Writer-director Julien Temple has the curious distinction of having directed both 1980's The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle and its historical corrective, the brilliant 2000 documentary The Filth And The Fury. As he says on his informative, compelling audio commentary on the new Swindle DVD, a filmmaker would have to be "a little mad" to make two separate films about the same subject two decades apart. But having devoted Swindle to Malcolm McLaren's postmodern carnival-barker spin on the Sex Pistols legend, Temple felt he owed the band a documentary that would explore the Pistols' human story rather than the three-ring media circus McLaren delighted in manipulating and abusing. Swindle's tagline proudly hails it as "the film that incriminates its audience," and indeed, Swindle aspires not merely to debunk the Pistols' cult of authenticity, but to blow it to smithereens, then throw a party on its grave.
The sneering, safety-pin-ridden bastard child of F For Fake and The Monkees' Head, The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle performs an anarchic postmodern take on the Sex Pistols' demise through McLaren's 10 mock "lessons" for transforming a group that can't play into the hottest act in the country. In another thread, hormone-addled drummer Steve Jones, dolled up like a low-rent shamus, goes looking for McLaren and ends up in South America, partying with legendary British criminal-in-exile Ronnie Biggs. Temple went on to become an MTV auteur, and since many of Swindle's sequences feel like self-contained music videos, it's easy to see the film as a giant demo reel tied together by the loosest of plots, as well as voiceovers, concert performances, animation, and news footage. On a purely academic level, Swindle's merciless toying with what Temple refers to as "the politics of entertainment" seems exhilaratingly audacious and ahead of its time, from the faux-adverts for Sex Pistols-branded consumer products (narrated by Temple himself) to a sequence in which a group called Black Arabs perform disco versions of Sex Pistols songs. But as a film, Swindle's incoherence, slack pacing, and weakness for adolescent provocation (ooh, Nazi imagery!) render it fairly exhausting. By the end, viewers are liable to be just as sick of Malcolm McLaren's self-serving bullshit as John Lydon was when he quit the band and refused to participate in the film.
The irony, of course, is that the real story behind the Sex Pistols as rendered in The Filth And The Fury is infinitely more compelling than McLaren's self-aggrandizing Swindle version. But Temple and the Pistols got their revenge. Sex Pistols' spectacular rise and even more spectacular implosion wasn't a swindle or a hoax, it was a genuine, revolutionary, and vastly influential expression of working-class rage. Behind the sneer and barbed-wire sarcasm lay not a black, mercenary emptiness, but Lydon's furious, unshakable conviction. It's undiminished presence in this film is the most subversive element of all.