Performance (DVD)

Turner/Lucifer

Another chance to recommend Performance.

It's probably the most accessible of all Nic Roeg's films and the 'performance' he dissects is something I think it's possible to grok immediately. (The straights who saw it in 1970 had no clue.)

It's "about" which parts of masculinity are innate, and which are a 'performance'. It was ahead of its time - music didn't really begin to explore these issues for another 18 months or so - the first indication probably being the "dress" cover of David Bowie's Man Who Sold the World. Mind you, once it did, popular music really got into the idea.

In the movie Chas (James Fox) is a London gangster who goes against his boss and has to hide. He holes up in Notting Hill Gate, in the basement room of a retired rock star, Turner (a young and pretty Mick Jagger). Pherber (Anita Pallenberg), in the kitchen, cooks him dinner. She picks an Amanita muscaria from her garden. He likes mushrooms, he says, so she gives him three-quarters of it.

The turning point (Turner, get it?!) comes when Turner, who once tried to chase Chas away, accepts him. They are both in Turner's closet. The tripping Chas is being dressed up in various guises by Pherber. Turner is playing guitar and singing a hopeless, lost, despairing song by the hopeless, lost and despairing Robert Johnson, a bluesman long rumored to have met the Devil at a crossroads and sold his soul for the songs we know him by.

The song is "Come on in My Kitchen".
You better come on in my kitchen
It's goin' to be rainin' outdoors.

Turner abruptly moves on to another Robert Johnson line, one that drips with real horror, adapted from Me and the Devil Blues.
Woke up this morning,
Heard a knock upon my door.
I said Hello, Satan;
I believe it's time to go.

Having mistakenly accepted the invite into the kitchen Chas finds himself walking side by side with Satan. Chas is introduced, if not to hell, to Chapel Perilous.Turner switches to John Lee Hooker – Bad Like Jesse James.
I may shoot ya
I'm mad wit'cha
Bad like Jesse James

Turner has begun to get inside his guest's head, as they say, singing a gangster's blues. In a sequence that's sometimes referred to as a "rock video" we see Turner acting out the part of a Chas-like gangster, which at this stage of his metamorphosis is still mixed bizarrely with his own identity. He rules Chas' firm as the new boss, but he's singing a Stones' song, "Memo from Turner", one which has nothing to do with East End gangs.

Chas knows his firm will eventually rub him out. He goes to tell Satan he believes it's time to go. But Turner isn't finished with him. He's trapped here in the house. His only way out is with someone who still has the capacity to move between worlds. "Take me with you," he says.

He does, but I won't say how.

Much more detail and spoilers here

Performance (1970) I

Warning: All of the below are spoilers, except the bits where I'm speculating. If you want to be shocked by the ending of the film, don't read any of it at all.

What's all this 'ear, then?

Performance was released on DVD this February; it's taken me until now to manage to sit down and write about it. And that doesn't include the fact that I've had it on VHS for several years. Or that I first saw it in 1976, six years after it was released in England. How, you might ask, does it take 31 years to try to sum up a film? Partly it's me, but Performance is a difficult film to summarize.

The movie Performance starts in the outside world with a linear story. Chas is a junior enforcer with a firm, a man with a sadistic gift for putting the frighteners on people – when he finds an antagonistic lawyer who purports not to be afraid of him, his destruction of the lawyer's Rolls Royce and humiliation of his chauffeur is a balletic masterpiece. We see him going about his usual business – smashing up a shopkeeper's premises until he agrees that he needs his firm's protection – when he hears his boss mention a bookie Chas knows – and hates. Chas destroys the turf accountant's shop, not realizing that his boss had other plans. He finds himself out of favor. It gets worse; the bookie, realizing the tables have turned, breaks into Chas' flat with a couple of goons and beats him up. (Everyone seems to be convinced Chas is queer; they make jokes about it as they tie him up and whip him. There are BDSM references throughout the film, but Chas, despite a sequence suggesting he's a sexual sadist, has a chirpy and unbruised girlfriend.) Chas manages to reach his hidden gun, shoots the bookie but lets the other two go. Only then does it dawn on him that he's put his firm in danger and he has nowhere to hide.

He pulls out his emergency money and buys a train ticket, but in the station waiting room sees Noel, a black guitarist with a Hendrix 'fro talking to his 'mum', an elderly white lady. He's got a gig, and is leaving his room in Powis Square with the back rent unpaid until he can get the money to his landlord, Turner. Chas changes his mind. He'll hole up in Turner's basement until the heat's off. He takes a taxi to Powis Square, blags his way in by claiming to be a performer himself, a juggler. He pays off the back rent and an exorbitant extra fee Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) thinks up on the spot, and goes to ground. Laraine, the cleaning lady's daughter, a youngster with a deep voice and masculine walk, acts as our Exposition Elf, providing Chas and ourselves with background information on the house and its inhabitants. The cinematography of the 'real' aspects of the house is so clearly defined I swear you can smell it. Upstairs it's patchouli, frangipani and joss sticks; the kitchen is Fairy Liquid dish detergent. The basement smells of damp plaster, dry wood, winter cold and old varnish.


Turner is a retired rock musician, who has, as Pherber says later, lost his demon. He's trapped in the house, a recluse. The upper part of the house is all carpets, silks, divans and cushions in rooms around a cavernous in-home recording studio. Downstairs is the kitchen. Pherber is cooking dinner, a live eel crawling from its fishbowl across the kitchen table as she and Lucy, a boyish French girl, attempt to plug in a transistor radio using two leads ending in sockets rather than a socket and a plug. "You can't fit those together," Pherber says, demonstrating. "It's all holes." In the greenhouse she grows mushrooms, but today she picks a wild one from the garden – an Amanita muscaria, a fly cap, a semi-poisonous and notably powerful hallucinogen. Chas likes mushrooms, he says, so she gives him three-quarters of it, mixed in his food. "That's insane," Turner later says. "I can't make that scene."

On to part II

Performance (1970) II

Warning: All of the below are spoilers, except the bits where I'm speculating. If you want to be shocked by the ending of the film, don't read any of it at all.












Call him Lucifer. He's in need of some restraint.

The linear story starts to dissolve. The hallucinogen is the excuse, but this is not a freak-out movie. The story is faceted, and since each part of the story has to be shown simultaneously, the style has to change. The dialogue becomes fragmented and some parts are repeated in different situations. In a way, the narrative resembles a dance-hall mirror-ball; multiple moving reflections patterning a complex surface.

The turning point (Turner, get it?!) doesn't come when Chas literally goes underground in the bohemian basement, but now, when Turner, who once tried to chase Chas away, accepts him. The scene is in Turner's bathroom closet. He's playing guitar and singing a hopeless, lost, despairing song by the hopeless, lost and despairing Robert Johnson, a bluesman long rumored to have met the Devil at a crossroads and sold his soul for the songs we know him by. The song is "Come on in My Kitchen".

You better come on in my kitchen
It's goin' to be rainin' outdoors.

It's enough to make you reach through the screen to warn Chas away. Turner abruptly drops the standard lyric for that song and moves on to another Robert Johnson line, one that drips with real horror, adapted from Me and the Devil Blues.

Woke up this morning,
Heard a knock upon my door.
I said Hello, Satan; I believe it's time to go.

It's rare to find any means of expression that can match the power and magical realism of blues; even Performance 'can't make it', can't 'achieve madness' – its own criterion for success - without using the real thing as a sort of sourdough starter for what's coming next. Having mistakenly accepted the invite into the kitchen Chas finds himself walking side by side with Satan. Chas is introduced, if not to hell, to Chapel Perilous.

Turner switches to John Lee Hooker – Bad Like Jesse James.
I may shoot ya
I may drown ya
Cause I'm mad wit'cha
Bad like Jesse James.

Turner has begun to get inside his guest's head, as they say, singing a gangster's blues.

Run, Chas! (He can't hear me.)

Turner quizzes him on his identity as Pherber plays sexual mind-games. Chas struggles to remember who he is and why he's there as the mushroom takes hold. He tells them he needs a photo, for his agent, and the two of them make a game of dressing him up to take his picture. They give him a wig that completely transforms him – he looks like a hippy, like a woman, like a parody of a washed up showman, each at different times. Turner dresses up as a South London hoodlum, Chas as an urbane American untouchable. As they role-play, Pherber and Turner uncover the lash marks on Chas' back and realize he's on the run, that he actually needs the picture for a fake passport. Pherber sits astride him as she puts ointment on his wounded back. "He's a striped beast," Turner says, suggesting she's his Babylon, from Revelations. "Nothing is true, everything is permissible," says Turner, then. He's been reading from Borges all evening, so we know that by now, but each facet from the mirrorball has to go past once it's set in motion. He tells us the story of the Hashishin, to get Chas into their enchanted garden.

To part III
Back to part I

Performance (1970) III

Warning: All of the below are spoilers, except the bits where I'm speculating. If you want to be shocked by the ending of the film, don't read any of it at all.

There are mirrors everywhere – they are the traps that have caught Turner and are keeping him in the house. Pherber takes Chas to bed and holds a mirror to her body so that he and we can see half a male body and half a reflected female body, likewise mingling their two faces, but he says he's 'normal'. He's 'all man'. She's perverted, he says. Turner is watching them, hidden from them. Eventually, she gives up, spending the night with Lucy.

Turner is having his own personality crisis. In a sequence that's often referred to as a "rock video" and is sometimes seen as a standalone, we see Turner acting out the part of a Chas-like gangster, which at this stage of his metamorphosis is still mixed bizarrely with his own identity, a rock star. He rules Chas' firm as the new boss, but he's singing a Stones' song, "Memo from Turner", one which has nothing to do with East End gangs. The gangsters, in a horrible parody of Turner's girls, get naked and groove to the beat. We've seen plenty of evidence that they are homosexual, but Turner's imagination doesn't take us even as far as the linear narrative in that direction. The mimesis is incomplete. But at the end, he's strong enough to smash a mirror with his gun.

Chas has missed his connection with the fake document man, and he calls his nephew for help. Turner stands beside him feeding coins into the phone and giving him the delivery address for the passport. Of course, as the camera angle widens, we see his boss is in his nephew's house, having muscled in with his hard men. They're having a cuppa, nodding politely, taking down the address.

Chas sleeps with Lucy, the one he calls 'underdeveloped'. As they wake up, Lucy's form beside him is replaced for a moment with Turner's. Later, as they talk, Lucy asks for something. He goes to get it, still wearing the skewed and uncombed wig, and runs into several armed men on the ground floor landing. He knows the score – the firm have decided to 'put him down like a poor dog what doesn't mean to harm you but has become a danger'. He buys some time and goes upstairs to tell Satan he believes it's time to go. But Turner isn't finished with him. He's trapped here in the house, bereft of his demon, ready to take the next step. His only way out is with someone who still has the capacity to move between worlds. "Take me with you," he says.

After a slight hesitation, Chas does so, shooting Turner directly through the crown of his head. We see the bullet penetrate to his very core; what's at the core is shown on screen. It's not what you might think. Chas goes down to meet his boss and is driven away in the white Rolls-Royce. We see them leave, the camera peering through the car window. It's Turner's face we see in the car, looking mildly astonished at the bright light of the outside world.

Back to part II