Quadrophenia

I JUST CAN’T EXPLAIN

How is a fan to write a serious study on a favourite film? Looking at the ‘convertibility’ of the subcultural capital acquired through cult fandom, Joanne Hollows, drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Sarah Thornton, makes a division between those who convert it into economic capital through careers in fields such as retailing, distribution and magazines, (a notable core Mod, Justin de Villeneuve, became the svangali for Twiggy’s rise to international success) and those who convert it into ‘proper’ or cultural capital, frequently within academic writing (such as this monograph) (Hollows 2003: 48–9). This latter ‘conversion’ can be problematic since such writing tends to reproduce rather than question subcultural ideology, partly because the author finds it so enjoyable, but mainly because it can be ‘defiant’ to exegesis. Dave Marsh, biographer of the Who but no great fan of ‘Quadrophenia’ the album, complained that its greatest ‘confusion’ was to make Jimmy a Mod since this made him incomprehensible to most people – certainly most non-Britons and also to the many people in the UK whose lives had not been touched by Mod. A contemporary film like George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973) could travel, Marsh argued, both extrinsically, because its lifestyle had already been exported in pop films and music, and also intrinsically, since the culture described in Lucas’ film was genuinely pop – only ‘adults’ were excluded. Conversely ‘Mod was a real cult; it defied translation; which is one reason why it was the only important aspect of sixties British pop culture not adopted by Americans’ (Marsh 1983: 421). For Marsh this insularity was not necessarily Townshend’s fault: he needed a vehicle to reassess the historical importance of the Who, and a radical stage for Jimmy ‘in order to examine that aspect of Sixties idealism which was the philosophy “Quadrophenia” really represented’. Instead, the problem was that the album had been primarily interpreted by critics and reviewers whose own past had been moulded by their early encounters with the Who and with Mod. Quoting the effusive New Musical Express album review by Charles Shaar-Murray who states that ‘to those of us in the provinces, the Who were Mod’, Marsh extrapolates this state of affairs to both sides of the Atlantic: ‘Even in America, Mod had some following. Among the most rabidly Anglophile fans, it was a quiet cult that included just the sort of person who was liable to become a rock critic’ (ibid.). Marsh implies here, not just an over-reverential approach from an otherwise viperfish rock press, but the on-going question of judgement for the critic – the extent to which the terms of critical discussion should be taken over from, or adapted to, the discourse of the artist under consideration. Quadrophenia poses special problems in this respect, since there is a considerable reflexive element in Townshend’s compositions: songs quote from previous songs lyrically and melodically, while both ‘The Punk And The Godfather’ and ‘5.15’ quote the stammer of ‘m-m-my g-g-generation’; in addition Roddam’s film visually references the album’s artwork while its characters speak dialogue at times adapted from the album’s lyrics. This multi-layered reflexiveness creates a work which makes continual reference to the conditions of its own functioning: it thus proffers an enclosed conceptual world which comments on itself, tempting critics to make their own judgements an echo of this self-commenting.1 Furthermore, Townshend has always proven himself an articulate, thoughtful writer and interviewee, offering an alluring set of terms and ideas for the discussion of his work – his commentary to the 1997 Quadrophenia Live DVD is something of a masterclass in critical illumination.

How to react to this? The danger is to operate so much within the terms of Townshend’s own thoughts that the critic fails to provide substantial points of purchase on undoubtedly complex material by bringing it into comprehensible relation with other modes of understanding. One could argue that this is equally true for several contributors to the film: Mod writers Stellman, Fletcher, even Meaden all fed in memories and anecdotes, creating circles within circles of Mod-dom. It is here, though, that the more collaborative nature of film proves beneficial. Director and co-writer Franc Roddam is pivotal to the creation of a critical space; an observer rather than practitioner of Mod, Roddam took the ideas Townshend had invested in the double album and expanded them in line with his own hinterland in social realism. His addition of a back story, a layer of London social context was important: so too was the introduction of further characters, since the young cast this necessitated brought a fresh, punk-inflected sensibility to bear on their interpretations. These differing agencies all help Quadrophenia to house both an intimate recreation of Mod but also an antithetical stance, competing frames of reference germane to its depth of meaning and openness to diverse interpretation. Quadrophenia’s appeal lies largely in opening a hermetic subculture to its social realist context: as such it is a cult film that dares to explore the dangers in being part of a cult; it is a Mod film that points out the potential mindlessness of Mod.

Marsh’s view on the ubiquity and accessibility of American youth culture highlights another potential danger, the ‘diluting’ of Quadrophenia’s USP, its evocation of a quintessentially (quadracentially?) British youth movement. The recourse to transatlantic points of reference has been evident right from initial responses: for instance, Paul Taylor wrote in 1979 that the film offers a ‘restrained evocation of that cornerstone of the “adolescent angst” movie, Rebel Without A Cause’. For Taylor the Brighton sea on which Quadrophenia opens ‘subsequently represents for Jimmy the same mysteries as the starscape did for James Dean’ while ‘the almost literally cliffhanging finale is Jimmy’s chicken-run with himself’ (1979: 199). It is undoubtedly a fruitful, enlightening comparison. The extended metaphor of the cosmos in Rebel Without A Cause explores alienation as an existential malaise, with Jim Stark’s problems arising ultimately from our abandonment in a mechanistic and uncaring universe, devoid of all meaning except that we choose to create for ourselves. An oceanic equivalent washes over Quadrophenia. Long before Jimmy gazes into the waves at Brighton, he practises total immersion at the public baths, a scene that links with Kevin’s later condemnation of their codes and costumes as meaningless – ‘underneath we’re all the same’ – to which Jimmy retorts that ‘you gotta be somebody or you might as well jump in the sea and drown!’ His father tells him that the music of the Who, the group with whom he so identifies, ‘sounds like a drowned dog’. Twice he escapes moments of turmoil to sit and stare into the waters of a nearby canal. At the Brighton Ballroom he dives off the balcony, as if in a dry run for his final headlong ride over Beachy Head.

Let me get back to the sea: Jimmy and the oceanic imperative.

However, alongside such a philosophical approach, both films equally interpret teenage angst as experiential, stemming as much from dysfunctional family life as elemental indifference. This allows for ‘cod Freudian explanations’: Jim’s need to find masculine identity, to be both himself and at home, is complicated by the failure of his father to provide the necessary patriarchal stature against which the son can test himself. ‘His apron-wearing, hen-pecked father is, in the parlance of the time, “castrated”’ (Cook and Bernink 1999: 221). Jimmy’s father gives him a slap for coming home late but cannot maintain the disciplinarian stance and he too remains the ineffectual, ‘castrated’ father – harangued in the street by his wife, unable to operate in the bedroom. Thus, the way both youngsters adopt the foetal position, Jim at the start on the pavement, Jimmy near the end while watching waves lap against him on the beach, may be interpreted as ‘linking [their] desire for meaning with Oedipal regression’ (1999: 170).

Maybe. Though rarely explored to such ‘depths’ of erotic subtext, Jim / Jimmy has become an enduring, even obligatory comparison. Fred Dellar’s early compendium of ‘Rock Cinema’ saw Quadrophenia as ‘a latter-day Rebel Without A Cause, with Daniels as a 1964 James Dean’ (1981: 130). It was to Dean’s character that Danny Peary turned for elucidation in his pioneering work on cult movies: Jim and Jimmy ‘equally represent all volatile youths in throes of growing pains, in desperate search for their identities’ (1984: 134).2 For British writers it remains ‘about growing pains and youth culture, with Jimmy an updated version of his namesake in Rebel Without A Cause’ (French and French 1999: 172). Other points of contact continue to reach out across the water: personally Quadrophenia’s ending has always conjured up comparisons with the final scene of Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) where Peter Fonda’s Harley Davidson ‘Chopper’ flies through the air, then catches fire as the camera floats up to view the long wide river alongside the highway, and Roger, McGuinn not Daltrey, starts to sing ‘The Ballad of Easy Rider’. This biker bookend to Jimmy’s Mod conflagration also has much to recommend it by virtue of comparison and contrast: Easy Rider is an elder sibling study of alienation and youthful disappointment with outsider, essentially innocent characters desperately fleeing the system; it both revels in the hippy movement yet is critical of it – Fonda’s character, Wyatt, acknowledges to Billy that their search for spiritual freedom had failed, that ‘we blew it’; it was also the first feature film truly to integrate rock music into its entire story line, moving from orchestral background to foregrounded expression, as does Quadrophenia (Monaco 2003: 187–8).

RECALLING OTHER NAMES

However, in an essay centred on Easy Rider Mark Shiel has warned how the academic desire to embrace movies as cult products risks ignoring the historical and cultural context in which particular films originally circulated, and as such diminishes rather than enriches their understanding. This highlights a third potential danger for cult film criticism, that it will endorse, even facilitate ‘the commodification, dehistoricization and de-socialization of the cultural objects it values or examines’ (Shiel 2003). This ‘decontextualising’ is clearly problematic for a film as specifically socio-historically situated as Quadrophenia and, for all the mileage America can offer, analogies far closer to home are equally applicable and potentially more relevant to the film’s overall meaning. A basic comparison of family backgrounds brings the dialogics of social class into the picture: Jim Stark and company, for all their archetypal angst, were well-off, bourgeois, college kids whilst in Quadrophenia ‘the British working-class patois was so extreme it was almost the point of a lot of the dialogue’ (Robert Sandall: DVD documentary 2006). As much as the Stars and Stripes all over Wyatt connote a generation ‘looking for America’, the white cliffs of Beachy Head that preface and conclude Jimmy’s journey signify a work earthed in ‘Englishness’. If one looks at Soho-on-Sea before San Francisco then an indigenous and informing genealogy for Quadrophenia soon comes into view. Jim O’Connolly’s Smokescreen, a Butcher’s Film Services B movie from the apposite 1964, has a memorable pre-credit sequence where a blazing Hillman Minx Convertible hurtles over the cliff-face, again, we later learn, unoccupied. The film’s central character, Peter Vaughan’s parsimonious insurance assessor, may not have the mythic counter-cultural resonance of Peter Fonda’s ‘Captain America’, but Smokescreen’s use of extensive location footage (it was made at Brighton’s own film studios), gives the film a firm sense of place, a genius loci at least the equal of Roddam’s later Brighton foray.3

Easy Rider English-style: Jimmy’s rejection of the Mod ideal.

The comparison allows us to place Quadrophenia in a select British sub-genre, the Brighton (Beach) Movie. Brighton has a full cinematic history, from Robert Paul’s one-minute On Brighton Beach (1986), through Brighton Rock (John Boulting, 1947) and Genevieve (Henry Cornelius, 1953), up to London to Brighton (Paul Andrew Williams 2006) and the remake of Brighton Rock (Rowan Joffe, 2010). The fifty plus films made either in or about the coastal town have been termed ‘projections of what could be described as a national unconscious’ (Gray 2007: 65) but they also depict individual and conscious appetites. Especially since teenagers and their spending power came to the fore in the fifties Brighton’s libertarian reputation has proved an irresistible attraction both to the hormonal young looking for lust and hard-nosed film producers keen for a quick cash-in. Prophetic of the Mod moves to come, Linda (Don Sharp, 1960) tells of a scooter boy taking his girlfriend, Carol White, on a day trip down to Brighton, hoping for something more than sightseeing and a stick of rock. His rebuttal makes for an icy return journey. Overly optimistic on musical ‘scenes’, Lance Comfort’s Be My Guest (1965) sees David Hemmings and his pop group foil an unscrupulous promoter and set up the ‘Brighton Beat’ movement. With a paucity of pantheon pop stars, the film’s Mod credentials were boosted by the casting, in an acting role, of Steve Marriott of the Small Faces. More ruefully, Made (John Mackenzie, 1972) brought Carol White, now a single mother with a dead-end job, back to Brighton on a youth club outing. While on the beach she meets and falls for folk singer Roy Harper, though he soon leaves her to pursue his musical career.

A knowledge of such Brighton movies and their characters’ motivations can provide a historically specifiable ‘connection to a social base, or to a full, overdetermined (in the structuralist sense) social, political, cultural and economic context’ (Shiel 2003). Simultaneously, it depicts a liminal space, a threshold where ‘the physical geography informs the social conceptions of the space, evoking notions of transformation, ritual and renewal’ (Allen 2008: 55). Such spaces thus allow investigations of a changing context. With its Hare Krishna singers and hippy beachniks, Made shows where the Mod movement went after its ‘soft’ wing diverged into experimenting with drugs and mysticism. Its ‘hard’ wing developed into Skinheads, a grouping explored in Barney Platts-Mills’ debut feature Bronco Bullfrog (1970), largely cast and set, like Quadrophenia, in London’s teenage wasteland. Using young actors from Joan Littlewood’s ‘Playbarn’ project at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, the film follows the aimless council-house life of 17-year-old welder’s apprentice and proto-Suedehead Del Quant (Del Walker). Though an awkward and ineffectual tough guy, Del helps to rough up a rival gang member, joins his own gang-hero Bronco (Sam Shepherd) in a railyard robbery, has a friend badly beaten up in a revenge attack and, after constant parental arguments, elopes to the country with his under-age girlfriend, Irene (Anne Gooding); he returns disillusioned, has his motorbike run over by a lorry and parts company with the fugitive Bronco. As Nigel Andrews notes, ‘The central idea – Del’s persecuted but persistent attempts to get more from life than his environment is ready to offer – establishes itself in a pattern of gentle anti-climaxes that give the film, despite its loose structure, a kind of emotional unity’ (Monthly Film Bulletin, 37, 432–3: 215). Though never cited as an influence by Pete Townshend, there is a marked resemblance between several photos in the booklet accompanying the ‘Quadrophenia’ album and scenes from Platts-Mills’ depiction of working-class teen life in East London, notably cadre shots of terraced housing, the Blackwall tunnel, cafe and kitchen interiors. Several plot turns, images such as Del with Irene riding pillion, even snippets of dialogue – ‘bit flash, inee? – also resonate with Roddam’s later treatment.

Platts-Mills had been an uncredited assistant editor on John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving (1962) and, with its black and white working-class setting, Bronco Bullfrog has ‘kitchen sink’ / New Wave stylistics allied to its contemporary cultural content. The tropes and techniques of British New Wave cinema similarly contribute to the style and meaning of Quadrophenia. For instance, one of the signifying practices of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960) is its use of the sound bridge. When Arthur Seaton is out cycling, he is swallowed up by the solid wall of industrial noise before we cut to find him at his lathe. Heard even over the opening credits, this sound device functions ‘as a major indicator of the factory’s social power’ (Laing 1986: 121). In 1960 labour still encroaches on leisure time, foreclosing options. In Quadrophenia Roddam employs the same editing device but to opposite effect: as Jimmy, newly attired in his Dave Wax tailored suit, gazes at the press cuttings on his bedroom wall the sound of engines invades his consciousness before we cut to the open road and a convoy of Brighton-bound scooters. By 1964 (or 1978–79) it is play before work that dominates – the ‘youthquake’ has shaken up traditional attitudes to working practices. This is not a ubiquitous view, however. Paul, significantly older than the other Mods of whom he is faintly contemptuous, accepts his work and is critical of ‘young Jim’ for taking the day off: ‘you’ll be getting like them bloody beatniks before you know it. Ban the bombers who do fuck all for a living! You don’t work, you don’t get no money – and I like money.’ Older, wiser (or worn down), Paul has the age and outlook of an Arthur Seaton. Steph, however, displays evident alienation as a supermarket cashier – ‘Saturdays, I hate ‘em!’ – and her abruptly curtailed discussion with Jimmy about Brighton illustrates the majority Mod problem: how employment is both necessary to finance their hedonistic life-style, and yet, with its ethic of self-denial and self-discipline, is at total variance with that life-style. The Mod solution to the paradoxical demands of consumerism and work comes through time-expanding amphetamines, a chemical bridge between their hostile working life and the inner world of their ‘off-hours’ dressing up and dancing (Hebdige, 1976: 171). This ‘upper’ effect is replicated in Roddam’s sonic elongation, his reinvigoration of the sound bridge.

In an interview to coincide with the broadcasting of Dummy, Roddam had complained at the repeated failure of British attempts to recycle outdated formulae and called for his generation of television-based directors, more attuned to the social and cultural currents of their milieu, to be allowed to help achieve ‘a vigorous and exciting cinema’ (Screen International, 113, 12 November 1977: 7). For Paul Taylor Quadrophenia fully delivers on this promise: alongside its similarities to the work of Nicholas Ray, Taylor asserts that ‘it’s somehow appropriate that this almost immaculate realist reconstruction of a mid-Sixties cultural movement should be simultaneously a sort of coming-of-age for those strains of tele-naturalism and dramatised documentary which first came to prominence about that time with the Loach-Garnett-Gold contributions to The Wednesday Play’ (1979: 199). The documentary strain is evident in the big riot scene, with Tufano shooting in amongst the crowd and mostly between a height of three and six foot. The stylistic debt to tele-naturalism is best seen in the fluid camera work, as instanced in the single 86-second take that follows Jimmy’s arrival at the Kitchener Road party: the camera follows him into the hallway and putting his cigarette into the mouth of an African wall-statue, finding a drink, checking out two rooms, picking his cigarette up again and entering the dimly-lit living room to survey Steph, Monkey and others dancing. Technically, the use of a small dolly which could also crane allowed for such continuity of shooting, together with a smoothness not possible on a hand-held camera. The energy of the scene, however, emerges from methodology, allowing the actors to dictate the acting space and hence where the camera must follow. Nurturing what had been a necessity in his earlier documentary work, Roddam creates an equivalent performative space in the film’s only studio-shot scene. As in television drama of the sixties ‘there is a sense that the actors inhabit a space, rather than being constricted within a frame … The studio remains a studio but the actors invest it with meaning’ (Caughie 2000: 77). The director’s generosity occasions the naturalism in the moves and motivations of his young cast.

The depiction of television in Quadrophenia is not quite so generous. Charles Barr has noted how British New Wave films such as A Kind of Loving ‘depict television in a particularly vitriolic way’ (1986: 216). Given Roddam’s apprenticeship on the small screen, this trope is unlikely to be fully replicated in Quadrophenia and Jimmy’s enthusiastic response to the Who on Ready, Steady, Go! illustrates the exciting potential of the new medium. A generationally inflected critique is offered, nonetheless. When Jimmy returns late one night, having fallen asleep on the train – ‘I wound up in bloody Neasden!’ – his father’s comatose (castrated?) condition in front of the television mirrors the inertia of Arthur Seaton’s father after work. For Barr ‘TV is associated with the domestic, the feminine: the father in Saturday Night has been feminised’ (1986: 217): Jimmy’s mother is in charge here and, haranguing her son for ‘running about on them motorbikes all hours of the night’, tells him that ‘it’s not normal’. She does so without taking her eyes off the television screen, which is showing an episode of The Avengers – ‘The Frighteners’ (1961), a first season ‘pre-Mod’ offering of the ‘spy-fi’ adventure series that paired John Steed with Ian Hendry. The condemnation of her errant son is interspersed with the programme’s (appositie) dialogue: a criminal gang discussing a ‘psychopathic’ opponent and the need to take him to ‘a nice quiet piece of scenery and kick him to a bloody pulp’. Jimmy expresses the vitriol: ‘oh yeah? What’s normal, then?’ he asks (another favourite fan quote), his mother’s passive absorption of media violence differing here in a problematic degree from the furore generated over Brighton. Thereafter, like the New Wave young men before him, Jimmy ‘turn[s his] back on set and viewers in disgust and goes upstairs, in a liberating escape towards a space of individual desire’ (1986: 216).

DON’T YOU KNOW? DON’T IT SHOW?

Such provenance and praise have not sufficed, however, to raise Quadrophenia to cult status: popularity, yes, even belated academic acceptance, but why ‘cult’? Defining cult movies has always been as problematic as pinning down ‘Mod’: a recent collection of essays so entitled pointedly does not do what it says on the tin, asserting instead that ‘it is the process of making definitions and distinctions that is central to the cultural politics of cult movies’ (Jancovich 2003: 12). Equally evasive, the introduction to The Rough Guide To Cult Movies states that ‘there are almost as many different definitions of what makes a cult movie as there are cults in the world today’ (Simpson 2004: 6). Pace Mark Shiel’s strictures on production context, discussions of cult films are traditionally troubled by a double focus on both the intrinsic features of the film text and on its contextual reception, trying to analyse filmic features to discern how they create a cult movie, while also investigating the fact that a film is labelled cult through its interaction with a specific audience. Hence why, to tie in with a Stella Artois sponsored nationwide tour of ‘cult movies’, Franc Roddam was interviewed on 9 July 2004 by the Independent newspaper which asked him to select ‘The Ten Best Cult Movies’. Named only as ‘the director of Quadrophenia’, the inference of choosing Roddam was clear: Quadrophenia, a feature on the nationwide tour, had itself become a ‘cult movie’. It seems a secure assumption, having been selected not only by Peary for Cult Movies 2, but also featuring in Karl and Philip French’s Cult Movies and Ali Catterall and Simon Wells’ Your Face Here: British Cult Movies Since The Sixties.6 Roddam’s own (modest) choices illustrate the eclecticism of cult status, including usual suspects such as Performance and If … (Lindsay Anderson, 1968) but also more ‘mainstream’ and critically approved films such as Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950), My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946) and Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) (Roddam, 2004).⁷

Umberto Eco has also selected Casablanca as a cult movie. It is a choice that can baffle since Casablanca must be one of the most famous films ever made. But Eco’s canonical study – helpfully – provides parameters for cult status: ‘the work must provide a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan’s private sectarian world, a world about which one can make up quizzes and play trivia games so that the adepts of the sect recognise through each other a shared experience’ (1986: 198). Eco here is suggesting a crucial relationship between text and reception, implying that the ‘world of the text’ interacts with the ‘quoting of characters by fans’ through intertextual frames, ‘stereotyped situations derived from preceding textual tradition and recorded by our encyclopaedia’. Eco elaborates on this relationship, insisting that mechanisms in the reception of Casablanca can help us to understand the features of the film. Thus, the cult film ‘must display some organic imperfections’, be ‘ramshackle, rickety, unhinged itself’ and survive as ‘a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs’ (ibid.).8

Eco’s metaphor equates well with Quadrophenia since Townshend saw the source album as ‘a series of impressions. Of memories. You see a kid on a rock in the middle of the sea, and this whole thing explains how he got there’ (Marsh 1983: 415). Quadrophenia also has numerous intertextual frames. An occasional convention, inaugurated in 2008, brings available cast and avid fans back to Brighton. For adepts of the sect there exists a website devoted to ‘Quadrophenia’ in all its manifestations. www.quadrophenia.net, initiated by Dave Van Staveren in 2000, allows access to ‘The Mod Group’, a ‘Quadrophenia’ based chat group. This and similar sites enable fans to police the boundaries of and negotiate hierarchies within fandom, to distinguish a ‘real fan’ from an interloper or ‘tourist’ (Jancovich 2003: 198). That said, a ‘Quadrophenia tour of Brighton’ prides itself on attracting visitors from all over Europe, North America, Australia and Japan to explore the minutiae of the film’s location shooting (www.brightonwalks.com).⁹ Thus there are sites and sights aplenty for fan solidarity and competition.

A corollary to the attention to detail promulgated by such fan activity is a glee at locating errors and over the years Quadrophenia has shown itself to be fertile terrain. Initially placing Quadrophenia as a cult film because of its textual fractures could imply a definition by default, but Nathan Hunt has shown how trivia cannot simply be dismissed as an obsession with that which has no value or meaning: rather they are used to define ownership of specific texts, working ‘as a form of cultural capital within fandom’. Though open to general consumption, ‘through their use of trivia, fans lay claim to having special access to, and hence dominion over, specific texts owing to their supposedly superior knowledge of them’ (2003: 186). One of the distinctive – indeed infamous – pleasures in watching Quadrophenia, as noted at length on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), is to locate its myriad continuity errors. The following (accessed 26.06.13) is far from an exhaustive list:

• When Jimmy and his gang leave the Goldhawk Club to go after a gang of Rockers, John goes with them. However, in the next shot he is back dancing inside the club.

• Jimmy’s cigarette disappears between shots whilst handing pills to Steph in the café.

• The sign on the palm reader’s shop front changes.

• When Jimmy and Steph are running through the streets during the riot, Steph’s shoes change from white stilettos to dark flat shoes and back again.

• During the beach fight, John is fighting a Rocker in the sea, however in the next shot of the gathering in the narrow street he is bone dry.

• The fly-screen on the scooter that Jimmy steals disappears then reappears in the next shot.

• The shadow of the helicopter that filmed the final scenes on the white cliffs at Beachy Head is visible.

• Jimmy’s GS Vespa changes as he rides it off the cliff.

This ‘ineptness’ could serve as a calling card for cult inclusion since, with so many continuity errors, the film could be accused of being poorly made, a careless and cheap exploitation (Mathijs and Mendik 2008: 2). Considerably more potent for involved viewers, however, are the anachronisms evident throughout the film. Indeed, ‘there are so many historical gaffes in Quadrophenia that you run out of fingers and toes trying to catch up, and after a while they begin to look like deliberate insertions’ (Catterall and Wells 2001: 161). Again numerous such errors have been highlighted on web-sites. IMDb notes (accessed 26.06.13):

• When Jimmy enters the scrap yard to see Peter Fenton, ‘NF’ (National Front, a British white supremacist political party) graffiti is seen scrawled on the gates. The National Front was not officially formed until 1966, and its ‘NF’ symbol was not commonly seen in graffiti until the mid-seventies.

• Rockers are wearing ‘MOTORHEAD’ T-shirts but the band did not yet exist.

• A cinema advertising Heaven Can Wait (Warren Beatty and Buck Henry, 1978) can be seen in the background when the Mods fight against the Rockers.

• Although the film is set in the mid-sixties, the litter bins along Brighton promenade clearly show the ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ logo, but this was not introduced in England until the mid-seventies.

• The Pepsi logo on the Brighton ice cream shop window behind Steph, as Jimmy is carried off to the paddy wagon, was not introduced until 1973.

• During one of the riots, a Pelican crossing can be seen, introduced in the mid-seventies.

• A 1972 Ivory Mercedes Benz 200 passes by in the background as Jimmy steals Sting’s parked Vespa from the hotel.

• Many late-seventies cars (Cortinas) are seen in the background, particularly during the Goldhawk Road and Brighton Riot scenes.

• Routemaster buses (a type of London double-decker bus) in the film have the late-seventies boring white line-thru-circle London Transport logo, not the smart gold “London Transport” lettering they should have for 1965 [sic.] when the film is set. [We are informed that a similar time error occurs in Stardust.]

• There is a view out from Phil Daniels’ bedroom window, where a High Speed Train (also called the Inter-City 125) in British Rail blue and grey is seen to run past. The film is set in 1965 (sic) but the blue/grey paint scheme was not introduced until the late-sixties: this is a mere detail though, since the first production HST didn’t see service until 1975.

• The police in the riot scenes have hair hanging well over their collars – they are supposed to be 1964 vintage policemen, whereas in fact they are a mob of scruffy layabout seventies film extras.

• Some of the extras playing Mods have hair that is far, far too long, they just don’t look like sixties Mods at all. In fact they couldn’t pass muster as Rockers either.

• On Jimmy’s bedroom wall is an advertising poster for the Who on Track Records. Track Records didn’t form until 1967.

Picking up on the last point, sound as well as vision is fan-faulty. For Mark Kermode Quadrophenia is the best example of British producer Steve Woolley’s assessment of the function of pop music in the movies, which he describes as the cheapest form of period scenery or ‘wallpaper’ available to a film-maker: ‘if you can’t afford the sets, slap on a distinctive period tune and the audience will imagine the rest’ (in Romney and Wootton 1995: 17).10 But even here, as IMDb again notes, fans are quick to point out gaffes (accessed 26.06.13):

• The Who’s ‘My Generation’, featured on the soundtrack, wasn’t released until November 1965, over a year after the film was supposed to take place.

• The double LP ‘The Who Sell Out’ and ‘A Quick One’ special edition (prominently displayed in the Kitchener road party scene) was not released until 1974.

• Lyrically, ‘Bell-boy’ pushes Jimmy’s hero-worship of the Ace Face back to 1963, but his first sighting is at Brighton in 1964.

This enumeration of inaccuracy may seem tiresome but such incidentals double in importance when the film is about a ‘cult’ such as Mod. I quote at length not (just) to display my own ‘subcultural capital’ but to demonstrate that the disproportionate length such postings command compared to other internet-based film reviews provides plentiful evidence of Quadrophenia’s ‘organic imperfections’.

NOW YOU KNOW THAT WE BLAME YOU

There is a serious issue with these errors, however, apart from problematising claims for the film’s quasi-documentary realism. Popularity threatens fandom’s position of difference from, and opposition to, the mainstream: thus the film of a cult movement sets itself up not so much as a site of struggle for ownership but rather for disavowal. For purists such as Paul Weller and Paulo Hewitt, who wrote together The Soul Stylists, a survey of six decades of Modernism, Quadrophenia’s inaccuracies are not a battleground for subcultural capital but an out-and-out betrayal. The ‘private sectarian world’ which Eco accords to cult movies is true of Mod itself, arguably the cult movement ne plus ultra: as soon as the media move in, the hard core move on. Hewitt takes the anachronistic point-scoring to its logical conclusion, questioning whether any ‘real’ Mods turned up at Brighton beach. Hewitt argues that the genuine Mod movement was finished by 1963, its cover blown by Ready, Steady, Go!. The national publicity thus afforded the Mods ‘diluted the essence of the thing. Many felt affronted that their way of life was being trivialised every Friday night. By 1964 the Originals had joined their Modernist elders in Ronnie Scott’s and left so-called Mods fighting Rockers on the beaches’ (2000: 17). Note the dismissive ‘so-called’: once the movement went overground, Hewitt asserts that it ‘was taken up by idiots really, just beer boys and thugs – no self-respecting Mod would have been down at Brighton’ (Catterall and Wells 2001: 161). Perhaps for no other subculture has attention to detail mattered so much. As the blurb to Hewitt and Weller’s volume states, the Mods ‘are an eclectic family joined together by a tradition of secrecy, exclusivity and absolute indifference towards the outside world. They pass unnoticed because soul stylists always shun the spotlight. To them attention to detail is far more important than attention seeking’ (Hewitt 2000: rear cover). To ‘real’ Mods, not only did Quadrophenia open the door to a load of raucous wannabes, but the picture it portrayed was risibly inaccurate. Even storyline contributor Alan Fletcher conceded that ‘the look of Quadrophenia wasn’t 60’s Mod, and the kids in the film just don’t look Mod. It had a look of 70’s revival Mod in it’ (Catterall and Wells 2001: 161). Even there lay a further betrayal: the ‘original’ Mod revivalists – of which I counted myself a member – were themselves now losing their secrecy and exclusivity to a nationwide release. I did not berate the film as I recall some friends doing, but my ambivalence soon grew: Quadrophenia, by its very popularity, was letting down its core audience. It exemplified the invariable conclusion: ‘the simultaneous diffusion and defusion of the subcultural style’ (Hebdige 1979: 93).

YOU GOT ALTERED INFORMATION

There is a case for the defence with such anachronisms, nonetheless. In the mise en abyme of that 1979 audience, dressed up as a Mod and watching post-punks acting out a mediated version of the sixties Mod ideal (one can add another layer with the late-nineties re-release), I argued then – as now – that one can find a justification for the film’s indifference to chronological imperatives. It perhaps locates me at the softer end of the Mod spectrum but ‘for cult aficionados, it’s a large part of the appeal: democracy in action – one big happy family of Mods, past and present’ (Catterall and Wells 2001: 162). Context was all: given that the Who’s original soundtrack was a 1973 rock work, looking back ten years, and adapted to a film a further five years on, then the anachronistic nature of the whole enterprise came into focus, indeed became part of its rationale. Roddam himself realised this: over the years his put-down to fans who point out such historical inaccuracies is to tell them to ‘never let the facts get in the way of the truth’ and he frequently name-checks his erstwhile mentor Michael Powell and kitchen-sink doyen Tony Richardson who both appreciated Quadrophenia for that very reason: ‘They both admired the emotional truth in the film’ (ibid.). This modus operandi was there from the off: Warren Beatty and Heaven Can Wait was not cut out because ‘it was such a quick shot. It looked so good with the characters in the foreground I let that go deliberately’ (ibid.).

Heaven Can Wait: sloppy accident or serendipitous addition?

Though less deliberate, the cinema listing can be seen to support Quadrophenia’s final message, a felicity of the subcultural strategy enacted by the film. If ‘Quadrophenia’ the album roughly coincided with Stanley Cohen’s work on Folk Devils, its film version chimed with the publication of Dick Hebdige’s seminal Subculture: The Meaning of Style. The whole notion of subculture is dependent on ‘bricolage’, a metaphor developed from the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The French ‘bricoleur’ refers to a worker able to mend or maintain machinery by reusing items from elsewhere, sometimes improvising them to new use (rather like Pete in his scrapyard). In cultural theory the term refers to the processes by which elements are appropriated from the dominant culture, and their meaning transformed, often through ironic or surreal juxtapositions, to challenge and subvert that culture. Subcultures tend to be oppositional not in what they say, but the way that they say it, taking mainstream signs and bending them to new purposes. Hebdige shows how the Mods functioned as bricoleurs when they appropriated a range of commodities by placing them in a symbolic ensemble that erased or subverted their original straight meanings:

Thus pills medically prescribed for the treatment of neuroses were used as ends-in-themselves, and the motor scooter, originally an ultra-respectable means of transport, was turned into a menacing symbol of group solidarity. In the same improvisatory manner, metal combs, honed to a razor-like sharpness, turned narcissism into an offensive weapon. Union Jacks were emblazoned on the backs of grubby parka anoraks or cut up and converted into sharply tailored jackets. More subtly, the conventional insignia of the business world – the suit, collar and tie, short hair, etc. – were stripped of their original connotations – efficiency, ambition, compliance with authority – and transformed into ‘empty’ fetishes, objects to be desired, fondled and valued in their own right. (1979: 104–5)

Whilst an attempt to parody the logic of consumerism by resorting to excessive forms of personal expenditure, such ‘semiotic guerrilla warfare’ also requires that we regard these objects, rituals and meanings within dynamic historical and cultural processes – sixties Mods were also responding to a shift in the economy from traditional manual labour to nonmanual service industries (such as Jimmy in his advertising company). An equivalent cultural process of improvisation or adaptation is evident in Quadrophenia. Yes, the anachronisms may not have been the knowing intertextual play of the ‘sophisticated bricoleur’ of postmodern culture (Collins 1992: 337); they were undoubtedly accidents of filming, ‘“improvised” or made up (these are rough translations of the process of bricoleur) as ad hoc responses to an environment’ (Hawkes 1977: 51). Nonetheless, they remained in at the editing table and the ‘collage aesthetic’ thus achieved opens up new meanings for the finished product. Invited to work with the juxtapositions thus presented, the cinema hoarding showing Heaven Can Wait does not merely ‘look good’ but signifies as a prelude to the film’s conclusion where suicide is aborted and this life, rather than being left behind, is faced and challenged.

The same argument holds for the musical numbers. This is not just a case of Roddam’s use of the album ‘Quadrophenia’ on the soundtrack, a sound that had little in common with the Mod aesthetic of either 1964 or 1979 but was rather ‘a timely anachronism: brutish early ‘70’s rock’n’roll aimed at the hard rock market of its time’ (Stewart 1979). In his novelisation of Quadrophenia Alan Fletcher acknowledges ‘a certain amount of “poetic licence”’ with regard to some of the other songs referenced. His justification is that a song such as ‘My Generation’ was used ‘to illustrate some parts of the myth created by and around Mods’ (1979: 190). How, though, does this myth function? Hebdige has proposed that the aggression and incoherence of ‘My Generation’ constitute a ‘musical metaphor’ for the seaside Mod / Rocker disturbances of the year before. ‘Mod, it’s implied in the song by a series of formal echoes or correspondences, is improvisation within a tight framework: the tailored suit, the 4/4 beat of R&B, the … pulse of work and pleasure. But the pressure of constraint … of “clean living under difficult circumstances”, the accumulated pressure eventually takes us to the point where the contradictions can no longer be contained, where the pose can no longer be held’ (Hebdige, 1982). As such, Jimmy putting on the record at the party scene, a strategy that thwarts Steph’s smooching with Pete to ‘Rhythm of the Rain’ and brings all his male friends into the living room to dance, can be seen as a domestic prelude, a microcosm of battles to come both on the beach and within Jimmy’s psyche. Its inclusion establishes an aesthetically pleasing structural analogy – the ‘explosion’ at the end of ‘My Generation’ is more consciously collaged in Quadrophenia’s scooter-falling finale with the soundtrack splicing together the ends to ‘I’ve Had Enough’ and ‘Helpless Dancer’. This collage of diegetic and non-diegitic musical extracts also helps to provide the emotional truth so emphasised by Roddam. 11

I’M THE PUNK IN THE GUTTER

The acceptance of such readings depends on whether one adopts cultural investigation of a specific time (synchronically) or over time (diachronically). The latter strategy, necessary here given the elongated gestation of Quadrophenia, helps to take the film beyond an immediate, intransigent Mod audience, opening its qualities to a wider ‘cult’ appreciation without a ‘fetishistic separation or “reification” from their social base and multiple contexts’ (Shiel 2003). Catterall and Wells argue that Quadrophenia ‘avails itself of the myth-maker’s prerogative to mix anachronisms in order to achieve a sense of timelessness’ (2001: 162). Before that, though, such a ‘mix’ brings the film back firmly into the perspective of 1978–9 for Quadrophenia is, amongst its other generic definitions, a historical recreation. Robert Rosenstone categorises a number of strategies for rendering history in film: integral to all are omission and condensation which, with alteration and invention, depart from the norms of written history since they ‘create’ historical fact as a way of summarising data whose visual expression would otherwise be impossible or impairing to the dramatic structure of the piece (1980: 144–5). This is certainly applicable to Quadrophenia. Internet error-spotting tends to overlook the anomalous chronology of the 1964 seaside troubles: Chalky’s first words bemoan his father grounding him for the troubles at Margate, yet these occurred alongside the Brighton riots; Jimmy’s ‘On the Run’ headline clipping comes from the August Hastings stand-off, again post-Brighton. Rosenstone also discusses the more rarely employed ‘strategy’ of anachronisms which, beyond breaking the surface realism of the film, ‘work to demystify the pretensions of professional history, cast into doubt notions of historical distance and objectivity, and insist that the questions we take to the past always arise from our current concerns’ (1980: 149). Pierre Sorlin has pursued this point, explaining why historical films reflect their own period more than they represent the past. Through case studies of works such as The Birth of A Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915) and October (Sergei Eisenstein, 1928) he demonstrates that ‘we can only understand characters and events in historical films by referring to the years in which those films were produced’ (1980: 83). Put plainly, he avers that ‘history is no more than a useful device to speak of the present time’ (1980: 208).

Jon Savage would agree, arguing that ‘the movie Quadrophenia has very little to do with the high 60s, and everything to do with the period it was filmed in, the late 70s’ (1997: 16). So, is Quadrophenia a Mod film at all, or really a punk film in (dubious) Mod clothing? One can adduce direct links between the two subcultures. The Who’s ‘Substitute’ was an inspiration for punk: re-released in late October 1976, it re-entered top ten just as the Sex Pistols, who played it in their early sets, became the new ‘folk devils’. Punk foregrounded art school input, a move the Who had undertaken for Mod’s ‘group’ phase. Both subcultures expressed their affinity with young blacks: the Mods by imitating the ‘sharp’ look of Jamaican ‘rudies’; punk through their enthusiasm for reggae and occasional stylistic references to Rastafarianism. Conversely, where Mods had responded to the impact of consumerism on their lives, the punks reacted to a pervasive sense of imminent social collapse. Where the Mods’ ‘symbolic resistance’ was manifested through vanity and parody, the punks adopted a highly fragmentary style attempting to express chaos at every level, even challenging existing gender identities. Punk bricolage took lavatory chains, bin-liners and safety pins out of their domestic context and juxtaposed them with traditional fabrics such as tartan. For Graham Fuller, the two subcultures’ adornments may differ but ‘their sociological import is the same: it’s just that one is a revolt into style, the other a revolt into anarchy’ (1981: 1688).

It is an important difference, nonetheless. ‘True’ punk (again we enter the contentious terrain of subcultural exclusivity) was far less embraced by working-class youth than Mod and remained largely the domain of radical bohemians aiming explicitly to bring a revolutionary anger to British popular culture. There was indeed no ‘revolt into style’ here: punk took its basic ideology from the ‘anti-aesthetic’ tradition in European politics such as Situationism, the belief that political progress – conceived in anarchist or Marxist terms – could only occur once the very institution of art had been destroyed.12

Roddam himself does not accept the symbiosis or equivalence of sociological import: ‘The Punks were much more anarchic. Mod was a rebellion, not a revolution’ (Catterall and Wells 2001: 158). Academia would seem to be in agreement: Roddam’s film is absent from Claire Monk’s ‘Punk and British Film in the Late Seventies.’ Nonetheless, Quadrophenia ‘tangibly benefited from punk’s spirit’, a commodity that allows Radio On (Chris Petit, 1979) an honorary mention in Monk’s survey (2008: 82).13 It is there arguably in Quadrophenia’s very existence: punk regenerated not only the music business but rejuvenated British movies, with Quadrophenia forming part of the slipstream that created Jubilee, The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle (Julien Temple, 1980), Rude Boy (Jack Hazan and David Mingay, 1980), and carried through to post-punk offerings such as Breaking Glass (Brian Gibson, 1980) and Take It or Leave It (Dave Robinson, 1981).¹⁴ Significantly, when director Franc Roddam first discussed the film with Pete Townshend, they talked of punk, ‘not just as a musical movement but as something that they thought was going to influence fashion, architecture, design, all sorts of things, and possibly day-to-day-life most of all’ (Fuller 1981: 1688). It is there in the casting: Toyah Willcox and Sting, if not directly punk, were major post-punk or ‘new wave’ personalities; Mark Wingett, though then unknown, was a raw, full-on punk. (It is there also in the back-story to casting with the unsuccessful auditions by John Lydon and Jimmy Pursey.) It is there in the film’s format: as Kevin Donnelly notes, ‘punk arguably influenced Quadrophenia, in that it chose to eschew the artifice of the rock operas of a few years previously’. Being instead ‘essentially a drama with songs’, the film represented the Mods as ‘an earlier form of youth rebellion along lines that could be understood by a late 1970s punk-influenced audience’ (Donnelly 2002: 59). It is there in the film’s grim London locations, very similar to the depressing cadre of Breaking Glass. It is there, I feel, in the film’s moves: Jimmy’s balcony dive into the audience (another strategy to thwart Steph, this time with the Ace Face) was a staple of punk gigs but far too gauche for Mod. It is certainly there in the film’s language. Never mind the bollocks? The continued use of that particular expletive (a very post-Sex Pistols word) and the Mods’ unending swearing created a soundscape far more in keeping with a late seventies punk aesthetic. For purists it is there in the shift of the Mods’ class make-up inwards from the suburbs to the inner city and downwards from white to blue-collar. Jimmy, it must be admitted, has the perfect Mod workplace – an advertising agency, full of public school types that he can despise as much as they deride him. But his friends Pete and Dave work in a council tip and scrap yard respectively and Savage for one is adamant that no self-respecting Mods (let alone originals such as Marc Feld) would have dirtied their hands so. Noting such inauthentic tropes, Savage explains them as trading on ‘a kind of spurious latterday authenticity, in which the only “real” experience can be from “the Street”: you feel that it was made by people who took the punk rhetoric of “street credibility” totally seriously’ (Savage 1997: 16).¹⁵

The dance hall as well as the street creates this sense of overlap. It became difficult to attend a music gig in the late seventies without encountering, at the minimum, pockets of political violence with National Front members against the far left and punk films invariably reference this mood of national division. Sudden scenes of violence erupt with outriders in Jubilee, fascists in Breaking Glass and Teds in The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, while Skinheads even break the happy-go-lucky mood of the Two Tone Take It or Leave It, scrapping with Madness in the toilets of their west London debut gig. This ‘staple’ of the punk film grammar is present in Quadrophenia, with Jimmy and his fellow Mods dashing from the Goldhawk Club to find and beat up the Rocker Kevin. Excepting Jubilee and Breaking Glass, these films present if not celebrate a male world of peer bonding and martial grouping with sex taken where and when it’s offered: a toilet blow-job in Rude Boy is reminiscent of Jimmy’s knee-trembler up the Brighton twitten. Ultimately, though, it is the attitude as much as the action (and occasional anachronistic attire) that, for many, places Quadrophenia: ‘As the true retardation of Jimmy’s friends is slowly revealed, with their casual sexism, homophobia and racism, you’re so in the 70s that you think, well, why doesn’t somebody challenge them? And then you remember that, Oh, we’re supposed to be in the mid-60s – before all these pesky-isms had invaded youth cult discourse’ (Savage 1997: 17).

I’LL TAKE ON ANYONE

That discourse – the early orthodoxy of subcultural theory – has, from punk onwards, itself been strenuously challenged. Firstly, the tendency to interpret subcultures only in terms of resistance has been seen as creating an imbalance when placed alongside (majority?) pop cultures that advocate conformity, acceptance or incorporation. Indeed, such a division can fail to see how the two merge, as with punk itself, rapidly codified and incorporated into mainstream culture.16 If only tangentially, Quadrophenia is aware of how youth cultures face commercial incorporation and are targeted for general consumption and profit. Back at work at the advertising agency but badly hung-over after the suburban party, Jimmy retches in the toilet cubicle of the staff bathroom while his plumb-voiced bosses wash, shave and discuss their campaign for Perfect Blend cigarettes. The ‘People Like You’ film is going well, Fulford announces. ‘Yes, gorgeous tart!’ remarks Sir Jeremy Child of the ad’s lead. Still, Fulford feels their clients are getting greedy: ‘they want to corner the entire youth market. Cut right across the groupings.’ He has no worries for ‘As and Bs: training professionals, young managers, graduates, that type of person.’ As Jimmy emerges from the cubicle only to hunch over the sink between the two executives, Fulford looks down at him with undisguised contempt: ‘it’s the Cs and Ds I’m worried about. A little bit up-market for them.’ As they leave to view the rushes, Jimmy moves over to the hand towel, takes out a cigarette and lights up. Such self-referential positing of ‘real’ visceral youth against distant, disdainful adults and their ‘false’ marketing-speak can also be viewed as a trope intertextually redolent of the time in which the film is set, in particular the scene in Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night where George Harrison meets up with style guru Simon (Kenneth Haigh) only to be dismissed for his ‘pimply hyperbole’ and criticism of campaign totem Susan (Glynn 2005: 38–9).

Downmarket Jimmy with the As and Bs.

The very momentum of subcultural development, the idea that subcultures rise out of a calculated stylistic subversion of dominant societal norms, has also been challenged. Rather than beginning on ‘the street’ as authentic and subversive expressions of youth only to be later picked up by the mass media, it has been argued that ‘media and other culture industries are there and effective right from the start. They are central to the process of cultural formation’ (Thornton 1995: 117). If not quite there yet, Quadrophenia replicates Stanley Cohen’s thesis that Brighton was essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy created by media exaggeration: Jimmy’s bedroom wall featuring ‘Terror Beach’ and ‘Riot Police Fly to Seaside’; his father’s Daily Mirror headline ‘Fears of Another Weekend of Violence’; the ‘Big L 266 Wonderful Radio London’ warning of ‘Brighton shopkeepers putting up their shutters’ all connote a media fanning of the flames. This mediation is registered with the press photographer running in front of the Mods on the seafront, his furious snapping the catalyst for the outburst of their tribal chant. Jimmy’s mother’s subsequent beating of her son with a rolled-up Daily Mail indicates just how such media coverage could ‘stimulate hostile and putative reactions’ amongst readers (Cohen 1972: 28).

Thirdly, while cult fandom is still seen as ‘related to the legitimisation of masculine dispositions’ (Jancovich 2003: 3), subcultural accounts of youth have been accused of displaying an imbalance in gender divisions. By focusing on mainly working-class but overwhelmingly male subjects, ‘women and the whole question of sexual division have been marginalized’ (McRobbie 1980: 37). This is seen primarily in the lack of recognition of distinct female subcultures, but also in the failure to assess female participation in a given subculture. Again this is not entirely true of Quadrophenia. When Spider and his girlfriend are attacked and the boys all dash off from the Goldhawk Club in search of vengeance, the girls are more than happy to stay behind and dance together to ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’: it is only a brief scene but one foregrounding female Mod fashion and fun. It overstates the case to extrapolate from this that Steph and Monkey are strong autonomous women, but the film overall portrays them very much in charge of their sexual activity. Steph in particular has agency over desire: sexually liberated, she moves from man to man, seemingly uninterested in developing a stable relationship. It is Jimmy, by contrast, who is the pining romantic (in his way), clinging to concepts of true love and monogamy. Nor is this pro-active stance just the domain of the newly liberated young: when Jimmy first comes home he hears his parents arguing from the bedroom, his mother complaining at again being refused her conjugal rights – ‘I’ve always got to go to sleep: I’m fed up with it!’

Bleached blondes and bobby socks: sisters doing it for themselves.

JUST LIKE THE LESBIANS AND QUEERS

Thornton also critiques how the characteristics lauded in subcultures are commonly associated with masculinity, whilst those derided in mainstream culture are mostly associated with femininity (1995: 13). The problem here is that, if a subculture is continually characterised by ways in which it resists and transgresses the mainstream and if that mainstream is persistently gendered as female, then that subculture would seem to be reproducing existing power structures rather than challenging them. If not exactly foregrounding female characterisation or culture, Quadrophenia’s investigation of male bonding does not remain at the monotone level of macho aggression. Murray Healy suggests that ‘there’s something queer about all teen cults – just like dirty homosexuals, they’re dangerous, delinquent and demonised by the press … Both act as conspicuous reminders of what men should not be’ (1996: 27). More specifically, Dave Marsh points out how the group Mods of 1964 with serious ‘pill head’ habits and without the money to support them resorted to larceny and, ‘because Soho was one of London’s biggest homosexual cruising areas, considerable male prostitution’ (1983: 132). The larceny features in the giggling raid on the chemist’s shop but there is no open homosexuality visible in Quadrophenia. However, early scenes in the film sketch a potentially intimate relationship between Jimmy and his old schoolmate Kevin the Rocker. Their first meeting at the public bathhouse displays the film’s only nudity – male – and, after Kevin’s bath brush hits Jimmy, they face up then reminisce as equals. Though their Kinks versus Gene Vincent musical duelling should have revealed their separate group allegiances, these only become evident when Kevin later joins Jimmy in the cafe: evident too is Kevin’s despondency when two fellow Mods enter and Jimmy, fearful of losing face, beats a quick retreat. Undeterred, Kevin again takes the initiative, coming round to see Jimmy one evening in his backyard shed – another ‘space of individual desire’ (Barr 1986: 216). Agitated at the very sound of an approaching motorbike, Jimmy visibly relaxes when it is Kevin who appears and the subsequent discussion of their differing modes of transport is the occasion for Jimmy’s articulation of his creed – ‘I don’t want to be like everybody else: that’s why I’m a Mod!’ – the apogee of Eco’s ‘quoting of characters by fans’ (1986: 198). Around the paradox of Jimmy’s cri de coeur lies a further ambivalence: Roddam has suggested that Kevin ‘fancies’ Jimmy and points out the way the Rocker looks at and touches the arm of his old school mate (DVD commentary 2006). Alongside the bath house scene, this is the one time Jimmy is not dressed up to Mod orders, nor pinned down by peer pressure and has the chance to reciprocate a spontaneous kindness. Very much a ‘touching’ scene, it serves to present Jimmy with his first moral dilemma: to choose Kevin or the gang. It is not a plot line that the film cares to pursue, however, and Kevin disappears after being beaten to a pulp by Jimmy’s Mod mates in retaliation for the mild roughing up of Spider. Thus any hint of softness, let alone homosexuality, is suppressed. The stance is replicated at the level of characterisation: the way Jimmy and his mates, especially Danny Peacock, routinely harass and insult the tailors and barbers that style them – ‘no lacquer! Poofs wear lacquer!’- suggests a compensation for, if not a denial of, their own craving for the ‘unmanly’ pursuits of dressing up and looking good.

The Brighton riots may not be an obvious site for homoerotic intimacy but the shared cigarette between Jimmy and Ace Face in the black maria again (at least for Roddam) contains a thin bat squeak of sexuality. It is a prelude to some of the most effective scenes in the film when Jimmy, now at his most openly androgynous, returns to the coast in search of former glories. High on gin and the amphetamenes bought with his severance pay, he is caught topping up his eye-liner in the train toilet by an old woman: he turns and, ‘sadly ecstatic’, flips his eyelashes. The placing of Fulford on board presents the train journey as an intratextual summary of the life Jimmy is (vainly) leaving behind, but it again functions intertextually, once more resonating specifically with the 1964 of A Hard Day’s Night. Throwing his possessions out of the corridor window wins the admiring glances of two schoolgirls, much as the Fab Four’s antics had attracted the attention of Patty Boyd and her classmates. Then, sitting in a first-class carriage between two bowler-hatted commuters, he silently encapsulates the class warfare previously articulated between the obstreperous commuter – ‘I fought the war for your sort’ – and Ringo, who retorts ‘bet you’re sorry you won!’ The scene in Quadrophenia references a photograph from the album artwork closely enough to employ the same actor for one of the commuters, but the moving image adds to and greatly enhances the motionless cliché. Andy Medhurst has attributed to Dirk Bogarde’s delivery of the ‘confession’ scene of Victim (Basil Dearden, 1960) ‘the rare power of genuine subversion in popular cinema’ (1996: 128). Daniels’ very different performance here bears comparison. Perfectly embodying the ‘he-man drag’ so ‘greyly outrageous’ announced by Daltrey on the soundtrack, it is hard to detect a miscalculated stress: the eyes wide open yet opaque; the inflections at once distant and dreamy yet knowingly defiant in the literal attainment of a first-class ticket status. There is an awkward grace here in an (emotionally ‘moving’) still passage, positioned spatially between the pinstriped symbols of adult conformity but also temporally between two moments of eruptive conviction, with Steph along the street and then with Ace Face at the hotel. Indeed, from the demise of his own scooter through to the cliff-face casting off of Ace Face’s now vacuous Vespa, Daniels movingly captures the conflict in all its multiple evasions and betrayals, from agonised linguistic deadlock through to foul-mouthed releases of tension – ‘You slag! You cunt!’ and even, horror of horrors, ‘Bell-boy! Bell-boy!’

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 it: a bloody mad thing!’ When he gives up his job Dave again tells him ‘You’re bleeding nutty!’, while Steph’s final brush off – ‘If I’d known you were going to go off your bloody nut I wouldn’t have bothered. One minute you’re alright, the next minute you’re going bloody stupid’ – provokes the strenuous denial: ‘I told you, I ain’t fucking mad, right?’ Indeed so insistent is this slur accorded that one could plausibly take it as a typical teenage trope, picking on an associate’s known social stigma.

Secondly, the denial of any interior life seriously underplays the acting in the film: to cite an earlier foil to the ‘5.15’ tour de force, the scene when Jimmy collides with a GPO van depicts with complete conviction a young man’s descent into self-pitying despair. Deprived of all the external props that shaped his life – ‘you’ve killed my scooter’ – his solipsistic ranting conveys profoundly a torn and terrified teenage wasteland: there is no absence of void here. Depth and detail are also present in the minor key, for example in the rivalry from Dave to Pete, the ‘young buck’ keen to lock horns with the alpha male of the group. From the first exit of the Goldhawk Club there are menacing looks; Dave often gets up that bit too close; he then berates Pete on the phone to give them a contact for pills – ‘listen, you cunt!’ – before finally, down at Brighton, moving in on ‘his’ girl, Steph.

Thirdly, such an accusation underplays the film’s use of stylistic devices, often employed as a commentary on Jimmy’s state of mind. Quadrophenia undergoes a shift in tone in the closing half-hour, the post-coital, post-communal comedown that Jimmy cannot accommodate (but that Daniels acts so well). Roddam calls these final reels ‘closer to the original album’ and ‘more operatic’ in feel (DVD commentary 2006). ‘Melodramatic’ could also serve, if considered an expressive code ‘characterised by a dynamic use of spatial and musical categories’ (Elsaesser 1987: 51). Rather than failing to convey an interior life, it is characteristic of melodramatic scenes to ‘siphon’ off excess. The undischarged emotion which cannot be accommodated within the action is instead expressed through the soundtrack and surroundings: ‘music and mise-en-scène do not just heighten the emotionality of an element of the action: to some extent they substitute for it’ (Nowell-Smith 1987: 73). Music is employed to this end at regular intervals throughout the film. It functions as a register of Jimmy’s precarious state of mind when, on his first evening home, the lengthy hold as he cuts out the latest Daily Mirror front page allows a full playing of the opening verse and chorus to ‘Cut My Hair’ and couples the close-up of Jimmy alongside the Townshend photo with the singer’s lines: ‘Dressed right for a beach fight / But I just can’t explain / Why that uncertain feeling / Is still here in my brain.’ The music can equally parallel enacted changes in emotion. For instance, after the Kitchen Road party Jimmy takes his first trip to the canal: his inertia as we hear the opening verse of ‘I’m One’ – ‘Loneliness starts sinking in’ – changes with the chorus – ‘You’ll all see, I’m the one!’ Provoked at the sight of a sexual engagement denied to him, he suddenly drives hard at the couple canoodling under the bridge.19 When thrown out of the dance hall, Jimmy spends the night on the beach: dawn sees him staring out at the powerful, pounding waves. This scene eschews emotive close-ups: instead a long shot dwarfs him against the shoreline and the pier. Visually the scene all but obliterates the insignificant human presence; it is the music, the instrumental section from ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ that centres, low key via synthesiser and lead guitar, the brooding sentiment of Jimmy’s psyche. Finally, as the scooter crashes on the rocks and the credits roll, ‘Doctor Jimmy’ indicates that, with his fractured mentality, the struggle to comprehend the complexities of his life will continue.