BY SARAH BATY

Sid and Nancy also known as Sid and Nancy: Love Kills, soups accurate title, is a 1986 British biopic directed by Alex Cox and co-written with Abbe Wool. The film portrays the life of Sid Vicious (Gary Oldman) bassist of the punk rock band the Sex Pistols, and his relationship with girlfriend Nancy Spungeon (Chloe Webb). Chloe Webb also plays the mom, Monica Gallagher on Shameless who is also a drug addict/ alcoholic so it was interesting for me to make that connection! I didn’t really like it, definitely not one of my favorites that we have watched. I don’t know if it had to do with the fact that I couldn’t really understand anything that they were saying because the movie didn’t have captions and I am DEAF without captions. Also maybe it just wasn’t my type of movie which I feel was very very plausible as well.

In Cult Cinema and Drugs reading, it states, “a high number of cult films have links to drugs, either through featuring drugs in the plot, by referencing them abundantly, or by gaining a reputation for ideal viewing in a drugged state.” The effects of drugs provided an excuse to indulge in experimental shots, inlcuding superimpositions and unusual angles. Before these cult films came to be there was a production code in place laying down a series of guidelines of censorship for film producers. It was started in 1930 but wasn’t really enforced until 1934. Between the 1930’s and 1950’s films about drugs intended to be exploitation films sensationalizing the impact of drugs and warning of their dangers. After the 50’s the production code was relaxed and apended to allow treatments of drug addiction, prostitution, and child birth as long as they were “treated within the careful limits of good taste.” During this erosion of the production code throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s there emerged more daring depictions of drug use, many of which became cult films.

In our other reading Sid and Nancy he goes through three main points. First, he unpacks the tension between realism and interpretation in Sid and Nancy. He discusses the stakes that come with films about historical figures. The stakes being how to present the facts of their life and when to use artistic license and to what affect. Second fact he discusses was the society of the spectacle and the place of both punk rock and Cox’s film within in. He argues that the depiction of punk in the film suggests “the penetration of spectacle into the details of everyday life.” Thirdly, he argues that the critique of the spectacle is undermined as Sid and Nancy presents a depoliticized mythologization of the title characters. Cox is known for being left-winged in his films but in Sid and Nancy politics are eclipsed by the “disastrous romantic love.”