“Who Killed Bambi?” should be the name of the movie made by the London punk rock band Sex Pistols started filming in 1977. Their first album wasn’t even out yet, but shrewd, discourse-savvy manager Malcolm McLaren felt it was time for a scandalously self-referential corporate video. The script was written by film critic Roger Ebert and directed by US sex champion Russ Meyer. “Who Killed Bambi?” was never finished. The title – with its attack on one of the most popular animals in the Walt Disney empire – developed into a winged phrase.
The fact that 45 years later the Disney+ streaming channel brings the series “Pistol” into the world, the six-part biopic about the Sex Pistols shot by Oscar winner Danny Boyle – that’s such a rough joke that you can’t even really laugh about it. The US moral institution on the one hand, on the other hand the grumpy iconoclasts who said “fuck” and “shit” on British television in 1976, insulted the Queen as a fascist, sang about anarchy, aborted fetuses and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp: The Combination is either the ultimate betrayal of all punk ideals or their perfect modern-day fulfillment, depending on your point of view. All episodes can now be seen on the German version of the platform, and although “Pistol” will certainly not be included in the series canon, it is at least one of the most entertaining restarts of recent times.
Whereby it has to be added here in English tutor style: You should definitely see “Pistol” with the original English soundtrack. This is the only way to make it clear which worlds meet in this story and in about six hours bring punk first to the world and then straight back to the grave. Then you hear the street slang of West London juvenile delinquents like Steve Jones, the guitarist, whose 2017 autobiography was the basis for the screenplay. And in contrast, the stilted culture shock language of Manager McLaren and interspersed with targeted Victorian sprinkles Singer Johnny Rottenwho pose as string pullers and poets in the middle of the wild beer party.
“We’re not about music,” the Jones character tells a reporter, “we’re about chaos”
The search for strong female figures, which often seems strenuous, does not cause any problems here, because there was an abundance of them: the politically highly motivated designer Vivienne Westwood, in whose boutique the band met. In addition, the musicians Chrissie Hynde and Siouxsie Sioux, who are active in the Pistols atmosphere, who have achieved much more sustainable careers, as well as the punk-it girl Pamela “Jordan” Rooke, who is here in a great scene – played by “Game Of Thrones” star Maisie Williams – in a transparent plastic dress cycling along the beach promenade like an alien.
Like an Alien: Maisie Williams as Jordan.
(Photo: Miya Mizuno/FX)
With the decision to tell the highly controversial story purely from the point of view of guitarist Jones, director Boyle dodges an interesting assignment. What exactly made up the complex chemical reaction that not only created a short-lived rock band suitable for comedy, but also an internationally networked movement, the offshoots of which can be felt today in the last but one art discipline – the series doesn’t even deal with that. “It’s not for us about music,” the Jones character once told a reporter, “we’re about chaos,” it doesn’t get any more profound than that.
It may be that punk in London in 1976 looked more like a teenage party gone haywire. But here it’s a typical side effect of the many music biopics that followed the Queen film’s Olympic success “Bohemian Rhapsody” still to come: The myths that make up the real content and magic of pop are mostly deadbiographed in them, with very few exceptions. Danny Boyle also fails in this regard. The glorious, ur-British grotesque theater that he builds out of his own stuff is nevertheless a bit of anarchic fun at times.
pistol, at Disney+