I've just finished playing catch-up with my schoolwork (read: forced myself to stop writing and/or reading fanfiction for a single day) while on a caffeine high. And even five hours ahead of time. I shouldn't feel so accomplished, considering the work should've been done weeks ago, but Jupiter smite me: I'm smug. I managed to watch and read an eclectic combination of British stuff, and provide some meaningful commentary. I'm posting the criticism not to show off (it's honestly not the best work I could've done), but to recommend all three works. Have at it.

Talking Heads (created by Alan Bennett)
The Talking Heads monologues (“A Chip in Sugar,” “A Bed Among the Lentils,” and “Playing Sandwiches”) are nothing short of captivating. With no informant other than the characters/speakers, each of their stories are painfully intimate regardless of their different premises and progressions. Strangely enough, however, none of the monologues seem to be particularly cathartic in spite of the fact that all three deal with unfavorable emotional and/or psychological situations. In both “A Chip in the Sugar” and “A Bed Among the Lentils,” while the extent and severity of the emotional/psychological conditions are brought to light--mental illness and prejudice; alcoholism and repression, respectively--the speakers’ monologues end with a return to the status quo. Conversely, the turn of events in “Playing Sandwiches” leads to an almost predictable outcome--the paedophilia is revealed, the paedophiliac imprisoned. While “A Chip in the Sugar” and “Playing Sandwiches” were unsettling throughout, “A Bed Among the Lentils” managed somehow to incorporate moments of overt humor. Most notable, perhaps, is the incident with the wine being replaced with cough syrup. Of course, humor is lost when considering that the incident is merely one of the many hints at the alcoholism issue.

My Beautiful Launderette (written by Hanif Kureishi; directed by Stephen Frears)
The dynamics of characters and their relationships and conflicts make the cultural and sociopolitical representations and commentary in My Beautiful Launderette all the more weighted. Though potentially overwhelming, the intersecting struggles regarding ethnicity, class, and sexuality are nevertheless realistic. Consequently, the characters’ interactions, positive or not, are all the more poignant. Furthermore, whether the situations are dramatic or comical, all are underlain with an inescapable, depressing brand of irony. At the fore is the role reversal of the characters with respect to their ethnic backgrounds. Those who would otherwise be considered inferior are instead wealthy and/or educated; those would should be in positions of power are instead servile and/or forced to maintain their superficial dominance. Schooled and ambitious, Omar has working-class Johnny under his employ. As one of Johnny’s friends once says, “they” (that is, the Pakistanis like Omar, and any other Other) had been brought over to work for “us” (that is, Johnny’s fellow white Englishmen). Then again, Omar and his relations’ unstable superiority is marred both by their ambiguity (as English citizens who appear foreign) and their illegal business(es). Said ambiguity is the crux of all the interracial relationships. Though assimilation is expected of the Other, assimilation is made impossible having already been marked as Other, recalling cliches of rocks and hard places. Yet the sides of the cultural/social dispute become indiscernible in terms of their respective discourses: use of “us” and “them” is not exclusive to a single side. Though arguably overly optimistic, or at least unrealistic, the tension surrounding issues of race, class and sexuality are reconciled in Omar and Johnny’s relationship.

Crash (novel by J G Ballard; directed by David Cronenberg)
Due to the first-person perspective and the onslaught of concrete sensory details, J. G. Ballard’s Crash reads like the character Ballard’s stream of consciousness. Human and machine become so amalgamated in the novel, it’s no wonder that the descriptions are at once sensual and clinical, the cars eroticized while the humans objectified. The loss of humanness is effectively portrayed in Cronenberg’s film adaptation, what with the detached and puppet-like (thus absurdist, as in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange) acting. The sensuality of the vehicles and collisions, however, was made far more explicit in the novel than in the film. Though Crash is seemingly apolitical, it is nevertheless a social critique. So consumed with and by consumption of the material, humans have willingly developed a sort of triangulation of desire: the only way in which people connect with one another is if an inanimate object serves as a catalyst.
The character Ballard’s ambivalence (made more apparent through his narrative in the novel than in the film) was particularly interesting, specifically his awareness of and approach to the newfound automobile-centered triangulation of desire. Even before his accident, his married life (and in turn, his sex life) had been highly mechanical. The irony, of course, is that sex is undeniably the most animalistic aspect of human nature. Still, he and Catherine at least sought other people to fulfill and share their sexual/physical desires. Despite reveling in the sexuality given him with his and Dr Remington’s crash and more so Vaughn’s manipulation--he himself comes to appreciate and even deify the crash-mutilated human body--, he admits to his apprehension, saying Vaughn promises what is most wanted and most feared. In addition to sex and the human body, death in Crash is a quantifiable desire. Though morbid, it’s true that death is possibly the only thing in a person’s life which s/he can control. Vaughn and his followers manage to calculate not only the destruction of the vehicles but the destruction (and in a sense, transformation) of the human body. Thus, it is almost pitiable that Vaughn dies unaccompanied by Elizabeth Taylor as he’d planned and, what’s more, as the preamble to the novel.