Velvet Goldmine

(Todd Haynes, USA/UK, 1998)

For those who stumbled out of The Last Days of Disco (1998) not understanding – or remembering – what the fuss over that music phenomenon was all about long ago in the early ‘80s, Velvet Goldmine is a gift. Here the focus is on an earlier musical subculture of the ‘70s, glam rock. Writer-director Todd Haynes approaches it like a holy shrine of remembrance, a lost era of High Decadence and artistic freedom.

From its bold prologue – narrating how Oscar Wilde was deposited on earth by a spaceship and longed, before his time, to be a pop idol – Velvet Goldmine is a pure fantasy sprung from the deepest and darkest longings of adolescent fandom.

Is it a wicked satire on the fashionable posturing, market calculation and fiddly sonic experiments of David Bowie, Roxy Music, Marc Bolan and related dandies of the period? Not on your life. It is as earnest a tract as Camille Paglia’s awesome tome, Sexual Personae (1990).

Like Primary Colors (1998), Velvet Goldmine flirts with known facts and figures while exploiting full artistic license. The tortured, bisexual triangle of Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor) and Brian’s wife, Mandy (Toni Collette), will quickly reawaken the interest of those, with any memory of the period, in the private lives of David and Angie Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.

The songs composed for the film (superb pastiches that work in their own right) closely track the phases of Bowie’s music in the few short years leading up to the Ziggy Stardust craze. (Bowie refused permission for his own songs to be used – probably wary of the right-wing insinuation, upfront in the scenario, that has dogged him since Thin White Duke days.)

This is no docu-drama, however. The film holds firm to a central Wildean principle: the deepest truth is likely to be found in outrageous speculation and outright lies. Haynes has turned his retrospective report on glam into a Proustian search for lost time, dripping with nostalgia and melancholia.

Search in vain here for a consideration of any musical styles that preceded glam (like mainstream rock) or followed it (like punk). In the mid ‘80s (the film’s present tense), all is sad and grey without glam to light up the nights. As a reverie on music and its passionate meaning, Velvet Goldmine out-dances even The Tango Lesson (1997).

The narrative hinges on a mystery: why did Slade drop out of the pop scene at the height of his fame, and where did he go to hide? Haynes – who professes a discomfort, even a distaste, for Hollywood-style storytelling – borrows the tricky investigative structure of Citizen Kane (1941) in order to burrow into a puzzle that, ultimately, is hardly worth the solving.

But the plotline is just a pretext. Haynes’ main concern here is sex, and he filters the key story of self-discovery through an investigating journalist, Arthur (Christian Bale) – once a mad glam fan.

Haynes glorifies the glam era as the flamboyant precursor to 1990s queer culture – where identities and attachments are (hopefully) reinvented every day. Glam, in this optic, is queer without political correctness or hard-line intellectual theorising. The deeper that the film gets into Arthur’s story, however, the less interested it becomes in all-over queerness.

Velvet Goldmine’s not-so-hidden sermon skews to the view that every interesting revolution in culture, every flutter of the adolescent heart, every neo-romantic pop ballad is really very (male) gay at the core.

This masculine bias (not characteristic of Haynes’ work as a whole) gives the film its somewhat monomaniacal, hectoring tone – as well as its sneering contempt for everyday realities like the ‘heteronormative’ family (these creepy vignettes of home and hearth seem like a dead-on homage to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange [2001]).

And sadly, despite Haynes’ regard for the artistic freedom and patchwork spontaneity of glam, his own film is cerebral and schematic to a fault. Often, it is more of a critical essay than a movie – with an in-built bibliography and filmography (including references to Cultural Studies and avant-garde cinema) that will leave some viewers (and reviewers) way behind. But good on Haynes for, at least, that gumption!

Haynes – whose Safe (1995) I regard as one of most important works of its time – has spoken of wanting to make a trippy, adventurous, wayward film in the spirit of such 1960s milestones as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Unfortunately, for all its intriguing intentions and intricate moves, there’s just a few too many nestled Chinese boxes in Velvet Goldmine’s overly elaborate structure. You just wish Haynes could shake things loose more, for a change.

Still, any film about the sturm und drang of pop music which builds to the simple image of a wireless chirping away in the corner of humble bar must have something going for it.

Postscript [February 2024]: Velvet Goldmine is a film I have come to like and appreciate more with passing years and repeated viewings. I still regard its structure as overly tricky; but what drives the film most successfully is the music (by various hands), and the many sequences designed around it as music-video pastiche. It certainly wields an infectious energy.

MORE Haynes: Poison

© Adrian Martin November 1998