The Mammal the Monkey, the Monkey the Man

Watching Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) again, on TV last night, after a good many years, I find that my first viewing of it had left such a powerful impression on me that I had forgotten very little of it, but I saw it with new eyes. I had been half aware the first time that it was an amazing mix of mythological allusions Leigh had thrown into it, but now - primed - I saw more... much more. Oh yes, it’s gritty, miserablist drama if you want to read it that way, and it is truthful about trauma and abuse on a level that few films have ever been, but sets out to make the characters mythic emblems too.
I turned to the Internet, expecting to see loads of essays about the hidden meanings in it, comparing it to O Brother Where Art Thou?, but found none. Oh well, I suppose I’ll have to get the ball rolling myself. I am going to wax excessive over this, and be warned there are lots of spoilers for those who have not yet seen it. Beg steal or borrow a copy, watch it, and then read my lengthy, mythological interpretation of this magnificent, profound movie.
Johnny leaves Manchester to ‘escape a beating’ but ends up in London for a worse pounding than he feared at home. Is the opening sex scene a rape, or Johnny’s usual rough sex? Probably the latter, but the rape (or ‘abduction’) of Helen was the starting point for the Trojan war, and it is a personal war that Johnny tries to escape... jumping from the start of the myth right to the very end, changing from Paris to Odysseus, returning to his lost love. All the mythology he has skipped in this leap comes back to haunt him in his journey, however. And a lot of other traditions come into the mix too. Johnny alludes to himself as a ‘monkey’ throughout the film and brings up the history of evolution as his main metaphor for life in general, but blends with the Millennial ranting from the Book Of Revelations. But, although he is not aware of it, he is also bringing in ideas from Gnostic Christianity and from dualist religion in general.
Jeremy, the uptight, aggressive yuppie, is a kind of double for Johnny. Not his shadow, notice. The two of them behave in a very similar way, although from quite different motives. The parallel between Johnny and Jeremy makes sense of an apparently slight bit of business in which Johnny is mistaken for a millionaire by a chauffeur, and invited to step into a Rolls Royce, until his accent gives him away. Johnny thinks nothing of it, but it reveals that he has a twin - a rich and powerful duplicate at large in the world.
Jeremy is the false ‘landlord’ - in other words the devil, the Prince of this World. He, like Johnny, invades the fake paradise of No. 33 (very Masonic!) and takes it over. Only at the end do he and Johnny appear in the same place at the same time, and then there is a very strange encounter between them, Johnny muttering about his mother and his brother, reaching out to touch Jeremy and appearing to give him an electric shock in so doing. This is his symbolic rebirth (‘I’m still wet...’)
The two, Johnny and Jeremy, are twin aspects of the same personality... one from the north and one from the south; one dark and the other darker. Seth and Osiris, the ill triumphant while the relative good is broken and wounded. Yet it is Jeremy who is threatened with Osiris-style castration by Louise, who is both Penelope and Isis. They also recall Gilgamesh and Enkidu - Johnny being much closer to Enkidu on many occasions (“Monkey see, monkey do...”), but also mirroring some of their myth too, especially with the older woman in the upper room where he rejects her advances as Gilgamesh did the Goddess Ishtar.
Is all this coincidental? Hardly. Johnny makes constant references to religion, calling Archie ‘Bodhidharma’, asking Maggie if she believes in the devil, questioning Sandra’s Buddhist figures, asking why there are Greek images in the cafe girl’s house (‘Who lives here? Zeus?] and even picking up a copy of The Odyssey at one point, thrusting it at the camera, showing it to us as a concrete symbol of the myth he is in. Yet he fails to be Odysseus. The cafe girl (Calypso, effectively) throws him out after he says he does not like dogs. Only Odysseus’ dog recognised him when he returned, and if Johnny is not a dog-man, he cannot have the return of Odysseus. He endures many other aspects of the Odyssey, though.
His bag is stolen, and after this the true conflict begins for him, just as it is for Odysseus when his sailors untie the bag Aeolus gave him and release the winds. The storm is released for Johnny once his bag is taken away.
Brian the night-watchman is, on one level, the Cyclops, Polyphemus. He takes Johnny/Odysseus prisoner, because although he offers him sanctuary, he locks the doors and shuts him in. Brian is obsessed with not being seen, but he watches the woman across the street through a large, round window, like a great, single eye, like that of Polyphemus. Yet Johnny does not (as he did with Sophie) pretend to have no name. Instead he raises many religious themes with him. As Brian scans the mechanical ‘eye’ of his employer, Johnny asks if it is a ‘dadaist nun’.
Johnny makes Brian confront the idea that the Creator is the devil, that the real God is a universal truth beyond time and space... beyond the end of the world that Johnny expects. We shall only understand it when we evolve into something more advanced than humanity, something that can connect with the divine wisdom and recognise it for what it is.
Sophie is also part of the dualist symbolism. Sophia, the source of divine wisdom, is tattooed with an ‘ornithological mutilation’, a bird - the sign of the Holy Spirit. She is abused by both man (the monkey) and the devil, and withdraws from the false paradise, taking her silver ‘S’ sign with her.
Sandra (S[eth]-and-Ra) is the embodiment of the solar principle - returning early in the morning - but not on the Sunday (Sun’s day) when she was expected. She is the counterpart of Jeremy, and seems to be an ex-lover of his, coming out of Africa to bring order to her house once again; healing Johnny’s broken body but not healing any psychological rifts in the house since these are beyond her comprehension. Only life and death are her concern, as they are for Jeremy, who intends to kill himself rather than become old. In Egyptian Gnosticism, Seth was often referred to as Seth-and-Ra or Seth-Beloved-of-Ra, and Sandra is this figure, embracing all human religions (Catholicism and Buddhism) .
There’s a tiny bit of what looks like irrelevant banter about a firescreen at the very end. We see, briefly, a twin sun motif. ‘It’s something my dad...’ she says. As Seth-and-Ra, her dad is Father Nun, perhaps even the dadaist nun itself! Sophie, in turning the screen to the wall, neither banishing nor negating, as Johnny interprets, but reversing the influence of the creators of light and darkness, turning them back against the hidden fire of divine knowledge.
At the very end, Johnny is Achilles (wounded in his ankle) but still alive and still moving. He becomes Jason, the man with one shoe, who is destined to fulfill the prophecy and claim the Golden Fleece, but he is also Oedipus (the ‘swell-footed’ limping man) on his way to the next stage of his myth, killing his father and facing the Sphinx. Bereft of Odysseus’ symbols, Johnny now possesses the black eye of Horus. Like Adam, Johnny is cast out of the garden, and No. 33 is a green and leafy place. Notice how the first thing Sandra does on her return is tend to her plants, of which she has many!
Resurrected, like Osiris, like Horus, like Jesus, like Odin (who also suffered eye damage during his harrowing) Johnny hobbles away, beginning another cycle, another myth, destined to collide with more lives in chaos. He is rejecting the promised return to Manchester - the ‘city of man’, venturing instead into the city of destruction, seeking the city of God, or perhaps the Fleece, yet, significantly, he advances in the opposite direction to Sophie. The monkey-man has not yet evolved far enough to rejoin her.