“You Were Under the Impression, that When You Were Walking Forwards, that You’d End up Further Onwards, but Things Ain’t Quite that Simple”: Time Travelling and Quadrophenia’s Segues

Abstract

This chapter argues that through its segues and soundscape, Quadrophenia represents clashes between two historical moments, the early sixties and the early seventies. If the ending of Quadrophenia is notoriously ambiguous in its flirtation with suicide and its unanswered questions about Jimmy’s future, it may be that it is more productive to linger with the impasses that Quadrophenia dramatizes. Quadrophenia’s representation of Jimmy’s fraught relationship to Mod subculture, class, masculinity, sex, work, and the existential angst of the teenager, creates a dead-end for him in terms of one kind of narrative, the narrative of development, but opens up other possibilities that are enacted through Quadrophenia’s sometimes jarring leaps and transitions across space and time, its anachronisms, its nostalgia, its orientation toward a different kind of future.

One of the most significant, but also one of the most painful psychical achievements of the pubertal period is…detachment from parental authority, a process that alone makes possible the opposition, which is so important for the progress of civilization, between the new generation and the old. (Sigmund Freud ) ¹