I must be the last person in Britain to see Brief Encounter; I only watched it in full yesterday, though many of its scenes were already familiar to me, even if I can’t think where from. Anyhow, I apologise if what I say seems utterly obvious, or has already been said a hundred times. At any rate, it seems that if it has it has not been sufficiently noticed, because reviews and retrospective articles still talk of it as a document of English ‘stiff upper lip’ repression – often wondering how relevant it can be in a less ‘uptight’ age. Of course this is not exactly wrong, but what I found so fascinating about the film was how completely David Lean’s camera-work, and especially Celia Johnson’s acting, show that the idea of the ‘stiff upper lip’ is based on a false understanding of how the suppression of the emotions usually works.

The idea of the ‘stiff upper lip’, and the gestural rhetoric of shaking, trembling, desperate eyes and stolen glances which usually goes along with it, posits that the emotional turmoil of the repressed person is quite fully-formed and psychically available, but covered over by a regard for propriety, a fear of losing control. The lip is said to be stiff because it is always on the verge of wobbling, of breaking cover. The model is of a vast country of the unconscious, all ready to be expressed, if only there did not exist some strange blockage, experienced as essentially foreign to the self. But this is the wrong way around. For the experience of such repression is that, in almost every instance, one simply does not have the means to articulate the territory of the unconscious, that what one wants can take no form other than the sorts of self-conscious fantasy that Laura has on the train back to Ketchworth after one of her meetings with Alec – going to the opera at Paris, kissing on a Venetian gondola, standing on a moonlit beach, dreams which wear their unreality on their face – or the essentially mute avowals like those Alec offers her and which she reciprocates in their first acknowledgement of their feelings: ‘I love you’. That remark contains everything, and thus, for people such as them, nothing at all. The space in-between the emptiness of ‘I love you’ and the self-consciously too determinate, too perfect content of Laura’s dreams, the space of genuine wanting, is absent, not suppressed.

There is not a block on expressing something already there, a block foreign to the self. Instead, the predominant energies of the self are devoted to maintaining control, to finding ways to pass the time or keep the conversation going – and they always succeed. The stillness of Johnson’s acting, how her slump into despair is identical to her return to the modest gravity expected of the wife, is an index of this. The stiff upper lip suggests that violent emotion is always threatening to break out under self-control, but she shows that the problem is more that the control is always threatening to break out under the violent emotion. It always wins, because it is by far the more active part of the self, the part with the real imagination. The super-ego is delirious and clever; the id is ungainly and full of the most embarrassing cliché. Listen, for instance, to the ‘brightness’ of tone, the sense of solid practicality, in the lovers’ voices as they walk through the station after they have agreed that they must stop seeing each other, a scene which ends with Laura crying into Alec’s hands. ‘Brightness’, not brightness – it is a recapitulation of what they remember brightness ought to be, a remembering of how conversation is supposed to work, and it is this desperate resourcefulness, this sense of successfully playing a skilful game, which gives the scene its power.

Thus the fear of people like Laura and Alec of the ‘return of the repressed’ is present only on a deeper and less conscious level than the vulgar idea of repression would have us think. For in fact, the most psychically available fear is precisely that one cannot break down, that one always wins the battle against oneself. Of course Laura does have break-downs, outbursts – but they are always immediately followed by return to a complete quietness of demeanour, a perfect control. This is especially true of her attempted suicide, which takes place, according to her narration, without any thoughts at all. This is quite plausible, because the effect of this delirious super-ego’s constant busyness, its capacity and desire to always get along, is to prevent generalised ‘feeling’ from congealing into thought, about what precisely Laura feels for Alec for instance. This means that instead of the permanent mental presence of one’s emotions as a judgement, or attempts at judgement, of the situation, one has only the alternation of different moods. Given that these moods do not have sufficient form to pretend to evaluability according to correctness, one is no better than the other, they cannot be seriously thought about at once or compared, and thus inevitably the antecedently stronger, more psychically grounded moods, which lead to conformity to one’s situation, can always replace those which would demand a change.

This is not only more accurate psychologically, it is more productive politically, if we are interested in the politics of those desires which some oppressive aspect of society prevents us from realising. Brief Encounter has often been criticised for ultimately acceding to oppressive and patriarchal standards – for the failure of the couple to consummate their relationship, for Laura’s return to her husband Fred, for drawing a sharp distinction between the primmness of the middle-class central characters and the bawdy working-class, not so much in terms of their virtue but their psychological interest, their capacity to be the subject of a serious film. Laura and Alec are people; Albert and Myrtle are barely caricatures. And of course the answer to the question ‘why do Laura and Alec not have sex?’ is that the conventional middle-class sensibility of the time would not allow it. But what is striking is that the answers to such questions within the terms of the film, in terms of the motivations of the characters or the genuine aesthetic unity of the picture, are very thin. There isn’t, really, a reason they don’t have sex – they just happen not to. If they hadn’t been interrupted by Alec’s old friend Dr Stephen Lynn returning early to his flat, maybe they would have.

They didn’t. Moreover, it is impossible to tell what they might have done; indeed, the category of what might be or what they might do is almost entirely occluded in favour of what happens in fact. This is another way of saying that the lovers prevent themselves from thinking – they do not decide, imagine alternative possibilities, they create for themselves no centre of judgement from which they might do so and from which we, the audience, might in turn infer the possibilities available to them given their characters and circumstances. They do not truly have characters to begin with.

And this is in its way a more effective demonstration of the power of oppressive categories than a pair of lovers in conscious revolt against such categories would be. For it shows how the rules enforced on us may be rendered invisible, that the tracks they lay down for our lives may seem to be ‘just what happens’, because by destroying the power of thought they force a reflexive reliance on themselves, a falling-back onto the ordinary course of things which always just happens to be what the most oppressive structures dictate. Given the tale is told for us from their point of view, the reasons for this alignment are hidden from the audience as well. But, on reflection, away from the film, we will realise that such structures in fact determine the action.

In other words, Brief Encounter is most adequately interpreted as a translation into an apparently conventional English idiom of Brecht’s epic theatre. The actor’s distance from her own emotion is used to convey the determination of psychology not by the depths of the unconscious but by the ludicrous shallows of a absurd society. Of course, the difference, which means that Brief Encounter is permanently on the telly and Brecht remains a very niche interest, is that there are no didactic breaks in the action of Brief Encounter which force the detached reflection on the relationship of that action to the larger society which is, nevertheless, implicit in the film. Yet perhaps this is the film’s canniness – a brilliant form of entryism, a device to make itself more palatable whilst smuggling in the truly radical? Perhaps not. And yet – in its very refusal of didacticism or consciousness of its artificiality, it is a more effective witness than Brecht’s plays to the utter silence that may spread over the minds of those who make the first stirrings towards thinking their way out of their circumstances; not attempts to think beyond oppressive structures but evidence of the immense difficulty of doing so. In a time when everyone on the cultural left advertises their having left the categories of racism, sexism, heteronormativity or capitalism behind, and barely anyone makes the radical departures in thought which this would, it might seem, require, this evidence may well be salutary.