Ken Russell's "Tommy" is 50 years old, and somehow it's never been more relevant.
A boy watches something he shouldn't. The trauma seals his eyes, his ears, his voice — not literally, but the film doesn't much care about the difference between literal and psychological anymore by the second act. He becomes, through no will of his own, extraordinary. Not despite the silence. Because of it. A kid who cannot see, hear, or speak becomes the greatest pinball player in England, and the country loses its mind over him.
Naturally, his parents monetize it. This is the first thing the movie gets uncomfortably right: Nobody in Tommy's life looks at a traumatized, nonverbal child and thinks "Let's get this boy some help," they think "Let's get this boy a manager."
By the time the kid can hold a pinball flipper he's also holding up the family income, and nobody involved seems to find that arrangement strange, which tells you everything about how normalized it already was in 1975 and how much more normalized it's become since. We just call it "family content" now and put it on a platform instead of a marquee.
Then he's cured. And that's when it gets interesting — because the film doesn't end with Tommy healed and everyone relieved. It ends with Tommy healed and everyone worse. He opens his eyes and instead of a boy, they see a messiah. Thousands of people show up. There's a compound. There's merchandise. There's a mother figure handing out substances in a getup that would get you arrested at a school pickup line, and everyone treats her like clergy because in this economy, she basically is one — the Acid Queen is less a character than a business model, spirituality repackaged as a product with a markup, and nobody in line asks what's actually in it.
Here is the detail nobody in the movie ever stops to sit with: Tommy could see and hear the entire time. The blindness, the deafness — that was never the diagnosis, just the trauma's cover story, and it cracks the second the plot needs it to. Which means every follower who ever stood outside his window, every disciple who built a religion out of his supposed emptiness, was worshiping a man who had been watching them the whole time and never once corrected the record. Nobody asks what he saw. What he understood, what he endured, what he noticed in all those years everyone assumed there was nobody home. They don't need the story. They need the symbol. A vessel is so much easier to worship than a person, mostly because a vessel can't disagree with you, can't have a bad day, can't say something off-message at 2 a.m.
"I'm a sensation," Tommy tells them — not a boast, almost a warning — and it doesn't slow the crowd down for one second. Sound familiar?
Somewhere around here the movie stops being subtle about it, in the way only a 1975 rock opera fully committed to its own insanity can stop being subtle. The film doesn't ask you to interpret this restraint. It has never heard of restraint. It just keeps going, and dares you to keep taking it seriously, and somehow you do, because underneath all that mess is a kid who got exploited by everyone who claimed to love him, and that part was never a joke.
By the end, the flock has built Tommy a holiday camp — pinball as sacrament, camp as church, admission fee as tithe — and it collapses, as these things do, the second the crowd suspects they've been sold a story instead of a savior. They don't turn on Tommy because he was wrong. They turn on him because he asked them to actually do something rather than just adore him, and it turns out adoration was always the whole point. Following was the product. Tommy was just the packaging.
And through all of it, Ken Russell never once blinks. There's a bath of soap suds. There's an ocean of chocolate that a woman is made to swim through like it's a baptism. There's the Acid Queen's chamber, all needles and religious iconography bent so far past reverence it borders on outright blasphemy. There's a preacher congregation worshiping at the altar of Marilyn Monroe like she's a saint with her own feast day. And there, at the bottom of it all, is Ann-Margret, thrashing in a geyser of baked beans as though she's wrestling an opponent only she can see — which, thematically, she is.
Watching all of that unfold, I have just one very important, life-affirming question:
How the hell did they get the money to make that movie?
Matt Davidson lives in Springfield.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: 50 years later, 'Tommy' fits right in with modern culture | Opinion
