Although
Bill Douglas’ autobiographical trilogy about his Scottish upbringing makes for
tough and generally cheerless viewing, the use of the possessive pronoun in all
three installments (My Childhood/My Ain Folk/My Way Home) denotes a
certain stubborn pride, one indeed inherent in the very choice of project, and
beyond that in the sense of exacting attention to detail however painful. The trilogy
is almost all in black and white, the only exception in the second installment
coming at the very start, with the young protagonist Jamie watching the end of Lassie
Goes Home, its ravishing colour momentarily seeping to the surrounding frame;
it suggests that Douglas intends to position cinema as a site of transformation,
but the film never returns to such transcendence (rather amusingly, a later
glimpse of the cinema has it showing a George Formby vehicle, more likely a medium
of cultural fixing than of escapism). Indeed, Jamie is denied the most basic
elements of childhood stability (the title is bitterly ironic in this regard), his
mother dead and his father only fitfully interested, living with a grandmother
whose attitude toward him is wildly variable, seemingly subsisting mostly on
apples: it’s sometimes unclear exactly what we’re watching, but this reflects
the boy’s marooned, under-nurtured state. Whatever the physical, material and
psychic limitations of the lives Douglas observes, his people fill the spaces
they occupy with their eccentricity or character or willpower or localized form
of charisma; Jamie’s ultimate removal to central Edinburgh is a potential
liberation, but any sense of exultation is tempered by him being locked up in
the back of a van, as one might transport a diseased person, or a criminal. The
third film will confirm that his transplanting to the city yields no easy redemption
or renewal, that his way “home,” or to a means of productively engaging with home,
is to be far more circuitous.
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