Derek Jarman makes the first great punk film by refusing to flatter punk
A film marketed through punk culture could easily have become a celebration of new bands, clothes and youth rebellion. Jubilee is angrier than that.
Derek Jarman sends Queen Elizabeth I and her occult adviser John Dee across four centuries into a decaying future Britain populated by violent gangs, police brutality, media power, collapsing institutions and people attempting to turn destruction into identity. Criterion calls the 1978 film a mixture of history, fantasy, satire, anger, fashion and philosophy, while BFI's modern edition runs 106 minutes.
The cast is filled with figures who make the film inseparable from punk and adjacent culture: Jordan, Toyah Willcox, Adam Ant, Nell Campbell, Jayne County and others. Brian Eno supplies film and title music, while the soundtrack also incorporates bands from the scene. Jarman nevertheless treats punk as evidence rather than salvation. The film loves its energy enough to put it on screen. It distrusts its appetite for self-destruction enough to make that energy frightening.
Queen Elizabeth I enters the future because the Silver Jubilee gives Jarman the perfect historical pun
The title refers directly to the jubilee culture surrounding Queen Elizabeth II in 1977. Jarman does not begin with the contemporary monarch. He brings Elizabeth I into the story. Her occult adviser John Dee summons a vision of the future, allowing the Tudor court to become a point of comparison with modern Britain. The device is deliberately artificial. The film is not asking whether Elizabeth I would realistically understand punk. It uses monarchy as a long historical line across which national myths can be tested. A country celebrating imperial continuity meets an image of itself as disorder, exploitation and spectacle. The past does not correct the future. It simply has to look at it.
Jenny Runacre playing both Elizabeth I and Bod makes authority and anarchy share one face
Jenny Runacre appears as Queen Elizabeth I and Bod, leader within the future gang. This double casting is one of the film's sharpest formal jokes. Monarchical authority and anarchic violence appear as opposites. The same performer embodies both. Jarman does not need to announce that power can reproduce itself in different costumes. The face does the work. Bod's world may reject official hierarchy. It develops its own brutality. The future does not become free simply because the old institutions look absurd. Opposition can imitate the thing it hates. That is one of Jubilee's least comforting ideas.
Richard O'Brien's John Dee connects punk to a much older British tradition of occult spectacle
Richard O'Brien plays Dr John Dee, the historical mathematician, astrologer and occult figure associated with Elizabeth I, creating another cultural bridge through a performer already linked to the theatrical camp and sexual nonconformity of The Rocky Horror Show. Dee gives Jarman permission to treat history as ritual rather than classroom reconstruction: time travel operates through magic, while the future arrives as vision rather than science-fiction machinery. Punk consequently enters a British tradition of mysticism, pageantry and theatrical self-invention far older than the scene itself, making its supposed novelty look like another volatile costume in a much longer national performance.
Jordan's Amyl Nitrate turns fashion identity into intellectual performance
Pamela Rooke, known as Jordan, had already become one of punk's most recognisable visual figures through the King's Road scene around SEX and Seditionaries. In Jubilee, she plays Amyl Nitrate. The name itself turns chemistry into punk identity. Amyl is not simply present as a famous face from a shop. Jarman uses her ability to appear deliberately artificial. Makeup, clothing and pose become a form of thought. This matters because punk histories often divide image from ideology, as though clothes were superficial packaging around the real politics. Jarman understands fashion as political language. The body can refuse respectability before a character says anything.
Toyah Willcox enters before her own mainstream pop breakthrough, preserving a period when punk and theatre still overlap messily
Toyah plays Mad. Her later recording career would make her a highly visible British pop figure. In 1978, that future had not yet settled. She belongs to an environment where acting, punk, experimental theatre and music cross constantly. This is another advantage of Jubilee as primary-era fiction. It catches artists before later industry categories become fixed. A performer can be actor, musician, club figure and scene participant without needing one official brand. The film's cast operates almost like a map of cultural possibility rather than a conventional star ensemble.
Adam Ant's Kid is valuable because he appears before Adam and the Ants become one of Britain's biggest pop phenomena
Adam Ant plays Kid, and Adam and the Ants contribute music. The timing is extraordinary. Later new-wave and pop stardom can make the appearance look like a celebrity cameo. In 1978, Adam is still inside punk's unstable transition. His later success through highly designed image, videos and pop singles would embody exactly the kind of relationship between rebellion and commercial media that Jubilee distrusts. That does not make the film prophetic about him personally. It makes the archive richer. The performer continues changing after Jarman stops filming. A character remains fixed while the actor's cultural meaning expands around it.
Jayne County makes punk's gender nonconformity impossible to reduce to later fashion nostalgia
Jayne County and the Electric Chairs belong to the film's soundtrack and punk environment. County's presence is essential because punk's challenge to gender did not begin with later academic interpretation. Transgression was already embodied by performers whose lives exceeded ordinary male/female rock categories. This is another area where Jubilee's messiness becomes historically valuable. Jarman does not organise the cast into a clean thesis about representation. People appear who make the social world harder to normalise. The future Britain may be violent and ugly. Its margins contain identities the respectable past could barely name publicly.
Brian Eno's score makes the film stranger by refusing to make punk guitars the only sound of punk Britain
Criterion credits Eno with film and title music and identifies it as his first original film score. This broadens the movie's musical vocabulary. A literal punk soundtrack could have filled every scene with contemporary bands. Eno brings another history: Roxy Music, studio experimentation, ambient thinking and electronic texture. The result separates the film's emotional environment from a simple compilation album. Punk bands can appear as themselves or through songs. The score can move elsewhere. This is particularly appropriate for Jarman, whose cinema is as interested in atmosphere, painting and ritual as in documenting a scene accurately.
The soundtrack album is wonderfully inconsistent because the scene itself never had one sound
The soundtrack gathers Adam and the Ants, Wayne County and the Electric Chairs, Chelsea, the fictional Maneaters, Suzi Pinns and Eno. That range prevents the album from behaving like one genre manifesto. Punk appears beside art music and theatrical reinterpretation. The record becomes a parallel cultural object rather than an audio transcript of the film. It also contains early Adam and the Ants material significant to collectors. The album should therefore receive its own release metadata if implemented. A soundtrack can preserve scene history even when the movie remains the stronger political argument.
Big business replaces old government in the future because Jarman distrusts the corporation as much as the crown
Criterion's synopsis highlights an all-powerful media mogul. The future's authoritarianism does not arrive only through formal government. Commerce, media and celebrity become systems of control. This is one reason Jubilee ages beyond the specific punk moment. The exact companies change. The idea that private media power can organise public desire remains familiar. Jarman's satire is deliberately crude. Subtle institutional realism would not suit a world already functioning like an apocalypse painted on a club wall.
Punk violence is presented as stupid often enough to upset people who expected Jarman to celebrate the scene
BFI's retrospective writing notes that Jarman was critical of punk's fascination with fascist imagery and what he saw as petty violence. Vivienne Westwood objected strongly to the film and claimed it misrepresented punk. That disagreement is historically important. No filmmaker owns a scene merely because scene figures appear in the cast. Jarman presents one interpretation. Westwood's anger proves other participants rejected it. The conflict should not be solved by declaring one side correct. Punk was never one coherent ideology. A film depicting the scene became another argument inside the scene.
The film's women dominate enough of the world that male punk mythology loses its usual centre
Bod, Mad, Amyl Nitrate, Crabs, Chaos and other women occupy major positions in the film's future. This makes Jubilee look distinct from punk histories organised primarily around male bands. The women are not presented as one feminist collective. They can be violent, selfish, intelligent, funny or destructive. That is precisely why the casting matters. Representation becomes more useful when women are allowed to be the problem as well as the solution. Jarman's future does not assign moral purity according to marginality. Everyone is capable of participating in the collapse.
The city is grey enough that punk colour becomes another kind of urban graffiti
BFI repeatedly describes the film's bleak London. The contrast between degraded streets and aggressively designed bodies is central. Punk fashion becomes brighter because the environment appears drained. This makes costume part of urban cinema. The characters do not simply dress for each other. They mark space. A damaged city becomes background against which self-invention looks both heroic and absurd. The clothing cannot repair the city. It can refuse to disappear inside it.
The 40th-anniversary BFI restoration treats low-budget punk cinema as something worth preserving with institutional care
BFI's dual-format anniversary edition uses a 2K remaster from the original camera negatives. The irony is delicious. A film designed around anti-establishment energy enters one of Britain's major film institutions for preservation. That does not neutralise the work. It reveals what archives are for. Institutions can preserve attacks on institutions. The restoration also corrects a common problem with low-budget cult cinema: worn copies can make deliberate ugliness indistinguishable from poor reproduction. A cleaner source shows which dirt belongs to Jarman.
*Jubilee* matters because it records punk imagination better than punk reality
The film is not reliable evidence of what an average London punk's daily life looked like. It never intends to be. Its value lies in how one artist imagined the political and aesthetic possibilities surrounding punk while the movement was still fresh. Documentaries preserve events. Fiction preserves fears. Jarman feared that rebellion could become fashion, fashion could become commodity, commodity could become control, and anti-authoritarian energy could become another form of stupidity. That chain is the film.
Watching and collecting note
Use the 106-minute BFI/Criterion presentation as the canonical feature. BFI's 40th-anniversary dual-format edition uses a 2K remaster from the original camera negatives. Keep the soundtrack album separate, particularly because it has its own valuable early Adam and the Ants and Brian Eno material.