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November 3, 2007
I watched Julien Temple's 1980 directorial debut The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle last night. This post modern film is often credited with originating the now-legendary view of the band's manager, Malcolm McLaren, as the mastermind behind the phenomenon that was the Sex Pistols. They had become embalmed as cultural icons after they became a caricature:--act tough, jump up and down a bit, turn up your lip.
The film is interesting in the way the tensions between the band's desire to achieve popular success, the mass media's hegemonic function, and the music (and fashion) industry's reliance on innovation is explored:
If it is a haIf-frozen souvenir of the end of the punk musical revolution, then the Sex Pistols are presented as a theatre of the absurd for the jaded masses. They were a ruse, a scam, a swindle, to make a ton of dough out of the music industry---hence McLaren's series of lessons on how to screw the record industry for all its worth. McLaren basically asserts that he ran the show and that the Pistols were a bunch of talentless losers who couldn't play.
Structurally, the film is all over the place, jumping indiscriminately from to a naked McLaren lounging in a bathtub to vulgar cartoons, from already-stale concert footage to esoteric images ripped from surrealist shorts. Consistent grain and washed out-colors are visible throughout the picture, which is presented in its original full-frame aspect ratio. The sound is pretty poor: dialogue is often muffled and difficult to make out, with only a few musical sequences showing some degree of sonic dimension.
My view, that the film itself is a bit of a swindle and pretty vacant, is contested here by World of Stuart. He says:
Nowadays the film is widely regarded as a self-publicising, self-glorifying cash-in vehicle for the Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, which it undoubtedly is. But it's also dismissed as a factless fantasy portrayal of the Pistols' turbulent career, which is a rather more disingenuous criticism motivated by some dishonest vested interests, and as being devoid of artistic merit, which is just plain wrong. And so, World Of Stuart is taking it upon itself to begin the critical rehabilitation of a movie and an album which in many respects depict the punk era and particularly the story of the Sex Pistols the way it really was, and aside from that are tremendous, thought-provoking and ahead-of-their time entertainment and culture, sometimes intentionally and sometimes by accident.
He reckons it is a messy but always-watchable tangle of reality and fantasy, insult to history and insight into it at the same time, never to be taken at face value but nevertheless containing plenty of truth for the attentive viewer who can be bothered to look for it.
It's the music that stands because it says something:--'Pretty Vacant', for instance, is about a vacant mood--an empty feeling inside. The songs sound as energetic today as they did 30 years ago.
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Gary,
I understand that Julien Temple also made the documentary The Filth And The Fury in 2000. Having devoted Swindle to Malcolm McLaren's postmodern carnival-barker spin on the Sex Pistols legend, Temple felt he owed the band a documentary that would explore the Pistols' human story rather than the three-ring media circus McLaren delighted in manipulating and abusing.