Review of Wicked Little Letters.
To a far greater degree than the Republican Party, Britain’s governing class believes that the real spirit of the nation can be found in its countryside. The national stage is not located in big cities like London, but in the shires and market towns, where conflicts social and political can play out in miniature form. Virtually every one of the post-2016 tranche of Brexit novels – most notably Jonathan Coe’s Middle England (2018) and Bourneville (2022) – is set in small-town Britain. Political coverage in Britain is also bucolic in its assumptions. When a Westminster politician heads out into the shires, during an election or in the aftermath of a flood, it is thought that they will there confront what is an essentially perennial Englishness – an Englishness that, it is implied, in some way has their measure. It is in places like these that the temperature of the nation is taken.
But unlike Middlemarch, which depicts England on the eve of the Reform Bill through the goings-on in a small Midlands town, modern portrayals of these places show us a settled idyll. In the fiction and the programming of the 2010s, depictions of these towns and villages are an exercise in pointed whimsy. Forelock-tugging ploughmen; local eccentrics; and a clergy and aristocracy that still enjoy something like social deference – these are always the essential ingredients. This is meant above all to be comfortable terrain, an England that has always existed and will exist forever.
In these depictions, the kick to the narrative is always provided by some outside force that threatens to disturb this idyll: a dodgy developer, an obnoxious interloper from out of town or a kulturkampf issue that divides loyalties. The task for our heroes, usually a local worthy aided by an enlisted posse of eccentrics, is to restore the old equilibrium. This is the basic narrative device behind the cosy mystery stories of Richard Osman and Richard Coles, where acts of gruesome murder are counterposed against church bake sales and colourful bunting.
The indispensable woman of this genre is Olivia Coleman. Her characters are known for being models of traditional provincial respectability. The people she portrays, we are told, are repositories of a musn’t-grumble English decency and decorum – which is held to be as eternal as the shires and market towns themselves.
But what if such a person suddenly screamed “Fuck”? Her decorous and polite characters often do. The device is the same: a beau ideal that has, briefly, been thrown off kilter.
But with Wicked Little Letters, which premiered on Friday, this carefully constructed set-piece has at last tipped in chaos to the floor. The film is not so much a picking apart of the genre as a keying up of each of its characteristics to the absolute maximum. The resulting atmosphere is one of fever and lunacy. The setting – the seaside town of Littlehampton in the aftermath of World War One – is not a collection of quaint eccentrics, but a traditional freakshow. The residents of Littlehampton are sub-sentient, swivel-eyed and illiterate. They burp, fart, shit, brawl and fuck one another with a glazed, dead-eyed mania. Figures of authority, like the local police chief and magistrates, are not merely self-important but simple lunatics: bug-eyed, shrieking, liable to burst at any moment.
Wicked Little Letters is about Edith Swan (Olivia Coleman), an overripe version of the usual Coleman character. Edith is a pious, though vain and foolish woman who lives with her parents in Littlehampton, and has started to receive foul poison-pen letters from an anonymous source. The police get involved, and the finger of suspicion quickly falls on their neighbor Rose Goody (Jessie Buckley), a single mother tearaway who swears, fights, drinks and co-habits with her boyfriend.
Rose is arrested and put on trial for libel. We soon learn, however, that Edith has herself been writing the letters, which she keeps in a portfolio hidden in her bedroom wall. Edith unconsciously hates her overbearing parents, especially her gruesome tyrant of a father (Timothy Spall), and writes these letters as a way to express her suppressed rage.
Olivia Coleman saying “Fuck” has been the go-to comedic device of English cinema for close to a decade. Here it is tested to destruction. It is essentially the only joke in Wicked Little Letters: Coleman’s character is a prim and proper English lady who’s been driven over the edge, and so her horrible letters are exercises in cutesy viciousness (Rose later makes fun of Edith for overusing the term ‘foxy’ in her missives).
The assumption here is that this gag really is enough to carry an entire film on its own. It is not. This is a complacent piece of work, and it shows the exhaustion of the genre.
Edith is eventually found out, cackling maniacally as the paddy wagon takes her away. But look a little past this general bedlam and you’ll find the real heart of Wicked Little Letters. This is the local policewoman Gladys, who is the one who cracks the case and exonerates Rose. Gladys is a thoroughly Mayite figure, a dutiful, unsmiling, and conscientious social guardian. Gladys is one of the few sane people in Littlehampton, and certainly the only responsible adult. In the 2020s, cosy English fiction makes greater and greater recourse to grim figures of authority like Gladys. These are the only people – it is implied – who can maintain the old idyll in the face of challenges to social order, which is always ascribed to a kind of reefer madness. Littlehampton is mad; England is mad, and it is up to people like Gladys to corral these loopy bat-eared freaks into some semblance of civilised order. More than anything else, Wicked Little Letters is a depiction of the social theory of Mayism, of Starmerism. It’s an aesthetic of exhaustion that breaks down into absurdism; but it’s an absurdism that, tellingly, still never thinks to leave the English countryside.
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They want to kill us, it’s time ppl woke up. You don’t take boilers, cars, inflate energy unless you want ppl to die.
When will people realise that our rulers don’t want us to have any energy? It will be rationed to a couple of hours a day per household. You just have to read the dystopian novel “The Denial” by journalist Ross Clark to see the future our rulers have planned for us.
It is a puzzle.
Are they really so thick they just don’t understand the physics and economics involved, or they do and are evil?
I incline to the latter.
He went to Oxford. That doesn’t mean he is wise and doesn’t mean there are not gaps in his intelligence, but I strongly doubt he is “thick” enough not to be able to understand these things.
Yea they are really that thick
They are no “thick”. They know exactly what they are doing. This is the deliberate removal of the energy that gives us the prosperity we have, and since price and availability of energy is directly tied to standard of living, it means that Miliband and the eco fundamentalist Labour Party are deliberately lowering our living standard because Klaus Schwab says our lifestyle is “unsustainable”. It is about wealth and resources with climate the excuse the public seem to be falling for.
Definitely the latter.
The man is a complete fool or an utter villain, or both. How do these people get their grimy fingers on the levers of power rather than being harmlessly tucked away in an office?
9.8 million fools voted for the Party led by the Dark Lord who appointed him – that’s how!
Four out of five people did not. This is a zombie Government, a Government of nobody, it has no legitimacy.
Because people can’t be bothered to vote that’s how the Nazis got into power. Remember only 20% of the voting population voted for them. Ergo 80% didn’t but they’re still in power.
We’re all mad completely bonkers!
“…not properly though through…”. What is proper thinking? Opinion polls, perhaps?
An ability to think would be a start.
Good. Nuclear reactors are very expensive to build (costs include decommissioning) and more expensive to operate than coal or gas.
They require a lifetime guaranteed price for output, irrespective of market price… like wind and solar.
Whilst nuclear can provide base load, they cannot plug the intermittency gap caused by wind/solar – for technical reasons they run continuously, not stop/start.
If the nonsense persists of having subsidy farms as the basis of the electricity supply, then build more gas – versatile – for considerably less than the cost of nuclear, and which will be needed anyway.
Better still, ditch the whole Net Zero fantasy and go back to coal as the backbone of electricity generation with gas in the mix.
You make some good points, though I am not sure how “good” it is if they don’t fill the gap with hydrocarbons.
Hydrocarbons might run out one day, nuclear won’t, and while the UK could become self-sufficient with nuclear I am not sure how long we could be self-sufficient with coal and gas – perhaps a very long time, but what then? It would take a while for us to ramp up coal and gas extraction – exploration has probably slowed, coalfields will take time to reopen, fracking will take a while to produce (though to be fair the lead times on nuclear are also long).
We will either be without enough electricity or ever more reliant on non-UK gas, and feeds from France, Norway and others.
Yes but with coal we have well over 100 years at least. But the Labour Party have gone full circle from condemning Thatcher for her attack on coal and coal miners, to now wanting to actually blow coal plants up. —How times change.
100 years at previous consumption rates which in theory will increase with the advent of EVs and Heat Pumps and electric hobs. But yes still a big cushion during which time we can consider the next move.
Hinckley C is massively expensive because, for reasons that remain a mystery, the government decided on the European Pressurised Water Reactor design. There’s cheaper types of nuclear reactors, although none of them are as cheap as gas in terms of installed capacity. However the running costs of nuclear are much lower than gas fired plants with the same capacity. Therefore over the life time of the plant nuclear can compete with gas regarding cost, but can’t provide the flexibility needed to balance the grid (even without renewables there’s big differences in demand between summer and winter or day and night). One of the main costs of nuclear is the interest on the loans that the private sector has to take out to fund the construction. Governments can borrow money much cheaper than companies so if we followed the French example from the 1970’s whereby the government borrows the money to finance new nuclear plants we could have cheap base load electricity. Obviously government debt is at eye watering levels so borrowing another £70-100billion to finance nuclear plants isn’t going to make much difference and the government could pay the interest, and repay the intitial loan, on the nuclear debt via a small addition to our electricity bills. This would be a lot lower than the subsidies given to wind/solar farms.
We could have had 10-20 new nuclear stations planned and underway for all the money spaffed on test and trace… the difference being, at the end of it you have a useful asset delivering… vs ‘nowt’
Yes gas is the answer for reasons of heating and for electricity back up to the silly wind that Miliband wants and Net Zero is a globalists scam that should be ditched. But Nuclear is not so expensive when you consider how long the plants last. While offshore wind turbines need replaced every15 years, a Nuclear plant will last for 60. I would retain and build new Nuclear for electricity and keep gas for heating and backup. Although i should qualify that by saying that if we did not rely of silly renewables like wind then we would not require backup as we would have all the energy we require. —–Nuclear also uses up the least amount of resources and land and is also the safest way to produce electricity. As in all these things the phony climate crisis puts a spanner in the works of sensible and reliable energy policy.
We are heading into a very low energy time. The main priorities in such a time should be cheap food and energy. They are making sure that we don’t have access to either because they know that this time is coming and they want to make sure that the cull is as successful as possible. When power becomes this entrenched there is no chilled out way to remove the oligarchy, kakistocracy.
Starmer is a ‘good’ ‘citizen’ making sure everything keeps to plan. He is in good company.
“In fact, the life of all mankind is in danger because of global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of the major corporations; yet despite that, the representative of these corporations in the White House insists on not observing the Kyoto accord, with the knowledge that the statistics speak of the death and displacement of millions of human beings because of global warming, especially in Africa”
Osama bin Laden Terrorist leader behind 9/11 plot & attacks:
“What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing is a criminal act”
David Suzuki Celebrity scientist, alarmist extraordinaire
“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it”
Amory Lovins Scientist, Rocky Mountain Institute
“We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along”
David Graber Scientist U.S. Nat’l Park Services:
“Good terrorists would be taking [Ebola Roaston and Ebola Zaire] so that they had microbes they could let loose on the Earth that would kill 90 percent of people”
Eric Pianka Professor at University of Texas:
“The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species (man) upon the rest of the natural world” John Shuttleworth Founder of Mother Earth News magazine:
“The planet is about to break out with fever, indeed it may already have, and we [human beings] are the disease. We should be at war with ourselves and our lifestyles”
Thomas Lovejoy Scientist, Smithsonian Institution:
“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.”
Maurice Strong Wealthy elitist and primary power behind UN throne:
“An ecocatastrophe is taking place on earth…..discipline, prohibition, enforcement and oppression are the only solution. As for those ‘most responsible for the present economic growth and competition’, Linkola explains that they will be sent to the mountains for ‘re-education’ in eco-gulags: ‘the sole glimmer of hope,’ he declares, ‘lies in a centralised government and the tireless control of citizens.”
Pentti Linkola Finnish ecological philosopher
“…chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to [should] be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature; [Hansen] accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer”
James Hansen Prominent NASA climate scientist:
“…every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.”
George Monbiot UK Guardian environmental journalist
The maps below show which countries use the most fossil fuels and the countries where most people die from air pollution, in this case from in door fires.
Nice little round up, and good evidence why this scam is about wealth and NOT Climate. It is Eco Socialism pure and simple
I don’t mean to oversimplify things but all we need to do is get the farmers on side and you will be pushing at an open door. No group of people regardless of how elite they are can stand against the farmers. No farmers no food it is very simple. Once we have the farming sector under our control it won’t be difficult to denude the ruling class.
Labour are amateurs School boy and girl economists with not very high intelligence and no experience of anything other than socialist jobs such as local authority staff, snivel serpents, MPs bag carrier or charity or NGOs so they will destroy this country again, as Labour always have done
Well there you go.— If anyone was ever in any doubt that Miliband and the eco socialists are not really interested in the CO2 emissions from fossil fuels then here is the proof. —-If they did care about CO2 then Nuclear would for sure be very important to them since there are no CO2 emissions from Nuclear Plants. (Except in the manufacture, which is the same for everything). —No this isn’t about the climate and for the eco fundamentalists it never was. It is all about pandering to UN Agenda’s 21 and 2030. It is all about lowering the living standards of the British people because we became prosperous using fossil fuels and the UN/ WEF says we are to STOP. It really is as crude and as blatantly obvious as that.
Nuclear power produces zero CO2 emissions yet the muppets who actually believe the nonsense that CO2 warms the planet are cancelling nuclear power generation? You could not make it up.
What do we need those nuclear things for – whatever they are – when we have windmills for our base load and PV Panels at night?