DVD Review: Peter Watkins’s Privilege on New Yorker Video

Privilege had the jump on Easy Rider in telling a generation that they were going to blow it.

PrivilegeThe familiar 1960s-era sight of screaming, slack-jawed, and weeping young girls reacting to a beloved pop music idol on stage appears in an early scene from Peter Watkins’s Privilege, but it’s a teen-dream spectacle with a twist. Instead of shaking his hips or belting out three-chord paeans to puppy love, Steven Shorter (Paul Jones of the English rock band Manfred Mann) enacts a social-rebellion playlet that finds him handcuffed and imprisoned in a cage by theatrically grinning policemen.

“Set me free,” Shorter pleads to the audience over the rumbling riffs of an unseen band, his arms outstretched in supplication, wrists bleeding (for real). Indulgently liberated from his cell, he rips at his shirt in anguish, absorbs punches and kicks in a fight with the cops, and stumbles off stage as a mini-riot commences. In this Britain of “the near future,” a hushed narrator (voiced by Watkins) informs us, Shorter’s meteoric career has benefited from a one-party government’s directive to entertainment companies that they should channel the aggression of young folks with their product and “keep them out of politics.”

Watkins, in the wake of controversy and acclaim (including an Academy Award) for his BBC-sponsored faux documentary The War Game about a nuclear attack, didn’t originate Privilege but used rewrites and improvisation with the cast to mold it into a far less conventional, symbol-heavy “youth movie” than Universal Pictures could have expected. Working on a rare occasion in color and 35mm, he produced a commercially alienating satire of state, faith, and pop whose transgressions can be best understood in the context of its era.

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The brouhaha over John Lennon’s controversial claim that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus coincided with Privilege’s shooting in the summer of 1966. Watkins’s film sees the devotional passion and atavistic lust stirred by pop stars as entirely compatible with prostration before “God and flag,” and his poker-faced bureaucrats and bishops set about co-opting musical “revolt” with chain-store commerce and stadium revivals.

The pop star as ideological cipher (and tool of the Man) here seems to be the cinematic midpoint between media messiahs Lonesome Rhodes (from Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd) and Howard Beale (from Sidney Lumet’s Network)—both more conventionally entertaining rabble-rousers than Shorter, who as embodied by novice actor Jones wears his self-hatred with a sickly smile or a grimace suited to gastric distress. Rhodes and Beale’s initial sermons burned in their hearts, while Shorter knows that he’s a fraud from the start.

Jean Shrimpton, an iconic face of the era, is cast as a portrait artist who becomes Shorter’s lover and the vehicle to his turning against his paymasters. Her occasionally flat line readings and quiet, tentative physicality don’t suggest a catalytic conscience-raiser, but the pair have a touching, stranded quality in their intimate scenes—the ones that lie furthest outside Watkins’s usual neo-doc aesthetic—that works for their increasingly engulfed characters.

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Before Shorter’s sponsors decide that he needs to transform his image from persecuted jailbird to repentant Anglican (in the arena show that is the film’s second and last performance set piece), Privilege has some fun with Shorter’s coterie. For one, his jokey press agent (a fast and funny Mark London) and a fossilized record label exec (Max Bacon) share a strategy-swapping scene in a washroom that nicely anticipates Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap.

But aside from this lampoonery of professional leeches (and a sketch of a TV ad aiming to relieve a U.K. “apple glut”), Watkins prefers to keep the major power players’ manipulations in his sights. In the baldest “message” scene, a Mr. Big tells Shorter as they look down on London from an office rooftop that the hoi polloi will never fulfill the liberal myth of egalitarianism through education, but must be led into “a fruitful conformity” by the star’s wattage.

The showbiz glitz, while essential to the film’s concept (and budget), works against Watkins to a degree in both tone and performance. When the desperate idol finally protests, “I’m a person!,” it’s not entirely clear that he still is. In Shorter’s singing-evangelist debut, Jones is eclipsed by a Byrds-like band doing a chiming-guitar arrangement of “Jerusalem.” Ruthless fascists would likely bail on this depressed mascot long before these villains do.

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While not primarily intended as prophecy, Watkins’s tale of Shorter’s reign and fall has resonances of celebrity activism from Bob Geldof to Bono, as well as post-9/11 country-hit jingoism and Kanye West and the Dixie Chicks’s fussed-over smackdowns of George W. Bush. As for Privilege’s conceit of totalitarians playing puppetmaster to a nation’s entertainment industry, it remains intriguing but much too elaborate for our present moment. Corporate-marketed pop spectacle alone seems sufficient to keep youths distracted from the substance of politics. In his subsequent Punishment Park, Watkins addressed police-state tendencies in the contemporary West more directly, this time in America.

Image/Sound

Universal’s backing gave Watkins his biggest budget and a comparatively glossy look for his first color film, and New Yorker Video’s new transfer often looks like a bright approximation of the pop documentaries of the time. The serviceable mono mix disappoints only during the few musical sequences.

Extras

A 26-minute vérité short about the circus surrounding early-’60s pop crooner Paul Anka, Lonely Boy, was a major source for Watkins in creating Steven Shorter’s milieu, and it’s the chief supplement on the disc. On the verge of turning 20, Anka appears to be the opposite of Privilege’s neurasthenic mess, barking out backstage orders to his staff, plying the owner of New York’s Copacabana nightclub with gifts and flattery, and coyly planting kisses on the cheeks of adoring fans nearing collapse. The purity of his manager’s delusion that Anka will be the “biggest star ever” is such that Watkins places some of the flack’s hyperbole directly into the mouth of Shorter’s agent in Privilege: “God has given you a gift that he hasn’t given anyone in 500 years.” Given the Anka camp’s facility for inflating a writer-singer of schlock into a burgeoning superstar, the then-imminent British Invasion has never seemed more of a deliverance.

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Watkins contributes a “self-interview” in the disc’s booklet, protesting that critics have insufficiently grasped Steven Shorter as “an extended metaphor” for the excesses of modern capitalism and consumerism. In an excerpt from his 1979 book on Watkins, Joseph Gomez details Privilege’s pastiches of Lonely Boy and Triumph of the Will and the misunderstanding and anger with which the press greeted its release. In a new postscript, Gomez reevaluates the film’s echoes in today’s pop-political crosscurrents. An essay by Barry Keith Grant analyzes the Anka documentary’s investigation of pop-idol construction and the control of adolescent desire.

Overall

Though Watkins delivered sharper countercultural-themed films later, Privilege had the jump on Easy Rider in telling a generation that they were going to blow it.

Score: 
 Cast: Paul Jones, Jean Shrimpton, Mark London, William Job, Jeremy Child, Max Bacon  Director: Peter Watkins  Screenwriter: Norman Bogner, John Speight, Peter Watkins  Distributor: New Yorker Video  Running Time: 103 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1967  Release Date: July 29, 2008  Buy: Video

Bill Weber

Bill Weber worked as a proofreader, copy editor, and production editor in the advertising and medical communications fields for over 30 years. His writing also appeared in Stylus Magazine.

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