For myself Bex Bissel is that strangest of creatures: a creature of wit, intelligence, and violence. He aspires to middle class material wealth and may well supersede it in time. He understands their values and beliefs, he can internalise them, but ultimately he will reject them. For Bex is the logical conclusion of Thatcherite politics in the eighties: the affluent working class.
Bex is the product of the comprehensive school, the Falklands conflict, Lady Di and the "hand of God". He is Reggie Kray, Stephen Berkoff, Mike Reid and Michael Caine all rolled into one. He is an East End legend that might frequent your local boozer and makes you feel wanted or uneasy depending on how well you know him.
He is educated but stopped short of joining a University, maybe his parents couldn't afford it, maybe Bex preferred the lure of a quick pound note, or more likely he didn't relish leaving his mates behind to face the unknown by himself. Even though his reputation has national… more »

For myself Bex Bissel is that strangest of creatures: a creature of wit, intelligence, and violence. He aspires to middle class material wealth and may well supersede it in time. He understands their values and beliefs, he can internalise them, but ultimately he will reject them. For Bex is the logical conclusion of Thatcherite politics in the eighties: the affluent working class.
Bex is the product of the comprehensive school, the Falklands conflict, Lady Di and the "hand of God". He is Reggie Kray, Stephen Berkoff, Mike Reid and Michael Caine all rolled into one. He is an East End legend that might frequent your local boozer and makes you feel wanted or uneasy depending on how well you know him.
He is educated but stopped short of joining a University, maybe his parents couldn't afford it, maybe Bex preferred the lure of a quick pound note, or more likely he didn't relish leaving his mates behind to face the unknown by himself. Even though his reputation has national status from the travelling nature of the football fan, it is a limited fame, restricted to a few faces in pubs up and down the country. By avoiding further education Bex can still carry out his childish dreams of violent conquest. Even though he feels superior to his friends and foes alike he secretly needs their adulation and hatred to make sense of his ultimate life choice.
Unlike the absent fathers of Fight Club, the fathers of The Firm are very much in evidence, and here lies the problem for Bex and Sammy his infant son. Bex's father, Bill, may look like an amusing, cuddly, grandfather offering Sunday dinner advice on car maintenance, but he was once as violent as his offspring. Bill has handed down his weekend pursuit of football violence to his son as casually as if he had taught him how to fish. He still encourages Bex in his hobby by taking "team" photographs and storing weapons like they were old trophies in a bedroom that has become frozen in time like a shrine to a dead child.
Fatherhood has instilled a sense of responsibility into Bex. The quiet moments he spends with Sammy suggest love and affection, which can never be doubted. However placing the magnifying class closer to these intimate scenes perhaps he is lamenting his own childhood or even that of his own son. Bex has the power to make Sammy in his own image and maybe, just maybe, that scares him. One way or another it is inevitable that Bex will ruin him and Bex is powerless to stop himself carrying out that violent tradition. In fact, we can already see it happening. Sammy guided by Bex swears at his mother. The moment Sammy teethes on the Stanley knife left carelessly by his father, revealed by simple quiet close ups of the toddler and the Stanley with Bex oblivious, deep in phone conversation with his South London rival Yeti, still retains its sheer power to silence an audience into nothingness.
And finally, after thirty years, the tragedy of Bex comes to light after the wounding of his son. Rather than accept the fact that he is, in the words of Sue a "normal" estate agent, and not "top boy", he descends into a cycle of violence, which will terminate when he is neither.
The problem with Bex is that he has been indulged all of his life. First by his parents, then by his friends, and finally by Sue his wife. No doubt beguiled by his intelligence and success, his parents have created a spoilt 30 year old child, where the apron strings are never cut and threaten to strangle his marriage. When Sue, undoubtedly as guilty as everyone else in the hero worship, suddenly becomes an adult and questions his status, Bex throws a tantrum on a devastating scale.