The Decline… of Western Civilization
Directed by Penelope Spheeris
With Fear, X, the Germs, Black Flag, Catholic Discipline
(Columbia, 1980)
by William Ham
Few punkumentaries are worth half a toss, really – films like D.O.A.(1978) and Don Letts’ Punk Rock Movie (1977) endure as valuable social documents, but are done in as entertainment by butcher-knife editing, grainy photography, and (most unforgivable) rotten sound. Penelope Spheeris, fresh from years of directing the commercial parodies on ’70s-vintage Saturday Night Live and assisting in Albert Brooks’ brilliant docuparody Real Life (1979), took special care not to make these errors in documenting the first flowering of pre-‘core L.A. punk. The result is the only true reflection of that earth-shaking, socio-musical fissure.
SoCal circa ’79 was a scene as vital in its way as London or the Bowery were a couple of years before, and Spheeris captures it all: The impure mania of the Germs (“Pick up the mike, Darby!”), the Chuck Berry-meets-Chuck Bukowski difference engine that was X, and the audience-baiting Don Rickles of punk himself, Lee Ving of Fear. Great performances all, but it’s the non-musical segments that make Decline shine: Casual conversations with the bands, black-and-white interviews with scene brats (if anyone reading this knows the current whereabouts of Eugene, slap him upside the head for me), and a talk with Slash magazine guru Claude Bessy, whose own band, Catholic Discipline (featuring America’s favorite Jewish lesbian folksinger, Phranc, on bass), is included.
My personal favorite is the opening sequence, a hilarious montage of each of the bands reading the obligatory “this is being filmed” disclaimer that says as much about each of them as does the music. This would be one for the time capsule if I could ever bear to part with it. (Spheeris also helmed a sequel, The Metal Years [1988], which demonstrates how the winds of rebellion turned into flatulence with depressing speed. Not that I don’t think W.A.S.P. wasn’t a great band or nothin’.)
