Ridley Scott Options Brave New World

In recent years I’ve heard the name “Joy Division” tossed around in the small circles of music aficionados I sometimes frequent. No aficionado of music myself, I let their fawning references pass over my head. I knew I had long heard of the band, but never gave much thought to it. Admittedly, I realize now the reason for my disinterest was my confusing of Joy Division – the seminal, upwrought dance-punk group of the late ’70s – with Pansy Division – a ’90s “queercore” band of much less repute. As a young teen flipping through the stacks of indierock at the Middletown Ear X-tacy, the cover shots of naked, eagerly smiling men stacked atop one another burned an unsought icon in my mind’s eye. Much later, when I heard Joy Division’s most popular single, “Love Will Keep Us Apart,” on a party mix, I thought perhaps either the queer-rock group’s audience had suddenly expanded beyond its expected boundaries, or I happened to be at a party whose host was well-versed in highly obscure rock bands.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened the package containing the newly released DVD documentary Joy Division and read the tagline, “The true story of the meteoric rise and fall of one of the most influential bands of our time.” Now call me an ignorant homophobe, but I had never presumed such an openly gay band would have garnered so lofty a stature. That’s when it hit me, and Oh! How very stupid I felt. Not only had I been completely unaware of “one of the most influential bands of our time,” but I had confused said influential band with another group whose music is most likely all but out of print (Though I don’t recall seeing those records ever missing from their trusty posts in the CD racks, so they still may be there). Well, what better way to learn about a cultural behemoth than to watch a documentary? Aside from listening to the actual music, that is.

What unfolds in Joy Division is a poignant commentary on modernity, illuminated by the tale of a single band, its music and enigmatic front-man, Ian Curtis, and bookended with words of simultaneous reverence and dread for the plod of progress and caprice of revolution. Opening upon scenes of Manchester in Post-War and Cold-War era England, director Grant Lee goes to lengths to show us just how ugly modernity can be. In one of the many interviews included in this 96 minute film, former Joy Division members Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris ruminate on just how starved for beauty Manchester residents were, as the film pans through rolls of period footage depicting a wasteland of junked cars and uprooted lots, where trees are not to be found, and in their place, a “concrete fortress” against a backdrop of blue haze. It was out of the grime of Manchester that this uncouth collective of musicians emerged, who were otherwise known as “factory fodder.”

As murky a portrait the hometown setting painted, I found while viewing Joy Division the genesis of the band seemed just as veiled, even as I sat through each member’s account of it. Be it the lack of perspicuity due to the hazy memory of middle-aged rockers, or simply the imminent sign of time smoothing out the sharp edges of any story, what remained clear in the telling was that Joy Division was set apart from other Manchester bands (e.g. the Buzzcocks) in the Scylla and Charybdis of Ian Curtis. Indeed, as the film progresses, the tangible absence of Curtis comes to dominate both the physical and metaphysical discourse between those who were there to recount his tale. Slowly the film builds around him, eventually culminating in suicide.

Joy Division offers anything a novice to the cult might need to be properly initiated, as well as, I suspect, innumerable gems for the long-starved addict craving more of what hooked him over two decades ago – everything from audio and video from the earliest days of Joy Division when they innocuously went about reproducing Nazi propaganda as cover art, to interviews with practically anyone who was ever involved with or connected to the group, to even a recording of Ian Curtis in an episode of hypnosis in his last days among the living. The interviews and historical footage is presented impeccably edited to fit the erratic nature of the band under Curtis’ headship. The concert footage helps to represent fully the living dichotomy Joy Division presented while on stage, as Curtis’ stick-man frame sways like an epileptic, without calculation, his eyes translucent and empty as they stared ahead as into the great void his life had assumed in its fame.

For all the exceptional interviews, angles and personal accounts included in this documentary (including 75 minutes of special feature additions), a profound silence resonates from the corner of Deborah Curtis, Ian’s wife and mother of their child. After every few chapters in the film, a blip appears on the radar in the form of a pair of typed sentences from an off-screen interview with the widow Curtis – her own account of the bygone era. But aside from these brief interjections, this woman, whose role in Ian Curtis’ life was surely paramount, is hardly alluded to in the telling. The absence left me wondering about the “actual Ian,” the domestic who went home at night to read and write, watch after his son and sleep beside his wife, and where he fit – or didn’t fit – into this complex arrangement called Joy Division. Sadly, that aspect of the tale remains untold here. Perhaps one might rather seek its telling in the dramatized – and not to mention commercialized – version of Joy Division in Control, another recent film covering the band.

Pick up Joy Division at Amazon.