Happy Go Lucky (UK, 2008)

Overview

‘Happy Go Lucky’ is a movie about an Elementary schoolteacher whose boundless love of life shines through and beyond others who are afraid to express themselves joyfully.  The movie implores the viewer to transcend boxes, rules, expectations, and outcomes that have weigh us down as we live according to how life is ‘meant’ to be.

Poppy Likes to Ride her Bicycle

The film opens with the main character, Poppy, riding her bicycle through the streets of London.  I immediately thought of the Lily Allen song which also begins with the protagonist riding a bicycle on a sunny London afternoon (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL3vEscKgBc&feature=related )  I was particularly reminded of the  lyrics “and if you look twice, you’ll see it’s all lies”. 

Poppy comes across as an intelligent, discerning, woman who doesn’t  worry about the intricacies of social norms by which other people judge themselves and others.  Poppy at once appears lucid and illuminated, not by the outer world of prestige-seekers, but  by an inner light that glows timelessly and vibrantly

She arrives at a bookstore in which a book by a Roger Penro entitled “The Road to Reality” is prominently displayed.  One reviewer described the book as “the most complete mathematical explanation of the universe yet published”.  The viewer then sees Poppy turn to stand under a hanging mobile, the type people use in baby cribs.  In this moment it becomes clear that Poppy chooses innocence and whimsy over knowledge and certainty.    According to the cultural vernacular she is ‘immature’.

Poppy Gets Driving Lessons

The movie hinges on Poppy (“Pauline!?, no one’s called me that since I was little”) receiving driving instruction.  Scott, her instructor, symbolizes all that is anal and idiotic in a logocentric man’s world just as city traffic itself represents the dominance of one type of ‘order’ over all others.  He is obsessed with details such as her supposedly-improper footwear.  We also learn that he forces all his students to check their rearview mirrors while saying ‘En Ra Ha’, an obscure Satanic reference to an ‘all seeing eye’.  I read Scott’s use of ‘En Ra Ha’ as an anguished screech directed toward the female body (mothers with ‘eyes in the back of their heads, in biology known as an occipatal eye) as well as the vagina itself (the unseeing eye, that can receive, give, produce and self, the original giver of all life and truth).  Scott can fairly be said to suffer from an inversion of the Freudian concept of ‘penis envy’ caused by his obsession with the masculine values of order, details and rules that have arisen in response to the literal Rule of the Mother that all infants experience.  His and patriarchy’s attacks on immaturity represent the ultimate infantile tantrum.

Poppy’s Life Revolves Around Women, Not Men

‘Happy Go Lucky’ is told exclusively from a female perspective.  This is in line with the stereotype that women are more emotional, intuitive and dream-oriented than men.  “It’d be amazing to fly” is the clarion call of Poppy and her friends.  They imagine ever-greater happiness and freedom, drinking and touching one another in vaguely sexual ways and jokingly referencing each other’s “lack of style in my estimation”. 

Poppy’s interactions with her friends, and especially her best friend and ten-year “flatmate” Zoe, carry a school-age charm which drifts effortlessly into lesbian innuendo.  When Poppy and Zoe have a staring contest it comes excruciatingly close to turning into a kiss. “Who’s gonna blink first?” they ask one another.    Their coquettish contact is sharply and perfectly contrasted with Scott, whose patriarchal obsession with product over process is summed when he says: “I don’t care how you look, it’s how you drive”. While Poppy’s sense of self is embodied and expressed in conjunction with her bestest friends, Scott’s personal reality is defined in terms of independence defined by ownership of the vehicle he teaches out of.  He says: “I work for myself, I am my own man”. 

Scott’s obsession with independence (either a cause or response to his having no friends other than his mother) is contrasted with the scene that catalyzes Poppy’s need for driving lessons in the first place: her bike is stolen (“nicked”).  Upon realizing its loss she exclaims “I didn’t even get to say goodbye” Between Poppy and Scott there is a line drawn between Poppy’s affective connectivity with the animate and inanimate worlds, symbolized by her love of friends and her bike, and Scott’s detached repression of his individual desires.  While driving in a roundabout he announces that “if you get selfish bad things will happen”.  Unlike her neurotic Flamenco instructor, who has a nervous breakdown while leading the class in a chant of “my space!”, Poppy understands and is comfortable with the interlocking and flowing nature of social life.  She giggles when people struggle for autonomy because she knows that we arise interdependently with one another.  Poppy is neither oppositional nor self-effacing; she simple ‘is’ and this balanced state allows her to effortlessly experience all the charms life has to offer.

Poppy Learns About the Hypocrisy of Self-Proclaimed Pariahs

Scott is a difficult man, who at once harps on the education system being set up to force students to “reconfirm” an oppressive worldview while at the same time being obsessed with details such as how to check the rearview mirrors when passing other cars.  This obsession with a ‘one best way’ is reminiscent of F.W. Taylor’s scientific management techniques that involved discovering a ‘one best way’ to shovel coal or nail nails. 

The patriarchal obsession with detail is writ large in Scott’s character.  He rails against multiculutirasm and orders Poppy to lock her door because “there’s two of them” when black men cross the street. This sort of close minded paranoia sets off alarm bells for Poppy and demonstrate to the viewer just how close minded Scott really is. 

Poppy doesn’t understand where he is coming from and, at a deeper level, doesn’t really connect with men more generally.  Upon meeting a homeless person and attempting to engage him in conversation she finds that he speaks nothing but gibberish monologues followed by the phrase “You know?”  She senses that he speaks from a place of emotion, yet it is as though he were from another dimension, one which is incommensurable with her own.  Her empathy wins out, however, and every time he asks “you know?” she states that she does.  Earlier, she had refused to lock the door for Scott but when faced with raw expression, even in an untranslatable form, she responds affirmatively.  Poppy does this, I believe, because she represents the seraphic side of human nature often dubbed ‘loving’.  Poppy is a loving person.

Poppy Tries to Decide Whether to Fall in Love

As with many women at the age of thirty, Poppy finds herself being interrogated as to when she will marry and have children.  Her pregnant sister matter-of-factly informs her that she must “get a mortgage” and settle down.  It is worth pointing out that the literal translation of the word mortgage is ’til death’.  Yet, when Poppy responds “I like my freedom” her sister bursts into tears exclaiming “you don’t have to rub it in”.  The implication is that one ‘can’t win for losing’ when following the patriarchal binary of a)married with child or b)free of monogamous attachment.

Poppy Notices More Male Violence in the World While Flirting with Love

After enduring Scott’s many tirades against society, Poppy begins to notice more bullying in her class, and particularly the actions of one boy.  With the help of a social worker named Tim she uncovers the fact that the boy’s stepfather had beat him repeatedly.  Tim is a ‘gender traitor’ representative of masculine guilt over the thuggish and hostile interrelations common to most males in their school years.  To the viewer he immediately appears to be ‘mister right’ and this feeling is further reinforced when she wakes up happy the morning after she sleeps over at his house.  One still senses, however, that she is all-too aware of the narrated nature of their connection.  At one point she asks him “Are you happy in your life” as though scouting whether he has been as pressured as her to settle down and knock out a couple kids. 

Poppy Gets What She Wants

Poppy leaves Tim the social worker’s apartment for her noon Saturday driving lesson.  Upon seeing them kiss Scott freaks out.  Earlier, Scott had expressed disgust at Poppy’s playfully suggesting that she was a lesbian. “She’s gorgeous, I love her” Poppy had lovingly stated about her flatmate. But this time is different.  Under patriarchy, a man is always more threatening to another man than any woman can ever be.  Scott proceeds to ramble conspiracy theories and shout “It’s not me, it’s them” while driving erratically.  Poppy has had enough and, true to the elementary schoolteacher that she is, confiscates his keys.  She says“You’re not driving this car, Sunshine!” 

Though easyflowing on the exterior, Poppy is not going to let any typical male ‘drive’ her into a wall or dictate her worldview.  When necessary, she stands firm for what she believes in.  As a strong woman, she is actively in control of her destiny, far moreso than her ranting lunatic driving instructor.

Poppy Realizes That While True Love May be an Illusion, True Friendship is Always Real

Happy Go Lucky concludes with Poppy and best friend Zoe rowing a rental boat in unison and concluding that they have a long way to go before they are ‘there’, as in attached to a ‘mister right’.  One might say that in fact they have each found the perfect match: each other.  The song that leaped to mind during this scene was the sad and sultry Yeah Yeah Yeahs anthem (Ed. Note: I use the term ironically) entitled ‘Modern Romance’.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlgWj9GHE3g]

  “There is no…this is no…modern romance” Karen O sings. 

And off Zoe and Poppy float into the liquid London sunset…shining however they fe