/ Top: Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb as Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. Bottom: the genuine articles. Just to confuse things, I'll be alternating photos of Oldman and Webb and the real Sid and Nancy throughout this post! /
From the Facebook events page:
Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the
FREE monthly film club downstairs at Fontaine’s bar in Dalston devoted to Bad
Movies We Love (our motto: Bad Movies for Bad People), specialising in the
kitsch, the cult and the queer!
Considering February is the month of Valentine’s, we’ll be embracing a romantic theme with … Sid and Nancy (1986)! Hey! It’s a love story! (Well, director Alex Cox himself describes the film as “a horrific love story”. Its original title was going to be Love Kills). It outlines the doomed tragicomic “amour fou” between punk’s Romeo and Juliet: Sex Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious and his heroin-addicted groupie girlfriend Nancy Spungen … and let’s just say it all ends messily.
So – why not throw on a black leather jacket, stick a safety pin through your nostril and join us on 22 February for a quiet night with Sid and Nancy?
Added incentive: in honour of Valentine’s Day, Fontaine’s is being sponsored all month by the fancy French raspberry liqueur Chambord! So there will be special offer cocktails on the night – and they will be pink!
Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8 pm. Film starts at 8:30 pm prompt. Grab a cocktail and come down early! I'll be playing punk music and vintage erotica on the big screen before the main feature.
Considering February is the month of Valentine’s, we’ll be embracing a romantic theme with … Sid and Nancy (1986)! Hey! It’s a love story! (Well, director Alex Cox himself describes the film as “a horrific love story”. Its original title was going to be Love Kills). It outlines the doomed tragicomic “amour fou” between punk’s Romeo and Juliet: Sex Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious and his heroin-addicted groupie girlfriend Nancy Spungen … and let’s just say it all ends messily.
So – why not throw on a black leather jacket, stick a safety pin through your nostril and join us on 22 February for a quiet night with Sid and Nancy?
Added incentive: in honour of Valentine’s Day, Fontaine’s is being sponsored all month by the fancy French raspberry liqueur Chambord! So there will be special offer cocktails on the night – and they will be pink!
Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8 pm. Film starts at 8:30 pm prompt. Grab a cocktail and come down early! I'll be playing punk music and vintage erotica on the big screen before the main feature.
/ "I'll never look like Barbie. Barbie doesn't have bruises." Chloe Webb as Nancy Spungen /
Happily, we had another full house
downstairs in the Bamboo Lounge of Fontaine’s on 22 February for my presentation of Alex Cox’s confrontational 1986 biopic covering the whirlwind, drug-fuelled and ultimately
homicidal 19-month love affair between Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious (10 May 1957 - 2 February 1979) and
downtrodden groupie Nancy Spungen (27 February 1958 - 12 October 1978). It was great to see so many new faces. And
the screening was appropriately rowdy and boozy! Well, until the film’s
despairing closing scenes – when everyone was so rapt and hushed you could hear a pin drop.
Sid and Nancy was a key film for me as a
teenager (I taped it from cable TV onto VHS and watched it so many times I could probably recite screeds of
dialogue from memory!). Until Wednesday night, it had been a good twenty years since I last re-visited it. How great to
see it’s as powerful, scabrous and disturbing as I remembered! Thirty-one years
later, Sid and Nancy still packs a nasty punch. The film is like staring into a
raw open wound.
/ The real Sid and Nancy (I love Sid's engineer boots) /
The early scenes set in London – covering
the rise of the Sex Pistols and Sid and Nancy’s burgeoning romance – are brash,
rowdy in-your-face bad taste black comedy. Once the Sex Pistols acrimoniously
implode and an increasingly heroin-addicted Sid and Nancy find themselves adrift
in New York (especially once they check into their squalid room at The Chelsea
Hotel), the tone turns progressively, almost unbearably bleak and
claustrophobic. (Bizarrely, one of the most common criticisms levelled at Sid
and Nancy upon its release was that it irresponsibly glamorised heroin use. Which
raises the question: what film did they watch? It depicts addiction as a nightmare!).
I love maverick director Alex Cox's weird
flourishes of romantic, art-y magic realism or poetic realism or whatever you
want to call it. I think that aspect confused people at the time who expected
something more straightforward. For a brief period, he was a genuinely
distinctive and vivid original voice in British cinema. Sadly, like leading
lady Chloe Webb, in recent years Cox seems to have entirely vanished off the
radar.
Not that Cox doesn’t make some jarring false
notes, and Sex Pistols fans could certainly pick holes with the accuracy of
certain segments. We catch a glimpse of a band meant to be X-Ray Spex belting
out “Oh Bondage Up Yours” and they look wrong, wrong, WRONG. What a disservice
to Poly Styrene! The fictional glam rock star Rock Head who crops up in a few
scenes (who is he meant to be? Iggy Pop? Johnny Thunders?) feels terribly
ersatz and unconvincing.
To be fair, though, Sid and Nancy was never meant to be a documentary: it’s Cox’s idiosyncratic interpretation of their story, with artistic license. When it was released in ’86, Vicious had only been dead for seven years and his story was still fresh in peoples’ minds. More than thirty years later, we can watch Cox’s film more objectively and appreciate it on its own merits.
To be fair, though, Sid and Nancy was never meant to be a documentary: it’s Cox’s idiosyncratic interpretation of their story, with artistic license. When it was released in ’86, Vicious had only been dead for seven years and his story was still fresh in peoples’ minds. More than thirty years later, we can watch Cox’s film more objectively and appreciate it on its own merits.
/ Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb as Sid and Nancy /
On a purely superficial level, for
aficionados of punk fashion, Sid and Nancy offers a bonanza. Sure, Sid and
Nancy were stoned, destructive and barely-functioning hot messes, but boy did they have outlaw
style. Their wardrobes encompass studded leather bondage belts and wristbands,
black leather biker jackets, the unravelling mohair sweaters synonymous with
Vivienne Westwood and McLaren’s SEX shop, green nail polish, tartan, laddered
fishnet tights and painted-on skinny black Levis. (Special mention must go to
Nancy’s sensational gold leather micro-mini skirt. In real life Nancy Spungen
seemed to sport a distinctive “gun” necklace in every photo ever taken of her;
it’s weird Cox didn’t get Webb to wear a replica). I love the padlocked chain
around Sid’s neck (a gift from Nancy. When Nancy lovingly puts it around his
neck and clicks the lock shut, Sid says, “Cool! Where’s the key?” Nancy
replies, “What key?”).
Sid’s best accessory, though, is his
starved-to-perfection skeletal body straight out of an Egon Schiele painting or
Giacometti sculpture. (In later scenes Oldman pretty much entirely abandons
wearing shirts. To achieve Sid’s emaciated physique, Oldman reportedly
undertook such a drastic diet he was diagnosed with malnutrition at one point).
/ The real Sid and Nancy /
All these years later, the performances of
Oldman and Webb still astonish. Both are hilarious in perhaps my favourite
scene when Nancy takes Sid home to meet her horrified suburban family. Black
tragicomedy at its finest! This was one of the early roles that launched Oldman
as one of the best and most versatile Brit actors of his generation. Poor Web was
every bit as exemplary as Oldman, but she never seemed to catch another good
break after this and seemingly disappeared into obscurity. Read any book about
punk history and Nancy Spungen is perhaps the most reviled figure of the whole era. She was profoundly troubled:
diagnosed with schizophrenia at 15, expelled from multiple schools. At 17 she’d run away to New York, supporting
herself via stripping and prostitution and embraced groupie-dom (she was already "affiliated" with bands like the New York Dolls, Aerosmith, The Ramones and the
Voidoids by the time she met Sid). Webb portrays the damaged Spungen with humanity and compassion. For me, Webb’s two
finest moments are her junkie freak-out shouting at her mother in a phone booth ("he loves me more than you do!") and then later Nancy’s rambling, croaky monologue about a dream she’d had,
delivered to an unconscious Sid next to her bed. She rasps something about “we
had a little dog and we loved it … but it died and we didn’t know where to bury
it … so we ate it.” It sums up their toxic love and it’s like an eerie
premonition about what lies in store.
/ Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb as Sid and Nancy/
Anyway, to introduce the screening I
quickly Googled and compiled some “fun facts” about Sid and Nancy. Here are a
few!
Daniel Day Lewis was short-listed for role of
Sid before Oldman got it.
A young unknown Courtney Love unsuccessfully auditioned for the role of
Nancy. As consolation Cox gave her a supporting role. It’s
fascinating to see Love’s almost unrecognisable original pre-plastic surgery
face.
Sid and Nancy was originally intended to be
filmed in black and white but the financiers vetoed that idea. I think it would
have felt even harsher in grainy black and white!
Further reading:
Read more about the Lobotomy Room film club here
Loverboy magazine ventures into the wild, wild world of Lobotomy Room
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"Like" and "Follow" my Facebook page for all of your Lobotomy Room needs!
The padlock key was from Chrissy Hynde's squat, Cox notwithstanding...
ReplyDeleteI love Alex Cox, can't decide if S&N is a noble failure or just bad. It's a shadow of Repo Man or Walker. It's very much of it's time - 1986 not 1976. The goofy pseudonyms - Dick Bent, if you will - and broad characterisations like Sy Richardson's methadone clinic vendor - suggest a more anarchic gonzo Mad magazine burlesque than what ended up on the screen. If Madonna and Rupert Everett had made their version, it would have been perfect - totally lacking in credibility, pure Hollywood gloss with no pretense to realism or accuracy (the taxicab to heaven ending would've worked well - in the sense that the nausea would be total (though it's a terrible ending anyway)). The Pistols tour bus with helicopter in pursuit emerging out of the desert haze belongs in the Everett/Madonna version. A far cry from the reality seen in D.O.A. When Lydon told Drew Schofield as a scouser, I think that rather than stitching him up, he was suggesting that fictionalising the tale was appropriate and preferable (maybe that Johnny Rotten was 'Anykid'?). I don't think Oldman captures Sid at all, either, he plays The Sun's idea of Sid Vicious, an exageration of his Meantime character. Again, fine in a more anarchic film. The expected Drugs Are Bad sermon, complete with Dwarf signalling 'weirdness', a la Living In Oblivion. I wonder if it might be interesting if the film were narrated, in the style of Badlands, by Nancy, or Sid, or both - though by many accounts Nancy was extremely bright, believe it or not, with a high IQ (if disturbed), while Sid was closer to the guileless dupe. Voice-over brutally cut off like Joe Pesci in Casino - - great site and writing, thanks.
ReplyDeleteGreat to hear from you and interesting observations! Thanks.
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