Jimmy's Hall (Ken Loach, 2014) (Patreon)

Maybe I like minor Loach, when he and Paul Laverty are not trying to hard to make a statement and are content to explore Britain's rich history of class struggle. I ended up watching Jimmy's Hall since it seemed like it would be a useful point of comparison for Loach's newest (and last?) film, The Old Oak. Both films focus on physical locations that serve as social and political hubs for a working class under attack, but of course The Old Oak is a contemporary story about anti-immigrant sentiment, whereas Jimmy's Hall is a historically-based drama about power struggles following the establishment of the Irish Free State at the end of the civil war in 1923.

Going into Jimmy's Hall, I didn't know anything about its main subject, Jimmy Gralton, a workers' rights advocate who returned to Ireland following a ten-year exile in New York. I did, however, know that after seeing this film at Cannes 2014, Mike D'Angelo noted that its primary plot points are identical to those of Footloose. He's not wrong; the primary issue in Jimmy's Hall is the authority of the Catholic Church and the fear that dancing and singing will inevitably lead to worse sins (in this case, Communism). 

But the differences are instructive, because they have everything to do with historical context. In 1923 Ireland, the church is implicitly aligned with the conservative forces that supported the treaty with Britain. They won the war, sort of. (The IRA went into retrenchment, reappearing as a guerrilla force, hence the Troubles.) What's more, Loach is depicting a moment of transition for Ireland, when a socialist movement actually posed a threat to the power structure. The depiction of activities in the community hall are nearly unimaginable in the American context, because there isn't the same leftist historical commitment to adult education in this culture, at least not since the dissolution of the Wobblies.

Some of the elements of Jimmy's Hall that are admittedly stodgy and politically didactic "hit different," as they say, because of just how far we've slipped into hyper-capital. For one thing, Gralton's organizing shows how folk traditions like music and dance can not only bond a community but serve as expressions of working class identity. This is their culture, an entertainment that speaks to their place in the continuity of generations. But this isn't at all conservative here. The community hall also includes free art classes, literary study, boxing classes, as well as the area's only gramophone, which Jimmy brought back from the U.S., along with American jazz records.

In other words, Loach and Laverty are reminding us of the British tradition of humanist Marxism. As exemplified by William Morris, and eventually embodied by Birmingham scholars like Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, and Stuart Hall, British Marxism believed that the canon of great works were a part of a shared history, one that should not be monopolized by Oxbridge elites. The scene in which a young girl reads a Yeats poem, and various townspeople give their interpretations of it, is powerful precisely because it depicts an attitude toward art and education that is so very remote from the transactional model of learning that dominates today.

Given that Jimmy's Hall is a kind of historical tract, Loach and Laverty don't spend a great deal of time on characterization or psychology. The primary conflict between the liberal, forward-thinking Jimmy (Barry Ward) and Father Sheridan ("not that" Jim Norton) is fairly schematic, but it does show the extent to which the Catholic power base was willing to consort with outright fascists. The emotional hear of the film, Jimmy's unrequited love for the now-married Oonagh (Simone Kirby), is also sketched out in fairly broad strokes.

But all in all, I think this represents Loach on his surest ground, doing what he does best. He wants to remind us of other ways of life, and that present-day reality is the consequence of a series of decisions, not just the natural order of things. As a Marxist humanist himself, he believes that historical awareness is necessary for progressive social change. The authoritarian push to efface or distort our history (which may never have been as blatant in this country as it is today) is part of a conservative long game, aiming to disconnect us from community and reduce us to atomized individuals in perpetual conflict with one another. 

Put another way, Jimmy's Hall explicates a moment when the ruling ideology was working to eliminate any other possibility. And this, ultimately, is the difference between ideology and hegemony. Ideologies are relatively explicit. They are competing modes for explaining observable reality. But hegemony is the eventual elimination of any other conceivable possibility, the colonization and destruction of our imaginative capacity. Spoiler: the bad guys burn down Jimmy's hall. But Oonagh consoles one of her young students, telling her "they can't take away the learning in your head." Let's hope she's right.