7 - ‘An object of indecipherable bastardry – a true monster’: Homosociality, Homoeroticism and Generic Hybridity in Dead Man's Shoes

Summary

Desire [is] … the affective or social force, the glue, even when its manifestation is hostility or hatred or something less emotionally charged that shapes an important relationship.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985: 2)

The problems with gangs of men is that thing of leading and egging and creating your own laws as you go along. In its worst form it's like the most disturbing form of abuse. Some of it's homoerotic as well.

Shane Meadows, The South Bank Show

Misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other's blood.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818: 89)

Birth of a monster: the gestation of Dead Man's Shoes

Following his creative disappointment with the Film 4-funded Western pastiche Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, Shane Meadows' subsequent film, Dead Man's Shoes, saw a return to a smaller budget, complete directorial control over the final edit and a positive director–producer relationship with Mark Herbert of Warp Films. Co-written with lead actor Paddy Considine, Dead Man's Shoes can be seen as a creative reaction against the filmmaker's negative experience with Midlands, an attempt to creatively ‘erase’ the aberrant film. Meadows clearly alludes to this motivation during his talk at the Brief Encounters Film Festival held in Bristol in November 2004:

I think Dead Man's Shoes is what Once Upon a Time in the Midlands was meant to be. If you look at the very, very barebones of the story, it's the story of a stranger that comes back to town to confront a situation. I almost push that film (Midlands) out of what I think of the films I've made and put Dead Man's Shoes in its place as a kind of my first feature.