Wasted Time: "My Policeman" and the Importance of Queer Voices

By Suba Senthil

Photo courtesy of Parisa Taghizadeh/Amazon Prime Video

*This piece will contain spoilers about both the book and movie, so definitely come back once you’ve seen and/or read it!*

In preparation for the NYC premiere of My Policeman at Newfest, an LGBTQ+ film festival, I reread the book by the same title, by Bethan Roberts, on which the film is based. The thought of rereading the first quarter of the novel–– that is, the section from Marion Taylor's point of view–– was excruciating (maybe I'm being dramatic). Set in England in the 1950s, the book first follows a woman, Marion (Emma Corrin/Gina McKee portraying the younger and older versions of the character respectively), and her love for a policeman, Tom Burgess (Harry Styles/Linus Roache). Or at least, that would be how Marion would’ve seen it, how the world would’ve seen it— but this isn’t the whole story.

While we watch Marion deal with her feelings for Tom, Tom is sprung into his own love story. One day on his patrol, Patrick Hazelwood (David Dawson/Rupert Everett), a charming museum curator, comes to Tom to report a crime. Almost immediately, the romance between the two is born. But Tom is in a position of power, making it even worse for him to be outed as gay. Caught between the expectations society has for him, his own self-hatred, and the longing he feels for Patrick, we watch Tom’s curiosity and innocence slip through his fingers.

My Policeman is a tragedy. Truly, incredibly, thoroughly so. As Patrick would say, all love stories are. Of course, love to him was something more sacred, as he is unable to show his love in the open at the risk of being arrested, or worse, killed. The story unfolds through an older Marion’s eyes, about fifty years after the events at the heart of the novel occur, detailing her experience in a manuscript she wrote in order to share her side of their story with an older, now sick, Patrick. Tensions are running high in the Burgess household in this future timeline, leaving the audience eager to find out what exactly happened between the three intertwined souls.

One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the novel is that time was stolen from Tom and Patrick, as were many pieces of their story. We are introduced to the lovers and their story through the eyes of someone outside their relationship. We’re told only bits of Tom and Patrick’s story from their own perspective through Patrick’s old journal (in which he refers to Tom as “my policeman” in an effort to conceal his identity), reading it alongside an older Marion who finds it in a box of his old belongings. Tom and Patrick’s lack of autonomy in the telling of their own story and the secrecy that was forced upon them by an unaccepting society obstruct their time together. They are never allowed enough of it.

I want to first delve into some of what I felt were some of the most important parts of the work, and then explore some differences that arose from the source material into the film adaptation. Both are crucial to look at in how they relate to the necessity of queer voices in telling their own stories.

Both the novel and the movie bring us into the world of 1950s Brighton through Marion’s perspective. Red haired, fiery, naive, hopeless, Marion. I went into the book knowing how it ended, and I really do wonder if I hadn’t, how or whether that would’ve shifted my thoughts on Marion and the sections of the book written from her perspective. (Last call to stop if you don’t want the twist revealed to you.) The entire first quarter of the novel carefully builds this curated outlook of Marion’s, meticulously placing strands of sympathy for Marion in the audience, not preparing you in the least for her deep betrayal. She’s a girl, falling in love with a beautiful boy. It’s a timeless, touching story, a slow-burn romance trope. The girl falls in love with her best friend’s brother, life takes them in different directions in early adulthood, and they become reunited at last.

I think I threw up a little just writing that.

Of course, this isn’t the ending in store for Marion. In this version of the played-out story, Marion is blinded by her unyielding love (obsession) for Tom, because he can’t stand her. Or at least that’s how it feels in the book. Tom marries Marion for protection, and that’s it. The movie however, toys with the dynamics of this relationship a little more, creating more complex dimensions to their relationship. Tom, in the movie, is in a place of such denial of his sexuality and love for Patrick that the audience feels he’s (mostly) successfully convinced himself that he wants to marry Marion. Not because he loves her, but because he’s in love with the idea of normality, and marrying Marion will bring him some semblance of it. He’s meant to be this police officer, some sort of encapsulation of masculinity in a position of power. He even tells Patrick he’s fond of her because he wants to start a family, to be a father, to have children disguised in some facade to fit into societal expectations. There’s more of a connection between Tom and Marion in the movie, definitely a more special kind of platonic kinship, which almost makes Marion’s misreading of that as romantic more understandable. Which of course, is very deliberate. Even her relationship with Patrick–– while Patrick and Tom are seeing each other behind her back–– seems more genuine in the film than the book. The three of them become quite the trio, the movie’s trailer even starting with a toast made by Tom “to all of us.” This just makes it all the more painful seeing their short-lived happiness frozen in time, until one breaks, and three lives are destroyed (some more than others).

The movie does a phenomenal job translating the course of the same timeline of Marion’s and Patrick’s points of view to the screen. The narrative, built slowly in Marion’s perspective, shatters the second she opens Patrick’s journal. After Patrick and Tom’s first meetings, we're brought up to speed to where Tom and Marion’s story begins. It seamlessly shifts the entire story knowing all that went on with Tom and Patrick even before Marion was introduced to him as anything more than an acquaintance. A stunning montage backed by Ella Fitzgerald’s “Bewitched, Bothered, And Bewildered” complicates all of the beginning scenes we watched of the three of them, spotlighting the stolen glances and quiet moments between Tom and Patrick that were unbeknownst to a blissfully ignorant Marion.

While we’re witnessing the story from Marion’s perspective, it’s still hard to see Tom and Patrick’s story as one of high infidelity and side with Marion, despite the movie and book’s best efforts to have us do so. As an audience, we have the benefit of knowing the complexity of queerness and desire, particularly at a time where it was so heavily criminalized, that seems to go over Marion’s head. The moment that one might start to side with her, we find out she’s the one who sent an anonymous letter to Patrick’s boss claiming he was a homosexual, leading to his arrest, and the outing of his relationship with Tom in court. In the beginning of the movie, in what feels like a throwaway line on the surface, Patrick asks Marion where she’d want to go on holiday. Marion responds with Venice. Patrick says that she’s a true romantic, as she grabs Tom’s hand. Later, Patrick takes Tom on a “work trip” to Venice. This is Marion’s breaking point. She burns the postcard they had sent her, feeling taunted and used. In contrast, Venice to Tom and Patrick meant freedom. It was truly golden— both visually and for their relationship— and their last seconds of a chance at happiness. When they return from Venice, Patrick goes back to work, and he’s told there’s a policeman there to see him. Only this time, it’s not Tom.

In the book, Marion gives Tom the manuscript she had been writing in the present timeline, and he realizes that his career, family, everything— his entire life— has been stolen by her when she reveals her actions were what led to Patrick’s arrest. Not only his life, but Patrick’s, too. His Patrick. They had lost everything, all because of her. The movie, however, sharpens this knife, changing this detail of Marion telling Tom of her betrayal herself to him finding out on his own. She’s prepared to leave their home, one Marion and Tom had built over the past fifty years, forcing Tom to be alone with Patrick, and finally shares the secret she had been holding in for all that time. Marion has time on her side to soften the blow of her duplicity, but could any amount of time heal the wound made by sending the only person Tom had ever truly loved to jail? And yet, Tom begs her to stay, telling her he doesn’t want to be alone, to which Marion responds that he wouldn’t be alone, he’d be with Patrick. This brings us back to the question I touched on briefly earlier: does Tom, even in his old age, convince himself he truly wanted to marry Marion? To be in love with her? But what is love if one has to force themself to be in it?

Book Tom was more of this aggressive, easily angry, and quite often drunk person, at the hands of how deeply split his soul was between who he felt he should be and who he discovered he was. Styles’ portrayal of Tom, however, felt more innocent. As director Micheal Grandage puts it, “[Styles] can only do it truthfully and as he knows it.” Despite the novel revolving around Tom, the story is never quite told from his point of view. We see Tom in the light of sheer simplicity, through the eyes of other characters, and Styles’ characterization of him holds such an honesty to it. Roache, who plays older Tom, did such a fantastic job mirroring Styles’ depiction, and the transitions between the two felt incredibly seamless. The movie closes with an older Tom finally approaching Patrick, instinctively placing his finger on Patrick’s neck, just as he did the first time they had touched. Roache’s hand turns into Styles’, and suddenly Tom transforms into the innocent, hopelessly-in-love boy he was fifty years ago. I’m not sure Tom finds any semblance of acceptance until this very moment, and even then it’s a quiet acceptance. Corrin’s portrayal of Marion made it all the more hard to hate Marion. They’re an incredibly charming actor, and their chemistry with Styles and Dawson was completely successful in drawing sympathy from the audience, more than I had planned on feeling for Marion at the outset. Dawson was the perfectly-casted Patrick. He encapsulates the balance between Patrick’s refined elegance and troubled past flawlessly (which unfortunately wasn’t explored as much in the movie as it was in the book, though I understand why it was cut). Dawson and Styles’ chemistry was evident from the beginning, and they both did such a wonderful job portraying such innocence and simplicity of Tom and Patrick’s love. Their intimate scenes captured the simultaneously raw and tender nature of their relationship, the choreography of it transforming the two into something almost reminiscent of Greek statues.

The book has received its fair amount of disapproval. Many critics argued that My Policeman is a story, written by a woman, that milks the tragedy of gay romance––one based partially on a true story at that––and essentially creates a sort of “trauma porn.” While this is definitely problematic and a valid critique, I think it misses some of the complexity of the story. Roberts, like Marion, is an outsider to their story. Reading the novel, the audience is fully aware that, despite their immersion into this world, it isn’t exactly reality, and they cannot expect an account of a story about two queer men experiencing a completely different kind of homophobia in the 1950s to be entirely accurately when written by a woman in 2012. It does however, raise integral questions about who should have the right to tell what story.

The bonds between the formation of sympathy and literature forge paths for audiences to find the capacity within themselves to understand others who are unlike them. My Policeman is a novel dense with affect and its tragic ending is pivotal in allowing audiences to feel something, bringing to light such horrific realities faced by marginalized groups. However, sympathy, like all good things, has its limits. Sympathetic sentiments overstep when they give way to an outsider thinking they understand someone else, just by hearing their story. This “putting oneself in someone else's shoes,” despite, in actuality, being incredibly distanced from the other’s experience, gives people the audacity to speak over those who are actually experiencing something. The idea of “feeling someone else’s pain,” when taken too far, can be incredibly appropriative of others’ experiences and almost has an imperialistic effect. The nature of empathy then becomes dependent on who is telling the story. This drawback of the novel, while not completely solved, becomes salvaged in the creation of the movie as it places an importance on having a queer director, writers, producers, cast, and crew.

For queer people to be able to tell and portray queer stories shouldn’t be such a difficult ask. And yet, the history of queer stories being told in Hollywood is extremely catered to straight audiences. Empathy, a perhaps intimate feeling residing in the private sphere, translates to something stronger in the public: action. The personal becomes political. However, when someone is so distant from the people actually experiencing pain, there is less of a capacity for empathy. It’s so incredibly important that people get to share their own stories, especially when those people belong to marginalized groups. All throughout history, we’ve had our stories erased and spoken over; we’ve been spoken for. The time for that has passed. My Policeman, the film, moves the microphone from in front of the onlooker to the mouths of the affected. This necessary shift shines through the screen via its cast’s utter passion, commitment, and love for this story.

Styles actually reached out to director Grandage for the role himself, his team claiming he had an immense interest. In fact, by the time Styles first met with Grandage, “He knew other people’s lines; he knew all of his lines. He knew why he wanted to talk about it, why one scene worked this way and another worked another way,” the director told Vanity Fair. Corrin had also been brought into the project through Styles, who had been the one to send them the script, seeking their opinion on it before they had become co-stars. In all of the press and interviews, the cast’s deep understanding of their characters and the gravity of the story they’re telling is clear. Especially with the older cast members, who lived themselves as queer people in 20th century England, and experienced some of that story themselves. Everett had remarked in 2009, “Honestly, I would not advise any actor necessarily, if he was really thinking of his career, to come out.” To feel this way almost four decades after Tom’s time implodes the rose-colored view on the experiences of homophobia in contemporary society. Despite a mainstream-pushed belief that queerness is fully accepted in Hollywood, homophobia is still rampant.

Tom and Patrick’s story is one of wasted time. As Styles puts it, “Wasted time is the most devastating thing, because it's the only thing we can't control. It's the one thing we can't have back.” This is such a real, queer experience, that many feel and relate to. The portrayals of themes of denial and desire ring incredibly true, and are done with such authenticity and honesty. My Policeman shares with us pieces of Tom and Patrick’s story that weren’t wasted. To be allowed into experience just a fragment of their love, which was ultimately just a fragment of their lives, is something so special and tragic.