KEN LOACH'S POLITICAL CINEMA: WORK, POST-FORDISM, AND PSYCHIC SUFFERING IN SORRY WE MISSED YOU (2019)

Abstract

Although Ken Loach's Sorry We Missed You (2019) has sparked significant discussions about the configurations of labor in the contemporary context, some crucial aspects of its composition remain insufficiently explored. This essay offers an interpretation of one such aspect: the intersection between subjectivity and labor as represented in the film's narrative-dramatic composition of everyday life. To this end, drawing on Slavoj Žižek's notion of “social fantasy,” we present a series of critical reflections to examine the narrative-dramatic composition in light of both the post-Fordist historical-social process and its impasses, from an interdisciplinary perspective. The theoretical references for this essay include studies by Arantes (2014), Bihr (1998), Harvey (1992), Safatle (2019), and Žižek (2014). According to the interpretation proposed here, the film stylizes a social experience of suffering characteristic of a Symbolic order dominated by “systemic violence” (Žižek, 2014), which engenders a process of “negative centrality of labor” (Arantes, 2014). From these conditions, we argue that it is possible to identify a dialectic of desire recognition that structures the unresolved social tension, in which the collapse of fantasy leads the character Ricky to a traumatic encounter with the Real.

Keywords
British cinema; Working class; Negative centrality of labor; Labor precarization; Culture and the collapse of modernization