Poor Things, Glasgow, and nationalism

Nothing in the below would actually spoil the experience of Poor Things for you if you’ve not read or seen it, but it does briefly mention some of the fictional events. If you want to go in knowing absolutely nothing about the plot, skip this post, though I’m not sure why you would want that.

I thought Poor Things (the film) was excellent. In that, I am certainly not alone, although the conversation of the two teenagers in front of us on the bus home from the cinema suggests that prudish TikTok users might not take the same view. (Harsh?)

Nonetheless, a showing of Poor Things in Glasgow specifically ran the risk of being tangled up in a developing controversy. For the uninitiated: the film adapts a novel, Poor Things by Alasdair Gray (1934–2019), which is largely set in Glasgow with Glaswegian characters. But a few months ago, the information emerged that—not only did the film feature no Scottish actors, not only was it not filmed in Scotland—the setting had been changed to London, with all the Scottish characters turned English. (Except Willem Dafoe’s Godwin Baxter, who is apparently still Glaswegian.)¹

This was felt as a bit of a blow to the city in itself: a Guardian headline decried the decision as ‘bloody nonsense’. But Gray, whose politics were as prominent in his public image as his art, was an longstanding and outspoken Scottish nationalist, and so the story very quickly took on a political angle. An hour-long documentary was made, put on the YouTube channel Ossian (named for an ostensible ‘native Scottish epic’ that is today widely regarded as an eighteenth-century fraud) arguing that Poor Things is a ‘quintessentially Glaswegian, Scottish story’; it was promoted in the unashamedly nationalist newspaper The National and on the pro-independence blog Bella Caledonia, the latter named for an image in Gray’s novel.

Unionist cultural commentator Kenny Farquharson cheekily suggested that some nationalists ‘would prefer a mediocre film with a lesser director but with Scottish accents’. But pace this suggestion, there was a real, serious argument being made. Lots of people quoted a couple of lines from Gray’s debut Lanark, although not many provided the full context for the dialogue:

Travelling patches of sunlight went from ridge to ridge, making a hump of tenements gleam against the dark towers of the city chambers, silhouetting the cupolas of the Royal infirmary against the tomb-glittering spine of the Necropolis. ‘Glasgow is a magnificent city,’ said McAlpin. ‘Why do we hardly ever notice that?’ ‘Because nobody imagines living here,’ said Thaw. McAlpin lit a cigarette and said, ‘If you want to explain that I’ll certainly listen.’

‘Then think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.’ [Alasdair Gray, Lanark, book 2, chapter 22, I think the pagination will vary.]

Gray’s works were all, to a greater or lesser degree, dedicated to correcting this imaginative oversight of Glasgow’s magnificence. The worry was that, by beginning Bella Baxter’s journey in London, the film has done the opposite: it has contributed to the idea that Glasgow is not a great world city, suitable for the setting of an Oscar-hyped film, whereas London is. Gray’s secretary and later biographer Rodge Glass was paraphrased in the Guardian article as saying that Gray’s artistic project of building Glaswegian pride has ‘suffered a setback’.

Yet, after the initial outrage, Scottish nationalists suddenly seemed to cool off. Nicola Sturgeon, apparently a noted Gray fan, registered an ambivalent-to-positive tone: ‘anything that brings the work of Gray to a wider audience is a good thing’. And one of the two people who made the YouTube documentary wrote a piece for the National after seeing the film, playing down their initial ‘knee jerk’ reaction to the setting with praise for a ‘beautiful big weird film’ that constitutes a ‘fitting tribute to one of Scotland’s greatest ever creative minds’.

Part of this, I’m sure, is just the simple fact that the movie is good fun, which always has a tendency to override purely political objections to works of art. But there’s something else too. There is longstanding strand of Scottish nationalist thought—one that Gray himself heavily contributed to—that is counterintuitively founded, not on pride in, but on deprecation of actually-existing Scottish culture. It’s a way of thinking that strongly promotes a deep kind of cultural insularity. And, while it is not the only or even the dominant strand in modern nationalism, it’s one that still has power, and it’s what has driven a lot of nationalist Gray fans to back off from their criticisms of the filmmakers—and to blame themselves and their compatriots instead.

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A good question to lead us into this argument might be: why wasn’t the movie set in Glasgow? After all, as might be expected, Glasgow is not just an incidental backdrop to the original work; it contributes to the content. To be sure, Poor Things is not as dependent on its Clydeside setting as some of Gray’s other works (an adaptation of Lanark set in Burton-upon-Trent would be, um, difficult to pull off) with Bella Baxter on a journey across France and the Mediterranean for much of the plot. But specifically Scottish and Glaswegian elements run through it. One small detail might give the flavour: Bella’s interrupted wedding to Archie McCandless,² date unspecified in the film, is in the novel set for 25th December 1883—because right into the twentieth century ‘the Scottish Church [did] not think Christmas day holier than other’,³ and ‘Glasgow shops and offices and factories were as throng with business as ever’.

Given this, why wouldn’t director Yorgos Lanthimos—who by all accounts had great respect for Gray and his work—stick to Glasgow?⁴ Well, let’s ask him! Or rather, let’s let Mark Kermode ask him:

Lanthimos also crucially decided to drop ‘the part of the novel which is like a philosophical political essay about Scotland and its relationship to England and the world. I thought that couldn’t be part of the film, both in terms of just practically making that kind of philosophical essay into a film, but also me being a Greek person, making a film about Scotland. It would have been totally disingenuous of me.’

One part of this makes immediate sense: adapting a novel is an exercise in constraint, and Lanthimos couldn’t fit the political elements of Poor Thing’s Scottish setting into his film. That’s just sensible. But even leaving out any specifically Scottish themes, couldn’t Lanthimos have set the film in Glasgow? Perhaps the city would only have provided set-dressing; but it would have at least been a nod to the source material and the author, as well as to the city he loved.

Well, Lanthimos says it would have been ‘totally disingenuous’ for him to do so as a Greek director. But his film is not set in Athens or Thessaloniki; Glasgow is replaced by London. Presumably Lanthimos thinks there’s nothing disingenuous about a Greek person making a film about England? Or—and I think this is closer to the mark—he thinks that one can make a film set in England without it necessarily being about England, but a film set in Scotland must, just in virtue of the setting, be about Scotland.

In the run-up to the 2014 independence referendum, Gray published an essay about Scottish arts and culture called ‘Settlers and Colonists’ that caused a bit of a stir: he was using the terms in his title to refer to specific—named—English figures in the Scottish arts world. This was not received well by many (and rightly so). But pushing past the terminological controversy, Gray was making an argument about outsider influence on Scottish culture that has resonated in the years since. His claim was that non-Scots in the Scottish arts scene had done immense harm to Scottish culture. Because they shared the ‘same view of [the] country’ as non-nationalist Scots, a view Gray denigrated as ‘a London perspective’, their attempts to build up Scottish culture were meaningless; ‘their work for institutions originally created to encourage art in Scotland actually depressed it’. He praised, by contrast, the explicitly nationalist efforts of Yeats and Lady Gregory in setting up the Abbey Theatre in Ireland, presenting it as a model of how to promote national culture.

Why did Lanthimos shrink from setting Poor Things in Glasgow? Why did he feel that anything set in Scotland had to be about Scotland, that it was wrong to think otherwise? Perhaps because Alasdair Gray, and many other influential Scottish cultural figures, had said as much. The message from many nationalists was as follows: if you are a foreigner, then unless you are willing to contribute to the building of an isolated, distinct, one might even say autarkic Scottish culture, unless you are making a point about Scotland that is edifying from a nationalist point of view, you should leave well enough alone. I might suggest that Lanthimos, hearing this message, thought that by choosing London over Glasgow he could free himself of this artistic burden—a burden placed upon him by Gray himself, and those with the same nationalistic view of Scottish culture.

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The above-quoted passage from Lanark, in the voice of Gray-like character Duncan Thaw, continues:

What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. That’s all. No, I’m wrong, there’s also the cinema and library. And when our imagination needs exercise we use these to visit London, Paris, Rome under the Caesars, the American West at the turn of the century, anywhere but here and now. Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music-hall song and a few bad novels. That’s all we’ve given to the world outside. It’s all we’ve given to ourselves. [Emphasis mine.]

It is a canard of Scottish nationalist historiography that the 1707 union with England was conducted by scheming elites desperate for a slice of empire, against the interests of the Scottish people. But, it is common to hear, in the centuries since Scottish inferiority has been maintained by an increasingly cringing disposition on the part of the very people who the union betrayed: Scots have been ‘thoroughly provincialised’, as Gray put it in his essay on colonists. Gray was clear that outsiders were able to ‘colonise’ Scottish culture only insofar as they were aided and abetted by ‘Scots without confidence in their own land and people’. Thaw’s lament for Glasgow’s absence from our collective imagination was not just an expression of disappointment; it was Gray’s declaration that ‘we’, Glaswegians and Scots more broadly, had failed.

In this regard, Gray’s ideas line up with those of his nationalist contemporary, the political theorist Tom Nairn, best known outside of Scotland for his 1960s work with Perry Anderson in the New Left Review on the ‘Nairn-Anderson thesis’. Nairn’s influence on modern Scottish nationalism cannot be overstated (although today’s movement cannot be uncomplicatedly identified with his vision). His 1968 essay ‘Three Dreams of Scottish Nationalism’, undoubtedly the best introduction to his thought, is a substantial and deeply important argument about Scottish history. But it is remembered mostly for its memorable and witty one-liners; this is unjust, but the quotable lines do accurately reflect Nairn’s deep pessimism about the existing resources of Scottish civic life, civil society, and public culture:

Scotland is the land where ideal has never, even for an instant, coincided with fact. Most nations have had moments of truth, at least. Scotland, never.

Scotland will be reborn when the last minister is strangled with the last copy of the Sunday Post.

Nairn struggled to put much (if any) stock in actually-existing Scottish arts, politics, national identity, culture. In many ways, they were the problem with Scotland.

There are many problems with this reflexively pessimistic view of Scottish culture. (Purely practically, it’s not clear how one could build pride in one’s country by blaming one’s compatriots for being insufficiently proud.) But at the theoretical level, the deepest problem is that this view threatens to destroy any basis for advocating for Scotland in the first place. If Scotland (if Glasgow) really has produced little or nothing of value to define itself, why shouldn’t it just let itself be subsumed? Are there any principled reasons, not just prejudice and patter, why we should bother trying to create Scottish civic pride, rather than just co-opting Britishness?⁵

Of course, there obviously are principled reasons to want specifically Scottish (and specifically Glaswegian) culture and identity to thrive. My point is just that pessimistic nationalism can’t identify these reasons. Because it assumes that proud and successful Scottish culture would have to be a nationalist civic culture (and, especially for Nairn, a very specific type of nationalist civic culture), it can see only failure in three hundred years of history.

Now, another dimension of nationalist myth, ascendant for a time, was that 2014 had solved this problem. Despite Yes’ defeat at the ballot box, the pro-independence campaign had built a proud and distinctively Scottish civil society that would revitalise the nation, both politically (under an SNP government in Holyrood) and culturally, growing cultural confidence and setting the stage for independence in the future. But growing dissatisfaction with the SNP, the continuation of the same problems in the Scottish arts scene as existed before 2014, and the obvious emptiness of recurrent calls to revitalise the ‘Yes movement’ have all put the lie to this story, leaving much of nationalism reverting to its earlier pessimism.

And so, we see the following headline in the Herald: ‘Poor Things didn’t let down Alasdair Gray or Glasgow, we did’. The piece is more subtle than the headline might suggest, but the conclusion is pure nationalist pessimism:

It's not the film that failed Gray, it’s Scotland’s tenuous relationship with the arts. It took a Greek director with a trusted track record to find Gray’s novel and be inspired enough that we even find ourselves talking about such things.

The aforementioned YouTube documentary maker says the same thing in his National article: Glasgow’s absence from world culture is

not Hollywood’s fault. It's Scotland's. It’s Glasgow’s. It’s ours. It’s not Lanthimos’s responsibility to adapt our best original stories for the big screen and a global audience. We should be able to do that ourselves.

The argument is that Lanthimos has no particular obligation to help Scotland get out of its creative rut. Quite the opposite: Scots should be learning a ‘bitter lesson’ from the fact that a Greek got to Gray’s work before they did. Maybe if Lanthimos had set the film in Glasgow—and especially if he’d filmed it here—Nairn-Gray nationalism might have subjected him to questions about colonisation and his faithfulness to Scottish nationhood. But by moving the setting to London (and the filming to Hungary), he freed himself of any perceived cultural duty to Scotland. Yet, the pessimistic nationalists think, Scots are stuck with this duty; Lanthimos’ creative liberty becomes Scotland’s failure.

This is a way of thinking about art that trades in blame and obligation, in ‘fault’. The question being asked isn’t whether the film would have been better or worse or more interesting or more faithful or less original if it had kept Glasgow as the setting. It’s whether Lanthimos owed Scotland a movie set in Glasgow, and whether Scots should be ashamed that it took a Greek to adapt a great Scottish work. It’s not a way of thinking about culture that’s conducive to freedom and originality and artistic flourishing.

It’s also an insular and inward-looking framework. It leads to outsiders who are perceived as ‘meddling’ in Scottish culture facing accusations of being ‘colonists’, and puts Scots working with them at risk of insult, called timid and scared. It makes a Greek like Lanthimos almost afraid to engage with the Scottish elements of Poor Things, because of the idea that a film set in Scotland must be about Scotland. And, on the other hand, it stops Scots from looking outward, demands they turn to their own nation first. It says that the Scottish people, and especially Scottish artists, first and foremost have a ‘responsibility’ to contribute to Scottish national culture; if they do not do so, even just because they want to explore other themes and look further afield, it is a ‘fault’.

I’m not a Scot, not even a ‘new’ one, though Glasgow is now my home. In writing about Scotland like this, I am taking for granted a certain level of artistic and literary freedom; I am taking for granted that I can talk about Scotland without running the risk of ‘colonising’ its culture, and that my primary obligation is just to be truthful. I know that Glasgow is a magnificent city, though one with deep problems. I want that magnificence to be reflected, and that freedom upheld.

So, on reflection, I do think that Lanthimos would have made a better work had Poor Things kept its Glaswegian setting and characters. And, regardless of how the battle-lines have been drawn on this particular issue, I don’t think this sits uneasily with my opposition to Scottish nationalism. On the contrary, such a film would have been the perfect rebuke of the overbearing pessimistic nationalism that Gray so often slid into. And, at the same time, it would have made an immense contribution to the genuinely valuable project that Gray outlined—making Glasgow an imaginatively vivid and living city in the eyes of Scotland and of the world.

1. I say ‘apparently’: to me he sounds more Highlands, at least when he's not reverting back to pure American. But I’m sure Highlanders think he sounds nothing like them. All this to say he doesn’t do a great job with the accent.

2. Who in the film is called ‘Max’, not ‘Archie’; a more English name, I suppose.

3. Sic erat scriptum, at least in my copy.

4. Screenwriting credit actually goes to Tony McNamara, not Lanthimos; but it’s clear from interviews and background information that the decision to adapt Poor Things and the decision to set the film in London were both the director’s.

5. Nairn himself had at least a partial answer to this question, but it was premised on assumptions about the nature of the British state that (for all the epicycles he and others have conjured in the years since) have been plainly falsified by history. Today’s nationalists have, I think, no answer that goes beyond the level of cosy sentiment.