Drugs Will Tear Us Apart
24 Hour Party People, Directed by Michael Winterbottom
By Charlie Bertsch
Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 picture 24 Hour Party People is delightful even if you aren’t invested in the Manchester music scene of the 1970s and 1980s, and a whole lot better if you are.
By combining an irreverent screenplay with reverence for the bands it features – Joy Division, A Certain Ratio, New Order, and Happy Mondays – the film deftly tiptoes the line between lightheartedness and profundity.
We grow so fond of our protagonist, Tony Wilson, the club owner and record label boss, that we forgive his missteps and the lies he tells to minimise them.
Wonderfully rendered by Steve Coogan, Wilson is a confidence man who persuades himself as well as the people he is trying to con.
It’s his voiceover narration that makes 24 Hour Party People special.
Not only does he tell the story of how Manchester was transformed from a decaying backwater into a centre of global music culture – while placing himself squarely in the middle – he also draws attention to the sleights of hand that storytellers use to make a point.
Although we are meant to understand that Wilson’s heart was in the right place, the way he glides effortlessly from objectively verifiable events to outright fabrication imparts a disturbing aspect to the film.
Over and over, Wilson breaks the fourth wall to cast doubt on something he has said, making it clear that he is an unreliable narrator.
The extreme self-reflexivity of his tale helps us to perceive its seductive power. Even when he confesses to deceit, we still want to believe him.
One of the best examples comes early in the film. While pointing out some of the soon-to-be-significant individuals in the small crowd that attended the Sex Pistols’ first show in Manchester, Wilson mentions that Buzzcocks’ co-founder Howard Devoto would go on to sleep with his wife, Lindsay.
A little later, after Lindsay discovers him with a prostitute outside his first club, we see him go back inside to look for her. After he finds her having sex with Devoto in a toilet stall, he asks for the keys and walks out.
Instead of following Wilson, the camera lingers on the lavatory attendant standing at the sink, who declares, “I definitely don’t remember this happening.” At this point, the frame freezes, and we hear Wilson’s voice.
“This is the real Howard Devoto,” he begins. “He and Lindsay insisted that we make clear that this never happened. But I agree with John Ford. When you have to choose between the truth and the legend, print the legend.”
The role of the voice-over narration is frequently more subtle.
During a sequence in which we see Joy Division performing “Transmission”, culminating in Ian Curtis having an epileptic fit, Wilson sutures together this staged scene with documentary footage.
At first we see the band playing to an appreciative audience, followed by a shot of Wilson and the band’s manager Rob Gretton nodding with approval. But when we cut back to an overhead shot of the crowd, it’s apparent that there are numerous skinheads in the crowd performing a Roman salute.
As Curtis’s dancing becomes increasingly frenetic, the camera work capturing the crowd does, too, with a canted horizon and lots of shaking.
We then see archival footage of a crowd marching with large Union Jacks as Wilson – now, presumably, in his role as television newscaster – states, “The National Front took to the streets of Manchester today in the biggest demonstration of neo-fascists since the 30s.”
More shots of Curtis and the rest of the band follow, along with the increasingly rowdy skinheads, interspersed with footage of Britain in crisis that Wilson’s newscaster voice again narrates, culminating with “And now gravediggers in Liverpool refuse to bury the dead.”
After Curtis leaves the stage, we see his bandmates trying to help him in a dressing room. As Wilson makes his way backstage, a reporter follows him, asking a probing question: “How do you answer the charge that you’re a fascist?” He is referring to the Nazi origins of the name Joy Division.
Wilson’s reply distils the narrative approach of the preceding montage and 24 Hour Party People as a whole into a kind of manifesto.
“Have you never heard of Situationism or Postmodernism? Do you know nothing about the free play of signs and signifiers? Yes, we’ve got a band called Joy Division. We’ve also got a band called Durutti Column. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the irony there.”
As the story moves forward, through Ian Curtis’s suicide, New Order’s rise from the ashes of Joy Division, the creation of the Haçienda club, and finally, the emergence of the rave-happy “Madchester” identified with the drug-addled Happy Mondays, its Wilson’s voice-over that sutures everything together, trying to convince us that, as out-of-control as things may have been, the mind capable of fitting them into an overarching theoretical paradigm is still able to transcend the chaos.
The way Tony Wilson breaks character, whether to convey background information or cast doubt on his reliability, makes us keenly aware of the story’s retrospective quality. He revisits key events from a vantage point in the future, one which presumably correlates with the film’s release.
Although the screenplay predates the War on Terror, it’s not hard to perceive a connection between his glib storytelling and that of another Tony, the affable and eloquent prime minister who would go on to provide credibility to the warmongering of George W. Bush’s White House.
This is not to imply that 24 Hour Party People is making this analogy deliberately. Rather, the film provides us with the tools required to second-guess the statements of people who have the power of persuasion.
From one perspective, the film almost seems to be suggesting that the roughly fifteen years it covers, ending in the early 1990s, laid the groundwork for the outwardly very different world in which it was released.
Winterbottom’s masterful use of documentary concert footage also helps us understand how easily we can be misled by good storytelling.
Even though it is perfectly obvious that the actors playing members of Manchester bands are different from those musicians themselves – as exemplified by Howard Devoto’s cameo – we are still inclined to suspend disbelief.
Because Wilson’s narrator keeps reminding us of the distinction, we are able to sustain a double consciousness, believing the fiction on one level while reflecting on the process of fictionalisation on another.
When 24 Hour Party People came out, social media was in its infancy. So was the technological trickery that makes deep fakes possible.
In a sense, the film was looking into the future as much as the past, to a time when its approach to storytelling would reshape the entire mediascape.
Steve Coogan’s performance makes Wilson into a master of seduction, the sort that politicians strive to become.
In Wilson’s case, that rhetorical savvy is used for a wholesome purpose, promoting the Manchester scene he made possible. But the techniques he deploys – bending the truth here, inventing incidents there – can just as easily be deployed for sinister ends.
While those of us conversant in cultural theory will be thrilled by Wilson’s term-dropping, sober reflection on the state of politics today demonstrates how easily his self-reflexivity can be weaponised by people who did not share his socialist views.
On the contrary, in an era of metastasising populism, it is depressingly clear that many of the most effective storytellers in the 24 Hour Party People mode are political reactionaries.
American Vice President JD Vance, whose Ivy League education is the equivalent of Wilson’s degree from Cambridge, used the distortions and fabrication of his Hillbilly Elegy to become one of the most influential politicians today.
And Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has turned the spreading of rumours, stories which feel true even though they aren’t, into a dark art.
None of this is meant as a criticism of 24 Hour Party People, which has its heart in the right place just as Tony Wilson did.
On the contrary, it’s precisely because Michael Winterbottom’s film does such a great job of illustrating the power of storytelling that mixes fact with fiction and staged scenes with documentary footage that it demands to be seen again now.
Photograph courtesy of Phil King. Published under a Creative Commons license.