plug: The Ruling Class (1972)
"We were once the rulers of the greatest empire the world has ever known, not by superior force or skill, but by sheer presence."
Welcome to today’s plug, a quick recommendation of an oft-forgotten film, cult classic, or movie that is dying to be rewatched //
Well it’s 4/20, which is basically Black Friday (retailer POV, mind you) for anyone in the cannabis industry or media. Hadn’t really considered a 4/20 theme when selecting today’s plug but it’s as good a trippy absurd dark comedy with a drug/counterculture-aesthetic as any to mark the occasion.
The Ruling Class is a British cult comedy, based on a 1968 play by Peter Barnes, that takes dank satirical aim at the British aristocracy with a wicked sense of play, anger, and cinematic psychedelia. Writing for Criterion, Ian Christie calls it “unashamedly theatrical, [emerging] from a particularly interesting period in English culture when theatre and cinema together were mining a rich vein of flamboyant self-analysis.” Feels incredibly relevant as the world disingenuously mourns the death of Prince Phillip in another compulsory, helplessly cynical media hat-tip to the ancient Lovecraftian forces of wealth and power.
The Ruling Class begins with the death of the 13th Earl of Gurney by autoerotic asphyxiation. His only living son, Jack (Peter O'Toole), the natural heir to his estate and seat in the House of Lords, is institutionalized as a paranoid schizophrenic (seems like they threw that term around a lot back then). The other remaining Gurney's — the late Earl’s brother, Sir Charles, his wife, and their son — are mortified to learn that the Earl’s will leaves the entire estate in Jack's hands. He then enters the scene dressed like Jesus and claiming to be the second coming of the God of love. "Yes, he's a nutcase." the Gurney's butler Tucker later remarks, "Most of these titled fleabags are. Rich nobs and privileged arseholes can afford to be bonkers. They're living in a dream world, aren't they?"
Hijinx ensue, Jack’s carefree hippy-Jesus alter-ego upsets the Gurney establishment, his family hatches a scheme to have him re-institutionalized, which also hilariously (and tragically) backfires, and everyone comes out looking like a twisted caricature of imperial decadence and violence.
Watching The Ruling Class is like watching a hallucinatory episode of The Crown with a touch of Arrested Development and Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. It’s very specific to Britain but with a scathing edge that makes it feel universal, especially in days like these, rife with class warfare as they are. Both the play and the film emerged from an apex-moment of class struggle and deconstruction, as Christie explains in that Criterion essay I mentioned up top:
The truth is that Barnes’ play, at least, was very much a product of the rupture of 1968, and its political message is that, beneath a veneer of modernization, very little had changed in Britain. An advocate of hanging and flogging (“we’ve forgotten how to punish,” Gurney proclaims to a rapturous House of Lords) will always be more welcome to the Establishment than a gently deluded religious mystic. But Barnes was never merely a cynic or a polemicist: steeped in the history of drama from the Jacobeans and Shakespeare’s rival Ben Johnson to Artaud and Brecht, he wanted to challenge English audiences’ cozy relationship with their theatre of “reassurance." So the violent gear-changes from comedy, to pathos, to horror, are central to his eruption onto the British stage in the '60s.
Movies based on stage plays are always tricky (most of the time they either feel too much like a play or the scope is widened in a way that feels forced) but director Peter Medak delivers the goods. He matches the biting satire of the text with potent visual ideas that evoke the dark sociopolitical sea-change of the late ‘60s — exteriorizing the internal absurdities of his aristocratic subjects with an anti-realist approach.
Anyway, it’s 4/20/2021, everything is absurd, relatively little has changed, the Emperor wears no clothes, and we’re all gonna die. Might as well toke up, watch The Ruling Class, and look out for each other while we still have the chance.
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