Reeling Back

“The job of the artist,” Marshall McLuhan told us in 1973, “is to upset all the senses, and thus provide new vision and new powers of adjusting to and relating to new situations.” Sixteen days from now (Thursday, December 12) British voters go to the polls in an election likely to mark the end of “Great” Britain. True to their McLuhanian task, artists have been warning of just such a decline for decades. On this day (November 26) in 1976, the Sex Pistols released their debut single “Anarchy in the U.K.”, launching the musical movement known as punk rock. If the Beatles, all born during the Second World War, embodied their era's optimism, the Boom Generation’s Pistols (all born in the mid-1950s) represented pop cultural pessimism. While Americans were celebrating their bicentennial, the English were shaken by race riots at the Notting Hill Carnival, a fixture from the days of “Swinging London.” There are those who would argue that the United Kingdom that came together in 1706 will soon join the British Empire as an historic memory. Artists, for all their insights, are an inward-looking lot. Not surprisingly, their stories are often self-absorbed, much like the four unmistakably English films being added today to the Reeling Back archive (with links to each following the Afterword to this posting). Director Joseph McGrath mounts an over-the-top satirical attack on aristocratic privilege and the decline of the empire in his 1969 adaptation of Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian.