The Drowning Machine : the sea and the scooter in Quadrophenia

Baker, Brian (2017) The Drowning Machine : the sea and the scooter in Quadrophenia. In: Quadrophenia and Mod(ern) Culture :. Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music . Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 199-216. ISBN 9783319647524

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Abstract

This essay will argue that Mod masculinity is a late re-articulation of the clean, healthy, hygienic male body and subjectivity proposed by some variants of European Modernism – in particular Futurism – bearing in mind Peter Meadon’s definition of ‘Mod-ism’ as ‘clean living under difficult circumstances’ (quoted on the back of the film soundtrack double album). The shape of the Vespa – its streamlined and chromed body echoing the emphases of the aviation- and maritime-inflected architectural Modernism of significant buildings of the British seaside, from the de la Warr Pavilion to Morecambe’s Midland Hotel – is a symbol of Mod-ism’s connection to a vision of the future that offered a radical break from the British past. The paper will analyse the scooter as an emblem of a new mobility and promised re-configuration of society away from traditional class structures and towards new modes of sociality and individuation, from youth sub-cultures and Pop music to the development of the new universities in 1964/5. It will also be analysed in terms of symbolising the male body, which, in Mod, was both on display and encased in a kind of fashionable armour: suits, boots, and the Parka. This essay will then develop a counter-reading of Quadrophenia through the image of the drowned scooter on the back cover of The Who’s 1973 album. Quadrophenia, it will be argued, inherits 1960s impulses towards individuation and difference (not wanting to be part of the ‘mass’ or conforming to conventional desires and behaviours) while also exhibiting anxieties surrounding that individuation (loss of ties to family, isolation, psychological breakdown). This is most strikingly presented in ‘Cut My Hair’: ‘Why do I have to be different to them/ Just to earn the respect of a dancehall friend [...] Why do I have to move with a crowd/ Of kids that hardly notice I’m around’. The ‘neither/nor’ imperative of the narrative of Quadrophenia – ambiguously resolved in the image of drowning – manifests the possibility of suicide/annihilation as a means to escape this dilemma, but ultimately turns away from death (the sea), as Jimmy also appears to do at the beginning of the film of Quadrophenia, though this is more ambiguously presented in the photo-booklet in the album. This paper will read Quadrophenia not as a narrative of maturation, but one in which two counterposing imperatives – represented by the sea and the scooter – come together in the image of the drowning machine. Reading through Klaus Theweleit’s pioneering work on masculinities in Weimar Germany, the mirrors and chrome side-pods of Jimmy’s Vespa GS, it will be argued, signify a form of ‘armoured’ masculinity (also echoed in the ‘wartime coat’, the US Army parka) that defends the masculine subject against the pressures (and pleasures) of de-individuation, of the mass. In Theweleit’s reading of the journals and writings of proto-Fascist Freikorps veterans, the armoured body – clean, pure, armoured, machinic – is the Fascist body, an idealized masculinity that opposes the flux of the ‘red flood’: both femininity and Communism – connects together modernity, Modernism and Mod, but the drowning machine, and Jimmy himself, signify an irresolvable tension between the beckoning pleasures of the annihilating flood and deep anxiety about a loss of individuation.