56 Up (2012)

There is so much one can say about the Up series of documentaries, but in this post I’ll confine myself to a few observations about the latest installment, 56 Up (2012). This film was the first in the series for quite a while to vary the order in which the participants appeared. For a long time, Neil appeared last while Tony appeared first, and now they are switched. I’m not quite sure what impact these changes have on our perceptions of the participants and their relation to each other (if any), but I liked the change of format. One of my favorite things about the series as a whole is how much the original intention of the series (to show the continued dominance of the class system in contemporary British society) has changed, partly because the nature of class privilege (and the manner in which it is expressed) has changed so much since 1964, but mostly because the series’ participants have insistently talked back to Michael Apted and have resisted his attempts to make them personify one tidy category or another. The self-referential dimensions of the series have increased with each episode, to the point that many of the participants now spend a lot of their time talking about their feelings about participating in this project. 56 Up embraces this fact more than previous episodes, as we see when Suzy and Nick are brought together and talk about their experiences with the show. My favorite moment in this particular episode comes right at the end when Apted remarks that Tony seems quite racist, something that Tony vehemently denies. It’s such a symptomatic moment because race is so rarely mentioned in the series at any time. The sea change in Britain’s population since the 1960s, the extent to which it’s become a multicultural society, is what has blindsided the Up series most since it began (even though it was underway in 1964). In that respect, this series is, in many ways, increasingly a memorial to a Britain that was, rather than the Britain that exists today.