10 ‘Everything gets boring after a time’
-
David Wilkinson
Abstract
Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End deals stylishly with the seductions and dangers of sexual desire, accompanied by a hip soundtrack featuring Can and Cat Stevens. The film depicts the volatile and ultimately murderous sexual awakening of its baby-faced teen protagonist Mike in his first job as a pool attendant at a decrepit London swimming baths. Beset with various difficulties upon its release in 1970, Deep End was consigned to obscurity for four decades. To revisit this film is to encounter a cultural document that asks some difficult questions of the much-mythologised sexual liberation of the 1960s; a myth encapsulated first by the mediatised phenomenon of Swinging London and later by its more radical countercultural outgrowth. This chapter argues that Deep End undertakes a kind of autocritique that is as much formal as it is content based, drawing like the counterculture upon a boundary crossing jumble of modernist and popular cultural sources. It does so in a manner that participates knowingly in the transgressive allure of youthful ‘sexual liberation’ quite as much as it undermines this sensibility. Ideologically complex and suggestive, appearing to critique youthful alienation, consumerism and sexism even as it is tinged with a certain pessimistic conservatism, Deep End is significant not only for the structures of feeling it captures from its own era but also for the ways the film’s themes continue to resonate in a fractious present of ever more commodified sexual desire.
Abstract
Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End deals stylishly with the seductions and dangers of sexual desire, accompanied by a hip soundtrack featuring Can and Cat Stevens. The film depicts the volatile and ultimately murderous sexual awakening of its baby-faced teen protagonist Mike in his first job as a pool attendant at a decrepit London swimming baths. Beset with various difficulties upon its release in 1970, Deep End was consigned to obscurity for four decades. To revisit this film is to encounter a cultural document that asks some difficult questions of the much-mythologised sexual liberation of the 1960s; a myth encapsulated first by the mediatised phenomenon of Swinging London and later by its more radical countercultural outgrowth. This chapter argues that Deep End undertakes a kind of autocritique that is as much formal as it is content based, drawing like the counterculture upon a boundary crossing jumble of modernist and popular cultural sources. It does so in a manner that participates knowingly in the transgressive allure of youthful ‘sexual liberation’ quite as much as it undermines this sensibility. Ideologically complex and suggestive, appearing to critique youthful alienation, consumerism and sexism even as it is tinged with a certain pessimistic conservatism, Deep End is significant not only for the structures of feeling it captures from its own era but also for the ways the film’s themes continue to resonate in a fractious present of ever more commodified sexual desire.
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- Figures and tables vii
- Contributors viii
- Acknowledgements xiii
- Introduction – Let’s spend the night together 1
- 1 Where were you? UK chart pop and the commodification of the teenage libido, 1952–63 16
- 2 The Jerry Lee Lewis scandal, the popular press and the moral standing of rock ’n’ roll in late 1950s Britain 38
- 3 ‘I’m different; I’m tough; I fuck’ 58
- 4 ‘We are no longer certain, any of us, what is “right” and what is “wrong”’ 75
- 5 Lovers’ lanes and Haystacks 94
- 6 Queering modernism 113
- 7 ‘You just let your hair down’ 132
- 8 Singing Elton’s song 152
- 9 ‘Nothing like a little disaster for sorting things out’ 170
- 10 ‘Everything gets boring after a time’ 185
- 11 Run the track, but no bother chat slack 205
- 12 ‘This could be a night to remember’ 220
- 13 ‘Mummy … what is a Sex Pistol?’ 238
- 14 The ‘style terrorism’ of Siouxsie Sioux 258
- 15 Coming of age Asian and Muslim in post-punk West Yorkshire 275
- 16 ‘I’m your man’ 293
- Index 310
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- Figures and tables vii
- Contributors viii
- Acknowledgements xiii
- Introduction – Let’s spend the night together 1
- 1 Where were you? UK chart pop and the commodification of the teenage libido, 1952–63 16
- 2 The Jerry Lee Lewis scandal, the popular press and the moral standing of rock ’n’ roll in late 1950s Britain 38
- 3 ‘I’m different; I’m tough; I fuck’ 58
- 4 ‘We are no longer certain, any of us, what is “right” and what is “wrong”’ 75
- 5 Lovers’ lanes and Haystacks 94
- 6 Queering modernism 113
- 7 ‘You just let your hair down’ 132
- 8 Singing Elton’s song 152
- 9 ‘Nothing like a little disaster for sorting things out’ 170
- 10 ‘Everything gets boring after a time’ 185
- 11 Run the track, but no bother chat slack 205
- 12 ‘This could be a night to remember’ 220
- 13 ‘Mummy … what is a Sex Pistol?’ 238
- 14 The ‘style terrorism’ of Siouxsie Sioux 258
- 15 Coming of age Asian and Muslim in post-punk West Yorkshire 275
- 16 ‘I’m your man’ 293
- Index 310
