Having eliminated much of the danger associated with their brand of recklessness and violence, without sacrificing the fun, these kids play and represent the youth that has been left home to look after themselves while their parents work. And they are still too poor to afford proper toys, which is a particularly interesting stab at the Mods, who were known to have a strong interest in expensive fashion and scooters. Much like the original skinheads, those of better means have left out Woody, Shaun and the rest of the gang, and they have decided to express and act out this role through their destruction. The question this inspires is why. According to Hebdige, the ‘why’ of this adoption of such characteristics and behavior by the skinheads and these characters is an attempt at reviving a “lost sense of working class community” (56), which, indeed, Woody and his friends succeed in doing during this passage of the film.

Style, of course, was immensely important to this revival of the working class for the skinheads, which is explored in the following scenes of the film chronicling Shaun’s journey to becoming an official member of Woody’s group. At 20:43 in the film, the importance of style is illustrated by Shaun’s struggle to procure a pair of Doc Martin’s, the brand of boot popularly worn by skinheads. Shaun’s opposition to any other boot, especially the Thompkins shoes from London that the shoes saleswoman is attempting to push onto him and his mother not only goes back to the staunch refusal of the fancy Mod fashion, but emphasizes the importance of style in conjunction with subculture. Blue-collar workers in England popularly wore doc Martin’s before becoming a part of the skinhead uniform. 

At 22:35 in the film, Shaun completely appropriates the style of the skinheads when he has his head shaven and is given a Ben Sherman shirt by Woody. Lol (Woody’s girlfriend) and the other skinhead girls fix Shaun up like a proper skinhead and is thereafter considered a member of the group. These scenes act out Hebdige’s theory that the skinheads used style as an attempt to “revive, in symbolic form, some of the expressions of traditional working class culture” (56). This revival of style calls back to the sense of community that skinheads believed came with said working class culture.

 

What these attempt at revivals, of the camaraderie and style of the working class, could also call back to be an idea presented by Stuart Hall. In his article, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Hall discusses two ways in which cultural identity is thought of and discussed, the former he explores in the text being of interest in discussion of the film. This first definition of cultural identity is “one shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’, hiding inside the many other, more superficial and artificially imposed ‘selves’, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common” (Hall, 223). This way of thinking about cultural identity would explain the skinheads or any subculture’s desire to dress in a certain way; to identify with a uniform adorned by all its members. Style is a conduit for this shared culture and this sense of unity. Hall further writes of “oneness” and how this provides people with “stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history” (223). Given this definition of cultural identity, Shaun’s refusal to wear anything but the clothing and accessories that his new friends wear and the reason why subcultures are born in the first place are clear: to be apart of this stable, ‘oneness’.

The stability of Woody’s group and Shaun is threatened, however, with the introduction of the character Combo to the film. Combo represents the dissension that occurred within the skinhead subculture when nationalists with racist beliefs adopted it. When he arrives, his overt racism and excessively militant English nationalism caused several members of Woody’s group to leave him in favor of joining Combo’s. This includes Shaun, who had been convinced by the man’s ‘this is England’ speech, which begins in the film at 42:09, that his way was the right way because of he did not want his father’s death (as a solider in the Falklands War) to not mean anything.

Combo’s speeches are politically charged diatribes against immigration and race, but there is an intriguing social layer to his racism that is of particular and significant interest. In Subculture, Hebdige details the decline of the skinheads and the factors that played into it. One of the most interesting factors was the changing attitude in the reggae music scene. Skinheads drew a wealth of inspiration from the West Indian Rude boy subculture and their style. Their music was of extreme importance, which Combo himself admits to the character Milky, a Black skinhead, at 1:20:10: “it was people like your uncle—your uncle—that introduced that stuff to me.” He goes on further to state how this music “resonated” with the original skinheads, illustrating its influence on the subculture even more. 

However, the beginning of the decline of the skinheads, Hebdige argues, was signified by “ideological shifts inside reggae which threatened to exclude white youths” (58), creating a new disillusionment in the subculture it had helped create to alleviate. This could account for Combo’s incessant desire to lash out against the people he once identified with. Because the reggae has become “preoccupied with its own blackness,” so did he become preoccupied with his ‘whiteness’ in response, a kind of spiteful reaction to being hurt by a trusted friend even. 

This is very successfully exemplified in the film through its soundtrack. There is no scene featuring Combo in the film (save for when he is getting high with Milky) that is not scored. In contrast to scenes featuring the apolitical skinheads like Woody, where music, predominantly reggae, is being plaid, there is either film score or silence to Combo’s scenes. This unique use of a film’s soundtrack succeeds in showcasing reggae’s retreat from the skinheads and placing Combo as a metaphor for the perversion of the subculture.

Much of the theory in Hebdige’s Subculture and Hall’s “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” is clearly expressed in This is England through its plot, characters, and even soundtrack. The film’s characters express their identities as a part of the skinhead subculture is rooted in Hebdige’s theories on style—including fashion, music, and behavior—and Hall’s theory on cultural identity. These texts are instrumental in understanding the social implications of these characters and the reasoning behind their identification with a subculture. Based on these authors’ theories and their elements in This is England, it is interesting to speculate how the same theories might be applied to American society and subcultures.