Cheated

Speaking of Johnny Rotten, I finally got around to watching The Filth and the Fury the other night. I saw The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle ("The Film that Incriminates its Audience!") years ago, in the days of midnight movies, and loved it. I knew, of course, that it wasn't the whole story—but for years it was the only version available.

It's astonishing how recontextualization can change the effect of even iconic images. Watching the footage of the Pistols' last gig in San Francisco—the encore of "No Fun," where the band hammers relentlessly at those two chords while Lydon crouches at the front of the stage, staring down the audience with those gawdawful spooky eyes of his—this footage that has stood as a fearsome exemplar of Lydon's anger and negativity, and of his genius as a confrontational anti-frontman—watching it now, I swear to God the poor bastard looks like he's about to cry.

Here's this kid, barely out of his teens, half a world away from home, who knows he's losing the only friend he's got to opiates and treachery; he's sick with guilt. That feral crouch looks like a posture of defeat. It's heartbreaking, and that's an adjective I never thought I'd associate with the Sex Pistols.

(Roger Ebert's review is fascinating: he actually wrote the screenplay for the never-completed Pistols film Who Killed Bambi?, which was to have been directed by... Russ Meyer?)