Poverty (in Ratcatcher)
First, I want to know why you’re suggesting that being surrounded by ‘that crazy accent / foreign language’ would make a childhood horrible.
Second, yes, i think you’re missing something. This film is shot through the child’s perspective, and thinking back to my own childhood, even the worst of times had a golden shimmer. I didn’t know any better. Being poor, having an unemployed, alcoholic father, that was normal. That was life. In Ratcatcher, we see the boy retreat into imagination, into hope for better (as seen by his journey to the unfinished house). The boy knows he’s got it bad, and that it can be better.
I don’t think the director wanted to beat us over the head with depictions of poverty, but rather to tell a story about a little boy who’s got hope, despite the seeming lack or inability of things to get better.
Because it’s not American!!!!!!! Good children should be surrounded by Americans!!!!! Really, though, even looking through the child’s perspective, his childhood just wasn’t that bad…
Not to mention THE GARBAGE STRIKE! There are areas in America in extreme poverty that still enjoy the benefits of routine garbage collection. In Ratcatcher, being surrounded by garbage with no way out is an obvious metaphor – all around him things are bad, maybe not the worst in the world, but bad enough for him to feel forever trapped (his family will NEVER get one of those new houses), thus being forced into his own dream world.
So like the Panda said, it’s about how the option-less child deals with it.
Nate, maybe i don’t understand what you’re trying to get att. The film is not about poverty in itself. It’s not a display of the bad streets of Scotland, not primarily. I don’t believe that was Ramsey’s point with the film. It was about how a child deals with the world around him, good, bad, whatever.
Exactly, the point of the movie is a child’s imagination and it’s ability to allow him to cope with the unpleasant world that surrounds him. The mouse doesn’t die, it flies to the moon.
At no point does Lynne Ramsay walk into frame and say, “These children are in extreme poverty, and their lives are worse than any other child’s in the world.” That wasn’t the intention of the film.
I couldn’t agree more with the posts in defense of this film. It wasn’t about a child who had a horrid childhood drenched in poverty, it was about a child dealing with less (and in my opinion blatantly WAY less) that agreeable circumstances. It was about the imaginative escapist ways in which he dealt with life, plain and simple, and like the other people have been saying, it isn’t a film about extreme poverty it’s a film about a child living on the low end of the social hierarchy. I didn’t feel as if the point of the film was to show the viewer a horrible life, it was to show the viewer (as others have been saying) the childish view of a less than perfect life…
In agreement with SPP, CS, BB and EH:
I remember a moment…
The section that will always stick in my mind begins with James lifting some change from his dad and taking a bus out of town. The ride takes him to a newly constructed housing estate in the suburbs. To James it is a bucolic idyll. The awe we sense in him as he looks around a nearly finished house. The excitement of exploration, his senses stimulated, his imagination awakened. And then that moment…where he climbs through an open window. The framing of the shot is unmistakable. For a brief moment in time he leaves both us and the world he has known up until now behind him and runs and rolls through a wheat field, totally free. Free from our pity; free from the incarceration of the grim Glasgow council estate that is his cage. It’s a moment of young resilience.
I’ve lived on an estate. It’s not the “extreme poverty” that grinds you down so much as the immutable grey and the utter dearth of opportunity. I knew exactly that feeling of freedom when I went out to the country one day. Lynne Ramsey’s perfectly paced film delivers that fleeting moment of contrast to us in such a way as to make us all feel, keenly, the plight of a child living at the bottom of the social scale. We are not all born equal.
Well said Edouard. “…the childish view of a less than perfect life…”
And Carl, reading your description of the unmistakable scene gave me chills. That scene is definitely a stand out, one that will haunt me (in a good way) for years to come.
This film reminded me a lot of Tideland. Or maybe vice versa, but i did see Tideland first. It was difficult for me to put myself in the place of a child character at first, but once i was able to cross that threshold, both films had a profound emotional impact on me. It definitely makes you appreciate your own upbringing, if it did not have the emotional poverty displayed by both films.
Samurai Panda,
Totally, I never made the connection between Tideland and Ratcatcher, yet since you mentioned it, it’s undeniable. They both (and Gilliam specifically and literally) ask the viewer to completely ignore their adult logic and give in to the perspective of a child. In my readings as of late of aesthetic philosophy, children are often brought up as pure vision, the idyllic sense of wonder, which artists throughout history have tried for entire careers to regain, and I believe that both Ramsey and Gilliam succeed at least to a certain extent in achieving this state.
What it is it about human nature that prevents an adult from being able to identify with children and their point of view? We were all children. Hell, i’m still young, only 24, and i find the older i get the harder it is for me to identify with the point of view of a child, which is why Tideland was very difficult to watch the first time around.
Few film makers have been able to achieve this so jarringly as the two films mentioned here. We are transported into the mind of the child, instead of observing it from afar.
A lot like TIDELAND yes. I also found it fairly similar to GUMMO.
“Because it’s not American!!!!!!! " and? You live in sucha a controlled society that you have to yell that! Ratcatcher is a gem in so many levels. Poverty is not the real issue, actually is quite poetic to see their poor background as a metaphor. It’s a wonderful meditational film about the vision of a child. I love those accents, especially when theyre not american. You learned how vast in the english language around the world.
not that bad? what is bad then? living in your own shit? ffs.
I agree that the movie is mainly a coming-of-age story, but poverty is a big part of the picture; the garbage bags perfectly embody the horrid ugliness of the world that James has to grow up in, a world where childhood consists of that brief period before you become a wage slave whose only pastime is getting pished and watching football on the telly. That’s why James hates football, because he doesn’t want to end up like his da. The fact that the action is set during the 1973 strike is not coincidence even if there’s no obvious political statements being made.
Being from the West of Scotland, I happen to like our ‘foreign language’!
>*Tideland* and Ratcatcher…both (and Gilliam specifically and literally) ask the viewer to completely ignore their adult logic and give in to the perspective of a child
Ditto Jordan’s The Butcher Boy, which was the only film I could compare to Tideland, on seeing the latter. (Though I agree w/Tyler re Gummo in this connection)
Anyway – Ratcatcher is a great film.
The ending didn’t feel justified.
. . . because . . . ?
spoiler
First off, it’s really uncommon for little kids to kill themselves. And he didn’t seem that distressed beforehand. You never saw it in his face. Instead he came off as a kid who had witnessed so much disturbing shit, that he coped by being removed. HIs expressionless face and his fantasy trip to the fields both suggest his tendency to detach. I can’t see a child like that committing suicide. Just didn’t ring true for me.
This is the second Lynne Ramsay movie in which I’ve felt the lead character’s actions weren’t consistent with how their personality and circumstances were conveyed. I think she’s better at depicting small moments between people than she is at probing the depths of a character.
Try analyzing films through their structure rather than through characters, and Ramsey’s films will come alive for you.
It’s not poverty, It’s more like ‘Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle’ set in Scotland.
I didn’t understand the ending either – the cadence is all wrong.
I didn’t understand the ending either – the cadence is all wrong.
What would have been the correct cadence?
I would have shot it like a Turner painting. Ecstatic landscapes. Added some more livestock shots in there.
Wyeth is a better point of reference:
It’s been a long time since I saw Ratcatcher, so I’m not compelled to say anything definite about it, but thanks to Matt Parks for posting Christina’s World. It’s one of my top five paintings of all time.
I don’t remember being bothered by the ending, though. Is it realistic for the kid to kill himself? Does realism even matter at the movies?
Oh, I misunderstood what you meant by cadence.
Maybe she he was saying something different than Turner says.
I think Matt has it correct – the horizon and what that specific structure represents is what Ramsay was saying.
Is it realistic for a mouse with his tail tied to a ballon to fly to the moon?
Clearly there is a reference to the Pied Piper of Hamelin legend.
Who or what is the “ratcatcher?”
Here’s an excerpt from a review I just read that captures quite eloquently my feelings on the ending:
The hurt and unspoken pain in James’ eyes make you want to feel close to him, but Ramsay’s episodic, imagistic approach keeps us from getting to his core. Her technique takes the place of his voice instead of articulating it. The cruel realizations that Ramsay piles on James at the end of the film feel plausible and accurate but not emotionally earned. It’s unfair to be asked to suffer for a character we’ve been kept at a distance from. And, paradoxically, for all her poetic touches the movie feels more bounded by the particulars of poverty than the naturalistic approach of De Sica and Ray, which transcended realism to achieve poetry.
Is it realistic for a mouse with his tail tied to a ballon to fly to the moon?
No, but that was meant as the little boy’s fantasy of what happens to the mouse. He wakes up in the next scene, as if from a dream.
Drunken Father Figure of Old
So, aside from the fact that everybody spoke in that crazy accent / foreign language, I really didn’t think his childhood was that horrible. His dad was a jerk, and he accidentally killed his friend, but I didn’t think there were really any other bad things that happened to him. I thought they were supposed to be living in extreme poverty, but I really didn’t think so when I saw it. Am I missing something?