Steve McQueen’s racial-identity tale takes revenge on his art patrons.
British filmmaker Steve McQueen’s latest demoralizing film, Blitz, takes on England’s World War II experience when Germany bombarded England. The blitz — short for air war — caused social devastation, and McQueen revisits that fraught time when fortunate parents sent their children out of London for safety. He connects it to contemporary England’s preoccupation with race: White single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) dispatches her nine-year-old biracial son George (Elliott Heffernan) to a country refuge, but he feels abandoned and rebels. Returning home, George’s picaresque adventures expose him to the most bizarre eccentricities of the colonialist empire.
McQueen revises the cultural experience of the blitz that became a touchstone for earlier, patriotic generations — wartime British movies In Which We Serve, Vacation from Marriage, This Happy Breed — that no longer serve this moment’s reckoning with racial guilt.
In his own art-conscious way, McQueen’s approach to the blitz is ersatz — as was Mrs. Miniver, Hollywood’s contribution to blitziana. McQueen challenges the traditional, white English perspective of more recent British autobiographical remembrances, Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives and John Boorman’s diptych Hope and Glory and Queen and Country.
The racism that little George confronts isn’t just systemic, McQueen shows it as endemic to the West. George comes upon the mercantile curiosity Empire Arcade, which features a shop-window diorama of sugar-plantation enslavement and colonial exploitation — an archetype of McQueen’s art-installation approach to political filmmaking.
But the story McQueen fails to explore, perhaps because it’s too close to his own life story, is George’s birthright: How did his mother Rita fall in love with his father Marcus (CJ Beckford), the black migrant from the British colony Grenada? Their romance is dismissed in the briefest flashback. McQueen alienates George, essentially turning him into an orphan, never fully integrated into British society. Rita and her piano-playing father (portrayed by pop-singer Paul Weller) are too clueless to help George understand his biracial identity. He’s left to discover it on his own, through accident and surmise: meeting an air-raid officer, Ife (Benjamin Clémentine), whose name is “Nigerian for ‘love.’” As George’s only black male role-model, Ife inspires the boy’s surprised realization, “I say I am black!”
For McQueen, “blitz” refers to George’s fractured identity crisis, the biracial question that has confounded Millennial progressives ever since Barack Obama split social consciousness along some vague, unacknowledged color line. Young Heffernan’s beige complexion, curly hair, and long eyelashes symbolize the social perplexity of the British Empire come home to roost. He resembles young Dean Stockwell in The Boy with Green Hair who personified post-WWII guilt about child refugees.
George also predates the unborn love child of a white girl and black sailor who haunts Shelagh Delaney’s breakthrough 1959 play, A Taste of Honey, combining the gender and class concerns in postcolonial Britain. George endeavors to find home, wearing a Saint Christopher necklace from his mother, like an Oliver Twist figure whose family reunion is defined by the death and destruction of the blitz.
McQueen gives full vent to his art-world nihilism in the aerial matte shot of bombarded England: a blasted, smoldering, nation. In this bizarre world, George encounters a group of war scavengers (Stephen Graham, Kathy Burke) and a Fagin-like Jewish dwarf socialist (Leigh Gill) who articulates the gang’s anarchic hostility. In the most macabre, Dickensian episode — elaborately staged by McQueen — they rob the dead patrons of a bombed-out nightclub. Here, McQueen reaches the same depths of depravity that he did in 12 Years a Slave, but this narrative (with digressions showing Rita’s feminists spunk) is less coherent. Like that horror show, Blitz is not culturally authentic. George demonstrates none of the sophistication prized by Britain’s new generation of culturally diverse, socially ambivalent artists and intellectuals such as the more cerebral experimenters Isaac Julien, John Akomfrah, and Martina Attille of the Black Audio Collective and Sankofa who never broke into Hollywood as McQueen did. Instead of defining Britain’s novel mixed-race patriotism, Blitz is another McQueen concoction of art-world hubris, film-industry exploitation, and political opportunism.