Sid and Nancy · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Garbage is falling in slow motion. Sid and Nancy are kissing in an alley, and the trash comes down around them like confetti at a wedding, catching the sodium light. Nothing in the preceding hour has earned this. Roger Deakins has spent that hour photographing filth as filth: bare bulbs, stained walls, mattresses on the floor, takeaway cartons in the corners. Now the same filth falls on two people as a blessing. Hold that shot. Most of what this film knows is inside it.

Notice what the bodies are doing, which is nothing. They stand still and kiss. All the movement in the frame belongs to the world: the garbage, the altered speed, the light. Deleuze has a name for that reversal, the movement of world. Normally a character moves and the world holds still for them. Here the character goes quiet and the world takes over the motion, the way a dance stops belonging to the dancer and starts absorbing them. Cox stages it in an alley, and it tells you what kind of film you are in. These two are not going to act on anything. They are going to be carried.

Which is a strange engine for a rock movie. The music biopic normally runs on the oldest circuit in cinema: someone perceives a hostile situation, acts, and the act changes the world into a record collection. Deleuze called that circuit the action-image, situation to act to transformed situation, and nearly all studio cinema is assembled from it. Cox unplugs it in the first reel. Sid cannot play. There is no rise, no talent to validate, no explanatory childhood. Nothing is achieved and the story advances by attrition. What Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image — people who can no longer respond adequately to what is happening to them — arrives here not through art-film abstention but through heroin.

So what drives it? Deleuze kept a whole category for cinema like this and called it the impulse-image, the cinema of naturalism, his examples being Stroheim and Buñuel. It has a double structure. On top sits the derived milieu, the actual social world with its jobs and manners and addresses: late-period Pistols London, the disastrous 1978 southern tour, press conferences, a methadone clinic, Room 100 at the Chelsea Hotel. Underneath it lies the originary world, a raw zone of appetite the milieu barely covers, and Andrew McAlpine's production design keeps dragging it into frame. Syringes. Mattresses on floors. Walls that look like they have absorbed the people living against them. Rooms and corridors and van interiors too small to stand apart in, so the couple are staged in near-permanent collision. The drive gets a fetish too, in Deleuze's sense of one part-object that concentrates the whole compulsion: the needle. And what the impulse-image supplies in place of a plot is a line of slope, an irreversible descent with dates on it. October 1978, Nancy. February 1979, Sid, on bail.

Deakins gives the slope a colour. He lights almost everything from sources visible in the shot — sodium streetlight, neon, bare bulbs, the flat fluorescence of clinics and precinct houses — pushed toward saturation instead of corrected toward neutral. London is cold and blue. New York arrives as an orange fever; the Chelsea goes green, the alley amber. This is the affective colour-image: colour that stops describing a scene and absorbs it, so the feeling lives in the light rather than in the acting. For two decades nobody could see it, because the film circulated on video transfers that turned the whole scheme to brown. The 2017 restoration Cox supervised is what makes the case again. This photography was always closer to comic-book chroma than to grit.

Between the tableaux, the film just lets its actors exist. Arguments that go nowhere. Nodding out. The shapeless duration of addiction, held in long observational stretches that David Martin's cutting declines to tighten. That is dead time, temps mort, where nothing advances and you start to feel time instead of watching it get spent. What fills it is bodies. Oldman built Sid from posture and voice, the loose-jointed slump and adenoidal drawl, a vacancy that reads as sweetness one minute and absence the next, and lost weight for the late scenes to a degree that reportedly needed medical supervision. Chloe Webb's Nancy is the harder performance to sit with and probably the braver: a sustained high whine, wheedling and abrasive, giving you no comfortable way in. Deleuze's cinema of the body names this kind of film, one that carries duration in attitudes rather than events. You never learn what these two are. You watch what they do with their weight.

One posture becomes a set piece. Oldman's "My Way" — tuxedo, staircase, proscenium, ending with Sid firing into the audience — restages the number from Julien Temple's The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980) down to its framing, and reverses Temple's ironic distance into pathos. Deleuze would call that a gest, a posture that stops being personal and lays bare the theatrical relation the character is trapped inside. Sid is not expressing himself. He is performing the image of himself that has already been sold, and the film openly admits it is quoting the sale.

That quotation is where Cox gets radical, and where he earned the anger the film still attracts. Almost all punk cinema before it was documentary or near-documentary: The Punk Rock Movie, D.O.A., Rude Boy, the Swindle. Those films trade on the medium's oldest contract, the camera was there so this happened. Cox refuses the contract. He relocates events, compresses weeks, reorders the record for dramatic rhyme, and approaches Nancy's death obliquely without adjudicating it. Deleuze called this the powers of the false, which is not lying but the discovery that a narration refusing to settle true-or-false can reach something a faithful one cannot. Its companion is fabulation, people caught in the act of legending themselves, and that is the real subject: Sid Vicious was a legend before he was a body, and Malcolm McLaren appears here as an impresario of the legending. John Lydon's long, consistent repudiation is in a sense the proof that Cox knew this. Survivors are exactly who a myth cannot satisfy. The cost is real and worth naming — the tenderness extended to Sid is withheld from Nancy, who gets flattened into a grating antagonist, and later criticism has been right to press on that.

None of this was invented from nothing. Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965) supplies the armature: the amour fou couple as a suicide pact, organized by saturated location colour-coding and jump-cut ellipsis that skips the mechanics of travel. Cox takes both and revises one thing, since his couple never actually goes anywhere. From Badlands (1973) comes the exact move of laying lyric slow motion and a romantic score straight over squalor so the beauty contradicts the facts; the alley kiss is that move, transplanted. The Panic in Needle Park (1971) gives him the junkie couple as the last surviving social unit, shot in available light with no musical cushioning. Christiane F. (1981) gives him needle squalor as continuous texture dressed to the frame edge, with the rock soundtrack kept diegetic — which a rights problem then forced further, since the Pistols masters were unavailable and Oldman had to sing Sid himself. Jarman's Jubilee (1978) licensed the whole refusal of reportage.

Forward, three lines run out of it. Oldman left with transformation-as-method, the persona that defined thirty years of his work. Deakins left on the way to becoming Deakins. And the music biopic was reset: Velvet Goldmine, 24 Hour Party People, Control, eventually Pistol all inherit the permission Cox took, to treat music history as unreliable myth rather than authorized record. The romantic-squalid drug film runs on through Drugstore Cowboy and Trainspotting.

Which brings you to the last scene. Sid climbs into a yellow cab. Nancy is waiting inside. Children are dancing in the street. That is a dream-image, an onirosign, a fantasy circuit anchored to nobody's rememberable past, and Martin cuts it as a continuation of the film's grammar rather than a rupture, so nothing tells you where you now are. Watch it again and ask who is dreaming. If it is Sid, the film ends in consolation. If it is the film — the myth arriving on schedule to collect its bodies — then the last shot is a diagnosis of what you have been enjoying for two hours. Cox never says. The undecidability is the whole design, and it is why the garbage falls like confetti an hour earlier. This film keeps handing you beauty it does not think you should trust.