DONALD CLARKEon film-makers' 1970s pop revisionism
This week, Ricky Gervais (b. 1961) and Stephen Merchant (b. 1974) release an amiable little film entitled Cemetery Junction. There seems little doubt as to which of the two scribes had the biggest influence on the setting for their first feature as joint writers and directors.
Cemetery Junctiontakes place in a version of Reading (Gervais's birthplace) during the 1970s (Ricky's formative years). Next time round, Merchant might get to make his film set in Bristol during the 1980s. So it's the flared, three-day-weekish, couldn't-even-bury-the-dead 1970s. You know what that means. The hero listens to Barry Blue and Showaddywaddy. He eagerly watches Love Thy Neighbourand dreams of growing up to be Hughie Green. His mates dig Jethro Tull and Please Sir!
Well, not quite.
If the movies have taught us anything about that peculiar decade – troubled buffer between cultural liberation and Faustian surrender – it is that every young protagonist cared only for David Bowie and Roxy Music. A few years back, in Flashbacks of a Fool, the hero couldn't walk down the street without brandishing Roxy's first LP or Bowie's Ziggy Stardust. This time round, the leading layabout pastes a huge image of Mr Stardust over his bed. Journeys towards Reading's hotspots take place to the accompaniment of Bowie's All The Young Dudes.
A kind of pseudo-Stalinist David Cassidy-blindness overcomes too many film-makers when they seek to represent the 1970s of their youth and childhood. Yes, the odd croaky adult may enjoy rocking to Val Doonican or chortling to Mind Your Language. Sure, the odd older brother may nod his head to the narcoleptic guitar stylings of Wishbone Ash. But any character deserving of a place at a movie's centre will care only for those bits of glam that abut the experimental.
The forbidding hand of the directorial commissar will airbrush out every other piece of decadent, reactionary flummery. Alvin Stardust, that sinister imperialist counter-revolutionary, was, the film-makers argue, nowhere in the minds of the heroic pre-punk youth.
The gap between the 1970s and the present day is now so great that, even for those who lived through it, the era no longer feels like something that happened the other day. It’s history, and subject to all the reinventions and the reappraisals that history invites.
When, in 1997, Paul Thomas Anderson released Boogie Nights, the director could count on a fair percentage of his audience remembering the years of hipsters and hyper-inflation. Four years earlier, Brian De Palma offered us Carlito's Wayand, again, the representation of the 1970s felt more like a reflection on current affairs than a trawl through a vanished era.
Now, however, the 1970s is almost as foreign to cinema’s core audience as is the second World War. Heroic reinvention is common in stories set in both epochs.
All of which is a very long- winded way of saying: why does nobody ever like Peters and Lee in 1970s films?
