That impossible lucid object of desire: England in the Sixties and "Billy Liar"

I knew that the eponymous hero of John Schlesinger’s 1963 film “Billy Liar” was one of those types who live in a fantasy world whose images suspiciously resemble Hollywood films, with ‘relevant’ scenes from the recent European war and postwar England; a contextually situated, sociologically symptomatic narcissism.  I also could not help recognizing that he has a pretty shitty life defined by family and work relations, and a couple of romantic objects to whom he has at most a tedious obligation, and the people in all three of these categories are constantly at his throat.  I had mis-remembered this film as making much greater use of the Julie Christie character, Liz, as the fantastic character of Billy’s ideal woman.  I take this misrecognition as symptomatic of the strength of these images and their importance in the story.  

Billy is a youth of perhaps 19 or 20 who, like many British youth of his generation, lives at home with mom, pop, and in this case also grandma.  It seems he may have some real, if not realistic, desire to be a writer.  He fantasizes while laying in bed in lieu of setting about the day’s business, and at intervals when he is feeling particularly bothered by whichever Annoying Person he is faced with at the moment.  The principal themes of the reveries are those of war, including very short scenes when he becomes a soldier machine-gunning the Nuisance of the moment, and longer scenes of him leading a parade or speaking to a crowd as the head of a conquering army or one fighting back from defeat.  (The imaginary country ‘Ambrosia’ seems to draw on both sides of the most recent war; at one point the crowd answers his speech as Leader with a repeated “Sieg Heil!”). Nothing like a bit of supposedly legitimate violence to feed an idle young man’s dreamy ego.  He also has gone truant with some work obligation to the funeral parlor he works for and its very straight-laced boss with the Biblical name of Mr. Shadrach; the missed duty involves the theft of calendars, which he was supposed to deliver as part of some marketing scheme.  Mr. Shadrach in one scene confronts Billy in the bathroom, a suitable location since the world of Billy in this film could be said to be as demarcated by waste as much as deaths and undertaking, and certainly the world of this town is one he would be happy to bury, if not escape it or at least pose as its absurd hero. This unworldly boy who resists assuming normal obligations in the world of the adults around him, who seem to have amid their unending complaints no clearly manifest pleasures, may feel only like shredding (though he keeps them for some unspecified reason) volumes of an apparatus used to mark important events with their place in the passage of time.  (And are these events above all deaths? Indeed, the only important event that occurs in the film is precisely the sudden demise of his grandmother). The two romantic entanglements are a pair of opposites, one, a ‘nice’ girl in the manner of a sentimental, hopeful, and prudish type, and the other who is assertive and sassy and whom he may have shared a bed with.  He’s got both of these types, another emblem of the limited possibilities in his small town.  His problem with them seems to be that he has managed to give them both the same engagement ring, having carelessly augmented the attachments that he would really prefer to be rid of.  We sense that without his extravagant fertile imagination, he would be left with plans and schemes for seeking his own impossible advantage in this comically sad small town world.  

Enter Liz (Julie Christie).  She is first glimpsed in a scene where the inexplicably popular comedian Danny Boon (who Billy sees only as promising a boon to him), who asks for a beautiful girl to pose in a photo and, looking at the crowd gathered in front of him, picks her, quite visibly the only suitable instance of one (the other women are mostly older, and everyone except Boon himself, who turns out to be as worldly as we might expect a big city media personality to be, lacks her very fetching smile).  We later see the resulting newspaper photo, which Billy finds to his hopeful delight.  And then suddenly she materializes, as if by magic, at a dance hall where we find her sitting opposite Billy at a table for two.  Liz is all smiles and seems ready to order for Billy.  Seeming even to know what he is thinking, she is a kind of angel of encouragement, by type a virgin among whores, and a breezy optimist with no worldly cares in a place whose people seem to have them only.  She is both the perfect object for his desire, and one of identification, since her desire to be with him is a mirror both of his desire for a girl like her, and also his desire to get away.  So she proposes they run away together.  She will leave on the train as mysteriously as she arrived in his world, and he almost joins her, but of course cannot because the escape is an impossibly schematic one with no content.  There literally is no place for Billy to go, and he winds up cheerily entertaining himself with another helping of the military leader fantasy as he returns to his family home.    

What is particular about Liz as fantasy object is that she is portrayed realistically in visual, if not conceptual terms, without the explicit framing as an unreal fantasy that Billy’s military reveries have.  Her unreality indicates a deeper problem for him, one that lies on the plane of experience, not an a priori impossibility but only a painfully practical one.  Thus, there are two types of figures of imagination marked as such within the film (and setting aside the banal fact that any film is itself a work of imagination answering to needs thereof).  Both are perfectly cinematic, suitably implicating us viewers, in the typical modernist conceit that has often been fancied in art films then and since.  One is clearly demarcated by cuts between distinct settings, while the other is both a more credible, and for that reason more troubling, possibility of Billy’s world. There are girls like Liz, or at least who seem to be to the stricken.  The war has been over for a while (with the story set in 1963, he could even be an 18-year-old born precisely at its end), but the lure of both the big city and a beatific new life with a beautiful girl who gives him all her attention is impossible in a more frustratingly tangible way.  

The problem with Liz, and with their impulsively running away together, is that, first, she has no clear reality apart from her relationship with him, and secondly that their project of going to London figures in the film only as an empty gesture of escape.  A bit of reflection may be needed to see this, though the very thought makes it obvious what the problem is: so they are going to London on the midnight train, and then what?  To begin with, we know nothing of Liz’s own life or past, which suggests that she is ‘unreal’ in the sense of a credible image of a person that becomes incredible once one recognizes an unmet expectation of spectatorial realism, which in this case is that she has a life, ‘off-screen’ in relation to what Billy and we see, in the way that real persons must.  Secondly, we don’t know what job, place to stay, money, or other plans she has in “London,” which is a citation as much as a reality, given no concrete depth as an actual place that persons might inhabit.  True enough, many novels end with an indication of some future life that the one or more protagonists are expected to have, but that remains unnarrated or hors-scène.  But in this case, we know that he is a dreamer, and we also know, even if we are unsure about her, that he himself has little if any money, no job in London, and no place to stay, it also being at best unclear that she has one.  Our recognition that he has no comedic scriptwriting job in London is underscored by his having been snubbed by the superficially charming (and maybe charmingly superficial) Mr. Boon, who tells him in a polite, slightly embarrassed, and obviously vapid manner, to stop by his office sometime for a chat, like people in New York and elsewhere who say with vague enthusiasm, “let’s get together sometime soon,” meaning by that exactly never.  Their running away together is a vain adolescent’s dream.  We certainly can wonder what would happen if they stayed together the moment she stops acting like a television advertisement with a perma-smile.  What if she suffers or needs anything?  What if real life starts up happening again in the new place of the big city, which, when you are boarding the train to leave your boring provincial town, may at first have no attributes other than being the imagined place of opportunities that one escapes to?  Escape without a destination, desire without a (real) object. 

And yet, this is all too real — but as a problem.  Billy’s sudden feeling that he needs to run to the station before the train departs to get the inexplicably necessary and satisfying bottle of milk for each of them, seems to embody a dim recognition of the ultimately infantile character of the fantasy that Liz figures in.  Seeing that he is not going to make the train as he runs back to catch it, she is shown at the window in her seat on the train giving a shrug, as if to say, well, I’m going anyway, come if you like, and if you can’t, no matter. The image, being artifice, doesn’t need you, nor really love you back.      

Liz has an ambiguous status as both real and unreal, formally for the reason I have explained: she is not presented as visibly unreal, but is only so conceptually.  The viewer then must reflect at least minimally on what the fantasy-soaked life of Billy really is about.  One thing the film (made in 1963) is secondarily about is the aftermath of the war and the coming of the smooth, cool, fast, pop culture of the 60s, which in cinema and TV as well as advertising, presented a leap of still very conservative and provincial societies like England into a youthful world of enthusiasm and joy, pleasure and hopeful expectation.  That Liz represents that, we can infer when we see her breezily and with perfect good cheer and charm walking down the street.  She belongs, if anywhere, in supposedly ‘swinging’ London, and that modern urban world is one that Billy can only dream of.  Like all but one of the layabouts in Fellini’s “I Vitelloni,” he may never leave; we can wonder if he will as we wonder how he will grow up, and what Barbara or Rita he will marry.  We can easily guess what kind of wife either of them would make — not, in any case, one who would likely escape the provincial and lower middle class with its limited horizons that they are part of, probably of course leading to a life not so different from that of his parents.  The viewer targeted by the film may be luckier.  Is that an anxious thought and not just a hopeful one?  

I ached with longing for Billy to make it all the way to London and a new life with this beatific figure of joy who is so confident and encouraging.  In truth, since I know from experience that life in a big city is hard, I really wanted like Billy to just be with her.  I wanted him to stay on that train, feeling as viewer enchanted myself with this girl whose essence may just be that of an image. (The actress herself is certainly well chosen for this role.)  The cinephile in me also recognizes that film can be like advertising, and offer only a false escape from an everyday life that is perhaps a bit exaggerated in the typically squalid and provincial character of British lower-middle-class families with their constant infighting, in a nastiness that, a fact that their film history has not ignored, the Brits seem manage better than almost any people.  Among the possibilities of film are those that like advertising present and gratify escapist childish or adolescent fantasies, and those that make such fun of them as they offer us a critique of characters whose Inferno is built from their taking the promises of stories told with seductive images a bit too seriously, even if in the process they also expose a lot of the ugliness of the lived world many of us would love to greatly change, and that most people merely endure in their, quiet or unquiet, desperation.  At least it was fun while it lasted.