#20: Sid and Nancy
Hi hi!
I am just getting right into it this week because I have been traveling and, frankly, didn’t get my shit together to scout funds/action items and movie by a Black filmmaker recs. Next week! xoxo
#20: Sid and Nancy
Director: Alex Cox
Country: United Kingdom
Year: 1986
Runtime: 113 minutes
Language: English
**As always, this post contains spoilers!**
CW: drug use, self-harm, murder, suicidal ideation
Do you ever look back on your youth and feel, in the truest, most cliched sense that it feels like someone else’s life? It is almost impossible to relate to the choices you made or the beliefs, or the feelings. And yet, there you were. It doesn’t feel like a dream so much, but more like a movie you’ve seen a dozen times but don’t remember. Like a few weeks ago when Josh and I watched Dennis the Menace (the Christopher Lloyd version where he has 4 tracks of hair extensions and eats the beans): I had no memory of having seen it before and I couldn’t tell you the plot, but I, like those people who wake from comas fluent in another language, was speaking whole lines and predicting bits of action moments before they happened. I couldn’t tell Josh what was going to happen in the next 5 minutes, but I could tell him what was going to happen in the next 5 seconds for the entirety of the movie. I had clearly seen the movie a LOT at some point in my life but instead of remembering the movie as a whole (or remembering having seen it at all), its parts were baked into me.
The infamous story of Sid and Nancy, the real people, lives in me the same way. I’d somehow never seen the movie, but my high school (and college and ++, [we dated for 8 years]) boyfriend was very into Sid Vicious. He convincingly dressed like him for Halloween one year, we listened to the Sex Pistols and his solo album constantly, watched interviews and music videos, and my boyfriend generally idolized him so, much like The Beatles and Totino’s Party Pizza, the legend of Sid and Nancy lives as a nostalgic third wheel to my memories of being ages 15-23 even though I couldn’t tell you anything about him. And yet, as the movie played, I thought “oh yeah, and then this is when…”
All of that is to say, seeing this movie now at 32 was kind of a trip.
For anyone reading who may not know this story, it’s pretty simple and, I think, helpful to know before getting into it: Sid Vicious, bassist and vocalist for the 1970s British punk band the Sex Pistols had an intense (and famously drug-fueled) relationship with a young American woman named Nancy Spungen. The details are semi-murky (because heroin) but she died at the Chelsea Hotel after being stabbed by Sid in 1978 when she was just 20-years-old. He was charged with her murder but died of a heroin overdose while out on bail just a few months later. It’s tragic and I am fascinated by how the movie approached showing this tragedy. This might surprise you but I sort of hated it HA but HEAR ME OUT, okay?
So, the movie starts off just as I thought it might: in the aftermath of Nancy’s death. Sid (a very young Gary Oldman) sits on the edge of the bed at the Chelsea Hotel while a V.O. of his 911 calls play.
A NYPD detective tries to interview him but he’s unresponsive. A body bag is removed from the apartment. Sid is handcuffed and taken into custody.
At the police station, a group of cops interrogate him in a terribly lit room. They ask him where he met Nancy and he simply responds, “Linda’s.” We see a flashback to Sid and his friend and bandmate, Johnny Rotten (Andrew Schofield), on a residential street in London yelling “Linda!” outside of an apartment. Just an FYI: until the last few minutes, the entire movie is a flashback.
Linda lets them in and LINDA is played by Anne Lambton who played a huge role in scaring the bajeezus out of me as a child when she was in The Witches as the witch who offers Luke a bar of chocolate and a snake while he’s in that tree.
Anyone else? Well in this movie, she’s a punk dominatrix and Nancy Spungen’s friend.
Nancy (if you’ve ever seen a video of IRL Nancy…EXPERTLY played by Chloe Webb), who is 18 or 19 at the time, is visiting Linda and we learn that she’s a groupie who has traveled to London from New York to pursue the Sex Pistols. In the apartment, Sid and Johnny spray paint the walls and eat baked beans (hello, British people) with a fork which is very gross if you were wondering.
They have a gig that night and Linda and Nancy attend. After the gig, a bunch of punks sleep on the floor of Linda’s apartment. Nancy gets in between Sid and Johnny and when Nancy tries to cuddle with Sid, he says “Sex is boring. Ugly hippie shit.” She tells him he’s “fuckin’ insane” and rolls over.
The next day at a bar (pub), Sid and Johnny see Nancy across the bar hanging out with some New Wave guys. One of them throws a massive beer in her face and she runs out. Outside, Sid finds her crying into a brick wall, telling Sid the “junkie” inside ripped her off for 50 quid. “Never trust a junkie” she says.
He asks her if she can get him some heroin and he gives her all his money. She hops on a bus (it’s a red double-decker) and says she’ll be back in an hour.
Cut to Sid sitting outside the pub in the rain, in the dark, completely wasted, several hours having passed with no Nancy.
The next day, she does show up with the heroin and they shoot up in some guy’s apartment. Sid gets violently ill because, it is implied, it’s his first time using. I don’t know how true this is given the rumor that his mother supplied him with drugs so who KNOWS but in this film, she is the start of it all. Anyway, they sleep together and are woken up by their orange-haired friend playing a guitar on the floor which, I think this movie wants us to think, is VERY punk.
At the recording studio the next day, there’s a ton of people around. Throughout the whole movie, Nancy comes off as SUPER unlikeable, meaning: her voice is grating, she’s brash, pretty sloppy, whiny, and violent, as we’ll see later (also true for Sid, btw). This all very well could have been true to life, but again, as we’ll keep seeing, the movie really pushes this narrative and although Sid is no angel, they paint it very much like Nancy was the source of all of his problems.
After everyone leaves, Nancy says to Sid: “I don’t think Johnny likes me. You like me, don’t you?”
The Sex Pistols start their tour on a ferry, where Sid skips the performance to make out with Nancy in the bathroom. The cops (*ahem* bobbies) board the boat and after it's docked, they arrest and beat up a bunch of people while Sid and Nancy walk off and through the chaos unscathed.
That night in a tollbooth, Nancy calls her mom to tell her she got married (she didn’t). She asks for a present, like maybe $100 or so would be great. Her mom calls her out saying she’s not really married and she’s just going to spend it on drugs which are both extremely true. Nancy melts all the way down, screaming into the phone, “if you don’t send us money right now we’re both gonna DIE. FUCK YOU” and then punches out a bunch of the windows.
At the Sex Pistols’ show that night, a row of punk kids sit on the floor. This doesn’t matter at all except for the fact that one of them has a baby with a green mohawk. Not a toddler, but a BABY that doesn’t have any hair around the mohawk, which is several inches tall OMG there’s a picture of it BLESS
See?! I can’t get over it.
Sid and Nancy are at (I think) his apartment (sorry, flat). Neither of them are wearing pants but he’s wearing a leather jacket. Nancy bemoans, “I’ll never look like Barbie. Barbie doesn’t have bruises. Look at me. I look disgusting!”
Sid is on speed and vacuuming while they yell insults at each other. She puts on a boho-ish gown and dances around. He slaps her and then she packs all of her shit into bags and walks down the street. She sees her reflection on a mirrored wall and sees what she’s wearing and yells “I look like FUCKIN STEVIE NICKS! YUCK!” And changes her clothes in the street, which made me lol.
Johnny shows up at Linda’s house, who, remember, is a dominatrix who has a man hanging from the ceiling by his wrists. Of course, Johnny finds Sid and Nancy together in bed there, where they’ve clearly made up. Johnny invites them to meet another band (maybe it was called Rockhead?) and I don’t really understand why they’re meeting and this part was boring and confusing, but Johnny just gets wasted while Sid and Nancy make out on the bed.
The rest of the band and Phoebe (Sid’s road manager and friend, played by Debby Bishop), meet with Sid and Nancy at a diner. They’ve seen what they think is Nancy’s bad influence on Sid and tell them there’s no women allowed on tour. Nancy basically tells them to fuck off. They tell him it’s her or the band and then tell her the record company will buy her a house if she stays behind for the month.
She changes her tune real quick saying it’s what’s best for Sid and that she didn’t want to go on the tour anyway. They get in another fight that night while they’re in bed and he leaves. She yells, “WHAT ABOUT THE FAREWELL DRUGS?!” He leaves her behind.
From here, it’s basically what you would expect.
The tour isn’t going...great. Sid is wasted all the time and gets beaten up one night at a show. Meanwhile, Nancy is living with Linda and they’ve got a great dominatrix hustle going there, when Sid calls her from America and they make up. They play a show at a honky tonk bar which is...confusing. After the show, women dressed like cowgirls watch Sid carve the word “pain” in his chest with a razor while he lays on a hotel bed.
At the next show, Johnny and Sid argue on stage. Surprising no one, the band breaks up. On the plane on his way to New York, Sid takes pills with alcohol and lands himself in the hospital in NY. Nancy shows up dressed like a Christmas tree and they fly to Paris. In Paris, they go out to dinner and some guy who knows Sid stops by their table and Sid pukes all over him.
Sid tries his hand at a solo career, recording the music video for his punk version of “My Way” where he sings to a crowd of poshly dressed old people throwing roses at him. He starts shooting them all with a gun, including Nancy in the front row. They walk off stage together.
Back at the Chelsea hotel, Nancy and Sid talk about ways they could die together.
“If I asked you to kill me, would you?” She asks
“What would I do? I couldn’t live without you,” He replies.
She asks, “You’d kill yourself after?
“Yeah.”
So, it’s extremely grim over here. Also, you know how there’s certain textures that make you want to grind your teeth or make you feel like you want to wash your hands a bunch? That’s what Sid’s hair does for me.
They meet up with her grandparents in Phildalphia who she is very mean to. They have dinner with her whole family and it is just cringe TOWN. Sid is shirtless and smoking at the table. Their plan is: get off heroin with methadone, Nancy will be his manager, and they’ll live in Paris. Her grandparents lie that Sid and Nancy can’t stay another day like they’d planned because the whole family’s going out of town, which is a terrible lie, but I sort of get it. Sid and Nancy are a LOT.
Back in New York, they go to the methadone clinic. As his manager, Nancy tries to get Sid a gig as a solo artist and she is….really bad at it. Mostly because she’s 19 or 20 and a total loose cannon. But! The guy eventually gives them $3,000 for 3 gigs.
Nancy comes back to their hotel room, finds out he’s used heroin and she flips out on him. He smacks her and walks out. She chases him and he falls down the stairs. Again, not doing *awesome*.
Sid plays a gig in a small venue, performing “Something Else”. At the bar, for some reason, there’s a box of kittens which immediately made me neeerrvoouusss but turns out it’s just a totally innocent box of kittens for people to take home. Nancy takes one. At a bar after the show, they hang with some friends and the kittens, including a young Courtney Love who plays their friend Gretchen which fulfilled my yearly quota of being reminded I don’t not resemble a young Courtney Love.
Sid and Nancy are still living at the Chelsea Hotel with their cat. Sid is sleeping but Nancy, lit by the glow of the tv, tells him she had a dream they had a dog, but they didn’t want to keep it so they ate it. Even their dreams are chaos.
Sid plays another gig, this time there’s no one there, securing that his solo career is a total flop.
In a montage, we see Sid and Nancy reaaaallllly starting to fall apart as their addiction to heroin gets more and more severe. Side note, even though they look awful, I do not understand how they even partially maintain their hair at this point. I got bangs recently and the WHEREWITHAL it requires to wash and blow dry these fuckers every day is unreal and I’m probably just a little dehydrated and low on B-12. These folks are either always very stoned, sick, or asleep and they have dye jobs and curls and spikes AND bangs. Also they put whole outfits together which are sometimes matching.
They accidentally light their room on fire and don’t even try to leave until the firefighters pull them out. They’re moved into a new room. This is, amazingly, not their rock bottom.
In a rare outing from the hotel, they buy a hunting knife they see in a window display.
Sid and Nancy run out of money so they’re very sick with heroin withdrawal. Nancy is super depressed and says she wishes she were dead. Their heroin dealer shows up and although he almost leaves because they’re super rude to him, he ultimately delivers, except its speed, not heroin, which are two VERY different things. He leaves to try to score heroin.
They are fighting because Sid wants to get clean and go back to London and Nancy says they made a pact to die together. They wrestle and he grabs the knife. Nancy is stabbed in a way that makes it hard to tell if it was on purpose or an accident. In the next scene, they lay in bed together, sleeping. Nancy gets out of bed, which is completely covered in blood, as is her entire body. She’s been stabbed once in the abdomen. She stumbles to the bathroom and collapses, calling out Sid’s name, but he keeps sleeping.
The drug dealer arrives later that morning and sees Sid sitting on the bed, holding a knife on the blood-soaked bed.
We are back in present time, seeing Sid going through heroin withdrawal in a jail cell which looks AWFUL.
Sid is bailed out by his mother (who is rumored to have played a huge role in his subsequent heroin addiction and, ultimately, his death).
Sid gets a slice of pizza in a shack by the Hudson River, stops to dance with three little kids listening to “Get Down Tonight,” when a taxi arrives. Nancy, alive, is in the back seat. They kiss as the taxi drives away. I was half expecting it to lift off into the clouds but it didn’t :/
A postscript says “Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose on February 2nd, 1979. Sid and Nancy R.I.P.” and I am reminded AGAIN that Nancy was only 20 when she died and Sid only 21.
The truth is there’s no way to tell this story that doesn’t make both of them look like total shit. They were on heroin and other drugs basically all the time, were VERY young, generally reckless, and violent with each other. BUT one of them did kill the other one so that’s *probably* worse and I just don’t think the film emphasizes that enough. According to the film, she was “unlikable” and she introduced him to heroin, which he asked for by name, and she was abusive (as was he) and and and. But, again...he killed her soooooo controversial, but: worse? Food for thought. Also, the end of the movie romanticized their relationship a lot which I think is questionable at best because while watching it I not once thought “awwwww.”
I wish I had the photo to share of me and my boyfriend from the Halloween he dressed up as Sid. I was a fairy, but like...a Hot Topic fairy. I think even at 16 I knew the Sid-Nancy parallel wasn’t one I wanted to make. He painted the word “pain” in red paint on his chest and spiked his hair, wore a leather jacket. He looked just like him. We were cute, just a couple of kids.
Next up is #21, Dead Ringers, which initially had my favorite description of all time: “Jeremy Irons plays identical twin gynecologists,” until I heard it was also “a psychological thriller from David Cronenberg.” Yeesh!
See you soon!
XOXO,
Steph