A lot of movies have been made about punk rock and most of them are terrible. The main reason for this is because punk - ever since its rise in the mid to late '70s - has been perhaps the most bastardized sub-culture on the face of the planet. Just look around today to see what I mean. Punk has infiltrated every orifice of pop culture, from baby clothes to fashion lines to faux-attitude t-shirts to a common acceptance of piercing and tattoos (metal helped with that as well) to a wonky sea-saw of derivative music (emo, screamo, grunge, pop punk, Oi!, Celtic punk, hardcore, etc, etc). Consequently, finding a meaningful connection and an accurate depiction of what punk originally encompassed is like looking for a very tiny needle in a gargantuan, burning haystack.
Most punk movies try to simultaneously glorify and reproach the wild-crust lifestyle of those who inhabit the culture. They flaunt the music, the clothes, the snarling attitude - but these films never usually penetrate beyond surface level grime or melodramatic caution. They're stuck in a limbo of cool, the culture is merely an eccentricity to sell to an audience that has a similar ignorance about punk. It's a blind leading the blind situation, and the cliff is usually not far away.
Jubilee, however, struts about in a very different fashion. Presiding throughout the film is a deep embrace of know-it-all anarchy - a volatile, funny and effortlessly wise abandon that puts you in a strangely satisfying place. In some ways you could imagine Jubilee as an extravagant musical turned inside out. There are no breaks into song, but there are raw, impromptu musical performances. There is no grandiose story arch or moral backbone, but there is a surreal, disjointed adventure. There is no contrived cast of never-grew-up high school thesps, but the film is made up of very vivid, hilarious and obnoxious characters.
The film isn't so much a narrative as it is an insightful poem on the state of England in the late '70s. Unfurling in abstract stanzas, it jumps between Queen Elizabeth I, who wishes to observe the future of England, and a group of wayward "future" punks that live in a run-down, vandalized loft that always seems to be doused in a sea of orange, yellow and green. Connecting them is a supernatural entity (a god-man with black eyes and a leotard) that spouts off fragments of a cryptic eulogy for a Britain that already seems to have endured an apocalypse - namely, World War II.
The most striking aspect of Jubilee is the depiction of the post-war industrial landscape of England. Director Derek Jarman didn't have to dress up elaborate sets or fly off to some far-flung location in order to capture the post-civilization vibe he was looking for. He was living it everyday in the England of the '70s. Every where the camera travels there seems to be a pile of old factories, rusted fences, decrepit brick houses, abandoned storefronts and shabby loft spaces. It's surreal to look at the state of the country - it looks more like the ghettos of Blade Runner than an actual place within our time span.
But the scuzzy, broken-down landscape is populated with a wide assortment of characters, all very much alive and always looking for a bit of fun. The main group is made up of two pudgy girls in heavy pink eyeliner and colorful hair, Amyl Nitrate and Mad, two brothers with a bent for incest, a slut aptly named Crabs, a young guy, known as "the Kid", looking to make it big as a musician (played by a despondent Adam Ant) and a mute cross-dresser simply called "Chaos". They're all lead by Bod, a waifish upstart that stirs up the trouble (namely murder and dance orgies) that the group so desperately needs to cure their boredom. The actress who plays Bod, Jenny Runacre, also plays Queen Elizabeth I, adding a playful little spice of surrealism into the film's dynamic.
It's authentic acting all around, as most of the cast was actually engaged with the punk movement in some shape or form at the time. The girl who plays Amyl, mysteriously listed as "Jordan" on IMDB, particularly stands out with her precocious monologues on the woeful history of England, how art always begins as something that is alive and is then subsidized for the masses. She also reflects on art's inevitable destruction through a lack of dreams: "In those days, desires weren't allowed to become reality. So fantasy was substituted for them - films, books, pictures. They called it 'art'. But when your desires become reality, you don't need fantasy any longer, or art." There's also a particularly vivid scene in the film where Amyl performs in a theater, donning a viking outfit and lip-syncing to a dub-infused punk song. She attempts to make her movements look choreographed and even austere, but the masquerade is easily dismissed by her occasional grins and clumsy missteps. It's Jubilee in a nutshell - posturing uppity philosophy one moment, then shitting all over it the next.
This theater scene also introduces the most magnetic and bizarre character in the film, Borgia Ginz, played by a gleefully demented Jack Birkett. Swiveling his bug-eyes to and fro, baring his huge set of game show host teeth and cackling wildly like a lunatic, Ginz is the exaggerated media mogul that all the young punks who dream of recognition come to rely on. Ginz is perhaps the most perceptive of all the characters in Jubilee and becomes an embodiment of the film's primary tenants - self-destruction, chaos and manipulation.
"Without progress life would be unbearable. Progress has taken the place of Heaven...It's like pornography; better than the real thing," he says during one of his monologues, echoing the sentiment that such a volatile movement as punk was destined to burn out quickly, and all that's left is the fantasy of it. At another point Ginz exclaims, "This is the generation who grew up, and forgot to lead their lives", a very haunting statement that spells out the inevitable disillusionment that comes with an absence of responsibility.
That's the most powerful thing I took away from this inverted-glam, punk rock odyssey. Anarchy and indolence don't offer any answers - in fact, they never intended to. They are (or were), however, powerful tools of transportation, the end result just needs (or needed) to be made up of something else entirely. I think Jarman saw this with extreme clarity, knowing that one day, sooner rather than later, the party would be over. The punks would have to actually make good on their irreverent disassociation with society and shape England for the future. Unfortunately, the movement was dead before most people realized it - killed again and again by an implosive nature, mass commercialization and humorous dismissal from the general public.
But the archetype of punk persists and finds its way, albeit minutely, into our daily lives. Jubilee may sound the death-knell for a specific subculture and generation in the '70s, but punk encapsulates very timeless qualities of rebellion, rejection and strength. Long ago ceasing to be an ideology, punk has remained, foremost, a -feeling-. While it is certainly a word detached from its original significance, it is still valid when the right kind of mind is pushing it out of their lips and putting it into action.
