Never Mind The Sex Pistols, Here’s The Bollocks

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. How one goes about it, though, can change the meaning of the cat: who it was, how it arrived at the moment of its skinning, even whether or not it was, in fact, a cat that got skinned. Here, kitty, kitty.

In critical parlance, we don’t call it “skinning,” but “interpretation.” Interpretation happens, just like shit. It happens, of course, in the hands of critics. But it also happens in the hands of biographers, journalists, filmmakers, and the cats themselves. Sometimes interpretation buries the truth, just like shit, conceals its odor beneath a layer of store-bought schist, packaged and sold as a chaperone for the shit on its way to the dustbin. Which brings me to Danny Boyle’s Pistol, the six-part series on FX.

If you’ve been watching Pistol, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the skinned cat for a possum with rickets or a discarded mophead. Boyle and creator/writer Craig Pearce dissect the Sex Pistols with all the precision of rusty hedge trimmers. Their model for the series – and it seems for their understanding of the Pistols – is the music biopic schematic in which the childhood-trauma-bone is connected to the ambition-bone is connected to the won’t-take-no-for-an-answer-bone is connected to the fame-bone is connected to the drugs-bone and the sex-bone. In fact, Pistol devotes so much attention to boning that you’d think that sex was the Pistols claim to fame. I suppose some of this can be chalked up to Pearce’s curriculum vitae which traces a shallow line from Australian soap operas to work with Baz Luhrmann on boilerplate that-kid’s-got-moxie! schtick like Strictly Ballroom and Elvis. (O the ignominy of being fêted by hacks!)

At first, I took Pistol as something like Punk for Dummies. But by episode two I realized it was closer to Punk by Dummies. The interpretation on display – the skinning – is based on a near-total misapprehension of why such a series ought to be made in the first place (assuming that it ought). Pistol is based on guitarist Steve Jones’ memoir, Lonely Boy, and revolves largely around Jones’ wayward ramble from deprived child to depraved manchild. Perhaps this is the root cause of the waywardness of the series’ interpretation. Pistol is a hamfisted bildungsroman, balanced on the hackneyed fictional devices of armchair developmental psychology and White-male-individualist-heroism. The show makes the unconscionable interpretive mistake of understanding the Sex Pistols’ trajectory – and more specifically, Jones’ – as a rags to riches story. The problem with this is three-fold. First, and most obviously, there are no riches at the end of this story. Ikea furniture with the last piece missing; a tabl. Second, the model for this kind of story necessarily places personal ambition, talent, and success at its center. Stories like this end with self-realization – in both senses: the main figure comes to realize things about himself while also realizing his inner (often god-given) potential. But for those acquainted with the Pistols’ legend and with Steve Jones’ part in the drama, it is clear that his memoir could have just as easily (and perhaps more appropriately) been called Lucky Boy because he fell into the Sex Pistols and was just barely capable enough to hang on to the tailpipe of the careening vehicle as it fishtailed through the narrow streets of 70s British culture. Jones’ post-Pistols career has been inflated and kept (just barely) aloft by the exhaust from that tailpipe emitted over a twenty-six month period some forty-five years ago. Thirdly, and most importantly, the kind of story that Boyle and Pearce try to tell – focused on the qualities of an individual as he overcomes social and societal challenges to achieve his dream – must, by design, ignore the historical and material conditions that allow, or even necessitate, the confrontations and transformations that are central to the Sex Pistols’ importance.

Hear me, o idolaters, individualists, bootstrappers, entrepreneurs: The story of the Sex Pistols is not a story of individual accomplishment. Let us not wallow in the “genius” of Jones or Lydon or McLaren. Theirs is a story of their place and time. Theirs is a story of how various lines of history, politics, class, generations, and sensibility converged in a particular place and time; how a particular phenomenon emerged from this convergence and offered a glimpse of the alternative that according to Maggie Thatcher did not exist. What makes Pistol’s interpretation all the more bewildering is that the truer telling of the Sex Pistols’ story already exists in the form of Julien Temple’s 2000 documentary, The Filth and the Fury, which is to Pistol as cliff diving in Acapulco is to stepping off the Oxford Street pavement into a puddle of day-old dog piss. (Gee, I’m really winning here. I’m really winning. I hope I don’t get overcome with power.) Boyle is clearly familiar with Temple’s film. He pilfers clips that appear in The Filth and the Fury, implicitly acknowledging that Temple’s film is part of the historical record, part of the story. He uses these filched clips to tap into what can now be taken for reality, for truth. And he uses these clips as a way of delegating responsibility for the historical, the political, the economic, the societal, to Temple’s documentary. It’s as if the entirety of Pistol is followed by a footnote:

* cf. Temple, Julien. The Filth and the Fury (2000), passim.

As told – as interpreted, as skinned – by Temple’s documentary, the Sex Pistols’ story is one of worlds (old and new) colliding. The film juxtaposes footage of the aristocracy imbibing cocktails, privilege, and ideology, with piles of garbage in London’s streets, of kids trapped in council estates (public housing) as if in prison. Scenes of a young White man rushing an older White man (the racial identifications are crucial to the scenes), ripping a Union Jack from his hands and proceeding to beat him with the flag pole; of a Black woman, her face torqued with anger, delivering a looping right hand to the left ear of a White, helmeted English policeman, sending him reeling; of a bearded White man in glasses brandishing a piece of lumber as photographers document the arc of his terrified swings: the so-called “Battle of Lewisham,” a conflict  instigated by the racist National Front marching in a majority-Black, south London neighborhood on August 13, 1977.

Elsewhere in the film, John Lydon recounts the construction of his Johnny Rotten persona and performance style. Among others, he cites Olivier’s Richard III alongside comedian Ken Dodd. The tragic, the grotesque, the comic. From a constellation of British stars, Lydon cobbles a single burning sun, not of York, but of the English unconscious; a figure designed to peel away the floral wallpaper concealing the rot and mildew – the “damp” as the British call it – eating away at everything: from the walls of their terraced flats, to time-honored traditions, to the Empire’s august institutions, to the very entitlements of the Empire itself.

Pistol is an inadvertent tragedy. It’s there in the title: Pistol, singular, despite the story being truly collective, truly historical, truly social.  It transforms a story about collective energies into one about individual aspiration. It ignores the relation of cultural production – as both output and input – to unfolding historical pressures. The story that Pistol tells is false. It is false because it places Steve Jones at its center. In truth this is a centerless story. But even so, the main bodies in orbit around the vacuum do not include Jones. It is false because it emphasizes the inconsequential, and treats the actually consequential as a mere backdrop for the heroics of its doughty, lonely boy. It is false because, at its core – in all its true significance – the Pistols’ story is an historical story; a story of how energy wells up in culture like water behind a dam. It is a story of how the dam, seemingly eternal, will someday crack and buckle, revealing the contingency of its power and its purpose. It’s also a story of how the dam gets rebuilt, the energy returned to harness; how convention is a recalcitrant bastard and most of the time gets its way. That’s a story worth telling. Thankfully, we’ve still got Temple’s The Filth and the Fury.