Monty in Recent Years Nations

¶ … Monty

In recent years nations across the world have increasingly looked to private enterprises to supply the impoverished with the necessities for life. Historically, minimum subsistence rates were established and distributed to individuals who were actively seeking work by the government. However, the trend towards privatization of welfare, social security, Medicare and their foreign equivalents are leaving millions of people within the world's industrialized nations desperate for work and money. It is in this setting that "The Full Monty" is found. There is slightly more to this film than the comedy surrounding average, unattractive men stripping; the notion that their idea is the most promising endeavor is, at once, both funny and depressing. Within a town previously described as 'the jewel in Britain's industrial crown,' the only demand these steel workers can supply lies in the sex industry.

The decline of the working class in Britain has resulted in thousands of skilled workers who are unable to find work. In today's global economy former fail-safes like the minimum wage have now become barriers to employment. Since corporations are forced to pay workers residing in industrialized nations more for the same work, they simply relocate operations to where the cheapest workforce can be found. This practice can be devastating to entire communities; it is also amplified by the removal and downsizing of government entities designed to support the poor.

Sheffield, the community in which "The Full Monty" takes place, appears as a fragment of what it once was. The film opens with a glowing description of the town from an advertisement recorded twenty-five years earlier -- before any steel refineries were shut down. Sheffield is portrayed as a bustling town, poised for growth and prosperity. The film fails to detail the events that brought about the drastic decline and squalor in which Gaz and his friends find themselves.

Oddly, much of "The Full Monty" takes place in abandoned factories and neighborhoods; Gaz himself is never shown to actually dwell anywhere. It is understood that most of these men are former steel workers, so the choice of the abandoned factories as a practice facility is certainly not accidental: the filmmakers clearly meant for this to be both symbolic and comical. The "Steel Strippers" find work once again in the steel refineries; since there is no longer any steel, they work with what little they have available to them -- their own bodies.

Specifically what makes the situation in "The Full Monty" so funny is that it is so pathetic. One of the right wing objections to the welfare state was that it created a class of individuals who fed off of the scraps of society, and had no motivation or desire to contribute to the world in any meaningful way. "The Full Monty" portrays, by contrast, a group of individuals dying to work, in any way possible, but still hardly able to survive. The structures formerly in place to provide them with employment no longer exist, and those aimed to help them in times of need are slowly being pulled away. Their situations are pathetic, so their grand scheme to acquire money, to be amusing, must be equally pathetic.