Film

Pogue of Death

Documentary Offers Portrait of the Artist as a Drowning Poet

by Sean Nelson

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Lauren Weinstein

Wed Dec 18 at EMP.

"The author's character is not humour but sentiment. The spirits are mostly artificial. The fond is sadness, as appears to me to be that of most Irish writing and people."--William Makepeace Thackeray

"Humour, they say, is the first three sips of the stout; melancholy the remainder."--Jamie O'Neill

It's true that no sadness is as sad as Irish sadness. And no Irishman was ever sadder to behold than Shane MacGowan, the great minor poet of Paddy rock 'n' roll and former lead singer of the Pogues. If I Should Fall from Grace, a fantastic new documentary, examines MacGowan's self-determined downward spiral with a cold but sensitive eye.

The film shows his progression (regression) from Irish expatriate, to troubled kid enlivened by punk's first wave, to vital frontman of the Pogues in the '80s, to what he is today: a hulking, slow-eyed mass of boozefat and incomprehensible spiel, lumbering around the streets of London and Ireland like a living ghost. Film-maker Sarah Share has stated that she was no great Pogues fan when she started the project, and it shows in her unsparing depiction of MacGowan as a barely coherent suicide-in-progress.

The film opens with a Pogues reunion in front of a huge Dublin audience. The crowd is raucous and rapturous as the band takes the stage and fires into a song, guitars, banjos, accordions, and pennywhistles blazing. Then Shane starts singing and the tragedy makes itself plain. His once-rich baritone is now an impotent wheeze through which it's almost impossible to make out a single syllable. From there, it's off to--where else?--the pub, where himself agonizes his way through the simplest sentences, guzzling wine and gin, smoking endless cigarettes, and fumbling for uh... fumbling for the uh... the uh... the uh... the words.

Like all obliteration drunks, MacGowan provokes a complex set of responses--pity, contempt, anger, sympathy, mockery. But to a fan, he mainly offers a sense of shock that someone who was once so urgently alive can be so aggressively dead to the world, intent on his own oblivion. Clearly, a sharp intellect and wit lies beneath his sluggishness, but the urge to destroy his body has almost completely buried it. Shane's father tells the camera that "he had a brilliant mind"; then, fighting back tears of rage, adds, "he still does, a few billion brain cells later."

Share then cuts to footage of MacGowan in his prime, fronting the band that made him legendary. The contrast is staggering. Standing at a mic, belting out the rave-up "Waxie's Dargle," Shane looks like a skinned alley cat, his voice a furnace blast of rude Irish brass. You still can't really make out all the words, but my God, that voice! Listen harder, and you hear cleverness, ribaldry, youth, anger, fire, and deep, deep sorrow.

The Pogues combined authentic ceilidh folk instrumentation with a punk spirit (inspired in no small way by MacGowan's devotion to the Sex Pistols). They were rough-and-tumble Irish chauvinists, bent on enfranchising their fellow emigrants with righteous pride and debauched celebration for an abandoned culture. The poetry was classical--MacGowan's best numbers, like "Streams of Whiskey," sound like they might have been written 150 years ago--but politically immediate. They played Irish drinking music: songs to dance, fuck, fight, and weep to. They were also, famously, a pack of wild drunken bastards, none more so than their singer. Though several other band members contributed songs, Shane was the soul and star of the Pogues through five records--three great (Red Roses for Me, Rum Sodomy & the Lash, and If I Should Fall from Grace with God), one half decent (Peace and Love), and one almost worthless (Hell's Ditch)--before drink, drugs, and disinterest claimed the best of his energies.

Had Share settled on the easy irony that MacGowan is now a tragic caricature of everything he once celebrated and was celebrated for, her film would have simply been a morality play dotted with good songs. Instead, to her eternal credit, she refuses to let Shane become a joke. What emerges is an empathetic portrait of a tortured Irish soul. The camera doesn't flinch from its subject's wounded dignity, his drowned pride, and the sense, deep in his bleary eyes, that he knows his best work is far behind him.

For most of the film, MacGowan puts forth a confident aloofness. At a few key moments, though, he lapses into the mortal Irish sadness that has motorized the self-destructive will of poets throughout history. These scenes, during which humanity shines from the ravaged bloat of MacGowan's bearded, toothless face, are proof that there's life in the old boy yet. It's just too heartbreaking to try and guess how much.