X weren’t entirely pleased with Decline either, despite the fact that they are the film’s beating heart. When he took a lethal dose of heroin on December 7 of that same year, the image seemed like a morbid premonition. In tears, Darby threw a bunch of Decline promo posters on the bed the fliers feature a shot of Darby dead-center, lying on his back with his eyes closed, as if he were dead. In the Germs oral history Lexicon Devil, Darby’s friend Casey Cola remembers one night in late 1980 when the frontman returned from a screening of the film visibly upset. scene was furious about Spheeris’ portrayal of Darby in the film, his alleged brilliance smothered by a heap of substances. “Didn’t you feel bad that the guy was dead?” Spheeris asks. They laugh, and Darby spouts off a slur about the man’s race.
When Spheeris asks Darby why he hurts himself onstage, he limply responds, “to keep from being bored.” In the kitchen is a giant Evening News tearsheet that screams “SID VICIOUS FACES MURDER COURT.” The interview hits its ugly nadir when Michelle and Darby recount a story about finding a dead painter in the yard and taking photos with the corpse. Darby and his friend Michelle putz around the kitchen making breakfast. In his interview segment, though, he seems near sober, which makes the footage more disturbing. Onstage, Darby was a wreck, clearly intoxicated. His lyrics are completely unintelligible, and he’s entirely unresponsive when a marker-wielding audience member draws a swastika on his bare back. The frontman falls into the drum set, picks his nose, whines for beer, and searches for the microphone as if he’s suddenly gone blind. The live sets, shot at a rented soundstage roughly a year before Darby died by suicide in December 1980, are sloppy, narcotized temper tantrums. Their portion of the film is certainly the most intriguing, but also the most unsettling. When Spheeris asks him why he cut his hair into a mohawk, he simply answers, “because I’m searching.” Dukowski’s blithe attitude suggests that the hardcore movement was perhaps more dimensional than we’re often led to believe despite their legacy, Black Flag weren’t just a pack of angry young men.Īt the time of filming, Black Flag were on the first few miles of a long road ahead. Bassist Chuck Dukowski is the most eloquent of his bandmates, a sort of jolly, half-assed philosopher who’s dabbled in Christianity, Buddhism, and as Ginn puts it, “Harvey Kirshna.” He talks about how he turned to science in school to better understand reality, saying he conducted brain operations with scalpels and wires (on what, exactly, we never learn). And it all started here.īlack Flag are an unlikely source of levity in The Decline-their easygoing nature seems at odds with their pummeling music, which has become a longstanding template for certain strains of punk. It led to two subsequent sequels, covering the hair-metal excess of the late ’80s and the gutter-punk desperation of the late ’90s collectively, the trilogy spans several generations of L.A.’s underground and remains an essential historical touchstone. Instead, The Decline of Western Civilization observes a pivotal but reckless subculture in its rawest form. In her mid-30s, Spheeris was roughly a decade older than most of the film’s subjects, but her proximity to punk and genuine interest in disaffected youth resulted in a documentary that doesn’t try to bind the movement into a tidy, idealistic product for easy consumption. During filming, which took place from December 1979 to May 1980, Spheeris was married to Bob Biggs, the visual artist who owned the punk magazine Slash and launched its eponymous record label (its inaugural release was (GI), Germs’ lone studio album). The director was uniquely positioned to capture an uncensored account of L.A.’s grimy underground rock scene.
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