Sympathetic Devils
The psychic life of Britain between Godard and the Queen
Hannah Proctor
In bourgeois society the past dominates the present.[1]
Three Funerals
Sometimes the class struggle is also
the struggle of one image against another image.
When Margaret Thatcher died on April 8, 2013, I was not in Britain to join the celebrations. Instead, a friend and I went to watch Derek Jarman’s The Last of England (1987), whose grainy visions of vomit, smashing glass, debris, flames, and vodka-soaked Union Jacks under a dull red sky seemed an appropriate way to mark the occasion. When Jean-Luc Godard died on September 13, 2022, I rewatched two films he shot in Britain in the aftermath of May ’68: Sympathy for the Devil (also known as One Plus One) (1968) and British Sounds (1969).
Godard died the week following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. While “The Queue” to see the dead monarch trailed through London, a fist punched through a Union Jack on my laptop screen as I watched British Sounds. Didactic Maoist slogans punctuate documentary and dramatic sequences in Godard’s film. Those images, in turn, interrupted my newsfeed, creating a jagged montage of then and now. I wanted to write something about Godard, but responses to the queen’s post-mature death interposed. Godard’s polemical diatribes against capitalism collided with images of the twenty-first-century monarchy in this moment of social and economic crisis. Fists from the past smashed into the present.
Sympathy for the Devil and British Sounds depict and denounce the stuffy oppressiveness of British class society. While aesthetically and rhetorically anachronistic, the oppressive structures that the films decry remain intact. The queen had already been on the throne for close to two decades by the time Godard’s films were shot, but they seem to belong to the distant past, while the Crown survives even death. A centuries-old institution like the British monarchy should surely feel more anachronistic today than experimental films from the 1960s that attack an enduring global economic system. That this is not self-evidently the case—that the monarchy tends to be treated as an inevitable if eccentric aspect of British society—requires a psychic as well as social explanation.
Godard developed formal strategies to disrupt capitalism’s apparent inevitability, but psychoanalytically informed theorists—from Ronald Fairbairn to Tom Nairn, D. W. Winnicott to Jacqueline Rose—perceived that psychic attachments to the monarchy can help to explain why Britain has remained impervious to anti-capitalist revolutionary fervor. The peculiar phenomenon of the monarchy demands that the materialist analysis advanced in Godard’s films be supplemented by theories that venture into the realms of fantasy, fairy tale, and fetishism.
Street-Fighting Royalists
Many are the times we will be bludgeoned in the streets.
Many are the times when the government will be the victor.
On September 8, 2022, Mick Jagger posted on Twitter:
For my whole life Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II has always been there. In my childhood I can recall watching her wedding highlights on TV. I remember her as a beautiful young lady, to the much beloved grandmother of the nation. My deepest sympathies are with the Royal family.
Jagger posted nothing a few days later about the death of Godard, with whom he had collaborated on the film Sympathy for the Devil, which documents The Rolling Stones recording the film’s eponymous track, in which Jagger as narrator-devil yowls about killing the tsar and his ministers in Saint Petersburg. Marxist Tariq Ali recalls that Jagger once sent him a copy of the song “Street Fighting Man,” whose lyrics also invoke the October Revolution, with a note reading “For you!” after joining a protest that ended in mass arrests against the Vietnam War in London in March 1968. Jagger, nevertheless, received a knighthood in 2003.
Galvanized by the political struggles ignited in 1968, Godard abandoned conventional cinematic aesthetics to make more explicitly political films, interrogating content and form, while questioning modes of production and distribution. As critic Tobi Haslett has pointed out, much of ‘1968’ is there in Sympathy for The Devil—rock ’n’ roll posturing, Black Power, earnest Western Maoists, discussions of the Vietnam War and the Kennedys’ assassinations, invocations of sexual liberation and guerrilla warfare. The bickering Stones are shot in their studio, interspersed with vignettes depicting Black militants reading from radical tracts in a scrap yard on the banks of the Thames; a man is reading from Mein Kampf, while customers browse the shelves of a porn shop; and actor Anne Wiazemsky is spray-painting obtuse revolutionary slogans on walls and cars across London. The film is a Brechtian dissection laying bare the messy and mundane inner workings of the polished pop artefact. But ‘1968’ does not tend to evoke the drab and staid streets of Britain, which, even at their most swinging, remained at a remove from the uprisings taking place elsewhere.
Consider the cultural landscape of Britain in 1968: the first episodes of Gardeners’ World and Dad’s Army aired on TV, the first version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat premiered on stage, The Sound of Music soundtrack topped the album charts for weeks, and people flocked to see Barbra Streisand’s Funny Girl. Intended to provide a more intimate portrait of the monarchy, Richard Cawston’s BBC documentary Royal Family began shooting in June 1968 and was screened to an audience of over 23 million the following year to mark the investiture of Charles Mountbatten-Windsor as the Prince of Wales. Sympathy for the Devil may be embarrassingly didactic, aesthetically clunky, politically clumsy, and easy to parody—as many critics have observed—but against the backdrop of Britain’s enduring aesthetic conservatism and political quietism, it’s still heartening that such an artefact exists.
Godard’s two films shot in Britain immediately preceded his most politically militant and formally experimental collaborations with Jean-Pierre Gorin under the auspices of the Dziga Vertov Group. British Sounds was commissioned in 1969 for London Weekend Television and rejected by the company shortly before it was taken over by Rupert Murdoch in a bid to improve ratings. The hour-long film begins with a ten-minute panning shot of a car factory in Abingdon, with a stern voiceover explaining how capitalist exploitation functions. Words intone over the screeching noise of the assembly line. The script and images abrasively scrape against one another to emphasize the impossibility of adequately representing capitalism. If mainstream media and artworks passively register social contradictions, then militant works must instead seek to heighten them. As the film’s voiceover puts it: “Television and films do not record moments of reality but simply dialectics, areas of contradictions. Let us illuminate these areas with the blinding light of the class struggle.” It is pleasing to imagine these words passing discordantly over the shots of Royal Family as a young Charles stands in a river trying to catch fish.
Mystical Materials
The bourgeoisie have destroyed all human relationships except those
of naked self-interest and the callousness of cash on the line on the never-never.
Since 1960, British banknotes have carried images of the queen. Her face has appeared on at least thirty-three different currencies, a number that dwindled with the empire. Shillings were phased out, Jane Austen replaced Charles Darwin and polymer replaced paper, yet the queen remained. Soon her image will be replaced by an image of the king. The real abstraction of the value form may have little to do with the symbolic image of the queen on physical money, but that did not stop some media pundits from joking about the coincidence between her death and the sudden plunge of the pound following then-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s reckless “mini budget” four days after the official national mourning period ended.
Surreal to imagine Charles’s ruddy face peeping out from a wallet—a little jolt in daily reality. The queen’s monetary portrait has become as taken for granted as the existence of coins and banknotes themselves. The presence of the monarch’s face on quotidian objects like postage stamps and coins is one of the small ways the monarchy comes to seem an inevitable part of the texture of daily life, which is a long-winded way of saying that it’s quintessentially ideological. “People disagree when their bosses take too much [money],” said Godard in an interview, “but they don’t disagree when a star takes too much, so it must be that a star represents them in a way . . . It’s like a king. Sometimes people don’t disagree if there’s a king and there’s a part of them which is in the king.”
The Queen’s presence in dreams underlined her seamless integration into the fabric of British social, and hence psychic, reality. How to punch through that cloth?
In British Sounds, socialist feminist Sheila Rowbotham reads an essay on women’s liberation aloud over an image of a woman wandering naked around a house, which states that “revolutions are about little things,” by which she means pervasive rather than negligible. Godard tried to persuade Rowbotham to appear in the film naked, but she declined, deeming her breasts “too floppy.” She also questioned his insistence that shots of a naked woman could subvert patriarchal representations of women, to which he replied: “Don’t you think I’m able to make a cunt look boring?”
Godard’s aesthetic techniques intended to disrupt accepted phenomena to puncture the smooth circulation of images—and money—that quietly affirm the existing state of things. In contrast to the effects of the kinds of sexualized images of women over which Rowbotham and Godard tussled, the queen’s image rather made for a boring cuntlessness whose disruption would demand alternative aesthetic strategies. The queen’s image had a pacifying ideological effect, and its replacement by that of Charles, however unpleasant to daily encounter the boring cunt, will fulfil the same function.
Scottish psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn’s “The Effect of a King’s Death upon Patients Undergoing Analysis” (1936) discussed disturbing dreams by three patients that responded to the death of George V. Fairbairn argued their dreams shed light on their oral sadism and conflicted relationships to their fathers. Oedipal conflict was the watchword of their dream fantasies. This is in stark contrast to popular author Brian Masters’s Dreams about H.M. the Queen and Other Members of the Royal Family (1972), which not only stays on the level of manifest content but is also dominated by comforting dreams of the queen in mundane social situations: drinking tea at kitchen tables or turning up in the pub. He did not believe the queen represented something of repressed significance to the dreamer. Instead, he claimed her presence in dreams underlined her seamless integration into the fabric of British social, and hence psychic, reality. How to punch through that cloth? Freud, like Godard, grasped that an answer could not confine itself to content alone but would also need to attend to form: “The form of a dream or the form in which it is dreamt is used with quite surprising frequency for representing its concealed subject matter.”
Glamorous Nothings
There is only a fabric of contradictions,
whose pattern comprises the whole of society.
In The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy, Tom Nairn, who had played a major role in the Hornsey College of Art student occupation in 1968, argued that public fascination with the monarchy was fundamentally contradictory. The adoration relied on an insistence they are “just like us” (ordinary), combined with a firm belief that they are, in fact, nothing “like us” at all (extraordinary). Nairn compares the monarchy’s “magic-seeming” authority to a tenant in thrall to their landlord, but a landlord whose property is both literal and spiritual, just as the monarch is both a person and a symbol. The continued function of the British monarchy relies on a strange combination of the material and the mystical that makes possible what he calls the “glamour of backwardness,” an enchanting spell that prevents Britain from acknowledging its own decline.
According to Nairn, the “specifically anachronistic and parasitical form of capitalist evolution” that developed in Britain can only be explained by acknowledging the symbolic function of the monarchy. The approach to representing capitalism in Britain taken by Godard aimed at demystification through a distancing technique with aphoristic scripts written in a blunt historical materialist register, whereas Nairn turned to magical metaphors and psychoanalytic concepts to make sense of capitalism’s peculiar relation to the Crown.
To work out how it could be that the monarchy is regarded in Britain as a kind of “acceptable nonsense”—supremely significant yet utterly meaningless (and thus unworthy of serious criticism)—he turns to Freud’s discussion of disavowal in “Fetishism” (1927), which he glosses as “retaining a belief by appearing to give it up.” Fetishism, for Freud, arises from the fear of castration. Disavowal describes the male fetishist’s knowledge—following a childhood discovery—that a woman does not have a penis, combined with a continued belief that she does. The fetish object acts as a substitute for this absent presence, a “memorial” to the fear of castration. For Nairn, the monarchy is a surrogate for “normal nation-state existence”: “Fearing the castration of modernity, an ‘infantile’ (or early-modern) polity has constructed a fetish of its own retarded essence (‘our way of doing things’) and imposed an instinctive taboo around it.”
Nairn is particularly interested in how fetishism upholds a “pretence of ultra-normality” that can be viewed as merely “a little added colour and magic setting off the preoccupying greyness of his (enforced) sobriety and utter reasonableness.” If the meaning of the fetish object is disavowed, it can be treated as a nothing more than a harmless eccentricity. Freud noted that his clinical observations on fetishism only emerged incidentally. Far from viewing their fetish as a symptom that caused suffering, his patients tended to be “quite satisfied with it.” “Sometimes people don’t disagree if there’s a king.”
Survival of the Object
The basic error of modern social democracy is to suppose that
all one has to say is that there is a place to speak for that place to exist.
In British Sounds, Rowbotham’s voice is interrupted by a man pronouncing decontextualized slogans: “Freudian revolution. Marxist sexuality”; “Marxist-Leninist analysis of the most natural position to fuck”; “Sexuality and surplus value.” The article from which Rowbotham read aloud was part of a special issue of Black Dwarf, “1969: The Year of the Militant Woman.” The issue includes a glancing discussion of psychoanalysis typical of its moment and milieu: invoking Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse in a discussion of the sexual repression of children within the bourgeois nuclear family, delineating the family’s role in inculcating capitalist values from early infancy.
The issue’s opening article also mentions an attack made by Anna Freud, in an address to the New York Psychoanalytic Society in April 1968, “on the revolutionary student movements in the west for trying to change society rather than trying to solve their problems by adapting to it.” Anna Freud, then aged seventy-two, bemoaned the waning influence of psychoanalysis and accused young people of locating their problems in the external world rather than examining themselves. Juliet Mitchell has suggested that the discussion of destructiveness in D. W. Winnicott’s paper “The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications,” which was first delivered seven months after Anna Freud’s at the same institution, could be read as indicating his sympathy with the 1968 youth revolts. This generous assertion, however, is hard to bear out when read in conjunction with his 1970 essay “The Place of the Monarchy.”
In “The Use of an Object,” Winnicott differentiates object relating from object use. To use an object, it must form part of an external, shared reality. For an object to be used, it must survive destruction by the subject. For Winnicott, attempts to destroy an object are the prelude to the object’s ultimate survival—a baby might bite its mother’s breast but fails to annihilate it. The experience of an attempted but—crucially—failed attack is predicated on and consolidates love. These arguments reappear in “The Place of the Monarchy,” where Winnicott reiterates that an object that survives is valuable and loved. The British monarchy, he contends, is such an object. The object is destroyed in the mind—in the realm of unconscious fantasy and dream life—but it survives in the external waking world, and its survival “brings a sense of relief.” Why, he asks, “does any good thing exist if the fact of its existence and of its goodness incites people and may lead to its destruction?” His answer, if it could be called that, is tautological: the goodness of the monarchy derives from the fact of its survival.
Nairn’s and Winnicott’s different analyses of monarchy are worth sharpening into a polemic. Winnicott observes two coexistent contradictory attitudes to the monarchy among so-called ordinary people, which, unlike in Nairn’s account, include a position of genuine opposition to the institution: monarchy is either viewed as a harmless “cosy, happy-making” fairy tale or as an “an escapist exercise, weakening our resolve to alter bad things in the economy, bad or inadequate housing,... the discomfort of squalor and poverty, or the tragedy of persecutions based on prejudice.” When he talks about attempts to destroy the British monarchy, though somewhat hazy in his presentation, he presumably has in mind ordinary people’s thoughts, dreams, and critical conversations, rather than guillotine-wielding revolutionaries.
The survival of external objects for Winnicott is straightforwardly positive: “Reality becomes more real and the personal impulse of primitive exploration less dangerous.” Why the fairy tale of monarchy should triumph over an acknowledgment of material conditions is unclear. Indeed, the structure of his argument seems to affirm the disavowal identified by Nairn. He acknowledges that people’s psychical attachments to the monarchy are grounded in something that obscures material reality—“the awfulness of a slum”—while affirming investment in a shared fairy tale as a means of accessing something “more real.”
For Winnicott, the “reality” of the monarchy does not belong strictly to the external world but to the zone between waking and sleeping. He likens it to the transitional object of a baby, a physical thing (a blanket or toy) as well as a symbol. The monarch is likewise an actual person and a myth, and Elizabeth II succeeded in preserving her “dream-significance” by remaining remote as an individual. Transitional phenomena are characterized by an “acceptance of the paradox that links external reality to inner experience.” In contrast, Nairn’s discussion of the monarchy as a fetish object implies that accepting the paradox depends on a dangerous form of disavowal that participates in upholding oppressive social relations.
Winnicott pictures an end to the monarchy after which “this collection of lovely things becomes a list of priced goods in a catalogue” without envisaging what social upheavals might bring such a situation about—and stopping short of imagining a revolution that would also end capitalism. In this way, he doubly fails to acknowledge the violent histories behind the monarch’s “lovely things.” Breaking the spell for Winnicott would signal the end of a dream that he sees as sustaining rather than impeding the “healthy” functioning of democracy, whereas Nairn perceives that the enchantment plays a key role in precipitating what Winnicott glossed as “bad things in the economy, bad or inadequate housing… the discomfort of squalor and the poverty, or the tragedy of persecutions based on prejudice.”
As I read Winnicott’s cosy defense of the monarchy, Godard’s slogans punched through my mind. Winnicott admitted that the survival of the monarchy depended on various factors, including “the general psychiatric health of the community, comprised of a not too big proportion of persons resentful because of deprivation, or ill because of privations in earliest relationships,” but just how much deprivation and privation is “not too big”? Why should the paradox be accepted?
We Must Destroy
The bourgeoisie creates a world in its image. Comrades, we must destroy that image!
The queen’s image does not appear in British Sounds, but her name is spoken in its opening sequence: “A spectre is haunting Britain: the spectre of communism. All the forces of the old and new imperialism have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: British Petroleum and pop music, the Eurodollar and anti-trade union laws, Elizabeth the dunce and Wilson the traitor.”
Today, BP reports record profits amid surges in oil prices; Marvel, Spotify, and Netflix dominate the culture industry; the pound tumbles, prices soar, and wages stagnate; Tory politicians vow to further erode workers’ rights; and Labour, though out of power, is led by a man who reneged on his previous socialist promises. Many of the forces identified in British Sounds remain familiar, but now invoking the spectre of communism in Britain, a country where in recent memory even the friendly ghost of mild social democracy was ruthlessly exorcised by the ruling class, seems laughably far-fetched. Marx and Engels’s confusing metaphor doesn’t help: How can you be haunted by something that never even lived? Isn’t Britain more precisely haunted by the spectres of its actual history of capitalist accumulation and colonial extraction than by some ephemeral future?
In 1968, the queen’s Christmas speech emphasized “brotherhood.” The speech itself spoke vaguely of uniting “rival communities, conflicting religions, differing races and the divided and prejudiced nations of the world.” The royal family’s official website today makes explicit that the speech was delivered in the year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 reduced the right of entry for citizens from the Commonwealth to the UK. Also in 1968, Buckingham Palace negotiated exemptions within newly introduced legislation that forbade racial discrimination in employment and housing. Conservative politician Enoch Powell delivered his infamous “rivers of blood speech” in Birmingham in April that year in response to the proposed Race Relations Bill from which the palace sought exemption.
In British Sounds, a Powell-esque figure rants directly to the camera about workers demanding high wages and shorter hours, decrying the “communist rabble” of students, people in colonies “with their laziness, promiscuity and sordid homes,” and “filthy” migrants in Britain who “suck our social services dry,” turning “whole areas of our land transformed into alien territory.” The speech is hyperbolic and lacking the euphemistic turns of phrase that often characterize far-right rhetoric yet its core themes remain scarily reminiscent of those of the mainstream press and Tory politicians in Britain today: evident in right-wing responses to recent rail strikes, “cancel culture” in universities, people seeking asylum by crossing the English channel by boat, and demands to raise benefits in line with inflation.
A recent New York Times article by academic Kojo Koram pointed out now-ousted prime minister Liz Truss’s indebtedness to Enoch Powell, generating furious responses from the British right-wing press. He argued that Powell’s influence on postwar Britain—as an early proponent of policies associated with neoliberalism, anxious about Britain’s declining power in the wake of decolonization—had been overlooked and that Powell, not Thatcher, could be seen as Truss’s primary influence: “The British Empire may have all but ended 60 years ago, but [Truss] is still in thrall to its legacy.” What Koram calls Truss’s “zombie imperial thinking” seems a more apt supernatural metaphor for making sense of Britain at the moment the queen died than the spectre of communism invoked by Godard. Truss is now dethroned, and the new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, though personally wealthier than the king, has swerved away from her economic policies. Powell may have been horrified at the idea of a British Indian prime minister, but having Sunak as head of government does not make the state any less hostile toward migrants or Britain any less racist (as even members of the royal family have discovered). As the draconian new Nationality and Borders Act comes into effect, Sunak’s home secretary Suella Braverman recently claimed Britain faced an “invasion” of asylum seekers, saying it was “her dream” to deport people to Rwanda and declaring herself “proud of the British Empire.”
In a scene in the 1969 film Death May Be Your Santa Claus—directed by Frankie Dymon Jr., who was a member of the British Black Panthers and appeared as an actor in Sympathy for the Devil’s scrapyard scene—a Black man is shown on a soapbox at Hyde Park Corner surrounded by irate white people yelling at him about migration to Britain. Another Black man in the crowd informs a white man spouting racist slogans that “you came to our country before we came to your country.” The man on the soapbox addresses the furious audience gathered around him: “How strange are the paradoxes of history that Africa, the mother of civilization, has remained for over 2000 years the ‘Dark Continent.’” He insists those paradoxes must not be accepted.
Mourning Strangers
In a society in which classes exist class struggle will never end.
In the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana in August 1997, Jacqueline Rose surveyed responses to the mass public outpourings of grief that greeted it. While critics on the left decried the inauthenticity of mourning a stranger, or pointed out that the display of emotion “left a lot of undesirable components of the British political landscape intact,” liberals celebrated it as evidence of a more openhearted and egalitarian Britain, under a then-new New Labour government. If the first group expressed suspicion of public displays of emotions, understood as antithetical to the cool reason required for political critique, the latter interpreted feelings as straightforwardly pure and good: “emotion was only permissible as virtue.” Neither position acknowledged the sadistic and cruel aspects of emotional investments.
For Rose, policing grief, claiming it can be inauthentic if attached to the “wrong” object, misses how grief functions, “as if it shows up, or only shows up, in the moments when it is due.” Many people interviewed in “The Queue” invoked the experience of losing someone close to them when justifying their participation in that strange social ritual. Rose points to the limits of interpreting public outpourings of grief “as necessarily the veil for more personal, private, trauma,” suggesting they might instead have their origins in aspects of a shared social reality. In the context of the queen’s death, some observers ventured that the “veil” obscured forms of mourning that were simultaneously public and private, given how many people in Britain died due to the COVID-19 pandemic—deaths the state played a role in causing, deaths that have not been publicly mourned. Yet the scale and emotional intensity of mourning that greeted the death of the queen were notably far smaller than those that responded to Diana’s death. Even for those who turned up to see the queen’s coffin, the mood was more of rote reverence than deep sorrow. In this respect, the event had more in common with Charles’s 1969 investiture, where the crowds were far smaller than anticipated but the media nonetheless proclaimed it a “blazing success.”
Good Enough
The poet Anna Mendelssohn appears in Godard’s British Sounds among student activists at Essex University, where she had earlier been involved in resisting a visit by Enoch Powell. She was later imprisoned for four years for her alleged involvement with Angry Brigade bombings in the early 1970s. In an essay on her work, Luke Roberts latches onto a passing comment made by Lisa Tickner in her book on the 1968 Hornsey College of Art occupations, in which she states her desire to write “good-enough history.” It was in babies with “good-enough mothers” that Winnicott observed the transitional phenomena that allowed him to explicate and condone the survival of the monarchy, a leap from the individual to the social far less interested in processes of historical transformation than that intended by Tickner. Roberts acknowledges that bringing Winnicott’s theory to bear on Mendelssohn’s work is also a “fraught proposition” given her experience as an incarcerated mother and Winnicott’s cosiness with the British state.
In British Sounds, an adult’s voice is heard reciting key dates of protest and rebellion. These dates mark historic moments of revolt, rebellion and political struggle —1368, 1648, 1791, 1844, 1911, 1926—which are then repeated by a child. Perhaps this image of radical pedagogy suggests an alternative way of imagining a relation to shared reality and dream significance that departs from that implied by Winnicott by refusing to disregard “the awfulness of a slum”. Objects whose persistence perpetuates material harms should not be celebrated for surviving symbolically. The paradox need not be accepted. Roberts cites a poem by Mendelssohn in which art figures as a baby being sung a new history:
What is Art, O what is She,
a baby dandled on a strange man’s knee
For a mother to sing a new history.
Too close to impossibility.
That’s good enough for me.
[1] All “intertitles” taken from the screenplay of British Sounds