Document details

This paper seeks to revisit Lindsey Anderson’s brilliant and outrageously provocative satire If…. (1968), originally released in the United Kingdom in December 1968, and starring Malcolm McDowell, in his first major role, as the public schoolboy and anti-establishment renegade Mick Travis, who clashes with the conservative traditions and overbearing hierarchy of his educational institution. Firstly, the commonly accepted notion of the film’s prophecy and unparalleled reflection of the cultural ‘zeitgeist’ of the era – as one of radical rebellion and youth revolt – will be acknowledged before touching on the ways in which the film has also been identified by some scholars (Buckingham, n.d. ; Porton, 1999) to be much more ambiguous and less overtly ‘revolutionary’ than often claimed. After having established this important nuance, this paper seeks to go one step further by acknowledging not only the central ambiguity of the film’s overall message – and especially its scandalous finale in which the schoolboy rebels, armed with sub-machine guns and grenades, open fire on the staff, teachers and parents from the rooftops of the school – but the ambiguity of the historical ‘moment’ of the late 1960s itself, especially when viewed in retrospect. For this same period, although frequently defined, quite rightly, by its revolutionary energy and utopian demands, is simultaneously marked, at least in retrospect, by a profound sense of defeat. This sense of defeat can be attributed to the perceived failure of not seeing its revolutionary demands realised (e.g., May ’68) and because, in many cases, outbreaks of protest were themselves violently extinguished (e.g., Mexico City, Prague, etc.). The paper will suggest that the film and its violent climax remain symbolic of the era, not so much because they capture a sense of ‘youth rebellion’ in some pure, unadulterated form, but because, in their profound ambiguity, they capture the fundamentally ambiguous nature of the revolutionary ‘moment’ itself – one whose results are always contingent on other factors and whose potentialities are highly unpredictable – just like the many tumultuous events that took place during the ‘global crisis of 1968 – 1975’ (Faulkner 2018, 436).