Joy Division (L-R: Peter Hook / Ian Curtis / Bernard Sumner / Stephen Morris)
"Were they fallen angels or ordinary blokes?"
Any piece of writing entitled 'The Return of the 70s' is guaranteed to excite my interest; particularly one that understands 1979-80 to be a threshold moment when one world gave way to another.
But, as is so often the case, expectations are rarely met and part of my frustration with Mr Fisher's work comes out of disappointment. It's not that he fails to deliver insightful commentary (and retrospective judgement) on the decade, more that his points of reference are so very different from mine; the books of John le Carré and David Peace, for example, are almost entirely unfamiliar to me [a].
Thus, here, I shall discuss only what Fisher says about post-punk favourites Joy Division and the grotesque figure of Jimmy Savile [b].
I.
Fisher opens his exploration of the 70s with the following statement: "If Joy Division matter now more than ever, it's because they capture the depressed spirit of our times." [c]
Fisher wants (and probably expects) his readers to agree that:
(i) pop groups in general have (socio-cultural and/or philosophical) significance ...
(ii) Joy Division in particular have growing (socio-cultural and/or philosophical) import ...
(iii) a state of despondent melancholia defines the Geist der Zeiten in which he was writing [d] ...
(iv) this depressed spirit can magically be captured (embodied and expressed) by a group of musicians (which essentially returns us to the first point).
The problem is, I'm not sure I do agree with all (or even any) of these points.
But let's say, for arguments sake, that, like Hegel, we accept the notion that there's a virtual agency determining the ideas and beliefs of a given epoch and that art reflects the culture of the era in which it is created (not least because artists are themselves a product of their time).
That might be an argument for why art matters, but it still doesn't mean Joy Division are - or ever were - as important as Fisher insists; "more than a pop group, more than entertainment" [53].
I mean, don't get me wrong, I like Joy Division and even have a well-worn copy of their debut studio album Unknown Pleasures (Factory Records, 1979) in my record collection. But they're not the Beatles, or the Sex Pistols, when it comes to capturing (and transforming) the spirit of the times or channelling the future.
These two groups - and perhaps only these two - were (to adopt and extend a term coined by Foucault) founders of discursivity (changing forever the way we think, speak, act, dress, etc.).
II.
Fisher continues his piece on Joy Division by declaring them to be "the most Schopenhauerian of rock groups" [59].
By which one might assume he was simply referring to the fact that although they failed to have much success during their time as a band (1976-1980), they have exerted a wide-reaching influence ever since. But actually, Fisher means something much more interesting:
"What makes Joy Division so Schopenhauerian is the disjunction between [Ian] Curtis's detachment and the urgency of the music, its implacable drive standing in for the dumb insatiability of the life-Will [...] not experienced by the depressive as some redemptive positivity, but as the ultimate horror ..." [60]
Fisher expands on this:
"Joy Division followed Schopenhauer through the curtain of Maya [...] and dared to examine the hideous machineries that produce the world-as-appearance. What did they see there? Only what all depressives, all mystics, always see: the obscene undead twitching of the Will as it seeks to maintain the illusion that this object, the one it is fixated upon NOW [...] will satisfy it in a way that all other objects thus far have failed to do." [60]
Joy Division see through things; they know - far more radically than the Rolling Stones - that there's never any satisfaction; that the true Schopenhaurien moments are those "in which you achieve your goals, perhaps realise your long-cherished heart's desire - and feel cheated, empty [...] voided [61].
This existential revelation - that we don't really want or need what we thought we most desperately wanted or needed and that even our most urgent desires "are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road" [61] - is central to what Fisher calls depressive ontology.
III.
The great debate over Joy Division, says Fisher, is this: "Were they fallen angels or ordinary blokes?" [63]
Alert to the blackmail of the either/or, Fisher doesn't take the Deleuzian option of neither/nor, but nor, like Bartleby, does he simply prefer not to say. Rather, he suggests we should hold on to both options; "the Joy Division of Pure Art, and the Joy Division who were 'just a laff'" [63].
In other words, we should be a little bit of a romantic aesthete and a little bit of a lumpen empiricist, insisting like the latter on the need to root the band's songs "back in the quotidian at its least elevated and [...] least serious" [63].
Fisher's reason for wanting to hold on to both versions of Joy Division is surprising (and moving):
"For if the truth of Joy Division is that they were Lads, then Joy Division must also be the truth of Laddism. And so it would appear: beneath all the red-nosed downer-fuelled jollity of the past two decades, mental illness has increased some 70% amongst adolescents. Suicide remains one of the most common sources of death for young males." [63] [e]
IV.
We'll never know what Mark Fisher would have made of Steve Coogan's portrayal of Jimmy Savile in the four-part TV drama The Reckoning (2023), though I suspect he would have found it as problematic as Michael Sheen's portrayal of Brian Clough in The Damned United (2009) and for pretty much the same reasons:
"The problem with Sheen's now well established approach to historical characters is that it deprives the film's world of any autonomous reality - everything is indexed to a reality external to the film, judged only by how well it matches our already existing image of the character, whether that be Clough, Kenneth Williams, Blair or Frost." [87]
An actor with "more courage and presence than Sheen might have reached beyond physical appearances to reach a truth [...] not accessible via the TV footage" [87].
As I say - and without wanting to put words into Fisher's dead mouth - I suspect he would also condemn Coogan for simply offering an impression of Savile; perfectly competant as far as "mannerisms and verbal tics" [87] go, but "devoid of any of the tortured inner life" [87] that might have made Savile a more complex and more interesting character (although, arguably, what was so terrifying about Savile was his emptiness; the fact that there was a complete moral vacuum where one might have expected to find at least the remnants of a soul).
V.
Fisher makes the intriguing suggestion that Jimmy Savile may have struck a deal with the Devil:
"You'll get to live out your life with your reputation intact [...], but a year after your death, it will all be destroyed. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will survive. Your headstone will be dismantled. The penthouse in which you lived will be demolished. Your name will become synonymous with evil." [88]
Although he was a professed Catholic, I think Savile would have happily struck such a bargain.
In fact, one suspects that the thought of the truth finally being revealed after his death would have delighted him. For it confirms the fact that he got away with everything and made fools of everyone, including politicians, members of the royal family, and even Pope John Paul II, who awarded him a knighthood in 1990.
People say Savile was hiding in plain sight, but, actually, it was more a case of no one really daring to look, or, if they did look, then they refused to believe the evidence of their own eyes. It was only in 2012 that the obscene truth began to leak out, "like a build-up of effluent that could no longer be contained" [88] - first seeping, then surging.
By the end of that year, says Fisher, "the 70s was returning, no longer as some bittersweet nostalgia trip, but as trauma" [89] as the world of light (entertainment) transformed into "the darkest horror" [90]. Not only did we have to accept the truth about Savile, we also had to reconsider our affection for Gary Glitter and even, in 2014, Rolf Harris [f].
Parents used to think they had to lock up their children when the Rolling Stones or the Sex Pistols came to town, but it was actually Jake the Peg (diddle-iddle-iddle-um) and uncle Jimmy they really should've kept an eye on (as it 'appens).
But they didn't. And so Savile went on abusing his victims; young and old, male and female, dead or alive. Fisher provides a political explanation why this was so:
"At the time when Savile was abusing, the victims were faced, not with Jimmy Savile the monster, Jimmy Savile the prolific abuser of children, but with Jimmy Savile, Knight Commader of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Gregory the Great. When we ask how Savile got away with it all, we must remember this. Naturally, fear played a part in keeping Savile's victims quiet. [...] But we also need to take seriously the way that power can warp the experience of reality itself. Abuse by the powerful induces a cognitive dissonance in the vulnerable - this can't possibly be happening." [94-95]
Fisher (brilliantly) concludes his piece on Savile:
"The powerful trade on the idea that abuse and corruption used to happen, but not any more. Abuse and cover-up can be admitted, but only on condition that they are confined to the past. That was then, things are different now ..." [95]
Notes
[a] I have watched the film adaptation of Peace's 2006 novel The Damned Utd (2006) and I enjoyed it. Fisher, on the other hand, hates it; arguing that the film lacks all the bite and Gnostic mythography of the book and that in the hands of the film's director (Tom Hooper) and writer (Peter Morgan) the story is reduced into just another off-the-shelf cliché-ridden narrative.
Fisher also criticises Michael Sheen's performance (as Brian Clough) as campy and based on a popular image and pre-existing idea of the character, lacking depth or inner life. I will pick up on this in section IV of this post, when discussing Steve Coogan's portrayal of Jimmy Saville in the TV drama The Reckoning (2023).
See Fisher's piece '"Can the World Be as Sad as It Seems?": David Peace and His Adapters', in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2022), pp. 80-87. His remarks on The Damned Utd are on pp. 85-87.
[b] British readers will of course know who Jimmy Savile was (and what he was). But for anyone who is unfamiliar with the name ...
Sir James Wilson Vincent Savile OBE KCSG (1926-2011) was an English media personality and DJ. He hosted the
long-running BBC TV shows Top of the Pops and Jim'll Fix It. During his lifetime, Savile
was well known (and much-loved, although Fisher denies this) for his eccentric image and
charitable work. After his death, however, hundreds of allegations of sexual
abuse made against him were investigated, leading the police to conclude
that he had been a predatory and prolific sex offender (such allegations made during
his lifetime were dismissed and accusers ignored or
disbelieved).
As a result of the ensuing scandal, some of the honours that Savile was awarded
during his career were posthumously revoked and his television
appearances - including episodes of Top of the Pops that he presented - are
no longer repeated. As Fisher notes: "Now, condemnation is not enough: all traces of his existence must be removed [...] as if he were some medieval devil [...]" Ghosts of My Life, p. 94.
[c] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life ... p. 50. Future page references to this second edition of Fisher's book will be given directly in the text.
[d] Fisher's piece on Joy Division was adapted from a post on his k-punk blog dated 9 Jan 2005. It was published in its final form in Ghosts of My Life in 2014.
[e] Joy Division's vocalist and lyricist Ian Curtis, who suffered from epilepsy and depression, committed suicide, aged 23, in May 1980. Writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who also suffered from depression, committed suicide, aged 48, in January 2017. As a friend of mine remarked upon hearing of the latter's death (perhaps a little cruelly): K-punk is kaput.
[f] Glitter's status as a glam rock idol was irredeemably tarnished after he was imprisoned for downloading child pornography in 1999, convicted of child sexual abuse in 2006, and found guilty of a series of sexual offences (including attempted rape) in 2015. All round entertainer Rolf Harris, popular throughout the '60s, '70s, and 1980s, was convicted in 2014 of having sexually assaulted four underage girls.
Part 1 of this post on Lost Futures can be read by clicking here.
Part 3 of this post - on hauntology - can be read by clicking here.
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