When Penelope Spheeris was making the first part of her landmark documentary The Decline of Western Civilization in 1979 and 1980, none of the people she was chronicling were known outside of Los Angeles’s dank punk scene. They played furious music in clubs that looked and smelled like bathrooms, and lived in squats that looked and smelled like squats. (Or, like bathrooms.) But The Decline of Western Civilization is the first and best film of what would become a loosely linked trilogy exploring different LA subcultures over three decades.
