Filmic Identification: Women in Kitchen Sink Realism and the Formation of the Angry Young Man

Abstract

This essay will examine Look Back in Anger (1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), two kitchen sink realist films produced during a period wherein the traditional working-class identity that had existed hitherto was being disrupted. This essay will focus on how the traditional, gendered, working-class symbols, their remnants, and the fact that the films almost exclusively center on men, using women to convey messages about a male crisis of identity, and yet are branded as social realism, as working-class cinema, demand a question, one that Luce Irigaray posed to the esteemed Neapolitan sculptor Gian Bernini, modified for this essay’s purposes: “Working class cinema? Sculpted by a man? What working class cinema are we talking about? Whose working-class cinema?" What this essay aims to get at by way of this question is to examine the shifting gendered bifurcation of working-class identity in the 20th century—and the process by which this translated into the gendered bifurcation of working-class cinema by marrying psychoanalytic thought with elements of constructionist psychology, and using such ideas as ego-formation, the gaze, and narratives as a foundation—and extrapolate from that a process present in all the history of narrative cinema: how the fascination of film is created by pre-existing patterns of fascination within the individual subject and the social formations that have molded them. More significantly, how the marriage of these three differing frameworks for film critique is necessary to understand the gendered coding of characters to allow for specific stories to be told in working-class cinema.