There were two of us, a colleague and I, both keen to keep an eye on what is happening at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA). It has become one of those places we return to, not only to watch films, but to think through what they leave behind.
Perhaps that is why art matters. Not because it solves anything, but because it allows us to sit with what does not resolve.
We were there to watch James McAvoy’s directorial debut, California Schemin’, released in the UK on 10 April. Watching it in Dundee felt necessary. There is a particular feeling when a story returns to the place where you are sitting. It narrows the distance. It removes the comfort of imagining that what unfolds belongs somewhere else.
The film begins with something that feels improbable, almost comic – Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd, two young men from Dundee, come to a difficult realisation. Their music is not the problem. Their voices are.
Too Scottish. Too local. Too easily dismissed before anyone has to listen properly.
Pierre Bourdieu once explained that language serves as a form of social capital with varying value based upon who uses it and who listens to it. That logic sits silently beneath this film. Accent is never just sound. It arrives carrying judgments about education, intelligence, class, and legitimacy. Some voices enter the room already trusted. Others arrive having to prove they belong.
Both Gavin and Billy understand this before they fully articulate it. The shift is not quite automatic. Both are already working in the call-centre economy of early 2000s Dundee, a world where voice is trained, adjusted, and managed. Gavin draws from Billy’s workplace motto about giving people what they want. He does not invent the deception from nowhere. He extends a lesson the workplace has already taught him: give people what they are willing to hear.
If the industry is more willing to hear California than Dundee, then California is what they become.
At first, it looks like a trick played on an industry too sure of itself. But that reading does not survive for long. What takes shape instead is something more familiar and less amusing. Not deception as disruption, but adaptation as necessity.
After all, most institutions do not demand that you lie outright. They simply make clear which version of you they are prepared to accept.
It is not quite a con. It is closer to the quiet education of exclusion. You learn the mask before you learn the craft. You borrow the voice before you are allowed to be heard. You arrive only by first departing from yourself.
This version of the story is neat. It keeps the focus on the boys and away from the structure around them. Two working-class lads fooled the music industry. The end.
But the lie works. That is the uncomfortable part.
The same people suddenly become valuable once they arrive in the correct accent. Nothing essential changes except the frame through which they are heard. The industry does not discover them. It recognises them only after they have been translated.
That, too, feels familiar. Cultural gatekeepers rarely reward talent in some open, neutral sense. They reward what already feels legible. Familiar. Safe. Bourdieu made much the same point when writing about cultural legitimacy and taste. Systems often mistake recognition for merit because they have already decided what merit should sound like.
So the question does not disappear. What exactly is the deception here? The performance, or the conditions that made the performance necessary?
Authenticity, but only after approval
James McAvoy keeps the film grounded. No indulgence. No attempt to soften the edges. The rooms are ordinary, but the power inside them is not. Decisions are made quickly by people who rarely need to explain themselves. They are not searching for talent in any open sense. They are filtering.
The film understands something difficult about culture. Talent does not simply rise. It is selected, shaped, and made legible to those who control access. “California” does that work instantly. Dundee does not.
Mary, Billy’s girlfriend, carries the film’s uneasy conscience. She understands the desperation behind the lie, but she also sees its cost. Her presence holds the tension in place. This is not a story that can be resolved by choosing honesty over deception. The film does not offer that comfort. It knows the lie is wrong. It also knows the truth may have led nowhere.
There is a longer history here. Patronage did not disappear. It changed costume. Where artists once depended on aristocratic favour, they now rely on corporate approval. The gate remains. Only the language around it has shifted.
Dundee, early 2000s: the call centre as rehearsal
This is where the film became something else for me.
Dundee, early 2000s. The Technology Park. A call centre selling broadband before broadband had fully settled into everyday life. Rows of desks. Headsets. Scripts. Targets. I was there too, around that same time, working those shifts while trying to finish my PhD.
That proximity matters.
All three lead characters seem to come from that same Dundee world, the call-centre economy, selling the same promise of connection to people who often did not want to hear it. Watching them on screen does not feel like observing invented figures. It feels like recognition.
The humour. The irritation. The pride. The refusal to be reduced to where they came from.
It all belongs to that moment.
My own days were split in ways that made little sense when viewed from the outside. One hour writing about power, inequality, and political structures. The next asking strangers if they wanted to upgrade their broadband.
It sounds absurd. It was. But many working lives are built on precisely that contradiction.
You learn how to adjust. You are still yourself, but not entirely. A more acceptable version speaks into the headset. Arlie Hochschild gave this kind of labour a name decades ago: emotional labour. The management of tone, feeling, and expression, all in service of someone else’s expectations. But anyone who has worked those phones already understands the theory, whether they have read her or not.
The work could be draining. Targets. Supervisors. The steady pressure of being reduced to numbers. But that is not the full account. What stays is the people.
Someone covering your break. A look after a difficult call. A joke that only makes sense because everyone understands the small humiliations of the job. The moment the headset comes off, and the real voice returns, slightly tired, still present.
There was a form of community there. Not sentimental. Not clean. But real enough to matter.
The lie was never only theirs
This is why California Schemin’ reaches beyond the music industry. Gavin and Billy’s transformation is extreme, but the logic behind it is ordinary.
People are asked to adjust themselves constantly. Speak differently. Sound less local. Sound less working-class. Smooth out anything that might be judged too quickly.
For some, this happens on a stage. For others, through a headset.
Class struggle does not always announce itself dramatically. Sometimes it sits in pronunciation, posture, confidence, who gets interrupted, who gets indulged, and who is heard as naturally credible. Beverley Skeggs wrote powerfully about class as something lived through judgment and respectability as much as economics. You can see that logic here without needing to name it.
Gavin and Billy’s lie is not outside that structure. It is produced by it. Their performance simply reflects back the image the system already prefers.
What cannot be manufactured
The film’s centre is not the deception. It is the relationship between Gavin and Billy. Strip away the accents, the invented history, the bravado, and what remains is trust under pressure. That is what the industry cannot manufacture. It can package authenticity. It can sell rebellion. It can turn difference into style. But it cannot create the bond between people who know what it means to be dismissed before they begin. I recognised that from the call centre as well. People brought together by necessity, building attachments that last beyond the room that first held them. The work fades. The people do not.
What the film refuses to tidy up
The question left behind is not whether the lie was justified. That is too small. The real question is why working-class Dundee had to become California before anyone would listen. If talent were enough, the accent would not need to change. If access were even, geography would not carry this weight. If the system were open, there would be no need to construct another version of yourself just to enter it. But the system does not want authenticity. It wants authenticity after permission.
After the show
California Schemin’ does not celebrate the con. It sits instead with what had to be true for the con to work.
Once you see that, the story stops being unusual.
Dundee becomes every place told it is too small, too rough, too local to matter unless translated into something more acceptable. The call centre becomes every workplace where people learn, quietly, how to edit themselves before they are heard.
That may be the most unsettling part of the film. Not that Gavin and Billy performed another identity, but how familiar that instinct feels. Most systems do not demand deception outright. They ask for adaptation. The softer voice. The acceptable accent. The version of yourself less likely to make others uncomfortable.
And yet something remains beyond that exchange. Friendship. Shared memory. The unguarded return of the voice that does not need approval. The system may reward disguise, but it cannot fully possess what people create for one another.
Gavin and Billy enter into that world by lying. What provides the weight emotionally however is not their deception. It is what remains after the deception.
The true tragedy of these two young men was not that they told lies about themselves.
The tragic reality is that telling the truth as to where they came from wasn’t sufficient
Dr. Abdullah Yusuf is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Politics and International Relations at the University of Dundee, UK. He studied Public Policy and Diplomacy at The Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, and holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Dundee. His research and scholarship interests include: International organizations (United Nations, League of Arab States, and African Union); Politics of the Middle East, including Palestine, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli conflict; Politics of humanitarian armed interventions; Peacekeeping and post-conflict peacebuilding; International law and refugee protection; Climate politics; Post-colonial Studies. For more details on my teaching, research, and scholarship profile, please visit: his research profile and bio.
