floorboards. Loach once said that music enhances a film “by its
absence,” by which he meant that whatever emotion a viewer
feels should come out of the character and events, the situation
itself, and not from music added to the mix. In Riff-Raff,
Susan’s singing is one such event, and Loach chooses musical
numbers that both yank the viewer’s heartstrings and inch the
story forward: “With a Little Help from My Friends” when she
is getting by with just that; the folk song “Carrickfergus” by
The Dubliners when she is farther down on her luck (“I’ll sing
no more now ’til I get a drink”). On the soundtrack, Stewart
Copeland’s spare, jazzy piano melodies are alternately zany
and mournful. They act as bridges in a soundscape that is other-
wise diegetic: chainsaws buzzing, hammers banging, a worker
off screen somewhere whistling the snake-charmer song.
(Copeland, best known as the drummer for The Police, has
made many film and television soundtracks; he also provided
synthier, more apprehensive beats for Raining Stones.) At Riff-
Raff’s fiery climax, when Stevie and his friend burn down a
building in a glorious expression of rage and destructiveness,
piano, strings, and drum mingle with the crackle of flames,
while shattered glass bursts from the windowpanes like cym-
bals, and the score melts into the whine of sirens.I
t’s easy to see that riff-raffis a study of class, race, and
social injustice, but what makes it a riveting work of art rather
than a manifesto is how fully realized its ensemble is. Each
worker on the site is a complete person with his own goals
and way of being, and Susan, who in less adept hands would be a
delicate songbird crushed by fate, is something far more interest-
ing—a dime-a-dozen mediocrity whose artistic delusions exist in
tandem with poverty and addiction. On the night of the pub gig
she returns to the stage after Stevie’s friend Larry, a shambling,
politically engaged motormouth played with sloppy charm by
Ricky Tomlinson, shames the crowd, and wins them over with a
cover of, appropriately, “With a Little Help from My Friends.”
Afterward she is exuberant, telling Stevie she could “feel the music
comin’ out,” and speculating about a man in the crowd who might
have been a member of the press. Susan toggles between depres-
sion and fantasy, telling Stevie that she can’t commit to him
because she “could be going on the road anytime soon.”
Bad singing is often easy cinematic shorthand for decadence,
ego, and hubris. You know that when Dirk Diggler steps into therecording studio in Boogie Nights to assert, unconvincingly,
“You got the touch,” he has completely lost histouch—with
reality. Rock bottom is nothing other than the aspiration to be a
rock star. But Susan isn’t a terriblesinger. She’s not Florence
Foster Jenkins, portrayed by Meryl Streep in the 2016 biopic as
a caterwauling, feather-clad squawker who maintains her dig-
nity with an indomitable presence of self. Florence Foster Jenkins
is the story of an extremely wealthy woman whose enablers and
adorers go to great and expensive lengths to allow her to live in
her fantasy. Susan is deluded, but the extent of her delusion,
much like her socioeconomic position, is marginal. She’s no
better or worse than any other average girl giving it her best at
karaoke. No one lies to her and tells her otherwise. Riff-Raff
thus avoids making Susan into a spectacle, as much as it avoids
giving her the boldness, ego, and charisma of Jenkins. Susan
would never say, as Jenkins does, “People may say I couldn’t
sing, but no one can ever say I didn’tsing.” She’s far too inse-
cure for that. Her singing isn’t a way of seizing life—life slips
out of her grasp. She tries and tries, and gets nowhere. The
voice only strains.
Jenkins’s musical failure, like Dirk Diggler’s, has something to
do with entitlement—the feeling that if you want something you
should have it, and that other people should be made to listen,
and applaud your efforts. Susan doesn’t approach music that
way. She never explains why she wants to sing or what she likes
about it, though it seems to have something to do with losing
herself, with the feeling of the music coming through her. Still,
there’s a meekness to her spirit, some essentially self-abnegating
quality to her performance. She lacks the passion, for example, of
Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character Sadie in the 1995 film Georgia—
the hard-living, raccoon-eyed, less talented sister of a famous
folk singer. Leigh’s Sadie is pathetic, exposed, and riveting. Her
eight-minute rendition of a Van Morrison number onstage at an
AIDS benefit is at once uninspired and achingly raw. By contrast,
Susan’s big moment is being mocked by casting directors as she
belts out a dismal version of “Every Time We Say Goodbye.”
They tell her to “really sell the number,” that they want to see her
“living and dying at the same time”—as if that’s not already
what she’s doing. The last time we see Susan singing, she’s busk-
ing in the subway, and gathering the loose change to buy heroin.
She and Stevie break up soon after.
A beautiful voice carries you away from the singer and toward
something else—reflection, reverie. It transports. Bad singing, on
the other hand, calls attention only to itself. It returns you to the
singer, to either the limits of her instrument or the emotional
need compelling her performance. It exerts a gross fascination,
pulling you in. You can’t turn away from it. But in Riff-Raff,
Susan’s style of mediocre singing is wholly ignorable. You can
turn away from it as easily as the upper classes turn away from
the working classes. That’s what makes it so moving on screen.
It’s an example of thwarted ambition that is both more common
than we’ll ever know and highly particular. By making Susan’s
failure nothing special, Loach makes it something far worthier of
our attention—he makes it human.Christine Smallwoodhas written reviews and essays in The New
Yo r k e r, Bookforum, and Harper’s Magazine. Her fiction has been
published in The Paris Review, n+1, and Vice.July-August 2019|FILMCOMMENT| 23InRiff-Raff, Susan’s style of mediocre singing is wholly ignorable. You can turn away from it as easily as
the upper classes turn away from the working classes. That’s what makes it so moving on screen.