The Full Monty · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the dole queue. Six men stand in line for their benefit money, bored stiff, and then Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff" comes over the air and — without deciding to — their hips start moving. A shoulder rolls. A foot taps the routine. They catch each other doing it and freeze, deadpan, mortified, because the secret is out: every one of them has been practising the same strip act in private. It's the funniest scene in the film and also the truest, and it tells you what kind of cinema this is. Nobody acts here. The bodies act on their own, ahead of the men's will, and that involuntary shimmy in a government office is the whole movie in miniature.

Deleuze has a name for this. He called it the gest — not a gesture you make on purpose, but a posture or attitude the body falls into that exposes the social relation it's caught in. A gest doesn't illustrate a feeling; it carries the situation in the flesh. When these Sheffield men twitch into choreography in a queue for the unemployed, their bodies are saying what they can't: that labour has left them, that the only value still priced on the market is the body itself, and that they already know it. Cattaneo built a whole cinema of the body out of this. The film thinks through aching backs, sucked-in guts, the way Dave (Mark Addy) can't bear to be seen, the way Gerald (Tom Wilkinson) holds himself rigid to hide that he's been sacked. These are everyday bodies holding everyday duration — rehearsing badly in a draughty works, waiting, failing, trying again — and the duration is the point. Deleuze argued that modern cinema stopped using the body to get things done and started letting it simply bear time. The Full Monty does exactly that, then hides it inside a comedy so you laugh before you notice.

Why reach for Deleuze here at all, for a feel-good crowd-pleaser? Because the film's engine is a breakdown he diagnosed precisely. In the old action-cinema, a man perceives a situation and acts to change it — the sensory-motor circuit, situation to response, hero to resolution. Gaz (Robert Carlyle) is built for that cinema and stranded outside it. He's wiry, quick, scheming, forever perceiving a problem — no money, a son slipping away, a city gutted by the death of steel — and there is nothing to do. The mills are closed. The whole grammar of the working man's action has been switched off. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image: characters who can still see their situation perfectly but can no longer react to it adequately. The opening seals it — a chirpy old promo film, "Sheffield, a city on the move," laid ironically over rusting plant where the men now scavenge scrap. The motor of the place is dead. What replaces action is the strip: not a solution to unemployment but a posture the body strikes once the doing has stopped.

And here the film does something quietly political. The men can't find a people to belong to — the industrial working class that named them has been dismantled — so they invent one for a night. Deleuze, late in his thinking, said modern political cinema turns on the fact that "the people are missing," and that what's left is fabulation: people caught in the act of legending themselves into existence. That's the final number exactly. Six redundant men, ordinary and overweight and terrified, stand under the lights before a packed hall and become, for one chorus, a people who chose to be seen. The film withholds the last image — it cuts to black on the moment of full nudity rather than ogle it — and that cut is generous. The triumph is the standing-there, not the flesh.

None of this fell from the sky. De Borman's unglamorous, available-light Sheffield is Ken Loach's grammar, Kes naturalism turned on the post-Thatcher north. The wounded male body as a thing of labour and display goes straight back to Anderson's This Sporting Life and the factory-floor men of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; Beaufoy's strippers are their heirs after the work ran out. The skeleton — rank amateurs drilled toward one impossible show — is lifted from the backstage musical, 42nd Street rerouted through a Job Club, with The Commitments' trick of welding unemployed bodies to a needle-drop soundtrack. And its twin, Brassed Off, was working the same Yorkshire grief in the same year with a brass band instead of a strip. What The Full Monty added to the conversation was nerve: it proved you could take the slow, bodily, defeated cinema of modern duration — the cinema of people who can no longer act — and make a quarter-billion-dollar comedy out of it without lying about the pain. It seeded a whole cycle, Billy Elliot to Kinky Boots, every one of them finding dignity in a working body put on public display.

Watch it again for the bodies, not the gags. Notice how often the laugh comes from a man betrayed by his own posture — and how the film loves him for it. That involuntary tap of a foot in the dole queue is Deleuze's whole argument, danced.