Sheffield on Screen: The Full Monty (1997)

In Freudian psychoanalysis, fear of emasculation is understood as castration anxiety, which begins with the recognition of sexual difference; i.e. the shocking realisation that not everyone possesses a phallus. In The Full Monty, however, it is Gaz’s glimpse of a woman proudly urinating whilst standing up (from his hiding place inside of a toilet cubicle during a women-only Chippendales show) that sparks his fear of emasculation: “When women start pissing like us… that’s it. We’re finished... obsolete”.

Released in 1997, but set ambiguously in the mid-1990s (at least 1993 according to Gaz’s oft-worn Sheffield United shirt), The Full Monty invites the viewer into a Sheffield in crisis. Throughout the 1980s the industries that Sheffield’s economy was based on, steel and coal, had begun to disintegrate. The film opens with an excerpt from Sheffield: City on the Move, a 1971 promotional video that presents a glowingly optimistic vision of Sheffield’s future designed to attract investment; a vision that is, in the words of its narrator, “built on Sheffield’s primary industry: Steel”. Between the film’s release in 1971 and 1993 over 40,000 jobs were lost in Sheffield’s steel industry, primarily due to the ideological policies of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. This sharp rise in unemployment had a dramatic effect on the socio-cultural landscape of Sheffield, and its physical landscape was transformed by plant closures: in 1990, for example, the Meadowhall shopping centre opened on the site of a former steelworks.

Caught somewhere between this deindustrialisation and the newly-developing service economy, The Full Monty and its characters embody a kind of post-industrial weirdness. When they aren’t at the job club smoking and playing cards while fruitlessly hoping for work, protagonists Gaz and Dave, two unemployed steelworkers, seem to spend their time aimlessly wondering the gloomy streets of Sheffield with Gaz’s son Nathan, stealing (“liberating”) pipes and girders, and getting up to mischief. “Can’t we do normal things sometimes?” Nathan asks his dad as they, for some reason, stand atop a sinking car in the canal in Attercliffe. The film is driven by its characters’ search for work and meaning in strange new times, but also by Gaz’s fraught relationship with his son: Nathan’s mum has moved in with her new partner in the more affluent Crosspool, and is threatening to claim sole custody of Nathan unless Gaz can pay £700 in child support. After coming across the aforementioned Chippendales show, and estimating a thousand-strong crowd, Gaz hatches a plan.

It takes a lot of persuasion for Gaz to convince others to join in with his plan to form a self-described “Yorkshire version” of Chippendales (an American male striptease act), not least because of their casual sexism and homophobia. After recruiting his best friend Dave, their unemployed foreman Gerald, and Lomper, a former colleague that they save from a suicide attempt, they hold auditions in an abandoned steel plant and recruit two more members, Horse and Guy. These deserted steelworks form much of the film’s backdrop; whether out of habit, nostalgia, or a lack of other accessible places, derelict steel plants become social spaces and, in order to hide their dancing from others, their rehearsal spaces. Within these abandoned plants, in a parody of their working lives, it is former foreman Gerald that devises their striptease routine and teaches the group how to dance. The men are initially shy and reluctant about dancing, even pretending to be stealing pipes when they are arrested for trespassing during a rehearsal, but they come to find joy in their newfound retreat from stultifying masculinity: in a famous scene, later recreated by the now King Charles III on a 1998 visit to Sheffield, the group can’t resist dancing in the dole queue as Donna Summer’s ‘Hot Stuff’ plays over the sound system.

Masculinity is a key theme in The Full Monty. The film takes place at a moment when thousands of working class men found themselves severed from the productive, unionised labour that gave them a sense of purpose and dignity. The story does not find its resolution in a simple return to a lost idea of masculinity, however, and the casual homophobia and sexism that Gaz expresses at the start of the film is challenged. In one particularly revealing scene, the group are reading Cosmopolitan magazine and scrutinising the women in the photographs: to the horror of the soon-to-be Yorkshire Chippendales, Dave points out that “they’re going to be looking at us like that... What if, next Friday, four hundred women turn around and say “he’s too fat, he’s too old, and he’s a pigeon-chested little tosser””. The prospect of the male gaze turning back upon itself is terrifying, but ultimately Gaz and friends find some kind of liberation in allowing themselves to be vulnerable and even ridiculous. The film celebrates, rather than fears, the increasing cultural and economic power of women in society: in one scene a bench of young women wolf-whistle as Guy jogs past them, amused (“show us your pecs!”). As the men strip off in the climax of the film the smiles on their faces, and those of the audience, are genuine, even if the actors themselves reportedly had to share a bottle of scotch to pluck up the courage for their final reveal.

Onstage, the Yorkshire Chippendales begin their routine dressed in security guard uniforms, a play on the typical police costumes that are associated with male strippers. In fact, the figure of the security guard recurs throughout The Full Monty. Twice the protagonists’ plans are foiled by security guards, Lomper’s suicide attempt is even attributed to his new position as a security guard in the abandoned steelworks they used to work in, and the prospect of a role as a security guard at a local ASDA briefly splits Dave from the group, to Gaz’s disappointment (“you’re worth more than that, Dave”). The Full Monty is embedded in a key local instantiation of the Western shift from industrial, manufacturing-based economies, characterised by strong working-class communities, towards the contemporary more atomised, precarious service-based economies. The security guard represents a shift towards the latter. For all its faults, organised factory labour brought about, through hard-fought union struggle, a sense of real collective power. In contrast the security guard works alone, often keeping unsociable hours, and ultimately serves the interests of capital through the protection of private property. With the Yorkshire Chippendales dressed as security guards, stripping off their uniform and throwing it into an audience consisting of both women and men, The Full Monty sticks two fingers up to the systematic breaking down of working class communities, as well as to the outdated, heteropatriarchal understanding of what it is to be a man.

The Full Monty is possibly Sheffield’s finest cinematic output, winning a BAFTA for Best Film in 1997 and earning nominations for four Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Score, and Best Original Screenplay) in the year of Titanic and Good Will Hunting. Robert Carylye, fresh from a starring role in Trainspotting the year prior, adopts a passable Sheffield accent and performs Gaz’s oscillation between lackadaisical charm and reaching desperation to perfection. The Full Monty rejects the notion of a homogeneous, reactionary working class, and is instead a paean to the community spirit, good humour, and genuine weirdness that always persists through adversity in places like Sheffield.

The next time you are faced with the choice between adventure and mundanity, between playfulness and diligence, I would encourage you to at least consider the advice offered by Gaz in the denouement of the film: “You’ve got the rest of your fucking life to wear a suit, man”.