times and if any students had hopes of ending up anywhere other than the family business, they were busy lapsing into escapist fantasies about college and prospective sex. Soon, there would scandals that began after-school in cool shady foyers of neighborhood buildings- sweaty palms up the regulation length schoolgirl skirts, early uneasy drooling French kisses emulated from the cinema, exhibitionism, Debonair, filthy words, dirty jokes, cut-outs from Mid Day or even better the now defunct Blitz with its last page titties… yes, actual real girlie pom-poms unleashed without even something the size of a periwinkle on the nipples to block them from your eyes. You stare hard and remember with navigator precision every curve, bulge and contour from her pouty haughty dirty mouth to the fingers prodding ever so naughty into the navel to the tips of her toes that curl into the sand. You hold on to her till night is deep and the house asleep and your pillow mysteriously turns into her and you grind yourself into a pubescent orgasm against the bed.
Such stolen joys of the school yard were fleeting and before the semester was over you were most likely to be standing in the principal’s office squirming with embarrassment, blitzed out your skull with fear, sweaty forehead and all, and trying to scramble from an errant and shivering brain a way out of the mess. The banality and the moral sham of the school succeeded not only in eating away such essential pleasures of puberty but worse, succeeded in making you regret you had ever indulged in them. What adverse effects these had on the tender psyche of the students I can only estimate based on the limited sample space available to me and I’d peg the affinity for leather and latex and pain to a high 60% percent, another 30% for others that includes every perversion from animals to yo-yos. The remaining approximate 10% is for the normal and that includes the homosexuals.
When I think back to my school days I can only think of a few moments of ambiguousness that actually dared fuck with the crushing orthodox unilateralism of the school and perhaps got away with it. And the one which I cherish most is of a femme fatale whose real name I have temporarily forgotten.
Till then I had never seen the expanse of skin so real, so close in front of me. Slender alabaster back and a glimpse of the V divide between her breasts. Her lips were bloodshot red, as if ready for a kill and her eyes in a strange paradox, frail and lost. She walked her sexy stride through the corridors of dirty old men and jealous frigid bitches concealing with innocence something primal underneath. And if it could only get any kinkier, she was assigned to tutor us young minds in the all-round art of ‘moral science’.
She was an angel, a mysterious force that just by existing subverted the whole rotten system that was the school. She was my desire, my ache, my ardor, my kinky rebel and her name was ‘mischief’.
***
‘Little man whip a big man every time if the little man’s in the right and keeps a ‘comin’
-Motto Of The Texas Rangers
-Quote at the beginning of Terry Southern’s ‘The Magic Christian’
The first great sin committed by a school would be to reprimand a child for being mischievous. The first collar on man’s dog-neck. The first attempt to make him conform. To make a building block outta him. ‘Mischief’ is subversion and in excess it is, anarchy.
You wanna hold banners? Be my guest, but don’t call it anarchy.
***
‘The Ruling Class’ begins with a censor board warning that the film has been rated ‘X’. There is sex and violence and profane language/innuendo but hardly anything that could be described as gratuitous or titillating except, of course, the satire. It bites like sharpest teeth
‘I give you England’ says the 13th Earl of Gurney making a pompous toast as Director Peter Medak conducts the sequence with a symmetry for satire framing two parallel rows of white hair and wrinkled faces along with the decadence of the food on the table. The diners at the feast cheer the Earl on as he extols their shared feudal history and exalted position in the class system. The toasting ceremony reaches poker faced ludicrous heights of complacent pride and oration when the table raises a toast to ‘England, that precious stone set in the silver sea’ and promptly join in on choral ‘God Save the Queen’ only this is not the anthem as we know it. This one is a call to the Queen to “confound her enemies politics and to frustrate their knavish tricks.”
It takes no small balls to mess with a national anthem. It is a final frontier of sorts, at least in this country where egos and identities are pricked at a pair of tennis shoes found near the national flag. In meddling with a national symbol one is courting high treason- you’re questioning and provoking the sensitive collective consciousness of millions. Medak pulls it off but that is because his purpose is not jingoism or blind desecration. He seems to question the relevancy of the anthem and the patriotic spirit and the pride in identity that it seeks to invoke.
The 13th Earl arrives back to his estate from the feast and promptly proceeds to have some kind of kinky solo psychosexual role play dressing up in an army uniform substituting the pants for a ballerina skirt during which he accidentally asphyxiates himself to death. The funeral follows and soon after, the relatives and close companions gather for the reading of the will where it is discovered that apart from a sizeable amount donated to a few obscure trusts and the butler Tucker, the rest of the estate has been bestowed upon heir apparent and family loon Jack, the 14th Earl. And the last clause has it that to put the will under jurisdiction would be to surrender the whole estate to some odd trust. This is bad news for the stepbrother Sir Charles, his hard nosed wife Lady Claire and dandy flamboyant career aristocrat fool of a son Dinsdale who had hoped that they would be named guardians of the estate till the 14th Earl would get his sanity back. Another disappointed man is the doddering Bishop Lampton whose trust coffers have been overlooked by the will. It is scene rife with drama and comedy and Medak mines both for vicious satire, mean comic dialogue and caps it all off with the butler enjoying his newfound wealth with an extempore song and dance.
Even the butler and subservient classes are not to be let off the hook clean. Tucker is so used to serving at the Gurney estate that even though he has received a sizeable amount he lacks the courage and capacity to move out into the world as his own man. Unable to overcome his fear of his newfound freedom and wealth and burdened by his years and service and his butler lineage, he takes to drink and turns into a cocky offensive drunk but not cocky enough to walk out the gate. And finally with terrific irony, the fate reserved for errant butlers in English dramas catches up with him but only after we learn of his strong leftist leanings.
Meanwhile, enter Jack- 14th Earl of Gurney. Clad in monastic robes he wanders into the reading of the will and announces his decision to plunge again into worldly affairs. He requests for all attended to offer prayer and who else to offer prayer to himself- the God, The Father, The Holy Spirit whom friends address as J.C. or even Bert or Bert Enstwithe. The Bishop Lampton declares blasphemy and how perversely true!
This film earned that X rating like a damn merit badge.
‘The Ruling Class’ begins as an critique of the decline and decadence of the aristocratic classes but soon a bigger picture emerges- the object of critique is much larger in scope. It becomes a wide-reaching allegorical indictment of the oppression of all who exist on the upper echelons of a system- be it the government, the church, the academia or the technocracy and how they seek to influence and pressurize by politics of fear, the life of all who exist lower down the system.
The Criterion Collection synopsis calls Peter O’ Toole’s performance as Jack nay J.C. nay Bret nay… as a tour de force. That would be understating it.
With the entry of Peter O’Toole as mad Jack the film gets its frame of reference. ‘The Ruling Class’ is nothing but a brilliant tweaking of psychedelic cinema of the late 60s and early 70s with biting social satire or to put it simply as Kim Newman coins in his review of The Hex for RT Obscura- WHS (Weird Hippie Shit). Jack nay J.C. is the true flower child. Long haired, unshaven, lost eyes, ill fitting rags and mismatched clothes. His religion is love- Love for all and all for love. He is achingly romantic, sensitive, spontaneous, a pacifist and unshackled by society and its norms. He believes in freedom and a world without fear. His doctrine of ‘no love is sin’ is as much the doctrine of the ‘free love’ movement. He may sleep on a massive wooden cross but by his own admittance discovered himself to be God ‘outside a public urinal in East Acton’ when he heard voices from St. Francis and Timothy Leary, saw strange visions and ‘ran’. For all we know his ‘paranoid schizophrenia’ and ‘delusions of grandeur’ are repercussions from a vicious hallucinogenic and in the sense of the movie’s allegory- the escapist fantasies of a sensitive soul trying to cope in a strange, complex and unfriendly world that will not embrace the new and let go off the obsolete.
Peter O’ Toole delivers a psychedelic performance. The trip is him and so is the psych-out. It is an unmitigated thespian romp- freewheeling, mad, eccentric, speaking not in words but in onomatopoeic syllables, commanding in presence and yet playful. He portrays Jack not just as a man who believes himself to be God but more often than not, as God himself. And that is only the first half.
Complications occur due to his Uncle Charles’ devious methods to get his hands on the estate. Getting his mistress Grace to pose as Jack’s fantasy girl Alexander Dumas’ tragic romantic heroine ‘The Lady of the Camellias’, and sing an operatic duet, he gets them married and soon as Grace is pregnant with Jack’s baby he plans to certify his nephew as ‘insane’ and get him locked up in the asylum for good. Grace sees her own influence slip if Jack is taken away and engages psychologist Dr. Heder in search of a quick cure.
The final cure arrives on the tail of a comic montage of failed ones that tried in vain to contain the irrepressible Jack nay J.C. It is a scene that is charged with a surreal existential violence. A raving wild man calling himself the High Voltage God, blasts of thunder and lightning, high wind, a bizarre man in a gorilla suit, strange camera angels, jolting music- Medak whips up delirium and even as Jack gradually lapses into normality the eerie power of the sequence underscores a certain deviance, dystopia and fear that will continue till the terrifying end.
Post the cure scene, the movie takes a distinctly darker turn in mood and as does O’Toole’s performance. We see a man shackled, a man confused in his search for reality as he lapses to and fro between his supposed madness and supposed normalcy. In his eyes, one can see the fear and deeper still; one can see the monster that the fears breed.
‘The Ruling Class’ is an excellent adaptation of an avant garde play by Peter Barnes by the author himself. While the plot may boil down to essentially English preoccupations, Barnes rats on and subverts it at every point with high,low even sitcom humor, biting satire, terrific dialogue and a deep intellectual understanding that holds the film together even as it overreaches in ambition. But it is to Director Peter Medak’s credit and ingenious ability that he crafts the distinct texture of the film thus not only succeeding in its seamless translation to celluloid and even after over three decades, giving the movie its relevance, even urgency. He compliments the irreverence of the play with eccentric direction refusing to follow any set primer. Like I mentioned earlier, he has a sharp eye for symmetry sometimes captures his characters in extreme long shots as if enjoying the intricate design of his actors against the landscape. At times he evokes the stage- extreme close ups of faces who will abruptly pop up to stare at you or by accentuating the fakery of the sets or his actors’ performances or even actually having a character mention the stage. Then he has the errant speedy zooms, extreme slow motions, skewed angles, quick cuts and strange lights that are the vocabulary of psychedelic cinema. Add to that the surrealism of the choreographed musical numbers, each varying in terms of tone, style and necessity to the narrative. Also I couldn’t help but feel that the film’s mammoth 154 minute length with its blatant excesses- of runtime, of themes, of twists, of style, of jokes, of intellectualization etc added to strangeness and existential texture of the film.
Thus, the film itself becomes a schizophrenic medium and defiantly so. There is no fear and any pressure to conform goes unheeded. The Film is what it is. It is up to you to deal with it. And you are just as free to do as you please.
Believe. Don’t. Care. Don’t.
Mischief reigns.
You wouldn’t be making a mistake in addessing ‘The Ruling Class’ as ‘Fear and Loathing in Gurney’. But I guess I’d prefer reffering to the other one as ‘The Fear and Loathing Class’.
Same difference.
***
This is one of the stories that the femme fatale read to us in one of her classes.
It had a boy, perhaps named Mickey who was mischievous but essentially kind hearted. One fine day he finds himself in the middle of some unsavory conversation with some other boys. He takes it cool at first but later unable to stand the conversation he begins to howl, whistle… make some noise… mischief.
Someone walking down the road sees the kid throwing up a ruckus and then asks him why he did it. Mickey explains the story. And in the very anti-climactic way that these stories end, the passerby pats Mickey on the back… or gives him a sweet… or something.
And the shock prologue to the story went- Mickey grew up to be a respected priest.
Moral of the story: Be Careful. Be Very Careful. You never know how they’ll get you.
Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear.
- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
(post dedicated to Salil Mirashi)
(pics and info courtesy:- deviantart, doc40, sexyschoolgirlcostumes, photobucket, lesliehawes, ruby persson, wpfs, Metropolis Mag, boingboing, peta, Wikipedia, Holistic Forge Works, pooterland, humboldt, ica, soundtrack by radioblogclub)
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Best thing I’ve read in months. Thanks for taking us back to those days. And the film recommendation, of course.
“The chapter on reproduction is for self-study.”
One of the best thing I’ve read jab se maine hosh sambhala hai…
I mean that line, not the chapter…
Ok..the chapter too.. :P
I ve booked this for the evening. you bastards!
I am reminded of ‘we dont need no education’.
Somehow I feel the strict environment in School really helps one in an uncontrolled environment like the college. And think of college – ‘Animal House’ is the quintessential college movie where the rules are broken with glee!!! what a release of spirit that movie was!!!
Nice post and cool posters Sid!!!
Look out for Gonzo. you really didn’t leave any words did you. I guess there is something about exams. you lose the fear of consequence. it becomes inconsequential. cartman my boy. you can’t enter!
[Editors note : Caution: Lurker no need to do personal attack on other author/s while you praise a post. You dont like particular posts, don't read them. Please maintain civilized nature of PFC. Thanks]
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absolutely amazing writeup!!!
incredible!!!!!!!!
this is the sort of thing PFC should be shooting for, not the set of garbage rules from dabba on whether writing is important in cinema, how important, why important, when important, and implicit threat of anal rape if you don’t follow his strict interpretation of said garbage rules.
@lurker
PFC is pretty muh democratic. Authors can post pretty much any number of varied set of views here.