p for - privilege

[wytchcroft]

The World that Jones Made: 

Part one:

In the early 1960s Paul Jones was the singer with Manfred Mann singing on hits such as – 54321, Pretty Flamingo etc. Quitting the band in 1966 Jones conducted a brief foray into films before settling into a comfortable seeming groove with his own Blues Band, radio spots and reborn Christianity (of which more later).

As an actor he comes across as a little pallid and unassuming – but believable enough in the roles he took, roles that conversely were in at least three very difficult ‘outside’ productions. Obscure for many years, these films are finally available on official DVD releases. Films such as The Committee, with its Pink Floyd soundtrack and maverick cameo by Arthur Brown and a script by a professor from the London School of Economics  (then a ‘revolutionary’ hotbed and the very antithesis of what it is today).

The director of that film was a young buck called Peter Sykes and he cast Jones again in his film Demons of the Mind, a late Hammer horror film of unusual thematic complexity (written by the late Christopher Wicking) and visual assurance.

Jones made his debut in 1967 with Privilege ostensibly a typical rise and fall of the pop star saga but actually a strange, controversial and prophetic narrative from Peter Watkins whose previous film The War Game, (now critically feted of course) had been banned by the perennially gutless BBC.  In fact the film that Privilege most closely resembles is one upon which it was clearly a major influence, Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd movie The Wall.

Just as in the later picture Privilege shows us a parallel journey, the fracturing descent of the fragile rock-star just as their popularity explodes and the state happily co/opts them into Nazi styled fascist emblems.

Privilege - the rally.

    
Note: Rock music in England has always mirrored the British fascination with the symbols of Hitler’s Reich, diverse performers (and rarely for any single simple reason) from Keith Moon to Morrissey, from The Bonzo Dog Band through punk in the 70s and on, up to The Libertines. Godard’s 1968 film Sympathy for the Devil (aka One-plus-one) has a scene with Nazi saluting shopkeepers, revolutionaries and children that shows how the French director saw a Fascist potential in British culture, the shop in Goddard’s movie could very easily be Malcolm McLaren’s circa 1975... as well as conforming to that notorious stereotype of England as 'a nation of shopkeepers'.  

 
Godard and a little Britain;  child + porn =… a Nazi salute in front of the racks of porn magazines and comics; to the child’s left are some bloodied pop style boys, to her right an old man and a jazzy advertiser much as in Privilege.

McLaren himself seems to have moulded himself to some extent on the red haired manager from Privilege who in turn is clearly based on both Andrew Loog Oldham and Phil Spector.

Managers like these... who needs enemies?

The Wall however places as much emphasis on the personal, the psychology of the protagonist who falls into society’s sausage maker. Steve Shorter in Privilege is a void, no background is given to us and no real personality – and as a performer he is clearly held to have been cynically manufactured from the start. The nightmare that develops may be as epic as Pink’s (or Roger Waters) but his environment is more The Monkees’ Head or the Sex Pistol’s Great Rock n Roll Swindle than anything else. There are numerous Beatle allusions here too, for example there are scenes shot in Abbey Road and there is the sequence where the disabled are lead to the front of a Steve Shorter concert to receive a messianic blessing is authentic, “Cripples Mal!” became a regular and distressed cry from the Fab Four to their body guard Mal Evans, by all accounts, when faced with such a situation.

Note: Overlooked by many Beatle historians is the fact that Lennon cited Watkins as one of the most significant influences upon him, after Watkins personally prodded him by letter to become more politically aware and active as a performer/artist. Instead of Watkins the credit for this shift in Lennon is nowadays almost always given, by critics, biographers and commentators of one sort or another, to Yoko Ono - which is an entirely erroneous myth… or in other words, as Lennon would say; bullshit.

The chilling opening narration of Privilege states that in the “near future… There is now a coalition government in Britain, which has recently asked all entertainment agencies to usefully divert the violence of youth. Keep them happy, off the streets and out of politics.”

there's old wave and there's new wave and there's...

This narration accompanies the triumphant return of Steve Shorter from America for which he travels in an open top car and holds a hand in a stiff wave, half Roman half Nazi salute. Such a scene was re-enacted almost exactly ten years later by David Bowie outside Victoria station as part of The Return of the Thin White Duke (half Steve Shorter, half Edward VIII) which caused a media outcry. Bowie has yet to acknowledge (or possibly remember) the influence of Watkins’s film but that moment is just one of a number of elements in his career that appear to reflect moments from Privilege. The red suit of Bowie’s Glass Spider tour and his numerous stage routines based on the mock captivity and release of the pop-star from Ziggy onwards owe a huge debt, as well as the frequent messianic trappings of his 1970s characters. Midway between Privilege’s arrowhead swastikas and The Wall’s double hammer came Ziggy’s strobe flashed double Z, as caught on camera in Ziggy Stardust the Motion Picture.  

The 'captivity' sequence in Privilege is indeed electrifying - Jones giving his all as the line between trickery, theatre and and reality blur before the viewer and his on-screen audience, the cage and handcuffs and policeman that adorn  the stage seem over the top and artificial at first - but as the music builds and Jones voice becomes harder and harder as the crowd edge towards riot, the dream space of the stage begins to seem quite and normal and the violence genuinely threatening...
 

Privilege shows the idea of ‘pop star’ as free floating sign, (something whose meaning is entirely defined by the act of seeing it), to be an exploitable illusion. The audience does indeed project desires and fantasies onto him like a screen, but just as Steve’s function is later proved to be “Very adaptable” for the powers that be, it is also revealed that his audiences’ projections can be cleverly manipulated, pre-planned and pre-programmed by both the State (everyone from the fisheries department to the foreign office apparently!) and its Church (there are some hilarious comic vicars early on, shades of Moorcock’s Bishop Beesley from the Jerry Cornelius books) as well as the usual unsavoury collection of managers, producers and so on.

before the public - Steve’s attempts to express himself are thwarted by his own award which begins to drown him out with his own song.

As for Steve himself, “I am nothing” he says. He is infantilised, sulkily demanding chocolate milk and revealing his only hobbies to be sleeping and watching children’s television, using a gadget watch he does listen to music – but always and only his own. The film views his subsequent destruction as awful but has little apparent sympathy with the man, merely the position he’s caught in. There’s no cosy nostalgia (actually dismissed by one of the characters in the film) this isn’t That’ll be the Day and there are no delusions of grandeur ala Stardust or Tommy. Such a totally negative presentation may rile a viewer but it’s worth remembering that many stars are known for a childlike quality - think of Brian Jones and the House at Pooh Corner – or John Lennon primal screaming for his lost mother, Sid Vicious and his ‘little boy lost’ routine.

If Steve is presented with an apparent chance at adulthood, for both a relationship and for self responsibility, it is unclear to what extent he avails himself of – or indeed recognises the opportunity. The ‘love’ scene – which again plays almost like Godard – is simply a static and half heard interrogation, “what do you want? I can see what you want - what do you want?” Jones and Shrimpton repeat over and over. Like everyone else in the film they are simply negotiating, they are consumers.

transactions of love in Privilege... Jones and 60s icon Jean Shrimpton

Consumerism does allow the film some comedy; there are broad satirical strikes at advertising directors claiming to be influenced by the Moscow Arts Theatres and the Chunky Dog Chunks straight out of the Dennis Potter book of humour. Best of all are the men dressed as bouncing apples. The narration is often dryly funny heralding later ‘mockumentaries’ such as The Rutles.

The satire is not subtle, S.S. TV is just crass – but that’s almost the point, the film is a tirade and remarkable for sustaining itself for the length that it does.

The film is (quite deliberately) oppressive and alienating, dispensing with any real narrative and using the dry commentator in a Brechtian ironic manner. The film is a series of open ended fragments, but they are allowed to play out to the point where the viewer feels ill at ease – and this is matched by the pseudo-documentary style of the film as a whole, Watkins deploys frequent hand held or on the shoulder camera set ups but the shots use a wide lens and are therefore ‘cinematic’, which, alongside the bright colours* of the settings and costumes (cleverly deployed by the director even as they are knowingly explained to the audience) and the surface beauty of the leads, results in an uneasy sort of friction, a deliberate disjunction.

This increases the tension as the audience awaits both Steve’s inevitable breakdown and the equally unstoppable climactic concert. That concert, considered a weakness in the film by critics at the time as overblown and implausible, nonetheless reflected Cliff Richard and his tours with forceful evangelist Billy Graham. It is also (as is now conceded) eerily suggestive of what was to come - Mary Whitehouse and the enormous ‘Festival of Light’ just a couple of years later, whilst the use of the hymn Jerusalem (already enough to have William Blake spinning in his grave) is close to the bone now since its adoption by rugby fans and the Proms.
Just as the political system in the 'near future' Britain has imploded into meaninglessness so too the Church as its organ. There is no real religion seen or critiqued within the film, what is decried is the malign purpose to which the symbols and trappings of religion may be put - co/opted just as Steve Shorter is.

The rally with its Nazi flags, burning crosses and incitement to “conform, conform, conform!” is indeed long, it is visually accurate to the Nuremburg model - and I found it very, very uncomfortable to sit through.

I remember watching Privilege through a self protective haze of cigarette smoke on a little black and white telly and being astonished by the music and absolutely terrified by the ending. Decades later, watching in colour and on my computer, my response was identical. Writing this ‘review’ is therefore akin to writing out a nightmare hoping to make sense of it - and by doing so exorcise it from waking consciousness.

There is little resolution to the narrative, after the concert and after the breakdown Steve seems fades away. There is no ‘what next?’ ala Velvet Goldmine. If there is any answer to the desultory speculation about Steve that ends Privilege it comes from another film, another director and another rock singer/actor; in a double bill, Privilege could make a perfect prelude to Nic Roeg’s Performance (Just as If marries well with A Clockwork Orange) – this would add another (and bitter) layer to the character of Mick Jagger’s Turner, a fallen star adrift in his Chelsea pad in search of his ‘demon’ (mojo), if we knew the character’s last appearances before Performance had been wrapped in such an ostentatious display of religiosity, Nazism and conformity.   

Note: In a curious twist, not only did Paul Jones later embrace Christianity but Performance co/star James Fox did also. And it’s interesting to speculate on Jagger in the role of Shorter since he was, at that time, not long separated from Shrimpton’s sister and therefore knew Jean well.

……………..

*the film is actually structured by colour, from the opening blue washes through a yellow and white mid-point to the final ominous black and red.
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Next up: From one extreme to the other; after the hysteria of Privilege, ‘The Committee’ disturbs with its smiling Blair-like Quangos - and we find out if your teeth hurt after your head has been removed…

Comments

[sidherian.livejournal.com]

I saw the film many years ago and was equally disturbed. Must see if I can track if down.

Nice to see you posting :)

[wytchcroft.livejournal.com]

hey - good to hear from you too! :))))