Who Killed Bambi?

Gentle pretty thing / Who only had one spring 

You bravely faced the world / Ready for anything

Whilst it's true that Steve Jones in his role as an amateur detective is only interested in finding Malcolm and piecing together the clues that might explain where it all went wrong for him and his fellow band members (tragically so, in the case of Sid Vicious), there is, nevertheless, another question at the heart of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle which transforms the movie from an amusingly mythologized history of the Sex Pistols into a profound murder mystery and morality tale: with one big shout we all cry out - who killed Bambi?

It is, of course, a rhetorical question: when McLaren screams it into the faces of the assembled reporters at Henley Airfield, he's not expecting an answer. And neither is he simply giving reference to an off-screen incident involving the shooting of a deer by a decadent rock star, although, clearly, this scene - which belongs to the originally proposed film to be directed by Russ Meyer - is a non-too-subtle visual metaphor.   

So what, if anything, do we learn from Lesson 10 of the Swindle?

That innocence is easily lost? That it's a good thing to be disillusioned and believe only in the ruins of belief? That we should never trust a hippie? That the spirit of punk will never die; or that Johnny Rotten was a collaborator and that big business will always find a way to assimilate and market youthful rebellion? It's probably a (qualified) yes to all of these ...


Note: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, directed by Julian Temple, was released in cinemas in 1980; probably you can now find it on YouTube, or elsewhere online. Those old punks and film-buffs who are particularly interested, might like to read the script written for Who Killed Bambi? by Roger Ebert, which he has kindly made available on his website: http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/who-killed-bambi-a-screenplay

Caliban

Mirrors don't reflect flesh, only history
and so his own face made him rage.

Ah Caliban! You task me, moon-calf, you task me! For what am I to make of you; malevolent monster and would-be child rapist, or indigenous subject dispossessed of your native land and enslaved and brutalized by European colonialism?

It's impossible to hate you: my liberalism won't allow it. But it's also difficult not to find you repugnant. For you fail to reflect my image and my values and you suggest the pre-dawn or twilight of my own kind. Your ugliness is both sign of a thwarted development and symptom of degeneracy compounded by cambionic origins. 

Indeed, for the ancient Greeks your hideous aspect would constitute a telling moral objection in itself and the fact that you spoke with a certain lyrical power on occasion would do little to redeem you in their eyes: As the face, so too the soul.    

Ghosts

The reason that most people have never seen a ghost is

because they like to stay hidden behind their sheets.

For we, the living, disconcert the souls of the dead;

it is with fear and confusion that they moan when

encountered. 

 

On Big Breasts and Adult Babies

As someone who has always had a thing for ankles and eyes, I have never been a committed mazophile.  However, if I were to express a preference, then it would be for small, pert breasts tipping slightly skywards. Breasts that have none of that blue-veined, bovine-maternal aspect: breasts that make you want to smile, not suckle; feel like having fun, not being rocked to sleep.

For to be honest, I find the thought of adult male babies squirming and letting themselves go in an ecstasy of Madonna-worship, as they kiss and nuzzle in perverse exaltation between the milk-heavy breasts of an ersatz nurse or nanny, somewhat disconcerting. And one suspects that the women who hold and press their infantilized lovers to their bosom, if thrilled in part to have a man so helpless and in their grasp, nevertheless in some corner of their female soul despise and hate them with savage contempt. 

As Lawrence notes, it's one thing for an infant to drool and dribble at the sight of a big pair of tits, but for a grown man to be pornographically reaching out for child-gratification is shameful and disgusting.

Three Great Dictators and One Mad Poet

 

One thing that the great dictators of the twentieth century had in common was an ability to articulate their own philosophical pessimism with as much memorable brutality as they exercised their political and military power. They also shared a startling level of candour. 

Thus Hitler, for example, reveals all that we need to know about his paranoia and sociopathology in the following remark: There will only be peace on earth when the last man has killed the last but one. 

Whilst Stalin betrays the Machiavellian and murderous nature of his thinking with this chilling declaration: If you want to get rid of the problem, get rid of the man. 

Even Mao will be long remembered for his observation that: Political power grows from the barrel of a gun.  

But what of Mussolini? Try as I might, I really can't recall anything he ever said. Apart from the following, which, ironically, explains why this might be the case: I was never a great dictator; always a mad poet.

Urophilia: From Golden Showers to the Art of Pussing

Man Ray: Tears (1930)

The above photo, despite the title, has always suggested something other than a weeping subject. 

In fact, it brings to mind the charming scene in Bataille's short novel, The Story of the Eye, in which sixteen-year-old Simone asks her equally young but nameless lover to piss up her cunt. When the latter points out that due to the position of their bodies, his urine will almost certainly splash on her dress and face, she simply asks: So what?

This rhetorical question is thrown down as a kind of challenge; it wants to provoke an action, rather than be met with an answer. In a sense, it's as profoundly nihilistic as asking who cares? Met with this, the protagonist-narrator has no choice but to do as he is told. Not that he seems reluctant to indulge in watersports, or any other perverse sexual act that aims not at pleasure so much as the destruction of human happiness and integrity.

Personally, I'd find it a little disconcerting to be asked by a woman to urinate on her like a male porcupine. On the other hand, I'd have no objection were the roles reversed and, like many men, find the sight of a woman pissing strangely enchanting; not simply arousing, but also reassuring and rather touching. It's no wonder, therefore, that it's such a recurrent and popular theme in Western art.

And nor is it surprising to discover the growing popularity of pussing - although one suspects it's the semi-clandestine and semi-illicit nature of this activity that excites almost as much as the consensual voyeurism, or the sex that often follows.  

Of course, not everyone approves of this. Indeed, some might suggest that despite the close anatomical connection between our sex organs and the excretory functions, it's a sign of instinctual collapse to conflate acts of love with the voiding of bladders and so end up fucking in public toilets.  

Aberdeen

Christy Turlington by Mario Testino

for Vivienne Westwood (1993)

Grey sky meets grey sea meets black rock: I've been to Aberdeen in winter and, let me tell you, despite what the Scottish Tourist Board might have visitors believe, a silver city with golden sands it is not. 

And yet, miraculously, from the granite and elemental misery were born women wrapped in tartan splendour, whose white breasts are as warm and soft as the women of the sun-happy south.

Flightpath

Photo: Matt Cardy/Getty Images (www.theguardian.com)

Daybreak in Hounslow
and passenger jets
roar overhead.

Midday in Hounslow
and passenger jets
roar overhead.

Twilight in Hounslow
and passenger jets
roar overhead.

But in between the metallic hum of engines,
you can hear little birds singing as gaily as
on the fifth day of creation.

The Face of Marlene Dietrich

What Roland Barthes felt about the face of Greta Garbo, I feel about the face of Marlene Dietrich: it's a pure and perfect object that appears to be untouched by time or finger-tips; unmarked by traces of emotion. It's a face that belongs to art, not to nature and which has all the cold and expressionless beauty of a mask; a face that has not been painted so much as sculpted. An archetypal and totemic face. A fetish object.

Dietrich knew all this herself. And she knew better than anyone how to capture on film the face that she and von Sternberg created between them; make-up artists, lighting technicians, cameramen and directors all spoke of her brilliance in their fields of expertise.

She was an icon also to the top fashion designers, who were seduced by the fact that she dressed neither to please them, her lovers, her public, nor even herself, but solely for magical effect.  

I dress for the image. Not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marlene_dietrich.html#zBgFe3sa1iLvR7bc.99

I dress for the image. Not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marlene_dietrich.html#zBgFe3sa1iLvR7bc.99

I dress for the image. Not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marlene_dietrich.html#zBgFe3sa1iLvR7bc.99

Sun - Lizard - Rock

Sun, lizard, rock: between the three flows life. And I can't help wondering who it is that is deprived in world - him or me?

For whilst it may be true that our reptilian friends are unable to encounter other beings as such, or understand themselves within the wide and sophisticated context of meaning that we as human beings have developed, it strikes me nevertheless as a form of anthropocentric conceit to talk about Dasein's richness of world in comparison to the animals' poverty and the inanimate objects' complete absence of such.

When challenged on his thinking in this area and the Nietzschean attempt to revalue our relationship to the non-human world, Heidegger sarcastically responded by asking 'are we then supposed to revert to being animals?'
     
The remark shows little understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy of becoming, which is non-linear and so neither progressive nor retrogressive. It also displays ignorance of the fact that the idea of reversibility in evolution is not as outlandish as was once believed. In fact, Dollo's Law, first proposed in 1893, is increasingly recognised as non-binding as more and more examples of atavism come to light and new genetic discoveries are made.

However, I don't wish to develop this line of argument. Rather, I simply wish to echo in closing something that Lawrence writes:

If men were as much lizards as lizards are lizards, they'd be worth looking at.