*disclaimer to self-involved NYC residents: Soho referred to a neighborhood in London before it ever referred to the commercialized atrocity filled with people attempting to get “street style” photos that is the present-day Soho of New York
Men are scary. The scariest breed of all. There’s no denying that for any woman who has endured the fears we’ve all come to apprehend as “garden variety.” Walking alone at night, showing too much skin lest a man is arbitrarily titillated…being alone anywhere at any time of day, really. There’s so much a woman can’t do in this world without fear instilled by men, whereas a man remains free to “roam about the cabin,” so to speak, without a care. Which is perhaps why their breed gets so uppity at the slightest mention of misconduct—it touches on too great a nerve (and not the one they want). Especially if the truth about their sordid ass comes to light with hard evidence (like that photo of Virginia Giuffre with Prince Andrew).
But for as bad as women feel it is now, there is a tendency that comes with glamorizing the past to fail factoring in all that was wrong with it. All the changes that had yet to be made, particularly for women—to this day, still struggling for true equality. Yet when you’re young and naïve (or even old and naïve), it’s hard not to romanticize a certain time period. Drinking of that wistfulness like a drug. A heady, dangerous drug that can lead us to forget all about the present. Which, in fact, is what the present is banking on so that industries can make money off what’s already been done before, cashing in on that “built-in audience” that comes with recycling. After all, as Mark Fisher succinctly pointed out as a “for example,” “Faced with twenty-first century music, it is the very sense of future shock which has disappeared. This is quickly established by performing a simple thought experiment. Imagine any record released during the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995, and played on the radio. It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt to the listeners.”
Sort of like the reverse jolt one of the boys in Eloise a.k.a. Ellie’s (Thomasin McKenzie, who one might recognize from Jojo Rabbit, in addition to her unfortunate appearance in Old) dorm experiences when he grabs her headphones and hears what she’s listening to, calling it “granny shit.” This is one of many instances where the extremely integral role that music plays in the film (as it does in most Edgar Wright films) drives home this point that Fisher was making in his evidence of “the slow cancellation of the future,” accordingly “accompanied by a deflation of expectations.”
Can anyone blame Ellie—or any human, really—for finding her “vibe” more readily available in the past? Fisher also remarks, “The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed.” Just as Wright intends to do with the cautionary message of this movie. Fisher counters to that, “Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia.’ But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of formal nostalgia…” Of the sort that Ellie knows all about.
With Last Night in Soho opening in a manner similar to Adventures in Babysitting (again, the past being a beast the feeds the content of the present), we see our heroine dancing in a newspaper-patterned (is someone going to tell her Dior already did that?) gown she’s designed as Peter Gordon’s “A World Without Love” plays on her record player. Indeed, it isn’t just the presence of the record player alone that is intended to make us almost believe we’re in the 1960s already, but the overall “frozen in time” quality of her room, complete with posters (most noticeably, Breakfast at Tiffany’s) and other ephemera of the decade. Knocking into the phonograph and causing it to skip, she looks up in the mirror and sees the image of her dead mother reflected back to her, our first indication of what her Gran (Rita Tushingham) refers to as her “gift.” Already knowing she’s going to gain admittance to the fashion school of her choice thanks to the exchange with her mother, when Gran comes through the door with an acceptance letter from the London College of Fashion, Ellie is only too ready to take on the city.
It’s once she’s actually on the train that we’re ripped from the idyllic 60s-style setting she’s cultivated in the countryside, for we now see her wearing Beats (by Dre) headphones that place us squarely in the dreary present. Before departing, Gran warns sheltered Ellie that men are “different” in London. To be frank, predatory. Ellie eye-rollingly assures that she’s not going to let the big, bad city eat her alive the way that it did her mother, who killed herself when Ellie was just seven. Yet it’s clear that she’s not as filled with bravery as she’d like to believe upon taking her first cab ride into LDN, the smarmy driver ogling her and “joking” about how he’s going to become her stalker. Sketched out and disgusted, she asks him to pull over because she doesn’t have enough money to go any farther. He tells her he’s sure they can find “some way” to work it out, an early foreshadowing of the prostitution motif that’s to take hold of the narrative. Beyond merely the literal, Wright, who co-wrote the script with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, wants to get across the significance of just how much women are expected to metaphorically whore themselves out in a manner that is not demanded of men. Acting as trapeze artists as they toe the line between just the right amount of obsequiousness and assertiveness so as to never “enrage” the man to a point of a violent flare-up (something British men are all too well-known for).
As Ellie waits out her skeevy cab driver in a corner shop, she doesn’t find much more of a welcome at the dorm, save for a brief offer of help from a fellow classmate named John (Michael Ajao, who appeared long ago in the UK favorite, Attack the Block). No one needs to tell her what they should have told “Estella” a.k.a. Cruella in the film of the same name: she’s not going to be readily embraced by the rest of her fashion industry-aspiring peers. At first, her two-faced roommate, Jocasta (Synnøve Karlsen), is pleasant enough—you know, for a bitch. But when other students arrive, she sees less reason to put on airs, openly revealing her competitive streak.
Although Ellie should technically be “happy” to finally be among peers who share her interests, she instantly finds the entire experience of going out with them to the pub totally hollow and irksome. Terrifying, even—to see these people in her age group in their so-called “element.” Thus, around the time a guy tries the pickup line, “My dick died, can I bury it in your arse?” on Jocasta, Ellie finds the right opportunity to slip away unnoticed. But not before overhearing Jocasta talk shit about her in the bathroom stall.
Aware from the outset that she’ll never fit in with this ilk—especially with her “old soul” tendencies—Ellie seizes upon a flier advertising a bedsit. Located on Goodge Place (a little to close to the word “gooch”), Ellie is eager to take the room upon seeing it, even with all of Miss Collins’ (Diana Rigg) rules and regulations (notably, no “gentlemen callers” after eight)—plus her need for four months’ rent worth of dough. Obscene…but then, Ellie would find it more obscene to continue sharing a room with the impertinent Jocasta and her mean girl lackeys. Wright’s casting choice of Rigg, whose last role would turn out to be for this film after dying of lung cancer in early 2020, couldn’t be more appropriate considering both the romanticized time period and motif of the film. After all, Rigg was famously made into a sex symbol against her will after auditioning on a whim for the part of Emma Peel on The Avengers, a role that would change her life for the rest of the 1960s and beyond.
As Jay Gatsby once said, “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!” This is precisely what so many of us, like Ellie, are determined to do. And may actually just convince ourselves, like Gatsby, that we’re managing it quite well. For, even if Wright insists that nostalgia is a fallacy—and a perilous one, at that—it’s difficult not to feel as though most other time periods were much more preferable to this one. Okay, maybe not the 1930s anywhere or, for most non-white people, any time before civil rights were more fully accepted (‘cause we can all see they have not been fully embraced even now). But still, this is the era that categorically proves Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris was predicated on the fallacy of wistfulness for a different time before we were actually living in the worst time ever. And yet, just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does. So likely we’ll end up yearning for the days of 2020 (believe it or not) when full-tilt climate dystopia arrives.
Wright’s condemnation of the “nostalgia drug” (something that quite literally appears in Lisa Joy’s Reminiscence) ironically goes against the very thing that the film industry still thrives on: capitalism. For how can someone benefiting so greatly from nostalgia deem it dangerous when that’s what capitalism depends on to keep the wheels of the selling machine turning?
To this end, Fisher asks the question, “Why did the arrival of neoliberal, post-Fordist capitalism lead to a culture of retrospection and pastiche? Perhaps we can venture a couple of provisional conjectures here. The first concerns consumption. Could it be that neoliberal capitalism’s destruction of solidarity and security brought about the compensatory hungering for the well-established and the familiar?” It would certainly hold water in Ellie’s case, who finds familiarity in the 60s not just because its accoutrements are well-worn (no sartorial pun intended) tropes, but because it’s what modern pop culture has made unwittingly familiar to her as well. The added layer of Ellie’s pursuit of a career in fashion, one of the industries most fond of preying on nostalgia, should also not be lost on the viewer. The fact that all Ellie can do, in the end, is “repurpose” the past for her present-day clothing collection remains a larger cultural commentary on our innate inability to truly come up with something new as we remain suspended in an atrophying timeline. What’s more, “…retro offers the quick and easy promise of a minimal variation on an already familiar satisfaction.”
But it isn’t just nostalgia in a globally affecting (and restricting of innovation) sense that Wright touches on in the themes of Last Night in Soho, so much as how the things that happen to us personally in the past can haunt us forever. Change us fundamentally. Turn us cold—nefarious, even. Most commonly a phenomenon that affects women. This brings us back to men. Their inherently bullying and bullish qualities that make them so adept at strong-arming women into things they would not have otherwise agreed to, particularly in the past. Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg was on the Supreme Court, before #MeToo. And yet, even in modern times, Britney Spears was strong-armed into a conservatorship. For aspiring singer Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), the girl from the past who Ellie is able to tap into every night when she puts her records on at the bedsit on Goodge Place, that man is Jack (Matt Smith, now forever associated with being Prince Philip).
At first, Jack seems like an absolute dream (don’t they always?): charming, attractive and influential. How could Sandie (whose name seems deliberately spelled to mimic Sandie Shaw’s—and yes, one was almost hoping for this to turn into a revisionist biopic of the chanteuse) not fall down the rabbit hole? Especially when men in “entertainment” know they have the power to hold a woman’s dreams before her very eyes—only to crush them. Which is exactly what Jack does as Sandie is quickly made to realize that what she auditioned for in the middle of the night at the Rialto was not a singing job, but a whoring job. It is at this moment of understanding that Ellie’s own infatuation with the past no longer has a rose-colored tint. Blackened, instead, by the reality that things were just as shit back then. Maybe more so, as Wright might argue, and yet, our collective “…nostalgia mode is better understood in terms of a formal attachment to the techniques and formulas of the past, a consequence of a retreat from the modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms adequate to contemporary experience.” None of this means anything to Ellie with regard to more deeply examining the reasons why she might be so obsessed with a bygone era. For she becomes so caught up in it as the ghosts of dicks past quite literally crop up in what she finds out was Sandie’s old bedroom. A room that played host to many a “john” as Sandie is forced to carry through the sexual motions because she’s now too far down the path to turn back.
One of the most poetic elements of all the visual choices that Wright makes is to etch out the zombie-ish faces (this is the man who brought us Shaun of the Dead, after all) of Sandie’s former clients as they come back to haunt Ellie. As Sandie will later tell Ellie, it’s ultimately because she had to pretend it wasn’t really happening to her, to block out the faces of these men for her own self-preservation. A convenient, light form of self-imposed amnesia that allowed her to carry on with her job (until finally, one night, she could not any longer). This is something many women are familiar with doing when exposed to the sexual trauma men are so fond of “providing.” And rather than being an “upset” that a male writer-director is the one to evince this, it’s actually encouraging to know that there are some men out there who see the majority of their gender for what it is.
Last Night in Soho thusly tells a tale society needs to hear on a twofold level. On the one hand, a searing look at men’s foulness both historically and presently and on the other, the ways in which nostalgia is simultaneously excoriated yet “necessarily” embraced by the embedded-within-us-all tenets of capitalism.
