Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticI’ve always been haunted by the clips of the young Queen Elizabeth II that were used in “The Filth and the Fury,” Julien Temple’s great documentary about the Sex Pistols.
They were featured in a montage of images to accompany “God Save the Queen,” the thrillingly vandalistic Sex Pistols single released in 1977 to coincide with the Queen’s Silver Jubilee.
At the time, the song was a singular scandal. When Johnny Rotten sneered the line “She ain’t no human being,” he seemed to be trashing something sacred and doing it in an apocalyptic yet profound way.
What he meant, of course, is that if the Queen is no human being, that’s because she reigns over an inhuman system; she’s the monarch of a cruel empire.
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