Quadrophenia by Stephen Glynn

Author:Stephen Glynn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, MUS035000, Music/Genres & Styles/Rock
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

Jimmy and the Ace Face: a Perfect Blend.

Jimmy out of his brain on a train.

It is with his eyes most defined with mascara that Jimmy finally sees that life is hideously wrong outside of himself and all that he has is ‘Me!’ For Jon Savage, however, this androgyny is presented as a weakness. In his reading of the film the early gang scenes are so strong that they provide the film’s dominant mood: ‘By the time Jimmy – understandably because they’re such a bunch of stiffos – leaves the group in disgust, you feel that he’s the freak, that he’s the outsider and, as such, must pay the price.’ Thus, in spite of the beauty of the final sequences and ‘the deliberate ambiguity of the final shot’, the conclusion is that Jimmy is portrayed as a victim: ‘Things happen to Jimmy, he doesn’t initiate them: his full slide into Mod beauty is thus not subcultural aspiration but terminal psychosis’ (1997: 17). This line of argument is worth pursuing for, whilst agreeing with Savage that Quadrophenia has much of the seventies in its ‘make up’, I dissent entirely with his reading of the film’s psychological coarseness. Savage contextualises the film and its genealogy, noting first that in 1966 the Who were a plastic pop group, with girlie make-up and moussed-up French Mod hairdos; by the recording of ‘Quadrophenia’ they were a lads group par excellence. Like Marsh before him, Savage affirms authorial exculpation, ‘especially with a writer as acute and questioning as Pete Townshend’: instead, the problem for Savage is that ‘the film of Quadrophenia, in swallowing this “lad” discourse whole, leaves no space for anything else: not so much “We are the Mods” as “We are the Lads”’.18 The core characters exhibit ‘so neurotic and aggressive a normality that overt attempts at meaning are undercut’ and so, when Jimmy and his mother argue about what ‘normal’ is, Savage feels we are unsure where we stand. He returns to the source album and its central idea that Jimmy was psychologically unstable and, as such, ‘embodied the disturbances of his time’. He cites the beginning of the liner notes – ‘I had to go to this psychiatrist every week’ – but adds that ‘you’ll be lucky to find any hint of this aspect of Jimmy’s routine in the film. Nobody has any interior life here.’ Jimmy’s prime motivation is dismissed in the briefest of explanations from his dad: ‘half your Mother’s family is the same’ – an evasion which, for Savage, is all part of the film’s neo-conservatism: ‘only poofs go to psychiatrists, after all’ (ibid.).

IS IT IN MY HEAD?

My dissent from Savage’s reading is fourfold. Firstly his interpretation ignores the several instances in Quadrophenia when Jimmy’s mental state is openly referenced. ‘You’re fucking mad, you are, getting chucked out’, Dave tells him after his balcony antics in the Brighton ballroom. On his return from the riots he is berated by his mother: ‘I’ve done my best. Look what I’ve got for

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