‘Tommy’ or — Grief, Light, Music and Balls?
Ken Russell is one of my favourite filmmakers so I was amazed to realise that I had still never seen ‘Tommy’ (1975), although I suspect this was down to me never being that big a fan of The Who (I was more of a Genesis and Yes fan myself). Still, Ken Russell is Ken Russell so the music could’ve been by Peters and Lee and I’d have still been eager to watch it. So how was it? Well, it didn’t convert me to The Who as such (I still have some issues with them) but it did do something I thought impossible — it made me love Ken Russell even more.
‘Tommy’ starts with the colour blue (this is vitally important but its profound chromatic relevance will only be made manifest at the end of the film) before Robert Powell is revealed standing on top of a Lake District mountain and bathing in the golden light of the Sun. As he descends the golden glow slowly fades, the shadow of the valleys creep in and he returns to an Earthly existence. He is Tommy’s father.
After that I found the first forty minutes or so of ‘Tommy’ a bit of a mixed-bag and for a few reasons, the most obvious being that Rock Operas are, inherently, stupid. Plus, with his father killed during the war, Tommy’s withdrawal into himself and the rock soundtrack I thought this might be nothing more than a mash-up of De Palma’s brilliant ‘Phantom of the Paradise’ (1974) meets Pink Floyd’s awful ‘The Final Cut’. Not only that but The Who’s score and orchestration initially threatens to lapse into sub-standard Lloyd Webber territory and that’s a hell no one should be made to sit through.
Even when (or, in my opinion, because) Eric Clapton pops up it doesn’t get that much better and I felt my spirits sinking at the thought of having to sit through an adolescent celebration of unbridled individualism and self-glorification set to somewhat repetitive guitar riffs. Combine that with Townshend and Moon’s unnerving fascination with bullying and abuse and I was feeling a tad underwhelmed and uneasy.
Fortunately signs of life soon start appearing, specifically when Robert Powell blazes back onto the screen dressed in full RAF uniform, crucified on the cross and smiling benignly as cosmic pin-balls bounce around him, and as the rock music blasted my ears I found myself loudly cheering “And NOW it’s a Ken Russell movie!”. I had the sneaking suspicion that both ‘Tommy’ and Russell were only just getting going. And boy, was I right.
When The Pinball Wizard kicks in an extraordinary sense of elevation accompanies it that’s so impactful it’s vertigo inducing. Good god, I’d seen this sequence plenty of times before but never in the context of the film itself and when Elton John appears it’s with a blistering energy and force, and primarily it’s down to the editing. Seriously, I can’t emphasise this enough — Stuart Baird’s editing during The Pinball Wizard number is a piece of filmmaking genius. And the sequence is breathless enough as it is what with the frantic music, Elton’s scowl of hatred against his rival and his outlandish costume design let alone having the entire scene edited to the point of delirium.
Then Russell and Baird ramp everything up even FURTHER by acousmatising it all (essentially dislocating and divorcing the sound from its visual source — how can the band play when they’re smashing up their instruments?). This acousmatic approach achieves two explicit results — disorientation and exhilaration, and The Pinball Wizard is both incarnate.
(Incidentally, Russell frequently acousmatises sound and vision throughout ‘Tommy’. When Tommy’s mother gets hit with that bottle near the end the film is brutally acousmatised, the crowd’s singing dislocated from its visible human source and destroying “reality” in the process. This time the effect is purely disorientating as Tommy must now confront his grief. But back to the Wizard…)
And Russell cranks up the energy even further still! He has the entire crowd in the background bouncing up and down in perfect unison to the music, and just look how controlled it all is! This effect of energy and control means the film, for want of a better word, starts bouncing. Indeed, the film started bouncing so much I kept expecting it to leap out of the TV and start bouncing up and down about my floor like a crazed rubber ball (has Russell and his team managed to turn a film about spheres into an actual ball itself?!) It’s a truly ecstatic sequence.
From there ‘Tommy’ never let’s up and I had barely had the chance to calm down when I was engulfed by the cathartic explosion of Ann-Margret being “defecated” on by a TV set and my heart exploded with joy as I knew I was witnessing something no other filmmaker could ever show me in a billion years. The rampantly idiosyncratic tends to make me cry as it is (thank god movies this unique exist!) and I think it was is this, combined with the fact that Russell’s films can often feel like a warm, cosmic embrace, that starting moving me to tears.
Or how about the influence of silent cinema? ‘Tommy’ frequently plays out like a silent movie (Oliver Reed seems to understand this completely which is why his performance is so divinely, and appropriately, OTT nuts) and demonstrates just how good a visual story teller Russell was (is ‘Tommy’ the link between the silent cinema of Anthony Asquith and early Hitchcock and the pop videos of MTV?).
But let’s put gushing praise to one side and ask if ‘Tommy’ has any flaws. The answer? Oh, god yes! For one thing The Who can still grate on my nerves, the central conceit is stupid, I didn’t like the Keith Moon songs and the entire project does feel as though it goes on a tad too long. Personally I thought it was going to end when Tommy pops up on his hand-glider whilst singing about enlightenment (a scene of divine hilarity and technical brilliance). Yet Russell knows this would be a cheap and unsatisfactory ending, one that states and achieves nothing, so we must go beyond enlightenment, religion, stardom and fame and get to the deep, human crux of it all.
This is achieved by a shredding, a burning away, of all iconography. We must pass THROUGH symbols, through the cross (as any good theologian will tell you — the cross is not the destination but simply a way, if you want to put it in such terms) and the crucified father, and this is what Tommy does at the end. He has returned to the mountain in the Lake District (those hills where Wordsworth, Lawrence and Ruskin walked) where he was conceived as he has finally self-actualised both himself AND his father. The son has completed the unfinished transfiguration of the father by means of a profound psychological alchemical process — of turning grief into life, of blue into gold (I suspect ‘Tommy’ might be more a Jungian musical than a Freudian one, but I’d need to watch it again to finally figure THAT one out). Tommy has emerged from the blindness of trauma and grief and into the light. He is neither a messiah nor a martyr; he is a boy who has finally overcome the loss of his dad and is now in full and direct contact with the external world. The blue of the absent father has become the gold of the present son. This, also, made me cry.
This is why ‘Tommy’ never cuts to black. It does so only once, and explicitly so, which is during the abuse scene in ‘Fiddle About’, but that is the only place where Russell wants us (and we want to, too) to close our eyes. Apart from that we keep our eyes open because we can’t cope with our loss by hiding away. We must keep seeing. This is why Russell doesn’t cut to black for the closing credits after the climax but stays with the golden orange glow instead.
This is not Russell showing off or making an artistic statement. It is an act of supreme tenderness (and Russell’s films are so achingly and beautifully tender). The glow has not faded. He is allowing us to keep looking at the light.
