Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: Richard Gadd’s Half Man is brutal, thrilling and unforgettable

Cut to 15-year-old Niall (played in this timeframe by Mitchell Robertson), horribly bullied at his Glasgow school, and informed by his mother Lori (Neve McIntosh) that Ruben (Stuart Campbell) – the son of her partner Maura (Marianne McIvor) – is being released after two years in a young offender institution and will be sharing a room with him.

What looks like a disaster – the swaggering, charismatic Ruben immediately calls Niall “Bambi” – unexpectedly evolves into a transactional relationship: Ruben deals with the bullies, and Niall cheats on his behalf so he can pass his exams. In a scene of unsettling intimacy, the older boy helps his unworldly apprentice lose his virginity to Mona (Charlotte Blackwood). 

In the decades that follow, across six episodes, Ruben is in and out of prison, while Niall struggles with his sexuality and his ambitions to be taken seriously as a writer. When Ruben believes that Niall has betrayed him, he roars: “I’ll make you fucking ugly!” The prospect of savage violence is ever-present and mutilates everything it touches.

The greatness of Gadd’s vision is that he does not take the easy dramatic path of portraying Ruben and Niall as two distinct sides of a masculine coin: id versus superego, bloodlust versus restraint, instinct versus reason. One of Niall’s university flatmates, Celeste (Philippine Velge) tells him: “You’re very different, you two. It’s like one needs a head, and the other needs a body.” Another character says that “you’re the same person, in the way that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person.” 

Both are dead wrong. The profound co-dependency between the two men reflects the porousness of the partition that divides ferocity from civility. Niall is more than capable of vicious cruelty, vindictiveness and destructiveness: “a nasty little ogre of a man,” as one character puts it. For all his braggadocio, Ruben can crumple on a dime into abject vulnerability, his snarl supplanted by a cry of neediness. Both Bell and Gadd are breathtakingly good (as are Robertson and Campbell).

Already, Half Man is being bracketed with Adolescence and Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere – a glib category mistake. This is not yet another exploration of social media, incels and Andrew Tate. Indeed, in its mythic reach, it has more in common with anthropological accounts of violence and rites of passage like Walter Burkert’s Homo Necans and René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred (both 1972). 

In this, and so many other respects, Gadd’s artistic ambition is thrilling; and this unforgettable drama seals his reputation as one of the most important creative forces of our time.

Suggested Reading

Criminal Record has the makings of a classic

Matthew d’Ancona

FILM

David Bowie: You’re Not Alone (Lightroom King’s Cross, London, until October 10)

Hot on the heels of the opening of the David Bowie Centre at V&A East, a Channel 4 documentary and a clutch of new books – I especially enjoyed Peter Ormerod’s David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God (Bloomsbury Continuum) – here comes an hour-long “immersive” show that makes superb use of the venue’s 360-degree, 12 metre-high screens.

Working closely with the Bowie estate, co-directors Mark Grimmer and Tom Wexler have wisely structured their four-wall film around themes – curiosity, characters, outsider art, songwriting, rock’n’roll theatre, changes, spirituality – rather than a linear biographical narrative. The selection, deployment and juxtaposition of footage (video and audio) is dazzling and often very moving. 

In lazier hands, this could have been nothing more than a visual jukebox. But – from the 1974 Diamond Dogs tour and previously unseen film of Bowie at Earls Court in 1978 to iconic moments such as his performance at Live Aid in 1985 and interview with Jeremy Paxman in 1999 – the curation is exemplary.

None of this feels like heritage, either. As I wrote of JG Ballard last week, Bowie’s work seems more relevant than ever. The fragmentation of the self, the pulverising power of the internet, the collapse of the distinction between fringe and mainstream, the implacable spread of dystopianism: he foresaw it all.

A decade after his death, the Starman is still such a presence: long live hazy cosmic jive.

FILM

Rose of Nevada (selected cinemas)

According to the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, “the weird is that which does not belong. The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it.” By which reckoning, writer-director Mark Jenkin’s third feature is very weird indeed.

From the first shots of derelict boats, coils of rope, weathered beams and old tyres – filmed in grainy 16mm – the Cornish fishing village at the story’s heart is rendered as a place that is dying, perhaps already dead. Struggling to make ends meet, Nick (George MacKay) goes into the local food bank to pick up essential supplies for his young family. Liam (Callum Turner), meanwhile, is a drifter looking for any work going.

When The Rose of Nevada, a trawler lost at sea 30 years ago, reappears without explanation, both men are taken on by the new skipper and archetypal sea dog Murgey (Francis Magee). In the first of many inscrutable conversations – some of the characters seem to be hoarding secret knowledge – the boat’s owner Mike (Edward Rowe) asks the widowed Tina (Rosalind Eleazar): “So – are we going to try again?” She merely nods.

The rediscovered vessel’s trip is a success and the crew returns to the mainland with a hold full of fish on ice – though Nick is unsettled to see the words “Get off the boat now” carved into the woodwork by his bunk, only to vanish when they are out at sea. Back in the village, it is quickly clear that something strange and possibly hallucinatory has happened. 

From the date on a newspaper, Nick sees that it is 1993, three years before he was born. He and Liam are greeted warmly by the villagers but are addressed, respectively, as Luke and Alan – the names of two long-vanished fishermen. The food bank is an old-fashioned post office. The pub is full of life and laughter, quite unlike the deserted joint that it was when they left.

The eeriness of the time-slip – reminiscent of Chris Marker’s classic La Jetée (1962) – is compounded by the unsettling ease with which Liam adapts to the inexplicable. He is content for the (younger) Tina to believe he is Alan, to sleep with her, for her daughter to call him “Daddy”; happy, it would seem, to be a nomad in time as well as space. “I am someone else,” he says. “For now.” 

Nick, in contrast, still wants to know “what the fuck is going on?” Why, like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), have they “come unstuck in time”? There is a suggestion of temporal recurrence, of a Möbius strip tearing a hole in the fabric of space-time.

But Jenkin is far too allusive, cerebral and confident a director to offer any pat answers. As it weaves its uncanny spell, this compelling movie also has much to say about the power of the past, the magnetism of nostalgia, and the instability of identity. It will haunt you.

BOOK

Galahad and the Grail, by Malcolm Guite (Canterbury Press)

It is impossible to understand contemporary culture without an awareness of “re-enchantment”. In response to what they see as the inadequacies of modern secularism and materialism – what Max Weber diagnosed as “disenchantment” – a loose-knit network of writers and artists has arisen to offer an alternative and, in recent years, massively broadened its audience: public intellectuals including Charles Taylor and Iain McGilchrist; polemicists such as Paul Kingsnorth and Rod Dreher; and literary adventurers like the mythic storyteller Martin Shaw and the scholarly poet Malcolm Guite.

In this magnificent first volume of a projected four-part reworking of the Arthurian legend, Guite works in the ballad tradition – verses that are meant to be read out loud – to recount the quest for the Grail of Sir Galahad, son of Lancelot and descendant of Joseph of Arimathea. Cast as the curtain-raising tranche of an epic – the form used by Homer, Virgil, Milton and Tennyson – Galahad and the Grail is full of numinous power, literary grace and Christian tradition deftly braided with folk tales. It is also beautifully illustrated in a woodcut idiom by Stephen Crotts.

The invitation is irresistible: “Lift up your eyes to see the light/ on Glastonbury Tor./ Then come down from that far green hill/ to where the sacred waters spill/ and shine within the chalice well/ and listen to their lore.” On the journey, we encounter hermits, the “loveliness in grief” of a naiad’s song, a necromancer who has become a machine (“sometimes we ourselves become/ the idols that we make!”), Solomon’s ship, “the ecstasy and energy/ that to the sea belong”, a perilous wasteland and a sequence of tests that only the true of heart can pass. 

Guite – an authority on Coleridge, Romanticism and the Inklings (the Oxford group whose core members were JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and Charles Williams) – sees the cosmos as “a poem” and challenges the conventional distinction between the metaphoric and the literal. As he pursues this mighty endeavour, his own quest is to find the connective tissue between modern Britain and the Arthurian kingdom of Logres. In enchanted verse, ancient voices are brought to life by a magus of poetic art.