How to Fuck Up a Non-Narrative Film, How to Fuck Up the Apocalypse: Derek Jarman�s The Last of England

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Picture me, dear reader, all geared up to watch Derek Jarman�s apocalyptic The Last of England, which promised to depict the nightmare of Thatcherism, in which, and allow me to quote extensively from Fandor�s synopsis, �he has Tilda Swinton stalk through the remnants of industrial England, encountering visions of fascistic slaughter and sacrifice. These nightmares are cut together with his family's idyllic home movies, a link with the past soon to be severed, all overlaid with bleak quotations from poets like T.S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg, read in the stentorian tones of Nigel Terry.�

Well, first off, Tilda Swinton doesn�t appear on the scene until there�s only about fifteen minutes left of the film (it�s a younger Tilda Swinton; her eyes have become distinctly stranger looking as she ages).  As far as I could tell, there was one short quote a-piece from Eliot and Ginsberg, and not even terribly original quotations.  From Ginsberg, he has �I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked,� which is the most famous line in Ginsberg�s ourvre, hell, it�s one of the most famous lines in all of poetry, anyone can say it, it doesn�t even mean anything anymore.  And the Eliot line is of course, �Not with a bang, but with a whimper.�

Now, The Last of England is a non-narrative montage film, and that�s just fine.  Jean-Luc Godard�s epic �documentary,� Histoire(s) du Cin�ma, which purports to tell the story (or history!) of film, is similarly incoherent, and large portions of its sound-track consist largely of just Godard sententiously intoning �histoire(s) du cinema� along with the titles of the various episodes within the film, along with a few other catchphrases (it�s kind of like the Beatles� �Revolution 9� if that �song� was the soundtrack to a documentary and it went on for four hours).  But in spite of what this may sound like, Godard�s Histoire(s) du Cin�ma is quite enjoyable, on the whole.  Godard�s images are beautiful and melancholy and he knows how to juxtapose them to consistently surprising and aesthetically pleasing effect.  The same cannot be said for Jarman�s hyperactive mess of a film, which consists of crude shots of scantily clad young men smashing things in a post-apocalyptic London which at times seems more like Gaza.  The young men play with flares, smashes sticks and bricks, and, perhaps most memorably, fuck a life-size print of Caravaggio�s Amor Vincit Omnia. 

Jesus, Jarman.

Now this is all well and good, but there�s far too much of it.  Histoire(s) du Cin�ma works, at least in part, because Godard knows when to move on to new material, or at least when to introduce hints of new material into a pre-existing fugue.  Jarman�s nihilistic young rioters, by contrast, dominate the fucking film.  It�s only near the end that Tilda Swinton shows up to have a (possibly abortive) wedding and then run off into the wasteland and tear away portions of her wedding dress in a scene that calls to mind Kirsten Dunst�s manic depressive bride in Lars von Trier�s infinitely superior film, Melancholia, which brings me to my second point, which is about how Jarman fucked up a perfectly good apocalyptic premise: Thatcherite England descending into societal decay and fascist terror.  That�s what drew me to the movie, and I was sorely disappointed.  There are only hints of the degrading cruelties of Thatcherism in this film (a theme which I suspect Jarman�s countryman, Peter Watkins, would have handled with far greater aplomb).  If you�re going to film an apocalypse, do it with style, do it (to quote Ezra Pound�s rejoinder to Eliot) �with a bang, not a whimper.� Launch a fucking rogue planet at the Earth, like von Trier does in Melancholia.  Send body-snatching aliens to carve vaginas into people�s faces like the writhing gelatinous space puddles in Hajime Sato�s Goke: Body Snatcher from Hell.  Now that�s an apocalypse!  Not heroin-addicted pretty boys sneering at the camera.  If I want to see that, I�ll watch any of Gus van Sant�s non-Oscar-bait movies.  At least he occasionally casts William S. Burroughs.

Post-script:

I have written a review of Feng Xiaogang's Back to 1942 for Slant Magazine.  You shoud all check it out here.