Dead Man’s Shoes: Revealing the Subtext of the Lost Maternal

Beth Johnson and Joe Andrew

The notion of man, or, more specifically, masculinity itself

being represented as ‘out of step or shape’ is one that has

remained the focus of much British cinema from cinematic

representations depicting the milieu of ‘the everyday’ in

texts such as Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)

and John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving (1962), up to the present

day. Yet, the dynamic nature of social change has meant that

the filmic texts produced over the last 50 years have also

changed shape, reflecting the remorseless remoulding of these

concerns from, for example, industrialisation to post-

industrialisation. As Claire Monk (2005: 156) notes discussing

British cinema in the last decade:

1990s British cinema seemed preoccupied with men and

masculinity in crisis. These crises spanned the post-

industrial economic desperation of the male no-longer-

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working class represented by the stripping ex-

steelworkers of The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997), the

penniless Catholic father in Ken Loach’s Raining Stones

(1993), the tormented ex-miner turned party-hire clown in

Brassed Off (Mark Herman, 1997); the damage by dysfunctional

or absent fathering suffered by [...] the vulnerable

Nottingham youths of Shane Meadows’ TwentyFourSeven (1998).

Another of Meadows filmic text’s, Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) is

similarly focused on masculinity in crisis yet, this crisis or

breakdown is also extended in a spatial sense as, like Raining

Stones, Dead Man’s Shoes is: ‘set in the bleak new world of the

housing estate in which unemployment, debt, drug-taking and

crime have become commonplace’ (John Hill 2005: 181). Focusing

on dilapidated societies, peoples, spaces and places, Meadows

makes visible both the significance of marginal societal

positions – an everyday life lived on the fringes of decency –

and the violent consequences of going beyond moral margins of

acceptable behaviour. Against this tired backdrop, the

dominance of the white British male looms large, while women,

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in contrast, are rendered as almost completely invisible – a

hole at the centre of the narrative, and, when seen, depicted

as little more than sexual holes or what Stephen Maddison

(2009: 48) refers to as ‘debased receptacles’.

This article will consider Dead Man’s Shoes within these

contexts, arguing that the lost maternal is the primary

subtext of this and other Meadowsean filmic texts. Invoking a

triangulated structure to achieve this, the article is to

begin by offering a detailed reading of the opening section of

Dead Man’s Shoes, (its prologue, which is coterminous with the

credit sequence), before going on to consider and analyse the

role of women, present and absent, in the film. Finally, we

will examine the significance of the heroic quest in the film,

centring on the journey through the film of its central

protagonist, Richard (Paddy Considine).

That Meadows has sought to locate his study of ‘the

failings of working-class manhood’ (Fradley: 285) within more

ancient genres and approaches is evident from the very outset

of the film. Indeed, it will be the argument here that the

prologue of the film establishes a dualism which permeates the

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rest of the film. This dualism is the Paradise Lost of a

mother-centred, joy-filled childhood, as against the Man Alone

seeking his destiny. Let us then see how this dualism is

established, as well as the ways in which it and other aspects

of the film seem to predetermine its ending.

Significantly, the DVD version of the film opens with a

kind of equivalent to the literary epigraph, in the form of a

pre-credits voiceover. We hear Richard utter the words with

which the film proper (Day One) will begin: ‘God will forgive

them; He will forgive them and allow them into heaven. I can’t

live with that.’ From the outset, Richard hereby arrogates to

himself the divine role, and sets himself above the Law; that

is, he seeks to take over the role of God the Father. However,

it is his final words that predetermine the outcome, as,

implicitly, they predict his death.

The film proper opens with super-eight footage of the two

brothers, Richard and Anthony (Toby Kebbell) surrounded by

family figures. The ‘bits and pieces’ of footage work to

create a collage of working-class idyllic happiness; the boys

are hugged, loved and played with by their mother, grandmother

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and other female and male members of the family. In the first

segment there are seven brief shots in all: the two boys as

seemingly very young children, Richard as a toddler and

Anthony as a baby (Richard is asleep, while Anthony looks from

his pram at the camera); then their mother holding the baby

over a gate, in medium close-up; we then have baby Anthony in

the paddling pool, held by two sets of female arms; then there

is Anthony being carried from his christening; and finally two

shots of Anthony in his pram, and a partial shot of him being

handled, again by female arms.

There are a number of key points to make regarding this

opening sequence. In an apparent homage to similar super-eight

footage in Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984) which is crucial to

readings of that film, Meadows at once emphasizes the role

that (lost) childhood innocence will play in the thematics of

this film. At the same time, the montage clearly references

the super-eight footage at the opening of Mean Streets (Martin

Scorsese, 1973) - and Meadows is a known admirer of early

Scorsese. There too the footage is used as part of the credit

sequence. However, although the relationship between the two

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brothers in the Scorsese film has parallels with the

relationship between Richard and Anthony in Dead Man’s Shoes, the

actual footage is of the boys already grown. Secondly, it is

Anthony who is central to this dynamic, Richard appearing only

very briefly in the first vignette. As such, the film

establishes in the first few seconds that it is what will happen to

Anthony that will motivate the plot. These shots also establish

the centrality of the family, which will be totally absent in

the film proper, before the appearance of the family of Mark

(Paul Hurstfield) and Marie (Jo Hartley). Importantly, it is

also the mother figure that plays a key role in the super-

eight footage here, given that she appears in at least three

of these brief scenes. Blonde and pretty, she is the picture

of lovely innocence. The film has made its point: in prime

position, and of primary importance are the innocent child,

the family and the mother. These are the values against which

all the appalling male behaviour will be judged.

After this opening sequence (that we may term the pre-

prologue) we then cut to the first scene of about 20 years

later, the prologue. In line with Meadows’ influences and

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references, this is a shot of a classic ‘Western’ scene, of

two lone men in long shot (though, as we will discover, it is

really one man alone), striding across desolate moorland, with a

solitary tree on the hill.1 This first shot of Richard,

entering empty space from the right, immediately evokes

ancient stories and folk-tales. After the opening of home-

video family happiness, we lurch not only into another time-

frame, but also another genre and tradition, which immediately

establishes a potential mythic reading of the hero’s quest. It

will be this interplay between the two scenes that establishes

the key dynamic of the whole film.

Having briefly adumbrated what will be the main plot-line

(the hero’s quest), there is then an almost immediate slow

fade, showing flashbacks of the two boys playfully wrestling

on a single bed. The film then cuts to another shot of the two

grown brothers walking down a long, lonesome road, a track

between two desolate stretches of very scrubby moorland.

Again, the framing and editing suggest a mythic scene; again

the shot opens with Richard walking into the frame: already

1 Clair Schwarz also discusses this film in terms of vengeance narratives, and we will return to her key arguments in due course.

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for the second time film seems to seek to lay bare the device

of the hero setting out on his journey. As de Lauretis has it:

‘the single figure of the hero […] crosses the boundary and

penetrates the other space’ (de Lauretis: 118). This interplay

between the two genres and temporal modes continues for the

rest of the prologue. On the one hand Meadows presents further

footage of the boys’ seemingly perfect childhood; on the

other, Richard (plus Anthony) repeatedly enters the shot,

marching towards an unknown destiny. In all there are five

repetitions of these initial mythic moments.

The prologue (credit sequence) closes as Richard and

Anthony approach a deserted building at dusk, which ends with

a fade. The fact that these have been prologic episodes is

signaled both by the fade, and by first inter-title, the first

of five that will segment and structure the action into an

equivalent of the Shakespearean five-act tragedy. The viewer

is left with a series of questions: what will be the outcome

of the mythic hero’s quest; and / or will the lost paradise of

the matrocentric family be restored? These questions may now

be addressed, beginning with an analysis of the representation

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of women in the film. Let us begin with an overview of the

implications of this prologue for the overall representation

of women in the film.

Two key elements remain invisible in the picture perfect

narrative of childhood: the fact that Anthony is mentally

impaired; and that he is now dead as a result of having

committed suicide after being relentlessly abused by a local

small-time drug gang while Richard was in the army. Again,

while initially off-screen, a further clue regarding the dark

transformation of the rural idyll lies buried in the very

title of the film itself; Dead Man’s Shoes, a colloquialism that

makes reference to life haunted by death, existence haunted by

that which is rendered absent, or invisible. Initially figured

as ‘ob-scene’ in Linda Williams’ sense (2008: 7), ‘literally

off screen’, Anthony’s death is not made visible or discussed;

rather, Anthony is apparently present in the diegesis, as well

as being seen in black and white flashbacks inside the womb of

Sonny’s home.

Although Anthony is introduced cradled by his mother, the

protective maternal is figured as inexplicably absent from the

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present-day scene. Obviously missing, the mother is, like

Richard, unable to protect adult Anthony. Indeed, Anthony’s

‘lost’ mother arguably signifies the ghostly demise of all

mothers in the filmic text – the invisible, unprotected women

rendered present only in snippets, and even then, at the mercy

of obscene male violence. Accordingly, the ellipses of women

in Dead Man’s Shoes operate as a blinding point of obscenity,

thus organizing the obscenity (un-seenness) of the text

itself. As shadows of being, the alterity of women, their

ghostliness or phantasmic qualities are however evidenced in

the diegesis of the film in several ways and in particular it

is these fragments of women that we intend to analyse,

returning to the re-emergence of the ‘lost maternal’ at the

end.

The strangeness of the female lack is, we contend, worth

studying for at least two reasons. Firstly, it is precisely

because of its glaring absence. While women are not presented

as whole but always as ‘bits and pieces’, they haunt the frame

and are keyed out as prominent sites of social exclusion. In

Dead Man’s Shoes, it is women or, more specifically, the male

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characters’ clear lack of knowledge about women, women’s

feelings, desires, bodies and very existence, that

demonstrates male fears related to inadequacy. Like the

mentally impaired figure of Anthony, women in Dead Man’s Shoes

are locked away and silenced yet, in David Punter’s (2007:

130) words, they ‘emerge to haunt the current scene.’ While

many of Meadows’ later works such as Somers Town (2008) and Le

Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee (2009) also highlight the missing maternal

through, in the first instance, teenage boys Marek (Piotr

Jagiello) and Tommo’s (Thomas Turgoose) absent and invisible

mothers and, in the second instance, the strained relationship

between Le Donk (Paddy Considine) and his heavily pregnant ex-

girlfriend, Olivia (Olivia Colman), this absence contrasts

quite markedly with the position of women both in the film

that immediately preceded it, the flawed Once Upon a Time in the

Midlands (2002), and Meadows’ next feature, This is England (2006).

In the former we note the opposition between the immaturity

and weakness of both male leads, Dek (Rhys Ifans) and Jimmy

(Robert Carlyle), and strong women, mothers both, as played by

Shirley Henderson (Shirley) and Kathy Burke (Carol). In This is

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England Meadows uses the presence of women as a clear positive

marker. In the National Front meeting, as well as vicious

Combo’s gang, women are completely absent, while in the more

inclusive skinhead surrogate family that welcomes Shaun women

are very important, especially evident in the figures of Smell

(Rosamund Hanson) and Lol (Vicky McClure). Of course, the

significance of women would be yet further established in the

later four-part television series, This is England ’86 (2010) and

This is England ’88 (2011) where Lol is, in effect, positioned as

the main protagonist.

Returning to Dead Man’s Shoes, we note that initially,

snippets of women are seen in the film via pornographic

magazines, passed round by members of Sonny’s (Gary Stretch)

gang who look, stare and chatter about their holes, ‘fannies’,

anuses and open mouths. We first see Tuff (Paul Sadot) and Soz

(Neil Bell) sitting amidst a dirty, disorganised lounge space

looking at porn. Laughing at the material, Soz reads aloud to

Tuff: ‘They spit-roasted me on video.’ What is particularly

interesting about Soz’s selection of this line is that it not

only refers to the placement of women in the sphere of

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pornographic sex, but further, it nominates the moving image

of hetero-normative pornography as something explicitly done

by men to women. As a supposed figure of fantasy, the

mechanized cycles of penetration involved in the spit roast of

the female performer are rendered unrecognizable or perhaps,

inhuman to Soz. Indeed, the very notion of ‘spit-roasting’

conjures up and makes reference to the process of cooking meat

by penetrating a dead animal carcass at each end and turning

it repetitively over a fire. Rather than being about the woman

performer herself then, this act is transformed into an

anxious dialogue (for Soz at least), about phallic endurance.

Tuff’s response: ‘I’m not surprised, man’, is also interesting

in that it reveals that, rather than attempting to engage with

the pornographic material erotically, Soz and Tuff instead

appear to use it to facilitate their male bonding. This

reading is particularly pertinent in relation to what Paul

Wileman (2004: 21) argues to be a phallic defining logic of

the pornographic narrative: ‘Phallic endurance […] is the

defining dimension of the porn narrative […] Women are the raw

material required for this demonstration […] In the industrial

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production of porn films […] the women function like the

different kinds of meat processed and canned for sale.’ In

these terms, the woman performer is not positioned as an

erotic object of fantasy to Tuff or Soz, but rather as an

uncanny figure affiliated with thoughts of dirt, defilement

and discomfort.

This pattern of utilizing the pornographic images before

them not to get ‘hot’ with heterosexual desire, but rather,

for the distinct purpose of homosocial bonding continues

throughout the scene, as the pair laugh about having a ‘tit-

fuck’ with each other, and helplessly and humorously attempt

to define the meaning of ‘al fresco’ sex (‘that’s up your anus

innit?’ asks Soz). Their laughter, their continuous banter at

strap line after strap line, functions, we contend, as a type

of diegetic ‘wipe’, a humorous male aesthetic to cover up

their feared and uncomfortable lack of knowledge about women

and women’s sexuality. Such a response to women and, in

particular, to women who offer sex as a commodity of sorts is

evident in the diegetic figure of Patti (Emily Aston). First

revealed on-screen in a black and white flashback, Patti is

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seen draped alluringly across a sofa. With blond hair, and

adorned with a gold chain, large hoop earrings, a black tight

top with a deep ‘V’ neck, a short black skirt and black high

heels, Patti chews gum and watches as Anthony is bullied by

Sonny. Excluded from the male-dominated conversation, and the

physical and mental abuse of Anthony, Patti does not attempt

to prevent such abuse. Denied a voice, Patti’s silencing is,

though, implicitly rendered here, associated and, we infer,

ruled by Sonny’s fists and sadistic desires. Interestingly

however, though Patti’s role is seemingly framed as purely

sexual (a woman who will engage in sex with members of the

group as designated by Sonny), Sonny shows no sexual interest

in Patti. Rather, his sexual interest or desire for sexual

power is expressed in further sadistic abuse of Anthony,

especially in the following scene where he punches him

viciously for declining to fellate him.

Patti next appears in the diegetic present. The gang

wonder how Richard knows about where they live, and it is

suspected that Patti may be the informant, as she is nominated

by a member of the gang as a ‘big-mouth slag’. A flash-back

15

cuts to Patti being dragged from the sofa by Sonny. Pulling

her up by her hair and manhandling her out of the room and up

the stairs, the initial inference is that Sonny is about to

rape Patti. Instead, however, Sonny forces her with threats of

sexual violence to ‘initiate’ virginal Anthony, despite her

fierce resistance: ‘You’re having a laugh. I’m not fucking no

mong. I’m not doing it.’ In a squalid scene she rapidly

partially undresses, and straddles Anthony on the bed where he

sleeps. As Sonny orders the gang upstairs to watch, Patti

climbs off Anthony, humiliated, upset and visibly angry, only

to be further abused by Big Al (Seamus O’Neill); her arms are

grabbed and her movements controlled by Big Al, who reinforces

Sonny’s earlier power. Branding her hysterical, he shouts in

her face: ‘It was only a shag!’

While Patti is clearly situated as a sexual object for

the gang, the shocking violence that prefaces the sex scene

between herself and Antony means that Meadows refuses any

aesthetic of eroticism, instead, pointing to the exploitative

and abusive nature of Sonny and Big Al and, by extension, the

rest of the ‘gang’. Something particularly chilling about

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these flashbacks, beyond the obvious violence and humiliation

that they reveal, is also evident in the way in which they are

intercut in the diegesis with a repetition of such violence

against Patti in the present day. Piecing the events of past

of present together through intercutting, it is revealed to

the audience that the gang possibly believe that Patti, the

‘big-mouth slag’ has revealed their torture of Anthony to

Richard. Despite, in the end, believing her protestations that

she has had nothing to do with Richard (‘I ’avn’t’ fucked no

squaddie’, she cries, held by the throat by Big Al while her

child plays inside her home), the circularity of the gang’s

violence, the lengthy abuse that they dish out as and when it

suits, is laid bare.

While Patti’s body is used as one signifying surface of

Sonny’s abuse, another is seen in the form of the homosexual

sadistic tendencies that Sonny displays toward Anthony (as

Schwarz also argues elsewhere in this volume). Indeed, Sonny’s

complete domination and humiliation of Anthony function to

render Anthony as weak, feminized and passive. While Anthony

loses his virginity to Patti rather than as a result of rape

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by Sonny, it is clearly Sonny who ‘disables’ and remoulds the

identity of Anthony via continued mental, physical and sexual

abuse either personally performed or ordered to be undertaken

by others.

Coupled with Anthony’s unnamed mental impairment, his

child-like trust of Sonny operates to open up questions

regarding the ‘whereabouts’ of the mother figure. Dealt with

in the diegesis via a disturbed doubled structure - an

explicit rendering of maternal concern, the absent mother so

worryingly missing from the scenes of Anthony’s abuse is

figured and re-imagined in the character of ex-gang member,

Mark’s wife. Mother to his two male children, Marie occupies a

central position as primary carer and matriarch of the family,

appropriating what John Hill (2005: 184) refers to as the

‘traditional male space’. While first seen in the

traditionally ‘female’ space of the kitchen, her power over

her male sons is evidenced in her first line of dialogue:

‘Lads. In here now. I told you to be an hour. Where have you

been?’

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Despite the fact that Marie is clearly constructed as a

powerful figure, her concern is explicitly framed as

‘maternal’. Indeed, the very space that she occupies is a

suburban semi-detached home in a nicer area of the town next

to a park where her boys are ‘safe’ to play. However, Mark’s

dark past as a member of the gang that had abused Anthony and

led to his death returns to challenge this maternal power.

While Mark takes the boys to the park in the car in search of

his soldier ‘friend’, Richard stalks the house before ringing

the doorbell. Opened by Marie who soon recognizes that Richard

is the man that gifted her lads with what she nominates as

‘irresponsible objects’ (the gas mask and knife), she tells

him that her lads are ‘crackers’ before going on to confess

that she was ‘upset and really worried’ about the boys

returning with such articles. Recognizing her concern, Richard

asserts: ‘You’re a good mother,’ to which she replies, ‘Yeah,

yeah, I am a good mother’.

Clearly unnerved by Richard’s interest in her family, she

turns off the interior house lights and sits on the staircase

alone where she cannot be seen from outside. When Mark returns

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home they sit, relegated by fear unto this dark space in the

house rather than at its centre, and the haunting spectre of

Mark’s past (in)actions are brought into the light. Clearly

shaken, Mark’s voice wavers and his eyes dart about as a black

and white flashback of Anthony’s abuse by Sonny’s gang

(including Mark who did nothing to, but prevented nothing

happening to Anthony), is rapidly intercut before the present

is again restored. Unnerved, Mark avers:

I know who it is. Anthony, […] he wasn’t as old as us. He

was a simple kid, too simple to know what he was doing.

Richard went in the army. We had a laugh with him but

Sonny – everything, everything he took too far. Anthony

didn’t understand […] We all got in a van and we were

dropping acid and Sonny gave him some and I could see it

was going wrong, I could see his face. He was tripping

out of his mind.

While Mark’s confession is audibly played out, flashbacks of

the events that Mark is describing are again intercut with the

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present scene. In addition, the mournful choral music De

Profundis by Arvo Pärt (performed by Polyphony / conductor

Stephen Layton) plays, eventually growing in volume until it

drowns out Mark’s voice. Though his confession is seen to

visibly continue, the haunting soundtrack plus the

increasingly lengthy flashback sequences of Anthony’s final

torture before his death are exposed. In the present, Marie

stares at him incredulously and shakes her head. The flashback

is again picked up and the voices of the gang are brought back

into the diegesis as Sonny and the others abuse Anthony

further, before running off to their van, leaving Anthony to

his tragic fate.

Mark, like Patti, fails to prevent the abuse of Anthony.

Such a nightmarish recognition is made explicit by Mark

himself. Speaking to Marie, he laments: ‘I could have stayed.

I could have stayed and kept with him. I didn’t want to leave

him.’ As Marie clasps her hands before her in shock and as if

in prayer, the flashback cuts in once more, black and white

and with a shaky hand-held aesthetic, revealing Anthony’s

bloated body swinging lifelessly from a rope attached to the

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roof of the haunted desolate, half-destroyed space that he

believes to be the house of the devil. As Mark tells his wife

that ‘they found him hung’, she cries, covering her face with

her hands.

This is the last we see of Marie, and the film seems to

suggest that the maternal once more disappears from the

diegesis (though we will return to this point). The narrative

continues in the present to reveal that Richard breaks into

Mark’s house the next morning, finds him sleeping alone

downstairs and forces him back to the same gothic castle space

in which Anthony’s body was found.

The death of Anthony is not only figuratively seen to re-

emerge and haunt the space then, but is also revealed to be

both a potent physical and mental driver of Richard’s actions.

Speaking to Mark, Richard asks: ‘When you were torturing him,

was he calling for me? Was he screaming my name?’ ‘Yes’, Mark

admits. ‘He still is. You were supposed to be the monster. Now

I’m the fucking beast!’ Richard replies. Richard’s monstrous

sensibility is explicitly figured as uncanny in this statement

and via his accompanying actions. Rather than butchering Mark

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with a knife that he brought with him, Richard is unable to

carry out the murder. Like Anthony, Richard is finally weak,

bereft by his brother’s absence and terrified. Apologising to

Anthony’s ghost in a desperate whisper, he tells Mark to kill

him. Signalling the final collapse of patriarchal power, Mark

is forced to murder Richard as Richard confesses that if he

allows him to live, he will hurt his children. As Richard

encourages Mark to stab him, the ‘undead’ spectre of Anthony

haunts the scene, a figure unmoored, lost and alone. Reticent

but aware he has little choice, Mark does so, before

recoiling, horrified, in tears. The literal blood on his hands

echoes the metaphorical blood on his hands, signalling his own

mental weakness in not preventing Anthony’s death. Abandoning

the scene, Mark flees the gothic ruins of the ‘Devil’s house’

and stumbles out of the cold enclosed space, into the shadow

of the morning sun.

While such an act of stabbing can of course be read as

Mark’s own masculine penetration of Richard (a reading backed

up by the lexis of Richard ‘Come on. Come on. Yes. Yes. Yes. I

need you to […] Stick it in me. Yes. Yes. Please. Come on!’),

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as Punter (2000) argues, the importance of reading the scene

here should perhaps be placed on Mark’s ‘abandonment’ of the

site. The gesture of abandonment is one that Punter (2000:154)

suggests can be read in terms of sex: ‘an abandonment of the

already empty site of the male.’ As Mark walks away from the

crime scene, his male-ness is rendered derelict. Akin to the

destruction and decay of the gang and the town itself, Mark is

left broken as a murderous father, and a failing husband in a

marriage that may well now degenerate and die (in a realist

reading at least). The consequences of his actions, then,

affect not only himself but Marie and the children,

essentially dismembering the family, forcing them, in turn, to

abandon the town and life they knew before. The empty male

site, then, a site that could be imagined as the whole of

Matlock itself, bereft of male trades, employment and purpose,

not only casts out and destroys the very men and homosocial

bonds that it seeks to protect, but renders the other -

‘women’ - invisible, silenced and excluded. Like Anthony,

Patti and Marie are subject to abuse, not by the bosses /

parents of angry young men, but by the angry young men

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themselves. In place of Arthur Seaton and Schlesinger’s Vic

Brown stand Sonny and Big Al. Both abused and abusers, at

their hands, Patti and Marie suffer obscenely and as the

filmic text ends, are forced to suffer forever in silence.

Dead Man’s Shoes is, then, not only a text about ‘angry young

men’ but also a text that makes visible what Charlotte

Brunsdon (2005: 168) nominates as ‘desperate young women.’

We turn now to the third part of our analysis, as we

focus on masculinity in the film. In particular, we trace

Richard’s path and, especially, the crucial, fateful and fatal

consequences of his choice of the path of lone masculinity,

and the consequent loss of the familial in general, and the

maternal in particular. In this section of this article, we

will particularly focus on the mythic elements of the film,

also noted by Fradley (Fradley: 285), specifically those of

the quest narrative contained within the plot, embodied in

Richard’s return to his home town, in search not only of

vengeance, but also meaning and a fuller sense of his own

identity.2

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In order to contextualize the nature of Richard’s quest,

we need to turn to another of de Lauretis’s key arguments. In

discussing the role of the monsters encountered by Oedipus,

Perseus and other ancient heroes, she writes: ‘They are

obstacles man encounters on the path of life, on his way to

manhood, wisdom and power; they must be slain or defeated so

that he can go forward to fulfill his destiny - and his story’

(de Lauretis: 110). In large measure this sums up exactly what

happens in Dead Man’s Shoes. Richard is represented as a mythic

hero in a number of ways. The opening shot of Day One reveals

Richard waking up in the most basic and primitive of

circumstances, in a ruined, inhospitable, almost animal space.

This all betokens the desperation of a man outside the law,

but the mise-en-scène of Richard in his primitive abode also

reinforces both the Western, and more mythic dynamics. He

2 Elsewhere in this volume Schwarz also writes very interestingly of Dead Man’s Shoes as a vengeance narrative. Her argument focuses on the ‘eroticizedviolence’ that underpins the triangular relationship between Sonny, Anthonyand Richard that creates a ‘particular homoeroticism’ that is linked to themore persistent theme in Meadows’ work of homosocial ties between men. Equally, she sees the film develop the vengeance tradition along the lines of the lex talionis in Richard’s desire ‘re-write wrongs, to regain power’. While we will also refer to some of these elements within the film, our reading of Richard’s return and his wreaking of vengeance will focus on hisquest to fulfill his heroic destiny, and thereby, define his masculinity, aquest that will ultimately fail.

26

leaves the farm, as before on foot. Indeed, we will only ever

see Richard on foot, which again evokes ancient myth and early

hero narratives. Richard’s persona as a kind of ‘super-hero’

emerges from a series of key details. Throughout the film the

staging of Richard’s ‘executions’ (he executes gang member

Sonny, Herbie, Tuff, Soz and Gypsy John) implies almost

supernatural powers in that he is able to enter their various

abodes without either the characters or the audience actually

seeing him enter the premises. Like the ghost his brother is,

or, indeed, the ‘monster’ he later nominates himself to be,

Richard, it is implied, can walk through walls.

In terms of de Lauretis’ typology, the ‘obstacles’ that

are to be ‘slain or defeated’ are primarily female, such as

Medusa or the Sphinx. Indeed, although Sonny, in particular,

and his gang more generally clearly envision themselves as

heterosexually macho males, as in their consumption of

pornography discussed earlier, the mise-en-scène repeatedly

feminizes them, so that they are, in effect, rendered the

equivalents of these ancient, female obstacles. This is

suggested by virtually the first words we hear from Richard:

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‘You cunt!’ he screams at gang member Herbie (Stuart

Wolfenden). It seems no accident that this particular word is

used. The first we see of Sonny reveals more

demasculinization: his face is covered in clown paint, and

Sonny acknowledges his feminization when he says to Richard at

their first encounter: ‘Do you always paint men like women?’

Elsewhere in her ‘Desire in Narrative’, de Lauretis

neatly reworks Laura’s Mulvey’s famous dictum about sadism as

follows: ‘Story demands sadism, depends on making something

happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will

and strength, victory / defeat’ (de Lauretis: 132-3). We noted

earlier Sonny’s sadistic abuse of both Patti and Anthony: here

it is Richard’s ‘narrative sadism’, as part of his hero’s

quest that interests us, especially his use of the lex talionis.

That is, Richard sees his mission as not only to execute

Anthony’s torturers, but to replicate what they had done to him,

to take an eye for an eye.

The drug party scene is the microcosm of Richard’s

sadistic enactment of the ancient lex talionis. Just as Anthony

was ‘tripping out of his mind’, Richard gives the gang a taste

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of their own medicine when he empties the drugs he had stolen

from them into the kettle, so that they too will be ‘tripping

out of their minds’ to fully experience the ‘monstrous’ horror

he enacts. Each of the five men is treated in a way that

mirrors what they had done to Anthony. Gypsy John is executed

at his most vulnerable moment (on the toilet) in the near

presence of people that could, perhaps, have saved him. Soz,

like Anthony, is forced into an unfamiliar small and cramped

space (his dead body is revealed in a suitcase), his face

contorted and bloated, reminiscent of Anthony’s own death

face. As the gang had forced Anthony to perform for them,

Richard forces Soz and Herbie to dance for him. Then in an

almost perfect replay of the scene in which Sonny had tried to

force Anthony to fellate him, Richard drags the semi-naked and

utterly helpless Sonny out to the very same kitchen, to

execute him in military style with a single bullet to the

head. Thus, the syuzhet becomes a replay of the fabula, with

all actions replicated in reverse, abusers now the abused, in

a perfect working out of the lex talionis.

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Whether read as a ‘revenge Western’ (Fradley, Schwarz),

or in the more typological terms used here, the protagonist of

Dead Man’s Shoes, Richard is self-evidently a man on a quest.

However, although the ending of the film is ambiguous there

can be little doubt that, ultimately, Richard fails as a hero.

His encounters do not lead to rebirth / resurrection, in the

form of a new identity or the renewal / confirmation of the

old identity (de Lauretis, Lotman). Rather, Richard is

destroyed by what he has done, and the ending of the film,

however it might be read, does not amount to the overcoming of

evil, or the hero being rewarded with the prize.

There are a number of ways to investigate what leads to

Richard’s ultimate failure. Firstly, it is arguable that the

film is structured to suggest that the quest is doomed, and

that failure is inevitable, precisely because of what had

happened in the past, and, in particular, the estrangement

from the maternal. Indeed, in several ways, the film is shot

and structured to suggest that this is the story of a death

foretold, that Richard is doomed to a tragic death. As already

noted, the ‘epigraph’ to the film seems to suggest that the

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film will end with his death. Even in the sun-filled childhood

scenes, death lurks. As the mother carries Anthony from his

christening, large black tomb-stones loom in the background.

The very formal structuring of the film, into a series of five

‘days’ seems to predicate that there will be a series of days;

and the end is already known, as this implies a retrospective

telling.

Schwarz has written tellingly of the significance of

Riber Castle (the place of Anthony’s death) in relation to the

film. For her, it is ‘a visual metaphor for a range of male

follies’, including ‘the follies of the characters in the

film.’ Indeed, Riber Castle is the already haunted place where

both brothers will die, in effect, by suicide. Meadows

suggests that, as in Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), the very

place to be avoided is where all will end badly. This is

achieved by giving the audience glimpses of Riber Castle on

the hill above the town almost from the very beginning of the

film, as when Richard first visits Sonny’s house, on Day One,

or when the gang terrorizes Patti in the diegetic present.

Finally, it comes into full focus when Anthony is taken where

31

they have always been headed, Gothic Riber. There is, the film

suggests, no escape from this looming Gothic destiny of

horrible death for either brother.

The structure of the film suggests predetermination in

other respects too. The very disjunction of the fabula from

the syuzhet plays into this. That is, before the present of

the film begins the past is already a given, and none of the

characters will be able to escape the terrible consequences,

not only of what the gang did to Anthony, but, as is revealed

only at the very end, of the awful, shameful secret that

Richard has, and which is perhaps his ultimate motivation,

guilt (a point soon to be returned to).

But one person partially escapes the past, and has a

present and future not totally shaped by it. This is Mark,

who, as his name suggests, is marked out as different: indeed,

he is the only member of the very un-magnificent seven who

does not have a nickname. What is it that possibly saves him

from the fate of the other eight males who die? Certainly, as

we have already seen, he is as culpable as the rest. Despite

this shared guilt, though, Mark is spared, and of the nine

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male characters (the two brothers and the seven men in the

gang) he is the only one to survive. The primary reason for

this is that he alone of all the men (including Richard) has a

relationship with the maternal. In this sense he is the only

male character in the film who chooses the other of the two

options presented in the prologue. This ‘choice’ is clearly

and deliberately signaled even before we meet Mark, or his

wife, ‘maternal’ Marie, in that the first sign of the return

to family life is a scene of their two boys playing on the

floor, in a clear recreation of the scenes of Richard and

Anthony together in the prologue. The happiness and innocence

of childhood are seen for the first time in the diegetic

present (even though such happiness is thereafter threatened

by Richard himself). In this sense, we may read Marie and her

boys, then, as a diegetic recreation of Richard and Anthony

with their mother, and consider the fact that it is on this

basis - Mark’s relationship with the maternal and the familial

- that he is saved, if only from death. Richard, in this

sense, is no ‘better’ than the six men of the gang who are

‘executed’.

33

From the opening of the film, the audience is led to

believe that Richard had a close and loving relationship with

Anthony, for that is how this relationship is depicted in the

diegetic present, although this ‘relationship’ is by now

fictitious. In fact, this is not the case. Indeed, perhaps the

most shocking revelation of the film is that of Richard

himself when he confesses to Mark that Anthony died ‘because

he was weak, because he was a spastic’. Shot in tight close-up

Richard goes on: ‘he was a fucking spastic, [...] he was a

fucking nana’, with horrible mockery of Anthony’s voice. When

the terrified Mark insists that Anthony looked up to him,

Richard retorts: ‘Well, he was a fucking embarrassment to me.’

Sadly, this is the real truth of the film. Richard had killed

all the gang, apart from Mark, at least in part because he

recognizes that their behaviour was in part explicable,

because he too had felt this way about Anthony. As he says: ‘Now, I’m

the monster’. In reality, he had always been the monster. It

is only at this admission that Richard at last shows some

emotion, as he begins to break down, and lose for first time

his stony impassivity, with tears in his eyes.

34

The film begins to draw to a close; Richard persuades

Mark to kill him, because he has become the beast while Mark

is no longer a monster, because he has a wife and the

equivalent of the two boys that Richard and Anthony had been.

The power of the scene is enhanced by the way it is shot, all

in extreme close-up, mainly two-shots, intercut with black and

white flashbacks, but now of the recent past, of what we have

already seen, the killings, but also of Anthony calling for

help, as well as of Richard with Mark’s boys. Richard’s end is

figured in an overhead shot of him falling to his knees as he

dies, intercut with Anthony’s death. As Richard closes his

eyes in death, Meadows immediately provides a mirroring shot

of Anthony closing his, almost as if the two brothers have

finally been reunited and become one in death.

This closeness is, of course, too late to save either of

them: Richard had failed Anthony because he had failed to form

an adult relationship with him. Richard’s confession thus

serves as a horrific, destructive and implicit rejection of

the familial. Equally, Richard also fails as the hero in other

regards. Unlike Mark, but like the other members of the gang,

35

he has no relationship (outside the prologue) with the

maternal. Even at Anthony’s funeral, shown in flashback, their

mother stands more or less at dead centre of the group: again

the maternal is central. Rather than standing with her, Richard

stands militarily upright at the edge, still and forever

remote from the maternal and the familial.

To return to the prologue, we recall that two paths were

established, the matrocentric family, or the man alone.

Richard has turned away from the mother, and the family, and

can find no way back. More broadly, Richard fails to establish

a relationship of any kind with the female, and in this sense

he is no different from Sonny and his gang. Ultimately, he

fails in his quest, for all the reasons stated, and thus fails

to achieve the status suggested by one half of the prologue,

that of the mythic hero. Instead he becomes ‘monster’, a

‘beast’, and the beast must die. In this sense, Dead Man’s Shows

can be read as a critique of the failure of the male

(including Richard) to establish meaningful relationships with

the female, especially the ‘lost maternal’. Indeed, in both

Dead Man’s Shoes and other texts such as Once Upon A Time in the

36

Midlands, Somers Town and Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee, Meadows clearly

demonstrates that he is not only interested in male figures,

but rather, his concern for and interest in female figures,

the familial and the maternal is fundamental, embedded in and

demonstrated through their conscious diegetic marginalisation.

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