“The Dance, the Music, the Rave”: Partying, Pleasure, and the Politics of Cultural Production in Morvern Callar 1995 and Morvern Callar 2002

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the meaning of two acts of cultural production: the writing of novels and the acid house and dance music scenes as represented in Alan Warner’s 1995 novel Morvern Callar. Reading the novel against its 2002 adaptation by Lynne Ramsay, it historicizes the representation of working-class pleasure in relation to the developing discourses of the creative industries propounded by Tony Blair’s New Labour. Drawing a link between the concept of the creative industries and the well-established conversation linking “cultural independence” and devolution in Scotland, it argues that Warner’s novel represents acid house as a moment in which working-class pleasure and cultural production was a significant threat to establishment cultural values. By contrast, Ramsay’s film presents Morvern’s desire to party as indicative of a traumatized subjectivity which can be healed by the rejection of her working-class background and the embracing of a middle-class lifestyle informed by literature and travel. In this respect, Ramsay’s film is unable to metabolize the transcendent potential of partying and pleasure, instead mobilizing well-worn tropes of acid house’s meaningless hedonism to represent Morvern as an exceptional individual whose inborn distinction allows her to escape her background.