Introduction
The audience of “I, Daniel Blake” can feel the intense emotions the film depicts, the sufferings of a simple man under an unfair system –at least– in his personal story. However, the film that won the Palme d’Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival contains many internal concepts and ideas that explain and even go beyond the story of “Daniel Blake” to understand a general social system and protest against it from a moral point of view. This requires more than insightful and careful watching for the viewer to be able to understand what the film indicates with its dense and various scenes. What this article attempts to do is to provide a deconstructive reading of the film in two parts: one that explains the events as a direct criticism of bureaucracy and modernity in its capitalist form, and a deconstruction of the film’s symbolism in a more general way related to leftist concepts.
Bureaucracy and Systematic Injustice
The director, who is concerned with labor issues across all his works, opens the film with a dialogue of a man complaining to a health insurance official, which might be understood as the complaints of an ordinary old man. That is before we later understand that the film begins where Mr. Blake’s story ends, as a worker. He went to the insurance company to secure an Employment and Support Allowance after the doctor prevented him from continuing his work or performing any other labor to which he was accustomed, as he is exempt from work according to the trade union. However, what the Employment Support Union, or what is considered Social Insurance, does is check his condition with a Work Capability Assessment, by examining every part that is not related to Mr. Blake’s main problem, which is the heart. This shows that Mr. Blake was not complaining like an ordinary old man, but rather he was complaining as if he were anticipating the endless problems of bureaucracy that would not end until the end of his life. The film then presents, in multiple successive scenes, Mr. Blake’s suffering with this bureaucracy. For example, he cannot confirm his eligibility for a work exemption except through a letter he receives in the mail followed by a call from the social security doctor. However, the letter that never arrived forced him to call social security services and remain on hold for more than an hour and twenty minutes, only for the employee to tell him that he would make sure to send the letter that might not arrive once again. This is how the film narrates the events in a boring way that synchronizes with Mr. Blake’s boredom. The boredom felt by both the viewer and Mr. Blake is a systematic boredom caused by this Social Security Institution, or so Mr. Blake claims.
Bureaucracy here is nothing but a means of spreading despair in those entitled to security – which the state originally provides as part of social insurance programs – through long and tiring steps, which require patience that most people do not have. However, Mr. Blake had no choice but to fight and be patient, though his fighting did not last long before it took his personal belongings and furniture, and that is in light of his struggle with this bureaucracy that did not hesitate to put one obstacle after another in his way to obtain an exemption. All of this was before the last meeting at the Social Security Office. In this meeting, it was revealed by the employee that all his attempts to overcome the obstacles had failed, as she told him verbatim that “all of this is not good enough.” Mr. Blake protests in the street by drawing attention to himself, by writing the phrase “I, Daniel Blake” in bold letters on the wall of the insurance company itself, followed by a simple summary of his tragedy and suffering with social security services, attracting the attention of anyone passing by. Daniel Blake’s objection here was not the first, but it was certainly the first of its kind, as he was the one that ended up being arrested and taken to the police, before he fell into severe depression that prevented him from leaving the house. What should be noted here is that Mr. Blake’s story is the story of a good and law-abiding citizen, who only has to look for work and a way to overcome his health and bureaucratic dilemmas. However, this is certainly not enough in light of a system that evades its responsibilities and does not tolerate people, except those who become robots that benefit capitalism. Afterwards comes the importance of the main story of the other character in the film, which shows the impact of the capitalist system, especially when it is laced with extreme bureaucracy, similar to social insurance and security companies in Britain, which will be discussed in the next section.
Capitalism When Combined with Bureaucracy
The events in the film revolve primarily around the story of Daniel Blake. However, the girl, whose tragic story is linked to his, is also no less important in the director and writer’s narrative in criticizing the general social and economic system. In one of his first times in the Social Security Office, Mr. Blake meets a woman with her two children, when she was expelled from the Social Insurance Office for being ten minutes late for her appointment. The meeting between Daniel Blake and Katie was to show his solidarity with her in rejection of their inhumane treatment, as he screamed, before he was also expelled. When Mr. Blake saw Katie, his suffering felt trivial in comparison to the struggle of the mother of two children, who could not feed her two children before feeding herself! She was able to leave the homeless shelter after a long struggle and did not obtain approval from social security services to support her two children. Katie’s story constitutes the most intense scenes in the film, where the mere breaking of a small marble, while she attempts to repair the bathroom of her very modest apartment after a long day of hunting for a job that did not exist, was enough to bring down her broken tears in front of her children. This was nothing compared to her breakdown in the pantry for those in need as she began to eat what she had obtained, where she represented in her crying all the humiliation that a worker, who kept looking and struggling to find a living, felt. Katie’s story here is the most horrific representation of the capitalist system’s oppression of those who were not fortunate enough to be born into a wealthy family. In the end, she is forced to become a prostitute. The fact that Katie’s story is not a new one is enough to understand the deep impact of brutal individualistic capitalism on individuals, however, what is most important is the intersection of Katie’s story with Mr. Blake’s, which represents the intersection of bureaucracy and capitalism in their ugliest states.
What the film is trying to criticize is not the idea of bureaucracy itself or necessarily capitalism, but rather it presents a critique of the capitalist use of bureaucracy in so-called social services, which are nothing but an attempt to reduce the human losses resulting from capitalist brutality. The same system that produced these services has turned them into a means of reproducing individuals who are consumers useful to the capitalist system itself, and it cannot serve anything that departs from this equation. This fact aligns with the fact that these services are cold, dry, and unrealistic. This fact becomes evident through Mr. Blake and Katie. What the relationship between the two characters demonstrates is that only truly symbiotic human relationships, emerging from shared suffering, can provide general social security, which the bureaucratic system of social security does not. Mr. Blake’s story, which ends with his death in the final moments of the movie, expresses how the social security system serves the opposite of its purpose, it is merely a refined image of a miserable capitalist/individualist reality, and another obstacle for the working class.
Leftist Symbolism
The film does not attempt to hide its ideological and political orientation. It aims its arrows at the regime and everything it represents from the very first minutes. This confirms that the film’s agenda is not limited to the story of Mr. Blake and Katie, but rather it is an attempt to depict the infrastructure of modern British society as a whole under capitalism and bureaucracy, which are apparent through the systems in the film, in the face of the leftist objection that Mr. Blake’s story, in particular, symbolizes. The film indeed objects to the modern structure of societies in its essence and to all its productions, even if they seem to intersect and cohere with leftism. The film has a revolutionary vision, as the director does not accept half a solution represented in the form of social security. However, despite all this, we do not see unusual opposition. All that Mr. Blake did in protest of the system was to write a simple sentence on the wall of the Social Security Institution, which represents a trivial violation of the law that only affects Mr. Blake. His opposition is, at most, an attempt to defy the law by prosecuting himself through the same formal institutions whose bureaucracy he suffered from. Nevertheless, Mr. Blake symbolizes what leftism in Britain represents: the frustrated moral opposition that, albeit obtaining some of its rights, is losing the fight due to its exhausting efforts. He died of a sudden heart attack shortly before a meeting in which he was likely to win the life-long battle against bureaucracy so that he could earn a living. To that end, he represented leftism in a moral war he waged alone against a massive and brutal system that consumed all his energy and destroyed him when he was close to winning the simplest of all wars.
Conclusion
Most ideological works that carry a pre-action agenda are characterized by their repetition of resonant slogans that do not contain novel ideas or original artistic content at their core. However, the film’s director, Ken Loach, who has been preoccupied with the British working class since his cinematic career began, was able to start from the uniqueness of the individual’s human experience in understanding the infrastructure of the capitalist/bureaucratic system and not from ideology and theory. According to the director, Mr. Blake is a simple person and a fighter, who knows nothing about the left or right political wings, and does not understand what capitalism and bureaucracy are, yet he became a victim to these systems and resisted just like the left. Katie reads his last letter at his funeral, which represents the truth of his and the leftist struggle and symbolizes a revolutionary identity that protests and screams at the regime. The film concludes with a phrase no less tragic than what happened to its speaker and what he represents: “I am a man, not a dog. I, Daniel Blake, I demand you treat me with respect, nothing more and nothing less.”
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