I just saw this movie for the first time and I am wondering what other people think of the protagonist and the movie in general.
I think he was a real twally for the most part, as were almost all of the other mods. If the movie was trying to make being a mod look cool, it totally failed as far as I am concerned. I found myself agreeing with most of the adults in the movie.
But in the end, I felt somewhat sorry for the main character, even though the majority of his problems were his own fault.
What drug were the blue pills? Did he die in the end? Or did he just ditch the bike?
Strictly speaking, the adults are right - you should do your job diligently (if you want to keep your job and earn money and progress), you shouldn’t fight on the beach frightening innocent bystanders.
But the film attempts to portray the aching of teenage years where you may be the lowest of the low in your work and family environment but you can be respected among your peers. The glamour of gang culture I guess. You can exist outside society’s grey conventional rules and within the more multi-coloured world of your like minded friends where the clothes you wear, the bike you ride, the clubs you go to are all the most important thing. Not how well you can deliver the mail around the office. Sure, delivering mail around the office may be important because it earns you money but hanging out with your mates getting drunk, dancing, going on long distance scooter rides is a hell of a lot more fun.
For the main character, in his job and at home, he feels impotent. But when he’s with his friends he’s playing by different rules where he can be respected and admired.
I don’t think the movie is trying to make mods look cool as such - just portray the alienation of teenage years. The mods seemed cool to him, from his frame of reference. The movie is just trying to make you see things from his frame of reference. To make you understand why he might think they look cool not necessarily to make you think they actually are cool. There’s probably parallels with gang culture today.
The main character thought that the mod culture was so cool that he wanted to make it his whole life but at the end he became disillusioned when he realised that real life intrudes on the fantasy. When he realised it was all an illusion he ditched the main symbol of that culture - the scooter. He didn’t die - if you look closely at the very end of the film you see that the bike goes over the cliff on its own.
I can sort of see the attraction. In your work life you can’t really be yourself. You have to be careful what you say and can’t really let yourself go. When he’s out with his mates and they’re all on drugs, dancing to the same music, getting off with people - everyone’s like-minded. No one’s judging him. Everyone’s just out to have a good time. Everyone’s equal. The things that are important are all things that are within his control - the clothes you wear, the bike you ride, the music you listen to. In his outside life, the important things are outside his control eg he’s got a shitty unimportant job where he has to do what he’s told by superiors who he doesn’t like.
Plus the music in the film does a good job of bringing alive the teenage angst and the aching and the alienation.
Well, the twattiness was also part of the point - the main character was quadrophenic/dissociative. A mentally disturbed young man fragmented between four personalties. Under the circumstances his vaguely pathetic personality is part of the angst of the story as it isn’t entirely under his control.
Heck bad enough he had mad-as-a-hatter Keith Moon and manic-obsessive Pete Townshend rattling around and bouncing off each other in his noggin. Throw in egotistic-tough-guy Daltrey and Entwhistle fighting for space and I’d have been a little twatty as well :D.
Jimmy really is just another crazy mixed-up kid. I see Quad as being in the tradition of a whole line of disaffected youth movies. It may not stand with the classics, but it is a pretty good film. If you haven’t seen it lately I would highly recommend checking out the Criterion Blu-ray. The restoration work was amazing–the picture and sound are huge improvements over previous versions.
Speaking of Quad/The Mods…At The Who’s show in Liverpool a couple of nights ago, Pete addressed one section of the audience in typical Townshend style:
I always thought that the four-way multiple-personality angle, which gave the work its very title, was never satisfactorily developed in either the album or the film, and was in fact superfluous to the story. I suspect that concept really had more to do with Townshend’s desire to have four musical themes that he could weave together (and link to the four Who members) than with Jimmy’s alienation. The kid really just had angst in his pants.
I basically agree. The liner notes to the album suggest that Jimmy has four personalities, but that isn’t at all clear just from the lyrics. It is more obvious on the album that Jimmy has mental health issues that probably go beyond just normal teenage stuff. “The Real Me” refers to him seeing a shrink (also mentioned in the liner notes), which I don’t think was something done casually in the early 1960s. To the best of my recollection this is totally absent from the movie.
In the movie I think Jimmy’s immediate circle of friends was meant as a nod to the “four personalities” theme. For the purposes of the story he didn’t need to be one of a group of four friends, he could have had just one or two close buddies.