Pinball Trivia
In many high school English classes Julius Caesar is taking a back seat to “that deaf, dumb, and blind kid,” Tommy the pinball wizard, the new messiah.
Peter Townshend created the rock opera Tommy and the British rock group The Who performed it on a recording released in 1969. Now Tommy, in a slightly different version, has become a film, written and directed by Ken Russell (Women in Love, The Devils) and produced by Robert Stigwood. Columbia Pictures is the distributor.
No grand opera ever had a plot so fragmented or a hero so weak. One wonders what English teachers find solid enough to discuss. Mother (Ann-Margret) bears son, Tommy (Roger Daltrey of The Who); the boy’s father is missing in action and believed dead. About seven years later, the mother decides to remarry and beds Bernie (Oliver Reed), a camp director. Tommy’s father returns to find his wife and Bernie in bed, and Bernie kills him, all of which Tommy sees. The shock causes the boy to become deaf, dumb, and blind. As a teen-ager he becomes the pinball champion, famous and rich. After regaining his sight, speech, and hearing, Tommy creates a new religion with himself as messiah and a pinball machine as altar. But fame flies, his followers rebel, and Tommy escapes to a mountain top. End of film.
Russell fills out the skeleton of a plot with sick scenes of sadism and degeneracy. The acid queen scene (soul singer Tina Turner realistically portrays an acid freak) symbolizes the first three-quarters of the film. As Tommy trips out he changes from a copy of his father to a skeleton crawling with snakes.
Not only does Russell crowd the film with lurid visual effects, such as the acid scene, but he stuffs it to overflowing with religious, and specifically Christian, language and liturgy. For example, Tommy’s mother at a Christmas party worries that he “doesn’t know who Jesus is or what praying is.” She adds that “unless he’s cured his spirit can’t live.” The drunken party-goers ask, “How can he be saved from the eternal grave?”
To cure Tommy his mother tries everything, including a faith-healing service where the idol is a slick plaster-of-Paris statue of Marilyn Monroe, her skirt swung high above her waist, her arms hugging her sides to accentuate her breasts. Acolytes and concelebrants wear M.M. masks, the priest the vestments of the Anglican church (the film takes place in England). The communion elements are pills and Johnny Walker Red Scotch. As with a communion chalice, the lip of the bottle is wiped with a white cloth after each person is served.
In a final, desperate attempt to get some response from her zombie-like son, his mother throws him through a mirror. He falls into a pool, experiences some sort of rebirth, and runs along a beach singing “I’m free and I’m waiting for you to follow me.” It is hardly a subtle religious overtone to have Tommy sing those words as he runs past two fishermen hauling in their empty net.
His mother finds him on a rock and again pleads with him to hear and speak. His run along the beach must have cured him, for he sits up, prophesies that the pinball machine means more than they realize, tears off his mother’s jewelry and fake nails, baptizes her, and leads the way to new freedom. He knows the “master’s plan.”
Tommy claims to be “the light,” tells us how everyone worships him, and commands his followers to evangelize. “Bring everyone in,” he tells them, and he enlarges his house to hold them all.
Although he starts off being against materialism (no jewelry), he soon charges his followers high prices for sunglasses, earplugs, and a mouth cork, the required equipment for freedom. Tommy says they need to be deaf, dumb, and blind before they experience release. (He’s also against booze, drugs, and cigarettes.) But the crowd revolts, shouting, “We won’t take it. We never have, we never will.”
Tommy escapes only slightly injured from a fire that destroys his camp of eternal happiness. As he climbs a mountain he sings to someone, “I see glory from you. Right behind you I see millions following.” The message, if there is one, stops there, blurred throughout by an excess of conflicting, kaleidoscopic images.
Russell views our culture as hungering desperately for a leader, any leader. Even a deaf, dumb, and blind pinball wizard can capture our loyalty, if only briefly. The triviality of Tommy’s talent increases the bleakness of that vision and ridicules our messianic tendencies. Clearly, Tommy is Russell’s idea of a modern-day Christ—or his idea of the type of Christ modern man would follow.
Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov also speculated on the Christ man wants. Perhaps beneath the bizarre, cheap, shallow trappings of Tommy, Russell is repeating Dostoevsky. But with the great Russian novelist one senses that he knows the truth before he explains why the masses want something different and less demanding. Russell seems to know only the perversion.
CHERYL FORBES
Newly Pressed
Lighten Up, Barry McGuire (Myrrh, MSA-6531). Another great album from the former Christy Minstrels lead singer. An arrangement of his 1965 million-dollar single, “Eve of Destruction,” is the lead cut, and with “Don’t Blame God” and “1 Chronicles 7:14” it creates an apocalyptic musical trilogy. McGuire wrote most of the songs and is developing a better instinct for ballads, both in composing and in performing. “Callin’ Me Home” contains some nice verbal images, and the piano accompaniment complements these. This album offers a better variety of musical styles and themes than Seeds. Not all the songs are futuristic; some are just praise. But my favorite is the forward-looking “Pay the Piper,” a warning of doom with a good tune and an upbeat tempo. Regrettably, the lyrics for “You’ve Heard His Voice” are not printed on the jacket.
Gentle Spirit, Mike Johnson (Cam [P.O. Box 60445, Oklahoma City, Okla. 73106], Cam 1543). A much softer style than The Last Battle, and the words are specifically Christian. But the harder sound was more interesting.
Piano accompaniments here are predictable and too similar from cut to cut. The heavy use of echo chamber reminds me of early Rick Nelson. “Gather ’Round,” the album’s second song, has interesting lyrics and a nice, light tune.
I Am Not Ashamed, the Liberated Wailing Wall (Tempo, R-7080). A good collection of mostly original songs about the Lamb of Israel, though some of the orchestral arrangements suggest more the Big Band sound than Jewish music. The group is at its best in interpreting Old Testament passages, such as the Psalms and Isaiah. “Wait Upon the Lord” and “Hoshienu” are two good examples. This is a welcome second album from the Wall.
Revelation: Music for the Young World, songs by Mark Blankenship (Tempo, R-7056). The vocal and orchestral music by Blankenship, a member of the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board’s church-music department, paints pictures in pastel chalk of blues and pinks. Easy, undemanding listening.
CHERYL FORBES
