Thoughts for today - 18/04/25
England is Mine and the fallacy that anyone can be anything if they just try a little harder
In the penultimate scene of Mark Gill’s Morrissey biopic, England is Mine, a pre-Smiths Stephen Morrissey sits in a meeting at a job centre, interrupting his recruitment officer with the question, “Do you ever wake up and think, ‘I wonder if I could have been a poet?’”
The officer looks confused, but Stephen is undeterred.
“Do you think,” he goes on, “that if you tried just a little bit harder, that you could have made it. That maybe, instead of all this, you could have gone down in history? Manchester’s first Nobel laureate?”
Incredulous, the officer responds with with a mini lecture on the “two million other blokes out there” looking for work. This doesn’t seem to bother Stephen either.
“You can do it, sir,” he says. “I believe in you.”
And with that, Stephen walks out, resumes his bedroom writing, and is visited by a young Johnny Marr. The rest is history.
A reasonably good film, England is Mine is let down by this clichéd ending, the fallacy that anyone can become whatever they want to be. If only you would have tried that little bit harder - you’d have been the Oscar Wilde of your time, the James Joyce of Manchester, the next big thing. Those two million unemployed? No doubt they aren’t trying hard enough, either.
To be a little kinder, we could say that the scene is a reflection of Stephen’s renewed determination, after a long period of depression, a way of giving himself a pep talk. Maybe he sees a potential future in the old man before him, stuck in an ugly little office five days a week. Either way, we are sold a lie. There isn’t enough to go round. Who will do the little jobs, the shit jobs, the essential jobs? And what is it Stephen is aiming for? What is this perception of success? A number one? Top of the Pops? A Nobel laureate? There is no in-between. Art is not created for art’s sake. It is a means of production. A means of escape. A lucrative career.