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A thoroughgoing satire of pop messiah-dom and media puppetry, building on John Lennon's droll little quip about Jesus. England in the near future is a coalition rule in need of Opium des Volkes, "a useful diversion." Enter the pop megastar (Paul Jones), caged and battered on stage before shrieking fans, ensuring that riots take place in the concert hall rather than in the streets. Hands outstretched in heartthrob supplication or mock-ecstasy when not filled with merchandise, the singer is professional moaner, messenger, contorted fetish-object, "in every sense of the word a gilt-edged investment." He is also, as the documentarian's camera tries to follow him through a maelstrom of managers, sponsors and hangers-on, just a withdrawn body doing the state's reactionary bidding, a muddy painting with blank eyes. When the product reaches "saturation point," a new direction is needed—a psychedelic cover of "Onward Christian Soldiers" by monkish moptops isn't enough, a fusion of the political and the evangelical demands a shift from rebelliousness to repentance. The outraged thrust rests on Peter Watkins' straightforward transposition of faux-BBC reportage from battlefields and radioactive cities to recording studios and joyless ceremonies, culminating in "the greatest staging of nationalism in the history of Great Britain" and the Riefenstahlian pomp of neon-burning crosses and pulpit-pounding clerics. (Russell offers a concurrent inferno in Billion Dollar Brain.) Fascism, "is it a hit, or is it a miss?" The point of departure is not Lester's Fab Four but Antonioni's Yardbirds (Blow-Up), Weis and Idle's All You Need Is Cash carries on the analysis. With Jean Shrimpton, Mark London, William Job, Jeremy Child, Max Bacon, and Michael Barrington.
--- Fernando F. Croce |