Movie Review – Naked

Naked (1993)
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

For those not alive in the 1990s, a specific element is difficult to recapture. Due to a simplistic view of numbers, many people felt doom & gloom over the fact that the calendar would one day soon start with “20” rather than “19.” It sounds quaint compared to today’s world, where nothing seemed entirely significant about “2020” until there was. I do think the Cold War fueled many of the anxieties of the 1980s and preceding decades, but with “communism defeated,” you’d think the children of the West would be enjoying an endless capitalist bacchanal. It wasn’t the case because capitalism was spiraling; it was a long journey from the edge of the sink to the bottom. Mike Leigh was feeling that gloom; the conservative Thatcher era in the UK had left so many people barely holding on by a thread, and with that economic crush, they were becoming nastier to each other.

The film’s opening immediately challenges the audience. Johnny (David Thewlis) is mid-coitus in an alley with his date when he suddenly becomes much rougher to the point she cries out in pain and begs him to stop. He seems to come to his senses and bolts while she shouts that she will send someone after him. It’s quite a daring choice to introduce your film’s main character committing date rape, but that is tied directly into the themes Leigh is exploring in his masterwork, Naked. This is a film about a society completely deflated and how its people have been nearly stripped of what makes them human to be “better competitors” in society.

Johnny steals a car, flees Manchester, and ends up crashing at the flat of ex-girlfriend Louise (Lesley Sharp). She shares the place with Sandra (Claire Skinner), due back from a trip to Zimbabwe in a matter of days, and Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge), an unemployed and desperately needy woman. Floating on the fringes of this dysfunctional cohabitation is Jeremy, a shark of a human being, who may be one of the most misogynistic characters I’ve seen in cinema. He seems to simmer with an ever-present hate of women while seeking them out constantly. His role in this story remains nebulous, but when he crosses paths with our other characters, things go into an even darker space.

Naked is a fantastic example of the type of film our contemporary discourse seems to misread to the point that we have a crisis of media literacy. Johnny is a vile person, and his treatment of women is abhorrent. The same can be said for Jeremy. However, Leigh is in agreement with us that these are horrible men. If he wanted you to like them, he wouldn’t have made them rapists and narcissists. To include the horrors of the world in a piece of art is not to endorse them but to examine them, to seek out their root cause, to study the shockwaves they send through other people’s lives. 

Leigh’s films almost always center around a family and through their trials & travails, often moving towards a resolution but not quite there yet. Naked is like an anti-Leigh film, focused mainly around an individual who goes through a dark time but comes out the other end, not seeming to have learned anything. Johnny and the people around him live in the absence of family, which explains their madness, pain, wandering & searching for something that isn’t there. For Louise, it meant leaving Manchester with the promise of better pay and a better life in the city. That has not come to pass, and she is moving towards “going home.”

Naked’s nasty misogyny is meant as a seething critique of masculinity on the eve of the new millennium. Johnny lashes out at women because he is desperate yet too proud to be vulnerable. He needs connection, but he’s been turned hateful by the machine he was born into. In many ways, Sophie, a female parallel to Johnny, represents the warped female version of this. She is needy to the point of satire, she allows men to do things to her because she’s been so thoroughly convinced there’s no alternative. What makes Sophie & Johnny so similar is that they seem incapable, despite their intellect, of articulating the root of their unhappiness. It’s all around them, but they cannot see it.

Johnny’s journey through the night has him crossing paths with a belligerent Scottish couple searching for each other, only to erupt into a chorus of rancor. He finds a spot to sleep in front of a large building in the city center. The night watchman lets Johnny in so he can unload his strange philosophies on someone, but he isn’t prepared for the snippy retorts of his guest. A brief encounter in another alley leads to Johnny emerging bloodied & beaten, crawling his way home to Louise only to discover an even worse monster slumbering inside. Leigh fully realizes a horrific London, the center point of a society that has eaten itself & turned its children into snapping fanged mouths.

Naked resonates with artists working at the top of their game. The synchronicity between Leigh & Thewlis has to be witnessed, an actor able to be a collaborative conduit for a filmmaker unlike most of what we see in movies. What Leigh pulls off is incredible because, along the way, he makes Johnny somewhat charming & undoubtedly funny. Yet we can’t wash the sense of grime off ourselves by tagging along with this guy.

It should come as no surprise that the Safdie Brothers cite Naked as influencing their work. That jagged edge anxiety their films produce can have its lineage traced back to this one. It feels so odd to say these things about a Mike Leigh film, which are typically heartfelt and warm. But this was a story he needed to get out of him, an exorcism of the anger that had built up over a decade of social nightmares. Where is the Mike Leigh of the younger generations in the UK? They need one to tell the story.

Leigh can tackle trauma without exploitation. There’s never a moment where it feels like we are being titillated while told how bad Johnny is. He’s bad, and the film knows he’s bad, but Leigh also refuses to present us with a one-dimensional mustache-twirling villain. That would not be honest in real life, where predators can walk a fine line between repellent & seductive. We are being shown a society where the individual’s hunger has subsumed any sense of community or family.

The title’s nakedness is vulnerability, which is the worst thing a man could show in a capitalistic society. It makes sense that when Johnny presents himself as broken to Sophie, she finally sees who she is searching for a human being. And his subsequent choice after that moment makes sense, he has to callous over again, hide the pain away, and present himself as a detached snarky twat. If any of this sounds familiar, it should. If you live in the States or the UK today. Step back. Look around. You are surrounded by a sea of men like Johnny.