Filth

Filthⁱ paints as good an icon of the final stages of decomposition of the British Empireⁱⁱ as anything by Irvine Welsh ever could.

The first striking thing about it is the incredible poverty. Absolute, chilling, indigestible. A woman kneels by a dying man, and you can tell by the look on her face that what brought her to her knees isn't love, but something infinitely ugly : despair. THAT was all she had, a cardiac schmuck. Some cop makes a perfunctory, miserable attempt at sort-of maybe doing something, driven by the vague perception of some kind of regurgitated duty, barely recognisable in its parts. The woman clings to him, to the degree that she chases this disinterested, impoverished man to his sordidⁱⁱⁱ place of work, where she throws herself on him, rude, dressed but otherwise completely nude, child in tow. "Here, Tommy, this is the man I am now begging to take me in, look up to him as a father, whether he nods or not. We have nothing else, Tommy. Nothing at all. For Queen and Country, Tommy!" That is all she has. That's all anyone in there has, you get the distinct impression that everyone's wearing their only pair of clothes (mostly because - they do!) and no underwear for lack of underwear. Not in the sense that it's in the wash, in the sense that it's still on the ship. A ship that's not even coming their way.

The second striking thing about it is the incredible, absolutely unbelievable degree of moral decay the once proud empire now takes for granted, confuses for itself, for its own substance. The policeman, the typical policeman, will steal money from his own coworker at their masonic lodge. The same people who lied about the Rotherham enslavement of preteen white trash to the sexual proclivities of invading Asians last year, the same people who forced preteen girls in "refugee camps" at Darfur into survival prostitution, the same people. As Disraeli once said,

Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.

The third thing, but by now we're well dulled and so nothing could be striking, is the visceral unpleasantness, not outright painful but certainly not in the slightest, pleasant of everything. Everything. A young buck participates in the spitroasting of a whore, but it's no cause of enjoyment to any degree nor may he have the achievement : she taunts him. Why ? British. Then another woman bends over begging for the cock only to taunt the previous taunter. Who masturbates, apart, with such mannerisms that it leaves the viewer pondering whether the act is genuinely counter to the common intention - maybe the man is punishing his flesh in a flagellant manner ? The interpretation is plain and obviously possible, in context. His wife, with the mannerisms and accoutrements of a worn out whore, explains with hollow conviction worthy of a magazine piece the key to a happiness that could not conceivably make anyone happy, ever. Even the wallpaper is painful to watch.

Being born British is possibly a worse pox than being born with Noma. And there's only so many knitted scarves to go around.

1. 2013, by Jon S. Baird, with a bunch of inept, mumbling, ankylosed civillians. [↩]
2. You know, that meanwhile failed mercantile concern of the 1800s that attempted - for a brief period with the appearance of success - to retcon itself into relevancy, cultural and otherwise (such as the rather amusing claim to being "the largest", first being already taken and best being forbidden by the requirements of "irony" as a psychic defense). [↩]
3. Strikingly, strikingly sordid. When I was a wee privileged tyke growing up in poor soviet Romania, the sort of benches these subjects of Her MaJeStY's employ would have only been fit for the losers in the vocational schools. If that.

   Twenty years have passed, the pretentious empire can't meanwhile manage to decently furnish an orc hut. [↩]