Speaking in Riddles: British Cinema in a Postmodern Age

by Michael James (July 2026)

 

Up to 1968, censors in the UK monitored movie content to ensure that “no picture [shall be] produced which will lower the [moral] standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.” For the most part motion picture studios self-regulated content to avoid government oversight; but with increased public subsidy of the British film industry, the latter began asserting its influence to impose sociopolitical ideology on film production.

Prior to WWI, politics was not a paramount concern of censors. With the outbreak of war, however, winning hearts and minds became a lasting feature of the cinematic landscape. This policy continued through WWII and the postwar reconstruction, by which time the government was accustomed to using media to sway public opinion. Along the way, the concept of Britishness changed and some filmmakers resorted to metaphor to convey an old-fashioned nativism.

Britons did not want war with Germany, yet it came twice after Britain’s leaders committed themselves to defending France. The cost in lives and treasure was regarded as secondary; a gentleman’s word was his bond. Convincing the nation that war was a necessary evil was paramount to them. Hence, the first casualty was the ability to speak the truth.

 

From Censorship to State Patronage

After WWI, the UK was bankrupted in more than just financial terms. It also suffered a prolonged contraction on the international stage. A decline in national prestige led to public debate over the ethics of the class system and cinema became a vehicle to agitate for social reform.

At times, this introspection was amoral. It is evident in novelists Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, who lampoon the muddle that their compatriots made of war and peace alike. A second war with Germany forced their generation of writers and film-makers to moderate their tone, but the impulse to criticize was irresistible.

In British cinema, this theme is best explored by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. They were contracted by the Ministry of Information (a propaganda unit) to cement the Anglo-American bond, but in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Powell, 1943) they ridicule the outdated ethos of the British military. Prime Minister Winston Churchill wanted to ban the film, perhaps because it is adapted from a cartoon that attacks him personally.

To avoid the critical eye of the PM, Powell and Pressburger began speaking in riddles. Their movie A Canterbury Tale (Powell, 1944) is told through ancestor worship to project a subtle wariness that America’s cultural influence is a threat to the British way of life.

With I Know Where I’m Going (Powell, 1945), they expand on the theme by opening a dialectic with Gabriel Pascal’s Major Barbara (Pascal, 1941). In both films materialism represents America’s influence. Major Barbara sees it as a remedy for the class struggle. Four years later, Powell and Pressburger offer the opposite argument: native culture is more precious than material gain.

Powell’s casting of Wendy Hillier is inspired, because she also has the lead role in Major Barbara. In the latter, her character has rejected materialism but is eventually converted into a devout capitalist. For their movie, Pressburger wrote the character arc in reverse.

The heroine’s inner turmoil is symbolized by a whirlpool—an ethical watershed for the character and the nation she represents. It is a choice between following her heart or pursuing wealth, either by embracing Lady Liberty (America) or Vesta, the goddess of the hearth and home. Arguably, the upbeat ending appeals to the heart and not the head, because UK politicians ultimately pursued the money.

A Matter of Life and Death (Powell, 1946) is the last of their wartime films. The war was won when filming began and Pressburger constructed it as a parable to sum up Britain’s wartime alliance with America. American actress Kim Hunter represents the positive energy of Lady Liberty (which Churchill and Cecil Rhodes fell in love with). Canadian actor Raymond Massey represents its negative, Anglophobic aspect.

David Niven, a British Everyman, embodies the collective sacrifice of the nation. He is one of the walking dead, men who after tempting fate have, as if by a miracle, snatched victory (life) from the jaws of defeat (death). His war is over but he suffers prolonged consequences—PTSD (emblematic of shell shock, rationing and national austerity). In the postwar recovery, Powell and Pressburger foresaw that America was to be both an ally and an enemy. Everyone in the country knew that America was calling the shots and most were not happy about it.

It was also clear to Everyman that Churchill’s only strategy for conducting the war was to hold the Axis at bay long enough for America to win it for him. And so, in 1945, a war-weary UK electorate gave Churchill the boot. They didn’t believe the match was worth the candle. The end of the war marked not the end of political influence over British cinema, but a transformation in how that influence would be exercised.

Clement Attlee’s Labour government was anti-imperialist and its concept of a New Jerusalem didn’t include patriotic nationalism. Together they restructured the nation as a welfare state with film and television as its ideological soapbox. One of their first acts was to disband the Ministry of Information. The Central Office of Information was created in its place marking an ideological shift in state propaganda away from morale building to promoting government policy.

The gilding came off the socialist lily when austerity lasted four decades. During these lean years, many UK industries came to rely upon government subsidy and arts and entertainment were no exception. Government agencies used their financial leverage with the film industry to promote political initiatives. Topmost was immigration.

Postwar governments regarded immigration as a quick means to bolster tax revenues, and The Nationality Act (1948) made it easier for people in former colonies to emigrate to the UK. But saturating the marketplace with manual labour didn’t solve the economic crisis. Instead, it created more job redundancy, crippling demand for social services, and a growing housing shortage. Race riots and a political inability to solve the problem became lasting features of British society.

With immigration as a central pillar of the government’s platform, it was inevitable that xenocentrism took root in Whitehall, but winning public support was a tall order. Attlee had to suppress a revolt within his own backbench to get the Nationality Act passed, and MPs like Enoch Powell continued to speak against it.

In 1961, after a decade of increased immigration, the UK was still 99% indigenous (96% in London) and most people were content to remain that way. Policies that only politicians voted for sought to change that. A competition to win the hearts and minds of British youth has been an ideological battleground ever since.

Postwar economic austerity inspired a literary movement called the Angry Young Men. They asked a simple question: Where is the ‘land fit for heroes’ that we were promised? In books, plays and films they felt betrayed and attacked the establishment as the root of all evil.

These angry artists took the limited opportunity available to postwar British youth and composed a message of defiance: ‘We’re mad as hell, and we’re not taking it anymore.’ Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, a 1959 novella by Alan Sillitoe, made into a film by Tony Richardson in 1962, compares the nation to a borstal for unruly youths. Anthony Burgess went a step beyond in A Clockwork Orange (1962) by depicting the nation as a hooligan’s playground. Stanley Kubrick translated it into a controversial film in 1970.

Sexual content was still tightly controlled, so that “low forms of sex relationships are [not depicted as] the accepted or common thing,” and the new generation of directors regarded bourgeois morality and censorship as a violation of free speech. Take a scene that was cut from Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960): Marcus Crassus explains that if sexual appetite is a choice between having snails or oysters, he’d eat both. Mild by today’s standard, but seen as moral turpitude in 1960. By 1966, community standards changed and America abandoned censorship in favour of an age rating system. The UK followed suit in 1968.

Up to 1960, depictions of race in the film industry were patronizing or offensive, but as non-White immigration increased and the UK became more racially diverse, advocates sought to remedy the racial and sexual inequities. This shift is evident in A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961) and To Sir with Love (James Clavell, 1967).

When the messaging gained traction, minority advocates began denouncing nativism as a racist dog-whistle. They demanded that public funding of film and television come with guarantees of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). A salient argument in favour of DEI is that affected groups pay taxes. If this is used to subsidize film production, they should directly benefit from it. However, it negates the first cause that UK film and television should not be press-ganged into government propaganda campaigns. You don’t have freedom of expression if the government uses coercive means to limit what can be said or who is allowed to say it.

As the media hub of the UK, however, London’s multicultural experience can’t be ignored. According to the 2021 census, Greater London was 46% non-White (14% outside of London). Non-Whites are the fastest growing demographic, which creates a political demand for ever more diversity hiring in film and television. Andy Leyshon, CEO of the UK Film Distributors’ Association, regards it as a means to “enable impressive cultural change” in the name of “ever more diverse audience engagement [to] reflect modern Britain at its very best.”

Critics argue that, although DEI is well-meaning, it has become a mechanism to subvert native culture, impose gender politics, and promote critical race theory. They worry that indigenous culture is being made redundant in favour of a globalist agenda. As proof they point to how DEI is practiced.

Since 1994, the National Lottery has financed UK film projects through organisations like the British Film Institute (BFI), but funding comes with ideological strings attached. Topmost is DEI (“we see heritage as broad and inclusive”). The BFI mandate “to reflect the diversity of the UK public” is commendable, but when researching this topic BFI webpages show 35 discernible faces—23 White, 12 Black. Four are male (2 Black, 2 White). It isn’t even a close reflection of UK society. Other cultural platforms adopt similar messaging.

A filmmaker applying for BFI funds is given “diversity targets for the people [the BFI employs] and projects [it will] support using National Lottery funds:” 18% disability, 39% working class, 10% LGBTQ, London productions must hire 40% ‘global majority’ artists, the rest of England must include 30% global majority artists.

Ignoring the racial semantics and London being treated as a separate nation, if an applicant doesn’t meet these quotas they are denied funding. Instead of giving the producer a blank canvas on which to work, it forces them to paint-by-numbers.

 

Political Allegory and Modern British Cinema

A troubling effect of coercive philanthropy is that global majority actors are cast into roles they are ill-suited for. Bizarre examples occur in film adaptations of novels by Dickens or in Shakespeare plays. It is arguably culturally insensitive to alter the intent of the author and violate artistic integrity.

Inclusion is a good thing, but critics argue that it shouldn’t come at the expense of indigenous culture, revise classic novels, or rewrite social history. Doing so looks less like DEI than cultural replacement. To them, reducing the British Lion to a lemming scampering toward the cliffs of Dover isn’t a valid cultural strategy.

In 1968, UK censorship laws were changed to reflect American values, but when the US Supreme Court ruled (in June 2023) that positive discrimination is unlawful the UK government continued to embrace it.

In a postmodern society, virtue signaling is the norm and that is how self-editing begins. And so, topics that once offended community standards are promoted as alternative lifestyles; whereas nativism, once highly cherished, is thrown to the side of ‘crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin,’ and writers are pressured to depict it that way.

It is the current pattern of television and film production in the UK. Xenoracism is defined as prejudice against members of the same ethnic group, and that is a subtext of Brexit: The Uncivil War (Toby Haynes, 2019) where a nativist political victory is mocked as a travesty—a throwback to the old censor’s morality code that villains must be seen to lose.

It is easier for film producers to submit to the process than to resist it, but resistance isn’t useless. In Gangs of London: Season Two (Sky Studios, 2022) there is a lynching with a twist: the man holding the rope is Black, the victim is White, and Enoch Powell’s vision of a race war is realised on film. The conversation goes:

Victim: Your Dad would be proud.

Hangman: It’s not enough. Killing you, it’s not enough. I’m going to make you watch, Sean Wallace. I’m going to take everything you ever built—your power, your people, your city—and I’m going to replace you.

A Black undercover cop (the hero) taunts a White man (the villain) with a nativist fear that he is a shrinking slice in the ethnic pie-chart. It cannot be expressed by a White person in the UK without risking prosecution under hate speech law. By using code, dramatist Tom Butterworth bravely treats a controversial topic.

On the other hand, a documentary is a real-life depiction of sociopolitical and cultural values and is subject to the biases of its participants. From the age of seven, a group of people in the UK were interviewed every seven years by Michael Apted. In 56-Up (Apted, 2012) Tony Walker, a Cockney cabbie, laments that mass-immigration has made London unrecognizable. Apted accuses Tony of being a racist, because knocking immigration policy isn’t accepted as the common thing. If Tony compared a Cornish pasty to a kebab, maybe his comment would be more palatable. Alas, taxi drivers don’t speak in riddles.

A problem facing UK nativism isn’t just demographic change. American companies own the copyright to the works of many British authors and it gives them artistic control over the literary icons that define UK culture. It isn’t always a respectful collaboration.

Ian Fleming’s James Bond is the UK’s most enduring contemporary cultural figure. Under the Broccoli banner, 007 was faithfully depicted until they replaced his Aston Martin with a German car. The producers made a fistful of dollars from doing so, and it would have made Ian Fleming spit. The Broccolis sold the franchise to Amazon amid calls for a Black or female actor to replace Daniel Craig as 007 when he retired the role.

Craig’s final outing in No Time to Die (CJ Fukunaga, 2019) departs from custom by killing off notable characters, including the hero. Since From Russia With Love (Terence Young, 1963) the title sequence has featured women cavorting in silhouette, but No Time to Die uses a montage of themes in the film: a statue of Britannia crumbles and sinks beneath the waves, an Aston Martin is close behind, a pendulum swings and we dissolve from the wreckage of Britannia on a sandy ocean bottom to an hourglass that is running down. Tempus fugit.

No Time to Die is a pastiche of Bond movies and novels, an epitaph for creator Ian Fleming and the nation he fought for, the character he created, and a role that Daniel Craig made his own. The central plot and themes of the film are ethnic cleansing, the battle for global racial supremacy, letting go of the past and ringing in the new.

Bond retires to an estate in Jamaica (Fleming’s Golden Eye) and his replacement as 007 is a Black woman named Nomi (a pun on ‘not me’). Nomi is a wink at DEI and the pressure on producers to install a Black or female Bond. With tongue-in-cheek, they do both. Whoever replaces Craig as Bond will be decided by an Amazon. Let’s hope they choose wisely.

Director Danny Boyle was set to make No Time to Die, but the producers took issue with his vision of the film and passed the director’s chair to American Cary Joji Fukunaga with a new script by veteran Bond writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (helped by the entrancing Phoebe Waller-Bridge). Boyle was reportedly unhappy, and one suspects he set himself the task of outdoing Fukunaga.

Boyle is at home treating the gritty side of life, but matching a Bond film for style is a bridge too far. His next project was 28 Years Later (Boyle, 2025), a follow-up to his 2002 dystopian horror classic 28 Days Later, a reworking of John Wyndham’s 1951 sci-fi novel Day of the Triffids.

George Orwell wrote that the ultimate irony is to hold two opposing views and believe them both. 28 Years Later is created in that spirit as a critique of UK nationalism. And though the story is told from a right-wing perspective, Boyle and writer Alex Garland are supporters of immigration policy. In the spirit of doublethink, they treat nativism and diversity as a dialectic seen through a bi-focal lens.

As such, the film depicts UK nativism via postmodern allegory. Garland wanted to demonstrate that Western society is “incredibly fixated with regressive ideas … [and is] misremembering the past,” but the past isn’t fantasy; history is factual and concrete, not subjective. Some decoding is therefore required.

The opening sequence is set in 2002 during the outbreak of the Rage Virus. Blonde children watch The Teletubbies (A. Wood, BBC; 1997-2001), a kids’ TV show featuring androgynous characters from all colours of the rainbow (a postmodern trope echoing a Benetton advertisement in 28 Days Later i.e. ‘the united colours of Benetton’). “And the Teletubbies love each other very much,” the narrator says. It evokes critical race theory, gender politics, the indoctrination of youth and the battle for their hearts and minds.

A door bursts open. Blood-spitting maniacs attack them and Jimmy flees to the Kirk, where his dad, the pastor, is in a state of rapture. As the infected close in, the pastor declares it, “A glorious day. A Day of Judgement.” Jimmy whimpers, “Father, why have you forsaken me?” A Black vocalist representing the immigrant community then sings “Headed to the promised land.” Out with the old, in with the new.

A nativist take is that the scene condemns those who sacrifice the birthright of their children to globalist virtue signaling. Given Garland’s personal belief system, however, it is perhaps mocking them as a defeated people—British nationalism is getting its comeuppance.

We then jump to 2030 and Holy Island in the aftermath of infection (a byword for immigration?). Ancestor worship is heralded by intercutting scenes from Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (Olivier, 1944) and a refrain from Rudyard Kipling’s WWI poem Boots (“There is no discharge in a war”). The latter echoes a scene from Powell’s A Canterbury Tale where soldiers march to the cathedral and a sign overhead reads, ‘Boots.’ And what war is this? Literally, nativists battle the infected for dominion over their ancestral land. It is a new Hundred Year’s War and England has lost, again.

Holy Island is a refuge for survivors. Its community banner reads, “Fail we may but go we must.” The slogan is derived from a song (Fail We May but Sail We Must) on the 2009 album, A Pox on the Pioneers, by Andrew Weatherall. It paraphrases a line in Romeo and Juliet: “A plague o’ both your houses!” In the context of the Rage Virus, the first people and the new arrivals are both poxed, because they have raged against one another for generations.

The modified lyric on the Holy Island banner is ambiguous. Go can mean either to depart, or to fight. Fight or flight is a central theme of the movie, because the infection isn’t just viral, its ideological. Garland’s personal politics, he is mixed-race, suggest that nativism is the true disease, even though the film is told from its point-of-view.

The setting also makes a political statement. A monastery on Holy Island is where the Vikings began a three-century effort to conquer England. Modern immigration achieved a similar ethnic change in mere decades. In today’s political climate nativists feel like exiles in their homeland, pushed to the fringe of government policy, and denied access to political power. By confining them to a small island, Garland reduces England (the English) to a countryside and not a viable nation.

The fictional commune is in stark contrast to postmodern Britain, because no people of colour live there. Indeed, non-Whites appear only among the infected. Garland may be drawing a comparison between nativism and Nazi racial theory. Either way, survivors return to the land of their forefathers when oikophobia and xenocentrism didn’t have a whip hand over them, but their existence is fragile. The Holy Island commune is purely atavistic—it has no future.

Dr. Kelson lives on the mainland, the realm of infection, and he has a tenuous grip on reality. He lives a solitary, Lord of the Flies existence. The Hippocratic oath prevents him from taking a human life and he tranquilizes the infected instead of killing them. He is a diehard libertarian. As a doctor, Kelson is passively complicit in the emergence of the virus, and he tries to erase the evidence by burning the dead and building a temple with their bones. Kelson is like Nero fiddling as Rome burns—a metaphor for the ruling class that created a problem and failed to solve it: the bitter history of 20th Century Britain.

The hero is 12-year-old Spike. Isla, his mother, has dementia and Spike goes to Kelson for a cure. Isla represents Britannia. The cancer in her head can be read as symbolizing critical race theory and the postmodern ideology that, in this interpretation, men like Kelson have imposed upon her. Expressed as political duality—in keeping with Garland’s value system—her sickness may also represent nativism and Isla’s refusal to accept defeat.

Kelson tells them that the bone temple is a memento mori—Latin for “Remember, you must die.” Alternatively, it is a souvenir of death and a monument to the carnage that people like Kelson have wrought. A metaphor is ambiguous and depending upon which side you align with the meaning can change.

Kelson tells Spike that Isla’s condition is terminal; no medicine can save her. Dylan Thomas implored us to not “go gentle into that good night,” but Kelson wants Isla to submit meekly. There are “many kinds of death,” he tells her, “but the best is peaceful.” It is the counsel of every executioner. A central theme of the film is that resistance to change is futile. In that respect, the Islanders are the walking dead, the infected have inherited the earth, and both rage against anyone who refuses to go gently.

In extremis, the doctor abandons all pretense of preserving human life and kills Isla. She is a compliant victim and her skull is placed atop his totemic shrine. Britannia is a lost cause, Kelson’s job is complete, and it is political allegory from start to finish.

In this fictional universe, Britain is the only nation infected by the Rage Virus because it is the only actual European nation to sacrifice its ancient hegemony to globalist virtue signaling. Boyle and Garland use metaphor to broach the topic, because even an ironic nativist theme is highly controversial and therefore unlikely to be financed by the National Lottery. (Or get published by mainstream media as film criticism.)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) is the first sci-fi movie to exploit political allegory. Boyle and Garland take it to another level. For Garland it is personal. His mother is Lebanese and he likely called an infected Alpha ‘Samson’ because his mother is from the Holy Land. The appearance of Samson is foreshadowed when the villagers sing the Tom Jones standard Delilah.

Biblical Delilah is a foreign woman (a Philistine) who seduces a native hero (Samson) and then betrays him. Samson is blinded by her menfolk, but he pulls the temple down upon them. In 28 Years Later,  Samson is a Black man, the woman he impregnates is White, and the temple that he destroys is White-hall. A philistine is also a term for someone with perverse cultural values. Advocates of replacement theory fit the bill.

Boyle’s franchise has treated nativism from the outset, because 28 Days Later is from a rule in British murder investigations. If a murder is unsolved after 28 days a review is conducted to ensure that the case isn’t being mishandled. This is steganography (a clue in plain sight) arguing that the motherland has been murdered. Only Boyle and Garland can say whether their sympathy lies with the perpetrator or the victim.

 

Art or Propaganda?

Ideology can produce great cinema (as in the films of C.B. DeMille, Sergei Eisenstein, and Leni Riefenstahl etc.) but such works are great in spite of it. Ideological constraints force an artist to innovate, but without relief creativity eventually withers. Ask a Soviet director who came after Eisenstein. Name another Nazi director of note. Arguably, DEI has no valid artistic or cultural merit.

Political interference in art is the death of art. What remains is propaganda. George Orwell spent his last years warning against it, and we did not listen. We dishonour him even as we passively abandon our indigenous birthright. Pride cometh before a fall, the axiom goes, and it does not survive a push. It is increasingly argued that in a postmodern age European custom and culture are doomed to push up daisies unless we rage against the dying of the light. Tempus fugit. Or, as Doctor Kelson reminds Spike, the flipside of the impulse to destroy is “memento amoris” —remember to love. And what greater love is there than a child’s love for his mother?

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Mike James is an ex-patriot Englishman living in Canada, a veritable Englishman abroad.

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