Don't walk away

Joy Division made music with genuine psychic depth and cultural resonance. Both these dimensions to their work have been amplified by the silence surrounding it – a silence created by their habit of avoiding interviews and, of course, the suicide of Ian Curtis.

This silence remained unbroken until Deborah Curtis published ‘Touching from a Distance’ in 1995. In his introduction, Jon Savage hoped that her raw and unapologetic memoir might help heal the unresolved trauma of Ian’s suicide, and maybe it has, by informing two new feature-length films, Anton Corbijn’s ‘Control’, and Grant Gee’s ‘Joy Division’. Together, these films will expose Joy Division’s music to a bigger audience than it enjoyed while Curtis was alive, and seal its vital importance to the subsequent history of British music and culture.

They do so in very different ways, however, and with very different results, as ‘Control’ is a monochromatic, fictional account of Ian Curtis’ life, while ‘Joy Division’ is a polyphonic documentary. No guesses which one I prefer…

Certainly ‘Control’ has massive flaws. To name three of the most glaring, Sam Riley is way too nice to be Ian Curtis, Corbijn's cinematography is largely unimaginative, and the script is chock full of clichés, offering no fresh insight into Curtis either as a social animal or creative genius.

No doubt this sounds harsh. Having read glowing reviews of its authenticity, however, and knowing Corbijn’s qualities as a photographer, I was taken aback by how contrived and over-stylised the film is. The use of b&w throughout, combined with a constant focus on interior shots and scenes, gives the work the feel of a 60s kitchen sink movie – eg. ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ – which is seriously out of step with the visionary nature of JD's music and its angular modernism. It makes ‘Control’ a very difficult film to believe.

The domestic nature of the narrative also seriously limits its relevance and resonance. Grant Gee’s documentary situates Joy Division as the product of post-war deprivation, post-punk bravura, and post-Labour disillusionment. It’s an infinitely richer and more interesting tale, grappling with a cultural myth that is still being refined, not least because it poses an implicit question to the present age: which do you prefer, Icarus or Daedalus, daring self-destruction or cautious career-planning?

To put it in simpler terms, Corbijn’s slick movie simply doesn't feel connected to Joy Division’s music. This might be because most of the Joy Division you hear in the film is actually Sam Riley and his mates pretending to be the band, but in truth they do an incredibly good job there. I think the problem is more structural and thematic, in that Joy Division’s songs are so much more than simply a reflection of Curtis’ domestic woes. With the exception of three distinct shots that stick in my memory, the film’s narrow focus simply ignores these wider avenues of interpretation, spiralling into a narrative of personal collapse that also silences debate. That’s what suicide does, it takes control of a shared situation and brings it to a definitive close. Why a film made all these years after the event should choose to do the same thing is also beyond understanding.

Now for the obsessive fan’s complaints about the film’s errors of fact. For example, we are shown Ian on the night of his suicide knocking back the best part of a bottle of whisky. Yet we know from Deborah Curtis’ book that her father testified at the inquest into his death that there’d only been two fingers of the stuff left in the bottle. What he drank instead that night was virtually a whole large jar of instant coffee. It’s a tiny detail, but it’s of a piece with the film’s overall tendency to romanticise Ian as a stylish, good-looking young man who’s too incapable of dealing with the burdens of a young wife, baby daughter, Belgian lover, burgeoning career and epileptic condition all at once. And in symbolic terms, there's a world of difference between whisky and coffee. One numbs, the other stimulates. Again, I acknowledge it’s a small detail, but it suggests that Deborah Curtis, one of the film’s producers, had limited control over the final script.

Personally I find Corbijn’s view of Curtis utterly unconvincing. Listen to his lyrics, read Deborah’s book, watch the testimony contained in Grant Gee’s film, and it’s clear that he was a seriously difficult and disturbed man. He was fascinated by the dark side – Nazis, concentration camps, religious persecution through the ages, insanity, suicide, wars – and actively heightened his own physical and emotional suffering on an almost daily basis through lack of sleep, excessive smoking, and morbid introspection.

Why did Curtis do this? The conclusion I’ve reached is that his self-destructive behaviour was his badge of authenticity – as a suffering son, husband, father and lover, as a martyr-like public figure, as an epileptic and depressive crudely handled by the medical profession, and as a young, socially deprived man on a quest for dramatic self-transformation. To say pain was the price he was prepared to pay in order to wrest control of these various narratives is too neat and clichéd. Ultimately it was his sole source of meaning, a solipsism that helped him produce extraordinary art but destroyed his desire to live.

The fifteen-year-old public schoolboy I once was never understood any of this. I was simply devastated that someone who’d felt like a fellow traveller – only gifted with the ability to transform depression and despair into art – should have given up so swiftly and irrevocably. Barely a year spanned my excited discovery of ‘Unknown Pleasures’ and the bleak news of Ian’s death delivered over the radio waves by John Peel on Monday 19 May 1980. It’s clear from Grant Gee’s film that I’m not alone in mourning him still.