24 Hour Party People · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Halfway through the film a man in a public toilet looks at the camera and tells you the scene you just watched never happened. He should know — he's Howard Devoto, and the actor playing Howard Devoto is right there beside him. Wilson, narrating, shrugs it off: "I definitely don't remember that happening." Then he tells you to print the legend anyway. Most films work hard to make you believe them. This one works hard to be caught lying, and somehow that makes you trust it more. Hold onto that toilet scene. Everything Deleuze can tell you about 24 Hour Party People is folded into it.

Deleuze had a name for cinema that stops trying to be true: the powers of the false. His usual contract for film was the documentary one — the camera doesn't lie, what's on the strip really stood in front of the lens. Neorealism lived on that contract; so did Bazin's whole faith in the image. Deleuze's interest was in the directors who broke it on purpose and made the break productive — not sloppiness, not lying to deceive, but falsity as a creative engine. The truth/legend choice isn't a flaw in Wilson's story. It's the method. Truth and falsity become genuinely undecidable, and out of that undecidability the myth of Manchester gets manufactured in front of you. That is the powers of the false working as a principle, not a gimmick.

Deleuze gave this principle a face: the forger (le faussaire). His model was Orson Welles — and it's no accident the film's lineage runs straight through F for Fake, Welles's collage-essay built around a charming liar toying with truth and forgery. Wilson is the forger entire: Cambridge-educated, quoting Boethius and the Situationists while the books don't balance, a serial self-mythologizer who narrates his own legend and openly edits it as he goes. The forger isn't a villain who deceives. He's the figure through whom new truths get made rather than found. Factory's blood-signed contract giving the artists everything, the Haçienda hemorrhaging money — Wilson reframes glorious failure as the price of a real gift. He's forging meaning in real time, and the film knows it.

When two versions of an event are offered as both true — the scene as staged and Devoto's denial of it — that's falsifying narration. Not an unreliable narrator who'll eventually be corrected, but mutually exclusive accounts left standing side by side, neither winning. The whole structure runs on it: archival footage spliced against dramatization, captions and freeze-frames and Factory catalogue numbers interrupting the fiction, Coogan's heightened theatrical address cutting across the naturalistic, improvised scenes around him. The cut itself argues the thesis — that history is a montage of selected, embellished fragments. The image keeps asking to be read rather than simply watched, which is Deleuze's lectosign: the picture loses its self-evidence, sprouts text and footnotes, and turns into something you decipher. A music biopic shouldn't need annotations. This one is all annotation.

There's a deeper move, though, than one man lying well. Deleuze's late, political turn was about fabulation — subjects caught "in the act of legending" themselves, telling stories that call a community into being that didn't quite exist yet. "Madchester" wasn't a place you could find on a map in 1976. It became real partly because Wilson kept insisting on it, on television, to your face. Watch how the film treats him: framed slightly apart from every scene he narrates, at the edge, addressing us — participant and mythographer at once. The camera fuses his vision with the film's own; you can't separate Wilson's spin from Winterbottom's account. That fusion is what Deleuze called the author and character seeing through each other. The legend isn't decoration on top of the history. The legending is the history.

All of this only works because the film refuses the older machine. In classical cinema a man perceives a situation and acts to change it — the action-image, situation to action and back. Wilson can't. He watches two revolutions happen, narrates them, takes the credit, but he's a presenter, a conduit, a man at the edge of rooms full of people more talented than he is. The film is conscious of its own clichés — every rock-doc beat is flagged as a cliché the second it arrives — and that knowingness is exactly the crisis Deleuze located at the hinge between classical and modern film. It rewards re-watching the way a mind-game film does, not through a twist that rewrites the plot but through a narrator who's told you from frame one that he's editing.

Its ancestors are honest about all this. Liberty Valance hands over the thesis verbatim. F for Fake hands over the form — the forger's essay-collage. Spinal Tap supplies the skeptical grammar, Tom Jones the fourth wall, A Hard Day's Night the run-and-gun camera that Robby Müller degrades into DV bloom and banding, making the cheap image itself part of the lie that tells the truth. What the film seeded is everywhere now: the knowing, footnoted, anti-nostalgic biopic that celebrates its subject by puncturing it.

So: did the Sex Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall really change everything? Forty-two people were there; thousands claim they were. Wilson would tell you that's the wrong question. The right one is what the claim built. Watch it again knowing the man is forging it as he speaks — you'll see a film that figured out how to be completely truthful about being false.