Cops in Culture #2: Edward II
Derek Jarman once joked that he only adapted the work of Christopher Marlowe because he needed to tap into the cultural prestige of Renaissance literature to be able to get his radical queer film made. Marlowe’s 1593 play The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second tells the story of King Edward, whose commitment to his lover Gaveston turns the nobility and his Queen against him, spreading mounting rebellion until he is overthrown, imprisoned, and murdered. Jarman’s 1991 modernised film adaptation intensifies this story of homophobia, showing a conservative establishment closing ranks against queer renegades who don’t conform to its norms, as animosity towards Edward builds from petty vindictive whispering to full throated hostility from every institution; the media, the church, polite society, Parliament — and the police.
At the heart of the play is a civil war between forces loyal to the King and those serving the rebel barons. But it is not medieval knights who face off on the film’s battlefield. Instead, Edward’s forces are gay rights protesters — real members of the protest groups OutRage! and Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence — facing off against an imposing line of riot police. The scene is intense; the edit cuts quickly between the cops advancing, rhythmically striking their batons on the backs of their shields, and the protesters shouting, chanting, edging forward armed only with their banners and whistles. The action accelerates, the camera darts around, the soundtrack is overlaid with voices screaming, then the lines are broken up, the protesters are closed in and a kettle forms around them, the coppers’ truncheons still rhythmically swinging away. This action is punctuated by sharp cuts to static close ups of the Queen, far removed from the action, making a politician’s speech directly to camera, justifying the impending bloodshed in clipped, dispassionate tones which blame Edward and his supporters for the violence they are enduring.
Policing
The sequence is brief, very brief, over almost before it has begun, but it serves as a kind of centrepiece for the film’s political mission — this is not a period drama or a historical epic, it is a film rooted in real people’s current experience. Some things cannot be buried away in subtext or metaphor but must be plainly shown. At the centre of homophobic society is homophobic policing.
Shortly after the release of Edward II Jarman published At Your Own Risk: A Saint’s Testament, an anthology which included an essay by Paul Burston arguing that ‘it is the police, more so than any other public institution, who determine the exact extent of our liberation’. Jarman himself writes:
I was put up against the wall there many years ago by a violent gang who I thought were out queerbashing. … Only the fact that I was middle-class, white and had a film on at The Gate stopped a verbal assault – ‘You fucking queer’ – becoming physical. This gang were the police.
An earlier scene shows Gaveston similarly caught alone by a gang of officers, dragged across the dirty floor, and, still spitting sarcastic defiance through his bloodied lips, slowly choked to death with a police baton. Officers stand around and watch, laughing at his helplessness in the face of their brutality. Jarman is deliberate in showing that this is not an issue with one individual cop’s prejudices — the murderous officer shows up in only a few scenes and isn’t even named — it is an issue with the police as a whole.
History
Jarman’s film plays games with history. It tells a story of medieval events, in early modern dramatic language, as an intervention into a late twentieth-century culture war. Reviving the true story of Edward and Gaveston makes a bold intervention: it says that homosexual desire is not a new phenomenon, not a recent deviation from nature or a post-modern phase, but an integral part of human history.
Marlowe’s play contains a speech which normalises Edward and Gaveston’s relationship with the observation that since ancient times the ‘mightiest kings’ and ‘wisest men’ have ‘had their minions’ — from Alexander the Great to Socrates, the great men of history have kept the company of male lovers. Jarman celebrated this as a ‘great outing speech, the classic closet opened’, and it's clear his film has a similar mission, highlighting the queerness at the heart of the English literary canon. And yet putting ‘90s homophobia alongside a Renaissance play also highlights something else about history — it shows how petty and contingent the homophobic attitudes which fuelled the contemporary culture war were.
Neither the real King Edward in the fourteenth century, nor Marlowe in the sixteenth, could accurately be described as “gay”. Because, while homosexual desire and gender noncomformity have been present throughout human history, the impulse to categorise and label people according to them — to treat them as constituting distinct types of identity — is a feature of the modern capitalist epoch. The same epoch, that is, which produced ranks of uniformed police officers to regulate and constrain the population. Police were invented to maintain a new social order, just as queers were invented to be excluded from it. This bitter antagonism was constantly playing out in the streets at the time of the film’s release. Gay police officer turned sociologist Marc Burke wrote a few years later that ‘From a police point of view then, homosexuality would appear to represent part of the societal disorder that the police officer has dedicated his or her life to eradicating’. ‘Thou proud disturber of thy country’s peace!’ yells the cop who murders Gaveston in the film, marking his victim as an enemy to order and rule.
Respectability Politics
The film does not only depict homophobic violence, however; it is also concerned with violence by queer characters. Jarman commented that the film would not ‘endear [him] to Gay Times’ and established a crucial ethos for the film’s representation of queer oppression: ‘Not all gay men are attractive. I am not going to make this an easy ride. Marlowe didn’t’. After the battle, Gaveston’s killer meets his fate strung up like a side of beef, still in his police uniform, with Edward plunging a butcher’s knife into him (a visceral revenge fantasy somewhat familiar from Jarman’s earlier film Jubilee in which two homophobic cops are castrated and petrol bombed, respectively). If depicting the realities of police violence was bold, depicting a bloody reprisal was bolder still.
In the published screenplay Jarman records that for the filming of the riot scenes the OutRage! protesters were supervised on set by founding member Peter Tatchell who looked after them ‘like a hen with chicks’. Jarman makes a revealing comment on Tatchell’s influence on the staging of the clash between riot police and gay rights activists:
Peter Tatchell said that OutRage was a non-violent organisation so the [police] had to win. I thought we might have beaten one up.
The effect of this concern with maintaining a peaceful public image is a scene of queer victimhood, in which the protesters are hemmed in, pushed back, swung at with batons, but never assert any violence of their own.
Jarman’s film is an anachronism in contemporary discourse. Its politics are messy and impulsive, its characters unsympathetic, its queer representation problematic. It contains dated themes which have less compelling purchase on contemporary queer struggles (sardonically exposing the repressed sexuality of the ruling class, for example) as well as images which have lost none of their bite (the progressive queering of Edward’s infant son throughout the film, presenting the young boy in make-up, jewellery, and his mother’s too-big high heels, reminds us of the reactionary homophobic precedents to current moral panics about queer and trans influences on young children). But little in the film seems as alien to the current moment, nor as urgent to recover, as the clear-eyed sense of the police as agents of normativity, order, and coercion, violently repressing all that is messy and beautiful about the queer lives that so repulse them.