Jubilee

“God save the Queen…”

In 1952, Princess Elizabeth became the Queen of Great Britain, Northern Ireland, the Dominions, etc. With the UK suffering from the physical and financial cost of World War II, rationing still in force, and major cities blighted by bomb damage, the young queen inspired an outpouring of optimism and renewed patriotism. A new Elizabethan Age was declared, harking back to the long reign of Elizabeth I, which saw a flowering of literature, philosophy, science, exploration, and imperial expansion. For about two decades, the conceit held good – New Zealander Edmund Hillary’s ‘conquest’ of Mount Everest four days before Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953 was claimed as a British triumph; the economic recovery of the late 1950s (‘we have never had it so good’) led to the social and cultural revolution of the Swinging Sixties, exporting British popular culture and mores around the world. When Francis Chichester circumnavigated the globe between 1966 and 1967, Elizabeth II knighted him using the same sword that Elizabeth I used to honour Sir Francis Drake, an earlier seafaring hero. The link between the two Elizabethan Ages seemed secure.  

“The fascist regime…”

By the early 1970s, this royalist dream was dashed. The British Empire was dwindling as more colonies declared independence. Closer to home, the Irish Republican Army and other nationalist groups launched bombing campaigns and assassination attempts on English soil. Police violence and corruption was rampant, with several high-profile miscarriages of justice, and the persecution of African and West Indian immigrants and their descendants, who were already being terrorised by far-right groups such as the National Front. The economy collapsed in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, resulting in closures of heavy industries, rising unemployment, and the ‘Three-Day Week’, when energy consumption and working hours were reduced. This is the world of social breakdown reflected in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978), made in 1977 in response to the Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II.¹ The film’s immediate referent is the Sex Pistols’ notorious “God Save the Queen”, to which it alludes throughout. The song was conceived as a parody of the British national anthem, which was being played up and down the UK even more than usual during the jubilee year, an anthem of imperial triumphalism that was belied by the decadent state of the country in the late 1970s. It was hysterically attacked by the establishment and mass media, and banned by the BBC, who rigged the charts to prevent it reaching No. 1 in the UK.

“They made you a moron…”

From its original release, there has been controversy over the status of Jubilee as a ‘punk’ film. It certainly features figures on the fringe of the subculture, including Jordan, Helen Wellington-Lloyd (aka Helen of Troy), and The Slits, and makes use of punk music, punk iconography, and punk attitudes. Yet it was rejected by many within the movement as phoney, including Vivienne Westwood – designer for the Sex boutique, an early locus for the British punk movement – who created an ‘open T-shirt’ (as opposed to open letter) to Jarman. Westwood’s attack barely masks a more reactionary agenda: 

Jubilee: I had been to see it once + thought it the most boring and therefore disgusting film I had ever seen […] What an insult to my VIRILITY! I’m a punk man! And as you use the values you give to punks as a warning, am I supposed to see old Elizabeth’s England as some state of grace? Well, I’d rather consider that all this grand stuff and looking at diamonds is something to do with a gay (which you are) boy’s love of dressing up + playing at charades (Does he have a cock between his legs or doesn’t he? kinda thing) […] But I ain’t insecure enough nor enough of a voyeur to get off watching a gay boy jerk off through the titillation of his masochistic tremblings. You pointed your nose in the right direction then you wanked.²

Westwood later became a vocal supporter of the Tory party and a Dame Commander of the British Empire.  

“’Cause tourists are money…”

It is possible that the real source of Westwood’s ire was the character of Borgia Ginz (Orlando, stage name of the Romani performer Jack Birkett), a vicious parody of her husband, business partner, and punk Svengali Malcolm McLaren, as an exploitative, blind, bald music producer mouthing authoritarian epigrams.³  

“There’s no future and England’s dreaming…”

Jubilee begins and ends with a bored Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre) asking magician John Dee (Rocky Horror creator Richard O’Brien) to transport her to the future ruled by her 20th century namesake. The film presents England – and English history – caught in a loop, a dream, a nightmare from which it cannot awake.  

“We’re the flowers in the dustbin…”

Jarman counters this national nightmare – based on myths of conquest and individual heroism – with an ethics of community and an aesthetic of post-modernism (the term is seen as graffiti early in the film). Jubilee incorporates many groups that were ignored, marginalised, or even vilified by Official Punk (as witness Westwood’s t-shirt letter), such as radical feminists, Black people, and the queer community. It was made with friends in a spirit of friendship. 

Like the writer Angela Carter – whose The Passion of New Eve (1977) about a transgender academic in a dystopian metropolis shares many features with Jubilee – Jarman was a bricoleur who treated Western culture as a giant rubbish heap from which he took what he needed to twist into new shapes. Jubilee has its roots in the cinema of Jarman’s youth – the modernised Furies in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (Orpheus, 1950); MGM musicals; the cartoonish music industry satire of Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It (1956); the juvenile delinquency films of the 1950s; the female-centred exploitation films of Russ Meyer. It reimagines the testosterone-fuelled violence of Kenneth Anger and A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1972) with Pussy Galore’s lesbian gang from Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger (1964), and England’s camp tradition of music hall and Carry On films. It sublimates memories of Jarman’s time at boarding school, and his distant military father, and builds on the queer Catholicism of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Jubilee is a compendium of Jarman’s many strands of artistic activity, from artmaking, writing and set design to experimental film, performance art, and even gardening. In reaction to the ‘heritage’ industry that fetishised Britain’s picturesque past in films, TV, and advertising, Jarman finds beauty in wastelands and dereliction. Jubilee posits fantasy, imagination, metamorphosis, and the occult as weapons to counter the repressive grimness of reality. 

“No future…”

Because reality was only getting worse – a year after the release of the film, Margaret Thatcher was elected British Prime Minister. Her dismantling of the social fabric and demonisation of minorities (not least the queer community during the AIDS pandemic) made the dystopia of Jubilee look pastoral. While many old punks would scavenge prestige jobs in the media or turn to the right politically, Jarman would take a leading activist role against dehumanising Thatcherism in the 1980s, and make an even more savage howl of protest with The Last of England (1987).  Derek Jarman was a real punk.

Jubilee (1978 United Kingdon 107 min)

Prod: Howard Malin & James Whaley Dir: Derek Jarman Phot: Peter Middleton  Ed: Tom Priestley & Nick Barnard  Prod & Cost Des: Christopher Hobbs Mus: Brian Eno

Cast: Jenny Runacre, Little Nell, Toyah Willcox, Jordan, Hermine Demoriane, Ian Charleson, Karl Johnson, Linda Spurrier, Neil Kennedy, Orlando, Wayne County, Richard O’Brien, David Haughton, Helen, Adam Ant

Endnotes