Satya Rencic
Senior Thesis | 2025
Against Definition: Identity and Technology in Penda’s Fen
Satya Rencic
The seminal but underviewed 1974 film Penda’s Fen opens over England’s Malvern Hills, a picture of pastoral quaintness. Choral music accompanies scenes of bovine equanimity and white cottages poking out of meadows like teeth. The high, pure, voice reaches a long crescendo, but no relief comes: the note sustains long enough to distort itself into piercing shrillness, and the image of a barbed wire fence appears superimposed on the hills, rendering them a prison. Then, a hand reaches up, pale skin disfigured by a dark gash splitting the arm vertically like a chasm. The hand turns, baring its palm to the viewer, the wound a hideously exaggerated stigmata. The hand falls slowly, and a radar-like sound joins the warped hymn: an omen of the technocratic fears that appear in the shadow of religious delusion1 . Fear of technocracy, among other themes, make the film resonate with a modern audience.
Penda’s Fen is a coming of age story, often misrepresented as folk horror2 due to a few notorious scenes3. The fact that the movie resists genre definition reflects its central ethos: that restrictive delineation of identity (e.g., societal overemphasis on racial purity) erases individuality. The main character, Stephen, is a boy on the verge of adulthood in the 1950s. Through a series 1 Penda’s Fen, 00:01:30 2 cite 3 cite
of uncanny visions and conversations, he begins to rebel against the crude nationalism his adolescence was steeped in.
Stephen’s evolution is guided by the titular Penda and his foils, the fictional ‘Mother and Father of England’. Penda is a historical figure known to be the last pagan king in England, who serves as a symbol more than a character in the film. Penda champions the darkness, strangeness, and obscurity of the Dark Ages, which offers freedom from judgement. The censorious ‘Mother and Father of England’ are the primary, visible antagonists of Penda’s Fen. In contrast to Penda, they believe in lightness and purity, but informed by a nationalist and racist religious zealotry.
This triangular conflict is the heart of the film, but its relevance spreads beyond its immediate context through the character Arne’s “technocratic angel of death”4: the film’s secondary antagonist. Through a dual historical analysis of contemporary evangelical movements and medieval religion, interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura, and modern internet critical theory, I will argue that it is this “angel” whose shadow has permeated modern times as the enemy of a free society. I will then place the film in this historical context and explore how its subversive use of dissonant, dichotomous imagery (between purity and dirtiness, light and darkness, and past and present) keeps it relevant in today’s issues of technocracy and the digital panopticon.
4 Penda’s Fen, 00:16:33
England in the 1970s: A Return to Purity
England in the 1970s was a country at odds with itself: the increasing immigration and cultural freedom of the previous decade inflamed a new period, defined by political crisis and a loss of faith in the postwar establishment5. Eventually, widespread disillusionment with the government paved the way for Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 electoral victory, but Enoch Powell articulated the dogma of the conservative countermovement as early as 1968, in his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. He spoke to what he viewed as a silent majority opposed to racial diversification, and stoked their fears of an impure England. This was a country where white people were evicted from their homes and tormented by black immigrants without consequence, where Sikhs attempted to maintain ‘customs inappropriate to England’, a country whose immigrant population was projected to make up a terrifying 10 percent of the total population by the year 20006. Powell emphasized that ordinary people, not extremists, agreed with him, and that something must be done to vanquish the ‘grave…but avoidable evils’ of immigration, and worse, integration. The speech concludes with a classical reference, which its title is also borrowed from: “like the Roman,” Powell augured, “I seem to see ‘the river Tiber foaming with much blood’”. This reference scaffolds his argument, built on the belief that English identity was a long and unbroken chain of white Saxon eminence, which ideally should be linked back to itself to prevent any changes in its
5 Sloman, Peter. “‘Take Power Vote Liberal’: Jeremy Thorpe, the 1974 Liberal Revival, and the Politics of 1970s Britain.” The English Historical Review, vol. 137, no. 588, 2022, pp. 1462
6 Enoch Powell, ‘Rivers of Blood’, April 20, 1968
makeup. Historical evidence, however, refutes this romantic tradition of national purity.7 Penda’s Fen asserts that there was substantial precedent for the mixing of races and religions so dreaded by Powell, and that it was an essential (though glossed over) component of English history and identity.
Still, Powell’s views gained supporters over the next few years, and many amassed to join the Nationwide Festival of Light, most known for two mass rallies in 1971. The brief movement, headed by conservative activist Mary Whitehouse, among others, condemned the rise of permissive society and the crude media, pornography, and blasphemy it had ushered in. The movement’s first director, Raymond Johnston, taught one of its core principles: the Christian family ideal. This was a nuclear family, consisting of man, wife, and as many children as God willed. This narrow definition left no room for single-parent families, childless couples, or same-sex parents, all of which were both symptoms and causes of a morally bereft society: divorce begot disturbed children, he said, and homosexuality spread sexually transmitted diseases8 .
“Pure” England vs. Pagan England
From Powell to Johnston, the common rhetoric was that society must return to its pure, Christian, essentially English roots in order to become moral again. But their idea of what ‘true’ England was was a sterilized and whitewashed myth. Medieval Europe was quite diverse; much of the progress made by medieval scholars and theologians was stimulated by the interchange of ideas between Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Many texts popular
7 Of Mud and Flame,
8 Raymond Johnston, Caring and Campaigning, 121 2
with Christian theologians were classical Greek writings, translated first into Arabic and spread through the Islamic world, then eventually disseminated throughout Europe9. Even England, separated from the European mainland, was populated not only by the revered Saxons, but by Celtic and Welsh peoples, then the Romans, as well as Danes, Angles, and Scots10 .
Penda of Mercia: The Last Pagan King in England
The titular Penda, of unknown roots, is known for being the last pagan king in England. He ruled the historical territory of Mercia, bordering Wales. He was defeated in the watery Battle of the Winwaed by the forces of the Christian Oswiu of Bernicia in 655 A.D., a loss which according to the medieval scholar Bede marked the effective end of Anglo-Saxon paganism: ‘Penda perished and the Mercians became Christians.’11 In this greater history of medieval Christianity, the pagan protector was the last opponent to Christian hegemony in England.12 In the film, Penda’s historical fight against Christian hegemony is transposed into the 1950s, where he represents a bulwark against the modern social order. Penda’s Fen positions Penda’s pagan land of Mercia and his
9 Kieckhefer, Richard, Magic in the Middle Ages, 139-143.
10 Harle, Matthew, and James Machin. Of Mud & Flame: The Penda’s Fen Sourcebook. Strange Attractor Press, 2019. pp. 167
11 Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum [hereafter HE] v. 24, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), pp. 564–5. ‘Penda perished and the Mercians became Christians.’
12 Hutton, Ronald. Pagan Britain. 1st ed., Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. 276 https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300198584.
forebears in opposition to the restrictive Christianity championed by the ‘Mother and Father of England’ and their real-life counterparts in Whitehouse and Powell. However, what exactly Penda stands for is unclear, in both his fictional and historical forms. He doesn’t force a specific lifestyle, and while the film clearly has morals, it argues more that those claiming to be the most moral are in support not of goodness but of sterility, and the perpetuation of the dominant ideology.
Britain's pagan history is hard to parse because most evidence is archaeological13 , rather than textual, and scholars dispute the extent of Christian influence in the first millennium. Some believe any Christian practice was forced upon people, and abandoned in their private lives, while others argue people readily adopted Christian beliefs as their own. A mosaic in a fourth century English villa featured both the Christian chi-rho symbol, and pagan figures, like Neptune and Dionysus14 , bringing into imagination a world not easily categorizable. Considering the opacity of Penda’s world and its belief system and morals, it may seem an odd choice to frame it as]oppositional to the clearly articulated morality of the NFOL, and the omnipresence of modern technology and the information it makes accessible. Upon closer examination, however, it is precisely that vagueness and obscurity that makes it Penda’s world perfect weapon for fighting on two fronts. Both the authoritarian traditionalism of the NFOL-like ideas and the oppressive omniscience of a technocratic government are essentially modern, ubiquitous and standardized: in contrast, Penda
13 Hutton, Ronald. Pagan Britain. 1st ed., Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. 276 https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300198584.
14 Hutton 277
is spatially rooted but transcends time: his cry of “Unbury me!”15 suggests an Arthurian figure, always ready to return when he is needed. He is mutable, able to take on the struggles of the main character Stephen as a gay man, a child of foreigners, and someone disillusioned with the stifling nationalism of his country and the secrecy and elitism of its government.
Light and Darkness in Penda’s Fen
The film’s use of light and fire furthers its subversion of traditionally “good” imagery and condemnation of its use in propaganda. Light is a concept that has often been adopted by movements claiming to affect positive change, such as the aforementioned Nationwide Festival of Light. In such circles, light is usually associated with the divine, and represents cleansing and purification. Penda’s Fen depicts the harsher side of this light through the characters of the Mother and Father of England, and offers a foil in Penda.
The Mother and Father’s evolution throughout the film reflects Stephen’s journey and gradually reveals the terrible nature of the light they follow. The first time they appear in the film, they are the focus of a newspaper article held triumphantly by Stephen in class, as he praises their successful censorship of a heretical film.16 In the central photograph, their faces are bathed in light, and they march forward as if leading an invisible army. Their hands are thrust joyfully aloft. The Mother’s arm, in front, is positioned similarly to the gaping, reaching arm in the opening of the movie: but in contrast to that arm, wounded and attempting to escape its
15 Script citation
16 Penda’s Fen, 00:10:53
barbed wire prison, hers celebrates the loss of freedom brought on by censorship. Their designation as parental figures signals their ill intent: as Penda says later in the film, they “would have us be children forever”17, choosing propaganda to feed to the people under the guise of protection, thus forcing their identities to be predicated on a single viewpoint, without room to grow or change. The first time they appear in person is during a vision of Stephen’s. After being knocked unconscious, he finds himself approaching a mansion, rhythmic thudding emanating from it. He enters the bright and verdant backyard to find a circle of smiling, complacent people dressed in whites and yellows. In the center sits a stump, where a man in black holding a bloodied ax beckons them forward to chop their hands off, one by one. The color contrast between the clothes of the people and the ax-wielder demonstrates the disconnect between the idea and execution of purification18. To these people, purity means ridding themselves of their agency: they are united in their inability to use their hands or defend themselves. As Stephen stands transfixed at the periphery of the scene, the Mother and Father appear, gliding forward in the same pose as in the newspaper. They are backlit: reaching out to Stephen in his dark pit of iniquity to bring him into their bright haven, free of the complications of sadness, sin, or hands. Notably, they themselves have not been chopped; their hands are entwined and raised in a single, many-fingered fist. This represents the reality of a “pure” society: despite talks of unified identity, things will always be lopsided: the people at the top keep their hands so they are the only ones who can hold power.
17 Cite from movee
18 00:46:37
After graduating from school, Stephen is effectively freed from the system that failed to mold him into a modern nationalist. Watching the sun set from atop the Malvern Hills; he, and the land beneath him, are silhouetted solidly against the sky and its puffs of white cloud19. White noise plays as a man and woman approach on either side of him: it is the Mother and Father Stephen once glorified for their work censoring “heretical” media. They are still dressed in their clothes from the newspaper photograph, which shows how identity can become inseparable from the media. They crouch beside him, trembling in reverence: “True English Boy?” asks the mother. “It is He. It is He. He has the light,” the Father asserts20. They believe Stephen is the chosen leader of their mission to purify England, and the “light” he has is his weapon. Their message soon takes a disturbing turn when the Mother begins to speak of the joy of being burned: “Through the flames, we see our Lord…When we are burned, why, we are turned to light!”21 The light she speaks of is one that blinds, rather than illuminates: this is the light she seeks in Stephen, a light that would burn the whole world in the name of homogenizing it. The purity they believe this light foments is a racial and sexual purity, a light that would cleanse England of immigrants, homosexuality, and anything else outside their norm in the name of God.
Light is central to Stephen’s personal arc, but it takes a different form than it does in the Mother and Father’s narrative: rather than ridding him of his individuality and truth, it reveals them after a journey through the dark. An early moment of
19 1:20:25
20 Rudkin, David. Penda’s Fen. pg 79
21 Rudkin, David. Penda’s Fen. pg 79
revelation for Stephen comes during a homoerotic dream starring the brutish boys in his class. When he awakes, a gargoyle-like demon is perched on his chest, leering in the dark. Slowly, eyes locked on the demon (briefly wearing the face of his crush, the milk-boy), Stephen reaches a shaking arm out to turn his lamp on. The room is flooded with light, but the gargoyle remains, solid and weighty as before22 . For Stephen, light reveals what is hidden in the shadows; it doesn’t burn it away. It is important to note, however, that the dream could only occur in the darkness and haze of sleep, where Stephen is free to explore his subconscious. Without darkness first, the light would not matter. This moment is crucial in Stephen’s self-awakening, because it forces him to acknowledge the homosexuality that so far has been restricted to the depths of his subconscious. The Mother and Father want Stephen to believe that accepting light means cleansing himself of impurities, rather than embracing them into a new whole.
The denouement of the film affirms light as illuminating rather than blinding through the revelation of the unburied King Penda. After the Mother and Father approach him, Stephen decries them: “I am nothing pure! My race is mixed. My sex is mixed…I am mud and flame!”23 Mud and flame represent light and cleanliness and darkness and dirtiness respectively, a dialectic inherent to humanity. The mud recalls the dream he had before his demon encounter, in which he stands behind a glass pane as rugby players throw mud at him; with the later context of the mud and flame speech, the mud of the dream can be interpreted to represent Stephen’s multifaceted identity, which he viewed as dirty but also
22 Penda’s Fen, 00:29:20
23 Penda’s Fen, 1:23:44-1:23:49
longed to engage with. Stephen now does not believe in one correct or superior identity, preferring complexity and blurred definitions of identity.
Enraged at Stephen’s rejection of them, the Mother and Father set fire to a photograph of Stephen, alighting the real Stephen as well. As he screams and shrivels, he invokes Penda, the ancient protector of the land. Penda appears, enthroned atop the hill, engulfed in flame. Unlike Stephen’s, Penda’s immolation does not harm him: he is impervious to the modern cleansing, because he is buried too deep in the land. Rather than fearing and consequently purifying the depths of history, Penda’s flame refuses shame and illuminates the depths. The presence of fire surrounding Penda recalls his historical counterpart’s death, on the banks of the river Winwaed. Many of his soldiers drowned during the battle24 , but Penda now asserts that he was not washed away. The mud of the Winwaed reflects the mud that Stephen speaks of; it represents the murky history of the pagan Dark Ages. The command Penda gives Stephen designates him as the bearer of this legacy: “Cherish our flame, our dawn shall come.”25 As the scene takes place at dusk, the aflame Penda appears as a sun, promising a new kind of light will emerge with the defeat of the restrictions imposed by the Mother and Father. He also recalls the truth of English cultural history: it has always been complex and full of different peoples. Penda’s light wants to illuminate the truth, but people can’t discover the truth without first being able to stumble in the dark;
24Brooker, Joseph. “Raymond’s Fen.” Of Mud and Flame: The Penda’s Fen Sourcebook, ed. Matthew Harle and James Machin, Strange Attractor Press, 2019, pp. 73.
25 1:25:34
this is represented in how Stephen only meets Penda face-to-face once he has embraced the darkness and mystery surrounding him.
Individuality and Aura in the Digital Age
Just as Powell and the Nationwide Festival of Light used light to validate their racial purist ideology, modern American Christian nationalism, one of the most prominent forms of identity policing, uses dichotomies of old (good, traditional) and new (bad, radical) to justify itself.26 However, there is a key difference between the way these ideologies spread in the 1970s versus today. Andrew Nalani and Hirokazu Yoshikawa (2023) defined four activity settings where this ideology spreads. Relevant to my argument is the authority activity setting, which is defined by “one or more individuals [having] legitimate power…over the rules, norms, and behaviors of a target setting”.27 Technology has expanded authority activity settings, which have the ability to influence mass culture and beliefs, in an unprecedented way. Examples include social media platforms and other public online forums, owned by private corporations and individuals with the power to control what consumers see. By pushing the algorithm and the same ideas onto millions of people, the internet has the ability to homogenize people and suppress their individuality in the same way the Mother and Father of England would.
26 Nalani, Andrew, and Hirokazu Yoshikawa. “White Christian Nationalism and Youth Development in the USA.” Society (New Brunswick) 60, no. 4 (2023): 551. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-02300863-8.
27 Nalani et. al, 556.
The critic Walter Benjamin described the idea of aura, or a special quality of artworks that is lost in mechanical or digital reproductions of them. He specifically refers to physical works of visual art, and the lack of aura in photographs of them. Furthermore, he credits the ability to reproduce once-irreplicable objects as part of the catalyst for the rise of mass culture.28 There are both positives and negatives to this, as mass culture creates accessibility to things that were once exclusively for the wealthy, but also takes the originality and individual identity away from them. Benjamin writes: “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition… it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.”29 The film’s final scenes can be interpreted more deeply with this lens: the Mother and Father set Stephen on fire not by lighting him, but by lighting his image. Despite Stephen’s denunciation of the Mother and Father and newfound sureness in himself, the photographic reproduction of him doesn’t hold his power and unique identity, and is therefore able to harm him. This aligns with the idea that reproductions of an object are not only themselves diminished, but also siphon aura from the original. Returning to the issue of extremist movements, this phenomenon of loss of aura is applicable to many things about modern age, from the way pervasive trends and beliefs flatten identity to the rise of A.I. art.
28 Benjamin, Walter. 1936. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin Books. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf.
29 Benjamin, Walter, The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, trans. J. A. Underwood. Penguin Books, 2008, pp. 6
When previously unique or important things proliferate online, they lose their meaning and gravitas. One character in Penda’s Fen foresees the dangers of technology.
The character Arne is a writer with radical ideas, initially disavowed by Stephen for his discomfiting speeches and “unnatural’ plays. At a town meeting which Stephen, his mother, and his reverend father attend, Arne unsettles the townspeople with his claim that the government is building something secret under the meadows of the town, Pinvin: “What is it, hidden beneath this shell of lovely earth? Some hideous angel of technocratic death?...for all we know…our entire civilian population is marked down…as ‘strategically expendable’”.30 Continuing the film’s theme of subversion of traditionally ‘good’ imagery Arne’s use of the word ‘angel’ to describe an evil authoritarian machine takes the pure, light Christian angel and makes it clunking and ominous.
What is the angel of technocratic death in our own time? It is never revealed what explicitly this looming threat is in the film, which smartly prevents it from becoming anachronistic in modern discussions of technology. I argue that currently, it is the digital sphere, that tool whose greatest enemy is obscurity.We live in the ‘information age’, but there is such a thing as too much information. Stephen’s personal journey and revelation necessitated privacy and inner reflection, things which are increasingly hard to come by in a time where the most accessible mirror is a screen, broadcasting images of people we are meant to resemble.
30 Script 16, book 292
Penda’s Fen’s Prescient Anti-Technocracy
It is no fault that the movie chose a figure from the Dark Ages to pass on its central message: in some ways the lack of knowledge and information that defines the Dark Ages is freeing. The world of Penda’s Fen cannot exist in a digital panopticon: it posits that obscurity, mystery, and privacy are necessary to explore and discover oneself. Penda’s urging of Stephen affirms this: “Stephen, be secret. Child, be strange, dark, true, impure, and dissolvent.”31 These are all qualities that are increasingly hard to find in a time where people are encouraged to document as much of their lives as they can online, to be surrounded and amalgamated into the whole. The online world shines a perpetual light; as long as a screen is on, true darkness is an impossibility. Penda names Stephen “our sacred demon of ungovernableness”: here, we see where the ideologies of the ancient Penda and the modernity-conscious Arne intersect. Both of them know that to blindly follow authority means loss of identity and free thought. Penda is the ideal figure to stand against technology, as he is rooted deeply in the land–the earthy, organic opposite of technology. Arne, too, is shown to be connected to the land: in many of his scenes, he is seen in his garden, interacting with the earth32. He thus serves as a modern mirror of Penda, standing against a society that consumes without question or resistance: “We are Consumers, blind gaping holes at the end of the production line, for stuffing with trash”.33 The danger of this lies not only in the consumption of products made to distract from
31 1:25:50-1:26:00
32Penda’s Fen 00:45:05
33 Of Mud and Flame, pp. 349.
and nullify feeling, but also in the fact that much of the ideology behind content available for consumption is invisible, creating the illusion of randomness and spontaneity in what content is shown. The internet has become nothing more than a vehicle for embedding consumerism into every aspect of our daily lives, in a grotesque reification of Arne’s fears.34 A unique individual, frozen in online snapshots defined by a consumerism-driven milieu is rewarded by the extent to which they commodify themselves. The standardized model of advertising and consumption has decayed authenticity: images and words are reposted in a never-ending cycle that leads the viewer in loops until there is no sense of past, present or future: everything simply hangs in the air, multiplying endlessly.
In his book Scorched Earth, Jonathan Crary wrote that “the internet age is the implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory, and social disintegration.”35 It homogenizes groups, inflames callousness and overinvestment alike, and polarizes ideologies. Crary posits that the only way out of a world in which a lack of internet seems unthinkable is a radical refusal of it. Stephen’s spurning of both Christian nationalism and the technological idols of the modern world is one such refusal. Thus, Penda’s Fen offers the hope of an alternative reality: one where we embrace the obscurity of the Dark Ages and allow people to find themselves in darkness.
34 Crary, Jonathan. Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a PostCapitalist World. Verso, 2022. Pp. 2
35 Crary, Scorched Earth, 2
Works Cited
Atherstone A. Christian Family, Christian Nation: Raymond Johnston and the Nationwide Festival of Light in Defence of the Family. Studies in Church History. 2014;50:456-468. doi:10.1017/S0424208400001893
Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum [hereafter HE] v. 24, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), pp. 564–5.
Dunshea, Philip. "The Road to Winwæd? Penda's Wars Against Oswiu of Bernicia, c. 642 to c. 655." Anglo-Saxon England 44, (12, 2015): 1-16. https://ezproxy.bu.edu/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww .proquest.com%2Fscholarly-journals%2Froadwinw%C3%A6d-pendas-wars-against-oswiu-berniciac%2Fdocview%2F1841247399%2Fse2%3Faccountid%3D9676.
Hutton, Ronald. Pagan Britain. 1st ed., Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. 276. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300198584.
Enoch Powell, ‘Rivers of Blood’, April 20, 1968
Harle, Matthew, and James Machin. Of Mud & Flame: The Penda’s Fen Sourcebook. Strange Attractor Press, 2019. pp. 167
Sloman, Peter. “‘Take Power Vote Liberal’: Jeremy Thorpe, the 1974 Liberal Revival, and the Politics of 1970s Britain.” The English Historical Review, vol. 137, no. 588, 2022, pp. 1462.
Nalani, Andrew, and Hirokazu Yoshikawa. “White Christian Nationalism and Youth Development in the USA.” Society (New Brunswick) 60, no. 4 (2023): 551–65. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-023-00863-8.
Kieckhefer, Richard, Magic in the Middle Ages, 139-143.
Johnston, Raymond: Caring and Campaigning, 121 2.
Penda’s Fen, the movie Crary, Jonathan. Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World. Verso, 2022.