“Ink”: Danny Boyle and the Apotheosis of Vulgarity

Danny Boyle opened the competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival with Ink, a frenetic chronicle of the birth of the new The Sun, in which Jack O’Connell throws himself wholeheartedly into the role of Larry Lamb, the man who turned journalism into a popular phenomenon that appealed directly to the instincts.

In 1969, man landed on the Moon and Rupert Murdoch bought The Sun. Two giant leaps in opposite directions. Danny Boyle provocatively draws the two events together in Ink, suggesting that the newspaper would ultimately transform our world in an even more radical way, planting a seed and providing it with all the fertiliser it could possibly need for the eventual emergence of Fox News and the corruption of traditional journalism. Murdoch, a press magnate —let us not confuse the press with information— and Larry Lamb gave the readers of Swinging London what they did not dare ask for but very much wanted to consume.

Adapted by James Graham from his own 2017 stage play, Ink reconstructs, with an aesthetic as aggressive and arrogant as the story itself, the development of the project that led Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) to acquire an ailing newspaper and task Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell) with overtaking the Daily Mirror in circulation. The result would be a Sun that became the apotheosis of vulgarity, a newspaper that historically and radically erased the boundaries between news, entertainment, sex and scandal until their very dissolution became its raison d’être.

The Newspaper as Spectacle

Boyle seems determined to make the film’s form replicate the very object it portrays. If a tabloid needs to seize the reader’s attention in a fraction of a second, Ink seeks to do the same with its audience. Swivelling camera movements, Dutch angles, distorting close-ups, heightened use of colour and editing driven by almost incessant agitation turn the newsroom into a feverish organism. The aesthetic thus mimics the newspaper’s own need for impact, although this formal consistency ultimately becomes exhausting in itself.

Boyle contrasts lavish seafood feasts and business lunches in elegant restaurants with rats scurrying through the underground, gnawing on newspapers beneath the bowels of Fleet Street. Above ground, decisions are made about what the public wants to read; below, the printing presses materialise the product that will be consumed and discarded the following day. The director films this food chain with an energy reminiscent of some of his most recognisable work, and with a visual insistence that leaves barely any room to breathe.

At its centre is O’Connell. Larry Lamb is the true protagonist of Ink, and the actor throws himself physically into a character who sees his professional opportunity as a form of revenge. The flashbacks to a childhood marked by bullying seek to explain the adult through his overcoming of impostor syndrome, although that process increasingly resembles a settling of scores. Now he is the boss: he chooses his team, establishes an editorial line and decides just how far he is willing to go to make Murdoch richer by the day and, above all, to win.

The Apprentice and the Tycoon

Boyle seems less interested in Murdoch — a figure whose life and legacy have been extensively explored in documentaries and whose shadow inevitably looms over Succession — than in observing how the seed the magnate plants in Lamb’s mind begins to take root.

Pearce, moreover, portrays a surprisingly affable Murdoch. He sets the process in motion, but Lamb quickly becomes its driving force, eventually surpassing and even challenging the businessman’s expectations, while Murdoch repeatedly gives way in pursuit of the ultimate goal. Decisions are always good decisions if they help you win. Yet the two men share something deeper than ambition: the need to prove that they deserve to occupy a space from which they have felt excluded. The magnate, too, carries the burden of his own troubled relationship with his father. For both men, the newspaper ultimately becomes a business, a weapon and a means of reparation.

Claire Foy plays Jules, a fictional character who introduces a female presence into an overwhelmingly male newsroom. Vivacious and every bit as dynamic as the world around her, she is a journalist, Lamb’s lover and the woman responsible for a women’s page that has little to do with feminism: among her duties is selecting the most attractive models. The contradiction is hardly insignificant in a film about the birth of a formula that would very quickly discover that the female body could also sell newspapers.

Drama Sells

The real point of no return comes with a particularly sinister historical event. In 1969, Muriel McKay (Lucy Russell), the wife of Murdoch executive Alick McKay (Jonathan Hyde), was kidnapped by men who mistook her for Anna Murdoch. The botched abduction ended with McKay’s death, and her body has never been found.

Boyle uses the case to establish Lamb’s moral threshold: even a tragedy that strikes his own immediate circle can be transformed into material to be devoured by his readers. The film even evokes the possibility that the body may ultimately have been eaten by pigs. The image then takes on a circular meaning: the public, too, voraciously consumes, day after day, increasingly outlandish, lurid and scandalous stories, while the parallel with the animal kingdom’s less appealing omnivores recurs.

Amid drunken binges, wild office parties, nude castings and ratings, the most interesting aspect of Ink comes to light. It lies not so much in establishing that Murdoch created a monster as in asking at what point the disciple realised that he could take his master’s idea much further.

The film spares us neither the clichés of journalism nor a certain false romanticism, as when Murdoch urges Lamb to listen, beneath the asphalt of Fleet Street, to the vibration of the printing presses. Is this an attempt to humanise the magnate with ink in his blood, or the beating of war drums on a battlefield whose front line is the newsstand?