Control, UK 2007

One doesn’t usually think of things like “pacing” in the context of a three to four minute music video—it’s a sprint and not a marathon, as they say. A rush of motifs, visual puns, locale and costume changes, often for no obvious reason whatsoever, and then it’s over. We don’t bat an eyelash when Duran Duran are lounging on a beach in Phuket one moment and standing atop Machu Picchu the next; nor is our (dis)belief ever challenged when a legion of corpses rise from the grave to join Michael Jackson in a choreographed dance routine, or a blind theater student produces a strikingly life-like bust of Lionel Richie, etc. We simply aren’t conditioned that way. When scenes are simply strung one after another—with no apparent trajectory or velocity, rhyme or reason—in a music video, we barely notice it. The same cannot be said about a full-length narrative film, however, and this same arbitrariness plagues Control, the debut feature from music video auteur Anton Corbijn.

The perils involved in making biopics about dead rock stars (in this case, Joy Division’s Ian Curtis) are too numerous to list here, but it should be said that we encounter virtually none of them in Control. This is not to the director’s credit, though; rather it is only because he never overcomes the initial difficulties of telling a story—of any sort—that he doesn’t even approach the problems of telling a rock star’s life story on film. Early on in the picture, my date remarked “It’s a good thing this movie’s in black-and-white, because otherwise it would be really mediocre.” This statement proved to be a remarkably astute one over the course of the film, as it became ever clearer that underneath all the shimmering monochromatic brilliance and pitch-perfect cinematography, Control is an afterschool special yearning to spread its wings.

There is a mind-numbingly literal, by-the-numbers quality that permeates the entire film. In the first five minutes, we see a teenaged Ian (played by the oddly DiCaprio-esque Sam Riley) alone in his room, smoking and listening to Bowie’s “Drive-In Saturday”. A series of quick cuts—to J.G. Ballard books on the shelf, Iggy Pop LPs next to the turntable, and Lou Reed posters on the wall—tell us all we need to know, apparently, about our protagonist. By the inclusion of these scant details we are to understand that he is a “disaffected youth”, “artistic”, “cerebral”, etc. In another scene, we see Ian and the future members of the band in the crowd at a Sex Pistols show, staring dumbstruck at the “spectacle” taking place onstage (and entirely off-camera, it should be noted.) This, we are led to believe, is a monumental turning point, as in the very next shot it is already mutually understood that they are forming a band of their own. Why? Because thirty years of Greil Marcus, Rolling Stone best-of lists, and VH1 specials say so, that’s why—but the film itself never approaches such questions, relying instead on this inane sort of cultural shorthand. In lieu of major developments, artistic breakthroughs, etc. we are given merely the rote signifiers of same. Whether this is due to the director’s relative inexperience or something more sinister—a distinctly information-age cynicism, perhaps, in which all narrative developments and characterization are rendered in a sort of “hypertext”, and seemingly minor details are important in that they are “linked”, as it were, to some body of pop cultural knowledge?—is hard to say, but nonetheless this sort of intellectual and narrative laziness is unacceptable.

That said, there really is nothing in this film that one can’t get from spending five minutes on Wikipedia—there is nothing added to or taken away from the existing Joy Division mystique. The screenplay for Control is, I am told, adapted from the memoir Touching From A Distance, written by Curtis’ widow, Deborah. But you wouldn’t know it from watching the film, as her character (played by the typically excellent Samantha Morton) is entirely absent for long stretches of the movie. It might have been a more successful film if it had adhered to the source material, and told the story from her perspective. Instead, it is told from Ian’s “perspective”—that is, the perspective of someone who by all accounts was a fairly detached, opaque individual, whose side of the story consists entirely of a few dozen songs he left behind—but cribbed song lyrics recited in first-person voice-over do not a “perspective” make. All the events, the people, the places and details are there; what’s lacking is an actual interpretation of it all.

Filming biographies of dead rock stars is, understandably, a tricky business—one is always running the risk of either infuriating the hardcore fans or alienating the neophytes—and the walking of this tightrope is so daunting that a director often forgets to make a watchable, functional narrative, let alone a unique artistic statement. (Oliver Stone gets closer to this in The Doors than he gets credit for, but that is neither here nor there.) In tackling such a project, Anton Corbijn had a couple of ways to go about it: either portray the rise and fall of a seminal rock group using a deteriorating marriage as a backdrop, or portray a deteriorating marriage using the rise and fall of a seminal rock group as a backdrop. Corbijn tries to give us a little of both and, naturally, accomplishes neither.

But there is another way he might’ve gone about it, one that, I feel, would’ve played to his strengths, taken full advantage of the black-and-white film stock, and made a more compelling film overall; that is, to make it more like a music video. If Control is, at root, an attempt to convey the feelings of bleakness and isolation that Ian Curtis expressed in his lyrics (and ultimately led to his suicide) then it is a categorical failure. In the film, Ian accomplishes everything he sets out to accomplish, has everyone around him bending over backwards to cater to his needs, and sleeps with gorgeous Belgian journalists—the “bleakness” and “isolation” are nowhere to be found, and we’re left wondering what all the fuss is about. But what if Corbijn had decided he was going to make a film that was true to Joy Division in the “spirit” and not so much the “letter”? If he eschewed factual, biographical “truths” in favor of figurative, emotional “truths”? I don’t know about you, but if Control had fewer scenes of Ian Curtis with visibly tortured expressions on his face, and more scenes with him, say, carrying a giant egg up a flight of wrought-iron stairs, or wearing a cape and plastic crown carrying a folding chair through the streets of Manchester trying to find some semblance of peace, or up on the cross as clockwork ravens gingerly peck away at him… well, it might’ve been a more interesting film at the very least.

There may be a good film to be mined from this material yet, but unfortunately Corbijn doesn’t give it to us. In his determination to toe the line—to neither offend longtime fans or alienate potential ones—we get a film that tries to be a lot of things: a biography, a monument to a certain cultural “moment”, a love story, a tragedy—but succeeds at none of it. Perhaps for his next project, if we were to get a lot more Corbijn, and a little less Control…

How did so much happen so fast? He still held vague memories of a youth that carried no possessions, no expectations, no cares—just the wind in his hair and the ground beneath his feet. In the blink of an eye, it seems, he’d gotten what, for lack of a better term, most people deem “a life”. Something that held him fast to the earth, weighed down by a force stronger than gravity. It was the force of so many mortgage payments, car payments, college tuitions, soccer practices, school plays, birthdays, vacations, graduations, home cooked meals, etc. But it was so much more than an “etc.”—he lived through all of it. It had a name, had a face, but it still didn’t quite seem to fit. Not exactly. Not all of it. A great deal happens between point A and point B, a lot of things—important things—though they don’t seem important at the time, if one is even conscious of them at all. Loveless sex does not become sexless love overnight—it just gets that way somehow. It’s a process, invisible, and the mind reels at filling in the blanks.

A small heavy object sat on his desk, a paperweight. It was a gift from his co-workers, commemorating “20 Years of Distinguished Service” at the company. A paperweight, he thought, had to be the most useless thing imaginable, and almost shameless in that respect. Yet there it sat, maximizing its dubious utility. But the thing is, he actually needed it. You see, over the course of his “20 Years of Distinguished Service” he’d risen through the ranks a good deal. Five years in, he’d traded his cubicle for an office proper, one with four walls and a door that swung open, slammed shut, and locked tight on the weekends. The thing about that door is, when it swings open, slams shut, it sends a draft through the office. A slight draft, barely perceivable, but strong enough to catch any loose papers on his desk and send them flying. If one isn’t paying attention it can be a real mess.

Five years in, he’d found a practical, economical solution to the problem: the lead crystal ashtray on his desk. This was in the 80s, when smoking in the office was still legal, normal even. The ashtray doubled as a paperweight. But over the years—“over the years”, he chuckled, it sounded so glib—a lot happened in those years, important things, but the mind reels at filling in the blanks. Nonetheless, over the years, policies changed, and all smoking was to be done outside the office, and he’d already given up smoking anyway. The ashtray remained, however, fulfilling its hidden potential as a paperweight for another year or two, before its presence on the desk began to irritate him. It was almost a visual invitation for anyone who set foot within those four walls to light up—though this never once happened, and probably never would have happened. But it still irritated him, however slightly, and the ashtray ended up at the Salvation Army, destined to continue its distinguished service elsewhere.

Out with the ashtray, in with the problem of papers flying off the desk again. It is a singular, peculiar feeling to realize one is at a place in their life where they actually need a paperweight. It was as if the paperweight was the thing, and all of the particulars of his own “life” were secondary, had shaped themselves just so, to suit the purposes of the paperweight. Everything in his life thus far had been determined far in advance, everything leading up to the paperweight.

When the 20th anniversary of his hiring at the company loomed, his co-workers must have thought about what to get him. Maybe they’d remembered the handful of times over the years in which he’d grumbled about papers flying off his desk, maybe not. They didn’t think, now this is a man who took violin lessons from age seven to fourteen and gave it up for baseball (slightly true) and girls (slightly more true) and pitched six innings of shutout ball against Wilson High in the quarterfinals of the city championships and drank so much Southern Comfort that night he was too sick to play the next day. They didn’t think now this is a man who’s gotten up at the crack of dawn to get to work long enough to dread getting up at the crack of dawn to get to work but he still does it anyway.

They didn’t think, now this is a man who was so wracked with anxiety during the birth of his first child that he threw up twice and never told anyone about it, nor did they ever consider that odd feeling he got when he first held the child in his arms, a strange mixture of fear, pride, guilt, joy, sorrow, wonder, and revulsion. They didn’t think, now this is a man who has suffered that ridiculous Thomas Kinkaide print in the living room that his wife practically blackmailed him into buying for her on that tumultuous vacation in Carmel for over a decade now. They didn’t think, now this is a man who puts his pants on one leg at a time, a man who laughs at commercials, cries at movies, a man who mows his lawn religiously and goes out of his way to be an exemplary neighbor. Of course not. They thought this is a man who needs a paperweight. And damned if they weren’t right.

The paperweight was small and heavy and made a fleetingly, satisfyingly loud thud when he hurled it at the wall of his office. It chipped the paint some and made a nice dent in the drywall.

“Is everything alright? I heard a noise,” one of the VP’s peeked his head in the door.
“No, everything’s fine,” he said, “I was just trying to hang a picture.”
The VP nodded and closed the door behind him, sending a sheaf of papers sailing off the desk in his wake.

God was punishing them for some transgression or other—of this Peter Gabriel was now certain. A merciless, torrential rain had blanketed the area, unabated, for nearly a fortnight. This made navigating the dense, Burundi woodland especially difficult. They had marched a week solid, buoyed by, what had seemed at the time to be signs of progress, only to find themselves exactly at the spot they had decamped from. Then there was that rain. At times it seemed to be merely indifferent to the misfortunes of the expedition; at others it exhibited what can only be described as consciousness—it knew what they were thinking, their intentions, and it derived some sick pleasure in thwarting them at every turn. Their stores of powder and cannon shot had grown so waterlogged as to be unusable. They were forced to leave it all behind in the jungle. It was only when they stumbled upon these selfsame powder-kegs a week later that they realized they’d been traveling in circles, otherwise they’d be marching blindly still. Now they could only wait, wait for a break in the rain.

Peter Gabriel had a dream—or a waking hallucination—his experience in the Congo had taught him there is no proper difference between the two. Whatever it was, it disturbed him. In it, he found himself transformed—older and wiser, with a long, white beard—a second Noah charged with the task of saving all that was worth saving in the world from the flood that was to come. He built an Ark, one that looked suspiciously like a matte-painted spaceship they’d used as a backdrop at a Genesis concert once. Two of every type of beast on earth boarded the ship. Biko, his beloved Yorkshire terrier-mix was there, as were his goldfish and a long-dead parakeet he’d owned as a boy. Humanity was represented by Kate Bush and himself; he felt strangely at ease about this. The flood itself was pleasant, like the drawing up of a hot bath after a long day out in the garden. The boat rocked gently atop the surface of the water. There was always plenty to eat, and they entertained themselves playing cribbage, games that lasted all night and which, somehow, both sides seemed to win every time.

The rest went according to the Good Book—forty days and forty nights, three birds and the whole bit. The waters receded and they soon found themselves on dry land. Peter Gabriel opened the hatch. But what he saw there was not a new dawning, a clean slate for mankind and another crack at redemption. No—he saw African faces with African smiles, in a colorful array of African garb from every tribe, as far as the eye could see. He was momentarily overjoyed at this sight—having feared all of this was lost to the flood—but that moment was burst instantly when he heard a familiar snickering from the front of the crowd. It was Paul Simon again. And Steve Winwood—inexplicably—was there, admiring some rustic thumb-piano. The American said nothing, only looked at Peter with that wicked grin on his face, and blew a single note from a harmonica. That was the cue, apparently, as Peter was hoisted in the air by the crowd, and carried away helplessly by a river of hands towards certain death…

Peter Gabriel awoke from the dream disoriented, but quickly regained his bearings by the incessant pounding of the rain on his tent. He peered outside. Most of his men were still asleep, save for a few quietly smoking and playing cards. Simon! He cursed the man’s name silently to himself. It was bad enough that there was no place on the continent where he was safe from this man’s grasp, but now the bastard was colonizing his own dreams as well. Peter was seized by one of his now-frequent migraines. He fumbled around through his rucksack for some laudanum but found none—he had used up the last of it in an unsuccessful suicide attempt that, naturally, he had no recollection of. They were really bent over the barrel now, he thought. Here they were, trapped in the jungle with precious little in the way of provisions and even less ammunition, a date with destiny looming on the horizon. Simon was less a man than a force of nature at this point. His army grew at the rate Gabriel’s was dwindling, and was fully stocked with all the latest artillery. This was a man who would dynamite Victoria Falls to rubble if he thought it would shave just one hour off his travel time. And it was this very man who awaited them—exactly where no one could say—this man with whom they were now locked in some dance of death, circling the continent. The throbbing in Peter’s temples worsened, as if the very drums of war were pounding in his head, hastening towards one final, dramatic confrontation that grew more inevitable by the hour…

Margaret Thatcher
10 Downing Street
London
SW1A 2AA

Madam Prime Minister,

I wish I could be writing under happier circumstances but the situation here is more dire than previously let on. While I am well of body my spirit is considerably worse off. I have simply seen too much for it to be otherwise. The conditions here are appalling. The view from my tent resembles nothing so much as some infernal vision of Hieronymous Bosch, only more exaggerated. Men, women, and children all indistinguishable from one another, black skeletons boiling in the sun—there is not a single tree or patch of shade to be found. Babies wail through the night as their mother’s teats have all run dry until they are too weak to do even that. I’ve seen women desperately gather up grain husks and dead grass, mix it all with mud and salt, boil it over an open flame and ladle it into bowls. The men, driven mad with hunger, set out into the night so as to die away from their families out of some perverse sense of shame—as though they could’ve done something to prevent any of this from happening!

The sporadic air-drops of mealy, substandard grain are met with sheer anarchy: one sees the scene from a distance and can’t help but think of so many ants devouring a cube of sugar. They all push each other out of the way to get there first, though they know full well that the early birds are often crushed to death by the mass of humanity nipping at their heels. I can still hear the sounds of screaming and breaking limbs in my nightmares.

For the love of God, send aid! And by aid I don’t mean sacks of flour and powdered milk and medicines of dubious origin—no, I speak of human beings with love in their hearts, sturdy constitutions, and a sense of purpose and the magnitude of the situation here. While economic aid is indeed necessary, I fear it is useless without the right people to carry it out. It is only by a combination of these, of economic and LIVE AID, that we can rescue these unfortunate souls from the brink of extinction. But time is of the essence, Madam Prime Minister, as I can feel the mouth of Hades growing wider everyday.

But I am not entirely without hope. Sting, despite all the rumours swirling that he is about to bust up the Police and light out for New Orleans to practice “hot nigger jazz”, has given me his word and pledged aid. Paul Weller remains solid as an oak and can be counted on whatever the situation. Ditto Billy Bragg. Even Jimmy Somerville, bless the lad, has offered to help once he has cleared himself of this latest round of buggery charges. Can the Human League and Kevin Rowland of Dexy’s Midnight Runners be far behind? Live aid, indeed!

I had hoped to end this missive on a more hopeful note, but I look at the calendar and realize it is already Boxing Day; meaning that yet another Christmas has come and gone in this god-forsaken land entirely unnoticed. I wonder if these people even know it’s Christmastime at all? But who could blame them if they didn’t? It is my hope that this time next year, we will let them know it’s Christmastime by our deeds, by spreading goodwill through charitable acts, and letting all share in our joy. If not, then I fear these people are doomed. I remain

Your Faithful Servant,
Bob Geldof

Day broke ominously on the shores of Lake Tanganyika the morning of 15 May. Dark clouds encircled the sun in sinister, secretive motions, like so many hyena around a wounded gazelle fallen behind the herd—an open-ended dread in anticipation of some terrible finishing blow to come. But come it never did; while the skies remained lead-dark the whole day long, it yielded not a drop of rain. This was both blessing and curse for, while the party remained dry, the oppressive heat—under such baleful, darkened skies—made one feel as if he were shoveling coal in the belly of some accursed steamer set out from Liverpool to the Cape of Good Hope. Whatever the outcome, it was to be a trying day.

The rag-tag group assembled there scarcely resembled the one that had disembarked at Dar es Salaam with such optimism just six weeks prior. It was not a pretty picture: just under sixty of Her Majesty’s regulars remained, with an accompaniment of 250 Nyamwezi tribesmen armed with a few dozen rusting muzzle-loaders and nary a cartridge in sight. Clashes with the Hutsis had been bad enough—they had lost nearly as many from desertion as in combat, and a cholera outbreak a week later claimed many times that number. That was followed by the wire from London informing them there would be no reinforcements forthcoming until the conclusion of Parliamentary elections the last week of June. “Oh well,” Peter Gabriel thought to himself, “never a dull moment, I suppose.” He was now about as far removed from Solsbury Hill as one could possibly find oneself.

The past several weeks had been marked by profound depression, the likes of which he hadn’t experienced since leaving Genesis for good following the birth of his first child in ’75. Whatever misfortune he suffered, no matter how harrowing, was made that much worse by the fear that something even more terrible lay just around the corner. Where in the first few weeks the days passed like Sissyphus’—every triumph neutralized by some setback—these last few weeks the days passed like Prometheus’—chained to a tree, his liver pecked out by vultures until death, only to be reincarnated to do it all over again the next day and the next for all eternity. He had taken to using laudanum but insisted he wasn’t hooked. Nonetheless, the expedition’s supplies of it were dwindling. He justified this to himself thusly: they would all be dead soon enough, and no amount of laudanum was going to change that.

Two days out from Tanganyika the party encountered a native frantically digging in the dirt with his fingernails, presumably for roots or bugs or sustenance of any kind. It didn’t take a native speaker to figure out what was going on; one look at the man’s face was all it took to realize something terrible had just befallen his people. Youssou N’Dour, Gabriel’s most trusted lieutenant, translator, and confidant, approached the man to assess the situation. The man babbled hysterically, his arms flailing wildly, fists pounding the dirt for emphasis. It wasn’t until N’Dour procured some food and water for the man that he was calm enough to explain exactly what had happened. The man spoke to N’Dour at length, in sober, hushed tones. Gabriel simply stood by, powerless, fearing things had once again grown from bad to worse. After what had seemed an eternity, N’Dour walked back over to the party, took Gabriel aside, and explained to him what the man had just told him.

Two days prior, a very powerful, very short white chief had showed up with many armed men and much hongo. This in itself was not so strange, as white men had been coming to the village to trade for many years now. They set up camp and a great feast took place with music and dancing. The chief proudly declared that the stranger was now N’Gogo, or “small white brother from another mother”. The tribe cheered and the feast continued deep into the night. The next morning, the two sides met to discuss trade. The chief proudly displayed the village’s stores of ivory, gold, and cloth. The white chief, though, merely scoffed at all this, and instead walked over to the center of the village and began pointing out several of the musicians, singers, and dancers from the night before. He told them he had come from a magical place far, far away, where ivory, gold and cloth were in such abundance as to be worthless, and that instead of currency, they used music. People there never went hungry, and there was no such thing as drought or crocodiles or the sleeping sickness. He wanted to take them all there to prove he was not lying. He was going to hold a feast for them that would put last night’s to shame. He was certain that, once they had seen this magical kingdom they would never want to leave. They would all be very rich there. He called this place “Graceland”.

Peter Gabriel grew increasingly nauseous as he heard this. “Then he took the people away with him,” N’Dour continued, “and headed for the coast. Now there is no one left to herd the goats. There is no one left to tend the crops. Everyone left in the village is either very old or very young—everyone but him,” he said, pointing to the distraught native. “He does not know how to sing or dance. He knows how to farm, but he is but one man with many mouths to feed. The white chief took half the village with him, leaving behind only these.” N’Dour motioned to some crates stacked against a wall at the edge of the village. He walked over, opened one, and pulled out a long player record. He placed it on the village’s lone gramaphone and played it. A hissing, crackling silence was violently interrupted by a tune Gabriel recognized instantly, the insipid “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”. He’d heard enough.

The thought that Paul Simon had stolen a march on him, and was nearing the coast with precious human cargo in tow, made Gabriel’s blood boil. Dread was replaced with indignation and a renewed sense of purpose. The sabers had been drawn. He had caught up with Simon once before, in Leopoldville; he would do so again. Or he would die trying…

A sort of “moment” I had a few months back: I was listening to “Dear God” by XTC on my headphones. I’d heard the song many times before (and many times since then) but this time was entirely different. For the first couple of minutes it was like any other time—I hummed along, knowing the words by heart. But when I got to the instrumental bridge—a sing-songy little patch in the music-hall tradition, a tuba lurching through a mist of electronic strings—past, present, and future rubbed elbows with each other (the Beatles with synthesizers, essentially) and I was overcome with an intense feeling I couldn’t shake.
It was like a rock split cleanly in half, revealing its geological life-story, only what I saw in the song was a cross-section of the history of the English race, between Cromwell and Thatcher, condensed in a single moment, a single point. Balfour and Bertrand Russell, Admiral Nelson, the Battle of Waterloo, and Goodbye to All That, Keats’ name writ in water, Aldous Huxley and Oliver Twist, “Penny Lane” and Graham Greene, Churchill, the Ministry of Silly Walks, and housewives collecting old biscuit tins to fight against the Blitz—all this and a good deal more was compressed into a single moment, a single feeling that ran up my spine like lightning, gave me goosebumps.

The sense one gets of England from the history books (the American ones, at least) is of a calm, cool, rational, methodical people bent on “civilizing” the rest of the world, making it sensible for all time. They saved the world from Napoleon, from Hitler, out of duty, because it fell in their laps, with all the righteousness of someone taking their recycling out to the curb. The story about the apple falling on Newton’s head is patently apocryphal: he himself said that everything he accomplished he did by setting up a problem beforehand and thinking about it for a very long time—what we call “inspiration” is not one of the traditional English traits—or so I thought. In a moment that notion was out the window.

The song’s lyrics resemble nothing so much as one of Lord Russell’s polemics against religious doctrine and, filtered through the medium of the song, revealed something there I hadn’t noticed before: namely, passion. Russell’s arguments against religion tend to rest on logical grounds, a pacifist worldview with no small amount of that utilitarian calculus of “the greatest good for the greatest number of people”. (Oddly enough, these are much the same grounds many of C.S. Lewis’ arguments for Christianity rest on.) The XTC song seems to begin in much the same way, but takes a sudden turn at the bridge, and what had once seemed to be a logical attack against God is revealed to be something more substantial by far: a personal attack against God. Andy Partridge shrieks a litany of transgressions “God” has committed (or allowed to go unpunished) against his flock. “Even though I don’t believe in you,” the song seems to say, “I have a problem with you nonetheless. Why,” it asks, “do all our best efforts and intentions, our toil, lead to naught? To what end? You’re supposed to be all-knowing—why?” A righteous indignation comes across in the song that reveals as much about Jeremy Bentham, Bertrand Russell, and Britannia as it does about Andy Partridge’s beliefs. A desperate shout into the void—an utterance one rarely hears with an English accent—and a moving one at that. The song ended, and naturally I hit repeat. And naturally, I could not come close to recreating the feeling I’d just experienced…

378: Gothic rebels, led by Fritigern, rout Roman legions in the second Battle of Adrianople, killing the Emperor Valens in the process and hastening the decline of the Western Empire…

1916: Aleister Crowley engages in a public chess exhibition in London, playing over seventy games simultaneously while blindfolded. His opponents include amateur chess enthusiasts, dockworkers, bootblackers, William Butler Yeats, and, it is claimed, several gods from pagan mythology. Over the next seventy-two hours, his opponents gradually concede defeat, with the glaring exception of Isis who, it is said, he battles to an amicable draw…

1986: Peter Murphy stands before a baggage carousel at Heathrow, only now feeling the full effects of the barbiturates he had taken to calm his nerves on the fourteen-hour flight from Jakarta. His hips sway side to side, his feet shuffle back and forth as though he is dodging bricks being hurled at him at incredibly low speeds. John Lydon stands a few feet away with headphones on, listening to and practicing along with a Berlitz Japanese language cassette. He is brushing up, apparently, for a TV commercial he is filming in Kyoto later that month. “An advert for hemorrhoid cream,” he remarks smugly, “because I’m such a magnificent pain in the arse.”

This explanation seems pleasing enough to Peter, as a slight smile crosses his lips. He grows increasingly dizzy and leans up against a support beam to keep from falling, his eyes closed, his face raised to the sky. Konichiwa. Domo ari-gato. Peter has a strange feeling that the support he’s leaning against is not nearly as sturdy as it first appeared; he feels it undulating beneath him, neither solid nor liquid nor gas, and if he concentrates hard enough, he can feel something like a pulse in the support beam, a pulse strangely attuned to his own pulse, beating away, in stereo.

He turns to find the beam mystically transformed: what was once an austere concrete beam is now a portly, red-faced Scandinavian man about fifty years old or so, with glasses and a bushy mustache. The support beam mutters something profane under its breath, then turns and walks away. Peter is floored, and not in a figurative sense. He crosses his legs in the Lotus Sutra fashion, his palms pressed against the floor for balance. Moshi moshi. Hai. Hai. Domo ari-gato. At that moment he realizes that the floor, too is not as stable as he’d previously believed. He stares at the baggage carousel to find that it has stopped moving entirely, and that everything around it is now spinning, spinning furiously, hurtling through space at 456,000 miles an hour, 93 million miles from the sun.

Lydon suggests they split a cab, and Peter nods in agreement (or he simply nods—it isn’t clear). Then he suggests that, if Peter isn’t too busy, they might stop over at Lydon’s maternal grandmother’s house off King’s Road for tea. Peter’s limp body slumps into the back seat of the taxicab, swaying like a reed in the wind, completely at the mercy of physics—each movement of the cab creates an equal and opposite reaction in Peter. Lydon chats away—it is unclear whether he is talking to the cabdriver or to Peter, to both of them or neither.

“You know they weren’t here before,” he says. “The Asians—Pakis… Me nan hates em, but me, I think it’s bloody brilliant.” He makes a sweeping hand gesture at the neighborhood out the window. “Imagine—the Ayatollah right here in the heart of London—it’s fucking beautiful, man… That’s the most punk rock thing you can do these days, it’s the next logical step, it’s all we’ve got left. If you want to be a rebel nowadays, you’ve got to grow a beard and pray five times a day. It’s great—oim finkin o convertin meself,” he continues in that musical theater Cockney accent he slips into from time to time. “If Sid were alive today, he’d be hijacking planes, trading hostages for guns and such,” Lydon continues, his eyes now subtly moistened with tears. “It’d be great laughs it would… great, great laughs…”
Peter Murphy sits in a chair in the living room of John Lydon’s maternal grandmother, completely unconscious, a full cup of Earl Grey in front of him now cold, a volume of poetry on his lap opened to Coleridge’s “Kublai Khan” sits unread. “Your friend,” Lydon’s nan remarks, “he’s rather a quiet one, isn’t he?”

410: Led by Alaric I, Visigoth armies enter Rome through the Salarian Gate and sack the former capital of the Empire, plundering its riches, slaughtering its inhabitants, …

1440: Gilles de Rais, Marshal of France and former cohort of Joan of Arc, is executed for crimes that include the rape, torture, and murder of hundreds of young boys, sacrificed, it is claimed, to a mysterious demon called “Barron” in an attempt to recoup his squandered fortune. It is said that de Rais would decapitate the boys and place their heads on stakes lined up in rows, and that, upon determining which one was fairest, would masturbate in their faces, amongst other things…

1983: Peter Murphy is breakfasting alone al fresco on an exceedingly pleasant spring morning on the Prinsenstraat in Amsterdam. He is enjoying a repast of smoked fish, sour cream, potatoes, and strong, black coffee. The whirring and clacking of so many passing bicycles, combined with the smell of incense and animal droppings and that singular, peculiar northern light transport Peter to another place and time entirely. A tableau vivant of tulips, black cloaks, and moneylenders, of Rembrandt, Spinoza, and anatomy lessons passes before his mind’s eye. He reflects for a moment on that tragic, Portuguese Jew, the author of The Ethics. Such a work would be inconceivable to write in Sheffield, Glasgow, London—only in Amsterdam, he thinks, in the 17th century or today.

He spots a shaggy dog in the corner, flat on its back, rhythmically licking its bollocks, nibbling its bits, and he thinks to himself God is in everything and in everything, God. That dog, those bollocks, myself, this fork, David J, the sun and the moon and the statue of Nelson in Trafalgar Square, all are comprised of, and comprise, one uniform, unbroken whole. I am Spinoza, he thinks, and he was, is, and forever will be me. In God, eternally yours, Peter Murphy…

He leaves a tip and takes a stroll, puffing on a Galoises to assist in the digestion process. He passes by a familiar hash bar, familiar in that it was where, four years earlier, he’d spent an infuriating afternoon with Ian Curtis, the late Joy Division singer, both the first and the last time the two would ever meet.

From the outset, it had seemed that Ian was entirely unclear on the concept. That one could not only purchase cannabis, but smoke and enjoy it in plain view, unabashedly and without fear of retribution from the authorities, was completely foreign to him. He insisted on whispering once they entered the establishment, even going so far as to hold a folded, dog-eared copy of that days Temps du monde against his cheek when he spoke, as though some vengeful god might be reading his lips that very moment.

Ian kept asking Peter when ‘he’ would show up and Peter insisted he didn’t know who this ‘he’ was. Ian asked if there was to be some signal, some password or secret knock, and if there was could Peter perform it, because Ian wasn’t feeling so hot at the moment and feared he’d botch the whole transaction.

Peter had procured them a couple of joints and found Ian crouched on the ground, whispering something about meeting in the restroom in exactly one minute. Ian grabbed the joints and scurried towards the back, low to the ground like an ape. Peter, amused by all of this, played along, gamely pretending to keep watch, peeking around corners, looking under tables, even flipping over couch cushions. It was great fun.

Finally, Peter walked over to the bathroom, called out Ian’s name, and as he walked in, heard the sound of a toilet flushing. By the time Peter found him, Ian had flushed all of the drugs down the toilet. Contrite, he sobbed. “The secret knock,” he mumbled, “that wasn’t the secret knock.”

Peter Murphy rents a bicycle on Ferdinand Bolstraat and rides half an hour into the center of town. He rolls a joint and sits down on the edge of one of the canals, smoking and thinking of his dead friend. He senses an odd symmetry—not “fearful”, like Blake’s, but comforting—in the events of this day and all the others in his life. He reflects on the character of God—the God which is in everything and everything in it, of harmony and eternal return, that ubiquitous sphere whose circumference is infinite and whose center is everywhere: in the sun, in our bones, in Ian Curtis, and in the delicate tendrils of smoke circling in the air above one particular canal in old Amsterdam…

1610: Countess Elizabeth Bathory is placed under house arrest for charges including the torture and murder of hundreds of peasant girls in Royal Hungary (present-day Slovakia). Witnesses at her trial testified that she would burn, mutilate, and bite the flesh off her victims, and bathe in their virginal blood to retain her youth, spawning countless legends and earning her the nickname of “The Blood Countess”…

1875: Edward Alexander Crowley (later changed to Aleister) is born at 36 Clarendon Square in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England…

1981: Peter Murphy is taking in some of the sights in Rome the day before a show when he catches a whiff of something seductive, feels it brush past him, then dissipate into thin air. He quickly rifles through his coat to make sure he hasn’t been pick-pocketed, then makes his way through the crowd of tourists when he smells it again. This time he’s quick enough to match a form with the scent, and before he knows it, he’s in hot pursuit. She’s tall and slender, fashionable—though not pretentiously so—in pea-coat, scarf, tight jeans, and knee-high boots. Her jet black hair is spiky and fluffy at the same time, with not a small amount of hairspray holding it together—but this being 1981, that could hardly be perceived as a flaw, akin to complaining that your pet goldfish needs to live in a tank of water and can’t play fetch, etc. Something about her gait strikes Peter profoundly—she is walking briskly, yet confident, relaxed—a panther utterly at home in her own skin. He has trouble keeping up with her, and almost loses her twice—first around a corner near the Spanish Steps and later in a crowd surrounding the Trevi Fountain—but Peter is determined to have his prize.

He’s almost in step with her when she ducks into a store. Peter sits back in an alley and waits for her to emerge. Recently he’s been reading Graham Greene’s Our Man In Havana, so he takes to this kind of intrigue like a duck to water. Finally, he thinks, I feel like a character in a novel—a protagonist, at that. Every second is charged with a kind of drama. Exactly what sort of bird is she, he thinks. A femme fatale? An angel with a secret to hide? His mind races at the possibilities. By the time she exits the store, Peter is convinced he is on the trail of a woman who is equal parts Joan Jett, Catherine Deneuve, and the White Goddess of pagan mythology, that tri-form entity of birth, love, and death.

On the Via Perugino he follows her not even four feet behind. He catches that scent again, that admixture of nightshade and eternity and the adult bookstore in Brighton he used to sneak into as a lad. Her scarf trails behind her, flapping in the wind, so close he can almost grab it. He’s reminded for an instant of that tragic prima ballerina, Isadora Duncan, and how she was strangled to death when her exorbitantly long scarf was caught in the wheel-well of her automobile. Peter imagines a similar fate for this ingénue. I’ll grab you by the scarf and pull you in, he thinks. He’ll hold her close and whisper some devastating aphorism of Baudelaire or the Comte de Lautreamont, and she would belong to him body and soul.

He reaches out and grabs the end of the scarf, only it doesn’t stop her in her tracks, but merely slips off her neck entirely. She continues walking another dozen steps or so before she realizes her scarf is missing, then turns around to face Peter, confidently clutching the scarf, channeling Casanova, Don Giovanni, and a little Count Dracula for good measure. When it becomes apparent that this femme fatale is indeed bandmate Daniel Ash—who was on his way to pick up a tennis racket he’d had restrung the day before—Peter’s mind scrambles for an excuse. He mumbles something about needing to clarify that night’s set list. Ash replies that he’s “kind of busy at the moment” and that he’s “sure it can wait till soundcheck”. Peter agrees, and comments on what nice weather they’d been having…

“We affirm the future of cinema art by denying its present,” Dziga Vertov proclaims in his manifesto. “The ‘psychological’ prevents man from being as precise as a stopwatch; it interferes with his desire for kinship with the machine.” It is this “kinship” which Vertov places front and center in Man With A Movie Camera. It is in many respects a 68-minute visual/kinetic love poem to “the machine”, which, oddly enough, was not entirely uncommon in early Soviet cinema–see: the tractor/seduction sequence in Eisenstein’s The Old and the New (1929). But there is more going on here than simply a celebration of industry and the proletariat; it is also a profound meditation on time and space, document, testimony, transience, permanence, and loss. None of those things can be said to comprise the content of the film–rather, it is only in the form, through manipulation and technique of the filmmaking craft, that those issues even arise–which I feel may be what Vertov was talking about all along with his kino-eye: an eye that sees reality even more “real-ly” than we can.

While Eisenstein chose to view communism through the lens of history, tell its story as the story of its great figures, its massive battles, and dramatic struggles; in the hands of Vertov, however, communism comes across as something more or less innate, embodied in the everyman’s very being. All one has to do is step back to see that the modern Soviet metropolis is in fact one massive organism (or machine, as it were), with innumerable moving parts, every part essential to the whole, but none so important that it cannot be replaced. Vertov’s city, like any person, sleeps, wakes, works, plays, and rests over the course of a day. A kind of precursor to the modern computer, Vertov’s city chugs along, powered by a dizzying series of binary oppositions: aerial shots and close-ups, stills and sped-up film, microcosm and macrocosm, weddings, divorces, births and funerals–all are essential to the working of the whole, all equally sacred, equally mundane. A night out drinking with friends, a wake, a carriage ride, an ambulance ride all take on a homogenous character when an entire city is compressed into the space of a frame, an entire day condensed into just over an hour. As he’d initially set out to do, Vertov’s work disarms us–that is, it disabuses us of any preconceptions of narrative we’ve inherited from so-called “psychological literature”, from the past. His socialist lens–in which the individual is subordinated to the whole–wreaks havoc on how we perceive the scope and significance of individual events, people, etc.

But the film is not nearly so dogmatic as I’ve made it sound thus far. There is an amount of playfulness, warmth, and humanity that no amount of ideological superstructure can quite blot out. In one scene, Vertov shows an editor editing the film as we are watching it–echoing the proto-postmodern gamesmanship of Kierkegaard, Unamuno, et al. Vertov never lets us forget that what we’re watching has been manipulated, exposes the stage structure, so to speak. This is not an “objective” documentary, but kinopravda, a truth that has been played with, teased out of real life. In the track-and-field sequence of the film, a discus thrower spins in slow motion and the frame freezes in mid-throw, in virtually the exact same position as the Greek Discobulus. The difference, of course being that Discobulus is frozen in an idealized time which never was or will be; but with Vertov’s discus-thrower, we know that there is always a frame preceding this one, as well as a frame to come. Whether this is art imitating life imitating art, etc., I can’t say, but it is effective nonetheless.

In another sequence, a long aerial shot looks down on a crowded beach. The innumerable white naked bodies wriggling and scattering resemble nothing so much as maggots devouring some rotting slab of meat. But Vertov intercuts this with extreme close-ups of the body parts of individual beachgoers–a knee here, the curve of an elbow there, the back of a thigh, etc.–all artfully composed and arranged, glistening sun and sweat. This arrangement of shots, I feel, undermines, inverts the film’s socialist thesis. Its message is namely this: that humanity, no matter how gross and senseless its operations seem as a whole, are considerably less so when we take a closer look. These “maggots” are all beautiful in their own way, all have their own story to tell, no matter how grotesque they may seem taken en masse.

Perhaps it was images such as these that contributed to Vertov’s work being received by the government with something less than enthusiasm, but that’s not for me to say. What is painfully clear, however, is how Vertov’s kino-eye, which could indeed pierce through reality to see something much deeper, failed to see what was happening right under his nose. He achieved a “kinship with the machine” closer than he probably bargained for, as the massive beauracratization of the Party under Stalin rendered Vertov obsolete, a footnote, like so many manifesto writers, he wrote himself into history as he wrote himself out of existence. As all those who deny the present in the name of the future come to realize, the past is just around the corner. Few have realized this truth more painfully, more “real-ly” than Dziga Vertov.