“No, no! I am nothing pure! My race is mixed! my sex is mixed! I am woman and man, light with darkness, nothing pure! I am mud and flame!”[1:23:31]
- 1 Mary Whitehouse (1910-2001) was a conservative and Christian activist who campaigned during the 197 (...)
1So says Stephen (Spencer Banks), the teenage protagonist of the 1974 BBC anthology episode Penda’s Fen, written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, as he finally comes to terms with his homosexuality, his complex familial and cultural background (he is the adopted son of a vicar and his real parents were Italian immigrants), and renounces, after a series of mystical encounters, his extremely nationalistic and conservative beliefs. Stephen expresses his radical rejection of purity through a series of antitheses that reflects the many ways in which the film deals with the theme of corruption as we shall see. Stephen’s outburst comes in reaction to a series of questions and temptations that covers most of thematic concerns in Penda’s Fen: Stephen is repeatedly asked by a man and a woman (looking like the Christian and conservative campaigner Mary Whitehouse1) who act as spiritual incarnations of the reactionary forces at work in 1970s England, if he is a “true English boy”. As they seek to gain him to their cause through promises of power – it is explicitly an attempt at corruption – their talk is filled with messianic undertones and allusions to Christian martyrdom. Thus “Nation”, and the Christian religion, feature as major themes along with the landscape designated by the couple as Stephen’s “inheritance.”[1:20:30-1:24:08] The boy’s revolt against their promise of power is at the heart of Penda’s Fen, his embrace of heterogeneity and contradiction is the logical outcome of the film’s entire narrative movement: a meditation on national identity channelled through the changing perception of the English countryside by the young Stephen Franklin as he struggles to adjust his almost fanatical faith in both Christianity and the English nation, with the discovery of his homosexuality and the revelation he is an adopted child of immigrant parents.
- 2 Dave Rollinson, Alan Clarke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 46.
- 3 Robin Carmody, 25th August 2001, https://web.archive.org/web/20120904102026/http://www.elidor.frees (...)
- 4 The Nationwide Festival of Light was a British Christian grassroot movement of the early 1970s prot (...)
- 5 In 1968, Conservative MP Enoch Powell gave a speech expressing his fear that mass migration was thr (...)
- 6 Adam Scovell, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (Leighton Buzzard: Auteur Publishing, (...)
- 7 David Huckvale, A Green and Pagan Land, Myth, Magic and Landscape in British Film and Television (J (...)
2As has been noted by commentators like Dave Rollinson in his study of Alan Clarke’s work2, and by Robin Carmody in a 2001 article3, Penda’s Fen was first broadcast at a time of conservative backlash against the supposed permissiveness of the 1960s. Christian movements and campaigners such as the “Nationwide Festival of Light” and Mary Whitehouse4 were waging a war against what they saw as a decline in public morality, six years before Enoch Powell gave his notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech against mass immigration5. Both the contemporary battles against permissiveness and the xenophobic climate constitute the background against which Penda’s Fen develops its own critical exploration of Englishness. Although writer David Rudkin is adamant that his work should be considered as a “political piece”6, and director Alan Clarke remains mainly associated with urban social-realist fiction, Penda’s Fen, with its engagement with the countryside and its mystical and surreal imagery of angels, demons, strange pagan cults, has been linked to the subgenre of folk horror. David Huckvale calls it “a culmination of the British pagan fantasy tradition”7. Along with contemporary feature films such as Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), or other BBC plays like James MacTaggart and John Griffith Bowen’s Robin Redbreast (1970), it is part of a wider current in 1970s British cinema and television engaging with the English landscape and pagan revivals. As I shall argue, the weird and surreal imagery of folk horror is used to question perceived stability and uniformity of English national identity. The landscape as a site of tension between competing forces both metaphysical and political is a staple of the folk horror genre which serves as the main vehicle of Rudkin and Clarke’s social commentary.
- 8 Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey, British Television Drama, Past, Present, and Future (London: Pa (...)
- 9 Rollinson, Alan Clarke, 55.
3Although it is widely regarded as a landmark of the BBC Play for Today, an important anthology program from the 1970s8, Penda’s Fen has been criticized for its perceived heterogeneity. At the time of its first broadcast, critic Peter Lawson complained the play was full of “unrelated materials that never fused into a coherent whole”9. As Andy Kelleher put it in his documentary Alan Clarke: Out of His Own Light, even those involved in its making, such as producer David Rose, and Alan Clarke himself, stressed they were not always certain about the play’s precise meaning. In the same documentary David Rudkin described his script as a “complex thematic organism” in which “several narratives, several themes seem to become involved with each other.” Indeed, allusions to contemporary debates blend with allusions to Christianity, paganism and the Manichean heresy, all of which are connected through Stephen Franklin’s struggle to find his true self. Penda’s Fen is a hybrid work: a coming-of-age story bordering on the fantastical, a meditation on nationhood blending history and myth to the point they cannot really be separated.
4I wish to show how the perceived heterogeneity of the work echoes its discourses on the hybrid character of Englishness, and that the play reverses the ordinary moral hierarchy between an ideal of purity and the forces that are commonly thought of as corrupting, to embrace eventually a generalized mode of hybridity and ambiguity. Stephen’s speech quoted at the beginning of this paper, makes it clear that purity in Penda’s Fen is aligned with notions of stability and homogeneity, both in terms of identity (national, sexual, religious), politics or even aesthetics. Thus “corruption” should be first understood as the undermining of such purity, an agent of instability and heterogeneity which opens possibilities whereas purity tends to close them in the name of a fixed ideal. At several points during the narrative corruption appears in its most common understanding as a form of moral degradation: the character Arne, a writer with radical ideas, who plays a pivotal role in Stephen’s political and spiritual conversion, jokes about “corrupting’’ him, and the discovery of his homosexuality is initially distressing to Stephen, another crack in the foundation of his initially arch-conservative notions of “Nation” and religion. But the play ultimately sides with Arne, a television writer like Rudkin, and embraces Stephen “mixed” nature. The hybrid nature of the work itself, oscillates as we shall see between a realist and a visionary style, between the mundane and the mystical. As such corruption, and the resulting heterogeneity and ambiguity, should be understood as a vital and creative force rather than a degradation from a fantasied state of purity.
5Neither ambiguity, nor hybridity, are values held in high esteem by the adolescent hero. Stephen Franklin appears at first as a rather arrogant adolescent with strongly held beliefs. He is an arch-conservative almost to the point of caricature, unswerving in his national pride. His father is an Anglican rector, and he is a devout Christian as he makes clear when ranting during a school debate against “the media as a source of evil in society.” He specifically targets a controversial TV documentary on the nature of Christ (called Who Was Jesus?) which he calls “atheistic and subversive trash,” while eulogizing the conservative couple who successfully campaigned to have it banned:
Look at this man and this woman. See if you do not see them as I see them! A mother and a father above all parents! A mother and a father of England! Who in this modern wilderness of amorality stand up alone to uphold our erring national family on its Christian path! [9:45-11:06]
- 10 On the importance and complexities of Elgar’s Catholicism in 19th century Britain and his re-approp (...)
6We do not know what is supposed to be the content of the documentary. This “investigative theology,” as it is called in the play, is never made explicit, and Stephen appears to reject it out of hand as something inherently vicious but with which he did not bother to engage. In praising a Christian campaigner who is a Mary Whitehouse lookalike, Stephen clearly aligns with the right, and even implicitly far right, in the cultural battle of the time. His failure to engage with an enterprise of “investigative theology” can be linked to his puzzlement when confronted with the apparent paradox of a “male” angel singing with a woman’s voice in his favourite piece of music, Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. Although Edward Elgar and The Dream of Gerontius have acquired an aura of quintessential Englishness, Elgar’s Catholicism and his choice of a poem written by Britain’s most famous catholic convert in the 19th century, cardinal John Henry Newman, contrast with Stephen’s Anglicanism10. The use of Elgar’s oratorio is characteristic of the film’s engagement with ambiguity, it first serves to characterize Stephen’s conservative politics and aesthetics, and yet it does not perfectly fit the rigid categories through which he understands the world.
7For most of the narrative, we are aligned with Stephen’s perception and knowledge, and the film is filled with surreal, fantastical visions of angels, demons, strange cults, and ghosts, which it is tempting to attribute to some kind of subjective projection. Although the stylistic treatment of these visions, as we will see later, is a factor of ambiguity, several of these visions (his sexual fantasy around a schoolmate, a strange ceremony in a labyrinth garden) are designated clearly as dreams tied to Stephen’s most intimate anxiety in regard to his identity, especially his sexual orientation. As we could expect from his initially reactionary stance, Stephen’s views on the subject are rigid and bigoted, and after a clearly homoerotic dream he dismisses homosexuality as “unnatural.” In his dream appears an angel, along with an erotic vision of the male bodies of his schoolmates. When he awakes, he is still troubled by the incongruous presence of a rather grotesque demon sitting on his bed, as if the world of dreams lingered into reality [27:00-29:48]. The angel’s androgynous appearance echoes Stephen’s remark on the supposed gender identity of another angel in Elgar’s oratorio, while the demon is briefly associated with the face of Joel the milkman, for whom Stephen expresses desire. The contrast between the golden angel and the darker demon serves as a metaphor for Stephen’s fears and struggle against a kind of desire he is not ready to accept yet. In one of the most memorable sequences of the film, Stephen, after being knocked out by the milkman Joel in a cycling accident, dreams of a strange cult reminiscent of similar scenes of pagan revival in Blood on Satan’s Claw or The Wicker Man. At the centre of the labyrinth garden of a country manor a crowd of people stands in a garden around a chopping block, and they are invited to have their hands chopped off by a smiling man in a suit with an axe [36:24-39:15]. The imagery is borrowed from folk horror, but it can also be read as an expression of Stephen’s fear, and in a Freudian fashion an allusion to the castrating power of organized religion.
- 11 Paul Newland, British Rural Landscapes on Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 162
- 12 Newland, British Rural Landscapes, 162.
- 13 Rollinson, Alan Clarke, 45.
8Beyond these intimate fears in the face of his growing homosexual desires, which must appear to the very religious Stephen as a particularly disturbing form of interior corruption, there is a sense of threat coming from the outside world (although it is still tied, partly, to Stephen’s perception) exemplified through the treatment of landscape. According to Paul Newland, British rural landscapes have “long operated as imaginative spaces in which horrific, ghostly or uncanny narratives unfold”11. They may convey a strong sense of Britishness, but they can also embody alternative spaces: “either as spaces seemingly untouched by urban modernity, rationality or the type of progress informed by the Enlightenment, or as spaces in which these prevailing ideologies might be challenged”12. It is through the intimate experience of the landscape and its ambiguities that Stephen undergoes a radical deconstruction of his beliefs and sense of fixed identity. The opening shots of the film, vistas of fields and vales with sheep, and the Malvern Hills in the background, associated with Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, convey the idea of a typically English heritage reinforced by the patriotism often attributed to Elgar’s music. The intervention of Stephen’s voiceover links both landscape and music to his subjective, idealized perception of his country. He asserts his love for England, and his sense of belonging to a national community tied to a specific land. Yet, the repetition: “I am one of your sons, it is true! I am! I am!” already betrays his uncertainties and strikes a note of anxiety, which is echoed visually and aurally. The singing voice of the mezzo-soprano (the angel in The Dream of Gerontius) turns dissonant, transforming Elgar’s lyricism into a cry of intense suffering connoting danger, an impression reinforced by the presence of a distant siren. At the same time, on the screen there appears, superimposed over the landscape, the image of a wired fence and a hideously burnt hand seemingly rising from the ground to grasp the barbed wire [00:04-1:43]. Although the symbolism of these images is never fixed in an explicit meaning, Dave Rollinson posits that the hand gesturing towards the barbed wire anticipates “Stephen’s attempt to grasp certainties and thereby escape them, and to question who ‘I am,’ in the context of National Identity”13. It certainly finds many echoes throughout the play as an expression of the adolescent’s self-doubt and inner demons, but also as a wider expression of anxieties and threats lurking below the familiar landscape.
9The superimposition of the barbed wire and the scarred and burnt arm over a valley with a village, gives them a kind of ghostly quality suggesting a departure from strict realism, as well as inviting to look, as one character puts it, at “the layer upon layer of inheritance” that constitute the apparently familiar landscape as it is caught between the remnants of a remote and mysterious past, and the threats of the modern world. The fence and barbed wire represent the control of Man upon nature, they are signals of ownership which spoil and divide the landscape. This is later explained in the provocative speech of a character called Arne, a television writer – like Rudkin – who celebrates the familiar landscape of the Malvern hills: “poets have hymned the spirit of this landscape. Our greatest composer has enshrined it,” he says, only to warn against its fragility and the threat of central government:
the earth beneath your feet feels solid there. It is not! Somewhere the land is hollow. Somewhere beneath is being constructed something we are not supposed to know. A top-secret we locals are not supposed to know is there. [14:24]
10He designates this dystopian – and quasi-conspiracist – vision in almost mystical terms, speaking of: “an angel of bureaucratic death” which is later echoed in Stephen’s father’s own radical heterodox conception of “a life enhancing revolutionary Jesus” whose message has been perverted by (as the pastor says) “the Paul, the Augustine, the institution mongers, the doctrine men,” [1:09:38-1:10:02] in other words by the church as a centralized power. The constraints imposed on the countryside and its potential poisoning by the industry and central government are paralleled by the rigid orthodoxy of conservative Christian and institutional religion. They have twisted the words of Christ and their discourse just like industry and government is corrupting the country landscape in order to contain potential subversive force and preserve their power. There is a strong sense that both threats proceed from what in the play Stephen’s father calls “a sick culture centred on authority and death.”
- 14 Mark Gatiss, A History of Horror, directed by John Das, Rachel Jardine, written by Mark Gatiss, BBC (...)
- 15 Scovell, Folk Horror, 7.
11Mark Gatiss, who popularised the term in a three-part documentary A History of Horror (2010) for the BBC, argues that folk horror films share a “common obsession with the British landscape, its folklore and superstitions14.” This, as notes in his study of the genre, “has stuck as the groundwork for its initial cinematic canonization ever since”15. In his paper entitled “The folk of Folk Horror,” Derek Johnston contends that:
- 16 Derek Johnston, ‘The Folk of Folk Horror’, conference paper given at Folk Horror in The Twenty Firs (...)
the community in folk horror is typically responsible for preserving the beliefs and rituals that separate them from the outside world. These beliefs and rituals give them cohesion and identity, but often present horror to outsiders underlying their initial appeal.16
- 17 Johnston, “The folk of Folk Horror”.
12Johnston posits that folk horror challenges “power relationships, shifting knowledge and understanding of the real working of the universe from the cities and the educated classes to rural, working class.”17 Both Arne, the dramatist, and the Anglican rector, emphasize local and small-scale communities as a form of resistance against the normativity of central powers. Although in the classics of folk horror like Blood and Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, and more recently Midsommar, the pagan revivals are often revealed to be tribal, or feudal, murderous cults, in Penda’s Fen the connotations are more positive. Stephen’s father reminds his son of the etymology of “pagan” and its original meaning: “from the village.” Paganism here embodies the element of heterogeneity necessary to revitalise the country, and the religious sentiment, it also conveys the promise of something more humane than the big industrial cities: “reject the monolith, back to the village,” as the rector says.
- 18 Diana Rodgers, “Et in Arcadia Ego: British Folk Horror Film and Television,” in Folklore and Nation (...)
- 19 Derrida coined the concept in Spectres of Marx, to describe the spectral nature of Marxism and the (...)
- 20 Rodgers, “Et in Arcadia Ego”, 207.
- 21 Pierre Macheret, “Marx Dematerialised, or the Spirit of Derrida,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Sympos (...)
- 22 Katy Shaw, Hauntology, The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century English Literature (Cham: P (...)
13Most relevant to Penda’s Fen are also Diana Rodgers’ comments on the prevalence of the themes of unearthing and death in the folk horror genre and its treatment of the countryside: “Such settings and themes often suggest that something old lies just beneath the surface of the countryside, a mystery to be one day revealed by ploughing its fields and furrows”18. She links it with the eerie quality often observed in folk horror and its treatment of countryside, and refers to the notion of Hauntology, a term first coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida and taken over by many critics and cultural theorists like Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher19, an eeriness “stemming from an absence of something, or presence of something which should not be there”20. Hauntology has been described by Pierre Macheret as a “science of ghosts, a science of what returns”21. This idea of the return of a distant past, as something that has been dormant rather than dead, unsettling the usual boundaries of time and space, is crucial to Penda’s Fen. There is no actual unearthing, but the threatening superimpositions of the opening sequence do suggest there are forces at work returning from the past as well as from the depth of the land. Although it is tempting to categorise the most mystical and surreal moments of Penda’s Fen as a figment of Stephen’s imagination, this does not account for the deliberate ambiguity created both by Rudkin’s script and Clarke’s direction. When Stephen is knocked out on the side of the road, he does not just dream of a strange, probably pagan, ritual, he in fact awakes in what appears an alternative and unstable version of his familiar environment, where the place he knows, in which he lives, has had its name quite literally corrupted from “Pinvin,” to “Pinfin,” and then again to “Pendefen.” Later the variations around the toponym “Pinvin” are confirmed when Stephen consults a dictionary of the names of places and finds that “Pinvin” was once referred to as “Pendefen,” meaning “Penda’s Fen,” an allusion to King Penda, the last pagan king of Mercia, thus linking the place to a remote, half historical, half mythical past when England did not even exist yet. Even if it is dismissed as a dream, it carries the idea that the past may reappear in the present, creating an entirely alternative version of the same place, as if the fabric of reality was corrupted by irrational forces. As stated by Katy Shaw in her study of Hauntology in twenty-first century English literature: “The experience of being haunted is one of noticing absences in the present, recognizing fissure, gaps and points of crossover”22.
- 23 On Bazinian realism and the importance of long take and deep focus as a way to preserve the spatial (...)
- 24 Rollinson, 67–68.
14The place alluded to in the play’s title is obviously such a point of crossover, enshrining in the land itself the souvenir of King Penda, thus providing a link to this remote, mythical time. It is a place where boundaries are blurred between past and present, real and imaginary, and the living and the dead, thus allowing the figures of the past to resurface and haunt the landscape they used to tread when they were alive. Elgar here is a significant figure, not only present in the film through his music, since he was also born and died in Worcester and is thus associated with the site of the Malvern hills. Therefore, the presence of his ghost cannot simply be attributed to Stephen’s obsession with him. He is part of the “layers upon layers of history” that constitute this place, as David Rudkin puts it, and if the encounter between an adolescent from the 1970s and a man dead in 1934 certainly count as an anomaly, a physical impossibility, there is no particular sign that could indicate his ghostly nature or his status as a hallucination. Although the camera lingers on Stephen’s face as he spots the old man, the reverse shot is not a point of view shot, instead we watch Stephen entering the frame and standing side by side with Elgar. In his study of Clarke, Dave Rollinson describes his style during the 1970s in terms of Bazinian realism23 relying on deep focus, and long takes, shot at a certain distance from the subject24. It gives the apparition the same concrete presence as Stephen, thus casting doubt as to the ontological status, the reality or the delusory nature, of what we are seeing.
15In contrast with the intense spirituality of The Dream of Gerontius, this version of Elgar is decidedly earthly. He proceeds to tell Stephen of his stomach surgery, his angry outburst at a little girl who sang for his birthday a song he had written for his dead wife, and most important of all he reveals the inspiration for the deathbed song of Gerontius: the whining of a dog over a bone. Elgar’s anecdotes all emphasize the needs of the body, its dysfunctions, illnesses, hunger, and even related emotions such as love and grief. They make an implicit statement that creativity, far from proceeding from an ethereal divine inspiration, is grounded in the corporeal and the everyday. Even the most “transcendental sublimity” is a fundamentally impure process implying, as Elgar says: “a demon to counterpoint.” [49:20-56:36]
- 25 In his essay “In defense of mixed cinema” (vol. 1, 53-75), André Bazin pleads for a mixed or impure (...)
16Elgar’s defence of artistic creation as an impure process can be linked to André Bazin’s notion of impure cinema25 which is certainly echoed in the generic hybridity of Penda’s Fen, mixing the coming-of-age narrative with theology, political radicalism, and popular genres such as the horror film. As we have noted, the form of the television play is itself hybrid, as its name suggests a connection with the theatre, but Penda’s Fen location shooting and use of landscape are clearly cinematic. As we have already noted, Clarke’s direction relies mostly on deep focus and long take to create a sense of reality by preserving the unity of time and space and presenting the characters in their immediate environment, but this apparent realism is juxtaposed along surreal and oneiric visions whose style is decidedly artificial. Stephen’s homoerotic dream starts with a composite image, almost a collage of various elements rather than a harmonious picture juxtaposing the Malvern Hills, the rays of the sun and the silhouette of an angel ascending behind the hills. It is followed by a series of short close-ups detailing a melee of male teenagers in sports gear with inserts on Stephen’s face, emphasizing fragmentation and discontinuity. These stark stylistic contrasts reinforce both the realist and the oneiric rationale, apparently maintaining a distinction between everyday reality and Stephen’s inner life, but as we have seen in the case of Elgar’s ghost, the mystical and the fantastical also contaminate sequences shot in a more realistic fashion. The film blends the real and the imaginary to the point they appear almost indiscernible: mixing the past and the present, several versions of the same place appear to coexist, and contaminate, or rather corrupt, each other.
17In the light of Elgar’s celebration of artistic impurity and the film’s own stylistic and generic hybridity, we can now briefly return to our starting point and the final sequence of the film. It shows indeed an attempt at corruption in the most common meaning of the term. In fact, it is reminiscent of the Biblical episode of the temptation of Christ by Satan:
- 26 The Bible, Authorized King James Version, Matt. 4.8-9.
Again, the devil took him up on an exceedingly high-mountain, and showed him all the Kingdoms of the world and their glory. “All these things I will give you if you will fall down and worship me.26
Like Jesus, Stephen is standing on a high point, the top of a hill from which he is shown “his inheritance” along with a promise of power, except that the satanic part of the tempter is played by the self-proclaimed Christians, while the saviour is the pagan King Penda. As the King gives his blessing to Stephen exhorting him to be “strange, dark, true, impure and dissonant,” we can clearly spot blood and wound on his hand, in an echo of the scarred arm in the opening scene, which remains unexplained [1:25:51], but given the religious and mythical symbolism that pervades the entire work it is not unreasonable to interpret this image as a representation of Jesus Christ’s stigmata after the crucifixion. From a conservative perspective, conflating the figure of Christ and symbols of Christianity with a pagan hero and pre-Christian mythology is certainly a satanic corruption. It is in fact consistent with the film’s embrace of contradiction and heterogeneity present in Arne’s insistence on dissent and distrust toward central authority, Stephen’s father’s “buried Jesus” and Elgar’s defence of impurity. Rather than a sterile and illusory conception of a pure, homogeneous and unchanged English nation, Penda’s Fen embraces, through the mixed roots of its main character, sexual ambivalence and a bold blend of Christian theology and pagan revival, an image of the nation as fundamentally heterogeneous, as hybrid as the film’s mix of various generic modes. Its conception of nation and religion is neither Christian nor pagan, instead it is both at the same time, standing at a crossroads where various traditions and origins blend, reflecting, as Rudkin puts it, a multi-layered history.