“The view is nice, but you can’t eat it”: A poetics of precarity in Bait (2019, dir: Mark Jenkin).

This chapter will examine Mark Jenkin’s 2019 film Bait as a work engaging with precarity at the nexus of contemporary debates surrounding the decline of local industry and prospects, the problems of home ownership in rentier capitalism, and Britain’s role in Europe. Notable for an experimental visual aesthetic and sound design which conveys meaning through hapticity, this chapter also explores, utilising narratological strategies developed by William Empson, how Bait also represents a return to the pastoral as a means of representing the new social hierarchies of precarity in a method that is ‘bottom-up’, particular to rurality, and able to account for interlaced dimensions of intersectionality in an increasingly diffuse social milieu.