The Sisters of Mercy at The World’s End
The World’s End (2013), the third part of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy, is stuffed with allusions and references to The Sisters of Mercy, from production design through plot and character to genre tropes, deep themes and choice of music. The film astutely keeps its Sisters sonic powder dry for the bulk of the runtime while cramming its soundtrack with late 80s and early 90s bangers plus The Doors, a seminal early influence on the Sisters.
At the surface, Gary King (Simon Pegg) – the nominally determinative opposite of Sisters founding member Gary Marx – is a full-bore Sisters fan. When we first meet Gary in flashback as an eighteen-year-old on his last day of school, he is dressed all in black including a long black coat. His hair is very obviously dyed black and he wears aviator shades. Out of school he swaps his black shirt and tie for a Merciful-Release-logo Sisters of Mercy T-shirt and three Ancient Egyptian necklaces: a Vision Thing (1990) Eye of Horus, an Ankh, and Horus wings. We then meet the forty-year-old Gary in a support group. It later transpires that Gary has attempted suicide, so empty is his life and, apparently, so arrested is his development. His four best mates from school all have ‘normal’ jobs and lives. They have ‘grown up’. Gary’s teenage best friend Andy Knightley (Nick Frost) is now a corporate lawyer. The plot’s emotional spine is the breakdown and restoration of the relationship between Gary and Andy, between ‘King’ and ‘Knight’. This core strand, along with the various other fallings out and makings up among the friendship group – one of these based on two guys’ pursuit of the same girl – are deliberately reminiscent of those of a band, indeed Gary and Steve (Paddy Considine) even jam together as teenagers. There’s also a running band-name gag, highlights include Gary King and the Enablers, and Bermuda Rhombus and the Aqua Nazis.
At the outset, Gary’s arrested development is linked to his being stuck in his eighteen-year-old identity. Twenty-two years later Gary still wears the same long black coat and aviator shades, the same Sisters of Mercy T-shirt, the same three necklaces. His hair is still very obviously dyed black. The necklaces are later temporarily joined by a toilet’s ‘Out of Order’ sign, confirming that Gary is both dissenter and nonconformist: he is literally out of order both socially and chronologically (across his arc one could say that he is at once ‘first and last and always’, as the Sisters lyric goes). We later learn that Gary even has a prominent Sisters tattoo on his chest, which he shows the others to prove that he has not been replaced by an alien simulant or ‘blank’.
Gary’s overt aim is to finish the twelve-venue pub crawl that he and his friends abandoned on their last day of school. His covert aim is to feel alive in the same way he did on that day, the last day he felt truly himself. The science-fiction alien/automata replacement plot (or ‘merger’ as the film has it) interrogates ideas of free will, conformity, rebellion and fitting in: how being a rebel (in this case a goth rocker) is often a lonely and challenging path that can lead to depression and even a tragically early death unless you can forge your own path or follow a path cleared for you by the scorched-Earth exit of bodysnatching aliens.
There’s a strong suggestion that what really makes us human is that ineffably weird combination of reptilian instinct and higher aspiration. Sex, violence and death are as essential to human experience as civilisation-founding intellect, spiritual epiphany and romantic adoration: an idea that neatly dovetails with the Eldritchian worldview. This reptilian instinct in rebel form is captured in the edited audio quote from Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels (1966) as used by Primal Scream on 1990’s single ‘Loaded’: ‘Well, we wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do! And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. And that’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna have a good time. We’re gonna have a party.’ There is no escape from the reptile house, as Eldritch has it.
Apocalyptic themes are also recurrent in Eldritch’s lyrics, especially across the three original Sisters albums. More specifically, at this world’s end there’s the implicit paranoia (in the Sisters story fuelled by speed, here a more certificate-friendly weed-toked iteration) that perfectly feeds malign conspiracies including an imminent Armageddon of which only you (and maybe your best mates) are aware. Conspiracy, paranoia and apocalypse are also central to the Season 7 finale of Spooks, ‘Nuclear Strike’, which features multiple references to Sisterhood album Gift (1986).
Ideas of ‘progress’ (as expressed in becoming an ‘adult’ and offered en masse by the self-justifying aliens) and nostalgia in conflict reflect a deeper unbridgeable chasm between the traditional and the modern. The fictional town of Newton Haven is home to the ‘UK’s First Roundabout Built circa 1909’, which highlights the town’s (and Gary’s) liminal, strange-loop status – moving forward but going nowhere – and resonates with the Sisters’ art, which has the same liminality. 1909 is an anagram of 1990 – the year that Gary is trying to recapture – and also the year of the aliens’ arrival. A piece of modernist civic art depicting a humanoid figure is in truth a giant alien sentinel, underlining the mechanised brutality of progress at scale. Plus ‘circa’ (literally circle) means ‘round about’ in chronological terms.
At the film’s initially downbeat first coda, with all electronics wiped out by an alien-triggered Armageddon (pity the poor Doktor who would not have survived), adult Andy, now a fully-formed knight in mythic terms and therefore independent of his ‘King’, tells the story of that apocalypse to some children (his attentive squires) gathered around a fire. Behind Andy, some graffiti reads ‘To err is human, to forgive divine’, a quote from Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism (1711) and an encapsulation of one of the film’s key themes. It’s also resonant in particular with Gift track ‘Rain from Heaven’ and in general with the entire Sisters of Mercy saga 1984-1987. There’s an even deeper layer in that Pope’s work, in part an attack on what he perceived to be bad literary criticism, triggered a flame war between Pope and one of his most outspoken critics, John Dennis, again echoing the war of words and lyrics between Eldritch and Wayne Hussey, which reached its apotheosis in ‘This Corrosion’.
Where The World’s End is so radically provocative, is in the other part of its deep thematics as represented by the upbeat post-apocalyptic second coda in which Gary – now a cowboy-hat wearing gothic Ronin – leads a team comprising the simulant versions of his teenage friends. Everyone is not the same. Everyone should not conform. You should be and become who you are, whether that means being a drone, a drop-out, a dissenter, or the leader of a post-apocalyptic gang of wasteland wanderers: King of your own dominion. You do not have to ‘grow up’ and ‘join society’ as Andy instructs Gary before the alien apocalypse, especially when society is innately dysfunctional and being an ‘adult’ means submitting to that innate dysfunction. Gary achieves the ideal of the archetypal rock ‘n’ roll rebel: staying forever young-in-spirit in a society that you have changed forever (yet still acknowledging the aging of the body: at the end he’s teetotal). At an even deeper level, Gary has become an alchemical ‘King’ through the integration of his psyche in the Jungian sense, as so brilliantly explicated by James Hillman: becoming who he was always meant to be. This mythic ‘becoming’ resonates with another line from ‘First And Last And Always’: ‘my calling, my time… ’til the end of the end of time’.
My favourite Sisters allusion in the film (unless, in a fog of oeuvre immersion, I’m reading too much into it) is a set-up and pay-off centred on Andy’s wedding ring. At the School Disco, ‘Marmalade’ sucks the ring off Andy’s finger and swallows it. Later, as Andy is running towards The World’s End pub, he is confronted by Marmalade, who tells Andy: ‘I want you inside me’. Andy immediately retrieves his ring by punching through the simulant’s stomach and grabbing it in a gloriously witty visual rendering of both ‘This Corrosion’ lyric ‘Gimme the ring’ and the implied ‘corrosion’ of stomach acid on metal (albeit that blank Marmalade’s stomach is full of blue goo).
‘This Corrosion’ – the film’s signature Sisters song – features three times on the soundtrack. First, there’s a segment of New York Choral Society vocalising during the climactic face-off between Gary-Andy-Steve and the aliens, at the end of which Gary’s sheer intransigent bloody mindedness defeats the invaders but provokes an annihilation by rapidly growing firestorm. Second, when post-apocalyptic Gary and his renegade blanks, like the Sisters on stage, emerge from smoke at the beginning of the film’s second coda and walk into blank-banned pub The Rising Sun on a new quest. This instance is semi-diegetic, the track playing in the pub on an old gramophone, which spins slower and slower before griding to a halt and creating a lovely moment of Old West suspense. And finally, over the end-titles crawl after a handbrake-turn segue out of ‘Happy Hour’ by The Housemartins. ‘Andrew Eldritch and The Sisters of Mercy’ are given ‘Special Thanks’.
Seen from the hill overlooking the town, the apocalyptic carpet of fire that consumes most of Newton Haven is poetically juxtaposed with ‘the orange glow of a new dawn’ from Gary’s opening monologue. Annihilation and a new beginning in perfect balance, and you don’t get more Eldritchian than that.
The Sisters of Mercy On Track Short is available from the Burning Shed online store here.