Recent years have given us so much copaganda – the positive portrayal of policing and prison in popular culture – I imagine even the cops suspect there’s a secret marketing team buried in the bowels of New Scotland Yard. As someone who is, shall we say, less enthusiastic about policing and incarceration, and actively scathing of portrayals that heroise these systems and those who work within them, I was ready to seethe as I watched prison drama Wasteman. In this case, however, I was proven wrong. Mostly.
Wasteman, the debut feature film from director Cal McMau, is exceptionally gritty, brutal and claustrophobic; its tight shots give us nowhere to escape to when violence ensues. It centres on seemingly gentle wallflower Taylor, played by a dazzling David Jonsson, who is mere weeks away from being released on parole. When the chaotic, macho Dee, played by a highly energised Tom Blyth, becomes Taylor’s new cellmate, Dee’s raucous craving for violence and revenge on fellow prisoners threatens Taylor’s release.
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Jonsson’s consistently scrunched brow and unnerving eye twitches are as painful to watch as they are a reminder of the actor’s absurd ability to bear his character’s soul through minute and intricate movements. Blyth equally commands the screen as Dee, with his obnoxious confidence and muscly physique striking a stark contrast between the two main characters. Though Dee struts around like a fanned-out peacock on crack, he doesn’t actually take drugs, he just sells them, but Taylor’s addiction to the heroin substitute Subutex triggers much of the action that follows. After Dee steals another prisoner’s drugs supply, a slightly predictable gang war ensues – Dee is stabbed, he wants revenge, and he blackmails Taylor to enact it.
The prison drama genre in general would benefit from a wider analysis of the violence of incarceration beyond the physical, and Wasteman is no exception. Blood, bruises and broken bones are visible manifestations of a system designed to subdue, oppress and marginalise society’s cast offs. We see this in Wasteman, but only in glimpses. More troubling is the lack of even a nominal acknowledgement of race and class, not least because they cast a Black and a white actor in the two main roles. This is no small omission – prison is a key pillar in maintaining racial and class oppression and it impacts us all, whether or not we are ever in its direct clutches. A prison film that fails to acknowledge this can’t really claim to be a film about prison at all.
However, this film does two things very well. The first is to lay bare the way prison strips people of their ability to make choices. When Dee blackmails Taylor into committing a horrific act of violence by threatening to hurt his son if he doesn’t, Taylor’s response can hardly surprise us; if you cage humans like wild animals and tell them they’re worthless scum, they’re likely to act accordingly.
Its second success is its depiction of both Taylor and Dee as complex characters who sit within a grey area outside the hero/villain binary. This is a particularly overused trope in prison dramas, but Wasteman doesn’t imply that either of these men is more or less deserving of being inside or that we should be rooting for one of them over the other. Both men are troubled, sad, selfish and violent, mired in trauma that Dee expresses through bravado and physical domination, which manifests more inwardly in Taylor.
