Merchandising of memory: watching the Joy Division documentary

One thing the world almost certainly doesn't need right now is a blog containing my half-baked thoughts on a 14-year-old documentary about an already-written-to-death-about band that ceased to exist more than 40 years ago. But … here it is anyway. Yes, it's my blog on the 2007 Joy Division film by Grant Gee (written by Jon Savage). Groan! Well, there's no going back now (but if you want to stop reading at this point, I quite understand ...).

So, the film. First off, it's pretty long (one hour, 35 minutes) and has a feeling of thoroughness. There's a biggish cast list of all yer JD faves: Tony Wilson, Peter Saville, Annik Honoré, Anton Corbijn, Malcolm Whitehead, Richard Boon, Paul Morley and Liz Naylor. And - bien sûr - we have the terrible trio: Bernard Sumner (gentle-voiced tubby chap prone to the occasional exaggeration), Peter Hook (overgrown lad still struggling to process it all), Stephen Morris (nervy oddball about to melt with embarrassment). The short version of this blog could have been Many talking heads talk endlessly about Joy Division but, in fairness, there's a degree of artistry at work. We hear many of the reminiscences as we see pleasing aerial shots of night-time Manchester, or grimy archive stuff of rotting Victorian houses, the new housing schemes of Hulme/Moss Side, the "modern" dual carriageways, stills of the Factory club, Rafters, Pips, and generally Manchester this and Manchester that. And of course we see photos or video (and also audio) of the dearly departed: Rob Gretton, Martin Hannett and (gulp) Ian Curtis. Yes, it all seems to be there. The issue, of course, is that anyone steeped in Joy Division has heard it all (or very nearly all) before. Even a casual JD fan like me found a lot of it over-familiar (from the Wilson book, the Corbijn film, the odd exhibition, Savage's journalism and the dozens of JD articles over the years). That said, let me bore you with my mini-list of notable things from the film:

*Bernard Sumner says he didn't see a tree in the supposed urban hellscape of Salford until he was ... nine (er, are you quite sure about all this Bernard?)

*They gave Curtis the singer's position in Warsaw on the strength of him phoning them up and realising they knew him from the Manchester gig-going scene (they'd apparently never heard him sing)

*They chose the Joy Division name (from House Of Dolls) because it was "quite punk" (Sumner)

*Peter Saville's pulsar wave design was done before he'd heard the album

*Hook & Sumner both say they don't like Unknown Pleasures, with Bernard Only-In-It-For-The-Candyfloss-And-House-Music Sumner saying it's "dark" and "too impenetrable"

*In a radio interview in 1980, Curtis says that playing large impersonal venues ("the Odeons") as they'd done on tour with Buzzcocks was "really soul-destroying" and he didn't want to do more of that (a good point, but would he have been able to resist if he'd been with the band as it got bigger in the 1980s?)

*The drugs Curtis was taking to control his epilepsy severely affected his mood - he could be very happy one day, then very morose and tearful the next

*Tony Wilson says that after Curtis died Honoré stayed at his house out in the country for five days and sat up smoking and talking and "playing the albums constantly" (which, to judge from his tone as he says this, was a pretty intense experience)

Reinventing the modern city (apparently): Ian Curtis on stage

And ... so on. Well, fair enough. I'm not saying this is uninteresting. And there are another couple of reasonably penetrating observations from the more peripheral characters. Corbijn says he was shocked at the "extreme poverty" of the UK at the end of the 1970s compared to the Netherlands (where "everyone was taken care of"). This big-picture socio-economic point is immediately complicated, though, by him also remembering how he was taken aback by the sight of people "drinking and smoking" heavily and wearing "thin" clothes in the winter, so it's not quite clear what he's actually saying (uncaring government or self-destructive people? Or both?). Another decent point comes from Corbijn's fellow film-maker Malcolm Whitehead, who says the period 1978-79 was marked by the moralising Manchester chief constable James Anderton and the incipient "consumerist/fascist society" that Thatcher was threatening to introduce. He says he saw his role as filming the underground "resistance through art and culture". 

What else? Well, I was pleasantly surprised by Peter Saville, who comes across as eminently likeable. Filmed with fabulous blue-beard stubble, he's elegantly dishevelled, a sort of chiaroscuro Factory version of a lost Renaissance masterwork. There's (god forbid) a hint of humour and self-deprecation in Saville's account ("I didn't think I could sit through listening to 40 minutes of Joy Division") which is a welcome counterpoint to most of the other stuff. And staying with Saville: he has, in my view, the single best line in the whole film. He says that in the end the only two things that matter from the Joy Division story are the two main works - Unknown Pleasures and Closer - and everything else is merchandise, the "merchandising of memory". Hmm. Next to this critical zinger it's sometimes a bit painful watching Paul Morley struggle to find the keynotes to his would-be cultural analysis. In one stand-out Morleyism the great man says the story of Joy Division "explains some of the rules of what it is to be cool". In another, he says Love Will Tear Us Apart is "possibly one of the greatest songs written in the twentieth century by anybody [great emphasis], because of the way in a Shakespearean sense … [zzzz, sorry Paul, think I dropped off there]". Bookended with Tony Wilson giving us his usual schtick about how Joy Division helped reinvent Manchester as a global "modern city", the documentary can sometimes veer into banal territory. It's "one of last true stories in pop" says someone in voiceover at the end, and ... at this point I'd had enough.

A final word on artistry. About halfway through the documentary we get a one-minute clip from the No City Fun film, a contemporary Wilson-commissioned short from Charles E Salem shot on Super 8. In my opinion, its thoroughly fucked-up cinematographic quality as we hear Disorder playing over the top is a winning combination and exactly what Grant Gee's film needed more of. In the end, Gee's Joy Division film is perfectly fine but I think I wanted something else. Possibly more texture, more space. Something sensual. Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man ...?