Anarchy in the U.K. was one thing, anarchy in Salt Lake City, Utah another thing altogether. Go ahead, try to imagine Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten going about their nihilistic rebellion there.
Can’t, right?
Of course the thing about being an anarchist anywhere is how you still have to rely on everyone else [the duped masses, for example] to grow your food and make your clothes and manufacture all the other basic accouterments of, say, surviving from day to day. After all, these things don’t exactly grow on trees, do they?
In other words, their righteous rebellion unfolded mostly inside their heads. There you make up the best of all possible worlds and expect folks to just go along with it once they realize [too] just how righteous your particular rebellion is. We find a lot of that here too, don’t we?
Anyway, after watching this who could possibly not want to become a punk anarchist? If only a tongue in cheek one.
Call this a gathering of…tribes. All of the bizarre points of view that folks are actually able to talk themselves into. Poking fun at the weirdos. Only there really are people like this out there. And they really do take this shit seriously. However, uh, idiotic it might seem to you and me.
Still, I could have done with a lot less Mark. Him and Salt Lake City.
The bottom line? Well, we all we to decide this for ourselves: DID STEVO SELL OUT? IS STEVO JUST A POSER?
at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLC_Punk!
trailer: youtu.be/DILdeHgWF-U
SLC PUNK [1998]
Written and directed by James Merendino
[b]Stevo [voiceover]: To be an anarchist in Salt Lake City was certainly no easy task, especially in 1985. And having no money, no job, no plans for the future, the true anarchist position was in itself a strenuous job.
…
Bob [to Stevo]: Well, it’s a crazy fucked up world and we’re all just floating along waiting for someone who can walk on water.
…
Stevo: Wait, time out. I just wanted to ask real quick, if I can. You believe in rebellion, freedom and love, right?
Mom: Absolutely, yes.
Dad: Rebellion, freedom, love.
Stevo: One: You two are divorced. So love failed. Two: Mom, you’re a New Ager, clinging to every scrap of Eastern religion that may justify why the above said love failed. Three: Dad, you’re a slick, corporate, preppy-ass lawyer. I don’t really have to say anything else about you do I dad? Four: You move from New York City, the Mecca and hub of the cultural world to Utah! Nowhere! To change nothing! More to perpetuate this cycle of greed, fascism and triviality. Your movement of the people, by and for the people got you…nothing! You just hide behind some lost sense of drugs, sex and rock and roll. Ooooh, Kumbaya! I am the future! I am the future of this great nation which you, father, so arrogantly saved this world for. Look, I have my own agenda. Harvard, out. University of Utah, in. I’m gonna get a 4.0 in damage. I love you guys! Don’t get me wrong, it’s all about this. But for the first time in my life, I’m 18 and I can say “FUUUUUCK YOU!”
Dad: Steven, I didn’t sell out son. I bought in.
…
Stevo [voiceover]: Bob and the rest of us had made an oath to do absolutely nothing. We were gonna waste our educated minds. We had no other way of fighting. As I said, there just weren’t enough of us. Sure, there was a lot more punks than there was four years earlier… but there was also as many posers. Posers were people who looked like punks but they did it for fashion. And they were fools, they’d say “anarchy in the UK.” What the fuck’s that? Anarchy in the UK. What good is that to those of us in Utah, America? It was a Sex Pistols thing. They were British, they were allowed to go on about Anarchy in the UK. You don’t live your life by lyrics. I mean, that’s all you ever heard from these trendy fucks. Like, “Did you hear the new Smiths album? It’s fuckin’ terrif.” Kids walking around Utah saying “terrif” with a stupid old English twang. See what I mean? What the fuck’s up with the England bullshit? You know Jag? He’s a fag!
…
Stevo [voiceover while bending over]: The sun never sets on the British Empire? Well the sun never sets on my asshole!
…
Mark: That’s what’s wrong with you Americans, you’re always looking for pain.
Mike: Yeah well…it pains me to hear you say that, Mark, it really does.
…
Stevo [voiceover]: If looking the way we did in Utah was unusual…in Wyoming, affectionately called the Cowboy State… we were fucking aliens.
Liquor store owner: What the hell are you?
Stevo: We come from the east in search of the Messiah. We followed that big star. Yeah, we bring gold and frankincense. Myrrh. Myrrh.
Liquor store owner: Oh, my God. Who let you boys out of the state institute? We’d better get you boys back in the hospital.
Bob: No. It’s all right, man. We’re from England.
Liquor store owner: England?
Stevo: Yeah. That’s right. That’s probably why we seem so weird to you, man.
Liquor store owner: England, huh? Well, that explains it, I guess. You boys enjoying your stay here in the good ol’ U.S. Of A.?
Bob: Sure thing. It’s a great land.
[his mother comes into the store]
Mother: What the hell is that?!
Liquor store owner: It’s all right, Mother. They’re from England.
…
Stevo [overover]: The Fight: What does it mean and where does it come from? An Essay: Homosapien. A man. He is alone in the universe. A punker. Still a man. He is alone in the universe, but he connects. How? They hit each other. No clearer way to evaluate whether or not you’re alive. Now. Complications. A reason to fight. Somebody different. Difference creates dispute. Dispute is a reason to fight. Now, to fight is a reason to feel pain. Life is pain. So to fight with reason is to be alive with reason. Final analysis: To fight, a reason to live. Problems and Contradictions: I am an anarchist. I believe that there should be no rules, only chaos. Fighting appears to be chaos. And when we slam in the pit a show it is. But when we fight for a reason, like rednecks, there’s a system, we fight for what we stand for, chaos. Fighting is a structure, fighting is to establish power, power is government and government is not anarchy. Government is war and war is fighting. The circle goes like this: our redneck skirmishes are cheap perversions of conventional warfare. War implies extreme government because wars are fought to enforce rules or ideals, even freedom. But other people ideals forced on someone else, even if it is something like freedom, is still a rule; not anarchy. This contradiction was becoming clear to me in the fall of '85. Even as early as my first party, “Why did I love to fight?” I framed it, but still, I don’t understand it. It goes against my beliefs as a true anarchist. But there it was. Competition, fighting, capitalism, government, THE SYSTEM. That’s what we did. It’s what we always did. Rednecks kicked the shit out of punks, punks kicked the shit out of mods, mods kicked the shit out of skinheads, skinheads took out the heavy metal guys, and the heavy metal guys beat the living shit out of new wavers and the new wavers did nothing. What was the point? Final summation? None.[/b]
Got that? Now all that’s left to do is choose sides.
[b]Stevo: Dad, you and I really gotta work on your definition of “good news”.
…
Stevo: You know what I think it is? I think you’ve become a fascist.
Dad: A fascist?
Stevo: You’re a Nazi!
Dad: Nazi, I’m Jewish, Steven, how can I be a Nazi?
Stevo: That’s the worst. Dad, look at this. What kinda, what kinda car is this?
Dad: That would be a Porshe.
Stevo: A Porshe, that you bought at a Volkswagen dealership. Volks…wagen, right? For the people who designed it? Who made that possible, Let me give you a hint, Adolf Hitler.
Dad: IT’S JUST A CAR!
…
Stevo [voiceover]: Where were we going? I mean, really, what was happening? This life, it was crazy. And I felt tired. Halfway through the season, inside I was so tired…and I had this wave of melancholy…just, like, sweep through me…and this impending sense that my philosophy… anarchy…was falling apart. What do you do when your foundation falls apart? I don’t know. They don’t teach you that in school.
…
Chris: Let’s speak of anarchy…
Stevo [voiceover]: So we started our debate. This was our custom. He believed in structure, I believed in chaos. This was an ongoing fight. He seemed to be winning.
…
Stevo: The school of science says the world moves from order to disorder…chaos.
Chris: They’re fools, Stevo. You know, life goes from order to disorder to order. Atoms come together randomly to form a structure. An infant is born. It grows, it gets older, it dies, it decomposes.
Stevo: Exactly. Back into chaos. Exactly. Anarchy.
Chris: But then those atoms are reformed into something else. A blade of grass, a tree, a flower, whatever…the cycle, man.
Stevo: I got it. The cycle, man. Yeah, I get you. The cycle.
…
Stevo [voiceover]: Jones didn’t need to prove the devil did not exist…not as a supernatural being… because I had seen the devil. He was in that room with Sandy. He was me, Harvard, my mom and dad, all of us. Jones was just making all of this up anyway, so who cared? “Fuck 'em,” I thought. “Fuck him, fuck this party…and fuck everything. Above all, fuck anarchy!”
…
Stevo [voiceover]: There’s nothing going on here. That’s what I saw when I looked out over the city: nothing. How the Mormon settlers looked upon this valley and felt that it was the promised land is beyond me. I don’t know, maybe it looked different back then.
…
Stevo: If I knew what was ahead of me, I may have stayed in bed. You see life is like that. We change, that’s all. You see, the guy I am now is not the guy I was then. If the guy I was then met the guy I am now he’d beat the shit out of me. Those are the facts.
…
Brandy: I have to ask you something. Why do you go out of your way to look like a bum?
Stevo: I look like a bum?
Brandy: Not in a bad way.
Stevo; I look like a bum in a good way.
Brandy: Aren’t you, like, rebelling against society? Wouldn’t it be more of an act of rebellion…if you didn’t spend so much time buying blue hair dye and going out to get punky clothes? It seems so petty. Stop me if I’m being offensive.
Stevo: Oh, no, go right ahead. It’s…No, it’s fine.
Brandy: You wanna be an individual, right? You look like you’re wearing a uniform. You look like a punk. That’s not rebellion. That’s fashion.
…
Stevo [voiceover]: And so there I was. I was gonna go to Harvard. It was obvious. I was gonna be a lawyer and play in the God-damned system, and that was that. I was my old man. He knew, so what else could I do? I mean, there’s no future in anarchy; I mean let’s face it. But when I was into it, there was never a thought of the future. I mean we were certain the world was gonna end, but when it didn’t, I had to do something, so fuck it. I could always be a litigator in New York and piss the shit out of the judges. I mean that was me: a trouble maker of the future. The guy that was one of those guys that my parents so arrogantly saved the world for, so we could fuck it up. We can do a hell of a lot more damage in the system than outside of it. That was the final irony, I think. That, and well, this. And “fuck you” for all of you who were thinking it: I guess when all was said and done, I was nothing more than a God-damned, trendy-ass poser.[/b]