I'll Show You All the Out-Takes

I began this piece in June 2007, just after viewing Control.

At some point during the fall of 2004, I walked into a classic brick-and-beam warehouse office diagonally across the street from CBGB^[1], home to a pair of film producers whose most famous respective works are the disoriented Talking Heads feature True Stories, and everyone's favorite sadomasochist dark comedy, Secretary.

After some transparently vexed half-jokes about my punctuality (a VIP at People had dropped his Treo in the stairwell; I had to swap it out), my hosts began a cat-and-mouse conversation about a short book I wrote in 2002. For the most part, it is a recitation of facts I absorbed after hearing a song called "True Faith" on the soundtrack to a long-forgotten American film, Bright Lights, Big City, in the spring of 1988. A few months later, I learned that a very different song my friends and I had skateboarded to, "Failures," was by the same band. I was told they used to be called Joy Division, and that their singer had killed himself.

Flanked by pillars of VHS tapes—despite the fact that you could fit the entire visual record of Joy Division on two of them—my hosts (and their impossibly young, adorably brainwashed PA) detailed their predicament: A couple of years before 24 Hour Party People blossomed from music obssessive's daydream into well-cast, semi-serious production, their New York-based film company, Double A, negotiated the rights to Deborah Curtis's memoir, Touching From a Distance. This occurred primarily because one of them (Neal Weisman) was a close friend of Tony Wilson's.

In the years since Double A had optioned the book, all manner of things happened—or didn't. Secretary was a critical smash, which must have distracted Amy Hobby from the project. Deborah Curtis may or may not have vacillated on certain things (the word "difficult" was used). Neal was unable to entice people from within the Factory camp to participate. Fingers pointed in all directions, but the end result was that the option lapsed, without fruit. Which is something 24 Hour Party People bore in bushels.

The idea of a dedicated Ian Curtis biopic was—and truly still is—ridiculously niche. It was always going to be a vanity project for whomever took it on, and without the financial and experiential resources to do justice to a story held so close by so many, a budget DIY venture would have been indulgent blasphemy. From the vantage point of a major studio, Curtis's life was too private, brief, and regional to translate, his contributions to popular music too unquantifiable to merit a multi-million dollar investment. Sensitive kid from rough town straddles working class guilt with romantic aspiration, sings songs of sadness, nobody can save him, end credits.

As a subject, Ian Curtis is only as captivating as the music he made, and the number of people captivated by Joy Division, as well as the depth of their devotion, was not well understood outside the realm of music journalism—until the success of 24 Hour Party People. Thereafter, a dedicated tribute to Joy Division, and Curtis in particular, became emotionally necessary for some, and financially lucrative for others. People who lived through those times, as well as latter-day fans, were shocked by the poignant and bittersweet first half of the film; how it accomplished the impossible so delicately, yet honestly, cracking the seal on a hitherto unthinkable notion: a public celebration of one of our most privately-cherished pop bands. The Ian Curtis Story was suddenly, definitely, properly going to happen, and Double-A—by 2004 operating under the name Washington Square films—had let sole ownership of the project slip through their fingers.

Two weeks before Washington Square contacted me, a press conference was held by Orian Williams, Anton Corbijn, Todd Eckert, Matt Greenhalgh, Anthony Wilson and Deborah Curtis, announcing the allegiances that would film Control. I'd read the transcript of this conference before our meeting; in fact, I'd been closely following the press release war between the competing Joy Division biopics for some time. Apparently, this was a source of frustration for the Control team, as about halfway through the conference, Tony took a very nasty swipe at Neal, and their producer said there was no way Washington Square could legally ever make a film about Joy Division.

Wounds like this are never clean. I wasn't going to assume the door was closed, and wanted to hear about their project. The Control production team had essentially no experience, and Anton Corbijn had never directed a film before. At the time, I figured it might still blow up in everyone's face, and the more seasoned Washington Square team would be there to clean up.

After some namedropping on both sides—Radiohead/Blur video director Jamie Thraves was on board to direct, Moby was handling the soundtrack—"Oh you know I just had drinks with his keyboardist last week!"—I asked them, "What's with Tony calling Neal a 'tosser' in public?" "How can you make this movie without Deborah Curtis?" An awkward silence split the table. Neal began twiddling my book, and asked sideways why there was no bibliography. Not offended at the indirect admission he hadn't read it very well, I replied that the book was sourced in the text, due to the limited number of references. He asked if I would be interested in working on their script with Jamie, verifying dates, and providing general background on the time period, musically speaking. It became clear they were looking for a way to legitimize their project, to source their script, and I worked myself into something of a self-righteous pique. "I'm sorry, but, if you're looking to use my book as an end run around Touching From a Distance, this is a non-starter. Both ethically, and insofar as that book is one of the three primary sources for mine. There's no way."

And so we struck the meeting, and Amy and Neal went off, I would have hoped, ready to accept reality. In the face of the press conference, there was no wiggle room: it was clear who should be allowed to tell this story. Yet as I understand it, they are still laboring in obstinate disregard, enjoining Lindsay Reade from the inner circle, using hers and journalist Mick Middles' atrocious carcass-sniffer Torn Apart as the reference point for a movie that should never, ever be made.

Sadly, the people you might have trusted to tell this story have failed. Corbijn's aplomb in personally financing the film (to the tune of £5 million) is admirable, but Control is a passion play of the first order. It is a blithe, Christian film that affords an even more casual means to pity or mourn or pretend to empathize with Ian Curtis, and as such it buries him, once and for all. The grand myth he became, the figure Factory made him—that he in all likelihood wanted Factory to make him—is cheapened if not undone by this ordinary, linear treatment. Corbijn has scotched a story that yearned for unforgiving, brutal eyes. For an exorcist. Mike Leigh's Naked is exactly the grotesque fin de siècle of naivete, romanticism, fatalism, petulance, rage and talent that Control should have been. This is a story about a guy who wrote cataclysmic, morbid poetry, delivered it in terrifying fashion, and hanged himself. It's not about the fucking good times^[2].

Everyone involved with Joy Division, who supported Ian Curtis as an artist, friend, manic depressive, and epileptic, inherited a responsibility upon his death, insofar as they had a choice: how best to serve—whether in silence or exposition—his memory. What we get from Corbijn is a confused attempt at kitchen sink drama, for all intents an extended remix of his wonderfully vague "Atmosphere" video^[3]. The film is a needlessly rote telling of a private and largely plain story that was already handled appropriately: in the Factory tradition, within the ebullient, myth-making 24 Hour Party People, and the more personal remembrances of Curtis's widow (not to mention the recent ruminations of his daughter).

Everything Joy Division did was obtuse—shrouded, and willfully so—and Factory helped take that to another level, in exactly the same way McLaren/Reid/Westwood buttressed the smart-aleck Sex Pistols. Tony Wilson consistently demurs and defers demurred and deferred to McLaren as some kind of grand patriarch, but he, and Saville, and Erasmus, and Gretton, and Hannett left a grander if less explosive mark on the same landscape. It wasn't the Clash who were "positive," it was people like Rough Trade and Factory, who plowed ahead after the storm died down, who strove to expand punk's societal gains.

There is a situational, historical component to Joy Division that rivals the Pistols, insofar as they were (or at least one could argue they were), the "flowers of romance." Rotten in particular was very big on the Romantics, on the idea of emotional and class anarchy, and prayed for post-punk more than anyone. Punk was about egalitarianism in one sense, about self-expression, but it was a totally rigid, constrained movement, because things were so far out of order socially and musically in England that all you had to do was stand up and scream "NO." Essential dissent was a revolutionary act for those ripped-banner wavers, a notion Greil Marcus discusses much more thoroughly in the epic Lipstick Traces.

Continuing that line of thought, Joy Division can be viewed as delivering on the promise of punk's liberation. They were moved to express a private desperation—feelings of isolation, longing, a lack of faith, a taste for unknowable eternality—in a cerebral, deliberate way. Curtis was lyrically gory, almost pornographic in terms of his emotional nudity, and that honesty has led to untold sympathies. Jon Savage's immediate reaction in Melody Maker was quite beautiful, but shortsightedly dramatic, and too forgiving: "Now no one will remember what his work with Joy Division was like when he was alive; it will be perceived as tragic rather than courageous." Right at the start, you are dealing with Christian imagery, with the notion of Curtis preaching and self-martyring.

I believe Curtis was initially very aware of the singularity he would attain through suicide—the romantic Permanence of it—but that this idea weighed less and less on him as he chose to end his life. The hopelessness he was embroiled in, as Sumner and most of his friends have always said, was very much down to epilepsy and manic depression, compounded by the counterproductive medications he was prescribed, and the epileptogenic situations prevalent in his chosen lifestyle. This is what makes Curtis a sympathetic figure, unlike Kurt Cobain (a junkie who constantly rationalized his addiction, evaded his responsibilities, then copped out). Ian Curtis was cursed, kept from doing what he dreamed of by a disease he had no control over. He wanted to be under lights that gave him seizures; to stay up all night; to drink and be merry; to walk his dog. He wanted to walk up the stairs with his daughter. He could not be trusted, nor could he trust himself to do any of these things.

Joy Division and Ian Curtis are static entities, monuments to qualities we are more desperate than ever to find in our art: truth, honesty, integrity, individuality, and originality. The potency of Joy Division's music, so haunting and ahead of its time, is amplified in that it didn't morph into something distasteful or compromised^[4]. Most bands embarrass themselves at some point—the Cure, Siouxsie, Bowie, Iggy, the Pistols, the Doors—and in killing himself, Curtis ducked that battle (and so many others).

Thanks to Factory records, Rob Gretton, and the tenacious, quality journalism of Paul Morley—not to gloss over their formidable live presence—Joy Division were able to build a following without promoting themselves in ways fans today consider off-putting and embarrassing. Authenticity is harder than ever to believe in, or unequivocally declare, and because Ian Curtis killed himself, people can project whatever they like onto his life and music. He's not around to tell them otherwise.

Joy Division never had the chance to compromise their music or message, so we can assume they would not have, but we can't know. We stare at the pictures, listen to the music, and drown in halcyon, inherited nostalgia for times and places most of us will never understand, making Joy Division what we want so badly, but may never know again: a band that means one thing.

^[1] I know neither why nor how this inside joke became a Gawker news item. I wrote it before work one Friday morning, marginally hungover, and sent it to Nick because I laughed so hard at even remembering the name Poi Dog Pondering. 2007 has been rife with last-gasp blog-on-blog incest of this sort. I started writing this entry in June, when I first saw Control. Which is to say, before "Meg White Sex Tape" became the #2 search result on Google, thanks to a message board prank.

Most of the people who were first fascinated by blogging—and therefore took it seriously—have grown out of it. The rest are kidding themselves, minute by minute. Worse, a younger generation is poisoned by weekly diapers-to-riches stories of Facebook billionaires, believing the internet is a real medium—that there is real money and authority somewhere in these wires—when the lonely, self-absorbed party-hoppers manning them are more gutless, deferential and deluded than ever. Not coincidentally we can say the same of the music and musicians they tend to write about.

^[2]I will never understand the urge to underscore meaningless, "humanizing" anecdotes when talking about suicides. Why do people stress how much fun people who kill themselves had when they were alive? "Oh I remember the time we sprayed beer all over Simon Topping, and then there was that time he farted in the van and we pulled over and threw packets of crisps and empty Duvel bottles at him!" Obviously moments like this were not very life-affirming for the departed. As far as Naked goes, I have never watched a film and thought, "Gosh some Joy Division would be perfect right about now!" I did at the end of this one.

^[3]Not a very unique turn of phrase as it happens: Simon Reynolds used the very same expression in his excellent New York Times piece.

^[4]For example, New Order recorded (but never released) a version of "Blue Monday" for Sunkist, a story finally came out in the Paul Morley-spawned NewOrderStory of the early 1990s.