Look Back in Anger: Jimmy's Revolution

Look Back in Anger is a play published in 1956 by the English author John Osborne that seeks to encapsulate the essence of British youth at the time, but how does it relate to Chilean reality?  

Jimmy Porter is a character that could work as an analogue to middle-low class youth, he is angry, bitter and feels like he is being robbed from greatness thanks to events that are completely out of his control. He is doomed to live a mediocre life in a post-war world trapped in a dead-end job with two characters that do not validate his pain. Allison,his wife, seems oblivious to the real world thanks to her upper-class background and Cliff, his dim-witted best friend, is not educated enough to grasp the whole situation. Porter sees this as a valid excuse to explode and constantly project his anger against the world, making as much noise as he can in order to wake up the people around him. Leaving out the misogynistic undertones that John Osborne seems to spread throughout the play, the main character could be easily related to how most Chilean youth seems to feel right now: Repressed, ignored and with an undeniable will to wake up the masses that seem to be dormant or simply not interested.

Just like Porter, they feel trapped and running out of options while asking for change to a generation that does not fully comprehend completely what is it what they want. A good example of this is how Colonel Redfern reacts to Allison’s situation, he doesn’t understand why the situation even started in the first place and recognizes that the world that he once knew no longer exists. In a similar fashion, Chilean youth have to deal with the past generations that were marked by a dictatorship that completely shaped their worldview with a regime of fear and silence; ending up with two generations colliding, one afraid of change and another afraid that nothing will change at all. This is perfectly summed up by Allison when she tells her father “You’re hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it.”

The Chilean society still has a chance to achieve the goals that it wants, but first it has to reconcile the generational and socioeconomic gaps that currently exist, because otherwise, something like the students movement will end up trapped in an empty rebellion that will lead up to a loop of conformity like the one that Jimmy Porter ends up meeting. Telling himself that there are no good causes left to fight for and that probably nothing will ever change.