"Sid and Nancy"

In "Sid and Nancy," Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb turned in brilliant performances and gave the same class and believability as Val Kilmer when he played Jim Morrison.  Something that surprised me was that Peter Frampton supervised the make-up and I assume that's THE Peter Frampton.  The irony is that he was one of the prettiest of the rock gods with his baby face and his long, curly blonde hair ... and the Sex Pistols would have hated him.

The story running through all of it was the nihilism of punk rock but when the only commitment is to death then it really doesn't make much difference what you do before it happens so go ahead and die.  And they did.

Punk rock had no choice but to destroy itself as improving it in any way makes it something else.  People tried anyway and it became alternative.  People tried to polish that too but then it became indistinguishable from rock and alternative died too.  Now it's nothing more than the insipid drivel teenage Brit bands make to amuse thirteen-year-old girls.

Lost to all of them was that the Rolling Stones were supreme punks in their time.  They were just as deep into narcotics but their passion was for the music and Richards often said he came up with "Satisfaction" in a dream.  They had no more use for the system than the Sex Pistols but they loved the music while the Sex Pistols even destroyed that too.

There is purity in punk in its contempt for just about everything but that contempt makes the music an effect rather than a cause.  It's the same with the satanic hell-rock bands as their rejection of Christ acknowledges Him and thus they too are only an effect and it makes them irrelevant.  In actual fact, pure satanism has nothing to do with a rejection of Christ so those idiots didn't even get the story right.

Some say punk was misunderstood but that's not true at all as the problem was that it was understood all too well.  People loved the contempt as only bankers love the system and punkers began conforming to each other just the same as Texas cowboys, high-school cheerleaders or lemmings marching to the sea.  Even today people still poke pins through their eyebrows or other awkward places as it's become a fashion and they look for jobs to get the money to shop at The Gap or whatever other second-rate shithole peddles the things they wear.

I hated punk and I still do.  It rejected everything musical that was ever important to me and just as they had contempt for me, I have contempt for them.  Not surprisingly I hated the movie.  The acting and the direction / production were brilliant but the story was abysmally stupid.  Of course they destroyed themselves.  They didn't know how to do anything else.

Notably absent from the story was any love of music.  There's almost no focus on practice or developing the craft even if only to create more of it.  Punk is said to show great passion but there was no evidence of anything but contempt, self-destructiveness, and violence.


Secondary to the story is their addiction to heroin while at the same time showing the primary theme of the complex love between Sid and Nancy ... and for a kitten ... and sometimes for children.  The heroin addiction seems a primary theme but they would have destroyed themselves anyway, heroin was only the mechanism for it.  Whether they loved each other more than heroin or even whether it was real at all is not for me to say.  You will need to make up your own mind as the movie is worth watching; a movie doesn't have to be pretty to intrigue me and perhaps you feel the same way.