Angry counterculture

"I learnt at an early age was it was

to be angry.... 

angry and helpless"

When talking about “Look back in anger” it is impossible to separate it from the “Angry young man” movement originated after this play was first put into scene. This movement gathered a bunch of British novelists and playwrights of the 1950s, they expressed despise and alienation with the established socio political order of their country through their work. “Their impatience and resentment were especially aroused by what they perceived as the hypocrisy and mediocrity of the upper and middle classes” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2014)

But what made this play so successful that a whole movement was born from it? what made people of that time, especially educated people  feel as identified as they felt?

First of all, “Look back in anger” by John Osborne was written in 1956, a period of time when England was going through  a harsh epoch due to many factors such as the end of the Second World War that left England in a financial crisis after been destroyed by the Nazi army and after putting all its resources in the war against Germany;  the process of decolonization and the independence of India,  one of its more financially important colonies from which England; and finally, because of the broken  promise of a more equal society with opportunities for everyone with education and skills, a sort of failed “American dream” .

The play takes place in an attic flat apartment in the suburbs where the protagonist live along with his wife, and his best friend Cliff. They all live together in order to pay for a decent place to live.

Jimmy, the protagonist of this play, comes from a  working class background. He is a despicable, harsh and blunt character who abuses his wife , who comes from a prominent family,  and also he is constantly looking down on his friend, who also comes from a working class but has less education than Jimmy.  Jimmy, worked hard to have superior studies since he believed in the promise of the government of gaining a  better position in life thanks to social mobility. Unfortunately,  this dream comes to an end when he realize that he is in the same social position, he hasn’t been able to move up  even though having a diploma, and  he has a mundame work, the same kind of work as any working class man.

And here is when Jimmy’s extreme hate and anger toward his wife and toward everything can be truly understood, because even if he tried to escape his lower class fate by marrying a middle class woman, he was not able to access to the middle class, since for them Jimmy will always be a lower class man so his resentment grow even bigger.  For example in Act III Scene II  Jimmy tells his wife  “In order to relax, you’ve got to sweat your guts out. And, as far as you were concerned, you’d never had a hair out of place, or a bead of sweat anywhere” (Osborne, 1957) . For Jimmy, his wife represent everything that he hates, and everything that is wrong with English society, the convenience of the middle and upper class and the apparently ease of their lives without any worries or real sufferings .

The success of this play and the consequent creation of the Angry man movement can be explained because of its public capacity to truly  demonstrate the grievances and anger of educated people whose talent and ideas are dismissed and rejected,  and that find themselves unable to find jobs on their study field because of the stigma of their social background, and who does not want  to conform with the fact that good job positions are and will always be of the elite. This play and subsequent movement are a protest against the English class - ridden establishment since there has never been social movement that did not include anger.

Billy Joel’s Angry young man

“There's a place in the world for the angry young man

With his working class ties and his radical plans

He refuses to bend, he refuses to crawl

and he's always at home with his back to the wall.

Give a moment or two to the angry young man

With his foot in his mouth and his heart in his hand

He's been stabbed in the back, he's been misunderstood

It's a comfort to know his intentions are good

He sits in a room with a lock on the door

with his maps and his medals laid out of the floor

And he likes to be known as the angry young man”

Finally, Jimmy’s Feelings of frustration and exclusion are atemporal and can be transferred to young men and women from any time and place,  who can be living the same social discontent and insatisfaction toward the Establishment and toward the unfairness of life and the way the world works. People who feel that no matter how hard you study or work, you will always be in the same place because life is already set, there is not a chance to move up because the only way of being in that place is to have been born there.   

References:

Encyclopedia Britannica, (2014). Angry Young Men | British literary group. [online] Available at: http://global.britannica.com/topic/Angry-Young-Men [Accessed 18 Aug. 2015].

Osborne, J. (1957). Look back in anger. New York: Criterion Books.

Metrolyrics.com, (2015). Billy Joel - Angry Young Man Lyrics | MetroLyrics. [online] Available at: http://www.metrolyrics.com/angry-young-man-lyrics-billy-joel.htm