Attack the Block, 2011, 88min
Montag, 25.01.2016, 20:00h, in der Zülpi290

This resembles a bad sci-fi movie … local people invaded by aliens …
You are left with no choice but to leave.

Monsters, race, and rewriting South London’s outer spaces
by Lorrie Palmer partly taken from ejumpcut.org

The thematic and visual center of Attack the Block is the looming monolithic Wyndham Tower, dotted with blazing exterior lights and dark windows, shot with slow tilts on an extreme low angle to suggest a slate-grey spaceship parked in the wilds of South London. The survival traditions of science fiction—a scrappy band of former enemies works together, a besieged stronghold becomes a living character, and anti-heroes find redemption—frame Cornish’s cinematic city in microcosm.

Set on Bonfire Night[5] in the capital, the film maintains its focus on the five young muggers who confront recently-graduated nursing student, Sam (Jodie Whittaker), outside the tower block where they live. The camera stays with them throughout, as they lead it (and us) into the depths of their urban turf. They stand in contrast to, on the one hand, the genuine gangsta hardcase, Hi-Hatz (Jumayne Hunter), whose relatively small-time drug operation nevertheless dominates the community. On the other side, they confront the police, who are predisposed to perceive the poor, the working class, and people of color—particularly teenagers—as disproportionally disruptive.

It is in this specific social and spatial context that Cornish foregrounds the tower block teens’ survival instincts, proposing that “people secretly know that, when push comes to shove, a gang like this are gonna be stronger, more together, and more capable to deal with situations”[6] than those who are less familiar with London’s rough edges. Attack the Block upends more than just genre conventions of representation. Its young protagonists rewrite the negative stereotypes linked to poor urban youth in which decay, criminality, and pathology conflate inner city residents with their environment. The gang disrupts the discourses that frame the precise “genre” of city space—public housing—that most reflects their marginal social status within it. Moses wounds the first alien after it crashes through the roof of parked car mere feet away from where the gang is robbing Sam. Led by him, the boys (including Pest, Dennis, Jerome, and Biggz) pursue the alien and kill it, unaware that it has bigger, meaner friends falling right behind it. These deep black neon-fanged predators literalize monstrosity, thereby disconnecting its symbolic stigma from the gang. We can read these monsters as symbolizing the potential danger lurking in the dark corners of public housing, a danger that has long been part of the debate around the social, economic, and political realities of these sites. And it all began with an architectural vision.

Postwar public housing in Britain

Utilizing the rational blueprint of Modernism, the designers and planners of public housing in postwar Britain envisioned a progressive synthesis of efficiency and community during the heyday of high-rise council estates that began during the widespread reconstruction of the period. Driven by the same Modernist urban dreams of Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus School and by the Le Corbusier-inspired International Style pioneered in the 1920s and 1930s, the high-density vertical city was to re-direct urban expansion upward instead of outward. This was the historic moment when old Victorian slums could be cleared and wartime bombed-out neighborhoods razed. The centralized government, with local councils acting as proxy, adopted public housing as the civic and economic centerpiece of the modernized welfare state. Architects channeled the working class and the urban poor through the twinned imperatives of social engineering and institutional beneficence. The 1950s and ‘60s saw affordable housing projects shift from the green zone, low-rise construction of rural Britain’s New Towns[7] toward the high-rise tower blocks of the modern city. Prefabricated concrete panels could be stacked on-site using construction cranes to build higher than old-style scaffolding had previously made possible. The design component of exposed concrete, inside and out, of these mass-produced units was in keeping with the Modernist style and imagined by its supporters to be more honest, eschewing decorative flourishes. Concrete was inexpensive, flexible, and believed to be nearly indestructible.

The result, not surprisingly, precipitated the necessarily cold affect of glass, steel, and concrete. The artistic and architectural rhetoric of the Modernist movement was itself a form of language, organized around the combined impacts of social engineering and style, as the designers’ intent was conflated with a perceived logical outcome. The conceptual disconnect within the Modernist aesthetic was that it was detached from living space. British planners and architects were influenced by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation housing development in Marseille (1947-1952) and its aspirational “streets in the sky.”

Far from the pristine whiteness that the postwar planners and architects imagined for their concrete utopias, the reality is that cracking, chipping, and staining from air pollution inevitably accompany the oppressively grey dampness of concrete, especially as it deteriorates over time.

Politicians and the media routinely focus on the exterior deterioration of tower blocks, creating in the public imaginary a symbolic association with social problems in contemporary British cities. However, this representation often masks a more general underlying antipathy toward the poor, working class, and immigrant populations housed at these sites. It also aims to justify pulling down the blocks to make way for privatized redevelopment schemes rather than restore the existing dwellings and provide consistent on-site maintenance and management. South London council estates like Aylesbury and the Heygate (a primary shooting location for Attack the Block) have become symbols of urban blight and the failed social engineering of postwar housing policies. The discourses in tabloid and mainstream media brand the residents and their communities as deviant, criminal, or abnormal.

Monsters, race, and the tower block

Often underlying stigmatizing representations of the residents of urban public housing is a polarization along race and class lines, particularly through the exclusionary tropes of nationalism. In juxtaposition with the concrete citadel of Wyndham Tower, the hooded masked gang in Attack the Block initially seems to support negative media stereotypes of violence and criminality. The social inequalities linked to place in media discourses have tended to support the racism embedded within a dominant ideology of national identity—and its colonialist history. However, in her examination of postcolonial British comedies, Sarah Ilott outlines a parody of media stereotypes (specifically, of gang members) in Attack the Block. She notes that the film undermines these by framing the teen protagonists’ particular urban Britishness against even more extreme Others: super-black alien invaders. Thus, the film sets up its

“black characters as inherently British rather than Britain’s Other, challenging the way that racist rhetoric attempts to position those of non-white ethnicity.”[17]

The film also challenges the boundaries of citizenship by spatializing those boundaries through the tower block’s characteristic architecture. Ironically, a containment inherent to the design of the Wyndham Tower—its corridors, exterior walkways, and its elevators and stairwells—ultimately helps Moses and his friends save their neighbors and their city from alien invasion. Attack the Block breaks from the type of cinematic representation of what Kenneth Chan calls “the ghetto, the hood, and/or the housing project as spatial constructs, hegemonic devices of control and containment”[18] in films like John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood (1991) by having the film’s characters use the confined location to their advantage.

In her discussion of causal relations between the design of public housing, criminality, and youth activities, Alice Coleman (1984) focuses on three design components that facilitate criminal behavior and make it impossible for tenants to protect their territory. The blocks enable anonymity (criminals do not want to be known), lack of surveillance (criminals do not want to be seen), and alternative escape routes (criminals prefer to elude capture).[19] Most of the action in Attack the Block takes place in the characteristic locales described by Coleman, but these spaces get rewritten. The characters define the spaces, not the other way around. This is as De Certeau has theorized: no space has an essential identity in itself; it only acquires meaning once activated by human motion occurring within it. The elevated walkways around Wyndham Tower provide anonymity and inhibit surveillance from the streets below. And the building’s long interior corridors extend that privacy, even as its elevators and stairways provide vertical escape routes at every floor. This film destabilizes the rhetorical alienation of tower blocks as symbols of urban decay and deviance by showing us the domestic spaces of all the characters, even gaining some sense of their familial support systems.

This demolishing of common ideological associations around “urban poverty” begins when the audience starts seeing the teens clearly, stripped of the anonymity of stereotypes and facilitated by the camera and by the tower block itself.

Joe Cornish turns the discursively devalued city space of Attack the Block to redemptive ends by associating the gang’s localized speech with the film’s shooting location and the characteristic design of high-rise public housing in Britain. He says it is a

“South London thing where kids actually pronounce all the vowels and consonants a bit more than they do in North London. In some films, tower blocks and estates are presented as these symbols of urban decay but we tried to do something different with this film and make the block into a sci-fi playground.”[25]

His explicit reference to social realism within a framework of science fiction—a genre in which the Other is traditionally a literal monster—distinguishes truly alien blackness—cinematically enhanced by visual effects so the monsters do not reflect light—from non-white British citizenship. In a study (2000) of young UK working-class and multiracial residents of public housing, researchers found that what the kids value most is “being known.”[26] Early in Attack the Block the camera pans across a brick wall at the periphery of the estate where the names of the teens we are about to meet are written in a tight cluster of graffiti. The outer spaces of South London are thus inscribed by its inner-city youth—now seen, known, named—in parallel with the cinematic rewriting of concrete brutalism as urban community.