“Wotcha, mate. It’s me, Guy Ritchie, genuine geezer and Madge’s old pot [and pan: man; Madonna’s ex-husband]. I’m doing the Lambeth Walk up from me ol’ kite [and spool: private school] with nothing but my barrel of bees [and honey: money] to whisper a jack [-anory: story] into your King [Lear: ear] on the Liza [Minnelli: telly]. Lawks! Is them the Bow Bells I hear? Gawd bless his majesty,” etc.
The Gentlemen (Netflix) is a yarn about an aristocratic family who go into a criminal enterprise with a gritty crime family (in fairness, all aristocratic families started out as crime families) so their estate can return to its former feudal glory. The gist of the story is, once again: “We’re not so different, you and I … Have we not both, in a sense, pulled off a heist on the people of Britain?”
Writers like Guy Ritchie are wedded to a notion of “authenticity” that celebrates both aristocrats and salt-of-the-earth types for knowing their place (with a class-mobility dispensation for the entrepreneurial criminal element) and sees aspiration and social mobility as illusory.
This is all, of course, coming from a posho dressed as a pearly king. It sells the same ideology, ultimately, as Downton Abbey, which is aimed at a different demographic but written by Guy Ritchie’s spiritual twin, Julian Fellowes. And what is that ideology? “Property is theft (and what of it?).”
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The middle class barely register in the Ritchieverse. This is because the middle class, annoying as they might be in their rush to tax-cut themselves out of existence (the writer gazes ruefully at the Irish Times readership), can only exist in countries with social mobility and a functioning social-security net.
Britain funded those things by taxing the hell out of aristocrats after the war, something that is depicted in the opening of the second episode of the second series as a terrible shame altogether.
At this point our anti-hero Eddie, the duke of Halstead (Theo James), gives a speech in which he laments the era of aristocratic guilt and vows to get his ancestral lands back. I have an urge to doff my cap at this point, followed by an urge to head an angry mob.
What are you at, Freyne? This is pure entertainment, not a political polemic. You’re breaking a butterfly upon a wheel (or, in terms Ritchie would understand, boffing a posh moth on a hoop).
Guy Ritchie is just the Tex Avery of his day. This is like doing a Marxist analysis of Quick Draw McGraw. A poststructuralist critique of Pepé Le Pew. A Lacanian dissertation on Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Yeah, well, I’m no fun, and I’m happy to do them too: Quick Draw McGraw legitimises the westward theft of the American continent; Pepé Le Pew needs to be me-tooed for several decades of consequence-free sexual harassment; and Alvin and the Chipmunks are clearly narcs.
I’m not saying The Gentlemen isn’t fun. In the new series Eddie and his criminal foil, Susie Glass (an excellently deadpan Kaya Scodelario), are leveraging their big marijuana business into something bigger with the help of some murderous Italian mafioso types and, at one point, a silent, torture-prone Asian assassin. (Ritchie seemingly never saw a stereotype he didn’t feel was absolutely fine.)
In the first few episodes they watch an associate being fed to a tiger, they chase a motorcycle gang in pursuit of a Botticelli painting and they pimp out one of their associates to a lecherous member of the House of Lords played by Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville. (He probably thinks he’s a real aristocrat at this stage.)
In episode one the brilliant Irish folk musician John Francis Flynn can also be found playing to a barn full of flatcap-wearing servants, as is the lot of the travelling Irish minstrel under colonisation.
Vinnie Jones plays a faithful retainer who says things like “anything for you and this family”. Ray Winstone plays himself (I think) and rarely leaves the sauna from which he runs a crime empire, has mystical visions and says things like “I ain’t paying that posh c**t another shekel”, which reminds me a little of pay negotiations here at The Irish Times.
Here are some Guy Ritchie projects I am pitching for future television seasons (I’m happy to executive-produce):
I’ve Got a Luverly Bunch of Coconuts: Everyone in the House of Lords receives a head injury and now thinks they’re a cockney.
Top Geezer: Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond race cockneys around like horses.
Mumsy’s Gone Kray Kray: Reggie Kray and the queen mum go on a cocaine-fuelled crime spree (with Vinnie Jones and Ray Winstone as Kray and the queen mum, respectively).
Bosh! A show in which boshing occurs.
The whole high-concept premise of Dark Matter (Apple TV) imploded towards the end of the first series. A show in which the main characters travelled between dimensions, it ended with dozens of identical versions of a physicist named Jason (Joel Edgerton) trying to return to his wife, Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) in their home dimension.
The multiples occur for sciency reasons that are subsequently shown to be, at the very least, inconsistent. At a certain point you just have to accept it.
The question is, can you have too many Joel Edgertons? “No”, says my brother, and “No”, presumably, says Joel Edgerton’s agent. “Yes”, says I, because I’m finding it very, very confusing.
Not only is it hard to know which Joel Edgerton is which, and not only does the faux-science quickly fall apart, but the moral logic also crumbles, because Daniela choses the “Jason” we’ve been following all along instead of the others, seemingly on a first-come-first-served basis.
Subsequently the family become relatively blase about the violent deaths of numerous other Jasons before hopping dimensions once again for more adventures.
The moral stability of our hero is also under question, given how easy it seems to be to make some of these near-identical doppel-, troppel- and quadroppelgangers go “evil”.
“We’re not bad people,” Jason Number One says to a policeman after Daniela murders yet another lookalike in the first episode of the new series.
If you’re explaining you’re losing. If you ever see me saying “we’re not bad people” to a tied-up policeman please step in and say something.
I’m also pretty sure that if a dozen or so Joel Edgerton corpses turned up in an American city they would forgo a big investigation and say: “Best leave it.”
And then, instead, they would choose to investigate the much cooler, less existentially-troubling crimes committed by Guy Ritchie characters who speak in cockney rhyming slang and/or posh.
