Cal McMau’s visceral feature debut, set in a men's prison, provides a useful lens for considering how pop culture informs our understanding of policing and justice.
Police and prison dramas often ooze with copaganda – a term used to describe popular culture that heroises and glamourises law enforcement and the penal system. This includes everything from Paw Patrol and Happy Valley to that Kendall Jenner Pepsi advert and Line of Duty. While there is no (official) department of the police force that works with directors and screenwriters to encourage these positive depictions, plenty of law enforcement officials both in Hollywood and closer to home serve as advisors to the industry – but copaganda is often just a reflection of the way most people see and understand these institutions as beneficial for society and crucial for public safety.
Looking specifically at the United Kingdom, even with growing public discontent towards the police, modern takes on policing still “tend towards a rumination on either the inevitability of the police despite their faults, or the ways in which police could be improved by a few ‘good apple’ diversity hires,” author Leah Cowan explains. Because most people have never been inside a prison, the way we conceive of incarceration comes largely from what we see on screen, through both journalism and popular culture. If we are to believe these depictions, police and prisons keep us safe, prisoners are the bad guys who commit crimes out of greed and an innate propensity for violence, and they deserve to be locked up.
Kelsey from transformative justice collective Cradle Community adds that most cinematic presentations of these institutions also obscure the extent of corruption. “We don't see the reality of the ways the police and prison guards are trained to escalate and provoke, particularly when confronting marginalised people,” she says, adding that copaganda has a knack for flattening the complexities of harm. There is also the widely held, and somewhat contradictory, view that prison is in fact far too soft – “But they all have TVs!” goes the common refrain.
You won’t look at television sets the same way after watching the spine-chilling opening scene of Wasteman, Cal McMau’s debut feature. The story follows Taylor (David Jonsson), a quiet, anxious prisoner struggling with drug addiction, whose imminent release is thrown into jeopardy when his new cellmate, the volatile and macho Dee (Tom Blyth), involves him in a drug deal that causes a series of catastrophic and savage events.
The film’s portrayal of incarceration is bleak: it is inescapably brutal and utterly claustrophobic, with the threat of violence so constant and sharp you can’t relax for a single moment. There are no heroic guards; the woman in charge of prisoner release is cold and clinical, and nothing about this story hints at even the remotest notion of rehabilitation. In fact, Wasteman only serves to prove just how limiting and dangerous prison conditions are – in this sense the film does an excellent job of presenting the gruelling reality of incarceration.
Janey Starling, prison abolition organiser and co-director of gender justice campaign group Level Up, explains why this is so necessary: “There's this myth that prisons can be rehabilitative, but we know that they are inherently traumatising environments. People are on constant high alert, living in cramped conditions with strangers that they can't trust. Prisoners do develop addictions to cope with that, and Wasteman tells this part of the prison story well.” It’s also useful to have this displayed in a British context given how inundated we are with images of American prisons, their extremity causing us to downplay the violence of UK prisons.
Director Cal McMau spent 10 years doing research, mainly via watching phone-captured footage smuggled out of prison and uploaded to YouTube, some of which is replicated in the film itself. He also worked with advisors from prison-leaver support charity Switchback, in particular ex-prisoner and now mentor Kam Johnsepar, who was on hand to provide technical information (such as what kind of kettles they had in prison) as well as acting as an authenticity guide. He also became a sort of spiritual advisor to McMau, who began asking deeper, more profound questions about whether Johnsepar thought there were any positives to prison. “I remember him telling me that the only thing the system does well is to lock people up. There is no other single benefit,” McMau recalls.
There’s a saying which has its roots in politics but has come to embody the idea that representation needs to extend beyond depiction: ‘Nothing about us without us.” While it’s likely that Wasteman would have benefitted from more prisoners and ex-prisoners being more involved in the writing and creative process, and it’s undeniably important that prisoners have a voice in an industry obsessed with capitalising on their stories, it’s clear that an effort was made to integrate lived experience into Wasteman. Per McMau, this appears to be landing well: “Every prisoner’s experience is different, but when we’ve done screenings with ex-prisoners present they tend to say we got it bang on.”
This is not to say the film isn’t lacking in other places. Wasteman somewhat skims over an important point about why Taylor and Dee (or any of the other prisoners we meet) have ended up in the penal system. For prison abolitionists who believe in building a world without prisons, understanding the ‘why’ of prison is crucial to understanding why not.
Prison is a lazy afterthought – like policing, it’s a system that waits until harm has happened and then acts punitively. Abolitionists are dedicated to preventing and mitigating harm at the front end, which requires understanding the root causes. Prisoners are disproportionately impacted by poverty, structural racism, childhood trauma and abuse, mental illness and addiction. Prison cannot ever be the solution to crime, because by its nature it is traumatising, dangerous, violent and unsafe. Within Wasterman, we see this through Taylor’s admission that his drug addiction developed only once he was incarcerated.
Though the reasons people commit crimes are often socio-economic and political in nature, the state’s response is punitive rather than restorative – it is perceived as easier, cheaper and more convenient to disappear people than to tackle the root causes of their behaviour. But if we want to live in a safer world, we need to look at these root causes and create interventions, systems of support and structures of care. More concretely: housing, education, equal pay, access to mental health support, childcare support, access to healthy food and, when harm does arise, transformative approaches to dealing with it that don’t continue the cycle.
In Wasteman, the only glimpse we receive into why Taylor was selling the drugs that led to his conviction is that he wanted to provide for his newborn son. We’re left to wonder why drug dealing was Taylor’s only option and what led him down that path, with no answers ever forthcoming. For viewers used to more reductive portrayals of prisoners and the prison system, in which we are normally asked to empathise only with the wrongly convicted or those with ‘just’ motivations, the omission may feel a little frustrating and unsatisfying. Copaganda in its most insidious form peddles the notion that empathy with prisoners is only extended when we know all the details of their lives. As David Jonsson says when asked whether he devised a backstory for Taylor, “I don’t really like talking about my process.” Instead, he prefers to leave the audience to come to their own conclusions. “I think asking the question is probably more important than the answer, especially in today's world where we all know how hard life is.”
Though it never emerges overtly in the film, Tom Blyth explains that he put considerable thought into Dee’s backstory. It’s one of violence, neglect and an overwhelming vulnerability that led to him refusing to be taken advantage of again, hence his violence, his propensity to “strike first.”
Could leaving the details of Dee and Taylor’s pre-prison lives so open-ended feed into the trope of a bad guy who’s done bad things and deserves to be locked up? Maybe, but perhaps Jonsson’s right – Wasteman doesn’t, and can’t possibly, provide all the answers. Provoking the audience to engage in the why of prison (and why they might feel they need to know every detail of Taylor and Dee’s lives to understand them) might prove more useful for anyone who has yet to deeply engage with the issue.
For Blyth, this character prep, along with the insight from Johnsepar and the rest of the Switchback team convinced him of a key truth: “The big takeaway for me is that if there’s help to be given, it should start way before someone ends up in prison. It should be going into communities, into certain schools…a lot of the time I think it’s about having elders who are really investing in [young people] and giving them a path forward that feels productive and rewarding, having people who believe in them.”
The same can be said for those leaving prison, where support is so lacking that people often return to old patterns of behaviour. Starling points out how accurately Wasteman depicts this struggle. When Taylor is told the news of his upcoming release, his reaction is not one of exuberant joy but of quiet fear and perpetual anxiety. “When it comes to long sentences, the institutionalisation that people undergo makes release a real battle, especially after a longer sentence,” Starling says. “How do you find a house? How do you find money? How do you start again?”
Having the answers to these questions would not only prevent recidivism, but, if properly funded and resourced, would also prevent people from committing harm in the first place. This is something we rarely, if ever, see depicted in our cultural media. “What’s missing are films and series that help us imagine functioning public services,” Starling says. “We need art that helps us think about a world where everyone has access to social housing, where people could actually survive on state benefits, not have to battle with social services over the care of their children, and be able to just survive.”
Part of the power of our current system is its ability to quash our imagination. We struggle to see beyond reforms like making prison ‘rehabilitative’ or reducing sentences for lesser crimes. The idea of not having prison at all often feels too big, ambiguous and amorphous for us to grasp. This is why art is so important. Film has the power to help expand our imaginations, to dream by seeing, to understand by feeling. Film and TV shape how we see the world we have, but also the world we want to build.
Wasteman does half the work, and it does it well, but we need films that challenge us to think beyond what we’ve ever believed to be possible. Part of the difficulty is that the world we believe in only exists in fragments. With this battle on our hands, art provides a mechanism for dreaming. If film and TV can provide even one street on the roadmap, we can begin to piece it all together – to create a future without the need for police or prisons, because everyone has what they need to not just survive but to thrive.
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