A social satire set in the near future, the mockumentary portrait ostensibly profiles pop icon Steven Shorter (played by Manfred Mann lead singer Paul Jones), a passive superstar controlled by a totalitarian government who uses him to shill policy, products, and even religion to a compliant and complacent public. Shorter is "the most desperately loved entertainer in the world," informs the dispassionate narrator, and his fame comes from his startling act, as much theater (and theater of cruelty in particular) as music. In our first exposure to his stage act, he's hauled out on stage by men in prison guard uniforms, bullied and tossed in a cage, and then pulled out and cruelly beaten as he cries/sings "Set me free" to an audience of young women worked into a state of hysteria. It's neither love song nor protest anthem, but a primal scream, a spectacle of suffering and endurance with Shorter as the pop Jesus Christ: the tormented, helpless victim enduring the tortures of life for everyone else and pouring out his soul in songs as an act of social catharsis.
On stage, Shorter is all image, the oppressed, vulnerable innocent, but there is a strange sense of discomfort with the spotlight, like he doesn't really belong there. Off stage he's even more absent, passively taking orders from his manager and his agent as they map out his career and decide what he'll be promoting next: a discotheque (his name is branded on a whole chain of them), a soft drink, or maybe the Catholic Church. That old time religion is losing its relevance in the youth culture, so when the aging bishops reluctantly decide to update their act, Shorter is the perfect ambassador to invite the kids to the party.
Watkins doesn't offer any pretense of subtlety in his brash portrait of pop stardom and the entertainment industry as the opiate of the masses, especially one that is controlled by a government in a cozy relationship with the corporate powers. "At the very outset, we decided to take the theme beyond the influence of a pop star, to create a broad allegory of the way in which the British establishment at that time was using various facets of the popular culture to divert the attention of youth (people in general, in fact) from becoming too involved in serious political issues," wrote Watkins in a "self interview" he conducted with himself in conjunction with the film's home video debut. Given the results, you'd never guess that the project didn't originate with him. The original script by John Speight was commissioned by producer John Heyman in the wake of the pop music movie explosion exemplified by A Hard Day's Night, and then worked into a more satirical vein by American novelist Norman Bognor to, in the words of Speight, "expose the rotten world of pop." Watkins extensively rewrote the material into a more political satire and social commentary and took a semi-documentary approach he had been honing with The War Game, giving the material a quality more chilling than comic.
This is no bouncy little rock and roll romp through Swinging London, but a film of joyless (though often intense and mesmerizing) music in a Britain of the near future where one party (formed because there are no longer any substantive differences between the conservative and liberal parties) rules in perpetuity. Shorter is not an artist as much as he's a tool, a commodity built by the establishment and used to encourage "a fruitful conformity." Becoming the poster boy for the hip new church is just another assignment for him. The huge Catholic rally is a combination of a sports halftime show and the Nuremburg Rally, dominated be a flaming cross that can't help but evoke a KKK gathering. Shorter makes his entrance in a mod-looking suit drenched a cardinal red, launching into his own rock and roll take on gospel music while the faithful gathered to worship at his feet chant, "We will conform." "We need no longer have any disturbing political differences when we are all of one faith and believe in one God and one flag," drones the matter-of-fact commentary. That removed, unemotional, anonymous yet authoritative voice so familiar to the British TV documentary becomes self parody as it brazenly and unapologetically explains the social engineering on display.
British supermodel Jean Shrimpton made her only feature appearance in this film, playing an artist assigned to paint Shorter's official portrait. She becomes fascinated by the repressed figure, a man who seems absent in his own body, exhausted by the grueling schedule and the pressure heaped up him and lost when there isn't anyone there to tell him what to do next. In the dramatic scheme of things, she's the complication, the one who inspires him to reveal his own repressed identity and make his own desires and feelings known. And that's the beginning of the end, for what good is a tool that no longer blindly does its job?
Jones is quite convincing as an inarticulate man uncomfortable in the spotlight until he opens his mouth to sing in some moments, his performance evokes a terribly empty shell of a man without any sense of self but he wanders through the entire film with that same vacuum of identity. For all the intensity of his performances onstage, he's still a vague presence without definition or personality and there's never really a moment when we see the desperately, obsessively loved icon whose very presence stirs crowds to action. Shrimpton is equally diffident and impersonal, quite natural in the interview scenes where she comes off as yet another compliant citizen who never gets around to questioning anything, but not particularly engaging in intimate moments as she attempts to plumb the depths of Shorter's torment. These non-actors are, not surprisingly, at their best when they aren't trying to act.
Their performances were roundly criticized when the film was released in 1967, but they had little to do with the indignant, even angry reception. Privilege was all but dismissed by the critics as "hysterical" and "juvenile" and roundly denounced in the press (grand old critic Alexander Walker called it "an immoral and un-Christian picture which mocked the Church, defied authority and encouraged youth in lewd practices" as if that's a bad thing!). It was rebuked by the church and withdrawn from general circulation by its British distributor, the Rank Organization. In Watkins' own words, "The fact that everything shown or implied in the film has come about in Britain subsequent years especially during Margaret Thatcher's nationalistic period has not changed its status as a completely marginalized film in that country." Its stateside reception was, at least in part, more critically responsive Roger Ebert wrote: "This is a bitter, uncompromising movie, and although it isn't quite successful it is fascinating and important" but it was a flop for Universal.
New Yorker's DVD release, the most recent release in its "Cinema of Peter Watkins" collection, marks the film's home video debut, forty years after its theatrical launch and virtual disappearance from the film culture. Locked up in Universal's vault, it was not shown on TV and only rarely revived for special theatrical showings. Along with the fresh high definition master of the film, the DVD includes the original trailer, a gallery of stills and posters, and the 1962 documentary short Lonely Boy, a profile of bubblegum pop star Paul Anka and the hysteria of his young female following. Watkins studied the film for insight into the music industry and the culture of pop idols and drew scenes and images directly from the production for his film while completely reworking the context. In the five years Lonely Boy, the music industry and pop culture was rocked by Beatlemania and the ascension of protest songs into the Top Forty. The contrast between the two films is more illuminating than the similarities. The accompanying 40-page booklet includes a reprint of an essay by Joseph A. Gomez (excerpted from his book Peter Watkins) along with a new postscript, a short essay on Lonely Boy by film Barry Keith Grant, and a substantial "self-interview" by Peter Watkins prepared for the film's DVD release.
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by Sean Axmaker
