Things I have written: Quadrophenia (Blu-ray review)

I’ve always liked Quadrophenia, Franc Roddam’s 1979 adaptation of The Who’s other rock opera but I never liked it as much as when I watched it this time. Which is kind of strange. Both the movie and and the album—which I’ll admit to only hearing in full in the last year, in part because the double-disc CD seemed too pricy to me when I first got into The Who—take as their subject male teen angst. Sure, there’s all that obsessive re-creation of what it was like to be a Mod in early ’60s England, but both are ultimately both about being in the thrall of under-20 existential crises (and adolescent hormones) that make you feel alternately like a constantly aroused king among men and a species lower on the evolutionary ladder than an earthworm. (It’s different for girls, no doubt, but that’s another movie.) Shouldn’t that have spoken to me more when I watched at 17 than it does now? Maybe it’s because both the album and, especially, the film put a little distance. They’re immersive but also reflective, the work of people who remember what it was like and are happy to have a little distance. The first shot is the most important shot of the movie. Sometimes you have to just walk away.