Jubilee

I spent this weekend working through the Criterion Collection edition of Derek Jarman's 1978 film Jubilee. Premise = Queen Elizabeth I (1533 – 1603) asks court magus Dr. John Dee to summon a spirit ethereal, Ariel, who reveals to the Queen "the shadow of these times", i.e., the future, i.e., Albion as the sun rises on it in the closing years of the 20th Century. What do the Queen and her retinue discover? As Jarman himself writes:

"Law and order has finally been abolished and do-your-own-thing is the order of the day. [As one character says, desires are now realities.] The church is a strip club and Buckingham Palace a recording studio... Open war between all factions of society. A gang of bike girls centered at H.Q. in Southwark, rape and kill all adversaries, led by the Queen of Punk, Bod [played by Jenny Runacre, who also appears as Queen Elizabeth I]... The music of groups like The Slits, Sex Pistols plays incessantly to rapturous reception."

The funny thing is, the punks mostly despised this film. Vivienne Westwood went so far as to silkscreen her criticism of the film on t-shirts (I suppose they were made available for sale through Seditionaries). There's probably something to the fact that the punk movement in the UK, given its sneering, colonialist appropriation of yobbo working class mores, was not very tolerant of alternative lifestyles. Whatever the case, Jubilee has had to collect dust in anticipation of a revival. I cannot and will not be just another observer commenting on how prescient the film is its portrayal of particular varieties of social and personal anomie, the old if not ancient evils of the "State", and the utterly destructive consequences of our opting for consumerism and spectator-hood. I'm sure you'd much rather read Naked Lunch anyway. And I won’t talk here about Jarman's highly politicized homosexuality, because I don’t feel qualified to do so. But, as someone whose on occasion inhaled the lingering chemical fumes of punk culture all throughout his mid-1980's adolescence, I can tell you that this film is fascinating as a pop cultural artifact.

Jubilee tries very hard to escape mass culture; Jubilee crawls and swims through stagnant pools of pop culture like a fleeing prisoner might have to make his or her way through raw sewage. I don’t think I can read the film's denouement, in which Elizabeth and Dee walk along the English shore and fade into the sunset (it is not clear whether they have returned from their journey in time or not) any other way. Although Jarman was always a keen observer who began his film-making career by mixing secret histories – documentary Super8 films of his own sub-culture – with extremes of fantasy, Jubilee seems completely smitten with punk music and fashion. So much so that Jarman places pre-MTV music videos within the film (most notably, earlier performances by Siouxsie and the Banshees and Adam and the Ants), and makes over trained actors like Toyah Wilcox so that they look more punk – lumpier, more sallow, and more mentally unbalanced – than the real punks themselves.

Ultimately, like me, Jubilee can think about punk but cannot be truly grounded in it or of it. After all, Derek Jarman was of a slightly older generation than that of his heroine Amyl Nitrate (original punk Jordan), and, as much as he had no use for the House of Windsor, he was still English in the way David Hockney is English. Like Hockney, Jarman was also a painter first, someone interested in beauty's conventions – beauty's history, if you will. Jarman could never be as bored, I think, as the highest avatars of punk cool could be. Nor did punk excel at self-consciousness; it made a virtue out of not knowing anything about itself. Several contemporaneous cultural developments, several 70's collide in Jubilee. Punk, disco, camp nostalgia, camp self-actualization (both in the form of the Rocky Horror Show participants on-board), Warholian art cinema, fascination with the occult, the filtering of post-modern thought into the English-speaking world. Such engagement with the world was antithetical to punk. If Jubilee is a punk expression, it is one only inasmuch as it reveals the inherent limits of punk as an aesthetic. I think this has little to do with punk's supposed nihilism. This nihilism is debatable, anyway… maybe UK punk was nihilistic, but mostly because it was an abstraction that got fat on art-school sweets; punk soon split and mutated into strains of surrealism, populism, extreme formalism, and even fascism. "No future" indeed. Rather, it has much more to do with the fact that punk was fashion, and punk was music. Punk was style and not much else, and so existed at that nexus where music is indistinguishable from style. Maybe this is why young people today still listen to Throbbing Gristle but could care less who Sham 69 were. As an idea, punk was a fluorescent wraith. Jubilee is perhaps best read as a very literary, highly imaginative diary chronicling the souring of one individual's infatuation with the potential of punk as aesthetic, as energy, and as opposition.

As Borgia Ginz, played as a queen-ed out Batman TV villain by a screaming, cackling skull billed as "The Great Orlando" says, "If we play our music loud enough, we can't hear the world falling apart." But Ginz is no punk; he's just an impresario, the hedonist who owns both the BBC and the C of E. And the problem is that the punks did think like him. That is, the world doesn't fall apart. Everything in the world falls in on itself, we are touched by everything impersonal; although it feels as if we are ourselves "blank", it is only because that touch is so neutral, so transparent, so without texture, like the red plastic bedsheets with which one character -- Crabs (Little Nell) -- asphyxiates one of her lovers. There is no collapse, no cataclysm. No whimper, either. What there is is terrible constriction. In such circumstances, nothing isn’t doom. Nothing would be a relief.

~ Joe Milazzo