The Analysis Of The Film "My Beautiful Laundrette" By Stephen Frears
In an effort to consolidate and other certain minority populations, hegemonic discourses aim to position diasporic and queer subjects as marginal to capitalism and public life, while simultaneously offering these subjects limited access and agency to determine their own rights to privacy. In the film My Beautiful Laundrette, directed by Stephen Frears with a screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, the character Omar navigates a complex series of identities and enterprises that call these discourses into question.
Omar is a second-generation immigrant of Pakistani descent, is involved romantically with a white man who has a history of racist organizing and action, and manages an increasingly successful business that functions as a space for many Londoners to complete an integral task, their laundry. Meanwhile, Frears and Kureishi juxtapose Omar’s fiscal success with the unemployment, state violence, and public acts of racist brutality that characterized London under Margaret Thatcher’s leadership.
In this paper, I conduct a reading of My Beautiful Laundrette that uses human geographies to chart Omar’s development as he interacts with the liminal spaces between public and private spheres, and with the charged concepts of mobility and citizenship. I pay close attention to the visual motifs of windows, mirrors, and modes of transit as symbols of the precariousness of privacy and the means of looking and surveillance that pervade confrontations between migrant subjects (especially queer migrant subjects) and the nation-state.
Through Omar’s evolving interactions with these spaces around him, Frears and Kureishi demonstrate the fragility of both genuine assimilation and overt resistance, but in doing so, they offer hope for a queered notion of citizenship and selfhood that transcends metaphor and resists the processes of consolidation and public expression that are central to Western expectations of identity formation.
Before Omar begins managing the launderette and reignites his relationship with Johnny, the protagonist’s earliest moments of class mobility and heteroerotic intimacy occur in spaces that straddle the private and public spheres. Omar’s uncle Nasser offers to give him a car, which functions as an early sign of Omar’s mobility the domestic servant of Hussein (who uses substances and constant bed rest to resist assimilation to public or commercial life in London and to cope with his wife’s suicide) to a contributor to industry and to the social and economic lives of London.
Immediately afterward, Nasser’s mistress Rachel kisses Omar passionately through an open car window in the semi-public and incongruous place of an immigrant-owned business, as opposed to the privacy of the home, or the public space of the sidewalk. This kiss foreshadows the ways in which love and desire for Omar always occur in liminal spaces between the heteronormative standard of love as tied to privacy and property ownership, and the primarily Western queer narrative that non-heteronormative love ideally leads to a linear trajectory from the private ‘closet’ to the public sphere.
Later in the film, when Johnny’s friends taunt Omar, Salim, and Cherry as they drive home from Nasser’s house, the car window functions as a thin barrier protecting two South Asian-British characters from a group of racist punks. However, when Omar passes through this barrier to approach Johnny, a shift in power occurs; whereas racial inequality and racism characterizes the beginning of this episode, Omar’s class privilege over Johnny creates a moment of conditionally upturned power relations. In a sense, the decision to cross from an intimidating experience in a thinly veiled private space (a car, used to navigate the London streets) toward a more intimate moment occurring on the street itself allows Omar to provisionally rewrite the narrative of power between migrant subjects and a group of ‘ethnically British’ characters.
Although this interaction on street subverts expectations of power between Omar and Johnny, the events that unfold in the space of the launderette, the second major immigrant-owned business shown in the film, become most emblematic of the ever-shifting nature of power and identity that Omar comes to embody. The setup of the launderette establishes precariously separate public, private, and liminal space: large windows separate the commercial space of the launderette from a busy street, and a backroom sits behind a one-way mirror that allows people in the backroom to look out, but does not allow customers or the public to see inside.
As Omar solidifies his relationship with Johnny while managing the launderette, he has the idea to sell Salim’s supply of illegal drugs to fund a renovation of the business space. On the day of the launderette’s grand reopening after its upgrade, the camera begins by looking outward from the backroom; through the one-way mirror, the audience sees the launderette itself, and then looks further outward through the window into a crowd awaiting the reopening on the sidewalk.
Omar proceeds to have sex with Johnny in the backroom, invisible to anyone else due to the one-way mirror, while Nasser and Rachel dance together in the business’s main commercial space, remaining visible to both Omar and Johnny and to the waiting crowd in the street. The arrangement of the place and the sign of the one-way mirror allow Omar to resist the surveillance that so often burdens queer and migrant subjects, and instead he can view everybody else while engaging in a pleasurable act that nobody else can see. However, even that privacy and vision exists for Omar within a commercial building, not a home. Once the launderette opens for business, Omar looks outward from the backroom while Johnny checks himself in the mirror, and for a moment, Omar’s face covers Johnny’s and they appear to be one person.
In these moments, the launderette promises Omar an ideal of privacy, pluralism, intimacy, and mobility that he experiences in neither the streets of the Thatcher-era perilous London, nor in the two ideals of domesticity offered to him: Nasser’s, which embraces a strong assimilation to British capitalism while excluding the uncle’s true love, and Hussein’s, which represents a futile form of resistance and limits Omar’s access to money, freedom, and his romantic partner. As much as the launderette contrasts the realities of the outside streets or the domestic spaces in the film, its promise to Omar matters to immigrant politics because it allows him to curate his own space to explore and produce his own identity and citizenship that resists monolithic notions of both British and Pakistani nationhood.
Omar’s enterprise embodies Alison Blunt’s notion that “cultural politics and practices in diaspora are mobilized and enacted over a variety of scales and chart both deterritorialized and reterritorialized spaces of identity, belonging and attachment”. The launderette has a deterritorializing effect because it weakens the notion of Britishness “as a transparent, ‘objective’ identity that is conceived of more in terms of what it is not” (Swamy), an attitude posits the white gaze as a hegemonic, singular, and self-effacing surveyor of the life of the other.
Instead, Omar’s launderette restructures a geographic space to reverse this gaze, and it becomes a space of pleasure, privacy, and agency that the home cannot be. However, as a punk throws a garbage bin through a window after beating Johnny and the barrier between Omar’s restructured space and the streets of Thatcher’s London comes down, the precariousness of Omar’s curated place as a means of resistance against wider social forces is exposed and Omar’s relationship with Johnny almost ends, which adds a new dimension to Nasser’s friend’s earlier statement that “launderettes are impossible” (CITATION).
Even so, in the subsequent transition to the final moment, Omar splashes a healing Johnny with water and their love appears to withstand the damage to their pseudo-home, the launderette. Thus, Omar’s trajectory transcends a singularly pessimistic final message about the queer diasporic subject’s potential for agency, resistance, and negotiation, and instead, the movie offers some hope for queer futures that write into being a citizenship characterized by creative and productive interactions with the landscape, social structures, and other people.
As a member of the so-called second generation, Omar is distant from his ‘roots’ of Pakistani culture in a way in which his father is not, yet his racial and sexual difference render him always somewhat marginal to dominant conceptions of British culture. However, his business locates him in the center of a certain social and economic space, and he refigures this space to simultaneously find refuge from the systems of othering that define British culture, and to build a certain constitutive identity that prefigures a brighter future. As Stuart Hall writes, “Cultural identity…is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being.’ It belongs to the future as much as to the past…
Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation”. This notion of transformation is reflected not only in the transnational concept of diaspora but also in Omar’s relationship to his sexuality. Western queer narratives have a tendency to portray the ultimate goal of queer subjects as the public articulation and consolidation of identity, and in doing so, these narratives often depict spaces of racial, national, or class difference as manifestations of the proverbial closet. However, in enjoying same-sex desire without ever naming his sexuality, Omar advances this notion of queer futures by dedicating.
