Lipstick Traces (13 page)

The disturbance in the subway station calls up the dormant Martian presence. The spaceship begins to vibrate, and the energy released by the
vibrations creates a vacuum. The vacuum sucks up sleeping genes, which create a repulsive, beckoning image: a glowing, horned devil, overshadowing London, the Martian Antichrist.

Across five million years, genetic drift is not uniform. By the twentieth century, some people are coded for destruction; some carry only a few broken alien messages. Some respond to the Martian image; some do not. For those who do, the ancient codes become language, and memories of the original Martian genocide course to the surface. For those who do not respond, language dissolves. Humanity is split into two species; there is anarchy in London. Men and women surge through the streets smashing all those they recognize as alien: all who carry less of the Martian essence than they do. The Martian image turns red. Hobbes’s state of nature was “the war of all against all”; this is it, and it is lurid beyond belief.

More human than Martian, Quatermass lives to see the demonic image vanquished and the Martian genes put back to sleep—but not before a comrade, more human than Quatermass, who can stand to gaze into the face of the image as Quatermass cannot, has been exploded in the attack. The image is pure phylogenetic energy; guiding a steel crane straight into it, Quatermass’ comrade negates the image with mass—a neat Einsteinian twist.

Quatermass’ assistant, more Martian than he, returns to his side as if awakened from a dream; minutes before, she was squeezing blood out of his neck. In a long, silent shot, the movie ends—and because there is no freeze frame, no automatic irony, the movie doesn’t seem to end at all. Quatermass and his assistant are seen in the wreckage of London; he leans on a ruined wall. Everything he has seen is in his eyes, and he is trying to forget what he has seen, but the shot—it goes on and on—doesn’t last long enough for his assistant’s eyes to focus.

Now it is plain that
Five Million Years to Earth
is a 1960s version of 1950s atomic-bomb-mutation films; an exculpatory allegory of Nazism and the Blitz; a quick and easy update of the gnostic heresy in which the world is split between equally empowered Good and Evil gods; a bid to make fast money off whatever dislocations might be circulating in modern society at any given time. It doesn’t play like that. It is progressively horrifying—especially at 2
A.M.
, when it is most readily seen on television; when, as Nietzsche wrote, “man permits himself to be lied to . . . when he dreams, and his
moral sense never even tries to prevent this”; when there is no one with whom one might dominate the film. Quatermass’ victory is the victory of rational certainty over irrational doubt; the doubt in his face at the end is not doubt that he has won, but doubt that he wanted to. Perhaps it is no accident that, on occasion, the Late Show has cut the last twenty minutes: cut the anarchy, offering only the mystery, its formal solution, and then the film’s last shot, which no longer carries any meaning.

That was how I felt when Johnny Rotten sang “Anarchy in the U.K.,” “Bodies,” “No Feelings,” “No Fun.” When he finished that last number, his last performance as a member of the Sex Pistols, when he threw it all back on the crowd—which was, to him, no more than a representation of a representation, five thousand living symbols of Scott McKenzie’s 1967 Love Generation hit, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” symbols of mindlessly benevolent hippies who knew nothing of negation—when he said, leaving the stage, carefully gathering up any objects of value, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?,” that was how I felt.

At Altamont in 1969, as the Rolling Stones played and a man was stabbed and kicked to death in the midst of the crowd in front of the stage, I had felt only loathing and distance; the peace symbols people flashed were almost as ugly as the violence itself. They affirmed nothing but the primacy of symbolization; the same people who raised those symbols also snarled and pushed for a patch of ground. I wasn’t implicated for a second, and I contemplated the degradation of it all. At Winterland people pushed, but not, it seemed, with anger or fear, but with delight, almost as a greeting—if André Breton’s old “simplest surrealist act,” firing a pistol into a crowd of strangers, or ramming through it in a football helmet, can be called a greeting. Halfway through the show, what had begun in the crowd as an act was turning into a new way of walking.

Over the next years this moment took many forms. In punk clubs in Los Angeles, then throughout the United States and around the world, it would be stylized into slam dancing and pit diving. It would shape a glossary in which the passive neologisms of 1970s human-potential and self-improvement
therapies (“Thank you for sharing your anger with me”) were translated back into active English (“Fuck off and die”). In convoluted ways, it would help define the spirit of the riots that swept the U.K. in the summer of 1981. More proximately, in contempt of all authority, it would lead to an immense increase in littering. It would permit thuggishness and scapegoating to be glamorized as self-expression (in the 1983 film
Suburbia,
a skinhead in an L.A. punk club approaches a woman dressed in a glitzy party dress. “I’d like to fuck your brains out,” he says, “but you don’t look like you got any.” She tries to push him away; he rips her clothes off and leaves her to the crowd), and it would inspire Gudrun Thompson’s “Manners for Muggings,” which appeared in a San Francisco punk tabloid called
Damage.
Illustrating her demand for a new etiquette with photos of herself beating up the hulking Stannous Fluoride, her boyfriend, Thompson wrote:

The eyes are the most vulnerable points in the body. The best way to attack the eyes are with the fingers or thumbs. Stiffen your fingers, part them slightly, and drive them THROUGH your attacker’s eyes. Drive your finger THROUGH HIS HEAD . . . Never believe a promise that you will not be harmed if you cooperate. Once gaining control over your life for even a few minutes, your attacker may decide to exterminate you. He is not considering you as a human being with a right to exist—don’t consider him one. DESTROY HIM before he destroys you.

Never feel sorry for someone who attacks you or feel you asked for it. Anyone who dares to threaten your safety and well being DESERVES TO DIE.

I pushed, too. Walking the aisles of Winterland as the Sex Pistols played, I felt a confidence and a lust that were altogether new. Thirty-two years had not taught me what I learned that night: when you’re pushed, push back; when a shove negates your existence, negate the shove. I felt distant from nothing, superior to nothing. I also felt a crazy malevolence, a wish to smash people to the ground, and my eyes went to the ground, where I saw small children (what sort of parents would bring little kids to a place like this, I wondered, thinking of my own at home), and thought of smashing them.

Reviewing the concert for a magazine, I mentioned none of this. Days
later, it seemed unreal. Seeing Johnny Rotten on stage, I was sure I would never see his like again, and so far I have been right.

Immediately after the last show of the Sex Pistols’ only American tour, Johnny Rotten reclaimed his given name, John Lydon. In May 1534 John of Leyden, a Dutch heretic also known as Jan Bockelson, was proclaimed king of the German town of Münster, the New Jerusalem—was, thus, proclaimed king of the whole world.

Earlier in the year, a group of radical Anabaptists—one of many new Protestant sects bent on replacing decadent church rituals with a literal practice of the Gospels—had seized control of Münster. At first they simply forced the town council to pass a bill legalizing “liberty of conscience”—that is, legalizing heresy, an unthinkable act even in the heyday of the Reformation. The Anabaptists quickly drove out the Lutheran majority, repopulated the town with like-minded neighbors, and, under the leadership of a baker named Jan Matthys, established a theocracy. By March, Norman Cohn wrote in 1957 in
The Pursuit of the Millennium
(a book that, published in France as
Fanatiques de l’apocalypse,
the situationists would carefully plunder), Münster was purified: refounded as a community of the Children of God, bound by love to live without sin.

All property was expropriated. Money was abolished. The doors of all houses were made to be left open day and night. In a great bonfire, all books save the Bible were destroyed. “The poorest amongst us,” read a Münster pamphlet meant to subvert the countryside, “who used to be despised as ‘beggars,’ now go about dressed as finely as the highest and most distinguished.” “All things were to be in common,” John of Leyden said later. “There was to be no private property and nobody was to do any more work, but simply trust in God.” In every instance the new commandments were enforced with the threat of execution.

Outside the walls of the city, Anabaptism—bits of which survive today in certain Pentecostal creeds—was itself made a capital offense; hundreds, perhaps thousands, were tortured and put to death. The local bishop organized an army of mercenaries and laid siege to Münster; in a divinely ordained sortie against the bishop’s forces, Jan Matthys was killed and John of Leyden took his place.

He ran through the town naked, then was silent for three days. During that time God revealed a new order. Matthys’ social revolution was suddenly exposed as abstract; John of Leyden was to take the revolution to the smallest details of everyday life, where death was to be the only sanction against any sin: murder, theft, avarice, quarrelling, the insubordination of children, the naysaying of wives.

Polygamy was mandated. It was made a capital crime for women of childbearing age to remain unmarried, or for new wives gathered under one man’s roof to differ. The streets were given new names, and John of Leyden chose the names of newborns. Spectacles were staged: great dinners, followed by beheadings. Black masses were held in the cathedral, gutted long before.

Still under siege, though carrying out a fierce defense that kept supply lines open, the citizens of Münster lived on rations; John of Leyden feasted, and dressed in gold and silk. The Brethren of the Free Spirit, who since the early thirteenth century had spread the social heresies of “all things in common” and “never work” across Europe, had believed that for those truly free in spirit, no crime was a crime and no sin was a sin—indeed, God’s grace was to be found in the practice of the worst “sins,” for it was only so that one could prove one was incapable of stain. John of Leyden told his city that he was permitted luxury and indulgence because he “was dead to the world and the flesh”—and that, soon, so would be all.

In January 1535 the bishop regrouped his forces and blockaded the town. By April every animal, the last rat and mouse, had been eaten; then grass, then moss, then shoes and whitewash, and finally human bodies. John of Leyden announced that as the Bible promised God would turn the cobblestones to bread; people tried to eat them. Cursed with eternal damnation, doubters were permitted to leave; able-bodied men were immediately killed by the bishop’s troops. Women, children, and old men, as if infected
with plague, were left between the battlements and the walls of the city to starve. Begging for death, howling, they crawled on their hands and knees scrabbling for roots; they ate dirt. Resistance to John of Leyden grew within Münster, and he carried out the executions himself. The corpses were cut into pieces, and the pieces were nailed up on posts.

In June 1535 the city was betrayed and taken; except for John of Leyden and two confederates, all of the men were exterminated. “At the Bishop’s command,” Cohn writes, John of Leyden “was for some time led about on a chain and exhibited like a performing bear.” In January 1536 he and his two living followers were returned to Münster, where they “were publicly tortured to death with red-hot irons. Throughout their agony the ex-king uttered no sound and made no movement. After the execution the three bodies were suspended from a church-tower in the middle of the town, in cages which are still to be seen there today.”

So much for one true Christ, for one true Antichrist. And to root motives in a mere coincidence of names is specious—but serendipity is where you find it. John Lydon was raised a Catholic; when in 1980 two born-again Christian rock critics (one of whom later took to the Christian airwaves to denounce rock ’n’ roll as the devil’s music) asked him if he suffered remorse for his blasphemies, Lydon said he did, and disavowed nothing. Nik Cohn, one of the first rock critics, is Norman Cohn’s son; in 1968, in
Pop from the Beginning,
the first good book on the subject, he disavowed all claims on meaning the form might make, affirming instead a pure, sensual anarchy, summed up in the watchword of Little Richard (who by the Sex Pistols’ time made his living as an evangelist denouncing rock ’n’ roll as the devil’s music):
A WOP BOP A LOO BOP, A LOP BAM BOOM
.