If you live in Scotland, and have attended a Cineworld over the last several months, there is a strong chance you have seen this trailer for We Are Northern Lights before your chosen feature presentation: If you have seen this in a Glasgow Cineworld, you may well have heard someone booing loudly during the trailer. That someone was me. I am sorry if I removed any pleasure from your cinematic experience, but I can only plead that I was allergic to the trailer and I would prefer to boo than to vomit. The trailer made me react this way because it had everything I hate about Scottish cinema in it; the twee, indie soundtrack, endless shots of gray skies, and the bile-swilling obsession with stereotypes of Scotland. For example, a Spiky Haired Girl arrives on screen, declaring "I've not got ginger hair, and I'm not wearing a kilt, so maybe I'm not Scottish, but I am!" I think that this excerpt of dialogue perfectly illustrates why my reaction to the trailer was so violent - as a Scotsman, I have gone to great lengths to dye my hair ginger every day of my life, and have refused to buy an item of clothing unless it is woven of my own personal clan tartan, so obviously I was furious at having my peasant illusions shattered by Roadkill's widow. We Are Northern Lights is a crowd-sourced documentary in the style of Life in a Day and Britain in a Day (a film in which I, myself, featured, shouting "Welcome to Scotland!"). The basic premise is, Joe and Flo Blow are invited to film their doings and submit the resultant footage. However, where the earlier projects gave participants 1 day to film their footage, We Are Northern Lights provides several months. And where taking part was the reward with Life in a Day, money was awarded to the "best" submissions for We Are Northern Lights. And thus we finally have proof that time and money isn't everything; where Life in a Day was an exciting, funny and moving film which found the universal in the specific, We Are Northern Lights is a package tour of Scotland filmed on an iPhone by a credulous tourist in a flabby Hawaiian shirt, asking bagpipers to sign his Runrig CDs. As you will know, Scotland is currently preparing for a referendum on the question of its separating from the Union with the other 3 British nations, so the timing of this documentary is appropriate; one is reminded of a line in The Help, in which the main character is advised to hurry along her book concerning black maids in segregated sixties Mississippi "before this whole civil rights thing blows over". Perhaps to lend the project a veneer of respectability, the film is directed by Nick Higgins, an academic at the University of Edinburgh. His page on the University's website counts among his interests "Images & the Politics of Representation" and also "The Cultural Politics of Indigenous Peoples". This might explain why We Are Northern Lights is obsessed with the stereotypes and clichés surrounding us, the natives of Scotchville, England. Higgins' work belongs to in the slagheap of films based in Scotland which seem obsessed with the notion of Culture as Product; you may recall, a few years back, Ken Loach's film The Angel's Share, which had, as a poster, 4 men in kilts, at least one of whom was ginger, with bottles of Irn Bru in their hands and some hills in the background. I was shocked that not one of them had their faced painted half blue. The film's advertising seemed to say "Look! Scottish people! Let's go laugh at them, with their thick faces and accents!" We Are Northern Lights is similarly obsessed with cultural accoutrements. The Highlands, for example; the film is overloaded with invasive shots invading the privacy of perfectly decent mountains, some of whom hasten to cover themselves with snow in order to avoid the prying gaze of rubbish filmmakers. I would be willing to bet that over half of the film is set in the Highlands, which is ridiculously unrepresentative; if you have seen a political map of Scotland, the majority of the Highlands are contained within 3 constituencies; Glasgow alone has 7. Hardly anyone lives up North in Scotland, but hey! Mountains = Scotchville! The film finds one of it's most annoying contributors up a mountain in the form of a Glaswegian complaining his way along the West Highland Way and up Ben Nevis, with nothing to do but point the camera at himself and his environs, describing whatever he is looking at as though he was road testing the prototype for some new junkie app. "Haw, mate, a mountain! Nae way, check the state of my feet! Oh, naw! A guy talking to himself on camera! Quality, man!" However, the grand jury prize for most annoying person on camera is, you guessed it, Spiky Haired Girl, who seems to think that she is auditioning for Big Brother, alternating between pseudo-profound statements such as those in the trailer, and skipping around a roundabout. Why is she skipping around a roundabout? Because she's absolutely wild, is why! "Scotland may surprise you! Take Glasgow's historic West End, for example, where local characters engage in traditional mating displays by skipping around one of the many local roundabouts!" The film is filled with similarly ridiculous people, farting out whatever hackneyed garbage manages to slop up into their mouth gaps. My friends and I even started a bet to see if we could guess what was up next on the roster of stereotypes, and sure enough, when I predicted a Braveheart reference was due, the film cut to a bus full of lager louts reciting Mel Gibson's "Freedom" speech.
At first, I thought the film had no structure, but in interviews, Higgins identified water as a structure for the film, and this makes sense; water is fundamentally amorphous, and I did leave the film feeling as though I had been sat beneath a waterfall for 3 days. But the film has a more fundamental problem, and that is, it has an agenda. Time and again, left-wing grannies are allowed on to gas on for as long as they please about the horrors of the English government. An old aristocrat is wheeled on to talk about land ownership (?!?!?), and how the people should own their own land. Then the lager louts pop back up on their bus, driving out of England, cheering. And eventually it becomes clear that the film is a pro-Independence screed. And personally, I find this a highly dishonest approach to documentary film-making which is on a par with propaganda. We Are Northern Lights is only playing in selected cinemas in Scotland and I have heard of no plans for a larger release. And this raises a simple question - if you are making a film about Scotland, and your audience is almost exclusively Scottish, why make an entire film which alternately propagates and attempts to dispel Scottish stereotypes? Is this not on a par with making a film for Indians with the core message "Guess what? You can still be an Indian if you don't wear a Turban"? Presumably, an Indian would already know that. I know that I'm still a Scotsman even though I lack ginger hair. I think that the film attaches itself so strongly to outdated stereotypes because they are the only things which nationalists have to cling to, a series of products and images which they can attach themselves to in order to bolster their lack of personal identity. Because if being Scottish isn't having ginger hair, drinking Irn Bru, loving Braveheart and the Highlands, then what is it? It's being human with an accent. And that is hardly a ringing endorsement of nationalism as a cause, is it? Ironically, I think the film does work as a piece of propaganda for Independence. Because if Scotland is anything like it is in this film, then I say make it independent and seal it off, brick by brick, that way no one will ever have to meet a single one of these quirky, enthusiastic FUDs ever again. Note: FUD is Scottish for "Fundamentally Unctuous Delinquent". Look it up.