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Workers' Liberty
the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class Workers Liberty Australia |
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Oh, it took me back — back to 77 when Punk found me and a generation of disillusioned youth.
Julian Temple’s documentary on the Sex Pistols, The
Filth and the Fury, brings the era to life.
The film starts with a brief, but withering, analysis
of the decaying society of mid 70’s England. The unemployment, the grinding
poverty, the despair, the loss of faith in Labour governments provides
the background to the rebellion against everything that was punk. A major
failing is that the link to social and political conditions is not continued
and threaded through the film.
Johnny Rotten, (John Lydon), was the intellectual
and political motivator. Manager Malcolm McLaren, cynical, sensationalist,
diverting the money comes across as the evil manipulator.
Punk was politically chaotic, but radically opposed
to what existed. It was, for Lydon at least, about being true to oneself
and rejecting all authority. Revolution was urgently desired, but anarchist,
socialist or fascist was unclear.
The Pistols were not pretty — swearing, spitting,
vomiting, and fighting — they would use of anything, any symbol that would
offend the people they hated.
It chilled me to see Sid Vicious repeatedly wearing
a tee shirt with the full Nazi swastika symbol, yet no fascist sympathies
are ever expressed. Homophobia and sexism are rampant, but racism is invisible.
Two lines from Anarchy in the UK sum it up:
"I don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it. Got to destroy bosses’
power."
Others in the band were just there to say, "fuck
you" and have a good time. Steve Jones cites his motivation as "wanting
to get my dick sucked".
The release of God Save the Queen for the
Queen’s Silver Jubilee, combined with the Pistol's outrageous stage behavior,
brought an extreme degree of persecution. They hired a boat to play opposite
Buckingham Palace while the Jubilee ceremony was on and were arrested and
roughed up for their efforts.
Lydon was assaulted by royalists many times in the
streets — once arriving at hospital with a machete stuck in his knee bone.
Police were called and he was charged with "inciting a disturbance of the
peace"!
They ended up banned throughout England; unable to
perform or have their songs played on radio or television. God Save
the Queen went straight to number one in the hit parade, but was not
shown in the papers — the spot was left blank!
A beautiful segment shows their last, and very telling
politically, performance in the UK at a benefit concert for the children
of firefighters in the midst of a prolonged strike.
Punk's enormous creativity and diversity were rapidly
curtailed and incorporated by the capitalist music machine. "Leather jacketed
clones playing crap music" became the dominant face.
By the time it hit Melbourne, that was how it was,
mostly. Yet there were bright sparks of creativity, honesty and rebellion.
I remember the band News, who had wonderfully
political songs like "H-Division Bash" and "Plastic Punks". Members of
the band joined the SYA (Resistance’s predecessor). I was also a member.
It was all too much for the staid SYA — Gavin, News
lead singer, was expelled for organising a Rock Against Repression fundraiser
for the victims of the police attack on the 78 Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
This was deemed to break policy not to build a Rock Against Racism movement!
The real motivation was to drive out dissidents from a recent fusion.
Much of the left was ambivalent or hostile to the
punks, seeing the violence, crudity and sometimes bigotry, but missing
the energetic and deeply lived antagonism to capitalism.
I went to the showing wearing PVC skirt and vest,
with torn lace stockings on arms and legs. Pretty much normal for me when
out to party. The film gave me a great sense of connection with that younger
me of twenty years ago. I still want to rebel, I still want to express
my creativity and I still want to smash this rotten system. The tremendous
energy and drive of punk is like a tonic.
It also made me realise the great contribution of
punk to popular culture: to improvise from found materials, to do it yourself,
to be true to yourself, to fight the powers that be - and its huge weakness:
that same individualism got on the way of building a collective social
movement that can actually make it possible for us all to express our own
creativity.
East is east is a film being promoted as a light-hearted comedy of culture clash. It's actually a gruelling exploration of the bitter consequences for a family in which the father clings desperately to his crumbling patriarchal authority, as his children grow old enough to challenge it. The writer has leavened his heavy load with plenty of laughs, which makes it just bearable to watch as the misery deepens.
George and Ella Khan have seven children,
six sons from mid-twenties down to about 10 years old, and a teenage daughter.
The number is soon reduced to five sons, when George insists that Nazir,
his oldest son is dead, after he fled in the middle of his arranged marriage
ceremony. The family lives in a small terrace house in Manchester, near
to their fish and chip shop where Ella works long hours, and the sons and
daughter help out. George’s contribution is at his own whim. Ella performs
a hazardous balancing act, giving limited support to George’s efforts to
keep Pakistani culture alive in the family, while making spaces for the
children to live their English lives without George finding out and getting
angry.
George the patriarch 'never listens' and
'only gives orders' according to all of them, and this places him at a
distance from us that verges on cariacature - and yet, how can we get to
know a man who thinks as he does, that a meaningful life is based on children
following their father's orders, and attempts to enforce Pakistani culture,
language, and wives on his children who feel themselves to be English?
And the question you can't help asking about him all through the film -
why is he married to an English woman in what is clearly a marriage of
his own choice - is put to him by his son Tariq, during a heated argument
which begins while George is filleting fish with a large sharp knife in
his hand. But the writer knows his stuff - he shows us moments of warmth
and love between George and Ella so that we can see that they care for
and understand each other more than many couples with several children
and even more years together. This makes the deepening conflict more painful.
The sharp edge of the conflict is between
the older sons and George. It is about the sons’ challenge to patriarchal
authority, more than a challenge from women, wife or daughter, although
it is Ella who is the cornerstone of the family and who ultimately leads
the revolt against George’s authority
The issue of racism is kept alive all through
the film. It’s 1971 and an Enoch Powell supporter down the road has a poster
in his window for a meeting to demand repatriation of immigrants, while
his young grandson greets George in Urdu and likes to play with the youngest
boy Sajid.
The film highlights the contradiction between
respect for cultural traditions, and freedom for individuals to break free
from the tradition and make their own lives in the dominant culture. It
particularly brings into sharp relief the fact that patriarchal family
structures as a cultural tradition can be challenged. But it doesn't throw
in the towel and say that cross cultural families and relationships are
impossible. It is funny too, but it is a strong film, provoking difficult
feelings, and far from lightweight, as the promotions imply.