Lost Classic – Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, irreverent take on the 70s punk scene

Jubilee, considered by many to be the ultimate punk film, pissed off a lot of punks. Siouxsie and the Banshees labelled the 1978 apocalyptic satire, “hippy trash”. Adam Ant said it was a “mess”. American punk singer, Jayne County, called it “wasted celluloid”. Not great press considering all of them had starred in the film.

Jarman was no punk which can’t have helped matters. He was posh, softly spoken and – at 36 – old. Nor is the film an easy watch. Queen Elizabeth I and her court astrologer time travel into a post-apocalyptic future Britain where girl gangs roam the streets committing random acts of violence, Clockwork Orange-style. The monarch’s guide is an androgynous, black-pupiled spirit, Ariel, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Jenny Runacre plays the queen as well as her modern incarnation, Bod, the leader of a group of sexually depraved, murderous delinquents.

In Jarman’s desolate rendering of an England gone to the dogs, Dorset has become a fascist enclave and women are bound to barbed wire maypoles. Elizabeth II, whose quarter century on the throne inspired the film’s ironic title, is mugged and killed for her crown in a Deptford wasteland. Even more disturbing than the casual beatings, fire bombings and asphyxiations are the punks’ pretentious monologues on art, history, sex and boredom.

Hammy Elizabethan prose (“This vision exceedeth by far all expectation. Such an abstract never before I spied”) sits side by side with hysterical punk slang (“You clammy slag, you’ve sat on the KY with your fat arse!”) Despite its apparent radicalism, respites in Tudor rose gardens inject the film with a conservative nostalgia that its iconoclastic audience would have found hard to stomach.

Jarman had an ambiguous relationship with punk ideals and his film displays a cautious respect for the movement’s irreverence and outspoken, headstrong rebel army. He channels punk’s nihilism in his portrayal of a cruel and confused Britain that has lost its sense of identity. In an interview in 1978, Jarman said: “We have now seen all established authority, all political systems, fail to provide any solution – they no longer ring true.”

Even so, there’s a sense that the wronguns in Jubilee are being ogled with amused fascination like circus freaks. As the film progresses, the mindless violence, almost playful at first, starts to lose its lustre. Two years before Jubilee was released, Jarman gave his cold assessment of the scene. “The instigators of punk,” he wrote, “are the same old petit bourgeois art students, who a few months ago were David Bowie and Bryan Ferry look-alikes – who’ve read a little art history and adopted some Dadaist typography and bad manners, and who are now in the business of reproducing a fake street credibility.”

The irony was that Jarman persuaded so many to take part. Adam Ant plays The Kid, a handsome, aspiring punk rocker offered a record deal by musical Svengali Borgia Ginz, played with gleeful Bond villain camp by Jack Birkett. Toyah Willcox plays the fidgety droog of random menace, Mad. The style icon and stalwart of Sex Pistols gigs, Jordan, plays the philosophising Amal Nytrate, whose gyrating and goose-stepping to a reggae distortion of Britannia while dressed as Boudica is as nasty as it sounds.

Jordan (real name Pamela Rooke) worked at the King’s Road boutique co-owned by fashionista Vivienne Westwood and Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, the wily impresario on whom the character of Ginz was based. It was Westwood who delivered the most famous and venomous attack on Jubilee, motivated perhaps by the suspicion that Jordan’s character had been inspired by her. In an open letter to Jarman she described Jubilee as “the most boring and therefore disgusting film I have ever seen.”

What probably aggrieved Jubilee’s detractors most was its vision of punk inevitably selling out, despite all its irreverent swagger. Jarman seems to have been vindicated by events. Adam Ant’s character, desperate for fame, is warned that if he throws in his lot with Ginz, “he’ll steal your voice and sell it. He just wants to package you. And when he’s through with you, you’ll just be another face on another cover.” Adam and the Ants would later sign up with McLaren who proceeded to steal all the Ants to form a new band leaving Adam high and dry.

The film was released two months after the bitter split between Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten and McLaren, who would later cash in with a film about the band, just as Ginz is said to have done in the film. Jarman saw punk’s hypocritical relationship with capitalism writ large in Westwood’s fashion brand. As if to prove him right, Westwood decided to print her rant about Jubilee on a mass-produced t-shirt. In 1992 she would accept an OBE by Queen Elizabeth II for services to fashion. Jarman attacked her in his diary, sneering at “our punk friends accepting their little medals of betrayal”.

Even though the backlash to his film was ferocious, Jarman didn’t care. Despite its disjointed plot, Jubilee stands up as a raw, troubling depiction of the moral pandemonium of the time. And by critiquing a movement with the active participation of some of its most prominent members, it was Jarman who had the last laugh.