The Naro showed the Joe Strummer documentary "The Future is Unwritten" this weekend. It's a fine film -- lots of non-conventional storytelling, funny moments, and great music, of course. But what I most admired about the movie was how the director Julian Temple resisted the urge to get too sentimental about the subject. Plenty of people deify Strummer, I think, for good reason. But there was remarkably little hero worship in the film.
Strummer is portrayed as flawed man with great ambition and talent and ideals that he sometimes had trouble living up to. I couldn't help comparing Strummer's story to that of Pete Seeger. Oddly enough, Seeger was (and is) the bigger rebel in several respects.
Still, I will always love Joe. At the risk of giving too much away, "The Future is Unwritten" in part tells the story of how Strummer started out as a hippie, renounced his hippidom in order to lead the punk rock revolution, then, later in life, once again embraced his peace-and-love hippie tendencies. That's not the story that punk-rock purists would like to see, but it's true nonetheless.
As Joe himself once sang, "He who fucks nuns will later join the church."
1 comment:
i really loved this film. i'll need to learn more about pete seeger.
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