Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve To Exist
by Brett Gregory
 

IN HIS painting called The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymous Bosch presents a radical, disturbingly surreal critique of the suffering in the class-ridden society of the Middle Ages, from the point of view of the lower layers of that society.

His images represent the cruelty and the suffering endured by the poor, the physical and psychological damage of poverty, poor mental, physical and spiritual health, and the chaotic, fearful, precarious horror of their lives.

The painting itself appears in many of the scenes of Nobody Loves You and Brett Gregory’s film is its modern equivalent. It’s an equally searing critical vision of modern Britain, from the perspective of a northern working class who over the last 50 years have been struggling with the interlinked problems of deindustrialisation, drug and alcohol abuse, depression and despair, all generated or magnified by neoliberal late capitalism.