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Corbijn’s Control is billed as a biopic of Joy Division’s lead singer, Ian Curtis. Its two hours cover the four years (1976-1980) of Ian’s public performances in the bands Warsaw and Joy Division before he hanged himself in May 1980. Corbijn’s gorgeous black and white cinematography is an ambivalent seduction…and also a tell; its sheer beauty draws viewers in (it’s really lovely) and pushes them out (the film is quite too grim for such loveliness). This is not a biopic; something else is going on here.
Critics tend to equate the black and white palette either with the film’s emotional darkness or, more neutrally, with creating a retro atmosphere that convincingly carries viewers back the late 1970s. I pivot in a different direction, sensing the crisp black and white cinematography as figuring both determination and openness. Like a photographic negative, the film form is determined in that the images do present “a black and white situation”, Ian’s clearcut and unchangeable suicide. But the black and white palette also is open, in that way black and white pictures always are haunted by the various colorful worlds they deny. That this haunting is an opening might be sensed by the general feeling that adding color to classic Hollywood films is a questionable and distasteful practice, or by the weird happening when coloring books became all the rage a few years ago (one more fold of the human search for comfort and stability). Color can bring decisiveness and meaning to what black and white pictures leave frustratingly undetermined, but that unclosed indeterminacy can also be what feels beautiful or playful.
No viewer can alter one iota the steady march to Ian’s decision to destroy his life (determined), but any viewer can tug at one or another element of the film and consider how it articulates Ian’s clear impasse with his equally clear (until it wasn’t) desire to maintain attachment to life (open). (My words of impasse and maintaining attachment are drawn from Lauren Berlant, of course, whose posthumous book, On the Inconvenience of Other People I have just finished.) The question this film poses for viewers is a question displaced from but akin to that which supported Ian’s wife, Debbie Curtis, in writing the book that Corbijn’s film interprets, which is, as Berlant writes at the end of the “Preface” to On the Inconvenience of Other People:
“How not to reproduce the embedded violence of the unequal ordinary? People say [as they did to Ian], ‘You got this!’ ‘We can do this!’ But it’s more like [for Debbie and her daughter, Natalie], ‘Once you let in the deaths, all that follows is life.’ A thing to be used.”
Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People (Duke University Press, 2022), xi. Bold added.
“How not to reproduce the embedded violence of the unequal ordinary?” I wonder if the film should perhaps not be thought of as a biopic of Ian Curtis but rather as a work of mourning, offered in companionship with what Berlant calls “the unfinished business of being with the object that is already in [us]” (Inconvenience, 172), where the us here is most proximately Ian’s wife, but quickly and seamlessly oozes out to his child, his lover, his bandmates, his manager Rob, his record producer Tony, and Joy Division’s ever accumulating fans. The film is wake work, as Christina Sharpe might say, flowing in the wake of a tragedy that is at once unique and dully familiar, and handing us “historicist documents of delayed witness” (Berlant Inconvenience, 154).
To breathe in this film as a work of mourning is to attend to its film form as figuration. From its black and white palette, its portraiture-like shots (so reminiscent of Corbijn’s own photographs of the band from the 70s), and its tendency to box Ian into spaces and minimize light sources, the film is a breath-taking figuration of Ian’s impasse, that is, his inability to bear the unbearable (Berlant, 152), and how that inability is not his alone, not his “fault”, as is so crassly said.
A figuration is a temporal thing, embedded with occluded histories, current contradictions, and tenuous pricklings of other futurities (which future-vectored but now-felt pricklings Berlant figures, in On the Inconvenience of Other People, through Foucault’s “heterotopia”). The occluded histories can be thought of, à la Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology, as the conditions of arrival of what we see in the figuration and what affects that arrival as contradiction, or impasse. In the case of this film, such histories would include Ian’s growing up in working class in Macclesfield in a heteronormative family; the normalization of marrying young; the lack of job opportunities; and the minimal care offered by the National Health System. Each of these histories is refracted in the film through mere gestures or fragmented scenes. They don’t add up to an explanation, and they can’t add up to an account with clear causal trajectories, because the work of figuration is to present current contradictions without resolving them. The contradictions that Ian lived remained at the level of impasse; he could not survive them. But Corbijn does allow the film’s figuration to feel, through its form, toward other possible futurities, collectively and caringly cobbled together. These are maybe-otherwises that open out from the undetermined black-and-white, futures where attachments to plural loves are not pitted against each other, where mothers and children are not exiled from the creative musical life of their beloveds, where lyrics are prompts for properly risked and love-filled questions, and where the NHS foregrounds survivance instead of expediency.
This is not a film to love and yet I do love it. I have read that it received a standing ovation at Cannes, a response that makes affective sense. The film’s story, its filmed plot, is a suffocating and relentless march to suicide. But the film’s form figurates the love, memory, and yes hope that always thread itchily through the (let’s hope) transforming and difficult work of mourning.