Everything smells like smoke again. 

I love the San Fernando Valley, don’t get me wrong; but every fall the Santa Ana winds kick up and with them, a couple of arsonists. The smoke has been so bad this weekend that today in my voice acting class, everybody got the same direction – better breath control, and don’t sound so much like Alec Baldwin. Listen to radio commercials about a month from now, and you’ll see what I mean.

What better way to pass the time then by staying indoors and watching a long-neglected cult film via Netflix? The film in this case is PRIVILEGE, Peter Watkins’ pseudo-documentary about a troubled pop star. It’s a little-known work, but people who have seen it tend to remember it. I for example, caught it once on TV over thirty years ago and haven’t been able to find it anywhere since, but I’ve wanted to. In fact, up until last year I couldn’t even have rented it if I wanted to. New Yorker Video got around to cleaning up five Peter Watkins movies and releasing them as a series.

Peter Watkins was a British television director in the late sixties who was quite ahead of his time. He made his reputation with THE WAR GAME, another faux documentary about London in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear blast. PRIVILEGE, shot in a similar fashion for theatrical release, covers some of the same territory. It takes place in 1970, which made it science-fiction in 1967. Teen idol Steven Shorter is as popular as all the Beatles rolled into one, and worshipped with a fervor that even the Beatles could only imagine. His ability to sell products based on an endorsement is so potent that there are Steven Shorter appliance stores. 

One of the entities putting that charisma to use is the “British Provisional Government”. By 1970 apparently the two party-system in England has given way to something a little more… efficient. So our popstar’s job is to channel the destructive energy of youth away from, say protest and politics. And Steven Shorter, increasingly, is realizing this and he doesn’t like it.

The style of PRIVILEGE is a lot like DON’T LOOK BACK, the long-unseen documentary about Bob Dylan. However, Watkins is said to have modeled the film on a more unlikely source: LONELY BOY, a half-hour Canadian documentary about Paul Anka. Steven Shorter IS Paul Anka, in a way. Beloved by pimply hormonal teenage girls; polite, clean-cut, good-looking enough to be an effective tabula rasa. And besides who would you rather have as the fresh face of fascism? Bob Dylan was so subversive he’d have spoiled the joke. 

The movie does overreach, but it’s noble overreaching. We see Shorter selling appliances, then next they call him in to do a commercial for apples because there is an apple glut, and then BANG! he’s called upon to simultaneously encourage christianity and blind conformity to an omnipresent government. It goes too far too quickly. Perhaps there just isn’t a slow enough pace to make that twist work, but it’d be great to see the movie remade as a mini-series. 

I hate to say it, but it would also be nice to see someone else as Steven Shorter. He’s played by Paul Jones, a non-actor who was the lead singer of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. Jones has two notes as an actor – nervous tension and thinly veiled agony. I can’t help but think there needed to also be some sense that he loves his job so much that he can’t stop performing, even when he knows what an awful agenda he’s helping. But he does really nail the two big numbers, which are masterful satires of the excesses of pop. It’s only once he’s not singing that you start to question how the public would be devoted to such a dour guy. Part of the Beatles’ appeal was how much fun they seemed to be having at their press conferences after all. Being famous can be fun.

Whatever. PRIVILEGE is a rare gem, and flaws only serve to make gems even more fascinating. Be glad that you live in an age where you can rent it. That is, as soon as I return my copy, because I bet that’s the only one they have in stock.

-daniel k.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 12:54 pm and is filed under General, Motion Pictures, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.