Although Rude Boy captures The Clash at the height of their powers, it consistently refuses the celebratory treatment we expect from music documentaries. That’s why the band disowned it. And why I avoided seeing it all these years, having heard it described as a conservative hit job, making light of their political convictions.
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the band’s founding, so I decided I could endure the negativity to watch them perform many of their best songs, both live and in the studio.
That footage is deeply compelling and makes Rude Boy worthwhile viewing for serious fans of The Clash, no matter what they think of the film as a whole. But once I began watching in earnest, I realised that the musical content is somewhat besides the point, narratively speaking. It simply provides a memorable setting, the way Monument Valley does for John Ford’s film Stagecoach.
Rude Boy’s opening minutes are crucial for understanding why the film disappointed fans of The Clash.
After the credits announce that all four members of The Clash star in the film, most viewers will be eagerly awaiting their appearance. That’s why the filmmakers hold back.
Rude Boy begins with long shots of high-rise public housing, then cuts to a shot of a leather-clad man looking out of a stairwell window on the top floor. The next shot reveals what he is looking at: a motorcade passing by rows of cheering bystanders.
We then watch the man descend the stairwell, as a Clash instrumental in a reggae mode starts up. As he descends, we see political graffiti and racist slogans on the walls behind him, including a crude sketch of a Klansman.
This is a classic way to introduce a protagonist, aligning the camera with his point of view, then following him as he passes from a position of detached visual mastery into one where he becomes an active participant in the scene. And this does indeed turn out to be the film’s protagonist, Ray Gange, playing a distorted version of himself.
What about The Clash, though? Isn’t Rude Boy supposed to be about them? Delaying their arrival creates tension.
It’s not unusual for filmmakers to use this technique, withholding the content that audiences expect in order to build excitement. The first few minutes of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws are a great example, as we first see a group of teenagers partying on the beach at night, then follow a boy and girl as they leave the group to go swimming, then watch in horror as the girl enters the water first, only to become the shark’s first victim.
From a structural standpoint, The Clash function like the shark. When they finally do appear on screen, fifteen minutes into the film, the effect on viewers should be similar: a sense of release, because their narrative desire has been satisfied.
Unfortunately, like literal orgasms, the cinematic type has a way of inducing temporary amnesia. Once we see a close-up of Joe Strummer on the mic, drenched in sweat and vibrating with energy, we are liable to forget what led us to this juncture.
When he begins singing the band’s cover of the 1976 Junior Murvin hit “Police and Thieves”, his gruff, gritty delivery revealing the rage in Murvin’s delicate falsetto, we are so relieved that The Clash have entered their own film that we don’t perceive the connection between this song and the sequence that immediately precedes it.
A large number of police, many of them carrying riot shields, are supposedly keeping the peace. In fact, they are protecting members of the fascist National Front from a multiracial group of counterprotesters. Even though the shots are visually confusing, it’s quite clear that the police are only feigning neutrality.
Given the association of “Police and Thieves” with the turmoil at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival, the fact that we see The Clash performing this song immediately afterwards clearly identifies them with the left. So does the red T-shirt Strummer is wearing, a provocative shout-out to radical militancy which includes both the Italian name of the Red Brigades and the iconic submachine gun logo of the German Red Army Faction.
The problem is that Rude Boy stakes out a different position, one that matches up with Ray Gange’s fictionalised portrayal of himself as a drunken, disaffected cynic. Instead of a rousing tribute to The Clash’s passionate political engagement, their refusal to sell out even when they are selling out large concert venues, the filmmakers provide us with a coolly analytic take on a decaying nation in which both the right and left try to exploit racial tension for rhetorical advantage.
This is not to imply that Rude Boy is conservative, as some have suggested. Although its perspective on political posturing is equivalent to the one Ray Gange embodies from his vantage point high up in the tower block, the way it depicts the police is a clear rejection of the law-and-order position that Margaret Thatcher’s Tories espoused.
One of the most uncomfortable scenes comes late in the film, when Gange expresses befuddlement that a “Black geezer” at a Clash concert would sing along to “White Riot”. Even though the lyrics to that song are meant to critique racism, its irony was frequently lost on listeners, as with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”
The defensive way Mick Jones responds to this statement demonstrates that it hits home. He tells Gange that he wishes more Black people would come to the band’s shows, without seeming to grasp how the crowds they are drawing could make non-whites feel vulnerable.
For people who believe in the life-changing power of punk and especially for those who also believe that The Clash is its greatest embodiment, it’s painful to perceive a disconnect between their music and the story it soundtracks.
Nevertheless, recognising the limitations they face is preferable to self-delusion.
Rude Boy isn’t a great film.
It includes material—such as instances when members of the band run afoul of the law—without sufficient context to be comprehensible. Too much time is spent repeating the same basic scene instead of adding something different. And the dialogue can be comically bad.
In retrospect, however, these shortcomings pale before Rude Boy’s refusal to sanitise its subject. No matter how much we love The Clash, there’s no denying that members of the band appear aloof and self-absorbed. No matter how deeply invested we are in the working-class subjectivity of their fans, it’s clear that many of them reject the band’s anti-racist messaging in favour of hostility toward outsiders.
Part of the problem with Rude Boy is that it’s trying to do too much.
It’s not a music documentary so much as a story about the role fandom plays in the lives of people who are only noticed when they run into trouble. Despite how much The Clash feature, their role is structurally equivalent to the one David Bowie plays in Christiane F., Uli Edel’s harrowing tale of heroin addiction in late-1970s Berlin.
But the filmmakers didn’t just confine their attention to the fraught relationship between The Clash and their fans. They also devoted a considerable portion of the film to an examination of the tactics used by an almost entirely white police force against people of colour.
At times, Rude Boy feels a bit like Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 Zabriskie Point, another film which depicts countercultural disaffection using amateur actors. Both films falter in their attempt to feature the story of individuals without resorting to the narrative conventions that typically govern films about political upheaval. Yet their awkward composite construction illuminates details that traditional storytelling obscures.
Although Rude Boy falls short of its creators’ lofty ambitions, it’s a far richer film than its reputation suggests.
The final shot, in which a triumphant Margaret Thatcher arrives at 10 Downing Street, is a perfect example of what makes Rude Boy both hard to stomach and the sort of medicine we need to keep down.
Come for The Clash. Stay for the rubble-strewn battlefield.
Photograph courtesy of Jon Jackson. Published under a Creative Commons license.
