I exist on the best terms I can
I loved Joy Division in high school and I’ve gone back to their stuff intermittently ever since. For an adolescent, the mystique of Ian Curtis’s suicide at the age of 23 had a lot of appeal (less so these days, though I still find the whole package – music, lyrics, singing – very compelling). I suppose at first I assumed that Curtis was your typical Romantic figure, an aesthete who couldn’t look away from the darkness, who in the end was simply not built for this intolerable world.
Later, I learned that he actually had some very specific problems: worsening epilepsy and a love triangle that had him guiltily bouncing back and forth between his wife, Deborah (with whom he had an infant daughter), and a Belgian fan, Anik. Those problems are the dramatic basis of Control, Anton Corbijn’s new Curtis biopic, which I found totally enthralling.
I also loved the previous Joy Division-as-characters film, Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, and found surprisingly little redundancy or overlap between the two movies. In the earlier one, you see Joy Division from the cheap seats, so to speak – the band are side players in the story of Factory Records owner Tony Wilson, so there seems to be little to their personalities beyond an aggressive ambition and a fondness for rock and roll decadence. I imagine that for unfamiliar viewers, Curtis’s suicide in the film must seem out-of-nowhere and baffling; after the death, the Tony Wilson character says something to the effect that “I want to make it clear that it wasn’t all doom and gloom with Ian.” But if you went into the film knowing nothing about him, it would never occur to you (until the contextless suicide) that there was any doom and gloom.
Which is cool with me – the movie is just one view of Curtis, one in which the suicide does not define the singer or the songs. It’s telling that 24 Hour Party People has a scene with the band onstage doing a pisstake of “Louie Louie,” but among the many musical numbers in Control there’s nothing so offhand or lighthearted.
Winterbottom’s view would seem to be the minority one, though – for most, any consideration of Joy Division’s records must be informed by the fate of Ian Curtis. And that seems to break down one of two ways. Either Curtis’s grim lyrics reflect something intrinsic about his sensibility, an innate existential ennui that made his suicide inevitable, or else they’re allegorical representations of the specific problems – the illness, the marriage – that eventually overwhelmed him.
There’s no question which side Control is on. The film begins with a voice-over of a few lines from “Heart and Soul” –
– and proceeds to sketch the contours of Curtis’s life and then fill in the shading. The marriage, the band, the epilepsy, the affair are all established fairly economically, and then in the latter third of the film the confusion and pain of the love triangle are simply dwelled on, in one long scene after another. All in a tone of grimy everyday realism, filmed in black and white. (By which I don’t mean to imply, by the way, that the movie is anything but gorgeous to look at.) When Corbijn cuts from a scene of Deborah and Ian fighting to one of Joy Division playing “Isolation” (“I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through, I’m ashamed of the person I am”) while Anik watches with increasing fretfulness, the message is clear.
Which I don’t have a problem with. Control just tells Curtis’s story from another angle. If it doesn’t tell the whole story of what was going on inside his brain – as Simon Reynolds notes, it ignores his fascination with rock stars dying young, his implicit understanding that death can be a career move – it’s still a powerful and very sad experience.
(Despite its realistic tone, by the way, Control also genuflects to the Joy Division mythos several times. Winterbottom’s movie explicitly took the Liberty Valance approach – “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend” – but it’s worth noting that both Control and 24 Hour Party People take pains to show us that Curtis watched Werner Herzog’s film Stroszek before killing himself, which is apparently true, and both show Tony Wilson signing the band’s contract in his own blood, which is apparently not.)
Anyway, I suspect that many fans will claim to find Corbijn’s version of events “reductive” or something, simply because they find the idea that existential ennui was at the core of Curtis’s being too attractive or intriguing to give up. And there will be some fans who don’t really want to think about Curtis as a person at all. Take Chris Ott, who wrote a book about the Joy Division album Unknown Pleasures (and who’s becoming kind of a bête noire for me – see here – as I come across more of his ramblings). On his blog, Ott writes of Control:
Yes, God forbid we should admit that there was actually a human being in there. At this point I’m gritting my teeth and reminding myself that name-calling is not productive.
Um, anyway.
I suggested that there are two ways to view Ian Curtis’s lyrics: as the expression of a tortured soul or of specific everyday problems. But there’s a third way, too: as a simple aesthetic pose.
After all, all kinds of bands both before and after Joy Division have purveyed dark imagery that didn’t necessarily reflect genuine inner torment. (Like, um, the entire Goth movement.) And we should remember too that said dark imagery is especially attractive to young people, and that Curtis was barely out of his teens, for God’s sake, when Joy Division got going.
You might argue that Curtis’s suicide automatically invalidates that interpretation. As Tony Wilson reportedly recalled:
But isn’t it possible that he didn’t mean it? That Closer was not a musical suicide note? That Curtis was an everyday life-loving bloke who simply had an adolescent’s infatuation with gloom and explored that in his art, and who – in a completely unrelated development – gave in to despair after his life started spiraling out of control? It’s admittedly hard to argue that “She’s Lost Control” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart” aren’t autobiographical in some way, but do “Isolation” and “Heart and Soul” have to be as well?
I should say that I’m playing devil’s advocate here – I actually highly doubt that Joy Division’s songs were completely unrelated to what was going on in Curtis’s mind. But I also want to say that I wouldn’t give a fuck if they were. You don’t need a suicide backstory to be unsettled and mesmerized by Unknown Pleasures and Closer. They’re powerful statements of modern industrial anxiety, which would be true even if Curtis had in fact retired to a civil service job in the suburbs and gardened for 25 years and raised throngs of children and grandchildren.
I’m also not saying that we should have no interest in Curtis himself. Control gives us one look at him, 24 Hour Party People another. Both are convincing, to me anyway, and undoubtedly neither tells the whole story. What could? But what I particularly appreciate is that neither movie treats him as a symbol or an icon; each of them reminds us that Ian Curtis was just a young guy from Manchester with some problems. Which is itself plenty enough of a “grand myth.”
***
Here are a couple bootleg classics. The first is from the unreleased “Warsaw” album (which has more raw energy than any of the official records, if not as much majesty or overall power) and the second is from a legendary show at the Paradiso in Amsterdam.
(Buy some official Joy Division stuff here.)
Later, I learned that he actually had some very specific problems: worsening epilepsy and a love triangle that had him guiltily bouncing back and forth between his wife, Deborah (with whom he had an infant daughter), and a Belgian fan, Anik. Those problems are the dramatic basis of Control, Anton Corbijn’s new Curtis biopic, which I found totally enthralling.
I also loved the previous Joy Division-as-characters film, Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, and found surprisingly little redundancy or overlap between the two movies. In the earlier one, you see Joy Division from the cheap seats, so to speak – the band are side players in the story of Factory Records owner Tony Wilson, so there seems to be little to their personalities beyond an aggressive ambition and a fondness for rock and roll decadence. I imagine that for unfamiliar viewers, Curtis’s suicide in the film must seem out-of-nowhere and baffling; after the death, the Tony Wilson character says something to the effect that “I want to make it clear that it wasn’t all doom and gloom with Ian.” But if you went into the film knowing nothing about him, it would never occur to you (until the contextless suicide) that there was any doom and gloom.
Which is cool with me – the movie is just one view of Curtis, one in which the suicide does not define the singer or the songs. It’s telling that 24 Hour Party People has a scene with the band onstage doing a pisstake of “Louie Louie,” but among the many musical numbers in Control there’s nothing so offhand or lighthearted.
Winterbottom’s view would seem to be the minority one, though – for most, any consideration of Joy Division’s records must be informed by the fate of Ian Curtis. And that seems to break down one of two ways. Either Curtis’s grim lyrics reflect something intrinsic about his sensibility, an innate existential ennui that made his suicide inevitable, or else they’re allegorical representations of the specific problems – the illness, the marriage – that eventually overwhelmed him.
There’s no question which side Control is on. The film begins with a voice-over of a few lines from “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
– and proceeds to sketch the contours of Curtis’s life and then fill in the shading. The marriage, the band, the epilepsy, the affair are all established fairly economically, and then in the latter third of the film the confusion and pain of the love triangle are simply dwelled on, in one long scene after another. All in a tone of grimy everyday realism, filmed in black and white. (By which I don’t mean to imply, by the way, that the movie is anything but gorgeous to look at.) When Corbijn cuts from a scene of Deborah and Ian fighting to one of Joy Division playing “Isolation” (“I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through, I’m ashamed of the person I am”) while Anik watches with increasing fretfulness, the message is clear.
Which I don’t have a problem with. Control just tells Curtis’s story from another angle. If it doesn’t tell the whole story of what was going on inside his brain – as Simon Reynolds notes, it ignores his fascination with rock stars dying young, his implicit understanding that death can be a career move – it’s still a powerful and very sad experience.
(Despite its realistic tone, by the way, Control also genuflects to the Joy Division mythos several times. Winterbottom’s movie explicitly took the Liberty Valance approach – “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend” – but it’s worth noting that both Control and 24 Hour Party People take pains to show us that Curtis watched Werner Herzog’s film Stroszek before killing himself, which is apparently true, and both show Tony Wilson signing the band’s contract in his own blood, which is apparently not.)
Anyway, I suspect that many fans will claim to find Corbijn’s version of events “reductive” or something, simply because they find the idea that existential ennui was at the core of Curtis’s being too attractive or intriguing to give up. And there will be some fans who don’t really want to think about Curtis as a person at all. Take Chris Ott, who wrote a book about the Joy Division album Unknown Pleasures (and who’s becoming kind of a bête noire for me – see here – as I come across more of his ramblings). On his blog, Ott writes of Control:
It is a blithe, Christian film that affords an even more casual means to pity or mourn or pretend to empathize with Ian Curtis, and as such it buries him, once and for all. The grand myth he became, the figure Factory made him—that he in all likelihood wanted Factory to make him—is cheapened if not undone by this ordinary, linear treatment.
Yes, God forbid we should admit that there was actually a human being in there. At this point I’m gritting my teeth and reminding myself that name-calling is not productive.
Um, anyway.
I suggested that there are two ways to view Ian Curtis’s lyrics: as the expression of a tortured soul or of specific everyday problems. But there’s a third way, too: as a simple aesthetic pose.
After all, all kinds of bands both before and after Joy Division have purveyed dark imagery that didn’t necessarily reflect genuine inner torment. (Like, um, the entire Goth movement.) And we should remember too that said dark imagery is especially attractive to young people, and that Curtis was barely out of his teens, for God’s sake, when Joy Division got going.
You might argue that Curtis’s suicide automatically invalidates that interpretation. As Tony Wilson reportedly recalled:
I asked [Anik] “what do you think of the new album”, she goes “I’m terrified'” I said “what are you terrified of?”. She replies “Don’t you understand? He means it” and I go “no he doesn't mean it, it’s art.” And guess what, he fucking meant it.
But isn’t it possible that he didn’t mean it? That Closer was not a musical suicide note? That Curtis was an everyday life-loving bloke who simply had an adolescent’s infatuation with gloom and explored that in his art, and who – in a completely unrelated development – gave in to despair after his life started spiraling out of control? It’s admittedly hard to argue that “She’s Lost Control” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart” aren’t autobiographical in some way, but do “Isolation” and “Heart and Soul” have to be as well?
I should say that I’m playing devil’s advocate here – I actually highly doubt that Joy Division’s songs were completely unrelated to what was going on in Curtis’s mind. But I also want to say that I wouldn’t give a fuck if they were. You don’t need a suicide backstory to be unsettled and mesmerized by Unknown Pleasures and Closer. They’re powerful statements of modern industrial anxiety, which would be true even if Curtis had in fact retired to a civil service job in the suburbs and gardened for 25 years and raised throngs of children and grandchildren.
I’m also not saying that we should have no interest in Curtis himself. Control gives us one look at him, 24 Hour Party People another. Both are convincing, to me anyway, and undoubtedly neither tells the whole story. What could? But what I particularly appreciate is that neither movie treats him as a symbol or an icon; each of them reminds us that Ian Curtis was just a young guy from Manchester with some problems. Which is itself plenty enough of a “grand myth.”
***
Here are a couple bootleg classics. The first is from the unreleased “Warsaw” album (which has more raw energy than any of the official records, if not as much majesty or overall power) and the second is from a legendary show at the Paradiso in Amsterdam.
- Joy Division, “Failures”
- Joy Division, “Disorder” (live)
(Buy some official Joy Division stuff here.)
posted by DW | 27.10.07
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2 comments
