NEDS

New acroyms are cropping up everyday in this world of fast cars, fast foods, fast sex. My latest acquisition of another one of my novel vocabulary comes in the form of a film! It's NEDS (2010) which I learn stands for "Non-Educated Delinquents". This third feature film of Scottish actor, writer and director Peter Mullan won the "Best Film"  award at the San Sebastian Film Festival in September 2010.   

According to the Wikipedia, the term "Ned" is "a derogatory term applied in Scotland to youths who wear casual sports clothes, with the stereotypical implication that they engage in hooliganism or petty criminality, dating back to 1960's or earlier in Glasgow" and that by 2006, the term "Schemies" is used in Edinburgh, "scallies" in Liverpool and "chav" used across the UK . "Neds culture"  is associated with violence in poorer housing estates on the periphery of postwar new towns lacking any social facilities like city centres for former working-class areas  and gangs of bored knife-carrying youths hang around isolated areas smoking, drinking, taking drugs and fighting. Common slang terms are to "chib" or stab with a knife or sharp weapon, and "a square go" meaning a fair fight between two individuals.

The film opens with something all students in the 1960s era Catholic schools are familiar with: climbing the short wooden step on to the stage at an assembly at the school hall once a year where there is an array of teachers, guests of honour all dressed up with suit and tie at the back of the stage beneath the backdrop with a figure whose ghostly appearance at unsuspected corners of the school will strike instant terror in the hearts of the most rebellious students: the principal, there standing in the glory of his academic gown in front of the rostrum witnessing and conferring honours upon star students stepping up sheepishly but proudly on to the platform to get assorted awards in recognition of their academic distinction or achievements. One such a student wearing a proud smile on his face on the stage is John McGill, a form 1 student from a Catholic family in a council housing estate in  suburban Glasgow with a doting mother, an alcoholic father, a known hoodlum brother now working as a painting worker.

John was promoted to Form 2B but was a bit surprised when it was announced that he was not as he expected, put into Form 2A, reserved only for the academic elites. He protested to a cynical teacher and went to the school principal who promised that if he were to be within the top 2 of his class by Christmas, he would be switched to the elite class. Christmas came. The time had come for announcing the top student of Form 2B. He was within the duo! He rushed proudly out from his desk the moment it was announced but was restrained by his teacher who asked him to show some manners.

The film shows that his teachers and the janitor and even the school principal are all disciplinarians without the slightest qualms at all in using corporal punishment administered in the form of whipping the hands of students with leather thongs, irrespective of whether the students are boys or girls or in the case of the janitor of piggybacking any student who is late on his own back and banging their backs against the protruding parts of wooden frame of the school doors! Is Mullan suggesting that if the NEDS are violent, they may be as much victims of as perpetrators or perpetuators of the verbal, psysical and psychological violence of the adult world which surrounds and pervades and penetrates their daily lives from birth? 

The story traces the treacherous traject of John McGill (first played by Gregg Forrest and later played brilliantly by Conor McCarron), an altar boy at Form 1 who told his mother that he intended to go to university and would like to become a journalist into a non-typical NED. It is a story of growing up as an adolescent in an environment in which there are really only two options: either be a "swot" or to join up a street gang to obtain status and bragging rights over violence, sex and drugs and money if one does not want to be the lowest member of the cruel but realistic adolescent pecking order. We see John turning cheeky in class shortly after he had his first taste of being treated as a respected member of one of the two local gangs and taking pleasure to show his courage openly in class by deliberately pretending not to know the answer to an easy question in Latin which his teacher expects his "star student" to know. He says bluntly and repeatedly that he doesn't know the answer and is deliberately rude to his teacher in class so as to provoke him into giving him that expected whipping of hand which he took without batting an eye wsith head held high and after his teacher is done, continues to hold them up high in the air for more, jeering his teacher openly by saying that he could not even whip properly, after which he whispers in his ears, the correct answer, just so to show his "cheek". Obviously his grades dropped shortly thereafer, we see him, smoking, knocking down a rival gang member and nonchalantly slumping a slab of slate tablet on him after he knocked him unconscious on the grounds a cemetery in between foraginng the delights of the lower front of a girl who fancies him right at the entrance of s that cemetery, beating other boys up first with bare fists, then slashing them with knives and himself being slashed in the endless internecine gang fights with knives, robbing a bus to get bail money for his brother, slipping down from the upper deck emergency window at the rear of a bus upon the arrival of the police and making good his escape, beating up his drunken father (played by Peter Mullan himself) who asked him to finish him off which he did, after which he went on to a raging rampage to release his frustration and anger, ending up in a special class for wood and metal work and eventually being neglected and abandoned with another obviously much less intellgient delinquent in a safari park van to roam perhaps symbolically on their own amidst lions.    

It is a realistic tale of violence, brutality, insults, mindless use of swear words, gang fights, smoking, drinking, drugs, knives, teenage bravado, sex and of growing up, acting big etc. told perhaps deliberately, in 1960's film color. The atmostphere is deliberately grim: we see dark cloudy skies and the events happening always in the dark or in the evenings. But there is also another type of color equally dark: the more lack lustre hue of Glasgow teenage gang langauge, which includes one "F" word  in every three or four spouting from the lips of angry adolescents with the ridiculous regularity of mindless puppets and with just about as much mental content. The films reminds me of one age old Biblical image:  John is a seed which fell amidst rocks by the way side. He grew up in the wrong kind of family, in the wrong kind of times, and in the wrong kind of environment! A feature film of John's downfall from a star student to a star hoodlum who is better than his peers because he got more than just physical muscles, told in in quasi-documentary style, without any sentimental romanticization but ultimately also without any further analysis or exploration of John's inner turmoil in any depths. It is an unvarnished tale told with a realism as brutal as its subject matter. I'd give it a 2B