Surfaces, History, & ‘Noise’ in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee
Jon Davies, 2003
Jubilee is a 1977 “fantasy documentary” by the British
director Derek Jarman (Quinn-Meyler 130). His second feature, it stands
out for me as his richest articulation of a particular time and place.
The film was heavily influenced in terms of style and content by the punk
movement. It is a disturbing, dynamic, beautiful and occasionally didactic
view of a girl gang in an apocalyptic future wasteland that bears a striking
resemblance to the late seventies British welfare state in decline.
Call it an all-White, dystopian Born in Flames. Over the course of this
essay, I will trace how Jubilee elaborates its politics and its poetics through
a generally chronological textual analysis.
In the preface to her book The Art of Memory, Frances
Yates describes the “art of memory” as a type of “inner writing” (6) invented
by the Greeks and passed down throughout European culture, which involves
developing a trained memory through inscribing images and places in one’s
mind. This was necessary for the development of memory before the printing
press existed (xi). Jarman cites Yates’ book, and the Renaissance texts
of Agrippa and Bruno that it refers to, as one of the primary inspirations
for Jubilee (43), and there are important parallels. Notably, Jarman
is carrying on Yates’ interest in how memory, and consequently history, is
produced through our mind’s active inscription and interpretation of images
and their contexts, as opposed to our minds being passively filled with memories
like a vessel. Basically, the art of memory suggests that the world
is primarily intelligible on a visual level, as opposed to all other methods
of comprehension. I will examine how the film treats the obsession of
the punk scene - and the increasingly postmodern world - with surfaces,
images, artifice, and the act of looking (the gaze) and how this emphasis
on superficial modes of understanding affect how history is interpreted and
constructed.
It would not be controversial to state that Derek Jarman
was the UK’s most important queer experimental film maker. He was also
a prolific and accomplished painter and music video director (see The Smiths,
Psychic TV, etc.) His films are all heterogenous and extremely dense
texts, eclectic in style, that are all grounded in social critique and the
historical “real.” His films contain varying configurations of documentary,
formal experimentation, literary adaptation, biography, and socio-political
allegory. For example, Wittgenstein is a dramatized documentary entirely
performed on a dark sound-stage, told through a variety of voices. The
Garden is a black and white, experimental re-telling of the life of the son
of God with a gay couple starring as Jesus. Edward II is based
on the Marlowe work, but also incorporates images from many different time
periods, including Annie Lennox singing Cole Porter or an ACT-UP demonstration.
Blue, made after he was blinded by an AIDS-related condition (he would die
in of AIDS in 1994), is a blue screen with a haunting soundscape of voices
and music. Jubilee was made for 50,000 £, low-budget, as were
most of Jarman’s films, and it was completed with the help of his friends,
a highly personal kind of filmmaking.
While labeled a “dull little middle-class wanker” on
a Vivienne Westwood t-shirt (Jarman 1996, 43), Jarman’s politics were unabashedly
anti-authoritarian, yet he refused to regurgitate dogma. His artistic
experimentation was as important as his political activism. In his work,
he constantly exposed the oppressive social, political and sexual norms of
the state. Knowing this, the first few times I watched Jubilee over
the past several years, I felt Jarman was celebrating punk’s subversions.
I enjoyed the antics of the punk gang, quoted their poetic rhetoric and celebrated
the fact that I’d found a text where art, anarchism, and queerness overlapped.
I felt validated. Only later, after closer analysis and more emotional
distance, did I see the contradictions and ambiguities that spoke to a more
critical view of the punk movement and society in general that he represents.
Jarman is basically pointing out the dangers of a movement that purports to
be revolutionary but is only constituted of so much bile and kerosene.
He finds the punk generation’s obsession with surface appearances, and the
consequent inability to see deeper, to see the world in the holistic context
of history, as a great danger. Their nihilism disturbed him. However,
the film stars “real” punks, it glamourizes and poeticizes them and their
violence, and it presents a similar nihilistic view of the future with apparently
not many options for agency.
The 1970’s in Britain were a time of recession and inflation
(Royle 212), with the unemployment rate hitting 6.2 % in 1977, the highest
it would be that decade (Marwick 284). In 1977, James Callaghan’s Labour
government instituted their first massive cut in public spending (Marwick
285). It was also a time when the perpetrators of violent crime were
getting younger and younger, with an increasingly higher percentage of these
crimes being committed by young women (Royle 219). Not surprisingly,
consumer spending was increasing steadily, as it had been doing since the
1950’s (Royle 285), and the gap between the rich and the poor was on its way
to becoming the insurmountable chasm it is today (Royle 154). The decade
came to a close with the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government
in May, 1979 (Marwick 289). The pre-fabricated high-rise council housing
buildings, detested by their residents, that carry such metaphorical weight
in Jubilee, appeared in increasing numbers from the 1960’s onward (Royle
33). Most important of all, 1977 was the celebration of Queen Elizabeth
II’s twenty-fifth anniversary on the throne, the Jubilee.
The film begins with a credit sequence in which only
the actors’ names are given. This is their film, for it is all about
performance: Who can act the meanest or the most outrageous. Among
the many famous punks in the film are Adam Ant as Kid, Jordan as Amyl, Little
Nell as Crabs, Richard O’Brien as John Dee (a non-punk role), Wayne (now
Jayne) County as Lounge Lizard, and the Slits as one of Borgia Ginz’s bands.
All of these figures are musicians, while O’Brien and Nell starred as Riff-Raff
and Columbia in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The credits are followed
by a title card: a strikingly composed black and white still of an explosion
with a large red JUBILEE superimposed, and a thundercrack which breaks the
silence on the soundtrack. Here, a moment of dynamism and action is
reduced to a still photo, the first of many moments of aestheticized violence.
The film is organized around the gaze, the act of looking
is the privileged performative gesture. Jubilee is structured by a wrap-around
story involving Elizabeth I, her magician advisor John Dee, and a midget
serving woman at Dee’s home at Mortlake in 1597. Dee conjures the angel
Ariel for Elizabeth’s pleasure and to give her knowledge. Ariel states:
“pluck up thy heart and be merry for I shall reveal to thee the shadow of
this time.” Ariel is a metaphor for the film screen in Jubilee.
He is abstract, divine, and the grantor of wisdom and prophecies. Ariel’s
visions are as valuable as the gold that results from alchemical transformations.
The parts of his body that are most like windows, his eyes and nails, are
black (his eyes are described as “mirrored” by Dee). He is impenetrable,
his subjectivity cannot be investigated, he can only reflect. In this
case, the future he reflects is the same location as Elizabethan England,
though it is urban London rather than rural Mortlake, but in 1977 it is a
violent wasteland. The camera often places us in a position where Ariel
faces the spectators directly, as if embodying the film screen.
The scenes of Elizabeth and her entourage in 1597 are
markedly different than those of the punks in 1977. Their scenes seem
extremely melodramatic: The writing is hyperbolic, the delivery very stagey,
and the lighting unnatural. The aura of royalty that Elizabeth represented
is enacted in a very artificial style that creates a feeling of alienation
rather than glorification of the Queen. The effect is one of nostalgia,
as the images do not resemble a recollection of history so much as a staged,
starry-eyed re-enactment of them.
The shift from 1597 to 1977 is not immediate however:
After we see two punks in long shot walking behind a huge bonfire with billowing
smoke, we see a reaction shot of Elizabeth, and then the action in 1977 continues.
The spectatorial gaze which seems initially like Elizabeth’s, acquired through
looking into Ariel, is complicated very early on. The shots of the streets
that could be from a discrete perspective are interrupted by a shot from
the inside of a car (whose passengers will be revealed at the end of the
film), thereby displacing Elizabeth’s point of view.
The 1977 world is shot in a distinctively cinema-verité
style. Jarman’s camera work is dynamic and energetic, in order to keep
up with the hyperactive characters represented. Typical of Jarman’s
camera work in Jubilee are zooms, whether zooming out to expose a pram in
flames on an empty grey street or zooming in on a small tattered image of
a defaced Elizabeth II on the wall of the punks’ apartment (accompanied
by the spoken words “misgovernment and idiocy” that explain the present circumstances).
Jarman does not present his apocalyptic landscape subtly: The word POSTMODERN
is spray-painted across a crumbling wall, which also testifies to the world’s
self-consciousness about its position in history. Almost immediately
begins the most important recurring gesture in the film: An anonymous
punk picks a pair of glasses off of the victim of a car wreck, holds them
up to his eyes, and looks anew at the world around him. The next shot,
edited with a straight cut, is that of a spinning globe with specific countries
blacked out and labeled with text such as “obsolete.” Perhaps Jarman
is suggesting that Elizabeth may have once had a monopoly over the eye of
enlightenment and reason, but here is a time when this authoritative subjectivity
has become democratized - the world of Jubilee is one with no powerful authority
(we find out soon that law and order have been abolished, and thus no more
statistics = no crime). This punk’s vision of the world is as valid
as that of a monarch once was. A scary punk girl who will later be introduced
to us as Mad informs us that “the world is no longer interested in heroes.
So sad. We now know too much about them, don’t we?” The by-product
of the democratization of subjectivity is that everyone is worthy of fame
and commemoration, so how do we distinguish the extraordinary from the mundane?
Amyl Nitrate, the historian with a perfume bottle and
pink sweater, informs us that art was only necessary when people needed to
channel their desires into a safe outlet. Now that people can make their
fantasies a reality, art is obsolete. “Make your dreams reality.
Myself, I prefer the song ‘Don’t Dream it, Be it’ [from The Rocky Horror Picture
Show].” The democratized point-of-view, and the ironic performance of
propriety and authority in this scene is emphasized by the straight-on camera
position and her placement at a desk, as if it were a newscast. In
Jubilee, art is yet another privileged institution that has been abolished,
but its refugees are perhaps the only hope of restoring a meaningful world,
as we will later see. In an act of nostalgia, Amyl recounts her love
of dance (something else that no one is interested in anymore) because it
enables her to defy gravity - another law. We then cut to an image
of a ballerina figurine in a music box and then some hauntingly beautiful
super-8 footage of Amyl ballet dancing that Jarman had shot earlier as its
own film. With a classical music soundtrack to further its antique value,
we see her dancing slowly and tragically around a bonfire (another recurring
image) of books in a junkyard. Books represent an obsolete form of
knowledge in Jubilee, they offer the in-depth information that images cannot
convey. She is surrounded by costumed figures representing “art” and
“death” (according to the script) who are silent witnesses to her danse macabre.
They seem to be mourning the loss of edified beauty in the midst of destruction
and filth through ritual. This oddly misplaced, tarnished footage records
the swan song - or rather the death throes - of the classical, ruling class
aesthetic worldview.
As might be apparent so far, the characters’ names are
all descriptive terms which reveal qualities about them without us actually
needing to know them. Kid is a wide-eyed naïf musician, Crabs the
romantic nymphomaniac with bourgeois aspirations, Mad the overly aggressive
pyromaniac enfant terrible, Bod the stylish but haughty and brutal fashionista,
Viv (which sounds like “life” in French) is an artist and thus the character
who Jarman treats the most humanely, Sphinx and Angel are the mysterious and
incestuous twin boys, Chaos the silent and virtually unseen maid, and then
there is Amyl Nitrate. It is not too difficult to guess what Jarman
is suggesting when he names the historian of the group after a drug that relaxes
the muscles and blood vessels and causes a rush of oxygenated blood to the
brain (A.K.A. poppers), which gay men have been using during sex for decades;
the past and the future are in the hands of a narcotized, lunatic aesthete.
A following sequence shows Bod laughing maniacally and
chasing after an unidentifiable woman wearing what the script describes as
a “scarf and hunting jacket.” Near an old shack, Bod attacks and the
woman falls down dead. However, we see the kill through a long shot,
making it difficult to discern any details, with a field of flowers (a counterpoint
to the savage violence) placed between the viewers and the action. With
a closer shot, and with gunshots in the distance, we see a young boy wander
onto the scene and retrieve a large gem from the dead body. He holds
the clear crystal up and looks through it (a familiar gesture) accompanied
by the sound of broken glass. Later, this sequence makes more sense
when we see Bod return home triumphantly, mounts a staircase, pushes open
the shutters and dramatically mock-opens fire on her friends with machine
guns pantomimed by her hands. On her head she wears a crown which can
only be that of Elizabeth II (the script confirms this), “I captured it,”
she proclaims proudly, “it’s High Fashion.” Interestingly, Elizabeth
and Bod are played by the same actress, so in effect Bod kills her own flesh
and blood by killing Elizabeth I’s only nominal descendant. Bod, the
brutal, tea-drinking, ex-Christian, high class bitch is the surviving Queen
of Jarman’s England.
Just before Bod enters is a clever scene where Amyl screams
“I broke my Winston Churchill mug” which we see is actually in the image of
Adolf Hitler (I might be wrong about this but it looks like his moustache).
As she shows Mad the remains, she sadly says “look” and Jarman cuts to Sphinx
and Angel reading the newspaper in bed, unperturbed by the tragedy, and refusing
Mad’s command to look. Only the twins and Amyl are seen reading for
pleasure in the film, it is clearly an antiquated activity to the more nihilistic
members of the group. Their literature is the pop culture detritus graffitied
on their walls: Triumph of the Will, Brave New World, etc. The Hitler/Churchill
reversal is perhaps the most overt re-writing of history in the film.
Jubilee offers us chaos both in images and in language, but the two are deeply
intertwined. Along with the democratization of perspective and the
obsession with surfaces and appearances in the film is the idea that history
can be manipulated to suit anyone’s needs, and is thus just a toy.
Amyl is the historian of the group, the history book that she is writing
is more like a diary or a scrapbook, and indeed she pieces together history
like a subjective collage, interjecting plenty of personal observations because
there are no hierarchies of objectivity in this world. Just as Elizabeth
I can use her power to see the future, so Amyl can access the past in however
way she wishes, constructing it according to her will: “[H]istory still fascinates
me - it’s so intangible. You can weave facts any way you like.”
If 1977 is “the shadow of this time [Elizabeth’s era],” then 1977 is Elizabeth
I’s legacy, and the residents get their revenge against her by disobeying
reason, order, authority and the linearity of time.
After Bod’s mock-shooting on the balcony, we cut
to see Ariel, Elizabeth I and her gang around the corpse of who we now know
to be Elizabeth II. The serving lady picks up Elizabeth II’s large glasses,
looks through them and eventually wears them. She finds the boy who
had taken the gem and frightens him. In his shock, he drops the gem
and the serving lady retrieves it, looking through it as well. The
jewel is held up and looked through several times throughout the film.
It too is an optical device that alters one’s world view, like the film camera,
and the crystal balls through which Dee communicated with angels. By
the end of the film, it also represents the cyclical nature of history in
the film. The serving lady returns it to Elizabeth I to be passed on
down the monarchic line back to Elizabeth II, from whom the serving lady took
it in 1977 (the first time that the 1597 group physically inhabit the same
diegetic space as the punks). They are there to mourn the death of
their monarchical offspring, and they also transport the jewel back to their
time. This action serves to underscore the malleable nature of time
and history, whether by conjuring divinities or by violence.
Soon after, we are introduced to Crabs and Kid on a date
at a restaurant. The other punks arrive to make trouble, with Mad waxing
poetic about a series of postcards for sale, which includes one of New York,
among other international destinations. What the point is of having
postcards for sale from international destinations readily accessible in London
is never explained. Mad ‘s comments include: “America’s dead, it’s
never been alive...All these ruins. All this concrete, brick and glass,
and the people who made them are utterly forgotten. The prisons we
live in today may have taken longer than a day to build but it doesn’t take
long to destroy them.” This is the legacy of reason, a world of decaying
buildings with all the people dead and erased from the historical record.
Bod attacks the waitress and covers her in ketchup, a typical theatrical
and cinematic stand-in for blood. In this world, the distinction between
real and simulated is negligible, but this is the only time that vicious
play-acting will be an adequate substitute for cathartic violence. This
is the first truly disturbing attack in the film, one of several, though the
others will be fatal. It is unclear what motivates the intensity
of their brutality, it is seemingly arbitrary who will be violated (until
the final assault, that is). Mad steals the waitress’ Shirley Temple
wig and puts it on. At the end of this scene Mad declares “For a moment
I thought you would kill her” to which Bod responds “Just a dress rehearsal,”
which explains why the camera focuses on the waitress applying lipstick for
so long at the beginning of the scene. With the make-up and 50’s waitress
costume, fake blood, and wig, what else could this scene be but the performance
of a murder?
The next scene most clearly examines the role of the
artist in a world such as this. Viv, Sphinx and Angel leave the restaurant
and go to Viv’s house. The three are the most sympathetic characters
in the film, with Viv the one Jarman seems to identify with most (Amyl has
her sympathetic moments, but in the end she sells her soul like the other
girls). Viv is not a manipulator, she has ethics and emotions.
She is capable of love. She has one of the best lines in the film:
“Artists steal the world’s energy...They become blood
donors. Their life blood drips away till they’re bled dry, and the people
who control the world make it as inaccessible as possible
by driving the artists into corners. Our only hope is to
recreate ourselves as artists, or anarchists if
you like, and liberate the energy for all.”
Artists are almost extinct in Jubilee, and from this statement it seems
that the “only hope” is to diffuse art into life (art = blood=life force)
in order for it to be of value, an historically dadaist position. Her
apartment does not contain any art objects, it is bare except for a bed and
a radiator. The walls are black. Her art is indistinguishable
from anarchism - with the goal of liberating the transformative possibilities
of art for everyone to participate in. For Jarman, artists must strive
to merge art with life in order to even begin to have an impact on the world.
Sphinx and Angel remain skeptical about Viv’s utopian ideas, however.
The first shot of the following scene is a close-up of
a TV screen showing another close-up of a girl punk singer’s face. Kid
watches the TV as Crabs molests him (for her, men are tools, she later says:
“He’s better than a vibrator, and bigger”), his proximity to the TV is as
near as the extreme close-up would suggest - later in the film he will lick
the screen, his desire for fame is so overwhelming. The television,
perhaps the greatest - to our eyes, overused - symbol for image culture and
the simulacrum is very present in Jubilee. Competing with the shrieks
of the punk song, which act more as ambient noise than anything else, Bod
sings ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ while admiring the crown, her new
trophy, and stating its potential usefulness as a crash helmet. Here
is yet another appropriation, and another playful juxtaposition of contesting
powers, official and anarchic. Bod receives a call at the end of this
scene from Borgia Ginz asking her opinion on a new star he’s grooming.
Ginz is a creepy, flamboyant and greasy megalomaniac who owns the entire media.
He is the Malcolm McLaren figure who constructs hapless punks into stars
for his own profit. From his studio is Buckingham Palace he produces
Top of the Pops, the show they watch on the tube.
Borgia introduces Bod to his official contestant for
the Eurovision Song Contest: Amyl Nitrate. We see her performing a
souped-up choral/reggae/punk version of “Rule Brittania” while decked out
in a costume of postmodern pastiche that is equal parts Roman centurion,
British patriot, and striptease. She performs to a huge empty opera
house, with stadium lights and fake smoke, the sounds of British football
hooligans, Hitler speeches, Nazi marches, and bombings in the background.
Like the rest of the film, this scene is emphasized as pure performance,
but here the artificiality of the scene is further emphasized through the
theater stage, and the way our historian’s performance dramatizes the illegibility
and schizophrenia of historical truth.
Soon follows a scene showing Crabs - dressed in bondage
hood with dainty ribbon - fornicating in a bed with Happy Days, a new trick.
She spontaneously decides to tie him up and then she, Bod and Mad murder him
by suffocation, with Mad filming all the way, stating “I like to watch” (which
could be the motto of the film and the world it depicts). The violence
is extremely disturbing and is highly aestheticized by the presence of the
camera (and all the taboos that go along with the idea of snuff films), the
occasional shots from the victim’s point of view, and by making the bedsheets
- the murder weapon - bright red plastic. Soon after, they dump the
red bedsheet-wrapped corpse off of a bridge onto a muddy beach. “Love
snuffed it with the hippies...sex is for geriatrics, mindless” are the consoling
words given to the romantic Crabs, who regrets losing someone who may have
been “the one.” As the girls look down at the hauntingly composed crumpled
red mass in the brown mud we hear Sphinx singing ‘My Love is Like a Red, Red
Rose...” (from the next scene) before this scene cuts. Jarman’s lament
for the death of love is extremely poetic and moving in this particular juxtaposition
of sound and image.
Angel and Sphinx are shown cuddling in bed with
Viv, they collectively represent the only hope for civilization, which involves
the twins, men, declaring that they are passing on the torch to Viv, a woman,
after five-thousand years of “being in the limelight,” and right as time is
almost running out. The only hope lies in a woman, the only non-violent
one of the lot, who believes in the vitality of living in the present.
This idea of valuing the present is set in opposition to the living in the
past of Amyl, the living in the future of patriarchal capitalism (with its
parental lineage, colonial expansion, RRSP’s, trust funds, “won’t somebody
think of the children” etc.) and the other punks’ total disregard for life.
The importance of Viv’s statement is underscored by the spiritual white light
that washes in on them when she opens the blinds. The twin boys are
the role models of revolutionary masculinity: queer, sensitive, intelligent,
poetic, voluntarily ceding power without a fight, and they literally enact
the virtue of “brotherly love.”
Because Borgia Ginz is the most powerful figure in the
film, much of the action is shown with him in a spectatorial position.
In a later scene we see Mad in a clown suit screeching her heart out singing
in a punk girl band contained behind glass in the studio as Ginz and his lackeys
survey them. Ginz’s omnipresent maniacal cackle is like the canned
laughter of a TV sitcom. It is prescriptive rather than merely expressive,
for he determines who succeeds and who fails (one memorable line: “the dollar’s
crashing without [Ginz’s] support”). In Jarman’s film, punk music is
explicitly shown to be a product created by the ruling class to distract
the masses from directing their manic and violent energy towards constructive
change. Borgia states: “As long as the music’s loud enough we won’t
hear the world falling apart!” When Kid is introduced to Ginz, Crabs
states “He’s going to be the next Garbo” which explicitly references the
construction of celebrity and the power games behind the scenes of the Hollywood
star system. Ginz’s lackey, Schmitzer, responds “Garbo was very profitable”
which serves to re-write the past as under Ginz’s control, or more specifically
to re-write the ownership of the product of Garbo’s star image as belonging
to Ginz.
The next scene returns us to the boys and Viv, who are
further humanized by showing them playfully picking flowers. The boys
decide to show Viv their friend Max’s garden, and so they break into a car
and drive there. This scene is one of the most clever - perhaps
didactic to contemporary viewers - plays with the idea of the simulacrum in
the film. Max had joined the army, but when he did not get an opportunity
to kill people he killed the weeds in his beautiful garden - and all the plants
- instead. He decided to replace them with plastic ones, which he nourishes
with Pledge and water: “I prefer the world dead. It’s cleaner.
My idea of a perfect garden is a remembrance poppy field.” The layout
of the garden is as one would expect in the urban wasteland, a small outdoor
enclosure where only Max and his guests can have access to the beauty of
his artificial plants. The walls block strangers from accessing the
visual pleasure he attempts to nurture so faithfully. Ironically, the
reason the brothers brought Viv to Max’s was to see “real” - i.e. artificial
- flowers as opposed to living ones.
Later, on a rooftop, Sphinx talks about growing up emotionally
dead in a regulated high-rise housing unit where he was never allowed outside
or even downstairs: “Sight: concrete, sound: the telly, taste: plastic, touch:
plastic, the seasons regulated by the thermostat...Never experienced love
or hate. My generation’s the blank generation.” His childhood
is emblematic not only of the characters in Jubilee, but of much of the 1977
British state, where anonymous, vertical council flats crowd the skyline.
Dehumanizing units filled with folks numbed by TV, sometimes struggling, sometimes
not, to have meaningful interactions with others. This is the environment
that has created the numbed punks who can only feel something through inflicting
pain on themselves and others out of the absence of opportunities and meaning.
The next scene shows the gang hanging around the apartment,
bored, playing Monopoly - a game where one gets to pretend to be wealthy and
powerful. They take out their black book of prospective murder victims,
whose photos they cross out as they go kill by kill. They realize to
their chagrin that they have completed the book; all are dead. To fill
the void, they look to the TV and see a trashy, glamourous drag queen character
named Lounge Lizard, who is Borgia’s biggest star of the moment. They
decide to kill her, explicitly stating that “the world won’t miss his missing
chromosome,” a eugenics-inflected statement that seems appropriate given
the frequent Nazi references in the film, and which further distances the
queer activist Jarman from identifying with the punks. One of them flicks
a switch-blade over Lizard’s image on the TV, a foreshadowing, but also a
suggestion that the end of her career as a media star is as serious a loss
as physical death. Before the gang come into her home, we see Lizard
watching herself on TV, singing along to her performance with a microphone
and adding some witty banter as she goes. Adding to the theme of looking,
she states “I’m so filthy rich I could eat my own glasses.” Lounge Lizard’s
death is another particularly brutal murder. Like the previous two
graphic attacks, the colour red is privileged. However, instead of
ketchup or plastic bedsheets, Bod throws Lizard to the floor and chokes her
with a microphone - the final performance - her death throes illuminated by
melodramatic red lighting as Bod kills her. Despite Lizard’s disturbing
spitting and gurgling, the other girls are bored. Killing is not the
thrill it once was apparently, and the mundanity and monotony of the event
are echoed by Amyl gently striking a tambourine in rhythm with a metronome
as the scene draws to a close. Ariel’s role as screen is emphasized
further at the end of this scene with some beautifully edited shots.
There is a straight cut to a long shot (which then zooms in) of Ariel holding
a rectangular mirror at crotch level which reflects glints of light at us.
There is then a quick cut to Lizard’s dead body and a tilt upwards to show
Elizabeth who has again entered the world of 1977. Ariel always seems
to appear out of nowhere, which adds to his otherworldly status. Dee
states “Light and dark, living or dead, mankind is attracted to the polarities”
to which Ariel, the screen, adds “seeing or not seeing.” Dee’s reference
to polarities also refers to the gender binary that Lounge Lizard broke and
was acutely punished for, ironically by violent girls who were also blurring
gender roles (during a fencing match between Amyl and Mad, Bod states “may
the best man win.”) Elizabeth demands knowledge of God, to know whether
he is dead, and the response is illustrated by Ariel in the following scene.
Inside Westminster Cathedral is a huge party organized
by Ginz, dressed as a cardinal. The revelers enact scenes from the Bible,
grotesquely and perversely parodying every sacred rite of Christianity amidst
sex, violence, and mind-altering substances. The simulacrum has replaced
God as well, as Ginz declares: “Progress has taken the place of heaven...It’s
like pornography, better than the real thing. They prefer shadows,
the light’s too cruel for them...they follow blindly.” These statements
sum up the world view of Jarman’s 1977, where both the ruling class and the
street punks are perpetuating an ideology of “pornography,” and “shadows,”
in other words, looking but not actually seeing anything, blindness.
Later, Amyl announces that she has written a new chapter
in her history book, on the subject of how humans once foolishly believed
they had material rights including “One desolate suburban acre and a car.
And then a TV, fridge and another car” and on and on until there was nothing
left and they “felt cheated.” This is what resulted in the decline of
civilization: Pride, and its consequence, greed. Humans once believed
they had political rights too but they quickly forgot about those. As
she reads her text, Mad carves the word LOVE into Bod’s back with a large
knife. Bod then instructs Mad to fetch some salt to rub on the wounds,
when she cannot find it, Bod states “Mad’s as blind as a bat” and urges Amyl
to look. In Jarman’s relatively sympathetic view of Amyl (at least initially)
it seems that the desire to engage with history, no matter how subjective
or inauthentic, is at least worthier than being “blind” like Mad to the past,
and correspondingly, to the present. Mad prefers to burn Amyl’s book
- another historical referent to the Nazis, and one we’ve seen earlier in
the ballet footage - the ultimate form of destruction as it leaves no trace,
rather than see or create the past as Amyl does. To illustrate the
dangerous quality of Mad’s superficial vision is her statement during a duel
with Amyl later in the film. Mad says that instead of needing fists
to vanquish enemies: “I just have to look at them.”
Angel, Sphinx, Kid and Viv decide to go to the Bingo
parlour that Max emcees, except they play arcade games there instead of Bingo.
The only two participants are two old “pepperpots” (to use the Monty Python
phrase) who reminisce about a friend of theirs who could not adjust to the
contemporary violent world, and was murdered. They have adapted - one
speaks of giving an inflatable doll to her husband while the other expresses
shock that their friend refused to carry a weapon. One of the ladies
wins a prize: “a 3-month supply of Jubilee knickers, red, white and blue.”
This is the only invocation of the title in the film, and it shows that the
monarchy - or more specifically, the celebration of Queen Elizabeth II’s 25th
anniversary on the throne - is nothing but mass-merchandised kitsch.
Apparently her murder at the hands of Bod has gone unnoticed or unmarked by
the underwear industry and the general population. In the entertainment-saturated
world of Jubilee, the Queen’s real existence, as opposed to her symbolic value,
is inconsequential. The Queen was once considered to be appointed by
God and now she is used to sell underwear. Jarman does not have nostalgia
for the past, he clearly states that the world of 1977 is Elizabeth I’s legacy,
and that this is clearly negative, but he does mourn for the loss of Britain’s
soul. Immediately after the invocation of the Jubilee knickers, two
police officers storm the Bingo parlour, harass the punks and shoot the twins
dead when Sphinx tells them “come on, give us a kiss.” Kid runs away
but is caught, beat up and slashed by the police. Perhaps because he
is represented as the young naïf, his is the most violent death of the
main characters, including a close-up of his gurgling bloody face, which
connects his death with that of Lounge Lizard, and the celebrated success
he was on his way to emulating. Kid’s death may be the most graphic
but it is not the most lamented. That honour is held by the twins.
When Viv makes it back to the punk house and tells the girls about what happened,
it is the deaths of their two virtuous queer boys who inspire their vengeance.
A hopeful gesture? Betraying little emotion, they calmly plan their
revenge and make Molotov cocktails.
Amyl and Mad stalk one of the cops and move in for the
kill. Amyl blinds him with her perfume bottle, the object that marks
her as a sensitive aesthete in her first scene. In this, the climax
of the film’s murder scenes, the two brutally tear him apart with a razor
and their bare hands. It contains a ferocity that is still as shocking
today as it probably was at the time. Part of the terrible effect comes
from the close-up shots of the combat where we see the girls’ slashes and
blows in close proximity to the cop’s face. Also, Mad’s performance
is wrenching: She is literally hysterical, screeching and attacking with devastating
rage, and breaking down at the end of it all.
By sheer dramatic coincidence, Crabs just happens to
pick up the second cop at the laundromat, not knowing of his deeds.
She goes back to his home and they entertain her typically banal romantic
dreams of suburban bliss while they shag. The doorbell rings, the cop
answers, and Bod throws in a Molotov cocktail shouting ‘No Future,’ the title
of a Sex Pistols song. Crabs is incinerated for the unforgivable crime
of bourgeois aspirations (or as Jarman describes her in the script, “casualty
of true romance” (Jarman 1996, 44)) and more pragmatically, for screwing a
cop. Crabs is both the model of stereotypical domestic femininity and
unrestrained female libido. Jarman sees Crabs’ practices of both as
forms of objectification and materialism, and her death is treated merely
as an afterthought compared to the only other sexually active characters,
the twins, who are virtually martyrs.
There is a cut to Elizabeth and her group in a garden,
a real one this time, with Viv who is weeping. She has escaped the urban
wasteland apparently, but at what cost? Ariel states: “I am the mirror,
the fire that consumes all that is created.” The act of reflection,
engaged in by Ariel with his mirror and Viv with her painting, is necessarily
destructive. Jarman does not offer any consolation to the radical artist
who merges art and life, they are doomed to be an outsider because they leave
themselves open to the world around them, and they respond authentically and
emotionally to it. “Yet, for all her good intentions, Viv remains unable
to combine her hope in the utopian promise of the vanguard artist with the
bleak reality of her own situation: her call to action is confined to the
sterile walls of her empty black room” (Quinn-Meyler 117). Ariel, as
a supernatural creature, is also divorced from the human world because he
has the power to show people what the future holds, which they do not necessarily
want to see.
The film begins its denouement: several of the shots
echo back to those at the beginning such as the view from inside a car (which
it turns out is from the punks’ point of view traveling with Ginz in his Rolls
Royce) and two punks in long shot walking behind smoke from a bonfire (this
time heading the other direction). The result is a cyclical structure
- as Elizabeth’s quote “the wheel turns...” from the previous scene suggests
- which emphasizes the futility and repetitiveness of society endlessly driving
towards annihilation and death. Amyl, Bod and Mad are driven to Ginz’s
mansion in Dorset. The British border, with the goal “to keep the riff-raff
out,” is marked by Nazi sieg-heiling, a USSR flag, and the provision “no Blacks,
homosexuals or Jews, and no seditious literature” (Amyl’s history book, perhaps?).
It seems that Jarman’s idea of contemporary geo-politics is one where only
tyranny, as opposed to freedom, has been globalized. The girls have
now been signed as Ginz’s latest band: The Daughters of God. They are
the legacy of Elizabeth I, whose status as monarch was seen as divine providence
as well. Hitler is at the mansion, playing the part of an artist in
paint-splattered suit. He states “I was the greatest artist of this
century, greater than Leonardo da Vinci” (a theorist of optics, the science
of Jubilee) and the girls toast him, laughing joyously. The TV plays
the Jubilee festivities for the Queen that died much earlier in the film.
The film ends with Elizabeth I and her group walking
into darkness. The ruminations of Elizabeth and Dee suggest that they
see the visions that Ariel has given them as mere trifle, magic is to them
a bit of pleasure. Ariel’s final declaration is much more grave.
He makes apocalyptic statements such as “The sun eclipsed by the wings of
a phoenix” and “We drift into a sea of storms.” The film closes with
“And now Elizabeth and Dee go along the same great highway, and the light
of the air about them seemed somewhat dark, like evening or twilight, and
as they walked the phoenix spoke and cried with a loud voice: COME AWAY.”
The idea of a phoenix resurrecting from the ash is another cyclical motif,
but Elizabeth will be continuing on a linear “highway” down the monarchical
line that still continues today. Perhaps Jarman’s final statement is
that Western culture’s supposed rational linear progress is in reality a circular,
repetitive death drive: “the horrific condition of the second Elizabeth’s
England clearly demonstrates not progress, but terminal degeneration” (Hawkes
106). After Amyl’s “Rule Brittania” Dee states:
“To you, Elizabeth of England, is granted the greater
vision. That man perceives but little and rarely beyond this labyrinth
and the serpent of memory is the still point of the world, that gateway which
man seeks. It is everywhere and nowhere. It is here and now, round
it time runs in a forgetfulness beyond...[H]e who murders will swim in blood
lapping against the bounds of time.”
Committed acts of memory are the only ways of avoiding the repetition of
past crimes. The crumbling Britain of 1977 is the legacy of the nation’s
authoritarianism and imperialism and their corresponding injustices.
Elizabeth I is given the ability to look at her actions as part of a historical
continuum, but she cannot make the connection between her time and the 1977
wasteland. Only by thoughtfully considering the historical effects and
context of one’s actions might we be able to escape this cycle of oppression.
England will reap what it sows, and only by being able to consider the consequences
of what one sows through historical example can the results be truly joyful
and not cruel.
The parallels between Elizabeth I’s reign and the themes
of the film are quite interesting, for its events unfold with her as the primary
spectator, a 400-year flash forward as one critic described it (Hawkes 106).
The first line of Haigh’s account of Elizabeth’s political career reads “The
monarchy of Elizabeth I was founded upon illusion.” He goes on to state
that this illusion constructed the idea that England before her was disastrous,
and her reign would be heroic. The Queen’s coronation happened on January
14, 1559 and from this point forward she put the propagandistic image mill
into overdrive in order to suit her reign (Haigh 7). In 1977 power
is displaced, decentralized, and in the 16th century it is consolidated in
one omnipotent body, a female one at that, and an expert at manipulation and
power games. In writings on her at the time she is represented as an
über-woman, goddess, and even a phoenix - the creature invoked in Ariel’s
last line of the film (Haigh 19). She believed that her position and
success were due to Divine intervention (Haigh 21). Many of her attributes
- “masculine” strength, courage, will, aggressivity, and vitality - are shared
by the punks in Jubilee (Haigh 20). Also like the punks, she knew the
value of appearances: “Elizabeth was a show-off, and she dressed to kill...The
Court served as a splendid palace for the display of majesty“ (Haigh 86-7).
Her image was widely circulated among the populace as well, in portrait format
(Haigh 148). She was a performer, always playing a different role depending
on the context: “On her throne, Elizabeth was the Virgin Queen; towards the
Church she was a mother, with her nobles she was an aunt, to her councilors
a nagging wife, and to her courtiers a seductress” (Haigh 106). According
to the published script, the scenes with Elizabeth I in Jubilee occur in
1597 when the Queen would have been 64 years old. By this time, Elizabeth
was not as charming as she once was. Her promises of a bright future
had revealed themselves as false by this point, and she was increasingly
withdrawn from public view: “[T]he English had never loved the real Elizabeth
- they had loved the image she created and the promises she had made” (Haigh
164). It was her image, and not her actions, that brought stability
and prestige to England (Haigh 172).
To Driscoll, the past in Jubilee
“is shown as a world of sympathy, culture and order...we
see him turning to the British tradition of middle-class dissent to solve
the problems of the contemporary milieu...Ever since the English Civil War,
middle-class dissidence has always turned away from the industrial middle-classes...expressing
sympathy with the supposedly effete, effeminate and (from the bourgeoisie’s
point of view) decadent aristocracy” (70-71).
He believes that Jarman sympathizes with Elizabeth I in Jubilee, but I would
argue that this interpretation is neglecting the complex presence of her court
philosopher John Dee. Dee’s role suggests that what is most attractive
to Jarman about the 16th century was that it was a time when the metaphysical
and otherworldly actually had currency. Dee would have been 70 years
old - and well past the period of his most intense involvement with Elizabeth
and her court - in the scenes set in 1597. The Queen did indeed visit
Dee’s residence at Mortlake - a small village about eight miles upstream from
London (Woolley 80) where the scenes set in 1597 take place - several times,
speaking with him about all matters philosophical: astrology, alchemy, theology,
even medicine (Woolley 82). In addition to his scientific and artistic
pursuits - he was trained in mathematics - Dee also was involved in the occult:
conjuring and “summon[ing] divine secrets of the universe from angels and
archangels” (Woolley 296) since at least 1568, and by 1579, Mortlake was
seen as a center of magical activity (Woolley 146-7).
An important figure for Dee was the archangel Uriel -
a “good creature” (Woolley 155) - who is obviously an inspiration for Ariel,
the angel in Jubilee, and Prospero’s supernatural servant (played by Karl
Johnson, the actor who played Sphinx) in Jarman’s next film The Tempest (1979).
Dee communicated with angels such as Uriel through a crystal ball blessed
by God (Wooley 236) which is represented by the oft-gazed into crystal taken
from Elizabeth II’s corpse in Jubilee. Uriel’s name means “fire of God”,
he is a “pitiless” angel who “watches over thunder and terror,” and he is
symbolized by an open hand holding a flame (Lewis 402-3). The prince
of lights, he is the “sharpest sighted spirit of all in Heaven” (Lewis 403).
All these qualities are referred to in Ariel’s mystic and opaque statements
throughout the film. An interpreter of prophecies, Uriel was sent by
God to warn Noah of the flood and he revealed astrological secrets to Enoch
(Woolley 156). Dee’s conversations with him always centered on revelations
as well, as Ariel’s role is revelatory in Jubilee. Interestingly, he
was the first angel to ever transform into a human (Lewis 404). The
pessimism of Jubilee is not quite so overwhelming when one considers Wooley’s
statements on the nature of angel prophecy:
“[T]he angels were not infallible emissaries. Just
like human testimony, the spiritual sort could not be taken at face value.
It could be corrupt, incoherent, inconsistent. Some angels were fallen,
some really demons in disguise” (Woolley 197).
This reminds us that the visions we see in Jubilee are not the unmediated
future, but a subjective, flawed vision of it. Interestingly, Woolley
sees Dee’s attraction to angels as an attempt to deal with the world around
him which was undergoing radical changes. With his library, his contacts
with royalty, his written works, his imprisonment and his religious struggles
“he could see as well as anyone...that the world was
in a state of transformation, and the angels captured this perfectly...Dee
had seen with his own eyes the world spill off the edge of the map, and the
universe burst out of its shell. And as the cosmos had spread into
infinity, so he had seen his, everyone’s position in it correspondingly reduced.
For the first time in more than a thousand years [could be perceived] a world
that no longer revolved around humans” (Woolley 297).
Jarman too, through his use of an angel as cinema, is recording testaments
to the radically changing world around him. The punks around London
were as much a sign of the unstable future of the nation as the angels were.
If Jarman’s view of them is neither wholly positive nor totally negative,
he is definitely engaging with their apocalyptic vision of the world, and
it is no coincidence that Ariel resembles a glam punk boy more than an otherworldly,
divine apparition. Jarman sees Jubilee‘s excessive, dystopian spectacle
as prophetic: “Dr. Dee’s vision came true - the streets burned in Brixton
and Toxteth, Adam [Ant] was Top of the Pops and signed up with Margaret Thatcher
to sing at the Falklands Ball... (Jarman 1984, 172)”
Dick Hebdige’s extremely influential study Subculture:
The Meaning of Style focuses on how objects - in our case the accoutrements
of punk - are made into symbols of “self-imposed exile” (2). Hebdige
defines British punk, which first made its appearance in the press in summer
1976, as an unstable mix of “heterogenous youth styles” influenced by glam-rock
to American bands like the Stooges and the Ramones to Reggae, Mod, and R &
B (25). The visual style was one of eclecticism and shocking juxtaposition
of previous sub-cultures, all held together by a safety pin (Hebdige 26).
They were apocalyptic, angry and alienated, arty yet proletarian, hedonistically
indulgent, and sexually perverse. This stylistic pastiche can be considered
postmodern, as is their desecration of the borders between high and low culture.
Perhaps their most subversive (and problematic) stylistic gesture was their
donning of bondage gear to dramatize the subjugation of their generation,
class, and attitudes. Jarman’s interest in punk in Jubilee mimics this
formally, for the story is explicitly nihilistic in design: It does not go
anywhere new, it can only go in mad circles, “punk might seem to ‘open all
the doors’ but these doors ‘gave onto a circular corridor’” (Hebdige 65).
The structure is also fragmented and episodic, as if mismatched and loosely
patched together with a safety pin itself.
The most important aspect of punk for Jarman is their
post-modernity, the fact that their self-images, perhaps more than any other
generations before them, had been manufactured for them by the media, which
makes their donning of radical styles all the more a complex negociation.
“Subcultures are representations of these representations” (Hebdige 86).
They dramatized the concept of the decline of Britain that was circulating
so much in discourse (Hebdige 87), a spectacle like that of Jubilee which
Ariel projects for Elizabeth. Another example of punk as postmodern:
“They are obviously fabricated...[and] [t]hey display their own codes” (Hebdige
101). They bring attention to their artificiality and the construction
of their personae. The non-programmatic, unfocused, chaotic energy of
the punk movement is virtually antithetical to Jarman’s political artistic
practice. Hebdige concludes: “I have interpreted subculture as
a form of resistance in which experienced contradictions and objections to
th[e] ruling ideology are obliquely represented in style. Specifically
I have used the term ‘noise’ to describe the challenge to symbolic order that
such styles are seen to constitute” (133).
The choice of one kind of consumer item over another
is a fundamental of style, and this indivisibility of punk and other subcultures
from the ethos of consumer culture is what bothers Jarman so much. He
cannot see their obsession with superficial style as being anything other
than a new kind of fascistic consumer capitalism - in Jubilee controlled by
a single dictatorial figure - who ends up owning the punks in the end.
Jarman is obviously intrigued by it, but does not believe it can be capable
of real cultural subversion, it is more a passive effect of Western hegemonic
culture than an affront to it. As Hebdige states: “The challenge to
hegemony which subcultures represent...is expressed obliquely, in style” (17).
Jarman does not put their nihilistic dandyism into the same category as political
activism or even revolutionary art, regardless of how problematized that
is.
Jarman saw in late 1970’s British punk the mode of protestation
which would become most dominant in the increasingly inescapable consumer
culture of our era. “[The spectacular] subculture is concerned first
and foremost with consumption. It operates exclusively in the leisure
sphere” (Hebdige 95). There is no better description of the prevailing
method of popular resistance in our age, for better or for worse, than a performative,
individualized challenge to a supposedly universal - and thus normalizing
- social consensus. There is no question that this resistance is entirely
focused on style, but in the age of the simulacrum, “a question of substituting
the signs of the real for the real...A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from
the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary,
leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models...” (2-3) style is
the central channel for manifesting both personal and institutional identity.
Sadly, many people believed (and believe now) that a revolution in style
was the only available option, and that the more profound demonstrations of
revolutionary desire would have to follow, after the war on the terrain of
lifestyle had been won. In the end, the artifice, the appropriations
and reclamations, and the language games of the punks in Jubilee can be seen
as threatening to the status quo, even if limited in their scope. The
value of his characters’ complex aesthetic re-negociations of dominant culture
and history, performed through style, is perhaps greater than Jarman realized.
Theoretical developments in the twenty-five years since the film’s production
have contributed greatly to our better understanding of the subversive aspects
of style and surface, a phenomenon whose merit is still fiercely debated,
as the need for revolutionary action has become even more urgent.
WORKS CITED
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Derek Jarman. Ed. Lippard,
Chris. Westport CT: Praeger, 1996. 65-83.
Haigh, Christopher. Elizabeth I. London: Longman, 1988.
Hawkes, David. “’The Shadow of This Time’: The Renaissance Cinema
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The Films of Derek Jarman. Ed. Lippard,
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Jarman, Derek. “Chelsea on Ice.” Dancing Ledge. Woodstock,
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The Art of Memory: http://www.silcom.com/~dlp/mnem3.html