Decryption | The Disneyification of the Sex Pistols

The formula is almost too easy, given that the series from FX is available on Disney+, but it is nothing more or less than the “disneyification” of punk that director Danny Boyle proceeds in Pistolwith results that are less big TV than an irresistibly ridiculous afternoon TV movie.

Dominic Late
The Press

A series among many others

American rock critic Steven Hyden once jokingly wrote that there are so many documentaries chronicling the history of punk that a documentary chronicling the history of punk documentaries should be made. A few examples, concerning only the Sex Pistols: in The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle (1980), agent (and shameless upstart) Malcolm McLaren cemented his legend with the help of director Julien Temple. That was before the surviving members of the band offered their cue in The Filth and the Fury in 2000. In terms of fiction, Sid and Nancy, in 1986, romanticized the stormy relationship between the hotheaded bad bassist that was Monsieur Vicieux and his girlfriend, whom he murdered (Pistol does not completely escape the pitfall of sweetening).

It is therefore a largely plowed soil that Danny Boyle pumps (Slumdog Millionaire, The Beach, Trainspotting) in this series in six episodes of 45 to 56 minutes, scripted by Craig Pearce (close collaborator of Baz Luhrmann) from the autobiography of the guitarist and founder of the Libidinous Pistols, attaching it Steve Jones.

The Danny Boyle Touch

With his excerpts from old television news, his oblique framing and his elliptical-epileptic editing, Danny Boyle is obviously trying very hard to visually translate the furious chaos of punk. However, the director finds it difficult to avoid the clichés specific to fictions dealing with the birth of a group (the first setbacks, solidarity in the face of adversity, dreams of grandeur), which we would forgive him more easily if the motivations of his characters were clearer or if his reading of the conditions in which punk emerged was less worn. The socio-economic alienation of an English youth suffocated by the recession, one wants well, but still?

The series thus has the historiographical insight of a musicography and the emotional density of a peplum (punk), the essential qualities of a surprisingly bewitching television fast-food for which such a rock narrative produces the same soothing effect as the tales of Perrault. in children.

The inevitable controversy

Last Monday, Johnny Lydon (known as Rotten) called Danny Boyle an asshole on the set of The Morning, ITV’s English morning show – imagine for a moment this grumpy old man interviewing Gino Chouinard and you’ll have a small idea of ​​this improbable scene. Asshole? This is what must have flattered the filmmaker, he who declared to The Guardian in May that he admired the rebellious singer “for who he is” (that is to say, an incurably grumpy person). “I don’t want him to like the series, I want him to attack it, he said then. It is his absolute right. Why would he change what is the habit of a lifetime? »

Last August, British justice decided in favor of Paul Cook and Steve Jones in a case opposing them to Lydon, who wanted to prevent the production from using the catalog of the Pistols. Be that as it may, Anson Boon, who embodies the putrid urchin, perfectly restores its rebellious pouts and surly swaying.

female characters

One of the most intriguing portraits of Pistol does not concern a member of the formation which gives it its title, but rather the American Chrissie Hynde (Sydney Chandler), founder of the Pretenders, who worked at the end of the 1970s as an employee of the SEX boutique, run by the designer Vivienne Westwood and megalomaniac Malcolm McLaren. The feminist subtext highlighting the exclusion that women suffered within the punk movement, just as it is (they had even less future ahead of them than their male comrades), seems a little forced, however. . Sad paradox: Boyle himself imposes on his female characters what he denounces, by relegating them to stooge roles.

The soundtrack

By punctuating the series of songs by David Bowie, the Stooges or T. Rex, Danny Boyle has the intelligence to subtly place the punk explosion in its context and to recall that, contrary to what a certain received idea wants, the punk aimed less to hasten the death of rock than to restore its ardor, blunted by the clumsiness of prog. Delicious irony: it is nevertheless to the sound of prog, more precisely to the sound of an improbably pedantic solo by Rick Wakeman, that one of the wildest scenes of Pistol unfolds, one of the rare moments of subversion at the heart of a show as wise as a Ramones kid bought at Simons.

Pistolon Disney+