Arsenal vs The Celebration Police

We're two-thirds of the way through the league season so now is a good time to look at how the fight for the title is shaping up. Arsenal sit third, one point behind Manchester City and five behind Liverpool, who have played a game more. Most pundits think it will be a straight fight between the teams currently in first and second place, with Arsenal failing to keep pace and City favourites because they have won the last three titles (and five of the last six, Liverpool winning the other). In other words, the assumption is that history will repeat itself: the early promise of Arsenal's challenge fading, City putting together a winning run over a dozen games and Liverpool making one of their periodic dashes for the finishing line. People rarely go broke betting that tomorrow's weather will be the same as today's, but there are reasons to believe that a new script might emerge. After all, it has to happen at some point. A feature of modern football is that as teams have become more drilled on the pitch, and as players have become more diligent and unassuming off it, managers have increasingly taken on the burden of providing personality and colour in the game, so that is as good a place to start the analysis as any.

Both City and Liverpool have managers either leaving or likely to leave in the not-too-distant future. Jurgen Klopp has already announced that he will be taking a sabbatical at the end of the season and while there is nothing official, or even rumoured, I think most people expect Pep Guardiola to fancy a change now that City have won the Champions League. His increasingly spiky dealings with the press suggest a man eager to burn his boats, and it's hard to believe he sees turning Jack Grealish into a world-class player as a suitably engrossing project any more. The counterintuitive integration of players like Haaland and Doku into the City squad looks like a master craftsman tinkering with his mechanism out of idle curiosity. He has always cut a dissatisfied demeanour on the touchline, but it's noticeable how much more morose he looks these days. Just as Klopp's manic grin has come to seem like the mask of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, so Guardiola's irritability suggests that he's near the end of his tether, or at least sufficiently bored to want to walk away.

In contrast, Mikel Arteta remains wound up to the point of mania, which means he's still on the upward curve of the managerial trajectory. It's nothing more that relative age, but it does suggest that the growth potential at the Emirates is greater than that at Anfield or the Etihad. This has been reinforced this season by the frequency with which other members of the coaching staff have been given prominence in the media, notably Nicolas Jover's contributions to set-plays and the rumours of suitors for Carlos Cuesta, and by the near-legendary status accorded the warm-weather training trip to Dubai. Even the goalkeeping coach, Inaki Cana Pavon, has been mentioned in dispatches in the context of the background to David Raya displacing Aaron Ramsdale. What this suggests is the emergence of a new narrative in English football, which is partly down to Arsenal's undoubted progress in recent seasons and partly the boredom of the media with the established narrative embodied by Guardiola and Klopp. Attempts to create a positive narrative out of Ange Postecoglou appear to have faltered, mate, while the negative narrative of Manchester United under Erik ten Hag also appears to be fading.

This has given rise to some odd behaviour in the media, most notably the arrival of the celebration police with their demands that Arteta and his coaches comport themselves with greater dignity, as if winning a game of football was akin to laying a wreath at the Cenotaph. Given that the same sources were always able to find fault with the touchline behaviour of Arsene Wenger, a man who was never less than dignified even when confronted by rank imbecility, these snipes are not worth responding to, but they are worth thinking about as evidence that certain pundits with North West affiliations are becoming uneasy. This doesn't mean that Arsenal are bound for glory, but it does suggest that the foundations are there for a sustained period of excellence that will unquestionably improve the chances of said glory. This is perhaps best understood if we look at the data. Over the first 12 games of the season, Arsenal garnered 27 points, scoring 26 and conceding 10. Over the next 13 games they took 28 points, scoring 32 and conceding 12. This looks like consistency, even if you'd ideally have liked 2 or 3 more points per third. The question is: can they maintain this pace and perhaps even improve on it?

Last season, the points haul per third was 31, 29 and 24: a fast start and then an accelerating decline at the business end. In Arteta's first two full seasons, Arsenal secured 13+21+27 and then 20+28+21. In other words, he has overseen periods of top-four performance (25+ points) but has been unable to sustain this over a season. 2022-23 saw title-challenging performance (28+) over two thirds, which was enough to achieve an 84-point second place finish. The hope is that this season will see a steadier return and thus a consistent table-topping points tally in the 85-90 range. 35 points from a possible 39 remaining is achievable, but 30 is more likely. However a final tally of 85 might be enough to win the title. It's worth noting that Man City had 55 points after 25 games last season and went on to take the crown with 89, but I suspect they'll drop a few more points along the way this season. Their games away to Liverpool and at home to Arsenal in March could well be decisive.

In terms of the squad and style of play, Arsenal look more balanced and varied. There have been hiccoughs and a periodic struggle with low-block defences (the defeat away to Porto this week being the latest), but there have also been examples of Arsenal confusing their opponents with their movement and the attention to detail on set-plays has been real and rewarding. As is usually the case at this stage of the season, Arsenal are going to need some luck on the injury front: specifically that they don't lose key players like Ødegaard, Saka and Rice. Given that they've lost Timber and Partey for almost all of the season, and Tomiyasu, Zinchenko and Jesus for part of it, you could say that they've already proved that the squad has greater resilience and depth. The question is whether they can now raise their game for the title run-in and take either or both of Liverpool and Man City to the wire. The one thing we can be certain of is that whoever manages to win the title this year will be fully justified in tearing off down the touchline to celebrate.

Antisemitism Again

There are a number of reasons for the Labour Party's continuing troubles over antisemitism. Having deployed it as a weapon for factional ends, there should be no surprise that it has proven to be a double-edged sword in the hands of the Tory press who, for commercial as much as ideological reasons, like nothing better than blood on the floor. Likewise, the patent insincerity of the more thuggish elements of the Labour right in claiming to be lifelong campaigners against racism and bigotry was always likely to blow up in their faces at some point. I'm genuinely surprised it has taken this long, but that in turn points to a third reason: that the media's indulgence of Keir Starmer's leadership was always likely to end ahead of the next general election. He lacks the charisma and novelty of a mid-90s Blair and the process of making Labour's manifesto "bullet-proof" against Tory attacks has left a vacuum that needs to be filled somewhow. When your leading defenders are either insisting that you are a serial dissembler who will suprise us all by being more radical in office, or that your lack of fixed principles is actually a sign of pragmatic maturity, then you know you're going to struggle when the electorate asks what it's getting in return for booting out the Conservatives.

Beyond the confines of the Labour Party, the contemporary salience of antisemitism obviously owes a lot to the conflict in Gaza, though it should be emphasised that the turn in sympathy against Israel and towards the Palestinians, which is what we're really talking about here, long-predated the 7th of October and can be traced back to the collapse of the Oslo accords. The defenders of Israeli policy, such as the UK's Community Security Trust, whose data on the level of "antisemitic incidents" is routinely relayed by the media without interrogation, have obviously sought to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, to the point of now claiming that the phrase "Free Palestine" is anti-Jewish if addressed towards Jews or Jewish institutions. In other words, we are seeing the boundary of what qualifies as antisemitism expanded, a danger that many previously predicted in respect of the demand to adopt the IHRA definition without qualification, including Kenneth Stern. This rhetorical inflation has led to many tropes that were previously considered acceptable, if crude and insulting, to now be taken as prima facie evidence of antisemitic intent, which appears to be what has tripped up Azhar Ali and Graham Jones, the two prospective parliamentary candidates at the centre of the latest Labour "row".

There is a fine line between believing that Israel has opportunistically exploited the 7/10 attack to pursue long-standing aims in Gaza and believing that there was a conspiracy to amplify the attack in order to further those aims. In suggesting the latter, Azhar Ali was indulging his audience in a worldview assumed to be common among Muslims: not just that Israel is conniving but that it is cruel and callous. What this suggests is that the presumption of factions based on ethnic or religious heritage remains part of Labour's internal management culture. Party members, even relatively elevated ones such as councillors, are assumed to have bloc loyalties (specifically to Pakistani-heritage biraderi) and must therefore be appealed to by pandering to what are assumed to be that bloc's prejudices. The two leading theories as to who leaked the meeting are that it was either a member of another faction disappointed by Ali's selection or someone genuinely appalled by what he said. In either case, this was clearly a political decision, which indicates how misguided it was to try and address the participant's concerns through the medium of an imagined bloc identity.

In contrast to Ali's statements, Graham Jones's "Fucking Israel" is a nationalist rather than a communalist sentiment. Likewise the claim that anyone fighting for the IDF is a traitor. What this highights is the double nature of antisemitism, here in the form of two distinct traditions: the idea of Jews as insufficiently loyal to their "adopted" country (Jones) and the idea of Jews as having an intrinsic moral deficit wherever they are found (Ali). The former has tended to be characterised as a sophisticated, even aristocratic tradition (e.g. the Dreyfus Affair), while the latter has been seen as vulgar: the antisemitism of the marketplace (e.g. Kristallnacht). But in reality these two traditions have always overlapped to the point where there is no meaningful distinction in practice - i.e. in how they impact on Jews. It exists purely in the minds of antisemites. The distinction between an upper class patriotism and a lower class materialism was constructed to reflect better on that upper class and to quarantine the lower classes whose "excitable" responses to economic disruption had a tendency to expand beyond questions of Jewish culpability into broader debates about inequality and power.

The paradox of Nazi antisemitism - that the Jews could be characterised as both rich and powerful and at the same time as poor and verminous - was not simply a geographical distinction between the assimilated Jews of the Rhineland and the alien Jews of the Polish shtetls. It was also a class distinction in motive: the bourgeois antisemite resented the unequal competition of the bourgeois Jewish cabal and despised the vulgarity of the poor Jew, while the working class antsemite resented the power of the Jewish capitalist and despised the unequal competition of the Jewish worker willing to accept lower wages. The double nature of antisemitism reflects those class differences. Likewise, just as anti-black racism reflects the beliefs of "white" racists rather than any intrinsic quality of "blacks" (hence racism birthed race, not the other way round), so classic antisemitism - that is the antisemitism of the modern historial era rather than the religious antisemitism of the pre-modern era - reflects the ideology of the ethnically homogeneous nation, which was meant to unify the classes. 

That classic antisemitism, with its roots in the nineteenth century and its overlaps with "scientific racism", never went away because we never superseded the nation state. But it has altered over time, specifically the dual nature of antisemitism has seen a bifurcation. The vulgar Jew has retreated into history in most Western societies. This is not simply because of the demographic impact of the Holocaust in Europe or the successful upward social mobility of Jews in the US (incidentally a continuing theme in American culture, e.g. in recent films such as Oppenheimer and Maestro). There are still working class Jews, but you rarely see them in the media. Instead the community representatives are overwhelmingly middle or upper-middle-class, tend towards the centre-right politically, and identify with the establishment. Likewise, few of us are familiar with the reality of working class life in Israel because Western media prefer to present the country in middle-class terms as one of technology start-ups, liberal values (that admittedly need defending from the vulgar Netanyahu) and the IDF's gender-equality, with the charedim as little more than a background noise and the illiberal settler movement as semi-detached.

This has left a vacancy that has been filled by Islamophobia. The traditional tropes of antisemitism from the "lower" tradition have been transferred wholesale: the shadowy conspiracies and unfair competition (the underlying rumble about the Rochdale selection), the morbid religiosity, the desire to defile white women ("grooming" will be on the Rochdale ballot courtesy of an independent candidate). We can also see elements of the upper tradition echoed in popular forms - e.g. the treatment of the traitorous Shamima Begum. But if the upper tradition lives on, it does so predominantly, if paradoxically, under cover of philosemitism. The Jews are to be applauded because they have shown us what a true nation state looks like. They are defeating the Muslim interlopers, purging their land and ensuring the survival of the Jewish race. A good example of how these two traditions now combine was offered this week by Trevor Kavanagh, the former Political Editor of The Sun, who opined that all Muslims are by definition anti-Jewish. This manages to treat both Muslims and Jews as homogeneous groups with common characteristics, while also conflating all Jews with Israel.

What this suggests is that Labour isn't going to able to "rid itself" of antisemitism, or at least the appearance of it, any time soon. The Tories will insist on the association of Muslim support and antisemitism not simply as a way of attracting Jewish (and Indian) support to themselves but as a way of gradually detaching Muslim voters from Labour. The hierarchy of racism within the party reflects a factional approach, and that won't change so long as the party remains averse to actual politics and so preserves the utility of ethnic blocs. The groups that achieved national prominence campaigning against antisemitism in Labour under Corbyn, such as the JLM, are unlikely to cede that prominence now, which will encourage further rhetorical inflation. The identification of the left with antisemitism has been pursued to inoculate the party from any taint of socialism, but the consequence of this has not just been a shift to the right on the ideological spectrum but a movement in the boundary of antisemitism itself, as Azhar Ali and Graham Jones have just discovered. Too many people are now invested in the persistence of antisemitism within Labour for it to easily disappear.

Labour's Industrial Strategy

John McTernan was unfortunate in his timing. His plea for Labour to drop the pretence that the green prosperity fund was anything other than an industrial strategy came only days before the long-heralded confirmation that the expected next government will not be spending £28 billion per year transitioning to a low-carbon future or anywhere near that figure. Lost in the debate over whether this latest u-turn shows Labour cleaving to the Tory agenda or simply incapable of sincerity is his use of a term suggesting a more dirigiste approach to the management of the economy than has been visible of late. As a confirmed Blairite, McTernan would no doubt insist that New Labour had an industrial strategy, but in substance this amounted to little more than acquiescence in the once-fashionable idea that letting the financial sector do as it pleased would ultimately benefit all. In fairness, that was a strategy with a long pedigree in British politics. The formal industrial strategy of the postwar years was, like the wider concept of planning, an atypical interlude in a history otherwise tending towards laissez faire.

The UK's fitful attempts to craft an industrial strategy between 1940 and 1980 reflected the nature of the economic model that developed over the much longer period between 1750 and 1890. The technological advances of the age, which every schoolkid learns to recite as a series of names (Arkwright, Bessemer, Stephenson etc), gave the UK a significant first-mover advantage as they did not spread sufficiently rapidly to allow other nations to quickly develop competitive domestic production. There were two consequences of this: the growth of export-oriented capital goods sectors in the UK (shipbuilding, railways etc) with the corollary of a firm commitment to free trade, and the defensive adoption of protectionist policies by many of those competitors in an effort to shield and develop domestic production (notably the USA). The common ground was a commitment to sound money - the gold standard - which in turn benefited the UK by making the City of London the central nexus of global trade and capital financing.

The extroverted nature of British industry led to sectors dominated by multiple, small-to-medium size manufacturers specialising in niche products and selling to a global market. In contrast, the protectionist policies of the UK's chief competitors encouraged vertical integration within captive domestic markets, the classic example being the development of Standard Oil in the US, a company that spanned extraction, refining, distribution and retail (a model that remains central to the oil business today). The institutional effect of this was the emergence of the large-scale corporation and a tendency towards merger as a means of achieving growth, particularly notable in Germany around steel production, which was only occasionally restrained by anti-trust laws (e.g. the break-up of Standard Oil). After World War II proved the inefficiency of further expansion through territorial aggression, this birthed the modern multinational. 

While all this was going on, the UK found itself pulled between competing interests. The established capital goods and manufacturing sectors lobbied government to preserve their export markets, which gave rise to the conflict between free trade and imperial preference (the latter being an attempt to stunt the growth of capital production and manufacturing in the colonies, which inevitably failed because no one seemed to appreciate that this wasn't what the dominions themselves wanted). Meanwhile, there was a conscious effort to consolidate the fragmented primary goods and manufacturing sectors during the twentieth century, notably coal, steel and automobile production. Typically, this was done by a combination of nationalisation, the encouragement of private sector mergers, and various schemes in between where the state would act as a sleeping partner underwriting private capital with public money. 

What remained a constant was the interests of high finance and the influence it exerted on the UK state - what Giovanni Arrighi, in The Long Twentieth Century, refered to as its "pecuniary rationality". Despite the retreat from the gold standard and the emergence of capital markets in New York and Tokyo, the City of London continued to exert sway over the state's fiscal policy and industrial strategy, constraining the former (the "Treasury view") and showing little enthusiasm for the latter. Indeed, if nationalisation in the UK was characterised by a willingness to preserve the existing management culture and resist workers' control, it was also marked by a desire to side-step the City's lack of interest in domestic opportunities and to short-cut the process of private sector consolidation. The problem was that the fiscal constraints inevitably led to under-investment in those nationalised industries by the state: neither brave enough to defy the money markets nor brave enough to reform British management.

The technological first-mover advantage that the UK benefited from in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries (roughly 1760-1840) now looks like a historical one-off, both in terms of the transformative effects it had on society (e.g. urbanisation) and in its duration, though you could make an argument for China's economic catch-up since 1978 being an echo of it, albeit through the absorption of common technologies into an untapped domestic market and then through labour cost arbitrage with the West. Subsequent cycles of advance, notably the second industrial revolution (1870-1914) and more recently the digital revolution (1970-1990), saw new technologies dispersed globally in ever more rapid bursts. This in turn means that the boost to GDP growth arising from new technologies tends to be weaker and much shorter. While tech-boosterism is still a thing among politicians and pundits, the likes of Tony Blair look increasingly naive in their fetishistic belief that the embrace of technology alone can transform a nation's fortunes. 

Today, growth above the historic mean, or even above the level of national comparators, can only arise in two ways. One is a historic conjuncture in which secular trends and contingent opportunities coincide to produce a benign environment. For example, a demographic bulge that rapidly adds youth to the working population or the demands of reconstruction after a period of major destruction. The second is a major change in the composition of the economy that provides a higher-level comparative advantage. For example, the discovery of oil, or other valuable resources, within a territory or the rapid expansion of an export-oriented industry that cannot be quickly replicated by competitors (such as semiconductor fabrication). Of course, these developments themselves entail risks, notably the resource curse in the first instance and exposure to fluctuating foreign demand and currency speculation in the second. A safer approach may be a state-led change in the compostion of the economy but for a developed nation with already mature technology like the UK such a change is more difficult to achieve: you can't just take it off the shelf as the Chinese did.

Outside these exceptional circumstances, the ambition for most states will be growth close to the international average. For developed economies, that's been around 2% per annum over the last twenty years. The UK is currently at about 0.5%, so there's certainly headroom, but getting closer to 2% won't generate the sort of tax incomes, ceteris paribus, required to fund much long-term investment, particularly given the demands to boost day-to-day spending on the NHS, social care and crumbling local goverment services. The green prosperity fund - or green new deal if you prefer, emphasising the pro-labour and pro-social aspects - offered a potential way out of this bind: a major retooling that would boost growth in the short-term and make the economy more competitive in the longer-term so sustaining that growth (or at least enabling the UK to keep up with its peer group). In rejecting the idea of using the green transition to boost growth, Labour are not simply allowing the Tories to set the agenda, or giving up on the climate crisis, they are confirming that the stranglehold of the City, last seen during the Truss debacle, remains very much in place. 

Labour hasn't been the party of the workers since the 1970s, and even then workerism was only one of a number of competing ideological strands, but it did retain a credible claim to be the party of growth long past that point and as recently as 2019. With this announcement, Starmer and Reeves have confirmed that it has given up that claim and is now simply the party of sound money: the "fiscal rules" have become a fetishistic end in themselves rather than the means to a particular fiscal end (higher spending, lower taxes etc). The move to the right on policy (i.e. all those promises reneged), like the authoritarianism and managerial brutality, are not simply the instinctive behaviours of the right wing of the party. They are an expression of an overarching commitment to sound money that inevitably produces a conservative, pessimistic mindset and a preference for austerity: the constraint of the growth they claim to be in favour of. Labour has no industrial strategy because it has no growth strategy beyond a pious hope.

All in the Family

Gothic is coded posh. Or, to put it another way, gothic is a romantic recuperation of the past in which ruined property represents the decline of a hierarchical order: the bare ruined choirs of an abandoned abbey; the forbidding castle of the absentee landlord. The persistence of social hierarchy, and the contemporary economic importance of property, mean that the gothic is never far from the surface of our culture. Unfortunately, this often gives rise to a fetishisation of the property and an unrealistic, even hysterical, treatment of social relations. A recent example is Emerald Fennell's film, Saltburn, in which a middle-class psychopath destroys an aristocratic family and inherits their country pile. You probably saw that coming a mile off, even without the signposting to Brideshead Revisited and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Two far superior films, with striking similarities in plot but which use the gothic in more varied and imaginative ways, are Joanna Hogg's The Eternal Daughter and Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers. Of the two, Hogg's film is the more obvious in the way that it plays with gothic tropes, but it does so precisely to wrong-foot expectations. Haigh's film is more subtle in its use of gothic themes, but that is because its class milieu is very different.

The Eternal Daughter re-uses the upper-middle-class mother and daughter from Hogg's two Souvenir films, Rosalind and Julie, but here both are played by Tilda Swinton. The film opens in suitably gothic style with mist and enveloping darkness as the pair plus dog arrive at a Welsh mansion, now converted to a hotel. The cabbie provides a tale-cum-warning. Naturally, the hotel is all but deserted, the receptionist is sour and unhelpful (she's Welsh and thus coded as resentful and lower class), and there are lots of noises in the night. The purpose of the visit is for some mother and daughter quality time, but it's clear that the relationship though loving is cool, even formal, with polite ministrations substituting for meaningful engagement. It's all very upper middle class in its emotional restraint and acceptance that there is an unbridgeable divide between the generations. There is also a strain of cynicism: Julie is covertly recording her mother's comments as raw material for a screenplay she is writing, which presumably reflects Hogg's own ambivalence about her autofictional approach to filmmaking.

It transpires that the building was one that Rosalind lived in as a young girl during World War II (it was owned by an aunt), and that she carries memories - some nice, some not so nice - of what occured there. Suitably cued, you're expecting something bad to happen and sure enough the dog goes missing. Julie enlists the help of Bill, an enigmatic member of staff, and they search the grounds. The dog then turns up in Julie's room. This is the signal for a tonal shift away from the gothic. Julie shares a drink with Bill, who offers advice on bereavement: Julie has lost her father and Bill his wife. She later hears Rosalind tell Bill that she, Julie, has no children and will thus lack a dutiful daughter to care for her in her old age. The film reaches its climax with a birthday meal for Rosalind at which point we suddenly realise that the reason we never saw both characters in the same shot was not because they're played by the same actress but because Rosalind was never there: she too is dead. Julie is at the hotel on her own, working on a screenplay (presumably this film) and thus conjuring up her mother's ghost. As the film concludes, we realise that the hotel isn't deserted, that the receptionist is solicitous and that the weather is fine. Further confusing expectations, the wise old head Bill turns out to be real, rather than another projection of Julie's psyche. 

A common and recurrent motif in both Hogg's film and Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers is the protagonist looking out of a window but in a way that suggests they are looking into the past rather than observing the present. Haigh's protagonist is Adam, played by Andrew Scott, a gay screenwriter approaching middle age who not only doesn't have kids but appears to have no friends: they moved out to the suburbs and country to raise families. Like Julie, Adam is in search of his dead parents and struggling to write about them. On a research trip to his modest childhood home in Sanderstead, he encounters a trim man in his 30s with a 'tache. What looks for all the world like a pickup turns out to be a visitation by his 80s-era father who takes him home where he is welcomed by his mother who recognises her now grownup son by his eyes. Just as Julie sought to establish a greater rapport with her mother, so Adam seeks to explain himself to his mum and dad, played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell. This primarily means coming out to them but it also means expressing what their loss meant to him. They died when he was only 12, after which he was brought up by a granny in Dublin (which explains Scott's accent). 

There's a degree of humour in the generational divide that veers perilously close to a 1970s sitcom, but the real subject is the unbearable weight of a love that cannot now be expressed even if the imaginative encounter with his parents provides the consolation that they would love him just as much now as they did when he was a shy and sensitive child. As with Julie and her mother, not only does Adam conjure his parents' ghosts but he is finally ghosted by them over a meal, in Croydon's Whitgift Centre of all places. The twist in this tale involves Harry, played by Paul Mescal, the only other occupant of Adam's London tower block, who offers human contact and warmth as much as sex, but who is eventually revealed to be another imaginative projection of Adam's mind but, tragically, extrapolated from an all too real person who is also now dead. Adam is lonely - pathologically lonely, adrift in a building that is improbably empty and constantly replaying the queer-coded music of his 80s youth: Erasure, the Pet Shop Boys, Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

The difference between the two films reflects the class of the parents and how this has affected the child's understanding of the world. Rosalind's emotional reticence and Julie's instrumentalism have left their relationship transactional. Gestures of care and tokens of memory - Julie's presents for her mother, her mothers stash of photographs - have become the medium of exchange. Honest expressions of feeling are avoided and when Julie's finally burst through they come across as self-pitying and selfish. In contrast, Adam's parents are more emotionally engaged - allowing Adam into their bed, relishing shared joys like dressing the Christmas tree - but their view of the world - dismissing "poofy shit" - was as typical of their day as the easy relationship with drink and cigarettes. Adam's loneliness is rooted in his belief that they could never have understood what he was experiencing as a bullied schoolkid: that he was effectively orphaned before their deaths in a car crash. Their return offers a chance for Adam to convince himself that it wouldn't have mattered: that they would have evolved with the times while continuing to love him for who he was and is.

The property in The Eternal Daughter has been lost to the family. It is now a commercial, and thus a slightly grubby middle-class, concern rather than a gentry family home with all its history of good and bad. Despite the early suggestions of ruin, the Welsh mansion is actually in good condition and a popular hotel. As such, it represents an optimistic view of changing social relations: evolving towards a more democratic if essentially capitalist future. The property in All of Us Strangers is cosy but also empty. Adam never interrupts the present owners of his childhood home. They aren't there just as there is no one, apart from Harry, in the block of well-appointed flats in London where Adam now lives, which feels more like an abandoned spaceship than a slab of prime real estate, an effect heightened by the vivid sunsets that Adam observes from his 22nd floor eyrie. This property is also capitalist but it looks more like an investment: the urban flat as safe deposit box for distant investors; the suburban home as a Thatcherite aspiration now found to be devoid of humanity. 

Gothic fiction is characterised by fear, the supernatural and the demands the past makes on the present. Julie fears a childless old age, Adam a life of loneliness. For both of them the supernatural is less a threat than a device that allows them to commune with the dead: a form of spiritualism for people who don't believe in spirits. The dynamic of both stories sets a time-limit on the past's demands - there is no haunting as such and the ghosts are a friendly as Caspar - and both protagonists come to realise that they must let the past go so that they, rather than the dead, can rest in peace. Both films ultimately supersede the gothic: Hogg's by highlighting the self-indulgence of the aesthetic and letting the light of day in; Haigh's by revealing that terror and inconsolable loss are quotidian emotions that affect us all, not the preserve of a social elite with refined sensibilities. Both are wonderful films. In contrast, the ending of Saltburn, in which Barry Keoghan's character cavorts naked through his newly-acquired palatial home, suggests little more than the masturbatory fantasy of an estate agent as imagined by someone who knows the correct cutlery to use on all occasions.