And my experience is not uno. Most of the women in my life have had some experience with Austen themselves, something that goes beyond her being a simple literary icon. Other alumni like Emily Brontë or Louisa May Alcott have had, and continue to have, their fair share of proximity to the women of today, but they haven’t integrated the popular lexicon quite as hard as Miss Austen. And in British cinema in particular, there is no denying Jane fills the majority of 19th-century book-to-film adaptations, and the tone, themes and structure of her novels have inspired most modern retellings of the past we have in our entertainment culture today (hello Bridgerton!).

And this adoration for Austen’s stories isn’t new. It’s nice to think of Jane as being misunderstood by the public of her time, like so many other literary luminaries, such as Kafka or Herman Melville. But, in historical fact, her books enjoyed quite a lively if manageable vogue. A developing fandom began showing up in print pretty early on. From 1811, when “Sense and Sensibility” was published, through 1817, when she passed away, and throughout the Regency and Romantic periods, Jane Austen’s novels were read, recommended, and ‘tagged’ in books published in Britain and in the United States. Other authors borrowed from, emulated, or tried to piggyback on her works, and several indulged in enthusiastic references to Austen herself.

In present days, things haven’t really changed, but now filmmakers are the ones trying to emulate Jane with their works.

In preparation for this essay, I got to know all of the BBC mini-series, the epidemic of Austen-focused films in 1995 and 1996, and the more creative remakes like “Bridget Jones Diary” and “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”. And just this year alone we’ve had adaptations of both “Sense and Sensibility” and “Pride and Prejudice”, as well as the reimagining of the latter, with “The Other Bennet Sister”.

Some look at this abundance of Jane-related media from a strictly analytic and somewhat pessimistic lens, blaming people’s love for Jane Austen adaptations solely on commercial success and smart marketing. Ellen Moody, from George Mason University, wrote:

“Film adaptations of Austen’s novels have become popular not because they cater to false or real comprehension in the audience of subtle issues, but because the production staff and movie companies now hire well-known physically alluring actors and actresses for the leading roles, avail themselves of sophisticated technologies which are used on location and absorb or excite the viewer’s attention — and plan and execute long-range, well-planned and expensive advertising campaigns.”

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I do agree with some of her points. We have seen the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Keira Knightley, Kate Winslet, and Dakota Johnson playing Austen heroines. It seems that, for the most part, the role of a Jane protagonist is solely reserved for a recognisable face. As an actor, one should not only aim to be associated with this big of a machine but also with the opportunity of being the face of some of the most recognisable literary figures ever written. Without wanting to, whenever I reread “Pride and Prejudice”, I always find myself imagining Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet. It’s inevitable.

Besides having a great understanding of girlhood, I gather that the reason Jane Austen’s female characters are so attractive is that there are so many of them. You don’t relate to socialite Emma? Well, there’s shy and composed Jane Bennet; do you feel like a misfit among your own family? Then Anne Elliot is perfect for you; or perhaps you’re kind, a bit naive, and with a tendency to love Gothic Novels, then Catherine Morland is your gal.

People often reference how Jane quietly defied social norms by commenting via storytelling on the archaic marital systems of the early 19th century as well as class structures and rules among the established elite. She understood that marriage wasn’t about simply falling in love; for women of her class, it could determine your financial situation, your security, your social position, your entire future. But I think her characters speak way more of her trailblazer views of the world than any storytelling technique she might’ve employed.

By writing and developing the inner world of female leads, she gave voice to a group heavily silenced and marginalised. The sheer body of work of Miss Austen is so dense that every female character she writes seems slightly different from the first one. Heck, in Pride and Prejudice, she managed to make every single one of the five Bennet sisters interesting. Not to mention their mother, Mr Darcy’s sister, or Caroline Bingley.

From the outside, they might all look the same: white, English, and privileged young women. And I’ll give you that, Jane wrote from what she knew within the confines of the era she was born into, and one can wonder how much her lexicon of diverse characters might’ve grown had she been born in a different decade. But I’d argue she found diversity elsewhere. Even by today’s standards, her characters feel abundantly real, people who could easily exist in our society.

One of the ways she conveys this intemporalness is by writing misfits. Anne Elliot, an almost spinster with a shy and subdued personality, or Lydia Bennet, a wild, flirtatious and reckless young girl (who escapes the strictures of her time in her choice to run away with a fleeting passion), seem like some of the more obvious examples. But even more traditionally beautiful and well-spirited heroines, like Emma Woodhouse, have some type of trait or arc that mirrors what Jane might’ve really thought of the regimens of her society. In the case of Emma, by the end she realises that fitting in with what society expected of her - the way she behaved being a signal of conformity - was keeping her from finding her true self. So I think her protagonists were a manifestation of quietly rebelling or, in more obvious cases, conveying social commentary.

I always saw myself as a mix between Lydia Bennet and Catherine Morland; I do think they are the two sides of the same coin. And there’s an Austen heroine for just about any girl. The situations might have changed, the societal expectations might’ve evolved, but the girlhood experience remains entirely the same. A constant state of perceiving and being perceived. Of judging and misjudging. Of falling in and out of love.

Ultimately, when we go back to Jane Austen stories, we are rarely waiting to find out what happens. We know who ends up with whom. We know who deceives Marianne, whom Elizabeth misjudges, what Anne Elliot regrets, who Lydia ran away with and whom Emma Woodhouse should have realised she loved long before she finally does. No, the pleasure lies somewhere else entirely. We want to see how these characters will be understood this time.

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*this review doesn’t contain spoilers*

dr:. Danny Boyle

watched: 06 September 2026

rating: 3/5⭐

People often reference Sofia Coppola or Wes Anderson when diving into the realm of visual particularities and tendencies. Girlhood iconography and pastels on one side and 90-degree angles and 60s paraphernalia on the other. Those are all fine - *says the girl with “Sofia Coppola Archive” on her shopping list and “The Museum of Wes Anderson” by her bedside table* - but there’s one filmmaker who I believe is as visually conscious (if not more) than the two most talked about in the zeitgeist. That is Danny Boyle.

His attitude towards the camera first fascinated me when I saw “Slumdog Millionaire” in a middle school geography class. Despite the uncomfortable chairs and the chewing-gum noises, the film didn’t lack elements to mesmerise; its story, built around a game show, had an uneasy, nervous nature that Danny translated into bright light shots and dynamic close-ups - an overall immersive experience. And, consequently, by the age of 15, I had fallen for the magnum opus that is “Trainspotting”. My favourite movie of all time.

And, as a long-time Ewan McGregor devotee, I wanted to take a look at both his first acting gig and Danny’s directorial debut. It’s a little movie called “Shallow Grave”, from 1994, that follows the lives of three Edinburgh middle-class yuppies who are too self-absorbed to realise something very wrong is up with their new roommate. Until it's too late. It’s a story “deeply embedded in post-Thatcherite decay in Britain” and explores themes of “greed, aggrandisement, pleasure, selfishness and individualism”, said Danny himself. The events that follow involve drug overdoses, large sums of money, body dismemberment, and the sex appeal of having done something very, very naughty. The screenplay was written by John Hodge, something that would mark Danny Boyle’s first collaboration with the writer, having done, during the 90s, two more movies: the aforementioned “Trainspotting” and another Ewan McGregor collaboration, “A Life Less Ordinary”.

Now Danny does seem to fall into the category of creators who surround themselves with a very particular crew. Not to say he doesn’t try to find new talent. Less we forget, a very young Cillian Murphy starred in his zombie apocalyptic film “28 Days Later”. But the visual continuity we witness in his films is not solely, but very much, due to the creators who have accompanied him throughout his career. For “Shallow Grave”, he hired cinematographer Brian Tufano and production designer Kave Quin, two artists who would end up working also on the set of “Trainspotting”. And I can’t stress enough how editor Masahiro Hirakubo would end up shaping Boyle’s characteristic tone. They would do three films together.

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As with many directorial debuts, “Shallow Grave” isn’t without its faults: the plot feels somewhat rushed in its resolution, the characters screamed for a bit more development, and the script could’ve benefited from tighter editing. But it still hooked me to the screen precisely because of these faults. With the aspects I cited lacking depth, Danny Boyle’s directorial tendencies mesmerised me, as they were the only thing I could concentrate on (besides Ewan McGregor’s long blonde hair).

“You can never get back to that innocence. It’s a good thing to start with a thriller, because you’re not going to have a lot of money and thrillers don’t depend on a lot of money. I say sort of semi-controversially or provocatively, your first film is your best film, always, because it has that innocence about it, about not knowing what you’re doing.”

The opening scene felt like a predecessor to the choose life “Trainspotting” monologue. A techno song (they couldn’t afford Underworld yet) plays in the background as we hear Christopher Eccleston’s line about friendship, trust and greed, while a fast-paced car ride through the streets of Glasgow fills the screen. ‘This could’ve happened in any city’, he says.
What follows is a brilliant movie opener, as the three friends, while looking for a flatmate, mock the sad contenders in a fast-paced rhythm that establishes their snobbish-focused relationship. I wish we would’ve gotten more moments like these.
And the other directorial highlights for me are, for instance, the Caravaggio-like still that pictures a dead man naked in his bed. Or David peeking through the attic entrance with his head upside down. Or when Juliet screams desperately in the car, as she realises she has been deceived, all the while Alex laughs in contentment, lying on the kitchen floor.

You get a sense of what was to come, how Danny Boyle would grow as a director and how, with this movie, he laid out the seeds for what would eventually become his signature approach to the film form. He understands that visual cues shape a story as much as dialogue, and this movie gave plenty of proof to corroborate this theory: the weirdly decorated apartment (that helped to shape the trio’s inner world), Alex’s collection of graphic T-shirts, and David’s claustrophobic work environment that eventually catalysed the events of the film.

And I shouldn’t even need to mention: the snail staircase.

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“England is the most class-ridden society under the sun” - George Orwell

During the 90s, after 11 long Conservative Thatcherite years, a massive wave of artistic projects emerged around working-class Britain. Oasis are often cited as the head starters of the movement, or at least the standout voices among these working-class artists. Taking cues from earlier Madchester examples like The Stone Roses or the Inspiral Carpets, they most certainly summarised and celebrated a specific modern British working-class culture based on traditions of collectivity and uncovering the extraordinary in the everyday.

But the Gallagher brothers, despite having a lasting impact on bloke fashion and football hymns, are far from the only ones offering Britain’s often muted groups a voice. In the film space, plenty of writers and directors came up with kitchen-sink-type dramas that consistently tapped into the collective anxiety and disenfranchisement felt by many after the decline of traditional industries and the introduction of policies intended to dismantle the welfare state and restore the power of the British elite (let’s put a pin here; I’ll circle back). Films like "Trainspotting", "Nil by Mouth", “Raining Stones", and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" are all dour progressive stories grounded in reality that circle around the idea of the modern working-class man.

But what even is this “modern working-class man”? Can he be reduced to lad mags, hooliganism and pub culture? Or is this collective identity tied to a much more complex history, one we can uncover by looking at artistic projects from the time? Well, that’s what I’m setting out to do: uncover why working-class identity became such a focal point for UK artists (mainly in the realm of cinema) during the 90s.

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Defining class structures in the UK

We can’t talk about the ‘working class’ without understanding how the Brits tend to define this concept. As with most issues, there isn’t a consensus on what this label means or who qualifies as working-class, but the Cambridge Dictionary describes it as “a social group that consists of people who earn little money, often being paid only for the hours or days that they work, and who usually do physical work. These jobs often include factory work, cleaning, or driving and usually require physical effort rather than higher education qualifications.”

Middle-class shower before work, working-class shower after work.

But obviously, since the 90s, the definition of what working class is or if we should even be labelling social groups, has been exponentially discussed. In 2013, the BBC defined the UK as having at least 7 different social groups. But contradictorily, a reader of The Guardian wrote in 2021 that there’s the elite and then there’s the rest of us: “When I see the labels working and middle class in articles, I know it means that we are usually being misled. We are too complicated, too nuanced to be pigeonholed so conveniently. That there is a ruling elite is undeniable; the rest of us are just arguing over the crumbs.” People are also more conscious of broader social issues that reflect in education rates and who occupies specific working positions, like prejudices related to race and mass immigration.

But for the purpose of this essay, I want to focus on the organised working class and how this label shifted between the 70s and the 90s due mainly to Thatcher as the leader of the conservative party.

Thatcher and the war on the organised working class

If Thatcher had one aim when she was appointed as Prime Minister in 1979, it was to stop the Brits from thinking in terms of class. “Class is a Communist concept,” she would later write. “It groups people as bundles and sets them against one another.” She wanted to erase the idea that people could better their lives by collective action, rather than by individual self-improvement: that is, “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”.

The Thatcherite revolution, capitalism’s response to the inability of Keynesian economics to deal with the economic crisis of the late 70s, was a means of ruthlessly culling unprofitable industrial sectors and involved a brutal assault on workers’ jobs and living conditions.

Almost one million people were unemployed in 1979, but that number rose rapidly in the early 1980s to 3 million and has never since fallen below one million. And it was the working class who experienced the most job loss from the 1980s onward. From mines to factories, shipyards, and steel mills. These industries were closed as a result of either disastrous neo-liberal industrial policies or, as was the case with the coal industry, simple political spite.

It was clear that Thatcherism’s war was on the organised working class. She believed that “morality is personal. There is no such thing as collective conscience, collective kindness, collective gentleness, collective freedom”. And her biggest effort to dismantle this community was a direct attack on industry and trade unions. It was not just that the systematic trashing of the country’s manufacturing industries devastated communities—though it certainly did, leaving them ravaged by unemployment, poverty and all the crippling social problems that accompany them, for which they would later be blamed. But working-class identity was itself under fire.

The old industries were the beating hearts of the communities they sustained. Most local people had worked in similar jobs and had done so for generations. And of course the unions, whatever their faults and limitations, had given the workers in these communities strength, solidarity and a sense of power. All of this had sustained a feeling of belonging, of pride in a shared working-class experience.

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How the 90s offered hope

Thatcher left office on November 28th 1990, after losing support from her own Conservative Party cabinet, and was replaced by John Major. But the damage had already been done. By 1990, unemployment was at the steady figure of 1.6 million and stood at 1.9 million by late 1996. There is no single cause of unemployment and no single cure. If there were, debate would simply focus upon whether it was good or bad to move the one policy instrument that might resolve it. Unemployment is the result of at least 5 major factors, most of which are within the grasp of political and economic intervention: poor international competitiveness, deliberate actions by the government, the effect of external shocks, the effects of technological change and the effects of growing inequality, which underpins the tendency for fewer people to do more work. But people love a scapegoat.

And yet, while watching the films I set out to analyse for this article, whether from Glasgow or Brighton, about family dynamics or night outs, with Ewan McGregor or Gary Oldman, I felt an undeniable sense of hope. And by the mid-90s, as working-class projects were being pushed out to the public with a much bigger cadence, a very naive idea of what growing up around struggles is began to circulate. Being working-class was cool. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

Even though unemployment was still on the rise and traditional industries were being dismantled by the minute, the working-class identity that Thatcher so fervently tried to disassemble was becoming stronger than ever. Looking at statistics only, in 1993 and 1994, for the first time in over a decade, there was a net increase of over 400,000 in union members. But just looking at artistic projects from the time and their respective success, working-class voices were all around. The rise of independent cinema was also a huge element in the spread of working-class projects. Around the world in general, the UK being included. Big film festivals at the time were built around finding new voices and shining a light on fresh talent. It was like a treasure hunt for studios, who wanted to pride themselves on buying original ideas from these people to make for them. So, the success of Oasis (as I stated above), the rise of independent films and the hatred towards Thatcher were all a part of a larger cultural movement.

Each of these films is different in its own way. Some worked out better than others, especially ones directed by future powerhouse names like Guy Richie and Danny Boyle. Some focus on teenagers, others on hooligans, others on 50-year-old somethings. They could be set in Glasgow, London, Brighton, Leeds…

But there are many parallels that can be made. Usually they tell stories about misfits; characters that either can’t find work or have just lost their job. They dwell on family dynamics - biological and fraternal ones, or made families, found families. They use the city as a character itself, when portraying its characters’ living conditions, the places they inhabit, the place they call home, the place they want to escape from. Football and lad culture inhabit these spaces, and the representation of pubs and hooliganism is quite common. This is mainly due to these films being heavily male-centred, male-written, and male-directed. There are some notable exceptions: we have “Secrets and Lies”, “Human Traffic”, or “Ladybid, Ladybird”. But it is a very male-dominated genre.

There’s also a great emphasis on nightlife and clubbing culture. There are entire films dedicated to it, but mostly the music scene is just used as a backdrop, something inherent to these characters’ lives. Even when music isn’t used to convey greater messages, its insertion serves to accurately represent the culture the characters are inserted into. They meet up at the local pub, they go to the club on Friday night, they desperately want to go to this gig next month.

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In the beginning of the decade, these could be considered indie productions with not that much of an audience; but by the mid-90s they had become an astronomical social phenomenon. That’s why we have so many examples ranging from masterpieces to low-budget flops. But the people were loving it. In 1996, “Trainspotting” grossed approximately £48 million worldwide against a budget of only £1.5 million. In 1997, “The Full Monty”, besides being nominated for 4 Academy Awards as well as for 11 BAFTAs, grossed £156 million.

The decline: Cool Britannia and mass production

By the time “The Full Monty” was nominated for Best Picture at the 1998 Academy Awards, the landscape had changed.

As with everything that is good, working-class movies were entering the trenches of the mainstream. By this time, Tony Blair had already been appointed as Prime Minister representing the Labour Party. And as part of his effort to turn the UK into a ‘cultural powerhouse’, he appropriated the term Cool Britannia, a term that, according to journalist Stryker McGuire, started to become prominent in the 1990s as a shorthand metaphor to reflect the British economic rise during the decade. But it soon became a buzzword to denote a renaissance in British art, fashion, design, music and film.

John Newbigin, former special government advisor on culture, said: “We saw it as a chance to redefine what the UK’s economic future would be about, not just factories or pinstriped bankers, but creative entrepreneurs drawn from across society.” Ever since, the creative industries have been a favourite of the British government and media. But what does this mean to the working-class communities that spiralled this movement?

Well, even if rare, there are still powerhouse names in the film industry today that grew up working-class and rose to fame and prosperity for telling stories informed by their lived experiences. But that doesn’t mean working-class projects keep on being pushed to the zeitgeist. And even when they were, it didn’t feel genuine for many. VICE gathered, for an article in 2021, a collection of quotes from personalities of the time who experienced it all, and most of them look at Cool Britannia with a stinking eye, as Britain’s youth culture had become a big business. Here’s Johnny Dean from Menswear:

“It started out as quite an arty scene, but devolved the more popular it became. Like any party, it started out with people talking about books and films, and ended with shouty men balancing beer glasses on their heads, puking in the kitchen sink.”

Cool Britannia and the reappropriation of working-class culture, its fetishisation and commodification, was an affront to the reality of those who lived it. Where and how you grew up and what you can and can’t afford is not an aesthetic nor a choice; it’s a simple reality. And the late 90s certainly saw a wave of projects that ended up feeling disingenuous towards those communities. Some people even say lighter films like “The Full Monty”, “Brassed Off” or “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” package mass unemployment and poverty into a tidy, comedic redemption arc that softens the bleak reality of deindustrialisation. Which I don’t agree with at all, but the feeling is there.

Still, it doesn’t mean the films I mentioned are insincere towards the working class. Most of them were written, directed and acted by people with that background, and it was a positive thing, at least in the beginning, that studios were pushing these types of projects and giving an opportunity to people who didn’t have independent wealth or personal contacts to make these films alone.

I enjoy my fair share of last-minute plans. It’s both the easiest avenue to feel like I have control over my life and a form of honouring the privilege surrounding my circumstances. To be able to say, capriciously, “let’s do this”, “let’s go there”, without worrying about what I’m leaving behind.

Maybe I should worry. But on a whim, I booked a long-awaited trip to England with my best friend for this November (yay!). And while London is sexy, Brighton is sunny, and Norwich is edgy, it was Manchester that called to us, as the industrial town-turned-music epicentre has been shaping my shelved CD collection ever since I listened to The Stone Roses for the first time.

20th-century artists do seem to appear more often in my assortment of Mancunian bands. The likes of Oasis, Happy Mondays, Joy Division, the Buzzcocks… But upon booking the flights, it came to me that maybe Manchester didn’t stop in the late 90s.

So I went above and beyond to find fresh, new, baby artists from the city of the working bees. ‘Something Real’, the debut album by The Guest List, came up and seeing it was released less than a month ago, it felt like the perfect project to discover the new Mancunian sound. And by God, my melons were officially twisted (tell me you got the reference).

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We start with a very Libertine-esque track as ‘Something Real’ features an upbeat guitar motif that recalls that recognisable late Brit-pop psychedelic sound. This will be a constant throughout the record, as other songs like ‘Pink’ or ‘Mundane’ also resemble something Pete Doherty could’ve come up with back in 2001. But that didn’t sell me immediately. Only when I listened to the sixth track, ‘If Ever Your Devil is Kind’, did I truly understand the essence of the album: a cinematic experience.

The cover of the record does seem to imply that. No face, stale human-like forms sit in an auditorium looking ahead while the band faces the opposite direction, looking directly into the camera, as if they know something we don’t. You might not even notice the five musicians sitting distantly on the final row, but they’re there nonetheless. Lyrically, this results in self-aware songs about the modern world and the modern youth. The first track presents real anxieties about the online orb, “War is on trend… The controversy wins once again”; ‘Weatherman’ dives into the destruction of ecosystems via human action, the climate crisis (in a similar vein to ‘Coyote’ by Westside Cowboy); and ‘Slow Down Sally’ (what even is a Mancunian tune that doesn’t reference a Sally) is a cautionary tale about dealing with a controlling and stalkerish relationship.

Frontman Cai Alty explains that “the album is basically us saying, ‘we’re young, we’re confused just like you - how did we get here?’ It’s about us trying to find something meaningful in a world that often feels overwhelming.” He fills the contradictory position of being both an observer and an active participant. As if knowing exactly what you are doing to yourself, but not knowing how to stop. The band observes, understanding with perfect clarity the trap they are in. And the horror in it is not that they are lost, but that they are watching themselves (and their generation) be lost (à la ‘Trainspotting ’, I should say).

And the last entry on the album dives precisely into that collective lostness. ‘The Only Ones’ offers comfort at the end of the journey, suggesting that shared struggles with doubt or hardship can be universal rather than isolating.

Now sadly, they won’t be performing in Manchester while I’m there. But I can always take a train to Leeds…

Personal Favourite: “Slow Down Sally” and “The Only Ones”

Release Date: 28th of August 2026

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dr:. Rian Johnson

watched: 09 July 2026

rating: 2/5⭐

Josh O’Connor as an ex-boxer turned kind-hearted priest has been dictating my thoughts since the moment I finished Wake Up Dead Man last December. I tend to stay away from murder mysteries. There’s only so much you can do with the genre; it isn’t as gory and aestheticised as horror films, nor psychologically haunting like a thriller. And, in a lot of ways, the search for the perfect plot twist usually comes at the cost of character building. Plus, not to sound braggy, I usually get the killer right before the credits roll (I figured out ‘Fight Club’ pretty early on, if you must know).

But fuelled by my unconditional love for a certain actor with big ears, I watched Rian Johnson’s most recent outing and, props to him, I actually liked it.

As we know it, Wake Up Dead Man is the latest instalment of the Knives Out trilogy. A series that, starring Daniel Craig as our favourite detective and the most blockbustery cast you’ve ever seen, safeguarded Rian’s name among cinephile groups after a disastrous run directing part of the Star Wars sequels (excluding Rogue One from the narrative, obviously).

But before Knives Out was even a premature concept, Rian Johnson had been enamoured with the idea of making a murder mystery since the early days of his adulthood. After a series of short films he made as training during his time at the University of Southern California, Rian chose film noir as the genre for his debut, where the murder of a young girl would initiate the narrative. Hence, Brick (2005).

The idea first came from his love of “Dashiell Hammett’s novels, and just wanting to make a straight-up American detective movie”, and after writing the script (which first started as a novella inspired by Hammett), Rian and his friends spent six years trying to get it made. They would go out and take location photos long before they had secured a dime of funding. When it finally did get made, Brick got accepted to Sundance, where it won a special jury prize for ‘Originality of Vision’. And originality does seem like a fitting descriptor. The movie might follow the lead of classic film noirs, but instead of taking place in 50s rain-soaked New York, it’s instead, in true early 2000s fashion, set in high school.

So the initial motivation of setting BRICK in high school was the thought, “OK, let’s do a straight detective story, but let’s set it in an environment where the audience can’t lean on their preconception of the genre at all.” So they parse every element of the traditional detective story and take it anew. It might be kind of goof, but let’s roll the dice on it and see if we can make it work.

For many critics, it did, in fact, work. The Guardian has cited the movie as being “a fine showcase of his now-trademark thrills, chills and twists”, and audiences have found a new way of appreciating the film’s ambition - just look at the top snarky comments on Letterboxd.

And while I do want to congratulate Rian for seeing his vision through (so few directors are given the opportunity to do so nowadays), I’m quite sad to admit that the combination of these two seemingly polar opposite genres (the ‘film noir’ and the ‘high school movie’) did not land for me. In a nutshell, it didn’t know what it wanted to be.

But despite this melting pot of concepts, this film is, at its core, a passionate effort. And because I’m not really interested in starting this new series on a sour note, I want to take this article as an opportunity to explore what ‘Brick’ did well (while briefly mentioning its faults) and why it ultimately keeps bringing in new fans as the years pass.

What “Brick” seemingly excelled at was in conveying the imaginary world teenagers secretly live in. A dream-like reality that feels oh-so-familiar, where teens speak in riddles, secret societies dictate the rules, and everyday spaces are deserted and quiet. All of these qualities, essential to the teenage reality, appear in the movie as a result of the introduction of the noir genre.

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High school cliques, social hierarchies and campus corridors are reframed as dangerous mob syndicates and shady back-alley drug rings overseen by a teenage kingpin known as “The Pin”. In this scenario, our loner protagonist (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) acts like a cynical Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum, his girlfriend (Emilie de Ravin) is the damsel in distress, the popular girl (Nora Zehetner) is the dangerous femme fatale, the football jock (Noah Fleiss) is the muscle in the whole operation, the list goes on. A correlation was made between high school dynamics and classic film noir tropes, but before knowing the inspiration behind the movie, I interpreted these misplaced analogies as part of a world-building known only by teenagers.

Perhaps its most distinct aspect is the dialogue. I saw it as a mirror of how teenagers tend to speak in such a way that adults never understand them (a specific teen dialect), but upon research it was revealed to me that the characters unsetelling way of speaking came from classic 1940s hardboiled detective slang: “I’ve got knives in my eyes, I’m going home sick”; “Maybe I’ll just sit here and bleed at you”; “You’re quite a pill”.

“When we made this, there were tons of high school movies coming out, so the language was a way for me, without any money, to just make the audience instantly have to say, “Oh, this isn’t the real world. I have to adjust to this. This is sort of the equivalent of a comic book reality.”

Although this world feels unnerving and, in some ways, even mystical, Rian was still able to make a connection between his creation and real-life dynamics. With Brick, class commentary wasn’t made as obvious as with the first Knives Out instalment, the movie instead focusing on the social dynamics of American high schools. But there’s a clear cleavage between our heroes, who hang out in local diners and empty hallways and walk around with dirty shoes, and our villains, who throw lavish secret parties in California mansions and show off sports cars.

The scenery also helps to ground the film in reality, as the movie was filmed in its entirety in San Clemente, where Johnson himself grew up. For ‘Brick’ he ended up filming at his high school just a few years after he had graduated from there. Hence, he knew the spaces that the characters cohabited like the back of his hand. A great advantage, indeed.

As with many debut outings, Johnson struggled to get funding and made the film on a shoestring budget, relying on the talent of his friends, like cinematographer Steve Yedlin, and family, like composer Nathan Johnson. The soundtrack is particularly memorable, one of the standouts in my opinion, as the lack of money forced them to be inventive. Although I think the dark ambience of the high school setting called for some Korea Girl or Yo La Tengo, the score features half-filled wineglasses with a finger dragged over the rim and other noises made by kitchen utensils recorded into microphones.

All of this helped to shape a dreamlike reality. In the first twenty minutes, I even conjured the possibility of it all being just a dream, a dream dreamt by Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character. The concept of time was blurred, he jumped around from place to place, and memories were getting confused with premonitions of the future. And this dream state is what teenagehood felt like.

This might be the main reason cinephiles keep coming back to the film. A misguided sense of nostalgia, almost wanting to be part, once again, of this dark reality. Little details help to shape this feeling, Emily’s characteristic bangles, the library’s dirty carpeted floor. Visual catalysts.

Unfortunately, the movie loses this Lynchian quality when it shifts to its thriller/murder mystery plot. For some reason, the quick-paced action and drug-filled camp of it all reminded me a lot of Guy Ritchie and The Snatch era, and so the slow and disturbing drama was lost in the middle of all this.

And my main problem is that Rian Johnson seems to want to impress us, if not by the dialogue (composed of an unhealthy amount of metaphors), then by the overly complex drug plot that I don’t believe even he understands. And while the positive aspects I cited above could make up a case for one of those half-bad movies you can’t help but love, its lack of direction made it impossible for me to call it a film I like.

I would love it if Rian were to remake his ambitious debut, picking up the pieces that worked out best - making a truly interesting case of what teenage alienation feels like. But alas, he’s probably conjuring up the plot for Benoit Blanc’s next adventure.

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You may argue that they have always been here. And I’ll add that it’s irrefutable to say that this industry, on an international level, tends to favour mainly American and English artists. Every single record, movie or book that comes out of any other place falls into the ‘niche’ side of things.

But I would suggest that, as of late, the Irish seem to be favoured, if not by the industry, then by the audience. I’ve mentioned Kneecap; they don’t necessarily sweep all of the awards. On the contrary, their anti-British rule sentiment and provocative, anti-establishment lyrics have led to increased scrutiny and anger over their political statements, culminating in calls to cancel numerous gigs. Still, they have built a very dedicated community of fans, not only from the island but from around the world.

And this is just one of the many examples: Sally Rooney, Paul Mescal, Andrew Scott… In an article entitled “Why is Irish Culture So Popular? Explaining Ireland’s ‘Green Wave’, Georgetown University refers to this phenomenon: “The New York Times labelled the phenomenon as a ‘thirst for the Irish’. Meanwhile, Vulture called it the ‘pluck of the Irish’. But perhaps what best explains the surge in Irish culture is the L.A. Times’ description of the ‘Green Wave’.”

So I, like many people, have been inundated with Irish media for the past couple of months. Why is that?

According to the article I’ve mentioned,

“The Green Wave can be attributed to the significant Irish diaspora — in the U.S., there are 35 million people of Irish descent [...]. But while Irish luminaries like James Joyce have long been an American staple, something different is happening right now as younger stars take centre stage.”

According to the associate director of Global Irish Studies, Darragh Gannon, there have been centuries of migration from Ireland to the U.S., usually by Protestants seeking upward social mobility. But the Great Irish Famine (1845-1852) “saw a sea change quite literally in that migration story from one of a positive, voluntary choice to one of exile, banishment, forced displacement and crisis. Between 1845 and 1855, approximately 2 million predominantly Irish Catholics migrated to the U.S.”, although they were met with resistance from a predominantly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Society.

Fast-forward a few decades, John F. Kennedy’s election as president of the United States “bookends the famine story from exile to immigrant success story. Political participation was the platform from which Ireland became recognised as an acceptable ethnic identity in U.S. culture and society.” And because today more than 35 million Americans claim Irish descent, “there is an inbuilt audience for representations of Ireland, Irishness or Irish experiences on the silver screen and on the stage.”

The professor continues by saying that this Irish resurgence in pop culture “is seen as the cultural antidote to the political chaos of Brexit across the Irish Sea in [their] neighbouring island.”, and that claim is supported by professor Heather Schwedel who says, regarding her British students, in a conversation with The Irish Times, “They’ve lived since 2010, under successive Conservative governments, who have ushered in a whole series of policies and measures, Brexit being the outstanding one, and seen the rise in English populist nationalism. They have a tendency, maybe, to look across the water and see Irish stories in a brighter light. In 2015, the Republic of Ireland was the first country to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote; the first gay politician became a prime minister in 2017; the abortion repeal of 2018, …”

But Gannon mainly goes on to argue for the Irish people’s way of storytelling, from their folklore heritage to 21st-century tales, spoken in a heavy accent. Quoting,

“We are an island culture. We are an island people, and storytelling was a huge part of rural society in Ireland. And when migrants came to the U.S., they brought those storytelling techniques and ways of life with them, and those have been transformed today into a contemporary, cutting-edge cultural form in film, literature and music. There is an Irish accent that defines this Green Wave quite literally in some senses.”

But to me, his most compelling argument is that of ‘collective experience’, quoting, “Our collective experiences as Irish people, with histories of colonialism and famine, make us more receptive and empathetic to the plight of other countries and other peoples.” He argues that these experiences, whether the struggle for identity against a backdrop of British occupation, the subsequent political climate of a Protestant regime versus a Catholic Nation or the abusive overruling power of the Roman Catholic Church, make the modern-day Irish more empathetic to other nations and societies’ struggles, more willing to listen to other people’s stories but also to represent them in media.

Let’s underline the collective experience part. Irish artists use a very transnational language, even when portraying national themes and history; quoting Liam Harte, professor at the University of Manchester,

“In some ways, the key to success is to be able to live in that very distinctive Irish idiom, while at the same time telling stories that actually cross borders and speak to other social and cultural situations.”

To me, the very same Irish idiom he mentions is the overwhelming force that actually distinguishes Irish projects from other endeavours and guides them through the treacherous trenches of pop culture. In my view, this Irish idiom is a synonym of collective conscience.

Diving into the realm of sharing ideologies, memories and history, I want to show how this collectivism is present in Irish culture and society and consequently in Ireland’s artistic endeavours. Whatever the medium - music, film or fashion - Irish stories seem to melt into one another, almost as if they are entwined, created by the same mind force.

Collective Conscience

‘Collective conscience’ is a term coined by French sociologist Émile Durkheim that refers to the shared beliefs and sentiments that unify individuals within a society. It exists as a separate entity beyond individual consciousness, exerting a compelling influence on social behaviour - without its participants even noticing its effects. The sociologist then identified the two types of societies in which collective conscience may be present: the traditional (or mechanical) societies and the differentiated (or abstract) societies.

Let’s focus on the latter. In complex societies, the collective conscience becomes more abstract and its moral contents harder to grasp. This signifies that in most modern, capitalistic, industrialised, and classist societies of today, collective conscience is dependent on moral density and social volume and sustained not through religious rituals, but through forms of communication to which most people have access - television, cellular phones, the Internet…

Collective conscience, then, exists beyond the minds of individuals, not as a palpable presence of beliefs and ideas but as an ever-lingering shadow stemming from traditions, laws, folklore, stories and generational experiences and trauma.

But Émile Durkheim’s thesis has been described by many scholars as mainly theoretical, with no real application to existing societies. Because where do you place individuality in the collective conscience? Yes, of course, we are affected by the world around us, by the childhood we had, and by the experiences we have had, whether we choose to be or not. But we handle these experiences differently; how we react is up to the individual. As rational beings, we behave and think differently from others, even if that difference is minimal. So how can a collective sentiment emerge and be widely held in the absence of widespread shared beliefs that are routinely symbolised through rituals and practices?

British philosopher Colin Howson picked up Durkheim’s theory and answered this dilemma: “Even with such diversity and complexity, common conscience does not totally disappear; rather, it progressively transitions into a general and indeterminate way of feeling and thinking that privileges the rights and dignity of the individual and the idea of individuality.” This means that collective consciousness translates more into the way we think than the way we act - we might have pre-conceived, often prejudiced, notions, but we don’t necessarily act on them; they’re just wired into our brains.

But, how does collective conscience translate into movies, songs and visual arts?

Art and the Collective Conscience

Art mirrors the artist. It’s very hard for me to separate one from the other and not to read the artistic product from the perspective of the ideals, values and actions of its manufacturer. I believe an artist will inevitably transpose his personal views into the art he creates, even if he doesn’t realise it, even if it’s not obvious at first.

Art reflects who we are, how we think and what we have experienced.

Here enters collective conscience. If, through art, we subconsciously translate our own notions about the world, whether we want to or not, those notions are inevitably shaped by presuppositions generated by the collective conscience, already melted into the artist’s brain. If art is shaped by the way we view the world, then it is also shaped by the collective consciousness that affects those views.

In the last year, I came across three Irish-based artworks that, in one way or another, delved into a very specific period of Irish history: the run of the Magdalene Laundries from 1922 to 1996 (check out my youtube page to learn more about this period). I watched Small Things Like These (2024), starring Cillian Murphy; I researched about the fashion designer Róisín Pierce for a school project, and I began actively listening to Sinead O’Connor. All of these art pieces, I encountered as totally unrelated. But, surprisingly, I kept on hearing the same theme: whispers about the Magdalene Laundries, something that I, not being from Ireland, had never heard of before. Why did it keep coming up? Could it be purely coincidental? A popular theme among Irish folks… just like the English love the Elizabethan or Tudor Era? Or could it reveal a much deeper understanding of generational trauma and collective memory?

History vs Memory - sharing an identity

Well, these artists might have chosen to tell stories about this period solely through a historical lens, just as we have plenty of movies about World War II or the French Revolution. But unless they act as a fiduciary document, artistic endeavours are almost exclusively subjective - they can seldom, even when it comes to retellings of the past, be one hundred per cent faithful, one hundred per cent historical.

In fact, we can learn factual history through art, but the way we perceive those facts changes from art piece to art piece. Historical notions in movies and songs may be presented as the irrefutable truth, but they are almost entirely contaminated by the creator’s own thoughts, feelings and prejudices. History and art can coincide in the same space, but they ground themselves in very distinct foundations - objectivity and subjectivity.

Now, memory, on the other hand, can exist in both realms. Undoubtedly, memory, whether individual or collective, grounds itself in history and facts as well as oral histories. But its main goal is still identity, the depiction of the factual event is subjective - it’s easy to mix facts with emotion - and how the event made us feel is more relevant than its accurate depiction.

This is particularly relevant when it comes to collective memory (one of the spectrums of collective conscience). People who share the same past create bonds, obviously. But collective memory suggests that even individuals who didn’t experience that past may share a common emotional bond if they were raised in a group (as large as a country) that remembers, celebrates, or gives notoriety to those events.

This notion of identity is what makes the theory of collective memory so interesting. Therefore, Irish media, movies, songs and artwork that ground themselves in that thesis gain a whole other meaning.

Art and Collective Memory

To me, the tales of Irish history and legacy came in the form of songs, movies and clothes. I’m not Irish, yet artworks from the last 30 years have brought me a real sense of understanding. Understanding the long battles being fought, over the years, against power structures such as the Catholic Church. One of those battles is still being suffered by the survivors of the Laundries and their families, but also by a community, a community that, through collective memory, feels in their blood the swing of injustice.

In a way, the artworks I’ve consumed about the Magdalene Laundries have been responsible for my insertion in the collective memory that surrounds these women’s trauma. I’m aware that I won’t ever connect with those stories as much as an Irish person (especially an Irish girl) - someone who actively cohabits a space haunted by these past experiences with the Catholic Church, someone who has probably been hearing these tales since childhood, someone who descends from a lineage of either traumatised women or a society who did nothing to protect them - but by consuming and discussing the art works that chose to dissect this period of time, I’m an active participant in preserving its memories.

Art is, most definitely, a catalyst for provoking and shaping collective memory. And with technological advancements, social media, and a greater facility in travelling, art can now be shared globally. Tales that previously were preserved through oral narratives, writings or physical artefacts can now be shared, with the advancement of technology, via online archives and content-sharing platforms.

This is the proof that language and communication are ever evolving, and it's through different forms of communication that memories are kept alive and truths are revealed.

9th grade. Brandy Melville was all the rage. Matching pyjama sets, American flags, “pearl” necklaces, Ginny tops and Hillary pants (yes, I checked their website). The “one size fits all” craze. It was the ultimate “cool girl” store, before the internet had even claimed that label. Most times, my friends and I couldn’t afford the luxury of buying a single piece, but just the mere experience of entering the white wooden store was treated as a ceremony. We’d get hit by the rudeness of the employees, by Pink Floyd and The Grateful Dead posters, and by pairs of cheeky underwear at 15 euros a piece.

But all was worth it when, reaching the counter, we would come face-to-face with the tear-provoking jar of pins. Those who know, know. Most pins had little angels on them, some had phrases, some had flags or prints. But to me, a self-proclaimed alternative girl (at least at that time) and a certified music fanatic, would always reach for the band pins. I’m looking at my collection right now, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Sex Pistols and Sonic Youth. And I swear to God that I had a Bob Dylan one. It was great to see my passions represented in a little thing I could put on my backpack, to scream to the world “I LIKE THIS”.

What never sat right to me, though, was when my friends, who most times had no clue, in their own right, of who those bands/artists were, would also take home those pins for the sake of “the collection”. Even though it annoyed me, I never used to confront them about it, but one time I snapped and snarkily, and probably stupidly, asked one of them, “Do you even know who Led Zeppelin are?”

Please believe me, it wasn’t at all in a condescending way. And it definitely wasn’t a “name three songs” situation. I was just baffled by the indifference she had shown towards a band, a record (it was Led Zeppelin I, I think), that had meant so much to me growing up. Her response? “I just like the picture. I don’t need to listen to the band to have the pin. It’s not that deep”.

That broke me. It’s not that deep. I didn’t say anything at the time, obviously, but it stuck with me. I think about that statement every time I wear one of those Brandy Melville pins (or any other band pin), but mainly when I wear THE closet staple from my wardrobe: band tees. If a pin already whispers our interests in a visual form, then a t-shirt begs people to actively ask you about said taste. It’s a statement. Or so I thought.

In this article, I propose we discuss the ‘why?’ behind wearing band t-shirts. Does it hold any meaning, or is it just not that deep?

The t-shirt: a basic staple or a reflection of the mind?

Everyone owns a t-shirt, whether as a neutral staple or as a loud piece, whether to sleep in or to go under a blazer for casual drinks; it’s pretty much universal. So universal and intrinsic to our culture that it’s easy to forget how recent this garment actually is.

Since ancient times, “t-shirt-like” garments, such as tunics, have been used as an underlayer in everyday attire, but, according to Real Thread,

“The origins of the t-shirt [as we know it today] date back to the late 19th century, when labourers would cut their jumpsuits [or ‘union suits’] in half to keep cool in warmer months of the year”.

According to the BBC,

“shortly afterwards, the Cooper Underwear Company began marketing the tops — sans buttons — as ‘bachelor undershirts’ [...] and in 1913, they became a part of the uniform of the US Navy, where they were known as ‘lightweight short-sleeve white cotton undervests’”

And by the 1930s, the term ‘t-shirt’ had already been coined by F.Scott Fitzgerald in his novel This Side of Paradise (1920). By this time, the t-shirt was solely

“an undergarment meant to be worn beneath one’s ‘proper’ clothes, and was seldom regarded as an article in its own right”

Said Joobin Bekhrad for BBC. It was only in the 1950s that

“the t-shirt truly became a t-shirt, no matter how plain and simple it was”

Thanks to heartthrobs like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), who rocked them on the silver screen. According to Dennis Nothdruft,

“it was rebellious, because [t-shirts] were actually undergarments … It was a tough political statement.”

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Already, this garment had been showing signs of an essence of impending change and revolution in its most plain form: the white t-shirt. According to Raphaëlle Orsini in 1000 t-shirts that make a statement,

“The success of the white T-shirt was now assured. It was adopted by hippies in the 1960s, while the grunge scene of the 1990s adored its ‘no logo’ appeal, as did the ‘normcore’ wave of the 2010s. The white T-shirt is a fashion statement in its own right.”

But a white T-shirt, with all its vanguard power and connotation, could also work as a blank canvas. It can be torn apart, pinned, dyed, stapled, bleached, cut up and written or drawn on, like no other piece of clothing. Its mutations are infinite, and anyone can do it at home. Since its genesis, t-shirts have been tied to a very punk mentality - the ‘do it yourself’ essence. But by the early 60s, big corporations picked things up and improvements and innovations in printing technology

“[...]firmly entrenched the graphic T-shirt in not only the fashion world, but also popular culture as a whole”

Says Joobin Bekhrad for BBC. Arguably, within the ‘graphic tee realm’, band T-shirts hold the trophy. According to Orsini,

“Beginning in the 1960s, rockers used T-shirts to make a special connection with their fans”.

Although they were first and foremost “a prime form of advertising”, with the band logo or name on the front and information related to the band’s current tour on the back - mainly sources of revenue for the bands - they

“soon turned into a real sign of belonging, with fans proclaiming their love for their favorite band as they would a political message”

That’s what band tees mean to me. But let’s dive into the reasoning behind it.

What value do clothes hold?

In my view, saying ‘it’s not that deep’ in relation to a piece of clothing deprives one of the greatest things fashion has given us of any meaning: a way to express ourselves. I don’t think wearing clothes blatantly reflects whatever we are feeling at that moment, as many people claim. It’s more complicated than that. The action of choosing something, as rational beings able to strive away from our more animalistic traits, presuposes a reasoning behind the object of choice; we don’t ever choose something because of nothing, it’s a decision that needs foundation, sometimes more concrete and complex than other times, but, everytime we choose something (in this case what to buy and what to wear) we are acting under a guide of reasons, even if the reason is merely ‘because I think it’s cute’.

So what we wear means something, whether it’s a piece with memories attached to it, something we saw on Pinterest boards, stuff we saw our idol wear or merely something that makes us feel comfortable in our own skin. The possibilities are infinite. We all wear clothes every day until we die. And in the particular case of T-shirts, according to Raphaëlle Orsini,

“A T-shirt says much about our relationship with the world and with fashion. It can suggest a quiet, introverted nature or a loud, outgoing one. It displays our musical, social, political and stylistic tastes. In short, the humble T-shirt very much expresses a part of our identity.”

And I agree!

What we wear can tell us a lot about who we are. And if you choose to wear something that means nothing to you (like the pin of a band you know nothing about), then the mere choice of doing that means something.

The case of the band tee: building community

We’ve established that clothes can show others who we are, to some extent. Band t-shirts, with their graphic and visual nature, are a monumental example of that. They don’t hint at the fact that you’re interested in band X or Y; they say it loudly. And proudly. Essentially, they communicate a message. And even though that message might fly by most people (the nicher the band gets), there’s the slight possibility that someone might recognise said band. And what a great conversation starter that is!

I can name you at least three examples of how I’ve built ‘relationships’ on account of band t-shirts; in my junior year of high school, I befriended the guy sitting next to me in an English class because he was wearing an Unknown Pleasures, by Joy Division, t-shirt; in university I began a conversation with a girl, now a friend of mine, who was wearing a Fontaines DC shirt, on how it actually belonged to her sister and it served as memorabilia from home; and in a philosophy class, back when I was sixteen, I’m pretty sure my teacher upped my grade because I was wearing a Hole tee (a piece of her teenagehood).

When they’re not from Bershka, H&M or any other store from the Inditex group (we do not support them!!!), band t-shirts usually have a very specific graphism, a graphism that could be interpreted in many ways, but that is always visually striking. They tend to have a black or white background and feature the band logo, album covers, and thematic illustrations that match the music’s tone, or even tour dates.

Hence, even if, for instance, no one you encounter is aware of the band portrayed in the t-shirt, someone might still notice it - simply because of its distinct visual aspect - and ask about it. I most definitely do that with bands I don’t recognise, but whose artwork, whether an album cover or an iconic logo (like the Rolling Stones tongue), I found dazzling.

But that might just be my music fanaticism talking. It’s always easier, at least for me, to show my interests than to tell them. I don’t think most people want to hear me ramble about Teenage Fanclub or Blur, but I’m certain someone will appreciate me wearing one of their tees if they know of the band.

All in all, they serve as wearable art. And that gets people talking

The case of the band tee: music is more than sounds

I’ve talked about community. But what does that mean in the context of music? Yes, we might have an affinity for the same type of sound, genres and lyricism, but music is much more than that.

We’re in an era where the statement I’ve mentioned in the beginning, “it’s not that deep”, is often used in conversations relating to the music industry. There seems to be this ever-growing theory that if something, say pop music for instance, is fun, then it doesn’t need to “mean anything”. Just look at Sabrina Carpenter’s album cover controversy. There were, obviously, people on all of the sides of this saturated conversation, but there was also a heavy weight of people who didn’t even want to partake in the discourse because “pop music doesn’t need to be deep or political”.

My darlings, everything is political. Because there’s reasoning, meaning and context behind everything. And music is no exception. Heck! Music, as an art form, in all its eras, subgenres and stylistic forms, might just be one of the words of our vocabulary with the most meaning.

Solely basing this argument on the genesis of music, according to Jeremy Montagu, a museum curator and author who specialised in the history and origin of musical instruments,

“There are four evident purposes for music: dance, ritual, entertainment, personal, and communal, and above all, social cohesion, again on both personal and communal levels”.

And considering that

“The earlier hominid ability to emit sounds of variable pitch with some meaning shows that music at its simplest level must have predated speech”

The human being has always had these necessities.

And this was just the beginning. After Rock n’ Roll imploded following a teenage sense of rebellion and independence that blossomed just after World War II (with the term ‘Rock n Roll’ actually tracing back to the 1920s), it was time for the youth to grab it and do what they do best: shake things up. Quoting Meredith Ochs, for her 2018 book Rock and Roll Woman: The 50 Fiercest Female Rockers,

“Blues, jazz, R&B, and country artists who laid its groundwork. Girl groups that projected a flashy, united front. Counterculture singers who protested the establishment. Punk rockers who democratised music-making. Riot grrrls who politicised it. And so many more. They all subverted stereotypes and challenged expectations, whether they set out to or not. Their rebellion is empowering and exponential”

Picking up a guitar, never having had classes, and building up a tune, is inherently punk; a classic case of a ‘do-it yourself’ mentality. That has a meaning. Writing lyrics as a form of protest, and shouting those preaches to an audience. That has meaning. Being the reason why little girls shave their heads and meet up in their parents’ garage. That has meaning.

All of these examples regard the position music has held, over the years, behind the ear of impending social and political change. Music forms communities, but it also moves them.

And if we take a closer look, diving on a more personal level, everyone can agree that at least one song has marked us. For some people, it’s the choir and church bells, for others, it’s folkloric heritage on weekends and national holidays. But for most people, it’s a song stacked within a record or under the guidelines of a certain artist’s discography.

For National Geographic, Virginia Hughes, when trying to answer the question “Why does a lullaby soothe a newborn, a dirge console the grieving, and a KoRn song make you want to rip your ears out?”, says

“our cognitive connection to music may have evolved from an older skill, the ability to glean emotion from motion [...] brain systems, finely tuned to detect changes in rhythm and speed, could have also evolved to pick up similar changes in sounds, and later, to intentionally exploit this perceptual system by making music. Rather than waiting around for sounds that just happened to make us feel good or bad”

we could make music with the same type of effects and do so whenever we want.

For the same article, Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, shares the same view as I, regarding music being more than just sound, he says,

“This idea that music is a frivolous add-on, and is not really serving a purpose, that it’s just a happy coincidence or auditory cheesecake or what have you — it just doesn’t feel right [...] There must be something that music is providing for us, that helps us as a social species.”

There’s no definitive answer to this, but it’s clear that, on both a worldview and a more personal level, music is powerful enough to change lives and behaviours!

For me in particular, it was punk who rocked my world. Nothing felt quite like listening to the proletarian sounds of Bad Religion, the hypnotic bass lines of The Clash and the dry voices of L7. It felt distant from me, from everything I had heard or witnessed before, but weirdly, it hit right at home. And so, now, whenever I wear my Ramones t-shirt, for instance, I feel everything coming back to me. The newfound independence of fifth grade, the messy times in quarantine, the loneliness of fifteen, the excitement of going to high school and the hard decisions at the end of it. This is the power of a ‘simple’ t-shirt.

But I already knew all of this. The mere act of wearing one of my band tees is religious to me. Dramatically, I feel their power whenever I use them. But in writing this piece, I came to realise that band t-shirts may be the last universal piece of what the internet vicariously calls ‘physical media’. Yes, there’s been a wave of TikTok content focused on the return of vinyls and CD players in the big 2026, but this concept became a staple solely for a very specific microspace inserted in Gen Z nostalgic rendezvous. In reality, most music stores are empty, cars are no longer being produced with an incorporated CD player, and vinyls have become more of a collector’s item than a general way of listening to our favourite records.

People haven’t been walking around with a Walkman or a portable cassette player for a long time. We have Spotify wrapped, but not CDs scattered around the backseat of our cars. And by the minute, concert tickets are being replaced by apps like Dice and TicketLine. Music is no longer palatable; we don’t exchange cds with our friends, we no longer carry The Smiths cassettes to class, so conversations about music have to, inadvertently, revolve around a cellphone.

Most of them anyway. Because we still have band tees. We can’t listen to songs through them, but we can share with others our niche interests inside the business - whether it’s an artist, a festival or an album. They’re the last remaining way of carrying our music with us, of pitching dialogues about the art of sound and of sharing, not with the world but with the ones in our proximity, what that means to us. We can’t devalue them, because we can’t afford to lose them.

Why do celebrities write autobiographies?

In a celebrity-obsessed society like our own, where parasocial relationships with our favourite actors have become a norm and where everyone seems to be able to share their opinions with the world in the form of a tiktok video, most of us look for big scandals, family dramas (looking at you, Brooklin Beckham), and celebrity feuds, to escape, not only our own personal problems, but mostly all the news outlets and big headers that remind us of the current state of the world. We see lip-readers deciphering what this particular actor said at a public event, we encounter breakdowns of our favourite musical artist's dating habits, and we follow @deuxmoi and other (un)reliable sources of celebrity gossip.

So, it’s only fair that public figures have a say in all this. Here enter autobiographies or memoirs.

As Tobi Nifesi, a memoir ghostwriter and member of the Association of Ghostwriters, mentions,

“For starters, a book is an opportunity for celebrities, public figures, and famous people to set the record straight. Because these people’s lives are constantly being written and spoken about in the media, you can understand why they may want to get in on the action and share their perspectives”

Autobiographies can be great for celebrities to control their own narratives, as they are meticulously curated to help them reclaim their public image from media speculation and to monetise their personal brand. So it’s no surprise that by 2023, at least 396 celebrity memoirs had been published, arguably the best year for public figures’ autobiographies; by 2025, the number had been significantly reduced, according to the LA Times, to only 290 memoirs. Still, last year we saw the likes of Brooke Shields, Antony Hopkins, Lionel Richie and Margaret Atwood entering the craze.

And I am also to blame for this new “money-making” machine. I proudly own a copy of Face It by Debbie Harry, Vivienne Westwood’s self-titled memoir, and Verse, Chorus, Monster! by Graham Coxon. And, yes, I plan to read Lynch on Lynch and potentially Just Kids by Patti Smith.

All in all, memoirs and autobiographies fuel these parasocial relationships we tend to have with our favourite artists, at least artists in my case - by the likes of it, even influencers are actively entering the “memoir business”. And that sells. We buy the autobiography, we get a little bit closer to understanding these public “characters”, closer to understanding their eccentricities, their hardships, the life-altering moments that made them who they are, closer to their essence. Essentially, if we read the memoir, we are the superior fans. And, in some cases, we’ll know the secret ingredient to their fame and success.

The thing is, most memoirs tend to feel a bit… bleak. The first pages feel exciting and new; finally, I’ll get a look into the life of X or Y, but as you go along, the words tend to sound inauthentic, uninspired, or plainly bad. Quoting Rachel Syme for the New Yorker:

“The Hollywood memoir is a perfect genre for summertime, when your mind is as gooey and malleable as a slice of American cheese, because it demands that you be willing to suspend your disbelief and indulge in dazzling lies.”

And, most times, I find myself pondering the question “Why should I care?” - you’re no Tom Sawyer, no Elizabeth Bennet…

Then there’s the subjectivity problem - we can’t take anything the author writes as facts (but they treat them as such) because the medium of the memoir is purely one-sided; so when the writer is recalling an event in their life, we can do nothing but speculate if it actually happened that way or if their subjective lens is blurring our comprehension of the moment.

I read a Reddit comment a while back that goes pretty well with my feelings.

“99.99% of the time it’s written by a ghostwriter. It’s just another way for celebrities to capitalise on their existing popularity. Bonus points if the book touches on one of the focus points all the big publishing houses are clamouring for, like identity, trauma, or ‘success against all odds’ stories. People like to read them, publishers like making money, and are pushing out massive selections of these books because book trends move a lot faster thanks to things like TikTok and Instagram.”

This comment goes hand in hand with most of the memoirs I’ve read or know of. The same old tragic childhood, the rise to fame through hard work and love for the craft, the inevitable downfall and the eventual redemption arc where, finally, the celebrity is seen for what they truly are. It’s basically the formula for those Bohemian Rhapsody (2019) type music biopics we all know of.

That doesn’t mean they aren’t amusing, quoting Rachel again,

“The sooner you accept that star stories are full of embellishments and omissions, invented quotes and one-sided recollections dictated to patient ghostwriters, the sooner you’ll come to appreciate them as the grand and eccentric performances that they are.”

And so, like any good and reliable fan, last summer, I felt the urge to buy Munkey Diaries, Jane Birkin’s memoir.

A first look at Jane Birkin and Munkey Diaries

She doesn’t need an introduction; an it girl for some, a fashion icon for others, the face of Paris in the 60s, or plainly Serge Gainsbourg’s most famous muse. But today we’ll go with Jane Malory Birkin.

In the preface of the book, we come face to face with Jane’s recollections of the upbringing of her parents, her own premature birth, and the early years of her childhood, spent, firstly, in a farm outside of London, and then in a big Victorian house in Cheyne Gardens, Chelsea, where she attended an eccentric day school with her sister Linda.

But the preface of this work also gives us insight into a titular character in this story (that Jane calls life): Munkey.

When I buy a book, I tend to go into it knowing absolutely nothing about its premise (so I’m not influenced by outside opinions or possible notions I might already have) - so, when I picked up Jane’s memoir, I didn’t read the back cover, I didn’t look up reviews or critiques. I was plainly intrigued by the title, Munkey Diaries, and Jane’s doe eyes and signature bangs.

So I made my own assumptions about the cover - Jane, looking at us magnifyingly, will tell us, spectators, about her life as the pinnacle of sixties sexiness with a little pinch of weirdness and how she felt like a monkey performing for the insatiable masses of fans that she had been collecting, ever since she met Serge at the ripe age of twenty-one.

Who was Munkey?

Boy, was I wrong. Munkey, and I should have detected it by the weird spelling, is not Jane’s possible state of mind as one of the most famous British girls to live. Munkey was, and I quote Jane, “[...] my confidant, a soft toy monkey dressed as a jockey that my uncle had won in a tombola and given to me. He slept by my side, sharing the sadness of boarding school, hospital beds and my life with John, Serge and Jacques. He witnessed all the joys and all the unhappiness”.

When she was eleven, in 1957, Jane began writing a diary, a diary directed to her dear stuffed animal.

“My parents gave me a diary, like lots of little girls. And I gave my girls diaries as well. I mean, I gave them secret diaries with padlocks, but in fact, mine were just exercise books. And it’s a rather good thing to keep, because you can have a good laugh later on about the tiny things that made you miserable.”

After the first entry, she kept on writing to her Munkey, both in English and in French, up until her daughter Kate’s passing on 11 December 2013 - a period during in wich, she recalls, “I lived a parallel life [...] I had no more to say, as if I had lost the right to express myself. With Kate, my diary came to an end”. She stopped writing, but Munkey remained by her side, or shared, in parts, with her loved ones,

“Kate, Charlotte, and Lou had his sacred clothes, without which travel was unthinkable. Serge kept Munkey’s jeans in his attaché case until the day he died. Faced with my children’s grief, I put Munkey beside Serge in his coffin, where he lay like a pharaoh. My monkey was there to protect him in the afterlife”

In 1991, her beloved Serge (although they were already separated) passed. They had a complicated relationship, something apparent in her memoir (and we’ll get into that), but what matters for the case is that he, ultimately, was the one to keep Munkey forever. Let’s hear Jane on it - for The Guardian, in a 2020 interview, she mentions:

“By the time Serge died, the children – Kate and Charlotte – were so distressed, I didn’t know what to put in the coffin that would make the children feel that he might be a bit safer. So I ran back home, and I got my Munkey, and I put him in with Serge. Which is a crazy thing to do, but better than to have lost him in a stupid hotel or to have any other idiot thing that could have happened to him.”

In 2018, at 71 years old, Jane, with the help of photographer and friend Gabrielle Crawford, decided to gather all the entries she had been writing since 1957 up to 2013, and assemble them all in two volumes. She mentions, “I wanted to publish nearly everything, and I’ve had a long life, so I needed two volumes. The first, from boarding school to the separation with Serge and waiting for Lou; the second book, from the birth of Lou until the death of my daughter Kate.” She ended up releasing the first volume in French in 2018, published by Fayard, which was then translated, with the help of Erin Floyd, into English and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2020; this volume contains diary entries from 1957 to 1982. The second volume, spanning from 1982 to 2013, was only ever published in French, also by Fayard, and it came out in 2019. It’s entitled Post-scriptum. I’ll be addressing Munkey Diaries solely.

In a conversation for SwissLife, Jane recalls the reasoning behind these publications when asked, “Did you want to take control of the ‘Jane Birkin’ myth by publishing these intimate writings?” She answered,

“You could say that, yes. I struggled with myself for a long time, but then I thought, there have been so many stories told by others about me and my family, now it’s my turn to tell my version.”

This, as we have seen, is the main reason for any public figure, especially one with such a presence and longevity in the public eye as Miss Birkin, to take the time to write a memoir. To take the time to reinvent themselves, to take the time to finally reveal to the public the story they’ve been hiding all along. So, in theory, Jane’s books could fall into the spectrum of “just another bland celebrity autobiography”.

But I would argue that it does not. I would argue that Munkey Diaries subverts the genre it supposedly belongs to. So let’s dive into Munkey Diaries.

About Munkey Diaries

We’ve already established that Munkey Diaries is a compilation of Jane’s written diaries, spanning from 1957 to 1982. Each year serves as a “new chapter” composed of all the diary entries Jane was able to keep from that year. For instance, the year 1966 has the entries titled: “Monday, 3 January”, “Sunday morning”, “Friday, Brighton”, and some even say “Undated”. The various entries span in length and subject, some detail trivial moments in her life (like taking a walk in a park or going shopping), some work as a liberation act (when shes’s angry about a situation or a person, and wants to vent) and some gives us an insight on already known events of her life (like public quarrels with her partners, or the making of various movies).

Let me give you an example of each of the different types of entries. For example, on the 16th of August, 1973, she writes about visiting a Castle with her two young daughters, Kate, who was 6 at the time, and Charlotte, who was 2 years old. She really writes from the perspective of a mother here, as she details a tantrum her youngest daughter threw during the visit. Quoting,

“4 francs each and children don’t pay. I said they were mad and didn’t know my children, who should be made to pay double! Never has a truer word been said. Charlotte refused to walk, I threatened to leave her, and she spat and yelled and tapped her tiny feet. In the end, I had to carry her because of all the onlookers tutting” (page 172)

Something every parent has experienced.

In July 1967, she details, for instance, her momentary feelings concerning her relationship with her then-husband, John Barry,

“You would never believe how sad, disappointed and deflated I feel; never have I felt so unwanted by the man I love. I feel my life rotting, and I don’t know how long I can go on in this set-up” (page 86)

In this passage, she talks to her Munkey in the first person, as a friend and expresses to him her loneliness, her sadness.

And finally, just after the release of “je T’aime… moi non plus” in 1969, and its rather controversial success, Jane writes about dealing with fame, while (and this was often forgotten) being a young mother:

“I’m now well-known because of ‘Je T’aime” and Slogan; we’re the couple of the year. In a lifetime, we couldn’t say we had such fun. And what will this year bring… America? What will that bring? Kate will be three, and yet my life since her birth has changed so much. Leaving John and starting again, it seems 100 years ago” (page 110)

She friviously talks about a fulcral point in her life, the beginning of her relationship with fame, while giving us an insight into her expectations for the future, her life with Serge and her past marriage with John Barry.

But alongside these, you could say random, diary pages, the present-day Jane makes comments or explanations about what some pages say. These written comments are in a different font, and sometimes they appear at the beginning of chapters (with Jane summarising main events that happened that year), sometimes they come alongside a specific entry (where Jane specifically refers to the events she had written about), and sometimes they are just simple and short footnotes.

Quoting the author:

“I decided to do a sort of autobiography with anecdotes of things that have come to mind in reading these diaries. Commentaries, too. And I’ve talked about people who had been so important that were missing, so we’ve done a sort of mixture of diaries of the time, with the memories of today”

Unfortunately, but reasonably, some diaries were lost. Like 1969, which was a pretty busy year for Jane, releasing both La Piscine and Je T’aime moi non plus. And so for the years with lost diary entries, Jane makes a general statement about the main event of the year. In 1969, she talks about the controversial single and its reception, having been banned by the pope:

“It was maybe later, when I was singing in the bathtub, that Serge asked if I could sing ‘Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus’” with him. ‘Oh yes, yes!’ I said, not because I found it particularly pretty, but to imagine him shut up in a tiny cabin with a bombshell like Mireille Darc was a terrifying possibility” (page 103)

This is quite interesting as we get a hold of both Jane’s inner thoughts and feelings from back then (because the entries were written when the event had just happened), but we also encounter Jane’s present feelings on the matter. To make the book, the compilation, she looked back on her diaries, she looked back on her younger self, and realised that she probably doesn’t agree with a lot of her younger self’s reaction to different matters. And the reader notices this in real time.

Why does the diary form matter?

1. Witnessing Jane grow up

This is one of the virtues of the diary form. You see Jane growing up. From the age of 11 to the age of 36. Most celebrities talk about their childhood and their teenage years, virtually the different phases of their life, in their memoirs. It’s a central point in their life story. But one thing is to talk about memories. Write in the present about the past. At best, you can change a few details, rephrase someone’s line in the story, embellish some controversial element, and at worse you might not even recall the event in its entirety; the memory might be blurred by the passage of time.

Another thing entirely is to present something written in the past. That’s what Jane does. So it’s not grown-up Jane that writes about her experience in boarding school, it’s little Jane that does that. And she does that not in the same year, not in the same month, not in the same week, but on the same day as the event happened. It’s a diary - according to the Cambridge Dictionary, “a person’s private record of events, thoughts, feelings, etc., that are written down every day”. So what we end up reading aren’t long-lost memories, but something that had just happened - or, at least, just happened in 1967…

And because she presents diary entries from a selection of different dates, from a span of 25 years, we see her progression through time. Well maybe not progression, one doesn’t “get better”, one simply grows up; the Jane that wrote on a wednesday in 1960 “Dull dull, very dull”(page 11) or “I learnt today about God. I wonder about that subject, He must be such a strange person, is He a man? Has He a body? If not, is He a void? And if he’s a void how can He grant our wishes?” (page 13); is not the same Jane that wrote “America frightens me, England has been cold to me, I wanted France, because France has wanted me” (page 192) or “John is erased, eradicated, covered by the eccentricity and completeness of my love for Serge” (page 114). Because in the first passages she was 13 and in the latter ones she was in her mid to late 20s.

And this is somewhat fascinating to read. Almost witnessing little bits of someone growing up.

For instance, the reader will notice that the segments tend to get progressively longer as time goes by; in the early years, it was rare to see more than a paragraph, and by the end, that’s all you encounter.

However, there is no real evidence that she fundamentally changed over time. All in all, she’s the same person. And Jane herself acknowledges this. Quoting,

“On reading my diaries, it seems to me that one doesn’t change. What I was at twelve, I am still today. The lack of confidence, the jealousy, wanting to please… I understand better why my loves couldn’t last.”

Still, it’s pretty interesting and outside the box to “meet” different Janes, or, at least, the same Jane but in different moments of her life.

2. Purposeful subjectivity

One of the critiques I made early on about autobiographies is their subjectivity, and how the author may very well write about their life in such a way that we, falsely, believe only the side presented to us. When writing the book, they most definitely embellish things, make up quotes, and exaggerate qualities. But they present those “changes” as the pure, untouched truth.

Well, doesn’t Jane do that to? A diary is something inherently subjective. While it may contain factual, chronological records of daily events, its primary purpose is to capture a person’s individual perspective, feelings, emotions, and interpretations of their own experiences. And Birkin, by assembling segments from her personal diaries to write her memoir, to tell her story, offers a truly biased set of events.

But, in my view, this works because she doesn’t treat her words as the irrefutable truth. She is 100% open about the medium she chose to use: the diary form, something purposefully subjective. So she doesn’t try to hide this one-sidedness; she is aware of it and chooses to embrace it.

“The diaries are, of course, unfair. You show your hand and complain, and there are different sides to everything, but here there is just mine.” (preface)

Facing this subjectiveness, she could have opted for introducing some changes to the source material. Omit segments, erase certain people from the narrative, tone down nasty details. But she didn’t. She changed absolutely nothing; she didn’t try to “re-write history”, she committed to the diary form.

“In principle, I have changed nothing - and believe me, I would have preferred to have reactions that were more mature or wiser than those that I had” (preface).

It’s subjective, yes. But that’s the point. That’s what makes it interesting.

3. The crudeness of the writing

There’s yet another virtue of the diary form. A diary is supposed to be a quick form of exhortation, a venting machine; you don’t think about it much before writing, and you transpose to it everything that is going on your mind at that second. You scream at the page without thinking about grammar, politeness, or “pretty words”. Using a diary essentially gives rise to a crude and raw type of writing. That’s what Jane presents to us. She claims, as I’ve mentioned, not to have changed much from the original texts. And the reader notices that.

When she writes, she wasn’t embodying “Jane Birkin”, the English girl made French icon, the trailblazer of the 1970s. No, she’s just Jane. Apart from the inevitable mentions of parties, movie premieres, and rendezvous with Brigitte Bardot and Agnés Varda, she makes us believe that she led a very mundane life. Because, in her eyes, through her words, she did.

“The reader will be surprised, as I was, to see how little I talk about my professional life. I hardly mention the films, the plays, not even the songs. When people die, I talk about it months later - the happy times I was too busy living” (preface)

In a conversation with Swiss Life, she even adds,

“Not long ago, someone asked me for my recollections of filming The Swimming Pool, and to be honest, I just don’t remember it any longer.”

This doesn’t mean Jane devalues her past projects and artistic endeavours, but that it isn’t her famous projects, her relationship with Serge or the signature little basket that make her who she is. She clearly didn’t waste a lot of time talking about those things in her diaries. And when she did, she always added a trivial essence to her words.

So Jane not only admits the subjective nature of her writing but also underlines how “messy” the diaries are. We encounter undated entrances, poems about her daughter Kate (page 89), scattered around, words from a Françoise Hardy-obsessed tween, drawings and scribbles, but mainly, a girl sailing through the deep blue sea we call life. And the way she sees life is presented to us in Munkey Diaries.

On Jane’s side - what did she write about

There’s life in boarding school (both in England and France), there’s life in a marriage with John Barry, there’s a life as a single mother, there’s a life alongside Serge, and a life after Serge with Jacques Doillon. For a fan like myself, all these events can be split and aligned with whatever projects Jane was doing at the time. “Oh, in 1968, she divorced John? Well, that’s the year she made Wonderwall” - one of the correlations I made when readin Munkey Diaries. Turns out she doens’t even mention the psychedelic movie in her diary entries...

Well, in reading the memoir, these “events” start to feel consequential. We might be backseat passengers, but we slowly begin to look at the world the same way Jane’s honest eyes do. Conversations that might be borderline controversial appear ordinary; behaviours that we, in real life, might quickly condemn are given another light; and relationships we normally judge as toxic can now be reevalued as complicated. It’s an honest book, and this lack of filters makes the reader a bit more comprehensive of the complex aspects of a life under the spotlight.

And Jane seems to agree with this view. In reading her diaries, she came to conclusions about how she reacted to certain events in her life, how she dealt with her various relationships, and, ultimately, why those love affairs didn’t last… In relation to her sour and short lived mariage to John Barry, she said, for The Guardian:

“When I read them, I find myself extremely tiresome. It must have been such a drag for John Barry to come back home, and there you’ve got this waif-like seventeen-year-old who is there running his bath, giving him his newspaper. When I look back at that, I think: oh my god... I only saw my side of the story.”

And while I do agree with Jane on the subjectivity she inadvertently presents, it’s impossible for the reader not to side with her at times. In relation to the quote I just mentioned, on her relationship with John Barry: I hated his guts. And even though neither the past Jane nor the present Jane holds that much of a grudge against him (Jane even understands him in a way), stating that she must have been an unbearable seventeen-year-old girl. I feel for Jane at that time because, in reading the diaries, you get a look at her state of mind, at her feelings. And no one should ever experience the pain and loneliness she felt when she was married to him. Quoting,

“I am so happy to see him. I suddenly have energy, and he hasn’t, poor thing, and he tells me to be quiet, and then I cry, and I am stupid, but it’s only that I can’t see him enough, which I suppose is a good omen” (page 63)

But she never explicitly tells you to hate John and to feel for her. This might have happened if she were writing in a storytelling perspective, where there’s a protagonist and there’s a villain. But she is purely stating what she feels, and even without her realising, the readers notice how quickly the marriage started to sour.

There’s obviously the age difference and the power imbalances. When they met in February 1965 at a Roman Polanski’s party (ew), he, already one of the greatest film composers of all time, was thirty-two, and she, a little girl fresh out of school, was seventeen; but she never looks down upon these disparities, quoting “He’s much older than me, which is wonderful” (page 63). It is actually her dad who opposes the relationship, quoting,

“He very quickly asked me to marry him. My father wanted to go to court to forbid it because I was still a minor. There were discussions in my parents’ garden in Chelsea, filmed by Andrew. You can see my father trying to postpone the date, you see John Barry winning, Andrew grimacing, and me following John Barry through the house to his Jaguar E-Type, getting in, with my basket. Three months later, I was eighteen, and we were man and wife”.

Right from the start, we encounter Barry’s unfaithfulness and his complete disregard for his wife’s feelings, quoting “He said I didn’t know the circumstances and I was stupid to cry” (page 64). And we witness Jane’s loneliness growing,

“I wanted to talk to John, explain that I was dying for company [...] I cannot explain last night’s madness, except that I was so sad and miserable.” Reaching a climax of self-harming tendencies, “I feel so capable of harming myself. It doesn’t mean I tried to die; I don’t want that because I love you and I have so much to live for, but sometimes when you are asleep and I haven’t been able to tell you the way I feel, the only crap way I can comfort myself is to sink deep into my skin, so it hurts me and the pain seems to stop”(65)

John might just be an idiot, if not a pedophile. But, although sad, it’s interesting that Jane never seems to realise that. Yes, she feels bitter towards him, but it comes from a place of loneliness, not hate. She still loves him, she still admires him, quoting, “never have I felt so unwanted by the man I love” (page 86), and when she eventually walks out of the marriage, with baby Kate in her arms, in 1967, she referred to the separation as “Our quarrel had been such a futile one. I knew it would end this way. If only I had stepped down a bit, but I felt I had to be cold to make a point, he had been so remote from me, it was only fair.” (page 86).

It was John who ended things, saying, “The time has come for us to go our separate ways”, but it was Jane who left the house with her baby in her arms. An action she now refers to as a mistake (page 87).

In a 2020 interview with The Guardian, after being asked, “Was it different with Serge Gainsbourg?”, Jane answered, “I really came into my own with Serge because he did nothing all day long but think of jolly things to do with me. So I was extremely happy. He was as jealous as I was”

Yes, they might have had a similar way of approaching life, but I don’t think that was the sole reason why their relationship worked. Or at least seemed to work better than the marriage with John, as it lasted more than a decade. There was still a pretty big age difference between Jane and Serge, but she was older than when she met John. She wasn’t an underage teenage girl. She had more experience with love and relationships, and she was a mother - she had to grow fast. And so she clearly approached her relationship with Serge in a very different way. She didn’t need to rely on him as heavily as she did on John because she was now an adult with her own priorities and projects, and she found a new love for France. It seems as if she finally found herself a home.

Still. It wasn’t a relationship without its faults. They met in a strictly professional environment, but Jane formed an adoration for him right off the bat, stating that she was in love with him, without even knowing him properly. She clearly still had a very romanticised version of what a relationship should look like, and after her experience with John Barry, that’s a good thing. It means he didn’t break her spirit.

And Serge quickly followed along. Soon after, they were dating and madly in love, for he even asked her to sing his brand new creation “J T’aime… Moi Non Plus”. But this time it didn’t feel so one-sided, Jane recalls,

“I decided to go back to London so as not to become the dependent wife that I had been with John Barry. We were staying at L’Hôtel Rue des Beaux-Arts, where Oscar Wilde died. Before I left, Serge had cried all night in silence in front of a lit candle, very Russian and dramatic [...]” (page 94)

She moves to Serge’s place in Rue de Verneuil with her daughter Kate, but Serge’s jealousy tendencies start soon after, with him showing unjustified anger when, for instance, Jane talks about other actors or artists, quoting,

“I had the stupidity to look at a poster with George Segal on it. I think he’s a good actor bt he is not my cup of tea at all [...] I don’t know why he was so furious, but he turned against me. He said I’d mentioned that actor too many times, and he was a rotten actor anyway.” (page 184)

and they would often fight, even publicly, like the incident at Castel’s, where

“he was mentioning the name of some girl, actress or something. I slapped him, lightly and funnily, I thought, and he hit out at my left eye like mad, so I hid my head for at least half an hour, my eyes running like a river. Then I made him grab my baske,t and Serge turned it over; everything out, all over the floor at Castel’s [...] then to pick everything up, furious, and jabbed at him with my cigarette still slightly alight. So he bashed me again and tore me down by my hair and slapped me again and left the nightclub.” (page 112)

But later in the night, when she was feeling sick, he held her head and her hair and put her to bed, “He was an angel but a human too - he was sick too, on top of me, just to see me sick”.

It was clearly a very complicated relationship full of ups and downs, but I do agree with the Sunday Times when they wrote “Birkin’s diary entries ultimately expose the toxic reality behind one of the 20th century’s most glamorous couples”. Even though, at times, she would refer to him as the big love of her life, quoting, “Oh, how I love him, his hair, his hands, his warmth. I want to kiss him and hold him until I cry with loving him, he’s so beautiful [...] I can think of no one but him all my life until I die. I want him and only him” (page 114); there was a lot of toxicity in the relationship, so, with the addition of Serge’s ever-growing alcoholism, their parting in 1980 felt a bit inevitable, even with a daughter, Charlotte, as a result of that relationship. In a 2007 interview with The Guardian, when asked if she believed she could have saved him from himself, Jane answered:

“I don’t think I could. Everywhere he went in Paris, people said, ‘Hey Serge, this round is on me.’ And he could not refuse. Someone called him a suicidaire optimiste, and that is very accurate. I don’t think he thought he would die at 63, though. He thought he would have two or three chances at redemption first.”

Here begins her time with film director Jacques Doillon, whom she met, while still in a relationship with Serge, after Doillon approached her to star in his film La fille prodigue (1981). They had a daughter together, Lou; I’m particularly found on how she phrased their love affair,

“I wish I were twelve and had met him for the first time at fourteen like Kate, and he’d been my first, maybe not the last, but the first. I would’ve liked to be an adolescent and in love with him, but I don’t think he would’ve noticed me. I wonder if he’ll leave me when I’m forty; I suppose so, he’s too young and I’m a bit too old for him” (page 279)

Mind you, Jane was actually two years younger than Jaques, but as we’ve seen, she was used to more dramatic age differences…

And still, while in a relationship with Jacques, she confesses, “I miss Serge dreadfully [...] I never think about how he [Jacques] feels enough, only Serge and me” (page 281). Clearly still holding a big part of what had been the greatest love of her life in her heart. In 1981, she writes,

“I asked Jacques if he realised that if ever anything happened to Serge, I wouldn’t be able to stay with him, that I would never get over it. The guilt would be unbearable just to know that he was sick.” (page 281)

And indeed, when Serge passed away in 1991, Jane and Jacques’ relationship ended shortly after. Maybe it was only coincidental, but one can wonder.

Jane vs Birkin

Ultimately, I would argue that the diary form humanises Jane. Blatant statement, I’m aware. But we tend to insert certain celebrities (or most of them) into little glass boxes accompanied by a striking label: icon, muse, it girl. All of these could apply to Miss Birkin, but all of them are deprived of any real meaning. So, who is Jane Birkin? I can speak for the younger generation, at least for the girls who grew up with Tumblr and who now spend hours on Pinterest; we all regard her as one of the ultimate fashion icons. She could’ve been ‘lost in time’, like a lot of other figures from the 60s, like Françoise Hardy, who don’t even come near in terms of monumental popularity among my generation, although massively influential at their time. But Birkin, especially with girls inserted in fashion spaces, in real life or online, is a universal, almost timeless figure. Maybe she was immortalised by the Hérmes bag, used by Samantha Jones and Mary-Kate Olsen; maybe she’s remembered because she’s an idol to our idols, like Alexa Chung; or maybe she was the one chosen to immortalise that specific 60s innocence. She’s Birkin.

But that’s not the Jane I met when I read Munkey Diaries.

Most of all, I met an insecure woman with a peculiar life, strong values and a deeply relatable way of approaching la vie. By only mentioning her movies, her song debuts, and her other artistic endeavours, very briefly, she gives space for feelings to grow. A mixture of sadness, warmth, longing, nostalgia and despair floods the pages - pages where a thirteen-year-old Jane, as well as a thirty-year-old Jane, can be vulnerable. She even said herself,

“I always cared more about what happened around the films, the dinners with Serge and the children, the parties, the encounters. The films exist, after all; what more can I possibly say about them?”

and those parties, those encounters, those relationships, build their way into the diaries via reactions, via emotions.

And behind the doe eyes and the eyeliner, Jane reveals herself to be an incredibly emotional and empathic person, who, because of her sensitivity, hides shattering insecurities. When she was married to John she constantly wrote about how beautiful his past lovers had been, especially in comparison to her, “he also had the swedish girlfriend who sounds so beautiful. I find it difficult to understand how he could love me after her” (page 62); in 1970 we notice her willingness to please others, “I don’t want to say sorry again, I’ve done it so often.” (page 118); in 1972 after doing a photoshoot with Brigitte Bardot (Serge’s past lover), she described her as having no flaws; and she even saves a little space in one of 1973’s entries to celebrate how Union magazine talked about her as having a ‘small bosom’ (according to Jane, the beauty standard at the time).

Indeed, it seems to me as if the bangs and the 60s eyes, the signature look that everybody knows her for today, were simply some sort of mask.

In a conversation with The Guardian, Jane says,

“When I was married to John Barry, there was always an eyeliner pencil on my night table. I was constantly afraid of not pleasing him. That was also the dictate of fashion. We girls all had to have eyes like daisies and long hair with bangs. It wasn’t about personality at all.”

She further enlightens this point in Munkey Diaries with her description of 1972 (written by older Jane), regarding a photoshoot she was supposed to do with Brigitte Bardot, she says, “I’d cried all night, and my face was all swollen, and I had such shiny eyelids that I couldn’t be made up. That’s why I’m so pretty in that scene, because for once, I wasn’t covered up with the typical make-up of the sixties” (page 150).

So, her ‘disdain’ for the look she’s known for only grew with age.

When looking back on the diaries, Jane comments with The Guardian,

“Well, I think that diaries are very unfair. Because one has a tendency of writing when you’re sad; when you’re happy, you’ve got lots of better things to do. When I read them, I find myself extremely tiresome.”

I tend to disagree. I found the compilation of the diaries absolutely enlightening (it made me want to keep a diary too), and even though she did pour her heart onto the page, for the most part, she also recorded a collection of pretty jolly moments. For instance, after spending an afternoon with her mother and sister Jane writes, “So cosy being with Ma and Linda again; I feel quite young again!” (page 175); or back in 1970, when she talks about how in love she was with Serge, “Oh, how I love him, his hair, his hands, his warmth. I want to kiss him and hold him until I cry with loving him, he’s so beautiful.” (page 114).

And in the midst of these memories, we get to know some of her more political stands. Positions I wasn’t aware of at all. How she was pro-choice, quoting,

“There was a great camaraderie between girls that I’d never known before. Of course, I had been for the legalisation of abortion, because chic girls always go to England or Switzerland without any problem of conscience or money” (page 151)

or how she was against the death penalty,

“There’s been talks of bringing back the death penalty after the apparent increase of crime in 1965. I have always felt and continue to feel very much against it. Pronouncing the death penalty in cold blood, I know, is basically and morally wrong” (page 66).

I bought Munkey Diaries like any other fan, as someone who guiltily picks up and enjoys reading celebrities’ autobiographies. But I closed the book with a slight disdain for the genre. Jane Birkin opened a whole new world to me, a world within the memoir spectrum but without the self-pitying, the redemption arc and the made-up quotes. What Miss Birkin felt writing entry X or Y, is what the reader, a few decades later, also experiences - we witness this young English girl turned French sensation diving into a life of motherhood, tough-love relationships, public feuds, cold nights in hotel rooms and controversial projects.

All the while, her black mascara and preppy eyeliner begin to slowly melt away, making Jane not only more ‘human’ to the eye of the fanatic reader, but also revealing a much more tender face. Revealing, simply, Jane.

These are some of the more conventionally attractive vampiric attributes that the media has been curating over the years - attributes that have got me in a chokehold, I confess. And from the information I can gather, most girls agree with me. Pinterest whispers, Spike (from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) tiktok edits, “I heart vampires” t-shirts; just by the abysmal popularity of Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, it’s easy to see how deeply our love fantasies and sexual desires can be entwined with the idea of such a creature. Only a vampire can love you forever, right?

Arguably, vampires could also present to us, mortal humans, “trapped” within our short and mundane existence, an escapism in the form of a love story. They exist somewhere indefinably between two states of being - the most nebulous of presences, they generally cast no shadow and reflect no image, yet we can see them, even touch them. In Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel - arguably the most famous of the vampire installements - Dracula does not simply reside “in a place that defines the East as if fundamentally different from the West”, as David Rogers, Principal Lecturer of Kingston University, puts it. At the beginning of his journey, it’s impossible for Jonathan Harker, one of our protagonists, “to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula” (page 3) - this particular vampire not only exists in a liminal space between life and death, but actively lives in a place between reality and illusion. This offers the discontent reader to fantasise about being taken away to such a place, where everyday worries cease to matter. Where conventional social roles and gender norms are blurred (both female and male vampires are blood suckers). More on the note of Bram Stoker’s novel: for Dracula, Stoker followed a specific tradition of the modern vampire story that had been developed as a sub-genre within the Gothic tradition (that had started in the late 18th century with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto) - specifically taking inspiration from Varney the Vampire (1846), Carmila (1872), diverse anonymous German stories, translated into English, such as The Mysterious Stranger, as well as relying on numerous non-fiction sources like Victorian travel books (such as Emily Gerard’s The Land Beyond the Forest, 1887). It is also heavily believed that, although Stoker may not have known about vampires as a child, he may have learned of similar cults in his childhood, for his mother especially immersed him in the rich folk culture and superstitions of his native Ireland. Because “vampirism, in some form or another, has appeared in all cultures, in all times” (David Rogers), specifically during periods of strangely spreading diseases and infections, such as syphilis in Bram Stoker’s time, or during “the end of millennia or periods of perceived social change and anxiety over the future”. So yeah, Dracula’s success can be associated with the fact that “Late-Victorian audiences loved vampire stories”, in the social and political context of their time.

Still, why, in this day and age, are girls the ones (generally) attracted to vampires?

Ultimately, if they are conscious of it or not, vampires are trapped within a body that once belonged to them but that no longer correlates with their state of mind - essentially, they could acquire the knowledge of a thousand centuries on earth and still look the same as they did when they were sired. Not only that, but, as arguably established by John Polidori in The Vampyre, they are creatures meticulously curated to attract their victims; they don’t rely on brute force, but centre their attack around seduction and the laws of attraction, as David Rogers puts it, “[John Polidori’s The Vampyre] established the vampiric villain as anti-bourgeois [...] and aligned the nineteenth-century vampire with the perceived threat of unbridled romanticism and a sexual potency that ensured neither society ladies nor innocent girls could resist his advances”. Essentially they hide a secret story, life and intention behind their “ultimate uncanny body” (as Chloe Atkinson writes for Pulp). They are more than what they appear to be, yet their image is what prevails through the passage of time - their physical appearance is the only lens through which they are seen by the world, and by their victims - that’s how they succeed in their pursuit, that’s how they hunt.

So I ask you. What girl hasn’t felt like that? As Chloe Atkinson puts it, “This is a notion that rings true for girls — after all, how many times might we have wished not to be judged through the lens of our bodies? It seems that girlhood is a perpetual state of being witnessed by oneself and the world”.

One of the appeals of the Twilight books, for awkward tween fangirls, was that Bella was kind of ugly. Kristen Stewart defied that by looking absolutely stunning in the movies, but in Stephenie Meyer’s controversial saga, Bella was plain and simple - yet Edward, described as the pillar of western beauty, was head over heels for her. He didn’t care one bit about what she looked like, and he was actually repulsed by the way HE looked. He had seen all the beauty there is in this world and still chose her. Meyers tries to sell the idea of soulmates; he was, in a way, waiting for her- but to me, Bella simply hit the jackpot, what teenage boy (or man, for that matter) is willing to see past the face, the hair, the body? So, even with the constant threat of him being an animalistic predator hanging over her shoulder, she chose the anti-materialistic vampire over the logical, safer, perhaps, all-American teenage boy.

And so do most of us, at least in our fantasies. Even if it’s dangerous, even if it’s tragic, the vampire and the girl could be equal in a liminal space.

All in all, it’s a threatening fantasy trapped inside book pages, AO3 fanfics, and early 2000s media, all in the safety of your home.

You can fight me on this, as many of you would probably come up with Pearl Jam’s Ten or anything by Dire Straits, but I would argue this 1972 David Bowie instalment is THE most Dad’s record ever. Maybe I’m biased, I grew up with a particular fond in music dad, who would blast “Five Years“ in full volume through the kitchen’s vinyl sound system, every time he made his signature bolognese- and he isn’t exactly the signature all manly man who loved construction tools and cars. He’s quite alternative in his way of being, his taste is fully schizophrenic (jumping from Muddy Waters to brit-pop Pulp, from Velvet Underground’s collabs with Nico to any italian love ballad). Still, David Bowie presents, probably not intentionally, a quintessential classic rock record - its powerfull, it’s nostalgic, it’s full of british suburbia references (the mentioning of Belfast, or the image of the brick house block on the cover) and the dads dig it like no one else.

Still, it transcends that status. And transcends generations. I recently got it on CD for my birthday, a friend gave it to me without me even asking for it - even if not a fan, they knew of its iconic and lively persona, a reputation that overshadows the “gen-X dad album“ allegations. Why is that?

I’m not here to write a stellar review on David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars - you have an article on the very outdated, but underrated BBC website that already did that. I’m here to give it a go on why the record moved me, just like it did my dad.

I find it absolutely out there, Bowie had a concept and executed it masterfully, and so the audience gets a lucid, almost interactive, story with a beginning, a (rather tragic) end, a protagonist and a visual setting. Let’s talk about the latter. The iconic Ziggy Stardust album cover was created by artist Terry Pastor, who colourised a black-and-white photograph taken by Brian Ward, to bring the “alien rock star” concept to life. Pastor used bright and surreal colours on top of Ward’s original gritty shot of David Bowie on Heddon Street, in London. This is where we see Ziggy Stardust for the first time - his alien-like persona, the glamour, the rebellious and androgynous look; here the journey, the tale, the rise and fall begin to take place. As Chris Jones (in a BBC 2002 article) describes - “[…] a loose story of the nominal Ziggy and his Christ-like rise and fall at the hands of adoring fans. It allowed Bowie to take the central role onstage, hiding behind a mask of glamorous decadence that some would say he’s yet to renounce”.

I could spend more words on the tale of Ziggy (Bowie) and his spiders (Bolder, Woodmansey, and Ronson), but I propose you go check the record out yourself, or revisit it (if you know of it already). It’s a seminar lesson on how to build a character and create a concept album. So go experience the story firsthand, go listen to the story-teller master, Bowie himself.

Personal Favourite: “Moonage Daydream” and “Starman”

Release Date: 1972

A slightly more approachable and mature record than their debut “Bandwagonesque”, thanks to their sweeter, more nostalgic beats and solidified lyrics, you won’t find a more perfect pop album than “Grand Prix”. Arriving at a time when grunge was long gone and the sound of Britpop was taking over, the record draws inspiration from the sounds of ‘60s bands like The Byrds and The Beach Boys, marking you from the first listen. The sound is joyful enough for you to move your head along. Still, there’s something about the simplicity and relatability of the lyrics that just makes you want to wallow and be saddened, “That summer feeling is gonna fly/ Always try and keep the feeling inside” (from “Sparky’s Dream”).

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Because the lyrics are consonant with the band’s motto - “Teenage Fanclub”; they recall teenagehood and are definitely targeted to a teenage audience. They’re not ruff or complex, but they don’t try to be; they might not change the world but they definitely help us see the beauty already present in existence, “Just kick my feet off the ground / I’ll embrace the sky” (from “Going Places”); and just like that, their very truthfulness and simplicity reveal a revolutionary act on their own.

Personal Favourite: “Mellow Doubt” and “Neil Jung”

Release Date: 1995

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