Scum (D)

Scum was originally made for television but banned because of its confronting content. Ray Winstone plays Carlin, an under-age offender sent from reform school to Borstal prison for assaulting a prison guard. In Borstal institutionalised violence is a way of life: the guards use it against the boys, the stronger boys against the younger boys. This is a bleak disturbing world of masculine aggression and hate, a racist world where black and white prisoners form separate ‘communities’, and where rape and physical coercion are accepted as currency. ‘Scum’, however, is not exploitative. The filmmakers’ anger is firmly directed to the hypocritical and sanctimonious authorities which allow the prison system to function through brutality rather than through justice. By the end of the film, in which we have seen a young vulnerable boy kill himself rather than continue the endless cycle of brutalisation, we come to understand that the prison system as portrayed in this film damages everyone: prisoners, guards, and finally ourselves. The attempts to ban this stark social-realist work and the hysteria mounted against its representation of youth offenders speaks volumes about the unsettling truths it forces us to comprehend.