The Conscious Cruelty of I, Daniel Blake

Jul 22

Turning the camera on an uncomfortable truth doesn’t just help us see something differently, it helps us to see ourselves differently. It asks us to confront the corners of ourselves we might better leave in the dark. And it often shines a light on the very worst of us. Since the 1960s, British director Ken Loach has consistently illuminated the forgotten, the marginalized, and those of us left behind. He’s drawn attention to homelessness, to hardship, and especially to the indifference of the state in abandoning its responsibilities toward the most vulnerable amongst us. His 2016 film I, Daniel Blake, focuses on the latter, where tensions are boiling as austerity measures take hold in Brexit Britain.

When confronted about his work, Loach has consistently referred to the extreme measures forgotten individuals resort to in the face of governmental indifference as ‘conscious cruelty’. The imposition of maddening bureaucracy, and the deliberate unwillingness of the elected to help the desperate. Food banks are giving out millions of packages each year, and the elderly in particular left to exist on less and less. Combine this with the economic self-inflicted isolationist head wound of Brexit, and it coalesces into a toxic cocktail of populist extremism, criminality and violence.

Most of Loach’s films are infused with a deep, aching melancholy. But in that sadness is truth. The truth not just about how things are, but how they feel. What it feels like to lose a loved one. What it feels like to be so desperate that your only option is to rely on the charity of others. Or what it feels like to have to resort to the basest of behaviors to simply put food on the table for your family. Like his peer Mike Leigh, Loach’s films are often characterized as bleak, but in the bleakness is hope, and very often a deep kindness. I, Daniel Blake is such a story about the tender kindness of strangers in the face of an uncaring state.

The titular protagonist, wonderfully played by Dave Johns, is a recent heart attack survivor who, nearing the end of his working life, is also a recent widower. Denied the benefits of unemployment and support allowance despite being declared unfit to work by his doctor, he finds himself inside an endless spiral of paperwork and frustration, lost in the digital divide. At the local employment office, he befriends Katie, played with deep desperation by the incredible Hayley Squires, a single mother of two who has recently arrived in Newcastle from London. She’s been on the waiting list for a home for years, but when she finally gets one, it’s hundreds of miles away from her family. In their desperation they find each other. He helps her at home and with the kids. She helps keep him company in his loneliness. She’s doing everything she can to hold things together. But it’s a fragile balance between dwindling funds and increasing bills. Daniel’s in the same place, but in their lives they see each other. There’s no hint of romantic interest, just two desperate people helping each other. Their relationship is pure, and good.

But as Katie gets increasingly frustrated by her isolated predicament, she turns to food banks for meals, and prostitution for income. Unable to get any other job, she echoes Daniel’s futile search for work, despite his poor health. There are simply too few jobs for too many people. Daniel discovers Katie’s work, and confronts her, but she refuses to let him intervene. The film concludes with Daniel’s benefits appeal finally coming through, but as he waits to be interviewed, a case he seems certain to win, he suffers a fatal heart attack, and dies in the bathroom of the employment office. Katie is destroyed, and offers what little words of kindness remain by way of eulogy at his pauper’s funeral. As with most Loach films, there is rarely a happy ending. No neat bow with which to conclude the story. And just like life, no resolution of the pain felt by the characters. In that frustration, there is deep, aching truth. This is how it really is for millions of people. And while we as viewers get to be tourists in this world for a couple of hours, as the credits roll it leaves us uncomfortable knowing we still live in a world where these injustices happen and we still do nothing.

I, Daniel Blake didn’t just make me sad, it made me angry. It made me furious that this still happens in modern Britain. It made me furious how an elected government could just abandon large parts of the population and rely on the bureaucratic apathy of people just giving up in order to help the economy. It made me furious that people were being reduced to numbers on spreadsheets.

But it also made me hungry. Hungry for change. Hungry to do something. And it’s this feeling of motivation that Loach has always excelled at. In shining a light on the uncomfortable truth about ourselves, we are offered a choice. Do something. Or do nothing. What I saw in I, Daniel Blake wasn’t right. And I felt part of the problem in being complicit in my indifference. But if I’m part of the problem, I’m also part of the solution. That is my choice too. At the very least I can donate. I can offer my time. I can listen. And I can get educated. I can see those affected. And if I can do these things, I can perhaps get a little closer to what those in need often want most… kindness.