Shots in the dark: the factory town that changed Rock 'n' Roll forever

Why a duck?" Chico Marx asks Groucho (who has just said "viaduct") in 1929's The Cocoanuts--and "Why a duck?" says Tony Wilson interviewing a shepherd using that bird to round up sheep in Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People. As well as being a reporter in the field and presenter for Granada Television (still his employer) in Manchester, England, Wilson was the impresario behind such Olympian bands as Joy Division, New Order (which rose from ,Joy Division's ashes after singer Ian Curtis' suicide) and Happy Mondays. Since screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce took the trouble to have the movie's Wilson, played by comedian Steve Coogan, tossing off the Chico line, we can assume he's forging a link between the Marx Brothers' dadaist anarchy and Wilson's no less surreal trajectory as the force behind Manchester's metamorphosis into the epicenter of British rock from the late '70s through the early '90s.

Inspired to get into the music business by the ferment of punk, as the movie shows, Wilson named his record company Factory. It was a reference to the city's industrial past but also invoked Andy Warhol's Factory when it became a similar mecca for do-it-yourself geniuses, including Curtis, record producer Martin Hannett and visual artist Peter Saville. Warholism must have been in the air in the grim northern metropolis: A fan of the Velvet Underground, Curtis was only 16 when, in 1973, he penned this Valentine to his girlfriend, later wife, Deborah:

"I wish I were a Warhol silk screen / Hanging on the wall! Or little Joe or maybe Lou / I'd love to be them all / All New York city's broken hearts / And secrets would be mine / I'd put you on a movie reel I And that would be just fine."

In the end, Curtis never made it to New York, but he did, briefly, play Lou Reed to Wilson's Warhol--the poete maudit sponsored by the credulous visionary.

Coogan's Wilson is a droll, pretentious, unreliable and thoroughly likeable guide to the Manchester scene, to his Warholian role as enabler and observer of rock 'n' roll excess--and to his proclaimed outsiderdorn. "I'm a mere character in my own story," he confesses, addressing the camera more intently than he does either of his wives. Every time he says something, he puts it in a cultural context, every act is "a search," as he puts it, "for the postmodern moment." During the film Wilson quotes, among others, William Morris, F Scott Fitzgerald, Boethius and director John Ford, whose line "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," he uses to justify his own mythmaking. He casually invokes the Last Supper and the Sermon on the Mount when validating epochal moments in Manchester pop. This is a protagonist so divorced from emotion that he spiels philosophical sound bites to his first wife, Lindsay (Shirley Henderson), even as she's leaving him.

Yet, like the shepherd with the duck, he cares for his flock, while proving unable to stop them from falling off cliffs: The epileptic Curtis, chillingly impersonated by Sean Harris and mostly filmed in monochrome, hangs himself on the eve of what would have been Joy Division's first American tour; Happy Mondays singer Shaun Ryder (Danny Cunningham), whom Wilson glibly compares to W.B. Yeats, blows Factory's recording budget on crack in Barbados. As the edifice collapses--the result, in the film as in reality, of cavalier management and drug-related killings at Factory's ecstasy-ridden Hacienda nightclub--the ghosts of Curtis and Joy Division's dead producer Martin Hannett (Andy Serkis) slip back into the movie as insouciantly as God (in Wilson's likeness) does at the end of the film to suggest Wilson should have signed the Smiths.

Shot in fizzing digital video by Robby Muller, 24 Hour Party People gleefully deconstructs itself as it unravels. After witnessing Wilson being serviced by a prostitute, Lindsay calmly retaliates by taking the Buzzcocks' Howard Devoto (Martin Hancock) into a toilet stall for a quickie--and there by the washbasins is the real Devoto, as a janitor, claiming this never happened. When Curtis kills himself, he does it in front of a TV showing an image of a dancing chicken from Werner Herzog's Stroszek (1977)--about a European in America who kills himself rather than choose between two women, which was Curtis' real-life dilemma. According to Deborah Curtis' memoir, Touching From a Distance (Faber & Faber), he had planned to watch Stroszek on the weekend lie died. Building irony on irony, Winterbottom then shows a human dancing chicken: Abandoning the meeting that sealed Factory's fate, Shaun Ryder heads out to get a "Kentucky," and is next seen clucking and flapping his elbows.

The obvious analogue of 24 Hour Party People is Julien Temple's The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980), which lionized Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren's conning of the British media and record industry around the time of Sid Vicious' death. Comparatively, 24 Hour Party People's nostalgifying of the Factory/Hacienda scene 10 years after its demise has an elegiac aura, particularly in the Joy Division sequences. If you were wounded by the group's doom the first time round, seeing it played out in a film will tear you apart again.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning