Director: Todd Haynes. Cast: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Christian Bale, Ewan McGregor, Toni Collette, Eddie Izzard, Michael Feast, Emily Woof. Screenplay: Todd Haynes (based on a story by Haynes and James Lyons).
Todd Haynes has already made two motion pictures that declare strange scenarios, introduce strange
characters, and then film them all even more...strangely. Poison, his
Sundance-winning debut effort, was a triptych of stories derived from the writings of Jean Genet,
following with wild tonal diversity a young boy who spontaneously flies out his window, a scientist who
concocts and mistakenly ingests a leprous serum, and a duo of prisoners who undergo—well, the plot of that
one almost defies description, but at its center are two men's bodies that become the sites of both
homoerotic passion and roundly discomfiting tortures and misery. Safe—which I
listed as 1995's 9th best movie but is probably, in retrospect, its 2nd or 3rd—follows one suburban
housewife whose sudden symptoms of illness are diagnosed and spookily treated as an allergic reaction to
nothing less than the 20th century itself.
If one theme emerges from these two pictures—which actually feel like five, given Poison's three
distinct narratives and Safe's bifurcation into an hour of disease and one of "cure"—it is the
abject vulnerability of the human body to the physical and social world outside. Haynes complicates his
projects, however, by frequently allowing his "real world" to be more mutable, more supernaturally elusive
than we expect, so that our persons are being acted upon by forces we are powerless to control or even to
understand. His films are audacious in design and rich with ideas, though he never erases the audience's
room to turn off the mental burners and experience them as engaging, eerie horror stories of a singularly
unpredictable bent.
All of which brings us to Velvet Goldmine, Haynes' third full-length film. Velvet Goldmine,
rather than itself tampering reality, moves to a cultural-historical moment where fantasy and mirage
were the informing conditions of a distinct, spectacular public scene: the glam-rock era of 1970s popular
music. The world of this film is still a mighty bizarre place, but this time the weirdness is not a
surprise—it's what legions of fans and misfit adolescents are paying to see on stage, or at least to hear
on their vinyl turntables. And if mutable, changing bodies are what you want, as Haynes so often does,
check out how insolently these performers reconstituted their selves. They were interested in codes
of gender and other "biological" marks only to the extent that they subverted them profoundly. Ask
yourself whether David Bowie is a man or a woman, and observe the impossibility of committing to either
answer.
The central figure of Velvet Goldmine is Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers of The
Governess), a performance artist whose heavily-synthed music and androgynously feline appearance draw
an increasing legion of blushed-and-teased admirers through the 1970s. Slade's "music" is not much to be
proud of, but nor is it ever the point of his routine. Rather, he conjures elaborate videos in
which he impersonates slithery djinns and blue devils. He fills concert stages with lavender smoke and
pillow feathers. He wears blue-mohawk wigs and covers his body in metallic, glittery paint. The nature of
Slade's art is his very command of your gaze; like a less macabre but equally self-promoting godfather to
Marilyn Manson, Slade hides beneath his pouty, self-serious expression the laughing janus-face of someone
who knows he has nothing of substance to reveal. His act is the very state of being nothing more
than an act. Whether or not they know it, Slade's fans seem attracted to the very ephemerality of his
vision, its byzantine dazzle that signifies nothing.
In some ways, Velvet Goldmine holds forth glam-rock as the apotheosis of the uncanny, shimmering,
sinister worlds that Haynes has always envisioned. As we have already seen, however, he is not a
filmmaker who is ever content with telling just one story. The complement he composes here to the saga of
Brian Slade is the sad, restrained story of Arthur Stuart, a journalist in 1984 whose assignment is to
research what has become of Mr. Slade and his "Maxwell Demon" alter ego since the public embarrassment and
ensuing disfavor of his self-staged "faux assassination" on stage a few years beforehand. Arthur, you
see, was one of the poor sops in the concert hall who thought there was some method to all of this
madness: that glam rock and its pansexual, ornamented idiom were not only saying something, but saying
something to and about him, who was at that time a confused adolescent living with parents who
cannot really see him.
Arthur buys a Brian Slade album and experiences the confounding, wondrous urge to touch himself while
looking at Slade, posed as a nude odalisque on the record sleeve. Arthur wears outrageous clothes and
takes unsanctioned trips far away from the house in a sheepish but urgent pursuit of whatever magic it is
he believes glam rock is unlocking: the solution code to the total enigma presented to him by his body,
his sexuality, his place in an adult world. Even with all of his rouge and mousse, there is a sad, Oliver
Twist look to Arthur; he is definitionally sad, disappointed somehow, and we know in a strange way that
his sadness will not leave him.
Clearly, the format of the journalist researching the life of a domineering, fallen-from-grace public
figure recalls the layout of Citizen Kane, particularly when Haynes has Stuart visit the subject's
estranged and bitter wife...on a rainy night and in an empty club that the camera enters through the
skylight! Some critics have barked against the bald appropriation of Welles' model, while most others have
generally derided the picture as an artifact as empty and as superficial as the rockers whose lives it
follows. Haynes is such an intelligent filmmaker, you would think he would earn at least more benefit of
the doubt than these lazy readings allow him.
In truth, the mimicry of Citizen Kane—which is unmistakable but doesn't really mean much—is a
perfect formal approximation of the endless, empty citationality that comprised the entire glam-rock
movement. Everyone copies everyone else for the sake of copying. A statement is made mostly by the
prestige of what you impersonate, and the flair with which you do so. Superficiality is not the mar or
pitfall of Haynes' film, but its stated subject and governing concept. The best way, to Haynes' mind, of
recreating glam rock for a 1990s audience is not to simply buy the costumes and put them on camera, but to
operate with equal ellipticism, self-consciousness, and empty fireworks of color and sound. Velvet
Goldmine does something more difficult than biographing glam; it embodies it.
Nor is it fair to accuse this structure as a chilly stunt: i.e., so what if he films in the same
derivative style as glam performers used on stage? Isn't that still a simple if clean and deliberate act
of derivation, an outsize and sparklingly outfitted gesture of xeroxing? What flies right in the face of
that line of criticism is Haynes' clear and extensive interest in Arthur's coming-of-age, which are almost
incredibly poignant both when he is a struggling teenager and a wistful, prematurely world-weary adult.
Arthur knows that when he goes back and recreates through his interviews his own memory of the glam era,
he will be forced to recognize that what was so laden with import and impact for his youthful self was
never more than a charade, a chimera.
Christian Bale, in a very moving performance, stifles Arthur's voice to a soft mutter and restrains
his physical moves, in such contrast to the reckless sprints that conveyed him as a boy to the stadiums
and venues where Brian Slade appeared. This is a character who has become cocooned; his melancholy is the
permanent, inevitable cost to any naïf who uses art as the mirror by which he perceives or constructs his
own identity. There is ecstasy in Arthur's initial identification with Brian, and later in a physical
consummation with Curt Wild, another headline performer played by Ewan McGregor in another magnetically
(and literally) self-exposing turn. There is also, however, a great sadness to the eventual realization of
how false that identification was. Brian Slade did not share, reciprocate, or articulate any of Arthur's
jumbled emotions or feelings, because Brian Slade was a hollow ornament without any feelings or emotions
at all.
Velvet Goldmine and its concentration on issues of copying and empty citation also take on added
resonance and considerable emotional wallop when cast in the context of postmodern theories of sexuality
and gender formation. Haynes, an explicitly gay filmmaker, recognizes here the groundbreaking work of
scholars like Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, who have written throughout the 80s and 90s about how all
gendered and sexual identities—most obviously the marginalized "female" and "homosexual" ones—are the
reinterpretations of inherited models, a cycle of repetition from which the origin point has vanished. You
become a woman, a man, or a gay man (as three examples) by acting "like" or even slavishly against
the image of Woman, Man, or Gay Man that you read within the culture. Velvet Goldmine must be aware
of these revolutionary theories and the late 20th-century explosions in gay identity politics; how else do
you account for a film in which the mid-1980s and the mid-1970s are seen as distant eras, an irrevocable
shift in time? Bale's Arthur realizes now, more than ever before, that the glam-rock era was for some
viewers like himself the most audacious, public acting-out of subversive gay identities: but it was
also just a sparkling rehash of borrowed costumes and props that would themselves be handed down. It felt
eye-opening, if you were a questioning adolescent, but it was no fuller or more substantial than any other
"performance" of gender or sexuality can be. Brian must have known that, and he used it to sell
tickets.
The issue of Brian's emotionlessness—which should not be confused with heartlessness, or apathy, since the
character is cold but not cruel—is reinforced by Toni Collette's skillfully viperish performance as
Mandy, Brian's ex-wife whom Arthur interviews. Brian was never much of a husband to Mandy, preferring
instead the bed of McGregor's Curt Wild. Ironically, the affair between these two men is not a passionate
counter-point to Brian's coldness to Mandy; there is nothing deeper about that liaison, which Curt comes
to realize is only possible because he is as false, as soulless a creation as Brian himself. The "romance"
between Curt and Brian is like the kissing of two shadows.
If much of Velvet Goldmine coheres more in mental reflection than in direct visual experience, one
may in large part blame the absolutely bewitching visuals imagined by art director Christopher Dobbs
and that sorceress of a costume designer Sandy Powell, whose outlandish ensembles
arrest the senses and are impossible to resist. Poison cinematographer Maryse Alberti also returns
to film all these carryings-on with great energy and kinetic aplomb. Curt and Brian's videos and live
performances prove that Haynes was as attentive and observant a fan of these shows as he is a keen though
nostalgic critic of what it all meant—or better yet, what it never meant at all. There is also a certain
catch-22 factor, in that even a rigorous, carefully-crafted film about hollow acts and vanishing images
will be hard-put to be remembered as anything more than the sum of its illusions, the cascade of its vivid
displays. That Haynes succeeds as well as he does in this respect is a marvel, helped by his perfect
selection of a humbly-imaged event to which he sends a virtual, teary-eyed love letter in the film's last
few shots.
Velvet Goldmine is not a superficial music video but a smart and compassionate dissection of
superficiality, and of the alternating joys and disillusionments experienced by its audience. The film is
beautifully played (except for some excessively blank faced, CKOne-style sneers from Rhys Meyers) and
wonderfully orchestrated by a handful of aces on the technical side. I am not positive that Haynes is
saying anything that people have not said before, though they have usually done so with less formal
virtuosity and daring, and I wonder if the picture will retain the same force three years later as
Safe at least has proven to do. Whatever its shelf-life, it is captivating at the current moment,
and more emotionally involving through Bale's performance than the material at first suggests. Velvet
Goldmine speaks eloquently about the danger of hypnotic spectacles, but for all the right reasons one
cannot look away from this remarkable film. Grade: A
Click here for a shorter, capsule-length response to the film, included as part of my 2003 feature article, "Queer Folks in the Cinema."
- Academy Award Nominations:
- Best Costume Design: Sandy Powell
- Other Awards:
- Cannes Film Festival—Best Artistic Contribution: Todd Haynes
- British Academy Awards (BAFTAs)—Best Costume Design: Sandy Powell
- Independent Spirit Awards—Best Cinematography: Maryse Alberti