Review of Filth and the Fury, The

Introduction

Interesting, but rather incohesive documentary about the legendary, notorious late-70s Punk band The Sex Pistols (or, in the words of former fan come bass player Sid Vicious: “f***ing nasty little bastards.”) Culled from archive footage of the period are interviews with the band both past and present, clips of recorded footage as well as masses of rhetorical playfulness in the shape of Tommy Cooper, Laurence Olivier and pretty much any media icon that catches director Julien Temple’s fancy in his myopic vision of the ground-shaking band.

Video

Given that almost the entire film is rooted in rough late 70s documentary footage, it all looks surprisingly good. The scratched, bleeding lenses and fudged colouration actually adds to the feeling of ugly, intimate back-to-basics Sex Pistols gigs in the muddy basements of S&M clubs.

Audio

OK. Its certainly loud, and a documentary about The Sex Pistols that isn’t loud is a bit like Kiss without make-up. However, the 2.0 audio track isn’t the clearest thing on Earth and Julien Temple feels it necessary to mumble his way through his commentary.

Features

Not much to go on in this VCI/FilmFour release. The theatrical trailer and a fairly sparse commentary track by director Temple that mainly focuses on his own experience with film rather than the subject under discussion. Its not without interest however, and Temple’s fascination with the Pistols is both genuine and surprisingly erudite.

Conclusion

Although only a part of the popular cultural landscape for 26 months, The Sex Pistols had an insurmountably powerful effect on the mass-consciousness. Their angry, thundering locomotive anthems to an alienated, disenchanted generation resonate even today. However their immediate effect wasn’t the anarcho-individualist revolution they had intended. Indeed, the Punk ‘movement’ that followed on from The Sex Pistols success was not unlike the trend-slave de-individuation we see carved all over youth culture today.

As for the film? Well, Johnny Rotten, Malcolm McLaren, Sid Vicious and co are as deluded and self-congratulatory as one would expect. With the benefit of hindsight, its not unreasonable to see that what became of the Sex Pistols and their legacy was something of a foregone conclusion even amongst the slag-heaps and uncollected rubbish piles of West London. As a result, Rotten’s predictably didactic narration becomes increasingly tedious and one wishes Temple had focused more on the strange, obsessive counter-culture that made them a success in the first place and the inter-personal rivalries that led to their self-destruction. Instead, Temple focuses on predictable pot-shots about the tedium of mainstream culture, sociological models of class-despair (contradictorily side-lined by the band’s rabid individualism), the collective denial of a middle-England’s rejection of a neglected underclass, a truly original collection of rebels spitting in the face of conformity yadda yadda yadda.

Its worth watching for the last third, where the sobering realities of a fickle public, paranoid music business, Nancy Spungen and each band-member’s success obsessed egoism led to a whimper rather than a burn-out. Vicious though was to have a more brutal and haunting fate, Temple milking the situation perfectly, lending the film an almost tragic arc that almost makes up for what is otherwise a fairly ramshackle and even oddly conventional rise and fall documentary. Like VH-1’s ‘Behind the Music’ with profanity, jump cuts and considerable pretension.