Return, Remembrance and Redemption: Hauntology and the Topography of Trauma in The Virtues and This Is England ’88

Journal of British Cinema and Television 19.1 (2022): 45-66

Edinburgh University Press

https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2022.0603

© Edinburgh University Press 2022

www.euppublishing.com/jbctv

Introduction

In the conclusion of his article ‘After Laughter Comes Tears: Passion and Redemption in This Is England ’88’, Robert Murphy argues that if Shane Meadows ‘looked more like an intellectual and didn't come from Uttoxeter, we might be comparing him to Carl Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman’ (2013: 209). More than a quarter of a century on from what is widely considered his first directorial feature, Small Time (1996), Meadows's growing cult status situates him as something of the heir apparent to the tradition of British social realism embodied by Mike Leigh, Alan Clark and Ken Loach. Outside the gaze of the London-centric media, Meadows has captured the poetics of everyday life on the socio-economic margins in what Martin Fradley describes as that ‘deeply and perennially unfashionable’ region of England: the Midlands (2010: 280). Rather than truncate the scope of his appeal, Meadows's obsessive filmic return(s) to these regional ‘non-places’, paired with distinctive character types, recurrent thematic concerns, compulsive temporal settings and a signature aesthetic, have resulted in increasing academic forays into his work – summed up by his very own referential neologism: ‘Meadowsian’.

Much of what can be understood as Meadowsian can be found in the aforementioned lineage of traditional British social realism: deprived communities ‘ravaged by the inexorable march of post-industrialisation’ (FitzGerald and Godfrey 2013: 155), ‘childhoods lived out on the margins of a society that fails’ (Lebeau 2013: 879) and debilitating legacies of ‘post-patriarchal angst’ (Fradley and Kingston 2013: 173). In equal measure, Meadows's works, alongside those of contemporaries such as Paweł Pawlikowski, Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold, are a notional departure from this tradition, moving ‘towards a more poetic form of realism that rejects didacticism and explicit explorations of social issues, in favour of a more ambiguous image-led narration’ (Forrest 2013: 37). In the case of Meadows, this expresses itself in a symbiotic mise-en-scène wherein traditional British social realism becomes a substratum – a space of (un)familiarity in which specifically realist topic matter, such as working-class deprivation, is also imbued with an opaque unrealism.

Some of the more nuanced hallmarks of Meadows's authorship are included in a thematic preoccupation with the return and repetition of the past. From TwentyFourSeven (1997) and A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) through to Dead Man's Shoes (2004) and the This Is England quartet (2006–15), his corpus is haunted by cycles of return, post-traumatic memory and redemptive impasse. These thematic tropes have a history in Meadows's position at the ‘social and geographical margins’ (Fradley 2010: 290). Or, as Clair Schwarz puts it, ‘halfway between cinema and documentary’, the hyper-realism of which is a mediation between his autobiographical and interpersonal memory, using his authorial position to control ‘the biographies of those he knew through their re-presentation in his films’ (2013: 216). Indeed, Joseph (Stephen Graham), the central protagonist in the Channel 4 television series, The Virtues (2019), is an alter ego and reification of Meadows's own repressed abuse and post-traumatic breakdown. In a recent and extremely personal interview in the Guardian in 2019, he talked about how he repressed the memory of sexual abuse in his childhood: ‘It was like every ounce of me knew, but I didn't remember it, so I must've blocked it’ (Sawyer 2019). The Virtues, then, provides an interesting analytical window whereby the threefold framework of return, remembrance and redemption can be explored and defined as a Meadowsian archetype.

While this triadic narrative pattern appears historically throughout Meadows's catalogue, this article is concerned with The Virtues and its intertextual relationship with This Is England ’88 (Channel 4, 2011), and more specifically with the post-traumatic hauntings of their respective protagonists, Joseph (Stephen Graham) and Lol (Vicky McClure). Their ghostly iterations of the traumatic are the logical conclusion of a director who has been preoccupied with the supernatural aspects of psychological breakdown throughout his career. In Joseph and Lol, Meadows develops the supernatural themes of his earlier work: Darcy (Bob Hoskins) in TwentyFourSeven, Richard (Paddy Considine) and his brother Anthony (Tony Kebble) in Dead Man's Shoes, all appear as (quasi-)supernatural figures and direct manifestations of trauma. The Virtues and This Is England ’88 can be read as logical extensions, with Meadows augmenting his documentation of the ghostly with a centralisation of a solidified and sophisticated thesis.

In this hauntological exegesis, one can track the thematic tropes of return, remembrance and redemption. By exploring these latter ghostly additions, full consideration is given to the spectral and the ghostly as principal components of Meadows's oeuvre. It is worth noting that while several excellent pieces by Robert Murphy, David Rolinson and Faye Woods share a similar scope of research, a distinctly hauntological analysis has thus far not been adequately undertaken. Yet The Virtues and This Is England ’88 are quintessentially hauntological texts – albeit within a distinctly Meadowsian schema. They are characterised by the persistence of the past, ghostly manifestations of repressed trauma, distortions of temporality and elements of uncanny return: that is, a psychological experience of something as strangely familiar, incidents where a familiar thing or event manifests in an unsettling, eerie or taboo context. Set against the post-industrial endgame of neoliberalism, the promise of a future that has failed to materialise stains the landscape, thus also positing a collective haunting: a society plagued by the disavowing ghost of capitalist inertia (Fisher 2014: 8). Meadows deals with the trauma as a symptom of a temporality which is, in Derridian terms, deeply ‘out of joint’ (Derrida 1994: 2002).

Throughout his career, Meadows compulsively returns to the 1980s as a site of trauma. The persistent (re)appearances of Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism stab memory: ‘no such thing as society’ and the end of the welfare state. Along with Ronald Regan, Thatcher was the primary architect of what David Harvey has termed the ‘neoliberal turn’, which for many signalled the end of the future, a moment wherein something fundamental seemed to break: time itself (2007: 9). Thatcher and her legacy form a traumatic obstacle. As diagnosed by Andreas Huyssen, we are suffering from a ‘fundamental crisis in the imagination of alternative futures’, a state devoid of temporal structure thus denying ‘human agency and lock[ing] us into compulsive repetition’ (2003: 2–6). The ghost of Thatcher(ism) is conceptualised by Meadows, explored as a personal and collective wound which refuses to heal: a traumatic device that lingers in the air, tardily compressing time, space and place into a suffocating cacophony. Thatcher's interminable recurrences in the present are ‘akin to traumatic flashbacks’ appearing unbidden from the backdrop she has created, a cause and effect of what was, is and cannot be: the spectre of neoliberalism (Hadley and Ho 2010: 1).

Indeed, ‘trauma’, as defined by Cathy Caruth, is an event experienced ‘too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully unknown and [which] is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor’, generating an internal wound that ‘breach[es] in the mind's experiences of time, self and the world’ (1996: 4). In his recent work, trauma expert Michael S. Roth augments Caruth's definition, adding that trauma occurs when:

[A] memory becomes a charismatic wound, an injury that attracts everything to it. In trauma, the recollected past causes suffering, and the traumatic event has a magnetic appeal that pulls a wide constellation of experience … into its orbit. But the extreme event itself resists representation; it seems to defy the meaning making activity at the core of both the psychoanalytic and historical enterprise. (2011: xviii)

Without this logical ability to make meaning of trauma, it remains only an event. When it is re-experienced repeatedly it creates an effect, yet the effect is only one of affiliation; comprehension of causality remains absent and thus the memory remains unconfigured and unhealed.

Meadows's work is marked by the exploration of this unhealing ‘charismatic wound’. In it, he uses temporal dissonance and repetition compulsion as his primary methods of navigating the trauma of England's forgotten regions and the characters that populate it. In a process of transformation, trauma is reconfigured through its narrative dissolution into metaphor – the spectral and the figure of the ghost. Represented as such by Meadows, the hauntological transmutation of traumatic memory into the figure of the ghost offers a clear link to the past as the primary site of pain. Implicit in the spectre is the conflicting state(s) of temporality. The ghost confuses linear time: a figure directly out of the past, a phenomenon in which the past is permitted to exist in the present, a symptom of repressed knowledge which simultaneously questions the possibility of a future based on the evasion of the past. Meadows undertakes the (admittedly obfuscating) task of translating trauma to the screen, yet through his adroitness and his affinity to the subject-matter he is able to explicate the psychoanalytic concepts and psychological manifestations of trauma while further developing the impact of spectrality studies on the field of trauma theory. The efficacy of Meadows's articulation of the traumatic stems from a dialectical synthesis of trauma in a theoretical and experiential capacity. The result is an authentic, realistic portrayal of (post-)trauma which also mediates the complexity of its ghostly and uncanny properties, its liminal nature, ‘the sensuous and the non-sensuous, visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, reality and not-yet-reality, being and non-being’ (Lincoln and Lincoln 2015: 192).

While the primary focus of this article is concerned with the exposition of hauntology as a fundamental component of the Meadowsian, it is important to address the dispersal of authorship. The ascription of authorial power within the body of his work must take into account, among others, the crucial roles of Warp's Mark Herbert (frequent collaborator and producer), Paul Fraser (childhood friend and co-writer) and Jack Thorne (co-writer). Thorne's role in particular is worth highlighting as the co-writer of The Virtues and This Is England ’88 and the chief collaborator in terms of writing in all of Meadows's television work to date. Equally important for this analysis is the agency of key actors. The highly improvisational nature of the Meadows methodology, combined with the expectation for the cast to go through a contextual lived experience, counts as more than performance. This emotional and interpretative labour was clearly expressed by Vicky McClure: ‘I took Lol home with me every night. I remained in character for the majority of the time … It affects your real life’ (Petridis 2012). Moreover, the central role of Lol's character in the television series can, in part, be seen from the perspective of McClure's push for the story to incorporate a female perspective and to step away from a heavy focus on the masculine narrative. Stephen Graham, another actor frequently used by Meadows and discussed at length here in his roles as Combo in the This Is England dramas and Joseph in The Virtues, has also played a highly collaborative part in the construction of the work, and whose status, like McClure's, arguably shifts from performer to collaborator and co-author.

‘Out of joint’: hauntology and the return of trauma

Ghostly cycles of return and the persistence of the past are primary tropes of Meadows. These cycles are manifestations of the stagnation which colours the landscape of working-class communities in the post-industrial towns of the Midlands and the North. In these bleak spots and ‘sink estates’, which more than most have been devastated by the interminable quality of neoliberalism, ‘there seems to be political consensus that decline is pretty much inevitable and irreversible’ (Steans 2013: 71). Indeed, Meadows captures this broken state of being through the conflation of time and place into a distinct feeling – what Raymond Williams called a ‘signature aesthetic’ (1977: 128). With This Is England's late 1980s and 1990 settings and The Virtues set in the present day, Meadows catalogues nearly 40 years of generational stasis, with the spectre of Thatcherism a ‘powerful obstacle that occludes and forecloses an engagement with the political and social conditions that continue to affect the present’ (Hadley and Ho 2010: 4). The worlds presented are imbued with a downtrodden hopelessness, a depressive social topography which is as irreversible as it is recurrent. In these stationary sites of time and place, Meadows explores the poetics of return and repetition. His landscapes are defined by ghostly fragments of psychosocial memory – a national and personal history deeply devastated by the return of the past, the inertia of the present and the inability of the future. This elicits a hauntological understanding of how Meadows frames his films. Martin Fradley, Sarah Godfrey and Melanie Williams point out that, understood as ‘traces of a recent political past’, Meadows’ films are ‘haunted both thematically and textually, displaying posttraumatic symptoms of repetition and a therapeutic working-through of histories both personal and socio-political’ (2013: 11).

Jacques Derrida first coined the neologism ‘hauntology’ in Specters of Marx (1994) as a response to neoliberal theorist Francis Fukuyama's triumphalism in declaring the culmination of the Cold War and dissolution of the Soviet Union as marking ‘the end of history’. Derrida argued that unchecked capitalism would have devastating implications and that ‘ideas thought to be buried would keep returning, albeit in spectre-like traces’ (Riley 2017: 18). In his ghostly aphorism, Derrida laid the groundwork for a new way of simultaneously conceptualising our repressed past while coming to terms with our failed future. This ‘failure of the future’, as Mark Fisher put it, ‘meant the acceptance of a situation in which culture would continue without really changing, and where politics was reduced to the administration of an already established (capitalist) system’ (2014: 16).

The ghostly manifestation and persistence of the past is illustrated in Derrida's analysis of Hamlet. Here he explores re-visitations from the past in two ways. Firstly, he links the figure of the ghost to a ‘spectre of communism’, and second, he seizes on Hamlet's pronouncement that ‘the time is out of joint’. As Edyta Lorek-Jezińska and Katarzyna Więckowska put it: ‘Spectres disturb chronology and the order of precedence it establishes … Haunting transforms the linear time of the calendar into a time of waiting and uncertainty, of not knowing who and when may arrive’ (2017: 19). This suggests an unresolved issue that must be worked through. In a Meadowsian context, disjointed ‘distortions of temporality’ structurally and thematically organise the text (Forrest 2013: 39). Capturing the intra-psychic optics from the psychoanalytic field, the spectre of trauma persists with an omniscience which causes normative structural time to collapse. In her recent study of trauma theory, Gina Nordini asserts the psychological totality of the condition, which ‘becomes all-encompassing – absorbing experience in a way that leaves little room for existence outside of the trauma’ (2016: 21). Meadows treats trauma in just such a fashion, as a device aggregating Thatcher's historical socio-economic enterprise with the personal tragedy it fostered. The past and the future are at one, inhabiting the torpid present.

The depressive urban territories and dysfunctional familial relationships act together as traumatic inheritances, structurally and personally, within violence of an economic system that has actively forgotten them. In this regard The Virtues and This Is England ’88 are correlatives. Foreshadowed by elements of uncanny return, the narratological arch of the works is driven by the physical and mental re-emergence of repressed personal histories, signalling that time is indeed ‘out of joint’.

From the beginning, The Virtues is marked by the destabilising departure of Joseph's son. The dysfunctionality of the father/son relationship is an essential Meadowsian trope. As Martin Fradley and Seán Kingston note, the film-maker ‘has been compulsively drawn towards paternal figures and the contested institution of fatherhood’ (2013: 172). Be they truant, inept, unfortunate or abusive, fathers in his work remain an unstable site of fragile masculinity and an embodiment of the traumatic economics of neoliberalism. It is immediately evident that Joseph is such a man, scoured out by life and perilously near an emotional precipice. The subdued despondency of Joseph in the opening sequence of The Virtues as he returns home to an empty flat is subsequently juxtaposed with the stabilising suburban environment in which his beloved son lives with his ex and her new partner. As they enjoy their farewell supper around the dinner table, it is clear that, despite the amicable (if not loving) relationship between the adults, Joseph is a guest in this moment of sacred nuclear domesticity. Thus from the very opening scenes it is apparent that Meadows is configuring Joseph as a spectral figure, looking from the outside in, a ghost who is preoccupied (like many Meadows protagonists) with an as yet unrevealed episode of childhood trauma.

The emotional upheaval brought on by the psychological re-enactment of familial abandonment at the farewell dinner prompts a rupture in Joseph, wherein the traces of repressed memory and the return of the past begin to confront his psyche. His unravelling begins and he descends into the temporary anaesthesia of alcoholism. With his desperation and aggression surfacing, he encounters a preacher on his stagger home. This after-hours street sermon induces a litany of fragmentary flashbacks from his childhood: the departure of his little sister, scenes from a children's home, priests and teenagers walking ominously into the woods. In a dual dialogue with these intermittent intrusions and the unseen evangelist, a drunk and clearly upset Joseph conveys his initial inability to process the re-emergence of his forgotten personal history, muttering: ‘Not yet, not now, not ready for that yet.’

This evangelical episode introduces a hauntological and classically Meadowsian interposing of different temporalities. Throughout The Virtues, the use of different film stocks not only denote different time frames but also different stages of traumatic reformation in the memory. The grainy snatches of VHS footage – employed regularly by Meadows throughout his career and ‘today an accepted signifier of memory’ (Elliot 2013: 86) – are intercut into the present-day narrative with increasing frequency as Joseph makes a return to Ireland. In between these two zones of time, Meadows incarnates Joseph as a ghostly wanderer, navigating the spatio-temporal zones of past and present and looking to excavate what he has subconsciously concealed. The liminal nature of Joseph's post-traumatic process of attempted remembrance further figures him in Derridian terms of spectrality. As he is unable to occupy or understand either zone, the future is inevitably inconceivable: ‘time is out joint’. Until Joseph is able to (re-)engage with his repressed memories, he will remain in a paradoxical state of transitory stasis. The hauntological mechanics of return elicit the need for a reconciliation and, without this, Meadows's characters are unable to occupy time and environment in a normative sense. In his analysis of the complex relationship between ghosts and chronological time, Jeffrey Weinstock describes the ghost as ‘a symptom of repressed knowledge’ calling into question ‘the possibilities of a future based on avoidance of past’ (2004: 6).

Understood liminally and from an anthropological purview, the notion of return initiates a rite of passage wherein Meadows's ghosts inchoately oscillate between states, as anthropologist Arnold Gennep puts it: ‘Whoever passes from one to another finds himself physically and magico-religiously in a special situation … he wavers between two worlds’ (1960: 18). For Meadows, this ‘special situation’ is the liminal terrain between the repressed past and the haunted present, neither here nor there, and the process of return is ‘played out on the boundary line between inside and outside, which it has as its function ceaselessly to trace and retrace’ (Derrida 1981: 133). In his post-traumatic return to the site of the repressed, Joseph can also be read as something of a meta-ghost: a ghostly presence haunted by ghosts. He himself seems literally to return from the dead to reunite with his sister Anna (Helen Behan) – as she herself confesses: ‘I thought you were dead.’ Indeed, throughout the text Joseph is reminded of his ghostly form, with Craigie (Mark O'Halloran) and Damon (Lewis Brophy) also likening his return to coming back from the dead.

Like Joseph, Lol is a character plagued by the cyclical nature of post-traumatic return in Meadows's chronicle of Thatcherism. Across both This Is England ’86 (Channel 4, 2010) and ’88, a hauntological analysis is framed by the centralisation of Lol's traumatic (re-)encounters with her father. As David Rolinson and Faye Woods note, the works are chiefly concerned with ‘the weight of the past as revealed in returns, hauntings and traumatic memory’ (2013: 186). The unforeseen return of Mick (Johnny Harris), the absentee father of Lol and Kelly (Chanel Creswell), to the domestic fold generates ‘cataclysmic emotional and psychological fallout… prompting Lol's psychological fragmentation and a profound schism in the formerly close-knit group of friends’ (Fradley and Kingston 2013: 182).

In the configuration of unabated horror, the return of Mick is a semiotic reminder of unreckoned experience. In This Is England ’86, he is a ghoulish spectre, appearing unexpectedly and suddenly, dominating, destabilising and denouncing Lol's historical narrative. Not only does his beleaguered repossession of the domestic space physically displace Lol, but his reclaiming of familial bonds with Lol's mother (Katherine Dow) and younger sister Kelly leaves Lol in a position of deepened estrangement. Mick's homecoming actively calls back the inaction of Lol's family when he sexually abused her. With the narrative climax of Lol's violent retribution and the murder of her father, he becomes an (un)dead manifestation of her literal tormenting ghost: an obdurate symbol of unprocessed trauma.

With death unable to erase the presence of Mick, Lol's mental deterioration in This Is England ’88 is akin to Joseph's in The Virtues, as both characters’ pasts fold in on their respective presents. For Meadows, psychological trauma can be understood in spatio-temporal terms, a liminal experience which is characterised by ‘the hauntings of and by characters, the traces that return and retreat’ (Holdsworth 2011: 38). The figure of the ghost forces Meadows's protagonists to confront the burden of the past and its unacknowledged spectres. In the case of Lol's encysted trauma, the history of her sexual abuse and the feelings of guilt surrounding the wrongful incarceration of Combo trigger a transgression. Memory is transformed into a living experience: the ghost.

This ‘experience of being haunted is an encounter with something that is not known and that possibly cannot be comprehended, and whose “appearance” produces a breakdown in cognitive functions’ (Lorek-Jezińska and Więckowska 2017: 19). Joseph's initial intra-psychic breakdown in the first episode of The Virtues is similar to the reaction of Lol when confronted with the initial apparition of Mick. She proceeds in a state of mental refutation: denying the ghost's illogical presence and her own reality. Lol's next spectral encounter is in the closing sequences of the first episode of This Is England ’88, when Mick appears in the bathroom and Lol makes the decision not to acknowledge this ghostly manifestation as a symptom of her repressed trauma. She assures herself that ‘this isn't real … this isn't happening … I'll be OK’ as she proceeds to walk out of the room. As will be discussed in the following section, Lol's rejection of the ghostly as a lived experience immobilises her trauma, signalling an initial negation of the ethical potential of haunting. Indeed, ‘in Derrida's formulation, the spectre is simultaneously from the past and the future, returning like a repressed memory which must be recognized and acknowledged in order to enable a move forward’ (ibid.)

Clair Schwarz notes that ‘the figure of the ghost becomes the participative dead subject who impinges on the living world’ (2013: 215). However, if ghosts are indeed rational expressions of the traumatic, how then does one account for the uncanny leakages in the material? Do these not undermine the rationality of such an interpretation? Throughout This Is England ’88, the spectre of Mick haunts each frame, remaining in shot after Lol. As Schwarz asks: ‘If his ghost is a pure psychological manifestation of her mind, why does he linger in the bathroom, the sitting room, the church and the hospital even after the means of his manifestation has left?’ (ibid.: 214). By viewing the haunting, the viewer becomes privy to the ghost: ‘Haunting is to let ourselves be haunted – by our own ghosts and those of others’ (Lorek-Jezińska and Więckowska 2017: 19).

‘He was in my bathroom yesterday’: speaking to the spectre

Avery Gordon argues that ‘we must learn how to identify hauntings and reckon with ghosts, must learn how to make contact with what is without a doubt often painful, difficult, and unsettling’ (1997: 23). As spectres of the past return to haunt the presents of both Joseph and Lol, The Virtues and This Is England ’88 explore the psychological identification, navigation and (un)reckoning of remembering. In narrative terms, once the return motif is established and the liminal process is underway, Meadows explores his protagonists’ interactions and transactions with the spectral. Understood in a hauntological schema, the mechanism of the ghost in Meadows's texts has a dialectical quality – presenting an opportunity to excavate and cognitively assimilate trauma. Alternatively, a rejection of, or an ability to process, spectral encounters can immobilise and intensify the traumatic reverberations of the past, thus transforming the liminal process into a depressive state of purgatory.

In The Virtues, memory and the process of remembering are inexorably tied to space. Meadows negotiates Joseph's repressed pain through the spatial (re-)encounters with the site of his lost childhood. The opening sequence of the second episode interposes Joseph's dreary trek back to the fictitious Irish town of Ballybraigh with VHS footage of a young Joseph departing the same landscape in earlier years. This temporal interposition is a recurrent technique deployed throughout The Virtues, juxtaposing the fleeing from and the returning to trauma, with both states gravitating gradually towards remembrance of the encysted. Betwixt and between these two notions of time, Meadows forms Joseph as a ghostly incarnation of Walter Benjamin's flâneur – wandering between the spatio-temporal zones of past and present and looking to excavate what he has subconsciously concealed.

In Joseph's psycho-geographical retracing of Ballybraigh, a dialogue between location and personal memory coalesces present and past experience into a singular uncanny event. In the third episode, this bilateral experience of spatial memory reaches a climatic interchange when Joseph returns to The Towers – the boys’ home where he was left, the site of his trauma. The episode opens with a premonition, with Meadows using VHS footage to recollect the moment that the young, visibly disquieted Joseph was first taken to the home. Meadows then cuts back to the present, with Joseph looking at a photograph of his son and then deciding that ‘he might go into town and see the old sites’. Thus, prompted by and engaging with the returning spectre of the past, Joseph chooses to return to the shadowy outposts, where the stain of place never ceases.

In retracing the ‘old sites’, he visits the cemetery to see his parents’ grave before inevitably walking to The Towers – a peregrination of loss, melancholia and remembrance. Returning there, Joseph, in Benjaminian terms, is looking to uncover, ‘to extract, to cite, what has remained inconspicuously buried beneath’ (Benjamin 1999: 77). Boarded up and abandoned to its ruinous decay, the building itself is a ghastly exteriorisation of Joseph's trauma. The physical act of breaking into the boys’ home is an act of psychological trespass: Joseph is actively seeking a transaction with the forgotten past of the space. As he ascends the stairwell of this Meadowsian haunted house, it is evident that it is awash with spectres of the past. In a metaphysical exchange with the structure, temporality completely collapses into a singular vividly (re)lived experience. As he walks down the corridor, the upstairs hallway is at once besieged by life and memory flooding from the space, seemingly of its own volition – faces, voices and objects (signified again by the interposed VHS footage) all imbue the abandoned structure. Time and space transmute into a plane where the past and the present exist co-efficiently as an act of re-experiencing. The clarity and abundance of what returns overwhelms Joseph and, in a state of physical and mental shock, he escapes from the haunted structure before the traumatic memory can reformulate.

The spatial poetics of Joseph's encounter with the abandoned boys’ home can be understood in relation to Kathleen Stewart's reflection on the process of ruination:

Objects that have decayed into fragments and traces draw together a transient past with the very desire to remember. Concrete and embodying absence, they are confined to a context of strict immanence, limited to the representation of ghostly apparitions. Yet they haunt. They become not a symbol of loss but the embodiment of the process of remembering itself; the ruined place itself remembers and grow lonely. (1996: 92)

Indeed, Joseph's sensory experiences of his spatial environment invoke a convergence of the internal and external, an unofficial history whose narrative lies in places and objects. Approached via Michel De Certeau's theory that ‘objects and words have hollow places in which a past sleeps’ (1984: 162), this entails that there is a remembered reality beneath the visible experience of space: an abandoned history of places and objects. Guided by the ghostly reiterations of his past and their unconscious cues, Joseph is beckoned to this site of symbiotic haunting.

The dialectical nature of Joseph's dialogue with the spectre of memory can be seen as an efficacious rendering of his haunting. Indeed, the principles of hauntology involve a decision: ‘The appearance of the ghost opens up the choice between welcoming or rejecting the spectre’ (Lorek-Jezińska and Więckowska 2017: 13). While it would be fair to judge that Joseph does not actually welcome the return of childhood painful memories, they guide him with cognitive cues on which he chooses to act, from his decision to return to Ballybraigh to his ghostly meanderings of The Towers. His revisitation of and communication with the forgotten ruins of his past facilitates the kairotic conditions for the repressed trauma to come to the fore. By listening to and taking cues from the spectral, the optics of Joseph's tragic childhood return with an increasing lucidity. Indeed, Joseph's series of Derridian transactions with the spectral are ultimately cathartic in nature, revealing the repressed and offering a chance of redemption.

While Meadows outlines the transformative potential of the figure of the spectre in The Virtues, in This Is England ’88 we see the destructive effects it can have on the individual. In a suffocating state of spiritual torment, Lol is haunted by the demonic ghost of her murdered father. As previously outlined, she initially is unwilling, and indeed unable, to process the reality of this recurring transgression. At first failing to acknowledge the radical discontinuity of the past's ghostly manifestation in the present, Lol becomes imprisoned in a deconstructed topography of time – a ‘paradoxical, liminal space between material existence and inexistence’ (Hetman 2017: 87). Her suffering simmers to the surface as the psychological terror of the haunting completely overwhelms her. In the first episode, when she visits the health centre, the nurse, Evelyn (Helen Behan), expresses concern about Lol's mental state. Evelyn's attempts to sympathise and understand Lol's trauma are met with belligerence: ‘Some sort of fucking psychiatrist now are ya?’

Yet Evelyn proves to be a spiritual confidante, a figure in direct opposition to Mick. As Murphy puts it: ‘If Lol is plagued by her demonic father, she also has a guardian angel in the shape of Evelyn, the community nurse’ (2013: 207). And while ‘Lol's dislocation is further articulated in the confrontation with the community nurse – a woman who appears to signify all that Lol lacks’, the efficacy of Evelyn's saintly character in both ’88 and ’90 is not without its complications (Fitzgerald and Godfrey 2013: 157). A cipher for the welfare state – a nurse, social worker, friend and spiritual guide – her role is both overdetermined and idealised, with further issues accompanying the conservative subtext of her religious discourse. Despite this, the friendship which forms between Evelyn and Lol is arguably ‘Meadows's most sympathetic and compelling rendering of female experience and community’ (ibid.).

Caught between Evelyn and Mick, Lol's liminal state is thus a psychospiritual battleground heavily imbued with the numinous: a post-industrial, Thatcherite re-embodiment of the angel/demon dichotomy. When Lol returns and subsequently apologises to Evelyn in the second episode, she is offered support and a chance of salvation – an opportunity to work through her suffocating state of perdition. In Evelyn's redemptive sisterly solidarity, it is evident that she can both listen and hear the reality of Lol's haunting. Her candid exegesis is needed for a matriarch such as Lol to open up, ask for and accept help. Their dialogue demonstrates Evelyn's understanding of Lol's haunting from both a spiritual and a traumatic point of view, simultaneously offering reassurance, guidance and empathy when Lol confides in her:

Lol: I can see him … I can see my dad. I'm not talking in my dreams, it's not even like he is a blurry vision. He was in my bathroom yesterday, so I spoke to him – and he replied. I know he is there.

Evelyn: He is not there.

Lol: I know I'm not going insane.

Evelyn: You're not.

Lol: Because he is there.

Evelyn: You've been so traumatised, you haven't had the chance to deal with it properly and because you are not at peace.

Lol: I'll never be at peace, I can never be at peace.

Evelyn: You can.

Lol: I can't. I have so many secrets buried in me, that I just …

Evelyn: Do you realise that none of this is your fault? You know that, none of this is your fault. And when you believe that you will start to get better, you'll start to feel better. You need help, I want to help you. I am going to help you. I am here and you can come in here anytime and talk, we can talk.

Lol: Please help me.

Evelyn: You are not alone, you know that. I will help you and you will find peace. This day shall pass.

The recuperative nature of this dialogue initially seems to invite a potentially cathartic resolution, with the function of the haunting helping Lol to verbalise her trauma and to accept help. Indeed, in her ensuing visit to the incarcerated Combo she acknowledges the enormous debt that she owes him for taking responsibility for Mick's murder. In this scene of repentance, Lol takes agency in an attempt to psychologically work through her guilt. Their collective (on-screen) history and shared personal memories are (re)framed. We learn that this prison visit is her first since Combo's redemptive act of atonement in This Is England ’86. A further unwitnessed incident from their personal history, this time one to which the viewer is privy, is reconfigured in an act of personal avowal. Lol confesses that in their conversation outside the factory in the first This Is England (2007) film, where she rejected his show of affection and called the night that they had spent together ‘the worst night of my life’, was in fact a lie, and she admits that ‘no one has ever been that gentle with me. I'm sorry I said that’. This act of amelioration denotes that, despite her haunting, Lol is trying actively to confront the burden of her past and the secrets buried in her. Not only does this exonerate Combo, but this is a mutual cleansing with both him and Lol able to (re)address a critical incident permeating their past.

In the triadic Freudian framework – something which Paul Elliot (2013) explores in relation to Dead Man's Shoes and TwentyFourSeven – Lol is showing the signs of working through her trauma, or as Meadows succinctly puts it in a short documentary that accompanied Dead Man's Shoes, ‘evicting all that fucking guilt’. In keeping with the Christmas-set instalment which locates Lol's haunting in a mise-en-scène of redemptive Christianity, she seeks sanctuary from the demonic spectre of Mick at Midnight Mass. After a day of potentially transformative psychospiritual interactions with Evelyn and Combo, the setting hints at the potential for a personal struggle for peace. However, in line with the stifling and invasive spatial poetics of the ghost in This Is England ’88, which has already seen Mick's dank physical presence and awful wheezing invade spaces of domestic tranquillity, turning the family living room and the bathroom into haunted sites, he horrifically returns, sitting in the pew behind her. His apparition in the church adds a further layer of horror, seeming to mock her attempts to find solace in spirituality: ‘Like a brazen and insistent demon he has followed her to where she might have expected sanctuary. He remorselessly torments her, countering the good effects of the support she's had from Trev, Combo and Evelyn’ (Murphy 2013: 205). The horrifying persistence of the ghost of Mick is too much for Lol, trapped in this purgatorial state whereby a traumatic memory has transformed into a living experience, and she takes the matter of redemption into her own hands.