Provocative Stimulus: Crossroad of Individual

and Collective Memory, Shaping The Memory

of Falklands War in This is England
Muhammed Gürsoy
Synopsis of the movie

• The movie revolves around a small kid called Shaun in 1983 who loses his father in Falklands War.
• Shaun is depicted as reserved kid, dealing with bullies in the school and somewhat is alienated
from the social interactions.
• He comes across with Skinheads, a subculture known for their anarchic and racist tendencies, and
he integrates into the group thanks to the sympathy shown by the group members.
• Later on, Combo, who was serving his time in prison, re-joins the group and affects the gang
members with his political views and attracts Shaun with his allegedly father figure.
• In spite of the initial sympathy shown by Woody and Rose –whom Shaun meets and who welcome
Shaun to the gang-, Shaun is allured to follow Combo and begins to participate in right-extremist
meetings and attacks.
• First-wave skinhead Combo, fuelled by rage against other ethnic groups and conservative ruling
regime, confronts another member in the group, Milky who has African origins, and brutally beats
him due to his angst.
• After this brutal attack, the group is dissolved and Shaun restores his first-given image as reserved
kid and in the end of the movie, he throws the flag of England, given by Combo, to the ocean.
Combo’s speech and the transformation of Shaun’s
memory
Combo: The Falklands? The fucking Falklands?
What the fuck's The Falklands? Fucking innocent
men, good fucking strong men. Good soldiers, real
people losing their lives, going over there thinkin
they're fighting for a fucking cause. What are they
fighting for? What are they fighting against?
Fucking shepherds!
Shaun: Shut up about The Falklands.
- Why?
- Cos I want you to.
- There's fucking loads of dickheads dying out there
for nothing.
- My fucking dad weren't a dickhead!
(Shaun begins physically attacking Combo)
…
- My fucking dad died in that war!
- Your dad died?
- Yeah. Get off!
…
- I can't lie to you. It's a pathetic war, man. And you
want your dad's life to mean something, don't you?
Interpretation of cordiality between Shaun and
Combo on Falklands War
• Combo, as a skinhead, refers to Falklands War through the lens of collective identity. From
his perspective, what he remembers about Falklands War is the innocent young men dying
in an undeclared war for nothing; his memory about the war is formed by political devices
of the subculture. Even though there is no open hint about Combo’s individual close
experience, it could be derived from his speech that societal factors are topping over the
individual site.

• Whereas, what Shaun remembers about the war as a kid is only constituted by the loss of
his father; Shaun’s experience on the war does not refer to societal and/or collective
bearing. From his point of view, it is a singular event in which he lost his father.

• Nevertheless, after integrating into a working-class subculture group, Shaun’s remembering

about the war is begin to be altered. He no longer commemorates his deceased father only
by looking at his picture in uniform; in fact he takes part in violent activism against the
authority and minorities in his town by the affection to Combo’s political views and
collective identity of Skinheads.
• (collective memory)”not as a collection of individual memories or some magically constructed
reservoir of ideas and images, but rather as a socially articulated and socially maintained ‘reality
of the past’” Irwin-Zarecka, 1994, p. 54, cited Hirst & Manier, 2008, p. 184).

• They (collective memories) “preserve the store of knowledge from which a group derives an
awareness of its unity and peculiarity” (Nora, 1996, p. 130, cited Hirst & Manier, 2008, p. 186).

• «Chief questions for epidemiologists are: Why do some diseases rapidly spread across a
population, whereas others die or remain confined to one person?» (Hirst & Manier, 2008, p. 187)

• For Shaun, Falklands War was stored in his individual memory only due to loss of father; later this
site of memory, loss of the father, evolves into one of the singular consequences of general
epidemic having affected larger audience: a war between two nations.
• Why could the crossroad of individual and collective memory be addressed as provocative stimulus? Individual
sphere is obliterated by collective sphere; his (Shaun) paternal suffering is utilized in political resistance and
objectivized in the identity of particular group. From Shaun’s perspective, the focal point of whole war is not
him losing the father, but, alternatively, another soldier and the mother of a thousand death*.

• «I can't lie to you. It's a pathetic war, man. And you want your dad's life to mean something, don't you? We
shouldn't have been there. She (implies Margaret Thatcher) lied to us. She lied to me. She lied to you. But,
most importantly, she lied to your dad. If you don't stand up and fight this fucking fight that's going on the
streets, your dad died for nothing. He died for nothing.»

• Combo consorting Shaun after being attacked and politicizing Shaun’s memory and enabling him to take part
in the identity of a particular group. From that point on, it could be claimed that Shaun remembers the war in
which he lost his father but as a political failure whose cost had been covered by the lower classes of England
as Shaun engages in racist attacks towards Pakistanis who, according to Combo, live on the land earned by the
blood of brave soldiers.

• * This is taken from a song, “How Does it Feel?” (1986) by British Anarchist-Punk rock band Crass. The song openly criticizes
Thatcher for driving people to die. Remarkable similarity between Combo’s speech and real-life correspondent of the subculture
is given to highlight the political stance of group’s identity.

• “How does it feel to be the mother of a thousand death?

Young boys rest now, cold graves in cold earth.
How does it feel to be the mother of a thousand death?
Sunken eyes, lost now; empty sockets in futile death”
Interpretation of the final scene
• Shaun throws the flag of England to the sea, this imagery indicates that what Shaun
remembers about Falklands War returns back to family kernel from collective sphere;
Falklands War no longer functions as a collective spectrum. What could be understood
from the symbolism in the end is that Shaun reinstates the initial remembering about the
war.

• He represses the trauma created by Combo’s brutal assault to Milky and violent racist
activities by the group in which he takes part and which is directed by the group’s identity;
he represses the social resources (the flag given by Combo) forming the collective memory
and reconstitutes the emotional ground of individual remembering as he picks and looks at
the picture of his deceased father’s picture once more. Nonetheless, waves will bring this
flag back another time, to another shore; it implies that racist, malice actions which he was
encouraged to take part by the group will be remembered at later stages.
Works Cited

• Irwin-Zarecka, I. (1994). Frames of remembrance: The

dynamics of collective memory. New Brunswick: Transaction
(cited by Hirst & Manier)

• Nora, P. 1996. Realms of memory: Volume I. Conflicts and

divisions, New York: Columbia University Press. (cited by Hirst
& Manier)

• William Hirst & David Manier (2008) Towards a psychology of

collective memory, MEMORY, 16:3, 183-200, DOI:
10.1080/09658210701811912