The Romanians Are Coming (2015): Immigrant bodies through the British gaze

Introduction

The event that marked the summer of 2016 was the success of the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom, which advocated for leaving the European Union (EU). The campaign was constructed around issues of controlling borders and reducing immigration; it utilized a strong nationalist discourse and disconcerting racist rhetoric that most especially targeted Eastern Europeans. The success of the Leave campaign was associated with the British media’s aggressive portrayal of a negative image of immigrants, seeking to render their presence in Britain a state-of-the-nation issue. In the past 4 years before Brexit, reliance on media to reshape the Romanian perception of Britain, as well as the British perception of the Romanian immigrants, was particularly noticeable. Take for example, a British ministerial proposal of a bizarre campaign highlighting the downsides of life in Britain, aimed at deterring new Romanian and Bulgarian immigration. According to the British ministers, the goal of this negative public information campaign (which has not been officially pursued as initially proposed) was to ‘correct the impression that the streets here are paved with gold’ (The Guardian, January 2013; The Telegraph, January 2013). The Guardian (2013) satirically followed up on this proposal using a series of enunciations of a variety of reasons for not emigrating to Britain, such as ‘Come to the 2013 European Capital of Obesity. It’s Contagious!’ (The Guardian, January). In response, Gândul, a Romanian newspaper launched a cheeky campaign entitled, ‘We May Not Like Britain, But You’ll Love Romania’. It encompassed invitations to visit Romania, in the form of posters (Figure 1) that read, for example: ‘Half of our women look like Kate. The other half, like her sister’. In the context of what appears to have developed as a media tug of war, it is indeed imperative to focus on the heightened influence that media has in shaping the perception of the Other. Namely, this article explores the various modes of depicting immigrant bodies that were encountered in the controversial Channel 4 documentary series, The Romanians Are Coming (2015). The documentary film director, James Bluemel, claimed to have spent 1 year filming seven cases of Romanian migrants to the United Kingdom. He followed these individuals through the complex emotional process of deciding to leave their native country and then their initial experience as immigrants in the United Kingdom. More specifically, his viewers learn about Mihaela’s immigrant story, as she moves to Sheffield, England, where she is offered better compensation for her work as a nurse. In addition, we become acquainted with the experiences of six Romanian men: Sandu, a Romanian Roma middle-aged father of nine; Stefan, a dedicated father who while sleeping on the streets of London tries to earn the money he needs to fix his daughter’s broken leg; Adi, who has been sending most of his wages home for 6 years while sleeping under a bridge; Alex, who struggles with a drinking problem and homelessness; Cosmin, a young man from Oravita who has joined two of his friends in the United Kingdom; and Alex Fekete, a Romanian Roma young man, who is also the narrator of the series.

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Figure 1.

Poster published in The Guardian aimed (satirically) at deterring Romanian immigration.

Bluemel’s documentary series has generated controversy and encountered strong protests within the Romanian community in the United Kingdom as well as among Romanians back home. These objections have included a silent protest that took place immediately after the first episode of the series aired that consisted of several hundred Romanians who took to the streets of London and then gathered in front of the Channel 4 TV station (Butu, 2015, The Romanian Journal). The Romanian Prime Minister backed up the protest via his Twitter statement: ‘I express my solidarity with the Romanians participating in this protest’. Strong reactions against the documentary series also came from other high-ranking government officials. For example, the Romanian Ambassador in London wrote to the documentary’s producer to express his disappointment with the way the Romanian community living in the United Kingdom was portrayed (Jinga, 2015, Huffpost). The Romanian Foreign Minister also publicly expressed concern about the show’s potential social consequences, which he argued, could negatively affect the Romanian community in the United Kingdom (Awford, 2015, Daily Mail). Numerous other voices articulated a similar sentiment in Romanian media’s established venues, including Romania Libera, Gandul and Ziarul Romanesc (Margaritescu, 2015, Romania Libera; Stanca, 2015, Gandul; Redactia, 2015, and Ziarul Romanesc). The various protests complained about the series creating an unfair image of Romanian immigrants through its disproportionate focus on stories of Romanians living in extreme poverty and its extended focus on the Roma community, even though it represents only a small percentage (3.3%) of the entire Romanian population.

The tensions existing between the Romanian and the Roma communities and the changing dynamics triggered by the Romanian political regime change from Communism to capitalism, are worth mentioning for a precise contextualization of our analysis. Rozalinda Borcila, Romanian artist, writer and political activist, astutely notes that during the Communist period, the Romanian identity was constructed mainly through tropes of Latinity as well as drawing its differentiation from the Roma population (Tyler and Marcinia, 2014: 51). After the collapse of communism, neoliberalism displaced the Romanian workforce from within the national borders, propelling it globally and, thus, the Romanians arriving in Western and Northern Europe found themselves in turn both ‘illegalized’ and racialized as Gypsy ¹ or Roma (Tyler and Marcinia, 2014: 51). In the context of these transformations, Kaneva and Popescu (2014) brought attention to what has been officially labeled as Europe’s ‘Roma problem’. This situation was caused by the inclusion of Bulgaria and Romania, counting the highest numbers of ethnic Roma among their citizens, as EU membership states. As a result, many Eastern European Roma, as EU citizens, gained the right to travel within the EU without needing to have entry visas. The receiving European communities feared and rejected them, repeatedly referring to them as criminals and security threats. Another important point to address here is the general confusion that exists between Romanian, Roma and Gypsy identities. The ethnographic research focused on the Romanian immigrants to the United Kingdom, written by Daniel Briggs and Dorina Dobre (2014), explores this topic in-depth. Illustrating especially well the overlap that persists among these identities is the following statement from one of the Romanian immigrants whom the authors interviewed: ‘Here (UK) they don’t call us gypsies; they say Romanians but picture gypsies’ (p. 69). From the authors’ various examples, we learn the specifics of the gypsy image that has been projected onto the Romanian immigrants as ‘someone begging, someone dressed in a long, flowery skirt…, someone with wrinkles around their eyes, someone who can tell their fortune if their palm is crossed with silver, someone darker, someone different’ (Briggs and Dobre, 2014: 68).

This conflation of Roma, Gypsy and Romanian identities distressed the Romanian community to the point that the Romanian government on two occasions (in 1995 and 2010) attempted to designate Roma officially as Tigani (gypsies) in all public documents and discontinue the use of Roma by Romanian state institutions (Rostas, 2010 cited in Kaneva and Popescu, 2014). In both cases, it was argued that such a measure was necessary because the word Roma sounded too much like the name of the country and thus could damage Romania’s international image (Kaneva and Popescu, 2014). The Romanian government decided to distance itself from the Roma community’s severely negative image formed throughout the EU. Anca Pusca astutely renders the severity of this negative image with examples from a media campaign initiated in Italy in 2006 that targeted the ‘illegal’ immigration of Eastern European Roma. As a part of this campaign, posters were displayed throughout the city, depicting Roma men as rapists and Roma women as child abductors (Woodcock, 2010 cited in Pusca, 2015: 327). Roma community’s image has been equally negative in the United Kingdom and Romania. A discourse analysis centering on various media representations of the Roma community in the British and Romanian newspapers between 1990 and 2006 shows that the group was regularly presented as mostly composed of thieves and beggars (Schneeweis, 2009 cited in Pusca, 2015).

The lack of a clear distinction between Roma and Romanian identities is usually invoked as the main cause for generating the overtly aggressive attitude toward Romanian immigrants found within Europe. Here the representation of Romanian immigrants resembles that of the Roma community. Take, for example, a textual analysis of the media’s reporting on Romanians in the run-up to lifting immigration controls for Romanians and Bulgarians on January 2014. It revealed that nouns associated with the word ‘Romanian’ tended to center around criminality (words like gang, criminal and thief), and economic poverty (squatter, beggar) (Vicol and Allen, 2014).

The Romanians Are Coming (2015)’s film director James Bluemel, in an interview published by MediaFax, confirmed his awareness of the negative portrait of Romanians in British media and further argued that his main intention in directing this series was to debunk the various tabloid stereotypes. He further stresses that he tried to bring attention to the humanity of his characters and to the sacrifices they have to make to begin a new life in Britain. As such, he assesses the documentary series to be a positive (empowering) representation of these immigrants (MediaFax, Bluemel, 2015a). In this sense, the series engaged with what Graeme Turner (2010) coined as the ‘demotic turn’, more specifically the increasing visibility of the ordinary and, in our case, marginalized persons in the media today.

The reality TV show might provoke the public to recognize ‘the human face’ of the Romanian migrants and the Roma community. The usual logic here, therefore, is that by showing photographic close-ups of migrant faces and including first-person accounts of their experiences, the series might enable more citizens to identify with migrants as human beings (Tyler and Marcinia, 2014: 7). On the other hand, one could also argue that the obvious intent to entertain the audience nevertheless undermines those claimed benevolent efforts. The Romanians Are Coming (2015) could be critiqued for exploiting people’s pain and misery, which in turn generate forms of entertainment and revenue (Wood and Skeggs 2011, 16).

Writing this article was to a large extent inspired by the amplitude of the critical voices claiming that The Romanians Are Coming (2015) builds a distorted image of the Romanian society and turns extreme poverty and vulnerability into a convenient, entertaining fetish. Nevertheless, the article’s purpose is not to contrast a “skewed representation” with a “genuine image” of Romanian immigrants, since all representations unavoidably presuppose specific viewpoints. Otherwise put, there is a plausible sense in which “authentic representations” are impossible. For example, we can imagine how a documentary film that shows solely successful immigrant journeys and economically vibrant Romanian cities, while minimizing the visibility of the Roma population, would be ideologically problematic. These representations would reinforce a standard neoliberal discourse celebrating global capitalism, and support an exclusionary idea about what it means to be Romanian ² .

In my effort to expose the intrinsically political nature of representation, what follows examines the relations existing between blindness and sight. Following James Elkins (1996, 13), I argue that blindness constitutes an inevitable dimension of sight. We are not only inevitably blind to various aspects of the world, but we are also necessarily blind to certain aspects of our blindness. Like the eye that cannot see its seeing, our implicit normative frameworks make visual perception possible, but these frameworks escape our explicit normative considerations. Therefore, these twin forms of blindness supply the necessary condition of possibility for perception and, importantly, the inevitable loss of information. The perceptual economy of blindness and sight are crucial in the formation and reinforcement of a national structure of fantasy.

Instead of concerning itself with the veracity of the immigrants’ depiction, the article brings the documentary in full focus, in order to explore the nature of the representation itself, as an expression of the British gaze. Therefore, this article explores in-depth the ways in which The Romanians are Coming (2015) plays two different roles that stand in tension with one another. One reinforces ideology, while the other involves exposing gaps within ideology. For example, in the first role the documentary, as a manifestation of the British gaze, offers various scenarios that reinforce the prevalent British nationalist discourse which others Romanian immigrants, through their association with dirt and extreme poverty. In its second role, the documentary makes visible aspects of the social world, which ordinarily remain hidden in everyday life, such as the vulnerable alienated human bodies in the nursing home in Sheffield and the general lack of emotions and care characterizing the UK space. In other words, the documentary’s visual space does not merely depict the world, but it also creates the conditions of possibility for the audience to question ideological assumptions, as well as to reimagine the social order by allowing the immigrants to return the gaze (Galt 2006, 89). These could lead to an awareness of inconsistencies within what is initially perceived as a homogenous and coherent British national social space. In this sense, psychoanalytic film theory encourages us to interpret mass culture as a massive screen on which collective phantasy, anxiety, fear, and their effects are projected. The Romanians are Coming (2015) at a closer look, could speak of the blind spots of the British culture, through its various forms of representation that manifest socially traumatic material, through distortion, defense, and disguise (Mulvey 1996, 12).

As such, one is indeed encouraged to question why it is that the British gaze keeps returning to specific imagery associations, which do recur throughout this particular film. The psychoanalytical exploration lets one understand what is about these stories that makes them entertaining to the British audience. The questions guiding this current exploration thus become: What drives the British director’s attention to these specific stories? How can we interpret the persistence of elements such as the decay of bodies and spaces, vulnerability, filth, coupled with outbursts of festive vibrant music and dancing?

Decayed spaces and decaying bodies

The film introduces us to the narrator of the series, namely, Alex Fechete Petru, a young man of Romanian Roma descent who lives in a Pata Rat, a forced Roma settlement in Cluj, Romania (Figure 2). Alex is filmed in his backyard, a wide-stretched field crowded with piles of garbage, as he starts the series with a cynical remark that is then repeated at the beginning of each episode. He identifies the differences between the world’s nations saying, ‘That’s the difference between nations, you see. USA is planning to go to Mars and Gypsies from Romania ride horses’. The documentary series persists throughout its presentation in exposing the discrepancies between what appear to be two distinct worlds that are existing in their own distinct times and spatial registers, namely, the United Kingdom and Romania. While Romanian spaces presented in the documentary are deeply tainted by the past Communist order, the UK spaces are already part of the future, as they display accelerated rhythms and sterile, strictly controlled neoliberal esthetics. In this sense, the documentary juxtaposes the sight of the post-Communist decay and degeneration with the full ‘spectacle of capital’ that is encountered in the United Kingdom.

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Figure 2.

The field of garbage in Pata Rat, Cluj, Romania.

The series launches with the image of a man riding a horse in a wide-stretching field of garbage in Pata Rat, Cluj. As a contrasting technique, the viewer is immediately brought to the streets of London, where the camera traces various groups of immigrants who are identified as Romanians. Some are begging, a man is playing the accordion, while others are gathered in parks, appearing to be camping as they have around them large bags in which we assume they are keeping all their earthly belongings. Their ghostly presence is out of place, as they lay on the grass with apparently nowhere else to go. A local British man who is interviewed remarks with disgust in both his expression and tone that the immigrants ‘stink this place a lot’. Another one argues that they should be sent back, while a third who is holding a sign that reads ‘Jesus’, reminds the immigrants of ‘thou shall not steal’ and expresses the opinion that ‘surely you have jobs in your land’.

The Romanians Are Coming’s specific themes and aesthetics position the series within the new sub-genre of television labeled ‘poverty-porn’ documentary. This recent reality TV genre, which includes shows like Benefits Street (2014), Gypsies on Benefits and Proud (2014), and Britain on the Fiddle (2013), has developed in the post-recession British context. Its focus is scrutinizing the lives of people in poverty. As such, it unfortunately transforms the condition of poverty itself from a structural social injustice into an opportunity for voyeuristically gazing at the lifestyle of the poor and assessing how deserving or not they are (Jensen, 2014). Tracey Jensen (2014) writes that poverty porn reality TV plays on an obscene curiosity about poverty as well as positions the lives of the poor as a site for moral scrutiny, something to be peered at, even judged and assessed. Specific to this genre, the series in discussion herein makes abject poverty an overly present circumstance. For example, in the first episode of The Romanians Are Coming, the viewer is taken into a forced Roma settlement in Cluj and subsequently into another one in Baia Mare. In Baia Mare, we meet Sandu, a middle-aged man of Romanian Roma descent, who for 16 years has lived in social housing at the edge of the city with his wife and their nine children (Figure 3). Bluemel, the documentary’s director, specifies that over a thousand Roma families are forced to live in this settlement, inhabiting one-room apartments, some of these without running water or electricity. The city authorities built a 6-foot wall around the site, a wall designed, according to the Mayor, only to prevent traffic accidents (Bluemel, 2015a).

Bluemel (2015a) describes the living conditions he encountered in this settlement:

This seven-storey shell of an apartment block – half-finished, with bricks missing and gaping holes without glass for windows, and with walls blackened by smoke from wood fires – rises out of a sea of rubbish which completely covers the muddy ground around it. In the middle of the site, a single tap provides fresh water. On my first visit, some young children were playing with a dead dog; they have no toys, someone explained.

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Figure 3.

Sandu in front of his apartment building, a part of the forced Roma settlement in Baia Mare.

The film director persists in diverting the gaze of the camera from economically vibrant Romanian spaces to repeatedly capture images of economic and social decay. He follows five of the characters to their original homes in Romania. In all, except one of these cases, we are confronted with poignant environmental and human body degradation. More specifically, the documentary shows human bodies mingling with stray dogs amid fields of garbage, searching in dumpsters for scrap metal, coal, or other things that they can sell, with unpaved dirt roads and decrepit unfinished buildings all around them. Two of these places are the previous mentioned forced Roma settlements in Cluj and Baia Mare, using the cases of Alex and Sandu.

Alex is the series’ narrator and lives in Pata Rat, a Roma settlement neighboring the garbage dump of Cluj. Alex introduces us to his neighborhood’s surroundings where we encounter large piles of garbage that seem to stretch to the horizon. Alex shares with the viewers that the city authorities dump their poisonous chemicals there, and that in his first year of living in that location his stomach used to get upset. Now he has adjusted, so much so that he can even live on the moon, as he jokes. The Roma community is forced to live on the margins of the city, discarded by the city authorities. Alex recalls that he used to have a normal life in the city before the entire community was forced to move and inhabit this forsaken place.

In the second and third episodes, we visually travel to two additional cities in Romania, namely, Oravita and Lupeni, to follow the stories of Cosmin and Adi. In each one of these encounters with Romania, one has the impression of witnessing a world that is disintegrating and one out of which humans are trying to desperately escape to avoid the rapid process of emaciation and the crumbling of their social space. The register of social life gives the impression to be contracting, as existing modes of social expression and interaction become outdated and worthless. Life itself becomes an impossibility in both Oravita and Lupeni from where Cosmin and Adi are fleeing. In Oravita, the Director continues his thematic exploration of decayed spaces, as he follows Cosmin who strolls through an abandoned apartment building that faces the one in which he lives with his parents. He recalls some good memories playing as a child in those ruins, but he makes it also very clear that lately he has had none. He puts it this way: ‘I am bored of this boring boredom’. The narrator cynically mentions that there is ‘nothing to do in Oravita besides going to church and waiting for a meeting with God’. Bruce O’Neill (2017) in his ethnographic work that explores the sense of boredom experienced by homeless people in Bucharest, conceptualizes boredom as an affective relationship closely associated with the feeling of time slowing down and with that of being stuck in place (pp. 3–4). The Romanians whom he interviews express an overwhelming consensus that life must be stimulating ‘over there’, referencing usually another country (O’Neill, 2017: 14–15).

A similar landscape is encountered when we follow Adi back home in Lupeni, a former mining town. As the mining industry collapsed after Communism, people remained there without employment and thus in stringent poverty. Lupeni illustrates, as cultural and social theorist Anca Pusca (2010) somberly argues that the Communist industrial horizons collapsed in a pool of dust, regrets, corruption and a sense of self-destruction and futility (241). The poignant landscape now filmed shows the rusted mining equipment being engulfed by wild mountainous vegetation. It all stands as a desolate reminder of the Communist era, as men and children now only search for coal in big piles of dirt.

In the footage from Lupeni, the viewer’s gaze rests for a moment on a Communist monument dedicated to the miners of that region. It shows two men in work overalls saluting the passersby, while proudly holding a drill and a large bouquet of roses (Figure 4). The monument reminds one of a past world and of the miners’ former glory. In contrast to the proud attitude that the monument inspires are Adi’s current life conditions. He lives under a bridge in the United Kingdom, while still working strenuously to support his five siblings, mother and wife in Lupeni. There is nothing glorious about his attitude, as he confesses that ‘My life is horrible for the moment’. He feels ashamed of his living conditions and keeps the painful details about his life secret when with his family.

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Figure 4.

An old Communist style monument in Lupeni celebrating miners.

Instructive here also is Jack R. Friedman’s (2007) research on the sense of shame that the Romanian miners experienced because of their declining social and economic status during the Romanian transition. He informs us that working as a miner before 1989 implied the ability to provide relatively well for one’s family and also having a patriotic and highly respected position under the system of state socialism. All this began to change in the years after 1989 (Friedman, 2007: 243), especially with the announcement of the closure of the mines in 1998. The miners were thus confronted with a changing sense of values, which ultimately led to an increased marginalization of their identities and lives (Friedman, 2007: 246).

Anca Pusca (2008) invites readers to see the rise and fall of different regimes and ideologies as marked visually through the construction or crumbling of symbolic buildings or industrial compounds that also reflect historical time and social change (pp. 369–370). The images of decayed spaces, so persistent in this documentary, can be interpreted as images of change. These images also commemorate the collapse of the Communist era and its specific way of life, its existing values, dreams, goals, social identities and networks. The overwhelming expansion of a neoliberal way of life with its ultra-rapid and unprecedented socioeconomic transformations leads to the production of new modes of living, thereby propelling individuals into different social bonds, spaces and time, while rendering the old ones redundant. The people and spaces associated with the old social order become inutile and unemployable (Bauman, 2016: 117). If one does not quickly enough let go of outdated dreams and modes of social existence, one finds herself occupying a dead social space and holding on to an identity that is scraped in the new world, an identity that has become unintelligible. As such, these radical social changes led to eviscerating the conditions of possibility for even life itself (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013).

In the documentary, the social spaces of former communities of miners as well as the Roma community are restructured and rearranged, both symbolically and literally, as both are pushed to the margins of society. In these conditions, one finds oneself excluded from what constitutes public life to become an abject being inhabiting what is now an ‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ space (Butler, 1993: 3 cited in Ahmed, 2000: 52). The decay of the habitual space is also matched by the decay of the bodies featured in this documentary. This is illustrated through the ‘shitty teeth’ that many of the characters display, the deformed legs of the Romanian beggar present in the opening scenes of the series, and the broken leg of Stefan’s little girl who suffers because of the incompetence of the doctor who operated on her. The connection between the degradation of the environment and that of the humans inhabiting it is further accentuated when the camera captures the image of a young man getting high on paint thinner in a field of garbage in Baia Mare, Romania. We also learn that Alex’s health problems are caused by the poisonous chemicals dumped by the city authorities next to his home.

The viewer discovers that the most common occupation undertaken in the United Kingdom by Romanian immigrants is that of street cleaner and car washer. In this sense, the Romanian immigrants are literally and perennially associated with dirt. For example, Sandu asks for employment, suggesting that he will even accept cleaning toilets. Stefan and Alex are both employed to clean the streets of London, while Liviu prides himself to be a specialist in washing cars. The word ‘shit’ also has a persistent presence in the documentary: ‘shitty house’, ‘shitty jobs’, ‘get out of this shit’, ‘shitty teeth’. Many of the characters are filmed sleeping roughly on the streets, in parking lots, or under a bridge with the rats. This thematic focus on ‘dirt’ and ‘filth’ continues when the documentary highlights that in Pata Rat, over 200 people in the community must share only six showers. Alex mentions that his wife has been waiting her turn to take a shower for an entire day. Here, it is important to recall William A. Cohen’s explanation that people are considered filthy when they are felt to be unassimilatable and their actions, behaviors and ideas are considered filthy when these individuals are thought to partake of the immoral or the unaccountable. The persistent presence of these versions of filth seems to be establishing sharp distinctions that articulate the British perspective that announces clearly, ‘That is not me’ (Cohen and Johnson, 2005: ix–x).

The portrayal of these immigrant bodies as always in close connection with dirt and abjection could be psychoanalytically interpreted as a result of their association with the lost self untamed by the symbolic order. Julia Kristeva (1982), for example, insists that this pre-Oedipal basis, that the symbolic order must disavow, is necessarily associated with the abject. This specific representation of immigrant bodies through the British gaze illuminates the view that they are regarded as existing outside the neoliberal capitalist order. Not fully included in the capitalist symbolic order, they thus stand out in the UK public spaces, acquiring a ghostly, out-of-place presence only associated with dirt and pollution that then disrupts the UK’s sterile aesthetics. Pollution, while it is often represented as dirt and filth, as suggested by Mary Douglas’ definition of dirt as ‘matter out of place’, is in truth a moral category expressed in symbolic form. Dirt is simply matter that, within a particular framework, appears in the wrong location, and so violates and disrupts the desired sense of order in the world (Cohen and Johnson, 2005: xi). For something to cross a boundary, especially one that is marked by a strong and commonly held symbolism, is to pollute the space (Hetherington, 2000: 21). Zygmunt Bauman (1998) writes about the mechanism through which the process of globalization designates certain categories of humans as waste. Indeed, these ‘refugees, the displaced, asylum seekers, migrants, the sans papiers, they are the waste of globalization’ (p. 58).

Dispossessed bodies and borrowed identities

In this context, it is instructive to recall Samira Kawash’s research into the process through which the homeless body is constituted. Her astute insights become especially useful in our analysis and become applicable to the emerging global market in which they illuminate the conditions of possibility for the creation of an intrusive immigrant homeless body (Kawash, 1998: 323). The global expansion of capitalist production and the neoliberal market, tends to unify spaces by breaking down the boundaries between one society and the next. It also displaces the labor force that is left to reimagine and build anew its position in the global society (Debord, 2014: 90–91). What renders immigrant bodies homeless, is the formative logic of the official public space of the neoliberal market, which in its very process of self-constitution necessarily involves the act of exclusion. This exclusion in and of itself is material, as it produces particular forms of material expressions. A material counterpart to this constitutive global market space is the displaced immigrant body which is apprehended as intrusive (Kawash, 1998: 322). Here we can bring attention to the fact that the workers coming from Romania are both in great demand within the British economy and at the same time excluded and discriminated against in that same social space. The documentary shows that the Romanian immigrants are able to secure jobs in a very short time if they are versed in English, as there is very little (or no competition) from the British workforce.

A telling scene is the interview with one of the representatives of the fruit-picking industry in the United Kingdom, who overtly states that the workers coming from Romania to pick fruit on farms are vital for the functioning of that industry. Asked what would happen if the immigrant workers could not move to the United Kingdom, he responds that most likely the industry will move to Romania. Neoliberalism also provides a rationale for the radical split between those who are privileged and considered legitimate in the system and those who are not. Any awareness of the mutual interdependence between these two categories is socially disavowed. These stark social divisions acquire a simple and convenient explanation, namely, the ‘failure of individual choice and responsibility’ (Hamann, 2009: 50 cited in Layton, 2014: 163).

The documentary series discussed here exposes the immigrant homeless experience of Alex, Adi and Stefan as they attempt to survive and integrate into UK social space. These men’s dispossessed bodies are propelled into a global market where they search for a valid symbolic position, an identity that will restore their sense of belonging to the world. This idea best describes Stefan’s situation, who without any special skills or ability to speak English, ends up embodying a borrowed fictional identity, that of a golden cowboy (Figure 5), and later the one of famous Charlie Chaplin, in order to entertain passersby in London. These borrowed identities allow him to participate in legitimate capitalist interactions and give him some existential validation. The problem is that there seem to be too many of these dispossessed bodies in search of a brief symbolic respite. Stefan shares with the viewer that in a short time there were six other men personifying Charlie Chaplin on the streets of London. Another telling story is that of Christian, Alex’s friend. When Christian contracts tuberculosis and is labeled a ‘tuberculosis patient’, the narrator underscores that contracting this life-threatening disease was the best thing that could have happened to him. His new symbolic identity makes his body intelligible to others and allows him to partake in the public social order. He gets recognition from the UK medical system, receives boarding accommodations, and as such, is able to escape homelessness.

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Figure 5.

Stefan embodying ‘a golden cowboy’ on the streets of London.

For a better understanding of the frantic search for a valid symbolic identity, I invite the reader to consider Todd McGowan’s argument, namely, that capitalism should be thought of as distinct from culture. He claims that capitalism transcends cultural bonds, kinship and community, shredding all these to pieces and reshaping them to fit its own logic. Different from being a member of a culture, who acquires a stable symbolic identity associated with a structure that extends beyond one’s own subjectivity (McGowan, 2016: 20), the capitalist subject constantly experiences the failure to belong. This explains, for example, the recurring fantasy in a neoliberal society of attaining some degree of authentic belonging that is accomplished in the market place, where ‘proto-communities’ of strangers form around specific patterns of consumption (Aldred, 2000). Unlike the subject of a particular culture, the capitalist subject does not have a stable place that offers a constant sense of identity (McGowan, 2016: 21).

Family space and festival

Besides confronting the viewer with far stretching landscapes of decay, this documentary persists in returning to what appears to be an idealized vision of Romanian family life and home. In the first episode, Alex, the series’ narrator, proudly introduces us to his family: ‘This is my gipsy son, my wife too is gipsy, even the little dog is gipsy’ (Figure 6). The interior of his small one-room house receives the viewer with bright pink colors and soft welcoming fabrics. His wife welcomes the camera either smiling or laughing, tenderly playing with her son and emotionally sharing the story of their difficult forced relocation to the margins of the city. She looks at her husband with genuine love, as she encourages him or interacts with him through playful jokes and gestures. The viewer catches glimpses of this beautiful young woman dressed in bright exotic colors such as pink lace, purple, or animal prints. These colors, fabrics and prints inspire softness, beauty and femininity, strongly contrasting with the desolate poisonous surroundings of Alex’s home. To the extent that the outside is toxic due to the dumped chemicals, the inside of his home is both wholesome and enticing.

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Figure 6.

Alex and his family in his home in Pata Rat, Cluj.

A particularly memorable scene is the one in which Alex’s wife is filmed making soap balloons to entertain her young son (Figure 7). The diaphanous feel of this image creates an inviting oneiric space, dissociated from the larger dismal environment outside. The documentary series concludes with an image of the three of them, mother, father and child, tenderly snuggling and playing after Alex decides to give up pursuing a life in the United Kingdom: ‘Fuck good life! Fuck money! I think I will go home’. A similar display of a wide range of colors, from purple, to red, pink and green appear in Sandu’s one-room apartment which he inhabits with his large family. The striking vibrant colors are associated with the interior and its pillows, rugs and blankets. The Romanian home space materialized through these vivid colors, soft fabrics and intimacy, strongly contrasts with the dreadful barren larger landscape where it is located. Home, which often consists of only one room, acquires the qualities of a hut that shelters, emotionally nourishes and protects its inhabitants. It is a place of soft colors and tenderness, a chrysalis that insulates the family against the outside crumbling noxious world.

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Figure 7.

Alex’s wife makes soap balloons to entertain her son.

Many of the characters in the documentary are filmed while singing and dancing. These vibrant celebrations are brought into the documentary’s space with little or no explanation, and they are closely associated with the home interiors. Sandu’s decrepit one-room apartment is the setting of what looks like a tumultuous celebration that emerges out of nowhere and includes women, children and men sensually moving to the rhythm of manele. ³ The small room seems to come alive in an outburst of exuberance. It appears to expand as well to accommodate the large crowd and the outpouring of joyful forms of expression. In the middle of this celebration, Sandu passionately kisses his wife and conveys his hope in the help he’ll receive from the British people. His wife while dancing cheers out ‘Long live England! And the Queen!’ Reminding one of Emir Kusturika’s films, is Sandu’s neighbor who wears a suit and dark sunglasses, and plays a broken violin, while surrounded by a friendly celebratory audience. A similar scene surfaces in the Roma community in Pata Rat, where the documentary introduces unexpected images in which Alex’s wife, accompanied by three other young women, moves sensually to and sings along with the rhythm of manele. James Bluemel also films the 2014 New Year’s Celebration when the community in Pata Rat comes together to drink champagne and enjoy fireworks, constituting yet another moment of what appears to be genuine happiness and a zest in living, strongly contrasting with the decaying surroundings present throughout the forced Roma settlement.

The general association that Bluemel makes between Gypsy identity and music is not a new one. Indeed music has always been a key element of Gypsy identity (Currid, 2006: 189). Across Europe, the image of a Gypsy has often been intimately associated with various forms of music and musicality since the mid-19th century. Composers like Liszt and Brahms made the Gypsy a centerpiece of their cultural fantasies part of European art and music. In literature and popular culture as well, the figure of a Gypsy has often been associated with innate musicality (Currid, 2006: 191; Pogány, 2004: 67). Similarly, Channel 4’s My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (2010) series portrays the life of Roma and Traveller communities as a perpetual lavish festival that celebrates life events, most often weddings. The Romanians Are Coming generalizes the predisposition toward expressing oneself through dance and songs, but not restricting it solely to the Roma community. As such, a similar atmosphere of exuberance and festival is fashioned in Mihaela’s home, where Mihaela together with her daughter and husband partakes in contagiously enthusiastic singing and dancing, thereby bringing to the forefront the tight emotional connections that these family members share.

Associating the Romanian family space with outbursts of exotic colors, music and dancing can be indeed interpreted as part of a nostalgic fetishistic outlook of the British gaze. As such, it functions as a reminder of what aspects of human existence had to be given up in order to enter the fast-paced neoliberal mode of living. Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984) argues that the fetish, because it represents a conflation of reality and fantasy, inhabits a magical and artful universe, a ‘marvelous and uncanny world’ (pp. 87–88). This is especially true for the Gypsy fetish, which facilitates the construction of an alternative social order as well as a different space–time relationship (Bancroft, 2005: 53). Gypsies are usually envisioned as lacking a sense of history and as living in a timeless universe ⁴ (Fonseca, 1995; Iordanova, 2002). The outpour of festival-like music and dancing as well as the vibrant colors through which the home interiors are present into the documentary articulate the nostalgic fetishistic nature of the Romanian immigrant portrayal. This nostalgic imagery suggests, one could argue, a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. When associated with the British gaze, the fetishistic representation of Romanian homes could be read as symbolizing and covering over a sentiment of loss and displacement. It also signals a sense of romance with one’s own fantasy of a return to an earthy and hence more authentic mode of existence (Boym, 2001).

In contrast to the Romanian home interiors, the UK spaces never emanate such celebratory forms of expression. Instead, the UK public spaces, especially the nursing home in which Mihaela works, remain chillingly cold and sterile. Here I invite the reader to recall Debord’s critique, which insists that although the present neoliberal age creates the impression of an existence that manifests itself through a series of frequently recurring festivities, those moments when members of a community join together in exuberant expenditure of life (such as the ones fashioned in Romanian homes) become impossible to achieve. This is the case because neoliberal societies lack a basic sense of community. As such, Debord (2014) contends that capitalism offers instead vulgarized pseudo-festivals that become mere parodies of real dialogue and gift-giving (p. 84).

Each one of the cases depicted in the documentary series underscores the strong family ties that do endure as the larger social and economic environment undergoes radical alterations and decay. Indeed, the characters’ identities, life goals and desires are closely tied to the dynamics of their families. As such, one could say that the family constitutes the key social structure of the documentary’s immigrant characters. This aspect is especially true in the case of Adi. For 6 years, he has lived under a bridge, sleeping rough, sharing the space with rats (Figure 8), while sending most of his wages back home to Lupeni to support his mother, five siblings and his young wife. He keeps the extent of his sacrifice secret from them. His mother articulates how vital Adi’s efforts are for making their life possible in Lupeni: ‘He’s been helping us… we’ve been able to pay our debts…and to have food’. When asked what would happen if Adi could not send money home, she responds, ‘We would starve here with the children’. The narrator concludes Adi’s story with a remark that brings to the fore the complexity of this young man’s life circumstances: ‘I don’t know if Adi is brave or stupid’.

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Figure 8.

Adi filmed in the space he inhabits under a bridge.

Similarly, we learn about Stefan’s strong commitment to his family, especially to his daughter Stefania. He endures months of homelessness while he learns English in order to be able to work in London. He explains why he cannot give up, as he shows the camera a photograph and a scan of the leg of his young daughter, Stefania. He explains that his daughter suffered an unsuccessful operation on her leg that left her with chronic pain. In a touching scene, Stefan calls home and hears the voice of his daughter telling him that the pain has not subsided. We also witness Stefan sending most of the money he receives as social benefits home to his family, keeping for himself the bare minimum to sustain his life.

Scenes that illustrate similar strong family ties and commitments are present in all the cases this documentary brings to us. Even in the case of Alex, whose family we do not meet, we see examples of heartfelt generosity. He shares his food and his precarious sleeping accommodations with his Romanian friends. He generously gifts his canned food to a homeless woman. He helps Stefan orientate himself in the British social benefits system and accompanies him to the dentist when he is in need of treatment.

The documentary also draws attention to the fact that the emotional forms of expression articulated in the Romanian households become inappropriate in the British setting. In this sense, there is a telling scene where the documentary spells out the need to discard one’s emotions if one wants to succeed in the British economy. This aspect is highlighted when a visibly vulnerable Sandu with tears in his eyes communicates to Dorin, a Romanian man living in the United Kingdom: ‘Listen, my brother, this is how it is. Even if it’s working in a public toilet, I’ll do it. If it’s digging, I’ll do it. I don’t want to start crying. I came here because I need it.’.. Dorin responds with his own advice: ‘You shouldn’t show your feelings in this country… You need to be meaner’.

The society of spectacle and its underside

Michel Foucault (1962) designates as heterotopic those spaces that have ‘the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect’. Such spaces are linked with all the others, but nevertheless, they contradict all the other sites. He reminds us that heterotopic spaces emerge when people arrive at ‘a sort of absolute break with their traditional time’ (Foucault, 1962). The documentary series juxtaposes two such sites that express a break in time, triggered by an encounter between different modes of living, namely, the public space of the neoliberal market in the United Kingdom and the decaying environment we are confronted with in Romania. This specific depiction of differences between national spaces and boundaries reminds of the psychoanalytic perspective that a boundary, besides referring to the delimitation of actual spaces, becomes the crystallization or spatial expression of specific psychological limitations. The crystallization of such limitations, Georg Simmel argues, becomes a living energy that forces the elements of a nation together and will not allow them to escape their unity (Simmel et al., 1997: 142–143).

Indeed the differences between Romania and the United Kingdom are rendered through placing a focus on the psychological limitations, namely, through focusing divergences in the ways of going about life. Furthermore, the documentary brings precise attention to an additional disconnect existing within national space itself, namely, the deteriorating desolated environment and the Romanian home environment that bursts out during exuberant festive energy and display of emotions. As such, the home is associated with ‘time in the mode of festival’, that is, ‘time in its most flowing, transitory aspect’ (Foucault, 1962). Similarly, the documentary juxtaposes the UK public space, which is presented as shopping malls, carefully manicured parks and streets in constant need of cleaning and upkeep, to the space of a nursing home, there showing vulnerable alienated human bodies disconnected from loving family bonds. One then reads the environment of the nursing home as a heterotopic underside to the neoliberal marketplace.

A memorable moment in the documentary is when Sandu, together with his eldest son and best friend, visits a shopping mall in Liverpool for the first time. The glamorous consumerist aesthetics sit in stark contrast with the place they left in Baia Mare. In Liverpool they are surrounded by images displaying representations of the glamour associated with commodity consumption. The camera follows Sandu, as he intensely stares at a display of Thomas Sabo jewelry, adorned with the image of a model wearing one of the jewels. It further traces the three immigrants and their gazes that keep sizing up the buildings and the glaring advertising. They utter their overwhelming enthusiasm about the sites, saying, ‘It’s so beautiful, I’ll be damned’. When he returns to his family in Baia Mare, Sandu attempts to share with his wife how impressive the sites in the United Kingdom were: ‘Woman! I went on a platform. We don’t have the kind of shops that I saw below me. On the platform as well’. He makes a hand gesture, suggesting he has no appropriate words to describe the fabulous places he saw.

The shopping mall in Liverpool exemplifies what Guy Debord calls a ‘society of spectacle’. Debord argues that the commodity form developed within capitalism tends to colonize every other social form, a process that reaches its endpoint in the society of spectacle, when human life becomes entirely the world of the commodity (McGowan, 2016: 20). This transformation leads to a hyperreality, which Jean Baudrillard (1983) argues is the process through which human experience turns into a pure simulation of reality, as society becomes saturated with signs and images merely reflecting each other, but with no claims to reality (Featherstone, 2007: 124). This form of ‘reality’ contrasts with the ‘earthy’, closer to nature, hence portrayed as authentic, forms of living that are associated with the Romanian space in the documentary.

The documentary juxtaposes the difference in the perception of time that is associated with the two national spaces through seeing Mihaela’s experience. She articulates the change in the nature of her perception of time, referring to her time in Sheffield, where she took a job as a nurse, as ‘dead days’. When asked what places she likes best in Romania, she responds: ‘I like everything at home’. She explains that at home ‘I’m always busy. There are only dead days around here’. One could argue that it is the time of capitalist production and the neoliberal dynamics in which she is assimilated, that manifest a stubborn oppressive presence in Mihaela’s life, as she states: ‘I don’t want to think about my home, about my daughter, about my mother, about my husband, about my dog. Better at work’. She also encourages herself: ‘But tomorrow will be another day, and then another day; will pass a week, a month, 3 months, 6 months’. Debord contends that the time of the capitalist mode of production, namely, the commodified time, is an infinite accumulation of equivalent intervals. This view recalls Mihaela’s counting of days and months as only dead blocks of time.

Here, it is instructive to bring our attention back to the various arguments regarding the human vulnerability experienced under neoliberalism. Lynne Layton (2014), for example, insists that the traumatic sense of ontological vulnerability generated by neoliberalism results in disavowal that is supported by a fetish structure (p. 171). At the societal level, fetishes can be interpreted as displacements of contradictions which the individual or community cannot resolve. As such, the fetish marks a crisis in social meaning. Manipulating the fetish, one gains a sense of control over what otherwise would become terrifying ambiguities (McClintock, 1995: 184). The fetish is able to bring certain details into the foreground of experience while disguising other features that are disavowed (Kaplan, 2006: 6).

The constant return to the Romanian family space, which comes alive through the outpouring of spontaneous festival and which shelters the individual in an intimate cocoon of tenderness, as the world around it undergoes fragmentation and decay, was mentioned earlier as being a nostalgic fetishistic outlook of the British gaze. The Romanian immigrants are associated throughout this documentary with vulnerability, filth and decay, but at the same time also with emotions, intimacy and exuberance. We argued earlier, that these fetishistic images thus cast into the shadows the very alienation and vulnerability generated by the neoliberal mode of existence.

Neoliberal discourse renders dependent and vulnerable states as shameful. As such, it is likely that these states will be repudiated and experienced as ‘bad me’ or ‘not me’. The fact is that when we dissociate parts of the self, these do not disappear without a trace (Layton, 2014: 166). They instead persist and manifest themselves in distorted, disguised forms, such as a group-reinforced denial of vulnerability, and the projection of the now disavowed vulnerability onto others (Layton, 2014: 167). This specific dynamics, in our case, illuminates the documentary’s persistence throughout in portraying Romanian immigrants as displaced vulnerable homeless bodies living in abject poverty. Slavoj Žižek (1997: 4) astutely notes that if an ideological edifice is to function normally, it must articulate its inherent antagonism in the material and cultural creations. What The Romanians Are Coming thus inadvertently articulates is the very vulnerability associated with neoliberal forms of existence. In this sense, the truly telling scenes are the ones that show Mihaela during her work in a nursing home (Figure 9). The camera focuses on the residents’ hands, which lack vitality and are in constant need of help with daily tasks. The narrator specifies: ‘Where I come from nobody sends their moms and dads away to be look after by strangers’. Indeed, the nursing home’s cold sterile environment contrasts strongly with the intimate family spaces we get to see in Romania. These aged bodies exist in a heterotopic space, an underside of the glamorous and economically vibrant spaces that ostensibly constitute the UK marketplace.

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Figure 9.

Mihaela at work in the nursing home in Sheffield.

The illusion of omnipotence that neoliberalism creates for individuals who pursue their own selfish desires as defined in separation from family and community, crumbles in these scenes. No longer able to participate in the capitalist interactions, the residents of the nursing home find themselves discarded and pushed toward the margins of society. In this instance, the striking difference between the omnipotence that neoliberal discourse promises and the reality of a vulnerable alienated human life is shocking. The vulnerability generated by the neoliberal social structure becomes a traumatic ‘hole’ opened in the fabric of reality. As such, the nostalgic fetishized images of exuberant festivals and intimate home interiors emerge as techniques devised to cope with the consequences of castration anxiety. The dazzling scenes of festival-like celebration are substitutes for what a community ‘once believed in and… does not want to give up’ (Freud, 1927: 152–153). As such, one only gains relief through a process of disavowal of vulnerability and its substitution (Mulvey, 1996: 5). Mihaela, after helping one of the residents lie down in bed, sheds tears and expresses her deep compassion for his situation. As such, the documentary series creates the conditions of possibility for Mihaela to return the gaze. She looks back toward the ones from whose point of view the series is filmed, where she encounters the very alienation and vulnerability which their gaze disavowed and projected onto the immigrant bodies. She connects with the residents of the nursing home and with the viewer, in this very condition of vulnerability, thereby articulating it as a fundamental human condition. As Mihaela puts it, when asked about what motivates her sadness: ‘You never know where life will take you. You know the thing is…you could end up in a similar situation’.