Between the dueling bluster of lead singer John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) and the band's manager Malcolm McLaren, the iconization of Sid Vicious, several books' worth of lionizing and theorizing, and one intentionally confusing mockumentary, the band has been handed down to history as the ne plus ultra of corrupted purity, conflicting messages, and hypocritical conceptualism -- the greatest of all rock 'n' roll swindles. But as evidenced by the new documentary about the band, The Filth and the Fury, the real point of the Sex Pistols, as laid out by Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock, John Lydon, and Sid Vicious, was to be in a goddam rock band; to take the piss, tell the truth, and have fun. The social circumstances of mid-'70s London being what they were—the film opens with about 10 minutes of newsreel footage of riots, explosions, labor strikes, and garbage piled 10 feet high in the streets, intercut with clips of the Bay City Rollers singing pop piffle on TV and, oddly, Olivier's Richard III —the band's gesture turned out to be revolutionary. The Sex Pistols' version of fun was to shove their then-shocking sound and appearance down the throats of a mainstream culture that refused to address the hopeless hell of the working-class background out of whose bowels they arose. As Lydon says in the film, "When you feel powerless, you grab any power you can... we managed to offend everybody."
We've heard this story a million times. But Fury, assembled by longtime Pistols historian Julien Temple, charts the band's two-year trajectory with the intention of restoring a bit of respect—as opposed to reverence—to the mythology. We see them evolve from four nasty nobodies, massacring Who and Jonathan Richman songs, into figureheads for a movement that imploded about 30 seconds after it got a toehold. And the enemy wasn't McLaren, nor the "establishment," nor Sid, nor even Nancy, but an audience that responded to the band with the same hero worship that the music was so defiantly spitting on. "The punks ruined it," Lydon gripes.
The brute pop glory of the Sex Pistols' music has long since been mere background for the question of whether or not the whole thing was a big hoax perpetrated by McLaren. The film makes a convincing case that the real driving force behind the band was—duh—the singer, and that McLaren (represented on-camera by a bondage mask being pumped full of air) was an opportunist who rode Johnny Rotten's tattered coattails all the way to Bow Wow Wow, stealing all the money and taking all the credit.
People resent the Sex Pistols because they were a creation with a message of destruction. But even primitive art needs to be made. Lydon's role is clear enough: He refers to Johnny Rotten in the third person. Just because it's theater doesn't mean it's fake.
The present-day interviews with the surviving band members are lit from behind, like profiles of witness protection program enrollees. But even in silhouette, John Lydon's indignation at McLaren's assertion that the band was his art project ("my little artful dodgers") makes you shudder. "You don't create me," Lydon sneers, channeling Rotten. "I am me. There is a difference."
There really is. It's taken Lydon—who hasn't always found the art in artifice—two decades to drop some armor and admit how much he cared about the Sex Pistols, how disappointed he still is in the way they crumbled, and, in the film's most shocking moment, how sad he is about the death of Sid Vicious. Even and especially after a thousand dewy-eyed confessions on Behind the Music, the sight of a professional bastard like Johnny Rotten unable to fight back tears registers with the heartbreaking severity of an H-Bomb.
In a time when the most oppressive force bearing down on underground culture is punk orthodoxy (which has cycled through innumerable phases of pro- and anti-Pistols sentiment by now), it's hard to imagine the world in which the Sex Pistols were a legitimate outrage. It's hard now to imagine any rock band inciting revolution of any kind. What's easy is to be over it, a stance The Filth and the Fury simply doesn't allow. Wading through the warts and the glory, we emerge with something new: a version of the story that makes us navigate our skepticism and take a stand. Who better than the Sex Pistols, even 22 years later, to remind us how good that feels?
