The Lethal Joke That Was Punk Rock

P unk was a marketing gimmick. It wasn’t about revolution or subversion; it was about mockery and fashion and making a buck. It was a put-on. It was a pose. As personified by the Sex Pistols, punk rock took off in a clothing shop.

Danny Boyle astutely observes all this in directing the richly imagined and thoughtful new six-part FX and Hulu miniseries Pistol (created and written by Craig Pearce), which bitingly recalls the noisome band’s steep rise and fiery crash. The Pistols were assembled as surely as the Monkees were and for the same reason — to fill a marketing niche. As played with fey elasticity by the wonderful Thomas Brodie-Sangster (he’ll always be the Love, Actually kid to me, but this performance is mighty fine), posh boy Malcolm McLaren puts together the Sex Pistols in the avant-garde store he runs with Vivienne Westwood in London’s groovy but rich Chelsea neighborhood. McLaren asks Westwood (Talulah Riley) what she is making her shredded, ugly, sexy/angry pieces for. “To expose hypocrisy and provoke revolution!” she declares. “What, with sticky black plastic and squeezy bottles?” McLaren answers.

McLaren intuited that the figures of authority whom everyone was supposed to fear — the Establishment, the BBC — did not actually run things anymore. McLaren recognized that the superior authority was the market, and the market was underserving bored youth. Being universally rejected by the adults was now a plausible path to success. “You have been banned from playing right across the country,” McLaren tells the lads. “Which is wonderful!” The Pistols were fired by two record labels before they could finish their one and only LP, but when it arrived it went straight to the top, at least in the country where the Pistols had successfully inspired mass loathing.

Things got going in SEX, the shop McLaren ran with Westwood. The pair like the look of one shoplifter, Steve Jones (Toby Wallace), so they start to envision him in a band, even though he can’t really play guitar. When a reprobate with teeth like soiled cigarette butts comes into the store to make trouble, McLaren reorganizes the band around him, John Lydon (superbly played by Anson Boon), even though he can’t sing. Jones hits on the perfect punk name for Lydon: Johnny Rotten. Hilariously, right there working in the shop is one of the greatest rock talents of all time, and no one pays much attention because she doesn’t fit McLaren’s marketing hook of “sexy young assassins.” Also she’s a girl and doesn’t snarl or throw pint glasses. Her name is Chrissie Hynde (played with a welcome earthiness by Sydney Chandler).

An actually talented songwriter and musician winds up in the Pistols — bass player Glen Matlock (Christian Lees), and had he stayed, the Sex Pistols might have mattered musically instead of merely totemically. As it was, the Ramones (who predated them slightly) and the Clash (who came a bit later) left them in the dust. Yet Pistol gives us six hours of explication of a band that recorded only 38 minutes of music — and the length is entirely justified by their cultural multiplier. The Sex Pistols were not very good, but they mattered very much.

There’s a lot of talk of danger and mayhem and upending things around punk and the Sex Pistols, but Boyle (whose series is based on Jones’s memoir Lonely Boy) makes clear that that’s all rubbish. Drummer Paul Cook’s parents are so warm and indulgent that they let him practice in their bedroom. Johnny Rotten, possibly the most despised young man in Britain, brings his mates around his parents’ flat to listen to the band’s first single, and his lovely folks beam with amusement. Mum even agrees that it would be cheeky fun if the song the band plays for them, which Lydon insists should be called “No Future,” were instead given the slightly naughty title McLaren prefers: “God Save the Queen.” That title got the song (which isn’t very good, very pointed, or even very interesting) banned, which in turn sent it to No. 1.

As envisioned by McLaren, punk was an elaborate practical joke. It had to be, because a genuinely nihilistic movement that thrummed with actual violence — as opposed to a stagey determination to be loud and shocking — could only wind up destroying itself. Yet when McLaren went for style over musicianship by replacing Matlock with Lydon’s friend John Ritchie, who was barely acquainted with the bass but looked the perfect punk, the move killed the band’s future. “No one cares what you sound like; it’s what you look like that matters,” is Ritchie’s credo. He spends more time trying to get his hair spiky (using Vicks VapoRub) than learning his instrument.

Unfortunately for McLaren, Ritchie didn’t see punk as black plastic and squeezy bottles. His nihilism wasn’t a stance. Ritchie’s stage name was Sid Vicious (inspired by a malevolent hamster), his mother gave him heroin for his 14th birthday, and he’d shoot up while the others were drinking lager. He had tortured a cat as a child, and as a man he would cut up his own chest on stage, with a large knife. He vowed to die before he was 21 and missed by only nine months, taking his girlfriend’s life before surrendering his own.

The Vicious saga concluded with his chilling rendition of the Frank Sinatra–associated song, “My Way” (today known for its appearance at the end of Goodfellas), which he performed only because McLaren needed a song written by Frenchmen at the end of his Sex Pistols movie for financing reasons. McLaren doesn’t quite grasp the lesson of Ritchie’s death, and after the murder of Nancy Spungen and Ritchie’s heroin-fueled demise a few weeks later, he simply works it all into his merchandising. As Jones watches in disbelief, McLaren designs a new shirt reading, “We’re dead, up yours!” “That’ll have the moralists screaming!” McLaren reasons. Yes, that’ll show those moralists, with their staid opposition to murder, self-harm, and lethal overdoses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KhxwG0eCiE