I suppose every rapist has a story.  However, the idea that I would care to hear it, let alone empathize, is an entirely different matter.  In Mike Leigh’s film Naked, Johnny (David Thewlis) somehow manages to draw sympathy from viewers even after his rampant victimizing; viewers end up unsure whether their pity or their disgust was the greater emotional response.  This attraction/repulsion struggle makes any definite opinions difficult to decide.  Mike Leigh and David Thewlis work together to create a paradoxically complex character, both through Thewlis’ dogged questioning, his troubles finding a place to stay, and a disarming sense of humor, and through Leigh’s continued focus on Johnny, refusing to write him off or reach any conclusions about him throughout the film.

            Johnny is, above all else, lonely.  He forever seeks out companionship, and finds it always among the equally isolated.  Everyone he meets is pathetic, and so by comparison Johnny seems a more dynamic person.  Johnny meets Brian, a night watchman who “guards space”; Johnny observes Brian at work and concedes he has “the most tedious” job in England.   Johnny dominates people intellectually, forever asking philosophical questions, of which he expects in return not answers but a blankness he can face with a deprecating grin.  When he meets Archie, a twitching, shouting Scotsman, Johnny mocks his tic and sarcastically addresses him as “bodhidharma”.  His scorn reflects our scorn; all his derisive comments gain our support, because we, unlike most of his acquaintances, are smart enough to understand his wit.  By affiliating always with lost, desperate, and weak individuals, Johnny takes on an ambiguous nature:  we know how he treats people wrongly, but our judgmental side can’t stand people who don’t respect themselves; we consider a woman monumentally stupid if she claims she loves a man who beats her.  Pushing Sophie around isn’t so bad, we reason, because she is a prostitute, and she is so drugged out all the time she probably doesn’t feel the abuse.  When people walk around so afraid to be bullied, we subconsciously feel like pushing them around, like they’re asking for it.

Of course, there are times when Johnny downright pisses the viewer off.  His truculent interrogation of the poster-hanging guy reaches an irritating pitch.  Johnny receives not one, but two beatings after this, and many viewers feel that he finally gets what’s been coming to him for so long.  But Leigh still follows him, and we have to watch Johnny suffer.  When Sebastian snaps at Johnny, we side with Johnny, because, even though we dislike both characters, Johnny has received some retribution.  We’ve come to like Louise and Sophie, especially since they’ve been terrorized by Sebastian, and their support of Johnny reflects our desire to be altruistic and defend the downtrodden victim, especially after accruing so much vicarious guilt for silently endorsing a number of past victimizations.

Since Johnny is so unpredictable, the viewer can never really be satisfied with one idea of him.  We accept him as a sort of picaresque character going from encounter to encounter, where this basic Johnny character puts a new spin on himself each time we meet him again.  This allows the viewer to forget Johnny’s past cruelty and accept his suffering as legitimate and worthy of our pity; it also shows how forgiving we are in the face of charisma.  Even Johnny’s harshest crimes lose some of their reprehensibility in comparison to Sebastian, making Johnny the lesser of two evils.  Johnny has rough, animal sex with Sophie, but she at least wants to be with him; Sebastian forces himself on her, raping her.  Surprisingly, Johnny’s rape in the beginning doesn’t bother the viewer as much as it should, largely because we have no real sympathy for the woman, and we manage to forget about the incident once the movie gets going.

Leigh’s ability to maintain Johnny’s ambiguity relies on comparison to both victims and victimizers; in an environment of relatively awful people, Johnny shines a little brighter than he would alone.  We end up identifying with him at some points, because he talk so much, he eventually has to say something we would agree with.  He makes observations about the very same problems we have –– “I’ve got an infinite number of places to go, the problem is somewhere to stay.”   His lifestyle embodies a willingness to be someone we, quite honestly, do not have the courage to be.  Johnny alienates himself from society, because of his very strong personality and his refusal to be complacent.  Johnny enjoys his own presence so much that we begin to share his enthusiasm.

With Johnny, Leigh gains the ability to comment on many different situations with a character whose viewpoint can be manipulated to be valued in one instance and opposed in the next.  By letting us understand Johnny a little it, Leigh leads us to ask ourselves “How far are we from the real Johnnies in the world”, and “Could I become one myself?”  Ultimately, Leigh faces Johnny’s heartlessness and his wretchedness with equal candor; he shows us how ugly we can be sometimes, considering how we treat each other, and how helpless we can be when we must rely on others to survive.