"I know a thing or two about performing, m'boy"

 fragment, from an essay about something else, on my favorite film 

“I am a bullet”—Chas Devlin

The essence of mod is the connection between Englishness, style, and violence. 

Rock ‘n’ roll had triggered violence before (with the cinema seat slashing done by Teddy Boys driven into a frenzy of excitement by the first rock’n’roll movies) but it had never represented it musically or enacted it onstage.   The mod sound was expressive not of sexual desire but of an unrest at once social and existential.  It's latent violence was dramatized by The Who in their climactic orgies of instrument-smashing: the orgasmic release that mod music and mod neurology required.

From violence aestheticized, to a kind of aesthete of violence:  Chas Devlin, the smooth criminal protagonist of Performance, a Donald Cammett and Nic Roeg directed film made in 1968 but released a couple of years later. Played by James Fox,  Chas  is an enforcer for a “firm” (criminal syndicate) in East London, a virtuoso “performer” who collects protection money and puts the squeeze on “flash little twerps”.  Chas is also a bit of a mod, what with his short hair, thin ties and sharp suits. He’s a narcissist who may have a homosexual past but currently goes in for S&M games with his girlfriend involving whips and mirrors. In one scene, we see Chas in his  bachelor pad in a posh apartment complex, dressing with great care. In a shot that seems to look ahead to Richard Gere in American Gigolo, Chas selects gold cuff links from a drawer that contains about a dozen sets, and then obsessively fussing over the placement of some magazines on his coffee table, making millimeter adjustments so that they are square with the edges of the table.  Then he’s off to threaten the owner of a betting shop who is being coerced into merging with the firm: the camera cuts from Devlin’s almost prissy sartorial rituals to a dustbin being hurled through the betting shop window by one of his thugs.  

Later, on the run after killing the betting shop owner, with whom he has some extremely personal history, Chas winds up hiding from the law in the Ladbroke Grove house of Turner, a burned-out and decadent rock star modeled on the Rolling Stones’s Brian Jones but actually played by Mick Jagger. Phoning an accomplice, Chas says he’s “on the left” (i.e. West London) and complains about the “long hair, beatniks, druggers, free love” atmosphere of his hideout. Chas is uptight and as Performance unfolds Turner and his lover Ferber (played by Brian Jones’s girlfriend Anita Pallenberg) loosen up their sociopath guest with hallucinogens, in order to break down his character armor and poke around inside his inner workings.

Whether deliberately intended as an in-joke or just an instinctive choice, the confrontation between the Rolling Stone and the mod-like Chas is inspired. Mods loathed the Stones, regarding them as scruffy art-school bohemians with dirty long hair. The very things that made Jagger, Jones and Richards anti-heroic role models for bourgeois students the world over was what convinced the mods they were posh middle class kids slumming it.  The antipathy endured:  echoing Pete Meaden’s definition of mod as “clean living under difficult circumstances”, Paul Weller once declared his belief in “clean culture, real culture. Not all this bullshit… rock fuckin’ image and…. elegantly wasted wankers, like Keith Richards.”   

One of the key figures behind Performance was David Litvinoff. He’s credited as Dialogue Consultant and Technical Advisor, but his most important role was serving as the conduit between the demimonde of upper class Chelsea and the East London underworld inhabited by the Kray Twins (the sharp dressed mobsters who provided the model for Chas’s firm).  

In his BFI  Film Classics monograph on Performance,  Colin McCabe describes Litvinoff as “ suppressed, violent, buttoned up...”  But then again “buttoned up”, or it’s more common equivalent “bottled up”, could almost be the definition of  Englishness....

director's cut bit on Performance from S+A

The Man Who Fell to Earth  deserves its reputation as one of the most successful – artistically, not so much commercially – rock star as movie actor turns to date. Probably it’s only real rival is the earlier Roeg movie Performance, which he co-directed with writer Donald Cammell.  Performance and The Man Who Fell To Earth go together, and not just because Bowie’s frenemy Mick Jagger starred in the former . The two movies form a conceptual pair, bookending the glam era. 

Filmed in 1968, Performance is absolutely Sixties, but it rehearses the themes of the pop era that followed swiftly upon the film’s delayed release in 1970. Decadence, sexual indeterminacy, the theatricality of performance are all in there, along with a persistent motif to do with mirrors (used to causing doubling and gender-blurring effects). There’s magic too: upper class bohemian Cammell was fascinated by Crowley and friends with Kenneth Anger, whose movies are clear influence on Performance. Cammell had a role in Lucifer Rising, playing Osiris the God of Death.

Just like The Man Who Fell To Earth, the plotline of Performance is really a frame for the draping of  highly-charged tableaux  and the elaboration of Roeg’s hallucinatory camerawork, with its disorientating edits and slippages of time and perspective.  The basic story involves the flight of an East End enforcer, Chas Devlin, who has incurred the wrath of his Kray Twins-like gang boss.  Posing as a juggler, Devlin takes refuge in the Ladbroke Grove house of Turner, a burned-out, reclusive rock star (modeled largely on Brian Jones, but  played by Jagger). Druggy, polysexual cavortings ensue, as Turner and his lover Pherber  Anita Pallenberg - once Brian Jones’s partner, by that point Keith Richards’s girlfriend) try to dismantle their sociopathic guest’s character armor and poke around inside his psyche.  

Long haired and made-up, the feminized Turner is the opposite of the proudly “all man” Devlin. Except that the East End gangland culture he comes from has a homo-erotic undercurrent: boss of the firm Harry Flowers dallies with toy boys, and it’s implied that Chas also has a homosexual past about which he’s in literally violent denial.  

Another glammy thread in the film relates to ideas of performance and identity.  The script was originally titled The Liars. Both rock star and gangster project a front as part of their trade. Devlin uses intimidation, a psychopathic aura, far more than actual violence.  In the movie’s critical exchange, Turner lectures the “juggler” Devlin (who he earlier described as “a performer of natural magic”) about theatre.  "I know a thing or two about performing, my boy!.... The only performance that makes it, that really makes it,  that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness. Am I right?”.

But Turner also knows that he’s lost his mojo: precisely the ability to believe the illusion he’s projecting. Devlin, whose name is close to devil, still has his “daemon,” as Pherber calls it. “He wants to know why your show is a bigger turn-on than his ever was,” she tells Devlin. She says that the criminal provides a “dark little mirror” that will perhaps help the fading rock star escape the hole in which “he’s stuck. Stuck!”

The second half of Man Who Fell To Earth - Newton under house arrest, passing time in kinky but listless sex, drinking gin by the gallon -  virtually repeats the  atmosphere of aimless decadence and psychic seclusion that pervades Turner’s West London townhouse. Roeg spoke of how Jagger and Bowie both possessed a charisma and physical presence that couldn’t be learned at acting school. “They’re not just a singer with a band. Their whole magnetism comes out in acting.” 

Neither film is strictly speaking about rock – Man Who Fell  To Earth isn’t at all, while Performance barely touches on music-making or the rock biz. But they jostle for first place as rock movies, capturing more of the spirit of their rock era – and more of their respective rock star in a starring role – than any of the films that more obviously deal with rock. 

 "and the only promotional poster that makes it, that truly makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves MADNESS!"

thankfully withdrawn poster for the movie!