Ode to Joy Division
ODE TO JOY DIVISION
Ian Curtis is resurrected in a superb big-screen bio-pic that sounds great and looks even better, especially if you know very little about his band.
APR 13, 2008 - HAD DON MCLEAN’S VINCENT NOT BEEN NAMED SO, had it not been such a readily identifiable tribute to van Gogh, it could have been a chronicle of Ian Curtis. All that heartfelt crooning about “how you suffered for your sanity” and “they would not listen, they did not know how” and “this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you” could just as easily characterise this lead singer of the post-punk band Joy Division, whose abbreviated lifespan (he died at a ripe 23) is best described in his own words from the song Heart and Soul: Existence, well what does it matter / I exist on the best terms I can / The past is now part of my future / The present is well out of hand. The latter lyric, about the present being “well out of hand,” is especially significant, because Curtis suffered from epileptic attacks, sometimes even while on stage. In other words, there were times he had no control – metaphorically, literally – over his life, his body, and that makes Control a nicely ironic title for a film based on his story.
An instinctive reaction to this information would be a roll of the eyes, followed by the groan, “Not another rock bio-pic” – and yes, the usual beats are all here. Young man, poetry in his soul and stars in his eyes, becomes part of a band; he and his comrades get a manager, get on TV, get on stage, get on the road, get high; the young man, meanwhile, gets married, has a baby, has an affair; the more successful they are, the more depressed he gets; on the eve of his band’s first American tour, he kills himself. But the director, Anton Corbijn, skirts the expected rock-god clichés. He resists the temptation of trying to explore Curtis any further – the way, say, Oliver Stone would have, possibly employing each epileptic attack as a convulsive springboard into a phantasmagorical inner world – and the result comes off less the chronicle of a musician than a sad, little movie about a sad, little man. (Almost as if to enhance the doom-and-gloom of the narrative – or perhaps because such images as the thin, vaporous triangle of a smoker’s exhalation lose their mystery in full colour – Control is shot in velvety black-and-white.)
Corbijn’s singular mission seems to be to offer evidence that were it not for his subject’s writing talents, were it not for the fact that he was in a band, were it not for his untimely suicide, Curtis would be you or me – a man who works at an employment exchange (and is not fashionably unemployed) and likes Wordsworth (and not Rimbaud) and who even dances funny, like a stick-figure-chicken flapping its wings. This anonymity – this nowhere-man-ness of Curtis – may be further pronounced if, like me, you’ve not listened to the band earlier, which makes the songs seem like they’ve been expressly written for the film. They’re not once-upon-a-time hits this story is built around; they’re simply the soundtrack to this story. Besides, the real music is in what Curtis writes, what he says. When Joy Division is interviewed by the woman who’ll become Curtis’ mistress, she asks about their music, if it doesn’t contain beauty. And Curtis replies, with the faintest of smirks, “Some of it, yeah. But some of it is not meant to be beautiful.”
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I’ve never listened to Joy Division. (In fact, I didn’t even know such a band existed prior to reading your piece here). But a lot of what you say about Curtis reminds me of another (much more famous) classic-rock icon also with an “abbreviated life span” (yes, Morrison). Maybe it’s The Doors you allude to when you mention Oliver Stone here? I saw the movie 5 years back (having never heard of the band prior) and then checked out some of their albums…awesome stuff. How Morrison blatantly courts death in some of his songs (at the height of his fame) reminds me of what you once wrote about Floyd “Oh, those poor guys! All those best-selling albums! All those millions. And they still sound tortured enough to slit their wrists.” And that bit about Curtis having an affair with a journalist who interviews the band…so did Morrison. Talk about great minds thinking alike!
Sagarika: yes, I was referring to the Doors movie.
Have you seen 24 Hour Party People with Steve Coogan in the lead? He plays the manager of Joy Division. The movie’s more about the whole Britpunk scene of those times, and Ian Curtis left a memorable impression on me, although I haven’t heard anything by Joy Division
Umm… Given the depth of what you usually write on film and books, I wish you’d checked up on Joy Division before writing this; a truly great, influential band, and one whose stature explains much of what Corbijn was up to. As it is, the review comes across much like the time I was being ragged in engineering college — I honestly thought Kalyanji Anandji (& other such twosomes) was one guy and that there were about 10-20 film songs in all. My would-be tormentors were fairly gobsmacked by this remarkable display of ignorance, I suspect. At any rate they shut up and stopped ragging…
Kenny: Nope. Haven’t seen 24 Hour Party People.
Hari Menon: The depth is lacking precisely because of the reason you mention: I’m not familiar with their music, a point I make in the piece itself. (Or are you saying that only those who’ve heard bands are qualified to write about films based on their music?) That’s why I wrote more about the movie than their music. But you’ve given me something to chew about for a future column…
Hari Menon: Jeez - we’re everywhere, aren’t we?
Hari Menon: “Nothing apart from a lack of something to say should discourage anyone from writing!” Love it!! Such a refreshing variation on this beat-to-death W.H. Auden quote: “You owe it to us all to get on with what you’re good at.”