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"Sex, drugs & punk rock.
Add violence & time
travel & you have . .
. . Jubilee"

Derek Jarman's 'Jubilee' (1978) is a wildly beautiful film which strikes a precarious, and compelling, balance between sheer anarchy and genuine tenderness. Jubilee begins when Queen Elizabeth I (played with quiet power by Jenny Runacre, who also portrays Bod) has her court alchemist, the historical John Dee, summon Ariel. The sloe-eyed spirit with huge hands (whom Jarman describes as having "a glitter punk scintilla") transports all of them 400 years into the future – just beyond our own time – to a dystopic London, which has become a literal wasteland, overrun with violence and decay.

Let Jarman summarize Jubilee for you in his own words: "Law and order has finally been abolished and do-your-own-thing is the order of the day. The church is a strip club [and Buckingham Palace a recording studio].... Open war between all factions of society. A gang of bike girls centered at H.Q. in Southwark, rape and kill all adversaries, led by the Queen of Punk, Bod [Bodicea].... The music of groups like The Slits, Sex Pistols plays incessantly to rapturous reception. The film is anarchic and very beautiful."

"Leave the guy alone, he's better than a vibrator and he's bigger"

The film has misleadingly been called a "Punk movie." It is much more than that, although the then-nascent movement informs the film in many ways, from music to casting to tone. Punk's heyday was 1975–80, with its two key albums – The Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks and The Clash's The Clash – both appearing in 1977, the year Jubilee was filmed (coinciding with Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee). Punk provided a clarion voice for alienated teenagers in its mix of hard-driving rock, socially aware but simple lyrics – that crystallized the mood of anger, powerlessness, and rebellion in the face of a severe economic recession – and a confrontational style which extended from the songs to the fashions of its devotees. 'Jubilee' provides a virtual catalog of the Punk Look, from Mad's (Toyah Willcox in a stunning performance) close-cropped hair dyed Day-Glo orange to angsty graffiti which covers almost every wall to the scrawled quotation from 'Psycho' which ends "...wouldn't even harm a fly" which fills the back of the jackets worn by the female biker gang. You may recall Hitchcock's final scene, when the strait-jacketed Norman Bates, "possessed" by his dead mother, tells us how harmless he now is, yeah, right. Even a small detail like this resonates, since the tangled connection between gender identity and violence is one of Jarman's key themes.

"Most people would hang up the phone,
she's hanging on for dear life."

Jarman's brilliance as an artist allows him to meld all of these eclectic sources, and more (including his two wildly diverse stated sources: Punk fan magazines of the day and Frances A. Yates's The Art of Memory (1966), a classic study of how people learned to retain vast stores of knowledge before the invention of the printed page), into a film of consummate originality and power.

He also brings beauty and emotional resonance to the film through his characters. He creates a resonance with these eccentric, and sometimes lethal, allegorical people. Jarman is well-known for including friends and lovers in his films. Not only does this provide a cost-effective approach to casting, it also brings a deeply personal connection to his films. Jarman not only published his autobiography in book form, throughout his life he also shot hundreds of hours of Super 8 footage. Some of those "home movies" found their way into his feature films, including the surreal "Jordan's Dance" and Jarman also re-edited and incorporated into Jubilee "Amyl's Dance,".

"I just love a man without its uniform."

Despite its Punk trappings, ultimately the film seems more about Punk than of it. How Jarman uses then-rising star Adam Ant reveals much about the film and filmmaker. When Crabs meets, and instantly tries to pick up, Kid (Adam Ant's character), she coos that he is "gorgeous." With his sweetly boyish persona – made just a bit wild by the black leather and painted-on lower sideburns – it is no wonder that Jarman, as reported by a friend on the DVD's documentary, fell "madly in love with him." But how Jarman uses Kid in the film may reveal at least as much about his sociopolitical insights as his romantic frustration. When Kid is asked what he does, he replies, "Nothing... Music." And throughout he is as passive offstage as he is frenzied onstage. His performance with his group, Adam and the Ants, is one of only two or three full musical numbers in the film; and it strikingly reveals Jarman's gifts as one of the originators of music videos.

But Kid is unable to connect with anyone, including Crabs. He seems content to lie on his stomach while Crabs pulls his t-shirt up and strokes his back, and that only because she has promised to introduce him to Borgia Ginz (played by "Orlando," aka Jack Birkett), the mogul who controls the entire world's media and hence political, and even religious, power structure. (Ginz shares a palatial mansion in Dorset with an aged Adolf Hitler.) Ginz is, of course, taken with Kid and signs him, immediately rechristening him "Scum." Claiming that's commercial. It's all they [the audience] deserve."

"It's like pornography; better than the real thing."

In the "triangle" between the two teasingly incestuous brothers, Sphinx and Angel (who utters the classic line, "I didn't know I was dead till I was fifteen."), and the artist Viv there was real connection and tenderness between all three of them, despite what many people would consider the highly "problematic" nature of their relationship. The brothers read as a gay couple and Jarman describes Viv as a "butch dyke." Yet they go to bed together; although the morning after Sphinx and Angel again seem more interested in each other than in Viv. What makes their relationship so poignant is that Jarman then goes on to show us their day together, which is the most genial sequence in the film. They also introduce us to the most hilarious character, Max – the Bingo king and former pimp, who now has a huge garden entirely of artificial flowers. (Max is played to the hilt by Neil Kennedy, who was a comparable character with the same name in Jarman's previous film, 'Sebastiane'.) You will not soon forget what happens when Max, horrified, spots a caterpillar on one of his plastic plants.

"Scum. That's commercial. It's all they [the audience] deserve."

Perhaps the most haunting, and disturbing, image of Kid is the close-up of Kid kissing his own image on TV and a moment later, he licks the screen lasciviously with his tongue, giving a decidedly postmodern twist to the myth of Narcissus. And on still another level, Jarman was showing his foresight into Punk's future. Just a few years after the release of Jubilee, as the filmmaker wrote in his memoir Dancing Ledge, "the film turned prophetic.... the streets burned in Brixton and Tosteth. Adam [Ant] was on Top of the Pops and signed up with Margaret Thatcher to sing at the Falklands Ball." Jarman concluded the passage by repeating the chilling words he gave Borgia Ginz at the end of 'Jubilee': "They all sign up in one way or another."

" . . and cries and cries, clutching herself, rolling . . "

The film's most overwhelming moment comes from an unlikely source: Mad. At one point, she and Amyl go off on a vendetta against two of the fascistic police officers. They find one, alone, taking a pee. Mad whips out her knife, as she and Amyl jump him, wrestle him to the ground, kicking and screaming. Then Mad, in a frenzy, castrates him. Although this is not Jubilee's only scene of "ultra violence," the result is unprecedented. Mad breaks down – the only time any character does this in the film – and cries and cries, clutching herself, rolling. Shockingly, this moment feels absolutely real. Significantly for the film, as actress Toyah Willcox (Mad) notes in the documentary on the DVD, Jarman shot a huge amount of film for this project. But this was the only instance where he included the "extended" footage. By implication, Jarman forces us to confront the full human toll taken by life in a completely anarchic world, without any order or social restraint. Although much of the film has depicted an ebullient, even enticing, picture of life in this near-future wasteland, this scene stops us cold. It forces us to reconsider the price of absolute "freedom" – and the deeply complex connections between anarchy and beauty – even as it humanizes the most dehumanized character in the film. It's an extraordinary, raw, literally visceral scene, and one which most will not soon forget.

No one can live in such a world, even in its ultimately commercialized form as 1970s Punk, with mass-produced albums and Punk boutiques. But Jarman ends his film on a much more subtly problematic note. In a hauntingly beautiful coda, we see our Elizabethan time travelers back in their own "Golden Age," as they walk along a placidly beautiful sea coast. But Elizabeth longs for a still earlier, and more pure, time, when she asks, "Oh, John Dee, do you remember those days? The whispered secrets at Oxford, like the sweet sea breeze? Codes and counter-codes." The 'doubleness' of her "codes" remark reminds us of the complexity of her reign: Does Jarman expect us not to know about the Machiavellian (or Borgian) intrigues, and murders, which marked the historical Elizabeth's court? As Mad remarks near the film's beginning, "There are no heroes." – yet Jarman acknowledges how we long for them, for a leader like Elizabeth, whom he describes (in his notes on Jubilee) as "The Virgin Queen, distant yet sympathetic, the paradigm of royalty." And what about John Dee, with his multiple nature, as another possible "hero"? He was a man half in the superstitious past (as an alchemist and magician) and half in the modern world (as one of the first scientists). The film nicely, and again - ironically, circles in on itself. Happiness is swept away with hope to be replaced by despair, all at the doing of the punks who are only acting out of what they feel is justice. Self destruction reigns supreme.
Again, Jarman gives us no clear, or simple guides for our own lives. ~ J. Clark

FILM INFORMATION: 'Jubilee'

Web: Cast, Bios and Additional Details at IMDb
Director: Derek Jarman
Writer: Derek Jarman
Cast, Crew & Credits: Full Cast, Crew & Credits
Genre: Drama | Music
Awards: 5 wins & 1 nomination
Runtime: 90 min
Spoken Language: English

FILM CLIP: 'Jubilee'



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