In the browbeating rage and turmoil running like a poisoned artery through the body and life of Johnny, a low-class and frustrated shmuck of an intellectual from Manchester, a rapist wandering London in search of a living, breathing person on whom he can inflict his spleen and disappointment, something of the glory of Hamlet rises to the surface. It might be only an illusion, or a slow-rising something like a bubble that just pops before we notice that it exists; but it is there, and the same vein of cynical despair arises in the form of this cinematic masterpiece directed by Mike Leigh: this is Naked.
Because matters in this movie of plot and story structure are less important than the bleakly stunning interplay of the characters moving across the screen, their relationships and reactions, the staging and aesthetic of it all, I’d better gloss over the different phases of this man’s lowly—and lonesome—existence in these northern reaches.
Escaping to London after his back-alley rape, Johnny invites himself into the house of his former girlfriend, Louise, also from Manchester, whose friend Sophie he goes on to seduce callously, making of her an emotional wreck and then abandoning her. He promptly decides to leave the women, casting himself as the raving lunatic in a stage-play of raving lunatics, undertaking an odyssey around the city of London as he displays the hard-driving and amoral cynicism that not only leaves others writhing in his wake but garners him an expected, perhaps inevitable beating on two occasions.
The story goes on from there, of course, but meanwhile in the making is the parallel development of a posh and pretentious yuppie, Jeremy, the ostensible landlord of Sophie’s house and a man whose psychopathic tendencies and sadistic streak as a rapist mark him out as the counterpoint to the more substantial and moving Johnny, who at least displays some kind of inner conflict—that is, a soul, heart, character, or whatever you want to call it. Our good old Jeremy, on the other hand, is nothing more than an animal scheming for its next morsel or bit of sustenance.
The difference between the two is most apparent during a scene where Johnny, after returning from his late-night odyssey through the gutters of London, has a hysterical fit as he battles his internal demons and what we suppose are his regrets and self-induced suffering on the floor of Louise’s hallway. Woken up by Johnny’s flip-out and sauntering out in his thong, the haughty Jeremy watches this distant thing on the floor flopping like a fish and gives merely a cold, uncaring verdict on the abjection of the human species, rebuffing Johnny’s tentative hand as he reaches toward his leg.
There is no brotherhood of man here, but instead the implicit belief in the power struggle and every man for himself. For all their similarity in the sexual act and their sadistic tendencies, there is a fine but hard line dividing the two men: there is Johnny, whose sadism imposes a kind of in-built, unseen suffering on the sadist, as though acting out of bitterness and self-disgust; and there is Jeremy, whose sadism is pure pleasure, or something intoxicating that he craves as a vampire its blood.
Leigh’s direction throughout the movie is powerful, letting the sensation of its spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment camerawork and acting work its way into the viewer’s understanding of the movie. And it is a marvel. The most searing and potent scene—really a short sequence—occurs when Johnny’s stranger-friend Maggie reunites with her long-lost illiterate boyfriend, Archie, a Scotsman with an accent so thick and a dialect so impenetrable that I might as well have been listening to a foreign language. Archie is a maggot and probably a wife beater—we discover as much when we meet him—and his girlfriend’s in for it when they start engaging in the eerie pantomime of a fight, feinting and scudding in the dust of an abandoned, derelict building as Johnny’s stark figure stands aside in his trench coat, darkly indifferent to the world and about to be swallowed by swirling shadows. It’s seems as though I were watching a stage play, and the staging itself is so spontaneously lucid that it’s almost hallucinatory. And certainly it’s not easily forgotten.
And as for the actual theories of the browbeating intellectual draped over this character, Johnny, who wears his armor of ideas as if to protect himself from himself? Many of them are compelling in an absurd and comical way, and a few of them seem almost conspiratorial; but more striking than the content of his ideas is his attitude toward them and the often awesome power of his dogged pursuit of nothing at all. Underneath the attitude of all this despair and negligence, he has a twisted drive that could be the basis of a strong—maybe even an extraordinary—character, if the circumstances were somehow different. He cares, but negatively, driven to a destruction that he seems to be at odds with, because otherwise why keep preaching like a madman? If you really believed in the evil and nonsense of the universe or of the species, you would check out, you would do nothing or commit suicide, simple as that. But a human being can’t live that way if he wants to survive, and the agony of Johnny has something to do with this internal conflict and the real explanations for his own ideas about the world.
But in some sense, Johnny isn’t at all wrong or even unusual. Seeking the truth of things can often turn into the fast track toward disillusionment, bitterness, and self-disgust. This is the human being’s cross to bear, at least in proportion as it is a thinking, inquiring human being and not one with an arrested development. It is Hamlet’s as well, that of a character turned against life by the realizations triggered by his thinking. And God knows that there are possibly more negative aspects of the human species than positive, if only we could find a way to weigh up all the madness. But negativity and nihilism are the likely outcomes, rather than the inevitable ones. And how much more interesting a character would be if he or she understood to its marrow the corruption, evil, and pointlessness of human life—and still decided to go on, not only to live but to act rightly and even with a positive defiance. Now that’s something I’d like to see, a compelling character, maybe even what could be called an extraordinary human being—or a person I’d love to meet.
