He deserv'd no such return
From me, whom he created ...
All his good prov'd ill in me,
And wrought but malice

-- "Paradise Lost"

In the end, history -- absurdist, implacable, amused -- overwhelmed the Sex Pistols, the British punk band whose cacophonous two-year career, from late 1975 to the first weeks of 1978, captivated England and made them synonymous with the very idea of punk rock. The making of "The Filth and the Fury," a new documentary on the band, was controlled by its surviving members and unapologetically tells its story from their point of view. But even so there are a couple of moments when we see in the band members' eyes or hear in their voices that there were forces at work that dwarfed them.

In retrospect, it's easy to see how England's depressed social psyche at the time had the power to generate rebels like the four grimy members of the band and their provocateur of a manager, Malcolm McLaren -- but it also catalyzed much stronger forces dedicated to keeping the peace, forces that harried the band incessantly.

You can see that the fierce intelligence and astonishing onstage charisma possessed by the band's lead singer, Johnny Rotten, which would have dominated almost any other conceivable group of band mates, could not overcome the fact that he was from the start a pawn in a twisted, nihilistic version of the Monkees, and no match in sophistication or perspective for the manipulations of the history-minded McLaren. And even the band's uncompromising, oddly selfless defiance, in the end, turned out to be the making merely of martyrs, not of heroes.

To this day Rotten and McLaren spar to take credit for the ensuing disaster. For much of the past 20-plus years, with Rotten's dyspeptic personality an obstacle, the story has been essentially McLaren's to tell. The two most important works to address the band, Greil Marcus' "Lipstick Traces" and Jon Savage's "England's Dreaming," are both enthralled with Rotten, but both also revel in the group's connection to a history of mischievous social provocateuring over the previous decades by groups like the Lettrists and the Situationist International, of whom McLaren was first a student and then a willing and articulate agent. (What unites the groups and the Pistols is a commitment to denial -- saying "no" to the established order.) At the time the books were written, this aspect of the story had not been appreciated; fairly or not it has changed forever our perspective on what it was exactly the Sex Pistols established.

Rotten, writing under his real name, John Lydon, offered a revision in an autobiography: "Rotten: No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish," six years ago. Now "The Filth and the Fury" is his attempt to wrench back a bit of the honor of definition, with help from the existing filmic evidence that remains. This is the "truth," he tells us repeatedly. (The same insistence marked his book.) It's a personal battle, to be sure, but he imagines that he's placing the band in history as well. Talk of the Situationists obscures the very real state of Britain in the mid-1970s, he feels: the desperation, the unemployment, the kids living in squats. To this end, he and director Julien Temple play the determinist, spawn-of-social-breakdown card heavily; we're reminded of the band's working-class origins and the unrest that marked Britain at the time. Rotten, in one of his typically incisive aperçus, tells us that to live in England at the time was to experience "a shabby, third-rate version of reality."

But that was many years ago. Rotten and his former band mates, in the film, don't allow us to see what they look like now; it's unfortunate that Temple went along with the conceit. The faceless voice-overs put a cast of shame over the proceedings. Do they not like how they look? Does a Sex Pistol have shame? They were self-styled monsters -- now they're monsters with feelings. In "Paradise Lost," a few lines past the ones quoted above, Satan, still seething, asks, "Which way shall I fly/Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?" In "The Filth and the Fury" Rotten lets wrath at his former manager cloud his judgment, and seems the weaker for it. But any creation will seem weak when it tries to diminish the god that animated it.

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McLaren spent the mid-1970s in the United States, managing the New York Dolls at the end of their career; one of his absurd innovations was putting the band in front of a huge Soviet flag. He also inhaled the beginnings of punk in the New York underground. He came back to England and with partner Vivienne Westwood began purveying strange fashion out of a now-celebrated Kings Road shop in London. (The store eventually was called Sex and specialized in leather bondage styles. Westwood went on to become a noted fashion designer.) You can overstate McLaren's importance, of course; but if he wasn't in uncharted waters he was certainly some way off from shore, watching carefully for the wave.

He was politically motivated, but also a fan of disruption for its own sake, and had the deeply held belief that pop music could do the deed. This notion seems quaint today -- but watch what happened. He put together a potential band of social and musical nogoodnicks possessed neither of brains nor scruples; the band's drummer, Paul Cook, and guitarist, Steve Jones, were essentially making their living as burglars. The bass player was a Sex store clerk, Glen Matlock. After some Pete Bestian shenanigans with a fellow named Wally Nightingale, a new lead singer was almost literally pulled in off the street: a sometime store habitué with a properly waspish personality and questionable hygiene to boot. (He earned the nickname under which he'd become famous because of his teeth.)

Again, Johnny Rotten's searing intelligence and electric personality would have easily led any other band. But he had not formed this group and there is, truth be told, little in his personal history to suggest that he ever would have on his own. He was a late-comer, and the boys McLaren had assembled had the virtue (from McLaren's point of view) of being dumb enough to be immune to the appeal of a smart aleck. In fact, they disliked him even before the first rehearsal, for which they simply declined to show up, and intraband relationships declined from there. Among other things, the three other band members were vociferously opposed to most of the sentiments articulated in Rotten's lyrics.

McLaren's p.r. smarts made the band a phenomenon in the underground scene almost from the day its lineup coalesced. He was helped by a new and aimless generation looking for a thrill and a spreading culture of violence and extremity. The most exciting part of Lydon's autobiography, which includes a great deal of oral history from other denizens of the scene, is the testimony from those who watched a phenomenon create itself literally from appearance to appearance; audience members with long hair at one show would turn up at the next with punk hairstyles and safety pins.

McLaren was also assisted by Britain's overheated and insular music press and the willingness of one of the country's biggest labels, EMI, to stock up on some of the destructive snake oil he was purveying. The band's first single, "Anarchy in the U.K.," was released in November 1976, but most of England really didn't know who or what the Sex Pistols were. But that was before Bill Grundy.

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