Necrophilia: It's Not Just A River In Egypt

The sweet strains of Joy Division's Atmosphere just drew me over to a coworker's cubicle. She was watching a preview for Control, the new movie about JD front man Ian Curtis (pictured at right), at a high enough volume to catch my attention. The release of the movie will likely breed a renewed interest (and perhaps alot of media attention) to Mr. Curtis. This could be a little bit of a problem for me.

His dark hair. His doe eyes. His pale English skin. I'm sorta in love with Ian Curtis and he's sorta been dead since before I was born. What does this make me?

There's no sting like the sting of an unrequited crush and celebrity attraction is the most satisfying sting of all. Since there's no chance of ever meeting the object of your desire, you can study them on screen and in print, watch them develop as pubic characters and be confident that you, the loyal fan, have enough investment in their success that you can claim a little credit for it.

Unless that celebrity is currently feeding the tree (or buying the farm? playing pinucle with the saints of yore?) in which case you just feel creepy. Exceptions can be made when you are drawn to someone's talent, like the common obsession with the less-than-beautiful Janis Joplin, but my interest in Ian is a purely a physical one. My sisters exposed me to New Order at a really young age (I've known every word to "Temptation" since I was 6) so Joy Division's driving dark-rock doesn't really do it for me. I'm enough into "Love Will Tear Us Apart" to claim some fan-dom, but I'm by no mean's diehard.

My real interest in Ian began my senior year of college when I bought a Joy Division poster and hung it above my bed. It was a black and white photo of four attractive young Englishmen standing outside a studio smoking cigarettes. There was no hint of the fact that their leader was going to hang himself and that the remaining members would go on to become one of the best bands of the eighties. It just showed some boys in their element.

So that poster became the last thing I would see before I went to bed. It was front and center in my field of vision when I was having sex. My enjoyment for the guy's music didn't increase that much, but appreciation for his face sure did.

So now I'm one of those obnoxious kids taking a big interest in an icon of days past without really understanding what the figure meant for his contemporaries. There's probably some homo out there, 15 years my senior, who juuuusst missed The Smiths and only survived high school by putting "Closer" on loop and killing time till college.He is much more qualified to write this musing than I am, but he probably has better things to do with his time right now.

But I digress. What the hell do I do about my postmortem man-crush? I remember sneaking glances at Playboy Magazines from the '50s when I was 9 years old and getting a thrill out of the naked ladies. I know now that those women were, by the time I got to them, geriatric. They were old and infirm, and probably meeting their ends by choking on their dentures or tripping on a fallen E-cup breast and rolling down the gilded spiral staircase of the Hugh Hefner Home for Moribund Hussies. I didn't enjoy their photos any less for it, but I certainly couldn't track them down to declare my undying love.

I guess the first thing I could do is see "Control." Has anyone out there in TNG-ville checked it out? (Ahem, Parker.) Is it worth seeing? Does it portray Ian Curtis in enough of a fallible light that he'll stop getting my knickers in a twist? I really need to know, because I'm about a week away from running another google image search of his face, blowing it up in photoshop, making it my computer background and then spending all day stroking my monitor and sobbing "why, Ian, why?"

I mean, I'd just be curious to see if the movie's any good.