There’s nothing overly complicated since Smith uses chemistry and biology to remind us of our bodily fragility, both clever and limiting for audiences.
Swallowed incorporates digestive horrors like in Angus Sampson and Tony Mahony’s drug-running thriller The Mule or Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s Swallow - very uncomfortable, very recognizable gastro gross-outs. What Smith reminds us is our bodies can be subject to horrors far more ordinary, which are subjectable scenarios some even choose. There’s a lot of ambition in Pistol, a lot of provocateuring, but it doesn’t spark.When movies like Carter Smith’s Swallowed tease “body horror,” first instincts often assume something Cronenbergian or mutated like Brian Yuzna’s Society. She shows what punk did, rather than telling it. “Provocateuring does make one quite hungry,” she drawls. The other is Maisie Williams as the late Jordan, who gets the best scene in the series, when she struts through her seaside home town wearing nothing but clear PVC, to the horror of the stuffy commuters and passersby. A scene of the band’s gig at Chelmsford prison, in 1976, is genuinely tense, then strangely joyful. It sounds great, and hints at how thrilling it must have been to be in the room.
The actors had to learn how to play their instruments, and the live performance scenes give a desperately needed shot of energy. Pistol fell flat for me, but there are two things that might make it worth a punt. “He just died, for fuck’s sake,” Lydon says to Temple, his voice collapsing with emotion. I thought of Lydon talking about his friend Sid in Julien Temple’s 2000 documentary The Filth and the Fury.
After meandering around the early days of the band, the show careers towards the inevitable implosion: Bill Grundy, the US, drugs, Sid Vicious (Louis Partridge) joining the band and flaming out tragically. It is a big ask of the audience, to throw out equal parts sentimentality and nihilism, and expect it to sit smoothly. It’s Pistols: the panto.Īsks too much of us … Toby Wallace as Steve Jones and Sydney Chandler as Chrissie Hynde in Pistol. When Johnny Rotten finally appears and spends an episode or two trying to write lyrics, he talks in scraps of what will become lines from their handful of songs. He speaks in statements such as “You’re a product of state oppression,” urging the band to “tear into each other like the seditionary sewer rats that you are”. Westwood’s character is wheeled out to explain things, while McLaren sloganeers. “Ruffians like you excite me,” purrs a predatory Malcolm McLaren (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), when Jonesy is caught trying to steal from his and Vivienne Westwood’s shop, Sex. The first episode is all about Jonesy (Toby Wallace), as Jones is known in the series, and his terrible, traumatic childhood and life as a young thief. The problem with this is that it gives the story a wonky, skewed focus and a frustrating sense of delayed gratification. It is adapted by Baz Luhrmann favourite Craig Pearce, from Jones’s memoir, Lonely Boy, which explains the Jones-heavy perspective. Danny Boyle directs this frenetic yet baggy six-part dramatisation of the Sex Pistols story, largely told through the eyes of guitarist Steve Jones. Strange, then, that Pistol (Disney+) ends up feeling too fast and too loose. T he Sex Pistols lasted for three years, and it’s fair to say that a lot happened to them in that brief, blinding flash of late 1970s chaos.