Review

Culture

Film & TV

Justice

Race

18 September 2024

6 min read

Rebel Ridge switches the code on corrupt coppers and body counts

An action movie tackling the all-time low trust in public bodies.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Two men stand off against each other, one holds a holstered gun.

Don Johnson and Aaron Pierre.

Netflix.

I wasn’t expecting to emotionally connect with this straight-to-Netflix action movie but Rebel Ridge is not a normal action film. It may be sitting at the number one position on the Netflix film charts, with its echoes of a classic Jack-Reacher-style thriller, but where it surprises and stands apart is in its challenging and nuanced handling of race, violence and corruption.

Race

Like Lee Child’s character Jack Reacher, Terry Richmond played by Aaron Pierre is a former US military officer. He is a private person, self-confident, respectful, comfortable with his own company and willing to go the extra mile to help a cousin who has got himself in a mess. Despite his lowly job in a restaurant, Terry happens to have financial means as well as expert survival and hand-to-hand combat skills. He is also Black.

The opening sequence shows Terry cycling into a small town when he is accosted by two local – white - police officers. Suddenly the dynamic changes. The determined, self-confident, resourceful man becomes the downtrodden object of a series of abuses and injustices. Terry tries everything to deescalate the problem, without success. Nevertheless, he remains polite, referring always to the officers who deal with him as “Sir”, and finding things to thank them for.

I found myself relating to this, remembering times that I have had to deal with abusive power and hoping that if I remain calm, polite and respectful, I could win the other side over. Some have called this “respectability politics” – the pressure on marginalized groups, particularly Black people, to behave in a manner that aligns with dominant cultural norms - including being overly-polite or restrained - especially in the face of abusive power or injustice. Another term for this is "code-switching," where minority groups feel the need to adjust behaviour, language, or appearance to fit into a different cultural context, often in response to systemic power imbalances.

Terry tries everything to get out of his situation with minimum disruption. But things deteriorate so far so quickly that Terry realises that nothing he can say or do will allow him to extricate himself. Cornered in this way, he is forced to pursue justice by other means.

It is hard not to see this film without remembering the death of George Floyd. That terrible incident in May 2020 highlighted racial disparities in policing in the US: 13 per cent of the American population is Black, yet they account for about 25-28 per cent of police killings each year. According to the Mapping Police Violence project, Black people are up to three times more likely to be killed by police than white people - between 2013 and 2022, about 7,000 Black Americans were killed by police.

The UK’s police services have had to admit to similar disparities. Black people are seven times more likely to be stopped and searched compared to white people in England and Wales. In London, where stop-and-search powers are more frequently used, Black individuals make up around a third of all stop and searches, despite representing about 13 per cent of the city's population. From arresting, handcuffing, the use of taser, remanding in custody and more, data shows that racial disparities are evident across the service. These disparities undermine trust in the police service, which in turn can inhibit the cooperation and information sharing needed to reduce crime and protect citizens.

The racial tensions that permeate the movie give viewers a glimpse into what it is like to be mistrustful of those who are supposed to help and serve us. As such it is a masterpiece in raising awareness of racism wherever it is experienced, and the fear and injustice that go with it.

Violence

Terry is huge, athletic and highly skilled. Like most movies of this genre, I was expecting the protagonist to be pushed to breaking point, thereby unleashing a wave of violence so severe and overwhelming that he becomes an unstoppable killing machine.

In Taken, Bryan Mills, played by Liam Neeson, kills almost 100 people, mainly of Albanian nationality, by gunfire, strangulation and electrocution, on his quest to protect his family. In the more recent John Wick series of films, Wick, played by Keanu Reeves, a retired assassin, kills over 400 people in a wave of violence initiated by the theft of a car and the killing of a puppy.

But Rebel Ridge is different. A key thread in the movie is the use of Escalation of Force–Non-Lethal Effects (EoF-NLE), meaning the use of verbal warnings, warning shots, non-lethal explosives and physical restraint tools like tasers or pepper spray that are supposed to minimise the risk of injury and death. In the film, the corrupt police officers have not only illegally raised money to buy this equipment they have also profited from renting out their EoF-NLE to third parties.

Terry shows himself to be a different kind of hero, with a stronger moral compass than the police service as he uses their own EoF-NLE against them. On one occasion we watch as he loads and racks his gun, only to use it in self-defence. He is an avenging angel unleashed who refuses to kill people. There are plenty of showdowns, but the final total body count is one.

Corruption

Many action movies, Taken and John Wick included, contain little social commentary. Rebel Ridge, on the other hand, is prepared to tackle some significant social issues. The corruption around EoF-NLE and militarisation of local police forces is one example. The other questionable practice that gets much discussion is “civil asset forfeiture” - an anti-drug regulation that allows a police officer to seize cash and other valuables with no due process. Both issues as portrayed in this film highlight the wider question of accountability of policing, as well as the potential for corruption that comes with its absence.

Indeed, it's not just about ‘bent coppers’ – the whole justice system is shown to be at risk in this film. The local judge is implicated in the corruption, and the state prison, as expected, fails to protect. The impact is pervasive. We see a conflicted black female police officer, a court worker struggling to get court support, and many others who stand idly by because they don’t seem to know what is right or good anymore.

At a time when trust in public bodies is at an all-time low – this film, despite its non-violent and subversive tropes, presents to us a heroic rebel with a higher moral compass who goes against the flow and pushes back against the system to try and fix things. It may not restore faith in our society’s institutions – but perhaps it does restore faith in something else.

Although the director, Jeremy Saulnier, claims Rebel Ridge was not based on a true story, I cannot help thinking of a true story that might have inspired it. I am reminded of Jesus Christ, the most famous rebel in history, who was killed in a showdown on a ridge outside Jerusalem for speaking out – lashing out even - against the corruption in the religious institutions of his time, for taking an anti-racist stance, and for living in a way that went against the flow. It reminds me of the lengths he went to get those he loved freed from the mess they had gotten themselves into, and the price he paid to try and save them from certain death. Like Rebel Ridge, the ending to that story remains open: who will take up the call and will true justice ever be served?

Article

Attention

Culture

Digital

Fashion

14 May 2025

5 min read

Meet London’s newest theologian – the Real Housewives of Clapton

The starter kits that kick-start the study of our souls.

Isaiah Morris

Isaiah is a visual artist and writer.

A woman looks at her phone, behind her is a montage of memes

How might an Instagram account summarise someone who’s a proficient user of Lime bikes, a lover of ‘natty wine,’ and has an affinity for small plates?

Sure, a particular East London ‘creative’ type probably came to mind. And you’d be right. However, perhaps there’s something more to all that social media signalling - a gesture toward late-stage capitalism, the ethical, the bourgeoisie, the material, or, dare I say, the spiritual?

Great religious texts are lived before they are written, and the prominent Instagram account Real Housewives of Clapton intuitively inscribes our new scriptures. (With Hanna Crosbie as its prophet. Along with Socks House Meeting and Dalston Super Stoned.) However, these new scriptures are not written on sacred scrolls but on digital tablets: memes.

Real Housewives of Clapton help us to see the vestments East Londoners are adorned with (new converts should begin with an Acne scarf), the pilgrimage sites to be walked (Broadway Market in Salomons), and the sacred meals one should partake of (rotisserie chicken is in vogue, but Jolene Newington Green is the cathedral). Nevertheless, young Londoners (like the rest of the Western world) are increasingly becoming more religious, not least Christian. As Lauren Westwood and Graham Tomlin discuss. But does all this newfound fervour always come leaping into traditional religion? I’m still not sure.

Ditching the poetic-spiritual contours of sacred writing for the potency of Microsoft Word ‘fancy’ text hastily pasted over stock images, Real Housewives of Clapton is delivering our new scriptures en masse, on pace with the changing of trends themselves. While memes are a longitudinal study nightmare for distilling emergent truths, they are great way to laugh whilst on the toilet. And the consumers of these LOLs? Those involved in the sub-culture themselves. It's post often generate tens of thousands of likes.

Real Housewives of Clapton articulates the aesthetics of our contemporary religiosity as it manifests in the everyday - so much so that religious attire re-emerges as a genuinely distinct perception of ‘East London’ attire, see the post below.. Religion is that term used to describe a community’s ritual, aesthetic, holy scriptures, sacred sites, and understanding of the Divine and how this relates to humanity.

Precisely because the projected identities these East London meme-dealers expose are entangled with a self-awareness for the ethical, it naturally gravitates toward the religious. To consider the aesthetics of ethics is to delve into theology. To meander on the aesthetics of a subculture in this way, then, is to be a theologian. The creators behind Real Housewives of Clapton are East London’s Rowan Williams (the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, not the actor), Germany’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or Medieval Europe’s Hildegard of Bingen. They’re reading the signs of the time and distilling it into potent visual metaphors.

So, what might we see if we were to read the memes of Real Housewives as theologians? Well, perhaps we can trace an eschatology (a fancy word for discussing the End Times).

The East London world is your oyster, but only insofar as it’s captured. And it needs to be a captured reality shared online so that we can feel seen.

In heightening our awareness of and orienting the sub-culture around “little things”—small plates, chippies, situationships, drinks, vitamin D—East Londoners are highly aware of the particulars of creation and how they can be in service to a more satisfactory existence.

A few months ago, Real Housewives shared this meme about running. Everyone knows someone who joined a run club in recent months; sharing the run map has become a “flex” on your friends (becoming a national security threat in the USA). Yet, the account contextualises this with the phrase, ‘after not posting anything for 9 months.’ There is, undergirding East London, particularly for men it seems, the felt need to maintain an air of nonchalance, aloofness, or, indeed, mystery.

A screen grab of a content creation meme.

Arguably, this nonchalance is from the same guy on Broadway market who ghosted you after the fifth date. Or, as appears every public holiday, the mysteriously unemployed DJ acquaintance who, via his close friends' list, is at his parents’ holiday home in Dorset.

Nevertheless, the account shared another meme a month later, see below, signalling something deeper. The identity of distance or mysterion is undercut by a more potent insight: we are obsessed with projecting our identities. Taking this to its logical absurdity, Real Housewives contrasts the purchase of a £1.29 Twix with the nostalgia of an off-licence. The East London world is your oyster, but only insofar as it’s captured. And it needs to be a captured reality shared online so that we can feel seen.

Participating in this religion includes evangelism through one’s online identity. But, in contrast to popular streams of culture, this aesthetic and its symbolic world only makes sense for those who live in East London. In other words, the Cult of East London doesn’t find its attraction because you might get global stardom. Instead, partaking in this particular cultural aesthetic signals to those you meet on Dalston High Street that you understand them and, hopefully, they might understand you.

Converging across both “social media mystery boy” and its always-online antithesis is the undergirding desire for our projected identity to be known.

As this meme about the sun coming out reveals, behind its comedic options—a designer jacket, spritz and ciggie, or the London sun—is a more dormant reality: we need all three.

A Freudian reading might interpret the designer jacket as the need for physical touch, the spritz as a plea for community, and the London sun as the need for God—the cult of Sol Invictus, perhaps. Maybe. Or, in a theological key, through the triangulation of branded cohesivity, a little drink, and the bodily calmness to feel as though we can finally close our eyes, we might actually find peace.

The garments Real Housewives self-abasingly propagates suggest that the spiritual lives of East Londoners are genuinely concerned with ethics. In aversion to fast fashion, we wear things that promote our being seen beyond a glance. This held-gaze has both to do with the self and the plea for us to look more seriously at the world we find ourselves in. This shift toward a more substantive looking subtly nods to an eschatology of peace.

The spiritual lives of East Londoners gravitate toward a longing for peace that is temporally filled with ethically just choices but is embodied unseriously. We laugh with and double-tap The Real Housewives of Clapton’s memes because we know this identity won’t save us. But spending one afternoon in London Fields wearing an iconic fit amidst the blazing British sun might just give us a taste of eternal serenity.

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