The scene is from Dan O’Bannon’s 1985 film Return of the Living Dead. A punk named Suicide (Mark Venturini) stands in a cemetery and says, “You think this is a fucking costume? This is a way of life!” Notably, he just kind of brings this up on his own, as if it is always on his mind. He needs to rant, even if no one is challenging him about it. By this point, punk music, style and generalized way of life had been around for years. As I’ll get into more in-depth later this month, movies and media of the mid-1980s were full of goonish, nihilistic deviants dressed in mohawks, studded leather, and a variety of other garish flourishes. But somehow, the punks in Return of the Living Dead feel genuine, and many who have an affinity with the subculture champion them as an accurate portrayal. This could be because they are actual characters, some of whom have empathic story arcs. Beneath the dog collars, piercings, chains, neon colors (in case of Linnea Quigley’s Trash), dye jobs, beer, trench coats, oversized pins, and zippers, they are more than just stock characters. Maybe the fan appreciation has to do with the self-awareness of the characters, not to mention the fact that it is actually a good film, which cannot be said for the saturation of bullshit that filled the 80s. It could also have to do with the cultural connection of punk music and horror films, epitomized in songs by The Misfits, the New Jersey band who sang tunes like “Horror Business”, “Night of the Living Dead”, and “Blood Feast”. Either way, O’Bannon’s film presents punk as a thing that can be considered both a style and an ideology.
It was well into adulthood until I began to think of fashion as a legitimate art form. Up until then I looked at the runways in popular media and stylishly over-concerned exhibitionists as superficial husks of human beings who are unable to rely on their souls to exist. But once I began paying more attention to the intentionality of fashion, and the potentially confrontational nature it has, I realized there is far more to it. I still look at the mainstream fashion world with a bit of disdain, primarily because of the glib emptiness that upper class hedonism lends to it (not to mention the unrealistic beauty standards it casually and regularly imposes on young people). But the important thing to walk away with is that anyone can choose to dress in a way that forces those around them to rethink what our appearances mean. It may garner outrage, laughter, spite, and confusion, but these reactions belie the power that style can have. One of the definitive texts that explores this is Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style from 1979.
Hebdige writes, “punk style contained distorted reflections of all the major post-war subcultures.” (26) It may now seem like a singular movement, but punk was made up of variations on the teddy boys, mods, and skinheads before them. In the UK they were also influenced by Reggae and West Indian culture--“By the early 70s, these tendencies had begun to cohere into a fully fledged nihilist aesthetic and the emergence of this aesthetic together with its characteristic focal concerns (polymorphous, often wilfully perverse sexuality, obsessive individualism, fragmented sense of self, etc.) generated a good deal of controversy amongst those interested in rock culture.” (28) More than just an instance of youthful individualism or working class solidarity, punk was an exhibitionist spectacle that emphasized desperation and chaos. Hebdige writes, “The punks appropriated the rhetoric of crisis which had filled the airwaves and the editorials throughout the period and translated it into tangible (and visible) terms.” (87) There was a frank openness to punk that allowed anger and taboo subjects to be articulated, contrary to bourgeois, polite culture.
As seen in Return of the Living Dead, Trash asks bluntly, “Do you ever fantasize about being killed?” A moment later she is taking off her clothes and getting ready to dance on top of a crypt. This is not the first time she’s acted like this, by the reactions of her friends. But this physicality is contrasted by Suicide’s above-mentioned, thoughtful preoccupation. I quote from Hebdige so liberally because his text is so definitive: “The second form of incorporation – the ideological – has been most adequately treated by those sociologists who operate a transactional model of deviant behaviour.” (96)
Style and ideology are often looked at as opposing concerns, but this works so well with punk which is about contradiction at its core. It coagulated together organically via the British working class, but like virtually everything in capitalist society, it was soon identified and commodified. Vivien Westwood, who ironically became immensely rich, famous, and influential, started off putting together style as “confrontation dressing” (107), which eventually solidified these oppositional aesthetics within the culture they were raging against. But of course it was the music that gave the look a greater significance. The Sex Pistols became rich and famous calling for “Anarchy in the UK”, but there were other bands who seem to be more consistent with the movement’s working class roots. Crass, with their political lyrics and discordant, lofi sound represent a side of punk that was too rough for digestion by mainstream culture. One of my favorite British bands that I discovered as a teenager were The Newtown Neurotics, in particular their song “Living with Unemployment”. Much of the punk I had heard up until then--like the Sex Pistols--I perceived as being about hedonism and chaos, disorder for its own sake. Hearing a song about poor, young punks who simply wanted a job was eye opening. Hebdige writes, “Richard Hell drew on the writings of Lautréamont and Huysmans. British punk bands, generally younger and more self-consciously proletarian, remained largely innocent of literature.” (27) This partially feels like a jab at British punks and their lack of education, but Hebdige, who’s writing focuses specifically on the UK, probably did not mean it that way.
Meanwhile in New York City, Richard Hell and his band The Voidoids were part of a distinct punk scene in and of itself. Hell is one of the more interesting punks for my purposes because he is a musician who crossed over into cinema. The Blank Generation (1980), directed by Fassbinder collaborator Ulli Lommel, is a cult drama in which Hell basically plays himself as the character Billy, or rather himself in so much as his punk persona. It is a movie that shows how the New York punk scene was just as influenced by pop art and the industry around that. It could be argued that the scene exuded more pretension than that of the UK, which as mentioned above, arose out of previous working class styles. Hell also had a supporting role in Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens (1982), a movie about a New Jersey girl trying to stand out in the NYC punk scene, only to realize the excitement is heading west to Los Angeles. I’ll get to this westward migration in a moment, but want to mention a few more notable NY punk films. Rock n Roll High School (1979) is a film that involves one of the most definitive punk bands playing themselves--The Ramones. It is full of youthful energy that ends in burning down the high school, implying the need for new, revolutionary approaches to life. That being said, my favorite New York City punk film is Abel Ferrara’s Driller Killer (1979), which provides a candid and humorous commentary on the art world, while also serving as a slasher--or I guess driller--movie. It includes all of the partying, jamming, and pizza eating of the scene at the time, while also relating the chaos and potential violence of punk to horror cinema, just as Return of the Living Dead did a number of years later.
While Wren (Susan Berman), the protagonist of Smithereens, decides to move to LA in ‘82, that southern Californian city already had a formidable punk scene of its own. Bands like Fear, The Germs, The Bags, and X (with their most famous album simply titled “Los Angeles”) churned out music and energy that was distinctive to their time and place. But still, as Alice Bag recounts in her memoir Violence Girl, “We didn't materialize out of a vacuum without any musical roots; we weren't born clad in leather jackets or ripped fishnet stockings.” (160) Her influences included glam rock, Elton John, The Ramones, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), and Mexican performer Pedro Infante. The book also recounts a bittersweet story of how Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols showed up at a Bags show while in LA, getting up on stage but ultimately crawling and flailing around because he was so intoxicated. Bag makes her appreciation for Vicious and The Sex Pistols clear, while also expressing the difference of her music. On the album “Yes, LA” she wrote and performed a song called “We don’t need the English”, which in typically blunt punk fashion, declares its independence from any potential UK punk origins.The song is a counterpoint to The Clash song, “I’m so bored with the USA”.
Alex Cox is the singular filmmaker who seemed to combine the punk flavors of the UK, New York City, and Los Angeles into powerful and now classic movies. Born in England, he went to UCLA to study film production in the late 1970s. Cox is the thread that weaves UK and US punk into a more complex cinematic fabric. His 1986 film Sid and Nancy tells the story of the Sex Pistols bassist and the American woman who defined his life. The movie could be considered some kind of allegory about the larger punk scene and its migration to the new world, but that may be too straightforward compared to reality. Although the movie tells the story of one of England’s most famous punk bands, it is very much a New York story, beginning and ending at The Chelsea Hotel. In the booklet accompanying the 2017 Criterion Collection disc release of Sid and Nancy, Alex Cox is quoted as saying, “The mood on the set changed to a more somber one when we stopped having fun in England and started getting dour and strange in the USA.” This makes complete sense in context to the story and the real occurrences behind it. At one point a wasted Sid (Gary Oldman) tells Nancy (Chloe Webb) that everything will get better once they get to America. She has to remind him that they are already there--“New York is in America, you fuck.” All this being said, Sid and Nancy is not even Cox’ greatest punk movie. Co-screenwriter Abbe Wool states, “Sid and Nancy weren’t representative punks at all.”
A couple years earlier Cox wrote and directed Repo Man (1984), which may be the definitive punk film. The most notable quality of Repo Man is that it is wholly original. It surely wears some influences on its sleeve, but there has never been, or ever will be, another movie like it. It tells the story of a young, frustrated man named Otto (Emilio Estevez) who accidentally gets a job repossessing cars. It is a strange occupation that sometimes makes Otto and his co-workers seem like the law, except for the immense amount of disorder involved as well. Much like he accidentally becomes a repo man, he also gets caught up in a conspiracy involving UFOs and a strange, bright, annihilating light that shines from the trunk of a Chevy Malibu.
Notably, Otto is not decked all out in punk style. His haircut even looks almost military inspired and he seems like a kid just trying to find his way into adulthood. The lifestyle is still there on the periphery and embodied by his friend Duke (Dick Rude) who gets caught up in doing crimes. Aside from the aesthetic of punk, Repo Man achieves the moniker in different ways. The sci-fi aspects of the movie are pure pulp and liken punk as another definitive genre of cinema all its own. The same could be said for Return of the Living Dead. But the glowing Chevy Malibu that is able to levitate and fly in the final scenes is very much reminiscent of Surrealism. This is not lost on Alex Cox, who mentions it in an interview on the Sid and Nancy Criterion disc--that punk is a revolutionary movement like The Surrealists. Both are concerned with transforming society and taking hold of the means of production. This connection was also noted by Hebdige as well: “The radical aesthetic practices of Dada and Surrealism – dream work, collage, ‘ready mades’, etc. – are certainly relevant here. They are the classic modes of ‘anarchic’ discourse.” (105)
What Luis Buñuel, father of cinematic surrealism (who I wrote about at length last year), says of that movement can easily be transferred to punk: “All of us were supporters of a certain concept of revolution, and although the surrealists didn’t consider themselves terrorists, they were constantly fighting a society they despised. Their principal weapon wasn’t guns, of course; it was scandal. Scandal was a potent agent of revelation, capable of exposing such social crimes as the exploitation of one man by another, colonialist imperialism, religious tyranny--in sum, all the secret and odious underpinnings of a system that had to be destroyed. The real purpose of surrealism was not to create a new literary, artistic, or even philosophical movement, but to explode the social order, to transform life itself…” (107) Punk rock understood this, and Alex Cox most certainly understood this when he began making films. Even if the influence is not front and center, it is always right there just out of frame. Anything could happen in a movie like Repo Man, and audiences who understood this felt the potential danger and liberation. The media sensationalized punk rock, and the aesthetic scandalized thousands of religious, bourgeois, conservative households around the world.
I spent a lot of this essay focusing on the geography of punk, but the general conclusion is that punk has no home. It is everywhere. By the 1980s it had disseminated and mutated, an uncontrollable force that could not be contained. To continue Abbe Wool’s train of thought about Sid and Nancy quoted above, “They were really fucked up people and they would have been fucked up if they were living in New Jersey or in the suburbs.” I once again quote Hebdige at length, simply because his words sum things up so beautifully: “It cohered, instead, elliptically through a chain of conspicuous absences. It was characterized by its unlocatedness – its blankness – and in this it can be contrasted with the skinhead style. Whereas the skinheads theorized and fetishized their class position, in order to effect a ‘magical’ return to an imagined past, the punks dislocated themselves from the parent culture and were positioned instead on the outside: beyond the comprehension of the average (wo)man in the street in a science fiction future. They played up their Otherness, ‘happening’ on the world as aliens, inscrutables. Though punk rituals, accents and objects were deliberately used to signify workingclassness, the exact origins of individual punks were disguised or symbolically disfigured by the make-up, masks and aliases which seem to have been used, like Breton’s art, as ploys ‘to escape the principle of identity’.” (120-1) Punk is possibly more successful than Surrealism or Dada in its attempts to blow up the social order, both externally and internally.
The goal of many may have been to transcend identity, be it class, gender, race, etc, but this idealistic thinking went only so far simply because the concept and aesthetic were manipulated into other directions. The contradiction that all subcultures must deal with is remaining open to everyone who wants to partake in it, while also keeping the original intent in mind. Elitist gatekeeping is counter to the “anything goes” aesthetic of punk, but the lack of this allowed for ideological subterfuge and the inevitable commodification by mainstream culture. As I will cover in next week’s essay, punk and skinhead subculture was adopted by conservative and white supremacist factions in an attempt to use the attendant disorder and chaos as a means for terror and control. It is ironic and ridiculous to think that people with such rigid ideological boundaries would adopt a subculture that is so well known for breaking down real and metaphorical walls. This was further compounded and sublimated by depictions of punks in the conservative mainstream culture of the 1980s. A thought provoking, radical idea was reduced to depictions of lazy miscreants and goonish criminals. This forever changed the perception of what punk is and could be afterwards.
Bag, Alice. Violence Girl: East LA Rage to Hollywood Stage, A Chicana Punk Story. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2011.
Cox, Alex. Sid and Nancy. [film] MGM & 20th Century Fox, 1986. The Criterion Collection, 2017.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979.