The Riot Club lays bare our secret love of the posh boys
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Version 0 of 1. For right-on folk, the portrayal of a fictional version of the Bullingdon Club in Laura Wade’s Posh was one of the highlights of 2010. The play provided a timely indictment of the “arrogant posh boys” who were about to add Downing Street to the pinnacles they already commanded. A transfer to the big screen could have been expected to adorn this Royal Court tract with a welcome wodge of gloss and panache. The Riot Club does this in spades; the effect, however, is to torpedo its message. As the Guardian’s film editor, Catherine Shoard, noted in Toronto, Lone Scherfig’s film glamorises the iniquity it purports to condemn. The Riot boys are nasty but beautiful and exuberant; the proles are worthy but lumpen, in both body and spirit. The gilded hero’s choice of an apparently fairly unremarkable state-educated sweetheart is as incomprehensible to the audience as it is to his peers. To keep us on side, the Riot Club’s misdeeds are made much uglier than the Bullingdon’s pranks; even so, they fail to inspire the revulsion that’s required. Of course, when it comes to glorifying mischief, cinema has form. In Annie Hall, it’s the Wicked Queen who wins the Woody Allen character’s heart, not Snow White. From the Joker and Clyde Barrow to Michael Corleone and Bellatrix Lestrange, bad hats have been similarly celebrated. Yet these were merely villains of fancy. Our real-life lordly oppressors, installed by prerogative and sustained through back-scratching, are nowadays ceaselessly reviled; surely they ought to have proved a somewhat harder sell. Why haven’t they? One of the film’s haughty protagonists implies a possible answer. He tells a pleb he happens to be bullying: “You’d like to be me but unfortunately for you, you can’t.” If we really wish we could be Riot Clubbers ourselves, a sneaking regard for the elect is only to be expected. Since there seems to be plenty of fun to be had, perhaps some of us do nurse such a hankering. Nonetheless, plenty of us clearly don’t. A more alarming possibility therefore presents itself. Maybe our ruling class enjoys unexpectedly widespread, if unspoken, approbation. There’s something unconvincing about the loathing we profess for it. Nepotism provokes no real howls of outrage even in the media, where it flaunts itself undisguised on screen and in credits and bylines. We still allow internships to be auctioned for charity at the festivities of the hyper-privileged. Even the Labour party is now parachuting its grandees’ exclusively-educated princelings into its safe seats. And what will we do? Vote for them. Acceptance of the prevailing hegemony is not obviously foolish. Elites of one kind or another have prevailed in most forms of human society. They haven’t all been well-behaved or satisfactorily selected; however, if those controlling your destiny are those best equipped for the task, you might reasonably overlook both fits of depravity and a lack of legitimacy. There’s an awful possibility that our own betters really are better than us. After all, University Challenge has to require Oxbridge to field just one of its constituent colleges against any lesser seat of learning, just to give the latter a chance. Even with this handicap, Oxbridge has won half of the contests of the Jeremy Paxman era. The Riot Club acknowledges this inconvenient reality, equipping its brutish reprobates with superhuman intellectual skills. The prowess of our ruling class need hardly surprise us. Private education of the kind enjoyed by the likes of Balls, Blair and Harman just as much as Clegg, Osborne and Cameron must instil something, or parents wouldn’t pay for it. What’s more, environmental influences such as schooling may not be the only drivers of superiority. If other attributes are heritable, those that beget success may also have a genetic component. Studies have long suggested that about three-quarters of IQ differences between individuals are down to heredity. Recent research has suggested that inherited advantage may be enhanced by a prosperous home environment. Among the privileged, nature and nurture may therefore be conspiring to promote intellectual pre-eminence. What goes for intelligence could go equally for application, confidence and aspiration. Perhaps you beg to differ: as far as you’re concerned, our swaggering masters are in no way born to rule. They arrive at the top by accident of birth and stay there only because their old-boy networks exclude those lower born who should rightfully usurp them. You consider the idea that you might admire these people entirely absurd. Maybe, but that doesn’t mean you cannot still connive at their ascendancy. Those who decry privilege most loudly appear slow to follow up on their gripe. Among progressive causes, social mobility ranks low: no one seems to be demanding that private schools be abolished. Quotas are urged for women in high places, but not for the working class. In fact, an entitled, self-perpetuating elite can be embraced even by those of us who deplore it. It gives us something to moan about and people we can blame for everything of which we disapprove. Its existence provides cover for our own failure to make more of ourselves. Its stubborn persistence is useful proof of the irredeemability of a corrupt system. If this elite talks posh and behaves badly, so much the better. It’s that much easier to revile it. Cinema has an aristocracy of its own. The Riot Club stars Max Irons. That surname ring a bell? Yes, he’s Jeremy’s son. His mother is Tony award nominee Sinéad Cusack, whose own father was Cyril Cusack, yet another big-screen luminary. Max (born Maximilian Paul Diarmuid) attended the Dragon School, Oxford, as did Tom Hiddleston, Emma Watson and Hugh Laurie. After that it was Bryanston, whose alumni include Freddie Fox, son of Edward Fox. Freddie is a close chum of Max’s, and he’s also – would you have guessed it? – in The Riot Club. Young Max was expelled from Bryanston, but fortunately that was to prove no bar to progress in his case. In this film, Irons turns in a perfectly adequate performance. For all we know, others, less favoured, might have done better. But which of us cares about that? Good on yer, lad. • Read more from our series the Bigger Picture |