This Sporting Life

Set in post-war York­shire, This Sport­ing Life tells the sto­ry of Frank Machin, a coal min­er turned rug­by star. A damn­ing com­men­tary on the sti­fling Eng­lish tra­di­tion of val­ues and class, mak­ing it the very antithe­sis of George Cuko­r’s My Fair Lady. Mach­in’s hard-bit­ten expe­ri­ences pre­fig­ure mod cul­ture: an upstart dying to be accept­ed, yet does­n’t fit in despite his best efforts and in turn rebels against received notions of what’s prop­er and right. In some respects, Machin plays out as a brow­beat­en fig­ure for change in post-war Eng­land and it’s through him that one can envi­sion the social rev­o­lu­tion that was about to take place there.

Unlike France and the Unit­ed States, where post-colo­nial­ism, democ­ra­ti­za­tion and brinks­man­ship were tak­ing shape in rev­o­lu­tion­ary ways both at home and abroad, Eng­land suf­fered a qui­eter fate as the fad­ing dowa­ger of glob­al dom­i­na­tion. Domes­ti­cal­ly the push-pull between cos­mopoli­tanism and nation­al­ism formed antag­o­nis­tic iso­la­tionisms about Eng­land’s iden­ti­ty, while youth cul­ture divid­ed between hyper-con­ven­tion­al ted­dies and twitchy mods med­icat­ing them­selves out of their hum­drum worka­day lives.

As half clung to the past and the oth­er half ush­ered in The British Inva­sion and Swing­ing Lon­don, Eng­land under­went a curi­ous­ly apo­lit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion, a sort of Sit­u­a­tion­ist wish­dream in which free­dom was seem­ing­ly achieved with­out pol­i­tics through organ­ic, endoge­nous forces that cap­tured the imag­i­na­tion through chem­istry and bon­homie. But the real­i­ty for most was far more grim. In that way Machin embod­ies the pecu­liar vain­glo­ry known only to celebri­ty who wish for noth­ing more than an ordi­nary life.

As Machin[e], Har­ris plays an Eng­lish Bran­do, a man uncom­fort­able with tra­di­tion yet deper­ate­ly long­ing for a nor­mal life all the same. His exis­ten­tial long­ing, when con­front­ed with his unhap­py con­scious­ness, intro­duces Marx to F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s Tom Buchanan. His unre­quit­ed love pos­sess­es him and con­sumes him. No achieve­ment will sat­is­fy him, nor any amount of mon­ey or pos­ses­sion. His teem­ing des­per­a­tion over­comes him as he’s left with noth­ing but emp­ty mem­o­ries; los­ing his teeth was but an anx­i­ety dream about every­thing else in his life and with noth­ing to show for it, he strug­gles dogged­ly onward.