Finally watching Julian Temple’s revisionist Sex Pistols documentary, “The Filth and the Fury,” I get the feeling that perhaps I wasn’t cheated after all. Like many 15-year-olds, the Sex Pistols for me were a gateway to new rebellion and new friends. I bought every officially released note of music and a goodly amount of bootlegs, eagerly read every book or article I could about them and sought out every interview I could with John Lydon, as he was legally obligated to call himself back then. (In fact, I was tuning in to W-DRE for an interview with Lydon on the occasion of the publication of his new memoir when I learned of Kurt Cobain’s suicide.)
The Pistols had the kind of attitude that only a 15-year-old could love. Spitting, sneering swagger. Vague contempt for authority (who? why?). Non-conformist and no respect for rock-n-roll as an “Institution.”
And then you grow up, and you start to think that instead of being some kind of truth-telling iconoclastic leader, that maybe John Lydon (nee Rotten) is a wee bit autistic and just generally a prick. And perhaps a bunch of nabobs wearing identical black leather jackets and purple mohawks are victims of the worst kind of conformity. And perhaps rebellion requires a specific target and grievance. And, worst of all, perhaps punk rock, as ritualistic rebellion against record labels and Elvis Presley has become a kind of institution itself. And then the Sex Pistols regroup for a couple of cash-in nostalgia tours, and you put away your Pistols records for fifteen years or so.
Well, the music still packs a punch. And Lydon can still focus his withering rage with a laser-like focus (if only Temple could more specifically place the Pistols and the punk rock movement in their particular geopolitical moment). But, mostly, “The Filth and the Fury” finds surprising pathos in the pathetic story of John Simon Ritchie (nee Sid Vicious). Throughout the film, Temple weaves in an interview with Vicious recorded after the Pistols breakup but before his New York adventures. With a stupid bloody scab on his face, Vicious comes across as both a pathetic junky and the scared little kid (he couldn’t have been more than 19-years-old). He just seems so tragically overwhelmed by circumstances. The poor kid can’t even manage a poker face, a facade or even a no comment. Instead, he plainly and meekly complains that he doesn’t want to be a junky all his life, and describes in excruciating detail the pain of junk withdrawal. Elsewhere, some prescient videographer documents, the uneasy co-dependent co-existence he shared with groupie/murder victim Nancy Spungeon. If the tears that John Lydon chokes back in remembrance (far more effectively recorded in the shadows than if Temple had focused a spotlight) don’t get you choked up, then maybe you’re as black-hearted as the film’s villain, Malcolm McClaren, who profited from Sid’s pathetic end.
The film was good enough that it inspired me to rip my old Pistols CDs onto my digital audio player (no brand names, comrades). Would that someone would do for Nirvana for today’s 15-year-olds, fifteen years hence.