I’ve never fully understood where Quadrophenia fits in the grand rock ‘n’ roll continuum. A love-letter to the Mod craze among UK rockers in the 1960s, it was made in a time when that fad’s clean-cut, tailored look had already been nostalgically reclaimed by British punk acts like The Damned. As a result, it’s difficult to tell whether some of the jerky, pogo-style dance moves the Mod kids pull in the film are period-accurate to 1960s rock shows, or if the punks filling out the crowd scenes were bringing some contemporary energy to the production that blurred those temporal boundaries. It’s just as likely the teenage reprobates of both eras happened to dance like that because they were on the same drugs—namely, a combination of cheap beer & stolen amphetamines—so it’s an impossible distinction to make. The project was strangely out of sync with itself since the point of conception, though, considering that it’s a bloated stadium-rock opera adapted from a concept album by The Who at their most overwrought, but it’s set in a time when The Who were a definitive force of ramshackle, no-frills rock ‘n’ roll. One of the most iconic scenes in the film features a Mods-only house party in which the entire crowd erupts into chaos when someone spins The Who’s proto-punk classic “My Generation” on the turntable, which is in disorienting aural contrast to the sleepier, sappier Who tunes that score the soundtrack proper. It’s a picture entirely out of time, evenly split between its setting and the era when it was made. That usually is the case with period pieces, but the ever-evolving trends & deviations of rock ‘n’ roll just makes the dissonance ring even louder than usual.
Perusing the extra features of the Criterion DVD copy of Quadrophenia I recently found at a Public Library liquidation sale, it seems that being out-of-sync with current rock ‘n’ roll trends was inherent to the Mod subculture from the start. Distinguished by their tailored suits, their rejection of early-50s rock ‘n’ roll, and their choice to ride motorized scooters instead of roadster motorbikes, Mods were in direct, violent opposition with the macho, leather-jacketed rockers that kept older rock traditions alive in the years before glam & punk changed everything. In addition to the usual talking-head interviews with the filmmakers, the Criterion discs include several French television news reports about these violent clashes, justifying the film’s third-act, beachside gang war with extratextual evidence that the two subcultures’ rumble was relatively credible to real-life events. However, what struck me most about those news reports was the culturally scattered, postmodern nature of their very existence. Here we have archived broadcasts from French journalists who are fascinated with the hard-edged lifestyle of British teens whose obsession with Italian fashion has spawned a newly mutated subspecies of American rock ‘n’ roll. The French reporters land a few zingers against Mod culture as a “new dandyism” that contextualizes it within older traditions of British counterculture. The postmodern multi-nationality of the phenomenon added an entirely new layer to rock ‘n’ roll cultural identity, though, whereas the motorcycle-riding rockers that the Mods clashed against were only one layer deep, idolizing American rock & fashion from earlier decades.
Appropriately, the strung-out protagonist who guides our tour through the Mods vs Rockers moment of the then-recent past is, himself, out of sync with the world around him. Phil Daniels stars as Jimmy Cooper, a pill-popping teenage Mod who can barely hold onto his entry-level mailroom job because he spends all of his nights sweating through his suits and jumping around to rock ‘n’ roll music with his dirtbag friends. Jimmy is constantly on the search for drugs he cannot find and cannot afford. He’s constantly crushing on a girl who’s only looking for a bit of fun, while constantly ignoring the flirtations of the other girl who actually wants him back. His desperation for Mod-scene notoriety (mostly so he can land his dream girl) only manifests in useless acts of teenage rebellion, like dragging his scooter through more uptight Brits’ flowerbeds, until he’s really given a chance to shine at a town-wide gang fight with rockers that ends in mass arrest. Only, when he’s released from jail, he’s found that his moment of fame was fleeting, his dream girl has already moved on, and the drugs are starting to weigh heavily on his fragile, hormone-addled psyche. In an early, telling scene he has a loud argument about music tastes with a rocker at the local baths (heads up for anyone who’d like to catch a glimpse of a young Ray Winstone’s cock & balls) that ends with the opposing Mod & rocker realizing that they were childhood friends, and there’s no substantial difference between them once stripped of their respective paraphernalia. The tragedy of the film is that Jimmy wants that subcultural distinction to signify a substantial difference between them; he relies on Mod-culture insignia to give his days & persona meaning, only to inevitably find it another empty frivolity, just like everything else in life.
Of course, Quadrophenia itself became a cultural touchstone to be disseminated in the great rock ‘n’ roll diaspora. The reviews & marketing for Jon Moritsugu’s 1994 punk-scene whatsit Mod Fuck Explosion reference West Side Story as the source of inspiration for its fictional gang war, but since the gangs in those films are the titular scooter-riding Mods vs. motorcycle-riding rock ‘n’ rollers, it’s a lot more likely Mortisugu was pulling directly (and cheekily) from The Who’s rock opera. So, there you have a snotty 90s-punk reiteration of a 70s-punk echo of a 60s-rock fad that split from 50s-rocker roots. It’s an out-of-sync rock cinema tradition you’ll find in other beloved period pieces like American Graffiti, Velvet Goldmine, and 24 Hour Party People — all precariously balanced between the eras they depict and the eras in which they were made. If there’s anything positive to glean from that temporal precarity, it’s the overall sense that rock ‘n’ roll never dies; it just tries on different silly outfits from time to time. The Mods’ outfits just happened to be sillier than most. I mean, who wears a tailored suit to a punk show?
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 