Teenage Kicks

Thomas Marsden, Lecturer in European History, University of Stirling

In my teenage years I watched If.… repeatedly.  As someone who went to private school, and who was not happy there, it seemed to speak directly to me, and a dream-like film itself, it merged with my daydreams of an alternate school life in which I could be as cool and rebellious as Mick Travis.  It was not the violent revenge that he and his fellow outcasts exact upon the school’s authority figures that I found inspiring.  This violence was, in any case, always safely infused with unreality.  In one particularly memorable moment, the school Chaplain, shot by Travis and his friends in the previous scene, is pulled, apparently unharmed, from a drawer in the headmaster’s office from which he graciously receives their apologies.  Rather it was the way in which the outcasts stayed true to their unconventionality, and audaciously responded to the pompous bullying prefects.  Even now, probably over twenty years since I last watched the film, I can quote Travis’s contemptuous put-down of the odious prefect Rowntree: ‘You know what I hate about you Rowntree, it’s how you give Coca-Cola to your favourite scum and your best teddy bear to Oxfam, and expect us to lick your frigid fingers for the rest of your frigid life.’  It provoked the vicious beating at the heart of the film, but immortalised Mick Travis as an anti-authoritarian hero.

(Images: Photographs of scenes from If…., ref. LA/1/6/4.)