ABSTRACT
This essay seeks to go beyond the positions adopted in academic debates concerning the aesthetics and politics of contemporary British social realist film. It seeks to do so with reference to a recent film which helps to focus these debates, Duane Hopkins' Bypass (2015). Despite the differences between Forrest and Nwonka, both make assumptions about the 'social' in social realism that are insufficiently historicised and/or politicised. Terminal visions of post-industrialisation are then in some ways unhelpful when it comes to understanding the neoliberal present in which capitalist realism offers no respite, not even for the economically superfluous. This concluding scene of the film is interesting in the light of Elsaesser's argument that we have undergone, not just in film theory and new realist world cinema, but across the humanities generally, an ontological turn which has subjected to critique the epistemological scepticism of radical constructivism.
