Something Rotten: The Punk Rock Richard III of Julien Temple's the Filth and the Fury

When you read old literature, it's steeped in the present; they rarely had a forward thought or looked back, either - they lived in one particular current stream. - Johnny Lydon, Rotten Now I just have to go with yesterday's discovery: A kind offuck-you-all attitude: fuck off Shakespeare, fuck off the-proper-way-to-speak-verse, fuck off snapping tendons and Laurence Olivier. - Anthony Sher, Year of the King (playing Richard III) In his documentary The Filth and the Fury (2000), Julien Temple posits an identity between Shakespeare and the Sex Pistols. The allusion to Macbeth in Temple's title draws upon a Daily Mirror headline registering public indignation after the group's infamous 1 December 1976 appearance on the BBC show Today, with Bill Grundy. From the perspective of the mainstream media, the band's vulgarity, drunkenness, and irreverence, which led to their being dropped by record label EMI, appeared "sound and fury," ultimately "signifying nothing" (Macbeth 5.5.26). Appropriately, Sex Pistols frontman Johnny ("Rotten") Lydon recalls in his autobiography, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, that as an adolescent he "loved Macbeth - a gorgeous piece of nastiness" (63). Yet it is Richard HI, not the Scottish play, which figures most prominently both in Lydon's reminiscences and in Temple's The Filth and the Fury. Employed by the director as a framing device, Shakespeare's play comes to life when related to the story of the Sex Pistols, as the king of England and the king of punk - Richard and Lydon - appear, in several respects, closely related figures. Like Temple's earlier documentary about the Sex Pistols, The Great Rock 'n Roll Swindle (1980), his second portrait of the group uses disjunctive techniques of collage, what Mark Blake describes as the "cut 'n' paste" style associated with early punk (162). Specifically, Temple evokes the sensibility of Jamie Reid, who designed the cover art for Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols ( 1 977) by juxtaposing seemingly unrelated clips from television and cinema alongside interviews with band members and those who witnessed their rapid rise and fall. Much like Temple's first film about the band, however, The Filth and the Fury is carefully designed, with a discernable structure underneath its fractured facade. From chapter to chapter, Laurence Oliviers 1955 celluloid Richard III is a recurring figure, lending cohesion to Temple's kinetic chronicle. On the 2005 DVD commentary track, the director explains that in using numerous clips from a film set in the fifteenth century, he "really wanted to set up this kind of random tuning in to another time, all which, in away, sets up the blue print for this very scattershot use of archive." The link Temple forges between Shakespeare's Richard and the Sex Pistols might seem problematic in a cultural context, for the playwright is typically associated with the sort of institutional authority attacked by English punks. Greil Marcus argues that punk outright rejected "the institutionalized or passe ' identities of the status quo" (qtd. in Laing 131). And Tricia Henry makes a similar point, but more emphatically, when remarking that late-seventies bands like the Sex Pistols offered "a mighty thumb of the nose to the cultural status quo of England in the 1970s, and it was delivered in raw, harsh terms. Mainstream rock culture, bourgeois society, Western civilization, history, the Beatles, and unemployment were just a few of the objects of their venom and contempt" (65). Shakespeare represents another "object" of such "venom and contempt," according to Alex Cox, director of the Sex Pistols drama Sid and Nancy (1986). ' While commenting on his film Revengers Tragedy (2002), adapted from a play by Shakespeare's near-contemporary Thomas Middleton, Cox insists that Shakespeare personifies the establishment in the English cultural imagination: Shakespeare's position is easy to understand and sympathise with: he lived under the Tudor dynasty, and any kind of dissenter (whether a playwright, a nun, or an actual rebel) was liable to be dragged off, tottured, burned alive, or hanged [. …