By (Dis)order of the Peaky Blinders: Trauma and Anachronistic Soundtracking in the Contemporary Period Drama

BBC’s Peaky Blinders (2013–) quickly transformed from yet another addition to the deluge of “peak TV” shows into a cultural phenomenon, cutting to the core of an oft-overlooked era of interwar British life filled with industry, the IRA, red scares, and Irish-Roma razor gangs. Punctuating the cacophony of Birmingham’s factories, the show’s soundtrack features heavily distorted, blues-inflected songs by PJ Harvey, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, and the White Stripes alongside turn-of-the-century parlour songs and traditional Irish ballads. Anachronistic soundtracks for period films have become increasingly common (most famously in Baz Luhrmann’s films), creating a productive tension between contemporary and period-appropriate music that pushes the historical drama sonic paradigm toward something that, as Christopher Hogg explains, complicates a narrative sense of time and place. Much has been written in popular media about protagonist Thomas Shelby’s PTSD upon his return from combat as well as the unconventional soundtrack, but little has been said about a combination of the two: the series’ musical representations of the post-traumatic psyche. In this paper, I focus on the first season as I argue that the Peaky Blinders’ temporally- complex soundtrack provides an aesthetic rhetoric through which the characters contend with the war’s traumatic effects. Drawing on the trauma-informed analytical frameworks developed by Maria Cizmic and Judith Herman, I explore the ways in which sonic manifestations of Tommy’s post-traumatic experience correlate to the soundtrack’s period-specific diegetic/non-diegetic musical divide. Jolting 1990s rock songs signal moments of intrusion and hyperarousal fuelling Tommy’s violence and sense of isolation, whereas references to “In the Bleak Midwinter” and Grace’s siren-like singing connect to concepts of recovery and community, thus providing a privilege point at which to interrogate sonic representations of trauma in the contemporary TV drama.