I am rather sure anyone visiting this website habitually won’t have missed the film “Pride”: in case you didn’t know about it, the film is a British production inspired by the real story of the London Pride of 1985: to everyone’s surprise, during that demonstration gays and lesbians were parading alongside Welsh miners.
The motion picture hit the headlines during the latest Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded with the Queer Palm (I was completely unaware of the existence of this award, but according to Wikipedia it is assigned to the movies dealing with LGBT issues during the Cannes Festival)
I believe there are a million different reasons to watch this movie, but I want to concentrate specifically on the sense of common good permeating the story, as it shows why caring for the rights of other people, even if their condition doesn’t concern us directly, equals protecting everybody’s rights.
The film recounts the intuition of a young gay activist called Mark Ashton who gave life to the LGSM movement (the acronym stands for: “Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners”), as he realised that the condition of his own community and that of the miners’ both stemmed from a common enemy: Margaret Thatcher‘s extreme liberism. From this moment onwards, the story deals with the gradual approach between the two groups while they pursue a common cause, more and more decisive for both.
At this point, the designer in me will try to explain you that behind the path toward mutual comprehension, which is never taken for granted in the plot, there is a pattern defined by 5 steps. Now, I’ll give you a little heads up about this piece. Thanks to the “Wonders of the Internet” this article is interactive: if you stick to the titles there won’t be any SPOILERS, while if you click on each of them you will access the full descriptions, which make for quite some reading (anyway let’s take it easy, I’m not going to tell you how Interstellar ends).
Have you done the little game? Did you randomly click on the titles? No? Go get the movie right now.
In short, if I had to choose an adjective to define “Pride” I would use “effective”: I know it seems a sort of aloof description when applied to such a moving story about a cause that was fought so hard for to the point of risking one’s life, but I’ll tell you my reasons.
“Pride” has a message to deliver, i.e taking interest in the future of other people equals making your own future a better one. To convey this, the film doesn’t follow an educational approach, but rather it tells the story from one party’s point of view one moment, then the other party’s the following one: this way the public can understand both sides of the situation. In complete honesty, the public is not told that achieving mutual understanding is an easy task, in fact the film promptly shows a series of obstacles arising in the process, as well as the great amount of energy necessary to overcome them. Lastly, to state all of these things and catch the complexity of the process without making the storytelling heavy, the film adopts the form of the comedy. The comedy of course is imbued with the best of the British humour: brilliant, polite, tender and bitter when it’s required, the film’s argumentations are fiery, as typical of British pragmatism.
The wonderful testimony of “Pride” doesn’t aim at depicting a happy world that doesn’t exist, but rather a reality that can turned for the better if all the people involved acquire consciousness of this possibility. Even in this instance I found a particular dialogue to be enlightening in its minimalistic and precise style. Mark Ashton is asked by a customer of the gay club why it is so important to invest so much energy on the mineworkers, this is his answer: “Because miners dig for coal, which produces power, which allows gay people like you to dance to Bananarama until 3:00 in the morning”. The concept of common good in one line, basically.
Thanks to all of these ingredients I truly believe that “Pride” is an effective film, since it speaks to those who are already sensitive to these issues, as well as to those who are not familiar with them and don’t feel involved. This way it can contribute to break more social barriers. Among these barriers I wouldn’t only include topics related to homosexuality, but to gender equality (it’s not by coincidence that the Welsh housewife Siân James treasures the experience so much that she becomes the first woman in the parliament to represent the county of Swansea).
In conclusion: a lesson I learned from reading the Greek and the Latin classics is that when an author chooses to tell a past story, s/he doesn’t do so just for the record, but to highlight the similarities with the present and to encourage the pursuit of a better future. My wish is that “Pride” will remember if not to everyone, but at least to those who picked on its message, that even an economic, identity crisis and a crisis of values can be overcome by not acting on impulse and keeping to one’s own yard. Instead, cooperation and exchange of knowledge are great means to pursue the common good. Personally, I strongly believe that improving the conditions of a minority can better those of the majority, or even just those of another minority: after all, if I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t have stayed up until the wee hours to write this piece.
