'Sid and Nancy'
Movie Review
Nerve Magazine, 1986
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| Johnny Rotten Now |
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| Johnny Rotten Then |
When I wrote this review of the 'Sid And Nancy' movie in 1986, Sid had been dead seven years; now, in 2025, he's been gone for 46 years. Johnny Rotten, now John Lydon, is 69. Steve Jones is 69 as well. Paul Cook is 68.
Sid, if he was still kicking today would be turning 68 in May.
Nancy Spungen, the titular 'Nancy' from 'Sid And Nancy' has been dead for 46 years, having died in the Chelsea Hotel room she was sharing with Sid from a single stab wound to the abdomen on October 12, 1978. Sid was arrested and charged with 2nd degree murder but never made it to trial, dying of an overdose on February 2, 1979.
Kind of takes the romance out of that Pete Townsend line about 'Hope I die before I get old'.
What hasn't died, at least sort of, is the Sex Pistols, a version of which under that name, is getting set to tour the US a little later this year. Why 'sort of'? Well, it's the Sex Pistols without Johnny Rotten. So, sort of like Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band but without Bruce Springsteen.
You will get to see Steve Jones (guitar) and Paul Cook (drums) from the original band, and, as an extra treat, Glen Matlock, the original Sex Pistols bass player has joined the line up. Legend has it Glen was kicked out of the Sex Pistols because he liked Paul McCartney. He's 68 and probably still likes Paul.
The Sex Pistols (Sort Of) will take the stage here in Denver on October 10 at the Mission Ballroom. There, for the $200 bucks or so you'll be shelling out, you'll get instead of Johnny Rotten, singer Frank Carter up on the boards mumbling, 'Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?'
But let's finish off on a more upbeat note. Not mentioned at all in the review of 'Sid and Nancy' from 1986 is that it stars Gary Oldman as Sid. Gary Oldman was virtually unknown in the US when the movie was released. This was only his third film and the first two had gotten very little notice this side of the pond. Who knew he was going to go from playing a weedy punk junkie to winning an Oscar for his role as Winston Churchill in 2017's 'Darkest Hour'.
I think if I was writing this review today, I might mention that.
The review was printed in Nerve, a short-lived (one issue??) newsprint magazine from 1986 with a decidedly political bent. Since the review was going to be rubbing shoulders with pieces on contamination at Rocky Flats, an expose of Irangate (yes, you might have to look that one up – political shenanigans weren't just invented by Trump!) and an interview with Noam Chomsky, I took a more sociological slant than I usually do. I still like the central metaphor of the dog collar as a symbol of either punk defiance or domestic servitude.
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IMAGES OF DOMESTICITY IN 'LADY AND THE TRAMP' AND 'SID AND NANCY'
Thirty-one years separate these two films, an almost unbridgeable gulf that Includes the Red Witch Hunts, the Civil Rights Movement, Viet Nam, the assassination of one president and the humiliation of all the others, Women's Lib the Decline of America and the Rise of the Yuppies, Neo-Con and the Politicized Evangelical Right. All this, and as they say, much much more has been accomplished by an ongoing and radical deformation of the traditional binary social bonding unit so necessary for the continuation of our beloved Western Hegemony: The All-American Couple.
Lady And The Tramp (1955) and Sid and Nancy (1986) provide public models regarding the domestication of the young adult. That one is impossibly positive and the other impossibly negative is the result of their being equally monstrous parodies that survive in our collective memories as the primal axis of an Oedipal drama that aims to turn its players into well-behaved and well-adjusted members of a close-knit and homogeneous society.
The central image of both films is the dog collar. In Lady and the Tramp. it is the badge of acceptance into the administered order, the mark, at once social and political, of one's inclusion in a hierarchy that provides the relief of a social geography encompassing a structure of relationships between individuals and the quiet, inflexible institutions of family, employment and civic responsibility. Lady and the Tramp was Disney's first animated feature to be based on a story of the studio's own making rather than on a tried and true fairy tale -- left to their own devices the writers whipped up an American Classic: Lady is a pert and perky cocker spaniel of obvious breeding who lives in style and comfort with her adorable masters. Jim Dear and Darling. The house is a huge and grand Victorian mansion, well-appointed and, of course, situated in a fine neighborhood.
The Tramp, on the other hand, is a mutt of suspect origin, with no fixed address and no visible means of support. A carefree and foot-loose sort, he is friends with all the riff-raft and quite adept at cadging meals and outwitting the authorities. A series of (mis)adventures bring these two star-crossed lovers together, but rather than the tragic ending that would seem to be indicated by their vastly different social standings, the Tramp reveals that all he ever really wanted was a collar, a license and a chance to sit below the salt at the Master's table.
Lady and the Tramp is indeed a fairy tale -- a fairy tale of bourgeois assimilation in which the lumpen proletariat is either eradicated (death being the fate of the suspiciously "foreign" types awaiting disposition at the dogpound from whence the Tramp is ultimately rescued), or rehabilitated through domestication. This film turns out to be an extremely bitter pill encased in the sweetest of coatings. Gorgeously drawn and lushly colored, the film's narrative is simply, yet wonderfully realized through striking characters and dramatic incidents pulling viewers along to a conclusion that leaves them smiling: each needs to take his/her proper place in society.
Sid and Nancy is the story of what happened to Lady and Tramp's children: mongrels of the bitch born into a world of crumbling stability where the nuclear family's position as the bulwark of a system in which individuals are trained from birth to take up their places in the order of things has eroded to the point where it is virtually unrecognizable and has thus become more and more Ineffective in the domestication of youth.
Alex Cox, the director and co-writer of Sid and Nancy, is an Englishman who studied law at Oxford and filmmaking at UCLA. In both countries he was drawn to the Punk scene, finding there an explosion of life that has been choked out of our existence. In both countries, Punk has been, at least partly, a visceral reaction on the part of children told that the world they are inheriting is sure to be a bleak, dirty mess and, though they aren't responsible for it, nonetheless they must live in it – Sorry, Kids, it just happens that way. Sometimes
Ultimately, S&N is not about Punks: it is about the crisis of social forms at this particular moment in history. The nuclear family has approached critical mass. Men, women and children still live in homes, going through the motions of the middle class dream where Dad works, Mom cleans and the Kids go to school. It is a dying dream, but its powers of persuasion remain.
For these kids, wearing a dog collar is an act of defiance: you want me to be your dog, well fuck you- dogs shit on the floor, piss on your leg and fuck anything that's warm and stationary for more than five seconds. That is Punk's power: its boiling energy, corrosive humor and terrible rage
Sid and Nancy furn out to be fake Punks: they are instead a young Ozzie and Harriet just starting out in a new Hell and not merely never finding an Exit but never even thinking to look for one. Sid and Nancy don't want to reject the system, much less destroy it - they want it to give them all the things it has always promised then. Throughout the film they both act out a grotesque parody of domesticity, the kind of parody devised by children who dress up in grown-up clothes and pretend to be adults. Cox is pointing out a basic problem for this generation: how will you begin to define who you are? If the old forms are bankrupt how will you survive if you cannot find out who you are?
The movie's greatest failing is that is does not indicate that these questions can be answered, Sid Vicious played bass and exemplified what manager Malcolm McLaren called Attitude for the Sex Pistols, a band that more than any other established the beginnings of a Punk identity. But the Malcolm McLaren/Johnny Rotten axis of the band is glossed over. They are the ones who survived: though they pissed on a lot of legs, they lived to laugh about it. By ignoring this part of the story Cox fails to show that new forms of social defiance are possible and leaves himself open to the accusation that his story is after all a cautionary one: behave yourself or this is what will happen to you.
Sid and Nancy drifted in a fog of infantile narcissism to their separate deaths: Ken and Barbie in dog collars, strung out on heroin and unable to separate themselves from the dreams of domestic bliss they yearned for. The movie's saddest moments are also among the funniest: the two visiting Nancy's family in America - how isolated they are and how oblivious they are to their isolation. it is in these scenes that it becomes apparent that Sid and Nancy really wanted to be our dogs: pampered, petted, spanked, fed, cuddled, scolded and, put to sleep when the time finally comes.
*****
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| Nerve Magazine, 1986 |
