Something Rotten: The Punk Rock Richard III of Julien Temple's the Filth and the Fury
2011; Salisbury University; Volume: 39; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoWhen you read old literature, it's steeped in present; they rarely had forward thought or looked back, either - they lived in one particular current stream. - Johnny Lydon, Rotten Now I just have to go with yesterday's discovery: A kind offuck-you-all attitude: fuck off Shakespeare, fuck off the-proper-way-to-speak-verse, fuck off snapping tendons and Laurence Olivier. - Anthony Sher, Year of King (playing Richard III) In his documentary The Filth and Fury (2000), Julien Temple posits an identity between Shakespeare and Sex Pistols. The allusion to Macbeth in Temple's title draws upon Daily Mirror headline registering public indignation after group's infamous 1 December 1976 appearance on BBC show Today, with Bill Grundy. From perspective of mainstream media, band's vulgarity, drunkenness, and irreverence, which led to their being dropped by record label EMI, appeared sound and fury, ultimately signifying nothing (Macbeth 5.5.26). Appropriately, Sex Pistols frontman Johnny (Rotten) Lydon recalls in his autobiography, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, that as an adolescent he loved Macbeth - gorgeous piece of nastiness (63). Yet it is Richard HI, not Scottish play, which figures most prominently both in Lydon's reminiscences and in Temple's The Filth and Fury. Employed by director as framing device, Shakespeare's play comes to life when related to story of Sex Pistols, as king of England and king of punk - Richard and Lydon - appear, in several respects, closely related figures. Like Temple's earlier documentary about Sex Pistols, The Great Rock 'n Roll Swindle (1980), his second portrait of group uses disjunctive techniques of collage, what Mark Blake describes as cut 'n' paste style associated with early punk (162). Specifically, Temple evokes sensibility of Jamie Reid, who designed cover art for Never Mind Bollocks, Here's Sex Pistols ( 1 977) by juxtaposing seemingly unrelated clips from television and cinema alongside interviews with band members and those who witnessed their rapid rise and fall. Much like Temple's first film about band, however, The Filth and Fury is carefully designed, with discernable structure underneath its fractured facade. From chapter to chapter, Laurence Oliviers 1955 celluloid Richard III is recurring figure, lending cohesion to Temple's kinetic chronicle. On 2005 DVD commentary track, director explains that in using numerous clips from film set in fifteenth century, he really wanted to set up this kind of random tuning in to another time, all which, in away, sets up blue print for this very scattershot use of archive. The link Temple forges between Shakespeare's Richard and Sex Pistols might seem problematic in cultural context, for playwright is typically associated with sort of institutional authority attacked by English punks. Greil Marcus argues that punk outright rejected the institutionalized or passe ' identities of status (qtd. in Laing 131). And Tricia Henry makes similar point, but more emphatically, when remarking that late-seventies bands like Sex Pistols offered a mighty thumb of nose to cultural status quo of England in 1970s, and it was delivered in raw, harsh terms. Mainstream rock culture, bourgeois society, Western civilization, history, Beatles, and unemployment were just few of objects of their and contempt (65). Shakespeare represents another object of such venom and contempt, according to Alex Cox, director of Sex Pistols drama Sid and Nancy (1986). ' While commenting on his film Revengers Tragedy (2002), adapted from play by Shakespeare's near-contemporary Thomas Middleton, Cox insists that Shakespeare personifies establishment in English cultural imagination: Shakespeare's position is easy to understand and sympathise with: he lived under Tudor dynasty, and any kind of dissenter (whether playwright, nun, or an actual rebel) was liable to be dragged off, tottured, burned alive, or hanged [. …
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