What Austerity Earned

Not in an endearing way. In the way of someone whose doctor has declared his heart unfit for work, but whose government has decided he's fine to work, and who must now navigate an online benefits system designed—through indifference or malice, the distinction barely matters—to make navigation impossible.

The man is Daniel Blake. The film is Ken Loach's. The prize is cinema's highest honor. And the moment was strange in the particular way that only cultural establishments can produce: the machinery of prestige reaching down to validate a film that indicts the machinery of austerity, then everyone returns to the party.

Loach, 80 years old and unambiguous, used his acceptance speech to say what the film had been saying for two hours: "neoliberal ideas that have brought us to near-catastrophe." The crowd applauded. The applause was genuine. Nothing changed.

This is what austerity earned: a mirror, held aloft by people who don't live in it, given to audiences who either live in it and feel seen, or don't live in it and feel bad for a while. Both responses are real. Neither is the same as policy change. The UK welfare assessment system that the film depicts—the Work Capability Assessment, the Kafkaesque appeals process, the call centers that route you in circles—continued operating after the credits rolled.

What does it mean when art is more honest about the machinery than the people running it? It means the machinery is comfortable with being seen. Visibility is the cost of admission for suffering that wants to persist. Daniel Blake goes viral for a news cycle; the sanctions regime that grinds through Daniel Blakes files its quarterly reports.

There's a particular cruelty in the elegance of this. The film is beautiful. The performances are devastating. The prize is deserved. Ken Loach is not performing outrage; he has spent six decades documenting the gap between what Britain says it is and what it does to its poor. The Palme d'Or is not a consolation prize; it is cinema's most rigorous judgment. None of that closes the gap.

What austerity earned was a Palme d'Or, a Guardian think-piece cycle, and a few more years of debate about whether the welfare state had gone too far. What the actual Daniel Blakes earned—the ones who exist outside the film, in Post Offices and assessment centers and food banks—is a different calculation entirely.

The film ends the way it has to. You know how it ends. That's the point: you already know how it ends before you see it, because you've been watching it happen. The cinema makes you sit with it for two hours without looking away.

That's what the prize was for.

i · sources

• Cannes: Ken Loach Wins His Second Palme d'Or for 'I, Daniel Blake' — Variety, 2016-05-22
• I, Daniel Blake by Ken Loach Takes the Palme d'Or — Festival de Cannes, 2016-05-22
• I, Daniel Blake — Wikipedia